Recently my friend group switched over to a non-facebook-owned messaging service, and the hardest part was breaking old habits. The facebook specific features? Messenger actually had fewer features to help us communicate and more features designed to distract us and make us mindlessly consume.

I could say the same thing about WhatsApp really; everyone is on it so why switch to Facebook?

I constantly tell people that my favorite social networking platform is email. I get laughed at a lot.

I'm not even saying the "open" experience is not often without frustration. It absolutely is. Part of Facebook's success is connecting the frustrating parts about the internet and making it usable for normal people. But it's not like Facebook achieved some amazing technological advancement, nor is connecting the communication mechanisms of the world something that cannot be done without harvesting all of our personal data.

Maybe Facebook also produces a lot of ill. Any claim about the final impact of Facebook is claim to be able to sum up the good and the evil FB does and get a definite value. That's a pretty challenging argument.

The internet forms the basis of this core technology and Facebook simply made it easier to use.

It's not like if Facebook goes away we're going to go back to SMS and expensive international phone calls. This method of communication was going to happen regardless. And there are clearly alternatives that exist today with different funding models.

Can you name a single alternative at their scale with a business plan that is viable long term and not state run or state supported?

Provided by some company via a paid service or ads. Most commonly an ISP monopoly or oligopoly, or a large service monopoly, in nearly all nations. Even if you run your own email server, it's not free, you're paying for the network access to do it.

> MSN video calls

Subsidized by an operating system monopoly.

> Google Talk

Subsidized by a search monopoly.

> Skype

Which was never able stand on its own profitable two feet. It was subsidized first by investor money, then by an auction monopoly, then by an operating system monopoly.

> Whatsapp

Subsidized by a social monopoly.

> All "for free" +plus no-ads.

Nope. All paid for with monopolies and or ads.

But that's the structure of any logical argument. If someone says X is only A, I will describe how I see plenty of B in X, which by itself doesn't say there is not plenty of A in X too. IE, One person makes a generalization, another points to an exception or several exceptions.

I do think it's important to remember that Facebook is really doing nothing technologically amazing to allow that communication -- voice or text -- across geographical borders.

Indeed, Facebook pretty much only amalgamates blogs, chat, forums and such. But given it's only making technological steps of some small-to-medium degrees, if the love isn't justified, then neither should the hate be justified? Currently, Facebook gets both.

The hate is because they collect so much data, and share and sell it so carelessly. Google collects at least as much data, for sure. But as far as I know, they just monetize it through their ad services, and don't actually provide it to others.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/technology/facebook-data-...

Facebook did a lot of difficult things (if they weren't difficult others would have done them sooner) whose end result is that humans around the world get a lot of benefit. Focusing on whether Facebook's advances were "technological" is beside the point. (If anything packaging the technology in such a way that people can actually use it can easily be more of an "amazing advancement" than making the technology in the first place).

> nor is connecting the communication mechanisms of the world something that cannot be done without harvesting all of our personal data.

I'm not convinced. Making communication usable may well require an interface that adapts to the individual user. Again, ultimately, if it's so easy to do it better then why hasn't anyone else managed it?

And also a bad thing, is a major theme of the parent comment you replied to.

"Lie" is a stark word for what Zuck is doing, but it's not wrong assuming he understands the dark side of his monster. But he also may not know if he's actively deluding himself, and eliminating everyone around him that doesn't support that pretend worldview.

> Now, Mr. Zuckerberg is barreling ahead with his shift to focus Facebook on private messaging and away from public broadcasting, even if it means shedding some of his top lieutenants.

That sounds a lot like "understand[ing] the dark side of his monster". Maybe an extreme overreaction, it's true. But a clear acknowledgment that "sharing will make the world a better place" is rather too idealistic.

Edit: spelling

See: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/34825225/ns/technology_and_science...

Even so, I've done lots of work with est / Landmark Education, and some with Lifespring, Tony Robbins and NLP. So I'm familiar with concepts of building relationships with family and friends, and broader social networking and community building. And a major aspect of that it honesty and open sharing, both 1:1 and in groups. it helps us see how much we're all the same, and builds empathy and love.

