9 ms·

> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon

by wisty 2y ago

> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies. Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names. It had the best network effect because of its real name policy (you could easily find people you knew), but it didn't tell you about it, it just posted your name from the sign-up page, which was kind of a dark pattern at the time. Facebook also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you. But don't try scraping your own contacts out of Facebook, that's wrong. Remember the apps, like zombie games? Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs. Facebook has always been ruthless and other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) as far as I can tell it's never really had any mission other than getting big.

guax 2y ago
I remember de people graph search when no privacy settings really existed and people kept complete and updated profiles. It was the ultimate stalker took. Absolute batshit crazy that it existed even for the short time it did.
3np 2y ago
There was plenty of koolaid around. https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook
Voultapher 2y ago
It was also born by the guy - Zuck and arguably in a similar spirit - who initially created a hot or not webpage to rank female college classmates by "fuckability". No clue how any of this would come as a surprise if you know his history. Brian Cantrill talks about how social media was born crocked [1] while referring to the eerily similar friendster backstory. [1] https://youtu.be/0wtvQZijPzg?t=482 https://youtu.be/0wtvQZijPzg?t=482
frereubu 2y ago
The idealism is the current corporate story - "enabling communication" etc. - but you're right that there was no idealism to start with. Zuckerberg set up The Facebook so undergrads at Harvard could rate how hot girls were, scraping their images from unprotected university servers. This is a great podcast centred around the film about it - The Social Network - but it delves really interestingly into the story and motivations of the early years: https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/the-great-political-films%3A-the-social-network https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/the-great-political-films%... The main conclusion is that Zuckerberg is a pure, amoral opportunist, which is why Facebook has been so successful through an era of "ask for forgiveness, not permission".
- tasuki 2y ago
  [flagged]
- soraminazuki 2y ago
  This is the first time I heard about anyone buying into any sort of "idealism" of Facebook. Isn't Zuckerberg famous for calling Facebook users "dumb f***s" back in the early days for willingly handing over all sorts of information? https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/ https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
  - frereubu 2y ago
    I wasn't saying anyone bought into it, just that it's the story Facebook now tells about itself.
- dabockster 2y ago
  It wasn't so much "idealism" than it was the fact that social media was directly responsible for the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the US's first Black president. It also gave him a significant advantage in 2012. Nobody wanted to touch social media out of fear of putting future Democrat POTUS candidates at a disadvantage. Notice how, in 2017, it's only after everyone starts post mortem evaluating the 2016 election that the "idealism" of social media begins to sour.
rajman187 2y ago
> other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) Not to detract from your main point but I think this misses a lot of contributions, eg Cassandra, Hive, Presto, GraphQL, the plethora of publications coming out of FAIR (fundamental AI research) and of course the Llama family of models which have enabled quite a few developments themselves
- __loam 2y ago
  I think React and GraphQL are pretty impressive in terms of how shitty they've made the developer experience at so many companies. GraphQL especially seems to attract the kind of people who love to misuse technologies built for massive orgs in companies with fewer than 100 employees.
  - pcthrowaway 2y ago
    > GraphQL especially seems to attract the kind of people who love to misuse technologies built for massive orgs in companies with fewer than 100 employees. This is almost exactly how I feel about Kubernetes
    - paddy_m 2y ago
      I have worked at companies with more kubernetes pods than customers. They loved graphql too.
  - ajb 2y ago
    There's actually a well-known effect in standards, that large orgs want to overcomplicate them, as having implemented a bunch of overcomplicated standards becomes part of their moat against competitors. This is definitely done deliberately; the most blatant example is Office Open XML but it's true of others too. They know that they have the staff to waste effort on it, and others don't. I'm not sure anyone is thinking 'lets open source our most dumb ideas to hobble potential competition' - but they would do it if they thought of it.
  - chillingeffect 2y ago
netsharc 2y ago
> Facebook also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you. I remember FB recommending me a contact, I thought "Why does that distinctive name sound familar?". I looked through my e-mails and I had sent a few emails back and forth with the person because of an eBay transaction. I know I never told FB to scrape my email account, but I'm guessing this person did. And it's certainly not even the address book, but the email addresses from people's inboxes (and why not the names from the "From" field as well. If I was tasked with this I'd even suggest scraping any signature fields). Hey, at least it bought Zuck a $900K watch.
- alterom 2y ago
  Facebook is routinely suggesting me contacts that I have met and interacted with offline, the only link to them being an entry in my phone book. Which, I'm guessing, I allowed Messenger to have access to at some point. Other than that, it's inference from GPS/location data, which Meta, as far as I know, didn't deny doing.
  - Cwizard 2y ago
    Were you ever connected to the same Wifi network? You can probably use that for tracking too.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      It definitely uses connection IPs as some heuristic. I exclusively used Facebook for family (years ago before deleting it) and received recommendations of otherwise socially-unconnected roommates who habitually accessed FB through house wifi.
