At least Facebook actually provides something of value to the hundreds of millions people who use it.
I think sugar is a more apt analogy than smoking. Facebook, like sugars, provides a source of a required human input. (Calories/human connection). Overdone, both are harmful.
Tobacco is a much more charged analogy, and is more extreme in terms of positive/negative balance. I think it reveals more about the biases of the person making the statement than it does about social media.
Sure, candy technically has calories. But the fact that human beings need calories isn't a good argument for eating candy. You can also get calories from healthy foods, and you can get "human connection" from, you know, talking to people, or sending text messages, or reading reputable news sources. Not coincidentally, the idea of a "social connection" was and is also a big part of apologizing for smoking as a habit.
That's also true of just about anything humans can consume. For example, sugar.
But, I dont consume much news from facebook (outside of reputable sources, like NPR), nor do I pay much attention to it in general, and I'm VERY cautious about what I post, to avoid anything that could create controversy or waves of any sort.
However, there's some value in "running towards the fire" so to speak. Facebook does not seem to me to be fundamentally evil, just willfully blind to the problems it causes. It's probably worth a few years of someone's life to try to steer that ship in a better direction.
In the end I didn't take the job because the position eventually offered was too low to do what I described above effectively. But I bet there are other folks here who might get better positioned if they took the time to interview.
There's no reason to believe that as a job seeker you can have some insight for a given company into how impactful your actions may or may not have on the things they are doing that you consider harmful. An honest assessment I'd argue should assume your impact will be minimal if not zero given a large enough organization, unless you are coming in as a high level manager.
As such it's hard to not take it as a self-rationalization given the incentives to create cognitive dissonance on the part of job seekers in order to take a high paying job working on interesting technical problems despite the potential negative effects it has on others. This doesn't mean there aren't good reasons to go work at such a place, it just means that if you're telling yourself that you're able to look past any ethical concerns you might have since you think you can be an influencer towards correcting them, I think it's worth reflecting on if you're not actually going to be put into a real position of power to do so.
The challenge with Facebook specifically on this front is that power is extremely centralized onto one person, so even if you were joining Facebook as, say, a VP, it's hard to know in advance just how much influence you're going to have over the direction of the company before you've learned where the boundaries of that influence are.
Regarding being fundamentally evil or not, I've worked around groups which were constitutionally amoral or immoral-- the mandate of the group was simply incompatible with common-sense notions of good and little effort was made to reconcile the two. Facebook does not seem to belong in that camp, but does belong in the grey wasteland of groups that are well paid to develop a peculiarly self-serving sense of ethics. The reason that's important is because amoral groups will simply not accept ethical arguments as valid arguments to make, while groups with peculiar ethics are responsive to them but sometimes their logical toolkit is filled with double-ended hammers and crescent screwdrivers. I've found that to be an important distinction in previous roles.
As you point out, there is an ethical hazard here. If I worked there for five years would I find their ethical blind spots so obvious? Is the environment corrosive in a spiritual sense? No idea, but early indications both during my interviews and speaking to current employees were mixed. It was definitely something that gave me pause.
In terms of whether you can actually have the requisite influence, I probably would have taken the job if I could have come to confidence on this. In the end I don't think I could have and I didn't take the role.
Of course, it's difficult to disentangle the compensation from the levelling, so I may just be lying to myself and saying that if they'd paid me more I would have pretended. To attempt to guard against that I asked friends and former colleagues who I thought knew both me and something about the dilemma and listened to their thoughts. It's not a perfect system but I think it yielded a set of thought experiments that were useful to me in making sure I didn't fall into that trap.
The WhatsApp founders had more influence that an engineering plebe would ever hope to have and still failed to change facebook's wicked ways.
That's just, like, your opinion, a random HN reader. And the vast majority of FB users do not share it.
Here is an excellent explanation of some of the most robust arguments against Facebook.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17144748/c...
Yglesias, a very smart writer focused on public policy, comes to the conclusion that it would be in the public's interest for Facebook to completely cease operations immediately.
