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And I guess I’ll agree to disagree. All I read was a tacky attempt at acknowledging bad people are allowed to use good things. I think you’re painting your own narrative on to a cliche startup growth memo ex post facto in a world where they’ve finished growing
The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.
That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends.
Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here.
And in this case, "connecting people" is a euphemism for adding more Facebook users, i.e., getting more people using a highly addictive social medium product that leads many people to feel more isolated and less connected.
None of what I read there is saying "anything we do is good and justified".
>That’s why all the work we do in growth
I'm not reading that as "anything we do for growth is justified". It's "everything we do in growth", as in all the tactics we currently use in our departments focused on growth, are justified.
This is like "everything we do in sales is kosher". It's admitting you do some abrasive things, but it's stuff that's justified.
Does it sound gross? Yes. Is it true for most companies? Yes. These are uncomfortable truths, companies make sites imperfect to optimize for ad revenue, do extensive A/B testing to see how they can influence behavior, go as far as sending you 20 email drip campaigns or bombard you with notifications to wear you down into using their products, these are all growth tactics that get used by not-evil companies.
To me, the dumbest part of this is that someone would write this all down, and be proud of it. So proud they'd make it a memo and send it company-wide.
This is the silent shame of the tech world. We're forced to modify our most harmless ideas to make a successful product in the real world where even having the best product ever won't guarantee success without tons of marketing using ad campaigns driven by ill-gotten analytics data.
That's what "Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here." is saying.
No, I'm doubling down on the "you missed the relevant and interesting parts of the memo" angle.
If you don't want to be called out for not addressing the main points of concern before dismissing the issue, why don't you address them rather than complaining for being called out?
Anyway, I seriously doubt "startups will be startups" will be the narrative very many people will accept here.
You're getting sidetracked by the terrorism stuff. Of course, any communication network can be used to communicate bad things. But that's not the main point of the memo. I don't know why you'd stop reading and thinking there and draw conclusions.
The scary part is the strong and clear call to all of Facebook that the ends absolutely justifies the means. That growing the network is good and it's the only good.
Privacy? Security? Health? Truth? Law? Integrity and ethics?
The message is clear that none of these are important if you can grow the network.