    - netsharc 2y ago
      I find it "amusing" that FB (or well, a lot of phone apps) can see how your relationship with people ebb and flow. E.g. for a dating situation: new WhatsApp contact, growing frequency of texts, growing frequency of WhatsApp calls, culminating in a night where both phones were connected to the same SSID / locatable in one geo-location throughout the whole night, without their users checking them. When that happens it'd be time to show them ads with the text "Your new love interest is highly interested in these products"... It'd also be "amusing" to big-data the whole thing and get the computer to spit out the answer to the question "Where is this relationship going?"
latexr 2y ago
> Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? That’s how Zuckerberg painted it, and no doubt there were people who bought it, at least internally. See the red book. https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  The number of people who drank the kool-aid is astonishing. To the same tune, I think that if you tell people that politicians lie, majority of them will be deeply shocked, hurt, and offended.
  - gmac 2y ago
    > if you tell people that politicians lie If you do it as a blanket statement — i.e. all politicians lie all the time — then yes, I will be pretty irritated. Some politicians spout dangerous nonsense most of the time. Other politicians can be trusted most of the time, and when they lie it tends towards 'spin' or 'being economical with the truth' (such as: "we are spending more on education than ever before" — when this is true in nominal/absolute terms but false in real/per-pupil terms). There is a world of difference between these positions, and treating them alike (as many do) undermines democracies.
  - latexr 2y ago
    I’m not sure that’s true in general. I see many people do the polar opposite: spout “every politician is the same, they’re all crooks”. Which isn’t helpful either. Could be a generational or cultural thing, though.
    - pixl97 2y ago
      I mean, you're both probably correct. In the US a huge portion of the population doesn't vote, I would expect those that think every politician is a crook. The other side that does vote thinks the other politician lies and their politician is the good one.
      - 2y ago
KaiserPro 2y ago
> Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names No, FB was a much better product, it was far more connected, any way easier to talk and make friends online. It also was a lot more reliable. > Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs. Indeed, they were not kind, mainly because they realised, way too late, that the API they had designed gave third parties way too much access to the "social graph". (see Cambridge analytica, although actually its much more smoke and mirrors than you might imagine) They needed to cut down that access because 1) they'd been told to 2) they realised that people could extract that data for free, thus denting their analytics advantage that made advertising so lucrative.
- firefax 2y ago
  >FB was a much better product FB used to have granular privacy controls and no "feed" -- you wrote on someone's wall, they wrote on yours, and people had to actively click on your profile to see the messages rather than have them thrust front and center. FB abandoned that commitment to privacy and has suffered as a result.
  - sidewndr46 2y ago
    How has Facebook suffered? Most of their losses seem to be self imposed, stuff like the "metaverse"
    - bigfatkitten 2y ago
      It's more accurate to say the community has suffered. This is the change that lead to Facebook being one of the leading misinformation platforms, because they shovel garbage at people to drive engagement. I have a throwaway profile with no friends that follow now pages. In the absence of anything else, Facebook has somehow decided I would most like to see anti trans nonsense, flat earth conspiracy theories and child sexual abuse material. (They don't remove the latter if you report it, of course.)
jkukul 2y ago
> and other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) as far as I can tell it's never really had any mission other than getting big. I sometimes wonder what motivations these orgs have in contributing to open source. My cynical side refuses to believe that the reasons are altruistic (although I'm sure there are altruistic individuals in those orgs!). I think that the decisions to contribute to open source are calculated business decisions made to benefit the organization by: * Getting outside contributions to the software that's widely used inside an organization * Getting more people familiar with the software so that when they're hired they are already up to speed * Attracting talent * Improving PR * Undermining competition (Llama?) Regardless of the reasons, I think that there's a huge net benefit to society from large companies open-sourcing their software. I just don't think that's an argument to view these companies more favorably.
- xorcist 2y ago
  Commoditizing your complements. In other words, wiping out your competitor's business moats. If their cashflow is dependent on selling phones, open source your phone operating system to lower the value of the proprietary system. It can also be used to quickly gain market share where you previously had none and wants to catch up on your competitors. You're bleeding money any way to try to pry open an established market, and open source might be the cheaper route. Most famous examples are perhaps Apple (webkit, cups) and Facebook (AI).
nonrandomstring 2y ago
> Has anyone ever seen Facebook as idealistic? During the "Arab Spring" [0], a lot of people thought Facebook was the dogs bollocks and that the sun shone out of Mark Zuckerberg's arse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring
conartist6 2y ago
I'll bite. When I worked there I didn't see the management as idealistic, but the news media vis a vis the employee base had a lot of power. Many times I saw fiery journalism create direct confrontations between Zuck and ordinary employees about things like the company's moderation reaction to the shocking "napalm girl" wartime photo. Back then employees often won, creating shifts on company policy that felt like would not have happened otherwise. At some point it seems that the company decided that it wanted its people to have less of that kind of power though, presumably because it created a liberal company and Zuck seems to see the idea of Facebook as a liberal entity as a serious threat to his company