So when he talks about social hacking through sharing and strengthening relationships, I hear it through those filters. But I also hear his cynical comments about oversharing fools that sucks into Facebook.

so anyway, I'm curious where this will go. Facebook now allows signups via Tor, apparently with no texted authentication. And if he creates a privacy-frirndly version that emphasiuzes P2P communuication, that woutld be very cool.

Anyone know?

You are trading ease of use and convenience for the next generation's walled garden where Facebook sees and provides everything.

Sure, the impact doesn't feel as such. And supporting Facebook's plan by talking to your relatives on it doesn't seem like a big deal. Neither did it feel like a big deal when the generations before us decided to sacrifice our entire planet for a few decades of economic advantage.

I understand somewhat why it's working, but still find it kind of depressing that it's being actively cheered on.

FB was founded in 2004 as a crappy for-profit startup. How many for-profit businesses born out of the goodness of the owner's heart? Yet you seem to make it sound like it's FB's fault.

> I understand somewhat why it's working, but still find it kind of depressing that it's being actively cheered on.

Social network has enormous benefit because we human being are social animal. Simple as that. I'm surprised that you only "understand somewhat why it's working". Just because there are bad sides of it doesn't make it a mistake. In fact I firmly believe the benefits it brings to the society should be cheered on.

Condemn FB for their shady tactics, but don't forget the positive effect. Get out of your bubble. Put yourself in regular people's shoes.

I judge Facebook by its actions and the intent of the Free Basics program is clearly shady, I was responding to a parent who was presenting it as a god thing full stop, so am simply pointing out that there is more to FB's motivation here.

> Social network has enormous benefit because we human being are social animal. Simple as that.

I was talking more about the various free data deals Facebook has set up in developing countries, which effectively make it so that a lot of people see only Facebook when they first get online. I was not talking about "social networks" as a concept being bad.

> I'm surprised that you only "understand somewhat why it's working". Just because there are bad sides of it doesn't make it a mistake.

I understand it has short-term benefits, however over the long term, do you really want billions of people to assume that Facebook is the internet, to have everything they ever said, every picture ever taken stored there? Maybe even more, considering a lot of them are unlikely to have access to timely information on internet privacy, given they're pretty much limited to FB, a party not known for its strong stance on such matters?

And how about startups from the very countries affected? You're hardly going to compete against FB in such a situation.

> Condemn FB for their shady tactics, but don't forget the positive effect.

I am doing precisely that; condemning shady tactics. The benefits of FB are achievable without these tactics, or even without FB itself for that matter.

What are some of the benefits unique to FB?

>Just because there are bad sides of it doesn't make it a mistake.

Lists, can be used for good or bad. The only way to ensure they're not misused is to minimize or eliminate the data collected. The centralization is problematic, as always.

Edit, formatting :/

What I am calling out as a lie is the premise that Facebook’s guiding principle was “for the greater good” (which was how it was sold to us at the beginning, in sharp contrast to other corporate entities), as opposed to “win at all costs” (which it has demonstrated again and again, from the “move fast and break things” mantra to the infamous Boz memo).

It’s fine if your corporate values are to win at all costs. I mean, it’s how most companies operate in our society. The problem is that they pretended to be something else, something inherently virtuous, and capitalized on this perception to win the early battles for top talent.

I use email to keep in contact with my family. CC everyone, then reply all. No Facebook required.

It seems like the situation of Facebook-anger today involves some people looking at particular interface of details that allegedly make Facebook in particular "more addictive" than email (or whatever unspecified social activity) but with this group with this narrow critique being joined by those with a broader critique of social media that essentially calls for nothing but face-to-face contact.

We face a difficult question of "at what point is a communication medium a tool of its users and at what point does a communication medium merely act on the users without them being truly conscious agents". I don't think we can really address this question by demonizing Facebook (the problem has existed since the dawn of mass media, with nearly all these media forms accused of doing terrible things and with the accusations at least have some support). Just for example, Zuckerberg may indeed have made some terrible choices but Facebook seems to signal a desire to take on this difficult question.