>> negative consequences of facebook use
Do those "academics" also research the positive consequences as well? I'm in touch with my high school and university friends to this day thanks to FB products. I value those friendships highly, but I now live on the other side of the globe, and I can't physically be there myself. My parents (and my wife's parents) are active users of WhatsApp and Instagram. My brother (who's also on the other side of the globe) communicates with me mostly via FB Messenger. I'd say my mental well-being benefits significantly from less isolation. I'd also say there are millions of other people like me, who can still easily keep in touch in spite of vast distances separating them from relatives and old friends.
Would alternatives exist if there was no FB? They likely would. But I don't have a problem with FB, as long as it's used moderately. I my view, however, it's a personal responsibility to moderate use. Part of being a functioning adult, so to speak.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
Then why did they choose FB when there are so many other group-chat type websites out there? I mean, Friendster is still around, or LinkedIn, or...
Is it so hard to extend those ideas from there?
Non-sequitur. I don't agree that FB is necessarily "bad for communities" in the first place. Besides, _which_ communities specifically do you claim it is bad for, and do you have any supporting evidence? Vox and Buzzfeed are not evidence.
Edit: Here are some citations to support my argument. Read all these and come back when you're done:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza
Which other fault-free organizations can claim to have settled with the FTC for privacy abuses, had their CEO forced to testify in front of the US congress and be questioned in a case of election manipulation, facilitated genocide, purposefully manipulated people into feeling depressed and many others?
There's an entire book written about the tremendous negative effects of companies like facebook on society - surveilance capitalism.
When comparing all of the above with the benefit of allowing various average joes to stay in touch with their family, which can very well be done over e-mail, phone, or any of the gazillion other social networks, it makes the latter mean precisely nothing.
At this point facebook would have to literally cure cancer for them to make up for their negative effects.
At least this article is upfront that it has a vested interest in demonizing FB
Agree to disagree.
We all live in the moment, and FB is having a bad moment right now.
I mean...HN is pretty Toxic sometimes. HN is amazing sometimes. Is it good? Is it bad?
HN is less toxic than PSJR because the field it covers is much larger and positive-sum; academic job rumor forums are much more fish-eat-fish.
He wanted to ONLY have all project status come from him - but he went on vacation, and I was required to get project status from the team involved - and when I did, I factually represented what I was told - that they were behind schedule - and I was let go.
Showing any interest in any area outside of my primary role was frowned upon heavily.
You could say the same thing about google, who are better at invading people’s privacy, and controlling the information they consume. The rest of them could also be seen as ethically objectionable in one way or another.
If you’re considering the sophistication of their engineering, and the benefits and remuneration you receive, then they’re very comparable. If you’re evaluating them ethically, then which ones are better will come down entirely to what you value as an individual, because each of them could receive some perfectly valid criticisms.
"Give people just the right amount of dopamine and fiddle with their psyche in all the right ways in order to maximize the amount of time they spend staring at their phones."
you don't know what the word "objective" means
"Give people just the right amount of dopamine and fiddle with their psyche in all the right ways in order to maximize the amount of time they spend staring at their phones."
And yet, that's basically what every entertainment driven person/business wants to do. Every app, TV show, news media, magazine or even the guy playing the guitar in the subway, all they want is the money that comes from constant attention.
There's the kicker, no? A lot of human technological progress was made under unfortunate (to put it mildly) harm-filled circumstances, and a lot of that wouldn't have been made at all otherwise because the option to make it with a cleaner conscience simply wasn't there. However if you do ever take such a role, despite its context, even if you have a clear conscience, I'd ask to try to have your work expand and live beyond the patron so that it can one day benefit all humanity. There is so much still buried behind the walls of corporate research that's worthwhile to a much broader group, but efforts need to be made to bring it out. Even more so if there aren't many other vertices of the company trying to pull in a better direction. (Ed: And I'd like to add that despite everything, Facebook engineers seem to be doing remarkably well at this. I won't ever join them but I'm not going to blacklist any interactions with them or worse aggressively target them.)