wslh 2y ago
> It had the best network effect because of its real name policy I think it was the best network effect because it started as an elite network in US universities and propagated from there.
jmyeet 2y ago
Facebook had the same kind of noble mission Google once had. Google's mission was to make information universally accessible. Facebook's was to connect people. There are lots of reasons FB beat MySpace. MySpace was really a different product. It was focused on your homepage, really. Facebook was one of the first to introduce an algorithmic feed. I would also disagree that people were "tricked" into using their real names. This greatly helped with discoverability and it's actually what most people want. As for Facebook scraping third-party sites... citation needed. I mean this was great for Facebook's advertising business but it's really no different to the DoubleClick (and ultimately Google) pixel, which is to say it's a high-level profile of pages you visit (that have the pixel). As for the games, Facebook didn't kill those. Mobile did. And I'm sorry, but nothing will make me feel sorry for Mark Pincus and Zynga [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3218774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3218774
rsynnott 2y ago
> Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? People who work there often seem to (or at least used to years ago), though I could never really figure out why.
MiddleEndian 2y ago
>the idealistic Twitter Never saw Twitter as idealistic. Seems to just want to show you celebrity gossip. Substantially worse product than Facebook from the start, and really pioneered the attempts at trying to continuously grab people's attention as opposed to just being a tool. Not really a defense of Zuck's products as a whole as Instagram seems to be the same. >Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names That was (and is) a fantastic feature, and I remember being aware of it when I signed up. It was super easy to meet people in real life then find them on Facebook, and then invite them to future events in real life or keep track of what they're up to. Also Myspace allowing HTML resulted in a bunch of entirely unreadable pages. And the Myspace extended friend network didn't really work because everyone was friends with Myspace Tom (who by all means seems to be a chill guy IRL) >Remember the apps, like zombie games? Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs. If anything, Facebook was too friendly to third party devs (which does track with your comparison with Amazon, which I think is far too friendly to third party sellers). Third party apps are anti-features IMO. Should've just stuck to its core functionality, connecting you with people you know, and showing you content from groups that you have chosen to join (which you can still get in your newsfeed if you aggressively block and hide almost everything, which I do lol)
- criddell 2y ago
  > Substantially worse product than Facebook from the start I disagree. When Twitter first started taking off at SXSW twenty years ago it had very little in common with Facebook. There wasn't an algorithm, there were no ads, and there was barely a website. You just received text messages from people you followed. You mostly interacted with it via your phone and for many of us, that meant text entry on the digits keys of a Nokia or Motorola phone. It was delightful. You likely personally knew all the people you were tweeting with. Facebook was something you did on your computer. There were lots of ads and they had just launched the algorithmic news feed. It was the beginning of something bad IMHO.
  - MiddleEndian 2y ago
    I think I got an account in late 2007 or 2008, so perhaps it was different in 2006 or early 2007. But I do remember in 2009, Ashton Kutcher was in the news for having a million followers on Twitter, so the time where it was not for celebrity gossip was certainly brief. I also generally prefer not to be notified by things on my phone if I can avoid it, computer use is more deliberate. >You likely personally knew all the people you were tweeting with. But I certainly knew all the people I was friends with on Facebook, they were people I first met in person, and it had their names. I think fundamentally, I dislike the asymmetric nature of "following" people on Twitter (or Instagram or whatever). On Facebook you are friends or you are not. Obviously you can hide/mute people or whatever but the fundamental interaction is mutual.
ghaff 2y ago
I more or less agree with a lot of whaat you wrote, but I'd argue for an ostensibly personal social network, real names are mostly a positive.
Climatebamb 2y ago
Amazon? FB was always a lot more evil. Amazon just build the best logistics network on the planet and leverages this for their monopoly. FB pushed fake news and everyting else without consideration as long as it grabs your attention which they then sell.
duxup 2y ago
Agreed, a lot of companies I can make an argument for believe in many being "idealistic" at some point. (admittedly I'm using "idealistic" as a very wide ranging concept here) Not Facebook... if there was some idealism it was way way before I found Facebook.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"Has anyone ever seen Facebook as idealistic?" The title refers to a memoir, an autobiographical account of a time period in the author's life. The word "idealism" refers to the author's idealism, not Facebook's. This is stated in the first sentence of the first chapter. Idealism routinely causes people to see Facebook as something other than what the facts show.
- wisty 2y ago
  Ah, nice point.
doktorhladnjak 2y ago
I know several people that worked there back in the growth days of the company. They had all drunk the kool aid hard on the work connecting people and making the world a better place. Several of them became very disenchanted when scandals like Cambridge Analytica or the manipulation of the public during 2016 election occurred. Zuck and the leadership there had really spun a positive, world changing narrative to employees.

