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.
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%...
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".
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.
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.
On the first page after signing up, it wanted me to "Add some Friends", and suggested a bunch of people I knew. Including my cousin with a different last name, and who lived several states away.
I've always been fairly privacy conscious, always using an adblocker, but that was downright creepy.
I told him "Don't worry John, they already have it. You're in my contacts list." and the realization that hit him was almost physical.
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.
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.
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.
Brian Cantrill talks about how social media was born crocked [1] while referring to the eerily similar friendster backstory.
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.
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).
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
And for the other projects, their paths are littered with the dead bodies of engineers who had been ordered to chase down one of Facebook's hype technologies just because "Facebook does it so we can follow their best example".
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.
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.
That’s how Zuckerberg painted it, and no doubt there were people who bought it, at least internally. See the red book.
Anecdotally, this is almost certainly false. I (and most people I know) are posting ("sharing") less and less. Faced with a surveillance panopticon, I think many normal people are opting out. Peer-to-peer networks are withering.
The internet is reverting to the format of traditional media, with two distinct classes of broadcasters ('influencers') and audience members.
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)
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.
That may have been late stage Twitter, but early stage twitter was _not_ that. It became _the_ (only) way to be able to get near real-time information on some unfolding event, usually by the people actually involved, and very useful in that regard. It facilitated realtime communications in a way that FB did not.
It was different at the start.
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].
Not Facebook... if there was some idealism it was way way before I found Facebook.
I think it was the best network effect because it started as an elite network in US universities and propagated from there.
Zuck and the leadership there had really spun a positive, world changing narrative to employees.
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.
People who work there often seem to (or at least used to years ago), though I could never really figure out why.
I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, spiritually toxic shit:
> Wynn-Williams’ critiques aren’t limited to Zuckerberg. She describes the working culture under Sandberg as so intense that Wynn-Williams felt pressured to send her talking points while in labor, her feet in stirrups.
My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!
Sure, but you can look at this in one of two ways. One is the way you seem to be angling for, where we have an employee who is so disturbingly eager to please that she continues to do work at absurd times when no one should ever expect to be working. The other way is of an employee who has seen how her boss treats employees, and believes that her position, career, and livelihood would be in jeopardy if she wasn't working even in situations where no one should be expected to be working.
I think the second take is more likely. And even if we think it's bizarre that someone could get to the point where they believe that kind of devotion to their job is necessary, it's still alarming and raises red flags that a company culture could cause someone to get to the point that they'd feel that way.
From my understanding that incident happened while she was in a directorial position, not some IC level. At that level one has to constantly actively balance private life and work, no one will do it for you. I am all for supporting employees on all levels (and sure her superior could and should have done some things differently) but if your aspirations and perseverance get you to the point where you are flirting with the C suite, you should also be aware the you own your decisions now.
This doesn't excuse Sandberg at all, I'm sure she would be a horrifically bad person to work for. But when I read that section I immediately thought of highly ambitious people I've worked with who I could see on either side of that encounter. Such people often are highly materially successful, although most of them don't seem very happy about it.
Woman-on-Woman violence in the workplace has to stop, instead of trying to constantly take each other down they need to be better allies to other women.
Especially true for those that aspire to be role models for successful women and write books about how to "Lean In".
Honestly, they need to grow a pair
This kind of pressure (might) have worked for me if I was just out of university and such. But with experience you get to learn your boundaries
You're a top-level executive and you're afraid of being let go by such a silly thing? They can't wait 2 or 3 days for "top level bullet points"? Seems like they depend on you more than you depend on them
Kind of reminds me of this Simpsons joke: "Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, and one to listen."
Should the photo grid be 3 wide or 5 wide... Thank god ChatGPT can now pump out the mindless talking points for them.
I don't think the stakes are that low.
Most people don't give two fraks about who Bezos or Musk or Zuckerberg are, and they definitely don't think of them when using products and services from the companies you mentioned.
One reason is that they are extremely manipulative and strategically exploit people with power over other people's money, notably taxes and what labour generates.
Do you want your job still?
sure you can take "holiday", but if you don't please your capricious master, you'll not have a job to come back to.
I can well believe that Sandberg is someone who lacks empathy of her immediate underlings, the mission comes first after all.
The fact she felt she could not turn her phone off without there being consequences is the core point here.