I disagree, for me this isn't about being addictive. Email doesn't quietly let websites I visit add themselves to my apps list and periodically reset/redefine my permissions so everyone can see my (and my friend's/family's) personal information.

If Facebook was just addictive I would still use it (I ditched it over 10 years ago).

I consider the lack of emojis a bonus. Old school smileys are just fine by me. :-)

(Actually, emojis work just fine with gmail, but I won't be embracing them any time soon)

Then you don't know "normal" people. Try managing a school mailing list for a while to learn all the different ways email fails for the average user.

Also you missed my sister off the last reply, please re-add her and resend your message, again. But without me in the CC list.

I'm sorry but I don't buy this at all. There are so many alternatives to facebook that are also free (i.e. skype or email) beyond "cel phone calls and sms".

You've simply become accustomed to the __convenience__ of facebook. That convenience has enabled you to interact with more people, and given you a sense of increased / improved connection with the world. But has the quality of those interactions improved? The world (including these execs) says no, on the contrary, interactions on facebook are oftentimes shallow and insignificant.

I also think it is possible to enable others to make such cost-saving use of the internet without also doing the objectionable things Zuckerberg has done.

There were, before Facebook, hundreds of apps that did the same thing, and there still are.

Both can be true of course. Zuckerberg may well have been driven by a less than altruistic vision but nonetheless still enabled some to benefit from the service.

Without defaulting to listing what bad Facebook does: Do those benefits really justify all the negative impacts? I hardly think so.

Nobody argues that Facebook keeping families in touch is a bad thing. It's the rest of it - the collecting and selling of data, the paid targeted propaganda campaigns, the intentional manipulation of user emotion - that people say is bad.

But if you don't believe the number of Facebook employees who have quit in protest, even Chris Cox, then I guess my comment here isn't going to persuade you.

The Russian campaign that you’re dismissive of is consistent with the heritage of Russian intelligence services. Lenin’s newspaper was called “Iskra” (spark) in the context of “from a spark a fire will flare up.” The army of trolls is there to foment dissent, motivate nutcases on the right and left and create scenarios difficult for the battleship that is American democracy to navigate.

Facebook is being attacked because it’s controlled with an iron fist by a guy who is over his head and possess extreme power without the foresight and vision to be a steward of it or the humility to delegate it. The company is harming the republic and the world.

It's not so simple, because not all employees would go along with it. It's possible that Zuck is stalling so he can figure out how to deliver what he's being asked for without creating too much turmoil.

> consistent with the heritage of Russian intelligence services

And also consistent with US intelligence services and a historic tit for tat. Russia's alleged $150K spend is being amplified because it fits the desired narrative, which is that social media needs to be much better controlled/censored, in this case for alleged national security reasons.

> guy who is over his head ... without the foresight and vision to be a steward of it or the humility to delegate it... harming the republic and the world

I would rephrase this as follows: A guy built an incredibly successful great firewall with built-in social credit system. In spite of his youth and inexperience he created something that governments have sought to create and control since before the modern information age. Now that he's created it and its value is (finally) understood by political leaders, there exists a desire to confiscate/control it to use it for the benefit of the republic.

The impact of FB's news feed algorithm on the 2016 election dramatically accelerated the power grab. Zuck saw this move early which is why he testified to congress that "Facebook should probably be regulated". He is insisting on overt, public regulation of something he sees as a public utility, but officials have their eye on the much bigger prize which is the great firewall + social credit system. Such a thing requires secrecy and of course does not resemble Zuck's concept of a public utility.

If you don’t cross the line and violate the community standards the answer is nobody.

If Zuck is trying to do distance the company from this shit and make it _more_ impartial, he's making the right choice for the long run. From what I've seen of him in congressional testimonies, he knows this is a problem, and he deliberately chooses not to pick a side as the company's CEO, even though he's under severe pressure to do so.

Cool. In other developing countries it lead to a massacre.