by wisty 2y ago

guax 2y ago

I remember de people graph search when no privacy settings really existed and people kept complete and updated profiles. It was the ultimate stalker took. Absolute batshit crazy that it existed even for the short time it did.

3np 2y ago

There was plenty of koolaid around. https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook

Voultapher 2y ago

It was also born by the guy - Zuck and arguably in a similar spirit - who initially created a hot or not webpage to rank female college classmates by "fuckability". No clue how any of this would come as a surprise if you know his history. Brian Cantrill talks about how social media was born crocked [1] while referring to the eerily similar friendster backstory. [1] https://youtu.be/0wtvQZijPzg?t=482 https://youtu.be/0wtvQZijPzg?t=482

frereubu 2y ago

The idealism is the current corporate story - "enabling communication" etc. - but you're right that there was no idealism to start with. Zuckerberg set up The Facebook so undergrads at Harvard could rate how hot girls were, scraping their images from unprotected university servers. This is a great podcast centred around the film about it - The Social Network - but it delves really interestingly into the story and motivations of the early years: https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/the-great-political-films%3A-the-social-network https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/the-great-political-films%... The main conclusion is that Zuckerberg is a pure, amoral opportunist, which is why Facebook has been so successful through an era of "ask for forgiveness, not permission".

tasuki 2y ago
[flagged]
soraminazuki 2y ago
This is the first time I heard about anyone buying into any sort of "idealism" of Facebook. Isn't Zuckerberg famous for calling Facebook users "dumb f***s" back in the early days for willingly handing over all sorts of information? https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/ https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
- frereubu 2y ago
  I wasn't saying anyone bought into it, just that it's the story Facebook now tells about itself.
dabockster 2y ago
It wasn't so much "idealism" than it was the fact that social media was directly responsible for the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the US's first Black president. It also gave him a significant advantage in 2012. Nobody wanted to touch social media out of fear of putting future Democrat POTUS candidates at a disadvantage. Notice how, in 2017, it's only after everyone starts post mortem evaluating the 2016 election that the "idealism" of social media begins to sour.