There should be a level of market cap where you company has to split, period. Megacorps create oligarchs, ruin competition and cheat antitrust.
Might it be an option that correlation and causation are reversed here?
Given the amount of criticsm a typical leader of a large company, or even a country, gets these days, it is no wonder that people with narcissistic traits have an advantage. Somewhat more empathetic people would've given up already, either when they received a large enough reward, or whenever they got serious criticsm on bad practices.
Free tip for a better society: stop worshipping success.
What should be the maximum of how big someone should be?
Humans are not perfect, whether "big" or "small".
Individuals should not have that much power. It's not healthy.
The problem is power accumulation, "small" people have a harder time limiting my freedoms by abusing their power.
I don't want a king, whether they got to be king by swords or money.
In democracy, the maximum should be 1. One vote per person. That's it.
In practice, we can delegate stuff, but I don't see reason why should people (as adults) accept any sort of authoritarianism in their lives.
Billionaires are bad for society.
Still, I've never seen a poor human becoming an oligarch.
The problem is not that those billionaires are not perfect, rather that they have too much power.
People amassing more money than entire countries just should not happen. "Eat the rich"!
It is a very small country.
(emph, mine)
This, coming from a Meta spokesperson, is rather rich.
Or more abstractly, is fact-checking the responsibility of authors and content editors, or of platforms and infrastructure that spread the content?
Publishing anything dodgy about the biggest tech executives on the planet without that would lead your company getting nuked from orbit
And the industry in question has compromised its host culture. What is Truth now?
This billionaire corporate sociopath suggested "Facebook remake the news ecosystem with the company at its center."
How is the corporate propaganda business working out socially and politically? I see the stock valuations — perhaps they are a measure of what has been lost in stability and community.
> "I’ve seen him face so many choices and lose touch with whatever fundamental human decency"
Including the rush to dismantle fact-checking in his corporation's product, which has become THE news source for millions of citizens.
People may be interested in the interview with Wynn-Williams (the whistleblower) on the News Agents podcast: https://www.globalplayer.com/podcasts/episodes/7DrpKCA/ (it's a UK news/political podcast very popular in the UK). From what they said at the beginning I think this is her first big podcast interview about the book/her claims. I wonder if she chose a UK podcast because of the US arbiter ruling.
Why don't we let the community decide, instead of these bureaucratic, free speech-chilling "fact checkers"? If it's good enough for your employer, it should be good enough for you.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/07/nx-s1-5251151/meta-fact-check...
Oh Facebook is taking her to court to block her speech? Hmmm..
Though he's still ahead of Elon, who was busted for boosting his Path of Exile 2 account.
FWIW, Ticket to Ride and Catan are decent, worth playing, euro games. That's miles better than Monopoly or Risk which the casual folk immediately think of in the context of board games.
Meta is trying to stop a former employee from promoting her book about Facebook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43349473 - March 2025 (104 comments)
if they signed a mutual non-disparagement agreement, and they are currently using that agreement to stop a publication, if meta goes and breaks that agreement, doesn't that nullify the contract?
I am not saying she isn't doing this because she has a cause. I am also not saying she is lying or anything.
But if you sell a book you can't deny that there might be a conflict of interest. Potentially she paints things more extreme than they really were.
I don't see these types of books as business opportunities.
“Over one dinner, Zuckerberg said Andrew Jackson — known for his populist appeal and his inhumane relocation of Native Americans — was America’s best president and “it’s not even close,” according to Wynn-Williams. ”
There are many reasons someone could have a person be a favorite president. It’s unfair to bring up the worst thing a president did in response to someone saying that this president or that president is their favorite.
For example I have liberal friends who say FDR is their favorite president. It would be unfair to say then “FDR known for throwing Japanese people in internment camps was the favorite president of Joe Smith!”
I have friends who say Obama was their favorite president. Imagine someone saying “Obama who killed thousands through drone attacks was the favorite president of Jane Smith!”
Anyway when it comes to Andrew Jackson specifically I had a libertarian friend in high school who was a big fan of him because he helped eliminate the Bank of the United States. I was in high school taking AP US History around the time Ron Paul was running for president so I believe my libertarian friend was connecting Ron Paul’s opposition to the Federal Reserve with Andrew Jackson’s anti Bank of US policies.
I don’t know why Zuckerberg likes Andrew Jackson so much. I wish the article had said it.