They include: "Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

That's like saying that telephones or the postal service lead to massacres when evil people call each other or mail propaganda flyers to the public. Yes Facebook should have done more to remove that content, but you can't really say Facebook caused the problems, and they probably would have happened on other platforms if Facebook didn't exist or had better moderation.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

The right way to counter a brief, sweeping comment isn't an even briefer and more sweeping comment.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/03/facebook-role-rohingy...

> "It was used to convey public messages but we know that the ultranationalist Buddhists have their own Facebooks and are really inciting a lot of violence and a lot of hatred against the Rohingya or other ethnic minorities," she said.

It basically sounds like the bad guys were using Facebook groups to communicate. They could have done the same thing on IRC or anywhere else on the internet.

Subjective... many believe it's hardly anything (i.e. basically free to them, which is an ok belief).

I wish that were true, but this is a rather naive perspective.

Facebook has a well documented history of requiring outgoing employees to sign non-disparagement clauses. For someone as high up as Chief Product Officer you’d better believe that they would have Chris sign something expressly forbidding any overt criticism of the company. Any severance package which in this case is worth millions or tens of millions would be contingent on signing.

I’m actually surprised he was able to say as much as he did.

But ethics can become a lot more flexible when someone's dangling a few million in stock options in front of your face.

You can still talk about literally anything else if you sign a non-disparagement clause or an NDA.

Why does this matter? It reminds me of the joke about how in America we value free speech so much that we can badmouth our leaders in public, but so what, in Soviet Russia they can badmouth the American leaders in public too. The question of how free your speech is, is determined by what you can't say, or can't get away with saying, without paying some hefty consequence (a punch, a fine, losing your job, imprisonment, forfeiting RSUs...).

That's why these things come with payment -- or for NDAs, a threat to make you pay them.

https://twitter.com/tedlieu/status/1105961668029358086

> @tedlieu I am authorized to make the following statement: If you feel silenced by an NDA and need help from a Congressional committee, please contact, or have your attorney contact, the House Judiciary Committee.

——-

For topics of societal and national concern, House subpoenas could be a good way to force disclosure — of things companies are trying to hide, via paying off employees in exchange for NDAs.

what's probably more likely is that his net worth is highly correlated with facebook's, and disparagement could materially affect that.

If I had such influence I'd certainly be hesitant to just go all guns blazing, and I'm someone that strongly believes social media (primarily facebook) is a serious threat to civilized society.

Ya, everyone does until they look at their bank account.

Can you please make your points neutrally and respectfully in the future? It's important for the survival of the community here.

Acton and Luckey both joined Facebook in 2014 as part of multibillion dollar acquisitions. They are like hired mercenaries and were never on the inside, or even close. Chris Cox joined in 2005, fresh out of college. He has been a true believer and one of Zuck's most trusted lieutenants since almost day one.

Of the people who worked there early, like pre 2008, I am not aware of a single one who is outspoken in criticism of Facebook.

...said everyone ever who was asked to leave or decided to resign because of irreconcilable differences with the organization.

I think that the people leaving also knew this all along, but now they are finally coming to terms with the impact that FB has really had on people, the world, privacy, and the way it has desensitized everyone to this type of behavior.

Facebook hasn't changed, that's not why people are leaving. They're leaving because they've finally been able to look in the mirror and realize that this isn't worth the paycheck anymore. That's gonna be a tough pill to swallow for most.

Human morality is cheap and SV has showed that.

You can also choose (if you decide you are free to choose) the set of morals that makes you the most happy (hedonism) or give you the most utility. Or you can decide to be a nihilist.

So it's not the same.

It's already been built for the US government, so why not profit by selling a US supervised version to the Chinese? Better than China building its own tech.

I think you underestimate the degree to which Google is a top defense contractor and in building this stuff for China is acting at the behest of the US Government.

These are people who were part of the first scaling out of single platform to 2 billion people. Their skill was in building out such a network and keeping it running. The skills required to do that well, came from people with business and compsci backgrounds. That work is done.

Now what matters is who joins. And what happens next to such a network.