rajman187 2y ago

> other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) Not to detract from your main point but I think this misses a lot of contributions, eg Cassandra, Hive, Presto, GraphQL, the plethora of publications coming out of FAIR (fundamental AI research) and of course the Llama family of models which have enabled quite a few developments themselves

__loam 2y ago
I think React and GraphQL are pretty impressive in terms of how shitty they've made the developer experience at so many companies. GraphQL especially seems to attract the kind of people who love to misuse technologies built for massive orgs in companies with fewer than 100 employees.
- pcthrowaway 2y ago
  > GraphQL especially seems to attract the kind of people who love to misuse technologies built for massive orgs in companies with fewer than 100 employees. This is almost exactly how I feel about Kubernetes
  - paddy_m 2y ago
    I have worked at companies with more kubernetes pods than customers. They loved graphql too.
- ajb 2y ago
  There's actually a well-known effect in standards, that large orgs want to overcomplicate them, as having implemented a bunch of overcomplicated standards becomes part of their moat against competitors. This is definitely done deliberately; the most blatant example is Office Open XML but it's true of others too. They know that they have the staff to waste effort on it, and others don't. I'm not sure anyone is thinking 'lets open source our most dumb ideas to hobble potential competition' - but they would do it if they thought of it.
- chillingeffect 2y ago

netsharc 2y ago

> Facebook also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you. I remember FB recommending me a contact, I thought "Why does that distinctive name sound familar?". I looked through my e-mails and I had sent a few emails back and forth with the person because of an eBay transaction. I know I never told FB to scrape my email account, but I'm guessing this person did. And it's certainly not even the address book, but the email addresses from people's inboxes (and why not the names from the "From" field as well. If I was tasked with this I'd even suggest scraping any signature fields). Hey, at least it bought Zuck a $900K watch.

alterom 2y ago
Facebook is routinely suggesting me contacts that I have met and interacted with offline, the only link to them being an entry in my phone book. Which, I'm guessing, I allowed Messenger to have access to at some point. Other than that, it's inference from GPS/location data, which Meta, as far as I know, didn't deny doing.
- Cwizard 2y ago
  Were you ever connected to the same Wifi network? You can probably use that for tracking too.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    It definitely uses connection IPs as some heuristic. I exclusively used Facebook for family (years ago before deleting it) and received recommendations of otherwise socially-unconnected roommates who habitually accessed FB through house wifi.
  - netsharc 2y ago
    I find it "amusing" that FB (or well, a lot of phone apps) can see how your relationship with people ebb and flow. E.g. for a dating situation: new WhatsApp contact, growing frequency of texts, growing frequency of WhatsApp calls, culminating in a night where both phones were connected to the same SSID / locatable in one geo-location throughout the whole night, without their users checking them. When that happens it'd be time to show them ads with the text "Your new love interest is highly interested in these products"... It'd also be "amusing" to big-data the whole thing and get the computer to spit out the answer to the question "Where is this relationship going?"

latexr 2y ago

> Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? That’s how Zuckerberg painted it, and no doubt there were people who bought it, at least internally. See the red book. https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook

anal_reactor 2y ago
The number of people who drank the kool-aid is astonishing. To the same tune, I think that if you tell people that politicians lie, majority of them will be deeply shocked, hurt, and offended.
- gmac 2y ago
  > if you tell people that politicians lie If you do it as a blanket statement — i.e. all politicians lie all the time — then yes, I will be pretty irritated. Some politicians spout dangerous nonsense most of the time. Other politicians can be trusted most of the time, and when they lie it tends towards 'spin' or 'being economical with the truth' (such as: "we are spending more on education than ever before" — when this is true in nominal/absolute terms but false in real/per-pupil terms). There is a world of difference between these positions, and treating them alike (as many do) undermines democracies.
- latexr 2y ago
  I’m not sure that’s true in general. I see many people do the polar opposite: spout “every politician is the same, they’re all crooks”. Which isn’t helpful either. Could be a generational or cultural thing, though.
  - pixl97 2y ago
    I mean, you're both probably correct. In the US a huge portion of the population doesn't vote, I would expect those that think every politician is a crook. The other side that does vote thinks the other politician lies and their politician is the good one.
    - 2y ago