That is a very different thing than "favorite president" - that's someone who believes they're being objective, that there's no arguments to be made about what others should see as a simple fact.
This book prob wouldn't have even blipped my radar were it not for all of these stories about how they're trying to stop it.
It's the same as owning a large share of news papers or TV channels. You own the public discourse.
If Larry Ellison is a greedy immoral bastard I switch to MS SQL Server, or something open source. When Zuckerberg or Musk became greedy immoral bastards, they started to shape the information fed to the world. You can decide not to buy a Tesla, but you cannot escape the results of brainwashing of other people that vote.
Bill Gates had serious trouble for including a free Internet Browser in his Operating System, because he was not able to influence the public discourse. The new internet mass communication companies do. Google never really got into much trouble while their monopoly was stronger.
People forget that the MS in MSNBC stands for Microsoft. Bill Gates invested heavily in media and lobbying in the late 90s / early 00s.
Edit: We do not want our platforms to be owned by someone like Susan Wojcicki who inflated her own importance and who thought mass censorship is ok (Google has really abrogated their responsibility here)
This idea is very parochial and American, and it's unfortunate in spreading a wrong idea that gives license for some people to behave as hooligans.
There are massive global companies most of us have never heard of, with CEOs who shun publicity and operate in what is really a mild-mannered but highly competent fashion.
Power also comes from politeness, tact, diplomacy, and the earned attachment of subordinates we call "respect".
They are not constantly immersed in scandal and drama because most of the employees never have much cause to interact negatively.
The cult of US Tech leaders is a vile and embarrassing spectacle of vanity, tantrums, acting-out, histrionics and arrogance. It's very poor human behaviour that harms the perception of business in the wider world, and we should not hold it up as normative.
So at least it was possible back in the day (of course after this many years a lot of details were lost and overall standards and expectations were very different back then).
This is nonsense. Plenty of good people are wildly successful. The difference is they aren’t addicted to the role, and so see a future for themselves beyond it. Connecting with that future self, in turn, effects their decisions today—at work, at home, in society.
We have a cadre of sociopaths leading our commercial giants. That is a fixable problem. Saying it’s a non-story is just being nihilistic and lazy.
It did not work out that well for the OpenAi board however.
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
If there is something out there that can do this, profitably, then we can kiss these mega social giants good bye.
I heard about the Blue Sky protocol, but it still feels primitive.
But socialising on the internet? There were plenty of options before, around and after then. Only, they didn't get the same support, convergence and effort since then. Because most people trusted the centralized services would opt to do the right things eventually. Ha. Fools were we.
You don't need to use the internet to socialize.
But if he stole code, that's different
If he stole the rollout strategy (to selected universities first) that's also different
I don't know how much he actually took, only that there are IMs with really pleasant things like "I'm going to fuck them in the ear". And making outright fake accounts for the W twins
2. Making me do it three times in a row is just obnoxious.
In my experience they were react coders
If it was so bad, why did she work there? She was a senior executive, not a wage-slave.
Years ago, an acquaintence was an exec at a tech company that imploded in a semi-public way. He decided he wanted to get a documentary made on the whole thing and sent me his pitch. A little too self-aggrandizing, which I pointed out among other things. Couple years go by and a doc did come out on it (not his), uncovers some shady things and lawsuits against the CEO…and a little bit of embezzlement on his part.
So I think you’re right on the money, there’s a reason she worked there. Sucky/shady company and she fit in well.
Said another way, all movie reviews are biased because we all have different tastes and preferences, we have all seen different movies which colors how we perceive new movies, we all have different values and limits, the list goes on. I like movie reviewers with a strong opinion, even/especially if that opinion does not agree with my own. Because I understand their strong opinions (their biases), I can easily apply my own analysis and decision-making to their opinion.
Nominative determinism?
--
On a different note, Obama, the ex-president with theoretically no official power, is calling up CEOs privately to get them to behave differently?
Seems like the Twitter files weren't the only corporate being influenced
The article's phrasing was a bit murky, but I read that to mean that Obama called after or around the 2016 election, while he was still president.
Then its a private citizen calling someone in their network. standard 1st amendment stuff right
If its making a speech about it in public, again perfectly above board.
Threatening to use executive power in private, very much not.
However the USA is arresting people for organising protests, so that whole freedom of speech thing has gone a bit stale, alas.