Compsci and biz people won't make a difference to vision. The next phase will be driven by ideas from social sciene, ecology, history, psychology, economics, politics, religion etc. People who have a deep understanding of the value of human networks and what they can do, will drive the next chapter of where Facebook goes.

I think, at the very least, it would have to be a not-for-profit organization.

1. Either this reflected a sincere belief by Zuck to build a different kind of product/corporate entity governed more by ethics than by money and power, or

2. This utopian positioning was a calculated recruiting strategy to attract the best and brightest recent grads from Stanford and other elite universities, who were extremely attracted by the idea of getting paid six figures to work on a fascinating product without having to sell our soul, like our friends in finance etc.

Or it could be some combination of those two.

My point is that if the underlying motivation were truly to do good, Facebook would have done something differently over the last 5+ years as the capacity for its product to cause harm became abundantly evident.

Instead, at every crisis/opportunity to fix the underlying issues, Facebook chose to brush problems under the rug in the pursuit of growth.

From my perspective, as someone who drank the Facebook kool-aid more than just about anyone in the early days, this represents a painful betrayal. I feel like one of the "dumb fucks" who trusted Zuckerberg's pitch to me back in the day.

Sure, he might have changed since, but there's nothing wrong with rational speculation. Selfishness and greed are real phenomena in human relations so it would be as foolish to ignore such possibilities as to believe them uncritically.

You're reading a lot into a (admittedly stupid) quip/jab/whatever-you-want-to-call it by a 19 year old.

I don't even disagree with your fundamental assertion here, just that this is incredibly weak evidence.

It's very presumptuous to think a single person or company knows better than the entire world on whether something is "good" or not.

People who argue for its value mostly point to the fact that grandma can see pictures of the kids and other pedestrian examples of things that were just as feasible over email/instant chat before planetary scale social networks.

At this point it’s becoming pretty clear that open by default social networks à la Twitter/Facebook are generally a bad thing for our societies.

The real issue is human nature. Social media is just a new medium that facilitates instant (and optionally public) communication but its still the same people at the end of the day. Email, chat and phone calls still have have vast amounts of scammers and propaganda and that will continue into any new comms that people use. There's no magic solution for that and never will be.

So is theft, murder, and the intentional infliction of pain for amusement. You can't dodge responsibility that way.

You're also ignoring several aspects that makes FB different in kind than a lot of what came before it. As but one example, they are the world's largest blackmail machine. Maybe you trust Zuckerberg & pals now, what happens when they're gone? When FB goes in to decline? When an internal threat hacks them? When Singapore or Russia or worse approaches FB systems folks with carrots and sticks? Has that happened already? How would we know?

I'm personally of the opinion that it was a terrible idea to build it in the first place.

Likewise social media is not just Facebook but a tool for communicating, and any use for good or evil is up to the individual. Facebook is also just one company and has at least a dozen major competitors. The companies will come and go but the tech is here to stay.

Mark Zuckerberg has long held the belief that a more connected world is a better world - and 10 years ago, I was as optimistic as he was. Today, I know for a fact that connecting my grandpa to people in Russia paid a few hundred dollars a month by activists to spread FUD is a terrible idea.

Yes, email, chat, IMs, etc are also being abused - but they all have a certain amount of friction and properties that put them nowhere near the kind of scales that social networks enable.

You can only have one phone conversation at a time due to the nature of the medium, and when it’s over, it’s over - whereas partaking in a Facebook/Twitter thread will feed you an addictive slow drip of notifications over the next few days. People don’t really get their news (in the formal sense) by phone conversations, so media companies aren’t incentivized to flood you with phone conversations about increasingly controversial topics to keep you engaged to generate ad dollars. Because phone conversations are real time and decentralized, no entity can prevent anyone from saying a certain word or mentioning a certain event for instance, the way social networks can and have.

Email is an interesting one - sure there’s spams and scams, but it’s fairly non instantaneous, and the decentralized aspect means that no single entity can choose what emails people will see. Email users also don’t expect their email server to be injecting content in their email queue, or reordering their emails to try to get them to read things that will generate dollars for them. It has its flaws, but people just don’t feel manipulated by their email as a medium (although of course individual emails can manipulate people) .