KaiserPro 2y ago

> Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names No, FB was a much better product, it was far more connected, any way easier to talk and make friends online. It also was a lot more reliable. > Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs. Indeed, they were not kind, mainly because they realised, way too late, that the API they had designed gave third parties way too much access to the "social graph". (see Cambridge analytica, although actually its much more smoke and mirrors than you might imagine) They needed to cut down that access because 1) they'd been told to 2) they realised that people could extract that data for free, thus denting their analytics advantage that made advertising so lucrative.

firefax 2y ago
>FB was a much better product FB used to have granular privacy controls and no "feed" -- you wrote on someone's wall, they wrote on yours, and people had to actively click on your profile to see the messages rather than have them thrust front and center. FB abandoned that commitment to privacy and has suffered as a result.
- sidewndr46 2y ago
  How has Facebook suffered? Most of their losses seem to be self imposed, stuff like the "metaverse"
  - bigfatkitten 2y ago
    It's more accurate to say the community has suffered. This is the change that lead to Facebook being one of the leading misinformation platforms, because they shovel garbage at people to drive engagement. I have a throwaway profile with no friends that follow now pages. In the absence of anything else, Facebook has somehow decided I would most like to see anti trans nonsense, flat earth conspiracy theories and child sexual abuse material. (They don't remove the latter if you report it, of course.)

jkukul 2y ago

> and other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) as far as I can tell it's never really had any mission other than getting big. I sometimes wonder what motivations these orgs have in contributing to open source. My cynical side refuses to believe that the reasons are altruistic (although I'm sure there are altruistic individuals in those orgs!). I think that the decisions to contribute to open source are calculated business decisions made to benefit the organization by: * Getting outside contributions to the software that's widely used inside an organization * Getting more people familiar with the software so that when they're hired they are already up to speed * Attracting talent * Improving PR * Undermining competition (Llama?) Regardless of the reasons, I think that there's a huge net benefit to society from large companies open-sourcing their software. I just don't think that's an argument to view these companies more favorably.

xorcist 2y ago
Commoditizing your complements. In other words, wiping out your competitor's business moats. If their cashflow is dependent on selling phones, open source your phone operating system to lower the value of the proprietary system. It can also be used to quickly gain market share where you previously had none and wants to catch up on your competitors. You're bleeding money any way to try to pry open an established market, and open source might be the cheaper route. Most famous examples are perhaps Apple (webkit, cups) and Facebook (AI).

nonrandomstring 2y ago

> Has anyone ever seen Facebook as idealistic? During the "Arab Spring" [0], a lot of people thought Facebook was the dogs bollocks and that the sun shone out of Mark Zuckerberg's arse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring

conartist6 2y ago

I'll bite. When I worked there I didn't see the management as idealistic, but the news media vis a vis the employee base had a lot of power. Many times I saw fiery journalism create direct confrontations between Zuck and ordinary employees about things like the company's moderation reaction to the shocking "napalm girl" wartime photo. Back then employees often won, creating shifts on company policy that felt like would not have happened otherwise. At some point it seems that the company decided that it wanted its people to have less of that kind of power though, presumably because it created a liberal company and Zuck seems to see the idea of Facebook as a liberal entity as a serious threat to his company

wslh 2y ago

> It had the best network effect because of its real name policy I think it was the best network effect because it started as an elite network in US universities and propagated from there.

jmyeet 2y ago

Facebook had the same kind of noble mission Google once had. Google's mission was to make information universally accessible. Facebook's was to connect people. There are lots of reasons FB beat MySpace. MySpace was really a different product. It was focused on your homepage, really. Facebook was one of the first to introduce an algorithmic feed. I would also disagree that people were "tricked" into using their real names. This greatly helped with discoverability and it's actually what most people want. As for Facebook scraping third-party sites... citation needed. I mean this was great for Facebook's advertising business but it's really no different to the DoubleClick (and ultimately Google) pixel, which is to say it's a high-level profile of pages you visit (that have the pixel). As for the games, Facebook didn't kill those. Mobile did. And I'm sorry, but nothing will make me feel sorry for Mark Pincus and Zynga [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3218774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3218774

rsynnott 2y ago

> Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? People who work there often seem to (or at least used to years ago), though I could never really figure out why.