Not really, for almost everyone who works there. I know a few exceptions. A rare few.
Look, I'm not arguing that we go string up all facebook engineers from the nearest tree. I'm merely saying that it is in fact quite reasonable to say that you shouldn't work for a company that is actively causing harm. And that there is "cool work" being done there does not obviate that.
And yes, good research is sometimes done in bad places. That isn't a justification for joining bad places so you can do good research. Your logic is all messed up there. It's better to instead do good research at a good place.
The simple matter is most of the people who work there, are there because of the relatively high compensation, and have plenty of other better options to do equally exciting work at more ethical organizations. But maybe not quite as well paid.
So. Let's stop sugar coating that.
Look, selling out is a thing humans do from time to time. Sometimes people are even in places where making that choice is totally justifiable. But don't tell me someone isn't doing it when they are. And you shouldn't let them tell you that either. Because if we don't let them tell us that, maybe they'll have more trouble telling themselves that, and honestly, that's what's really going to be important in the end.
I don't disagree. My logic is that sometimes the only place to do good research you're interested in and where you can have an impact is at one of these not-good, or not-so-good, places. If you can go elsewhere, of course, do so. But if you can't, I'm not going to tell you off.
I don't really disagree with much of anything else you wrote either. Most FB engineers aren't working on React/HHVM (or now Hack? That's thankfully been something I haven't had to follow but I have recognized its broader impact)/the next of these things or some other cool research project in program analysis or whatever. We aren't in disagreement that for most of them, they have no excuse if their conscience is bothering them. They do have plenty of opportunity to leave and contribute elsewhere. If we have any real disagreement, it's probably that I don't see Facebook as a net-negative (I do see some negative-pulling vertices of course), let alone "fundamentally evil" as mentioned above. My own conscience wouldn't allow me to work there even at a much higher salary than I currently have, but that's more to do with my feeling that as a business they aren't selling an "honest product". That's my own thinking, though, I don't expect others to agree with me exactly on what constitutes an "honest product", or its worth in the moral calculus, and indeed they might think what I do is dishonest in comparison.
"Selling out" is probably the wrong phrase for some FB employees, at least without clarifying what it is you're selling. Sometimes it's your soul, sometimes it's your ethical principles, sometimes it's just your desire to not work on web software. And sometimes it's nothing, because many FB engineers have a clear conscience, despite it all.
As far as pay, interesting things to work on and work environment, FB is in the top 3 of the world.
I’m sure the pay and work environment make it easier to ignore that.
I have someone who just went there. Because of money, basically.
Facebook Admits It Was Used to Incite Violence in Myanmar https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
What Happens When the Government Uses Facebook as a Weapon? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodri...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/05/facebo...
Covert user activity tracking, links to outfits like Cambridge Analytica, troll farms, "disappeared" groups, and all under the pretext of targeted ads - in what sense is any of that a clean, free-range Internet?
Not to mention “clean” and “free-range” are diametrically opposite.
It's a communication platform designed to enflame and enrage, because outrage gets the higher engagement metrics therefore higher AD revenues. Facebook designed themselves out of any legitimate argument they are merely a benign platform.
2. As you can see among other replies, people can find ways to justify anything. It doesn't matter that you deliberately create an addictive product and aid authoritarian leaders; if people use your product, that must mean what you're doing is good for them and for society.
https://engineering.berkeley.edu/2018/11/i-dont-really-want-...
https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/comment/is-facebook-...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/16/parents-k...
And the answer to your question is that Facebook pays a whole lot of money.
They pay at the top end of all of the top tech companies, and this is impressive.
I would only accept a position at Facebook, which seems to be building a fundamentally destructive product while going out of its way to behave unethically in many dimensions, if it was an absolutely last resort to pay the medical bills of some dying loved one or something.
Why would anyone be willing to work there if they had offers from companies that make products that help people and don't treat society with contempt?
EDIT: for a good primer on this subject, read this essay by Matthew Yglesias called "The case against Facebook": https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17144748/c...