Social media is just the perfect storm of tapping into human compulsions, a product controlled by a single company which seeks to derive profit above all else, misaligned free market incentives between platforms, advertisers and consumers, etc. This all makes for formidably harmful forces, and responding to the fact that these social networks have determining roles in genocides with vague platitudes such as “but they enable people to find loved ones and report crimes” comes across as a tad disconnected.

And avoiding censorship? Facebook, Twitter, etc cooperate with governments to enable censorship! If you want to avoid censorship, you are much better served by the broader, open, decentralized internet.

In case it isn’t clear, I’m a huge fan of the internet, email, instant messaging, message boards, and so on. Social networks in their current incarnation though are a very destructive virus for human culture.

There's no use in trying to argue why something shouldn't be done when it inevitably will be and already has, what we need is to think of ways we can adapt as a species and society to handle it with the proper care and concern.

If Facebook needs to enjoy an AT&T style monopoly on connecting people, they need to submit to being under a regulatory thumb.

Instant feed-based communications with varying levels of follower/friendship levels is a new technology provided by many organizations. Some are massive monopolies and others are indie apps, it doesn't matter but the tech is not going away so yes, we the people will need to learn how to deal with it.

Unrestricted broadcast access was understood as a problem with radio 100 years ago. Society controlled that with a regulatory stick and will likely do so again.

If you're comparing to radio then it's back to talking about the medium instead of a specific company and the same fundamental problems are inherent in all of them because of the social feed concept allowing for instant communications spread through a graph of connections. We've never had this same model before. Radio had interference and physical limitations but digital networks allow ideas to spread with infinite capacity and following 1:1 conversations until they reach everyone.

Sure Facebook has made their own tweaks like every other network, and maybe regulation can solve some of those issues and get everyone to the same base utility, but that's going to be a very hard battle that's limited to certain regions and doesn't affect anything about the underlying communications concept.

We still need to learn to live with social media regardless of who is providing and in what variation.

After all, don’t people get enough value out of cigarettes to smoke millions of them every day?

...No offense to anyone's democratic beliefs.

From a psychological perspective, when you escape a cult, there is a process known as "exit counseling" which is often required to help former members process their experiences and return to reality. I suspect that former Facebook insiders will undergo a similar process. And I view Chris' quote as an indication that he has begun his own transition.

At least, it’s probably something along these lines.

In the end we don’t have enough information, and probably never will.

We're not in some wake up call scenario here. Those decisions happened very, very long time ago, in internet years an era ego. This now are just consequences of a carefully laid path.

Or maybe they have acquired Enough money and have decided that sleeping in to noon every day is more valuable than making an app for people to share drunken photos of themselves?

My point is, there can be many reasons.

These people are vested, super rich and probably a little bored.

As long as FB is a 'darling' they can ride that - now when the narrative is darker, it's just a grind for them. They can move on, do nothing, do something fun, and possibly get out before any ugly things happen.

Just as FB was over-hyped on the way up, the negative narrative is also a little too much. There's a lot of grey in the details.

I think Zuck has made some mistakes, but FB is not trying to do evil.

Also: FB may have been a fad, not a trend. It may be kind of slowly dying as other things take it place, and while they continue to make money, some of the underlying metrics might be heading down. Usership certainly is. So it's easy to see people wanting to move on as FB moves into a more 'grind' stage of either limited growth, maturation into a boring corporation, or even downward stagnation.

The koolaid party is definitely over, the money is in the bank, so the impetus to stay is much less.

The problem is this means something different to every employee.

- I had to do that to survive - would be rather lame excuse.

I would say that if these people are the best, they it couldn't have taken them this long to figure out what's obvious to so many of no.

No, these are rats leaving the ship.

I don't consider people that oversaw one of the biggest cases of user data misuse in history which, by the way, could've been easily prevented, as the "best people". Sounds like Facebook is making the changes necessary to rectify the mess they oversaw.