MiddleEndian 2y ago

>the idealistic Twitter Never saw Twitter as idealistic. Seems to just want to show you celebrity gossip. Substantially worse product than Facebook from the start, and really pioneered the attempts at trying to continuously grab people's attention as opposed to just being a tool. Not really a defense of Zuck's products as a whole as Instagram seems to be the same. >Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names That was (and is) a fantastic feature, and I remember being aware of it when I signed up. It was super easy to meet people in real life then find them on Facebook, and then invite them to future events in real life or keep track of what they're up to. Also Myspace allowing HTML resulted in a bunch of entirely unreadable pages. And the Myspace extended friend network didn't really work because everyone was friends with Myspace Tom (who by all means seems to be a chill guy IRL) >Remember the apps, like zombie games? Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs. If anything, Facebook was too friendly to third party devs (which does track with your comparison with Amazon, which I think is far too friendly to third party sellers). Third party apps are anti-features IMO. Should've just stuck to its core functionality, connecting you with people you know, and showing you content from groups that you have chosen to join (which you can still get in your newsfeed if you aggressively block and hide almost everything, which I do lol)

criddell 2y ago
> Substantially worse product than Facebook from the start I disagree. When Twitter first started taking off at SXSW twenty years ago it had very little in common with Facebook. There wasn't an algorithm, there were no ads, and there was barely a website. You just received text messages from people you followed. You mostly interacted with it via your phone and for many of us, that meant text entry on the digits keys of a Nokia or Motorola phone. It was delightful. You likely personally knew all the people you were tweeting with. Facebook was something you did on your computer. There were lots of ads and they had just launched the algorithmic news feed. It was the beginning of something bad IMHO.
- MiddleEndian 2y ago
  I think I got an account in late 2007 or 2008, so perhaps it was different in 2006 or early 2007. But I do remember in 2009, Ashton Kutcher was in the news for having a million followers on Twitter, so the time where it was not for celebrity gossip was certainly brief. I also generally prefer not to be notified by things on my phone if I can avoid it, computer use is more deliberate. >You likely personally knew all the people you were tweeting with. But I certainly knew all the people I was friends with on Facebook, they were people I first met in person, and it had their names. I think fundamentally, I dislike the asymmetric nature of "following" people on Twitter (or Instagram or whatever). On Facebook you are friends or you are not. Obviously you can hide/mute people or whatever but the fundamental interaction is mutual.

ghaff 2y ago

I more or less agree with a lot of whaat you wrote, but I'd argue for an ostensibly personal social network, real names are mostly a positive.

Climatebamb 2y ago

Amazon? FB was always a lot more evil. Amazon just build the best logistics network on the planet and leverages this for their monopoly. FB pushed fake news and everyting else without consideration as long as it grabs your attention which they then sell.

duxup 2y ago

Agreed, a lot of companies I can make an argument for believe in many being "idealistic" at some point. (admittedly I'm using "idealistic" as a very wide ranging concept here) Not Facebook... if there was some idealism it was way way before I found Facebook.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"Has anyone ever seen Facebook as idealistic?" The title refers to a memoir, an autobiographical account of a time period in the author's life. The word "idealism" refers to the author's idealism, not Facebook's. This is stated in the first sentence of the first chapter. Idealism routinely causes people to see Facebook as something other than what the facts show.

wisty 2y ago
Ah, nice point.

doktorhladnjak 2y ago

I know several people that worked there back in the growth days of the company. They had all drunk the kool aid hard on the work connecting people and making the world a better place. Several of them became very disenchanted when scandals like Cambridge Analytica or the manipulation of the public during 2016 election occurred. Zuck and the leadership there had really spun a positive, world changing narrative to employees.