This is close to a straw man argument. Nobody claims users will abandon Facebook.

The article posits, instead, strengthening headwinds. Headwinds in hiring (there is already a double-digit premium Facebook must pay for talent). From recurring whistleblowing, and its impact on morale and productivity. Headwinds in projects and partnerships, like Libre/Diem being dead on arrival because Facebook brought it to the table. Senior leadership knowing they will, at least once in their career, be hauled in front of Congress for a nationally-televised grilling because their employer's unpopularity [1] makes it a popular punching bag. Headwinds in M&A.

People didn't stop using oil after the Standard Oil break-up. Nor Windows after its antitrust brush or cigarettes after the tobacco master settlement. The power of those companies was simply sharply reduced.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/6/22702798/verge-tech-surve...

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20110124001004/http://www.nytime...

Note how similar this is to the reports on what Facebook moderators deal with.

AOL's core proposition was being better than the Internet (more curated, coherent, and faster). When the web and internet exploded in size and scale, AOL's value evaporated. The dumb mergers and other mistakes were window dressing on this landscape transformation.

And for years (decades? still?) afterwards, people used AOL Instant Messager (AIM), because it was the most network/platform component of AOL.

So how would that happen to Facebook, and what would it look like?

Users would need an order of magnitude superior alternative, and most critically, users would need to move en mass. Facebook has rightly identified onboarding younger cohorts as key to their survival, but I don't see any realistic way Facebook dies a natural death in under 40 years.

I dont understand this, instagram for kids is supposed to give parents more control over what kids do on the internet. How could this make things worse?

To me it looks like, blind oposition to insta kids is largely due to irrational hatred towards facebook (partialy because it is cool to hate facebook now, and partially due to political conformism. As both D and R have found reasons why Facebook is bad to them)

Remember. Kids are using Instagram because a guardian/supervisor has allowed them to.

Instagram for Kids is a cheap attempt by Zuckerberg to groom young minds into assimilating into the sick digital abyss of social media. Not because we want to make safe spaces for kids. Nothing about unrestricted access to Instagram-like apps is safe, let alone positive, for young minds.

    Users would need an order of magnitude superior 
    alternative, and most critically, users would 
    need to move en mass.

I dislike FB for all of the usual reasons, plus a few of my own.

But I still have an FB account. I don't check it very often, and I've got notifications turned off. But ditching my FB account entirely means I'd lose access to dozens of people I wouldn't have a great way of contacting otherwise.

History tells us that something eventually will replace it. But, it's hard to imagine.

That used to be a fear of mine, but after deleting my account I’ve found it to be a core feature. It forces me to be intentional with my relationships; if I want to stay in touch with someone I have to make the effort. Otherwise, the relationship is likely more parasocial than actively rewarding, and I’m consciously ok focusing my energies on the people I currently want in my life to the exclusion of those relationships that have slipped into parasocial territory.

I've largely achieved that as well, I think. Slightly different road traveled, perhaps. I have a larger than average extended family: a dozen aunts/uncles and a corresponding number of cousins. It's impossible to have a close relationship with all of them, but I do enjoy keeping up with how they're doing and knowing when big life events (and deaths) happen.

So, my day-to-day life has absolutely nothing to do with FB. I've got notifications off and I typically feel no desire to check it. Instead I'm focused on my much smaller number of intentional, meaningful relationships. But, from time to time I do enjoy scrolling through FB and seeing how so-and-so is doing.

Do you have an extended family you keep in touch with? Do you keep up with them through other means, or have you just sort of let them fade from your life?

I have surrounded myself with chosen family and am always meeting new people. I give generously of myself to the people in my life because it brings me joy to do so. It’s a conscious trade off that means I lose touch with some people, and I’m ok with that. Most relationships should have an expiration date anyway; far too many people just go through the motions out of a sense of obligation.

It feels incredibly sad to just let those relationships die because you're focusing your energies on the people that are currently around you.

Also, to be honest, I felt the way you did before I deleted a twitter account with about 2k following and 10k followers. I felt like it was dominating my attention, and that made me mad. In a fit of pique I deleted it and it's almost funny how quickly I realized I didn't know any of them, and the passive consumption of their social media database entries was scratching some kind of itch but the same one I get from e.g. binging Star Trek series.

Very strange all around.

    but I wouldn't call "passively keeping in touch" with 
    thousands of people "relationships." It's something, 
    but I'm not sure what, it seems like we may not have a 
    good word for "casual strangers,"

The healthiness of it can vary widely. It's a very individual thing.

The relevant questions to ask one's self would include: overall, is this bringing me happiness? Are my "casual relationships" on FB causing me anxiety -- either directly, or because of more subtle FOMO, etc? Are they taking time away from other things that would make my life better, such as more meaningful relationships?

There is a happy path there. I genuinely like seeing that so-and-so from high school just had a baby, or whatever. "We sat through so many classes together," I think. "She was always cool to me. Good for her, she seems happy. Cute baby!" I might never really be close to her again, but I do like seeing that she's doing well.

I seem to be in the minority though. Maybe FB is like cocaine. Seems like some people manage to use it occasionally without damaging their bodies or lives. But the vast majority of people are worse off for it.

This particular thread reminded me of another recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603650 - an app to help you form deeper relationships. Do you need it? Do we need it? Do these things really help?

It's funny - maybe the perfect compromise is exactly what you described. You sometimes want mostly mindless FB updates from people you "know" and otherwise converse with your core friends and family through in-person interactions and other more engaging medium.

My neighbors are nice! We make small talk. That's fine. I like it.

Maybe the unspoken thing here is that it can be a human thing to feel you're a part of a community. A safety net of sorts. If I have to leave town on short notice for an emergency, who's going to feed my cats? I could find that person via my FB network. One of them would or would know somebody that could. One of them could ping me for the same thing. That kind of thing.

    This particular thread reminded me of another recent 
    thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603650 
    - an app to help you form deeper relationships. Do you 
    need it? Do we need it? Do these things really help?

I feel like real relationships arise from shared experiences. Doing things together. Playing sports, writing code, gaming together, whatever.

I don't think an app about sharing your life can really accomplish that.

Those relationships you don't want to let go of? They're largely worthless.

An interesting person from 15 years ago doesn't usually stop being an interesting person just because I haven't talked to them regularly.

All those connections are paid for in the most expensive currency that is.

I want Facebook for this purpose but it feels like it’s really not a blog. At all.

A friend of mine from high school happened to be in my city for a weekend. He posted on Facebook asking if he knew anyone there. We went out and had drinks and caught up.

I had a bunch of super close friends at a crappy job back when I was in college. We all went our separate ways but occasionally Facebook reminds one of us of some funny photo from the old days. It's triggered a few large group chats that have been pretty fun.

Every once in awhile I'll think about an old friend from school or a job or wherever and it's nice to just see what they're doing without having to go through starting a whole conversation. (Although I often will since Facebook is a good way to reach out to people.)

You didn't have normies and family and stuff on there; felt like you could actually express yourself.

Tumblr was its spiritual successor, I guess, in ways. But it wasn't the same. People actually wrote things on LJ. Maybe it was mostly crap, but it was often thoughtful and personal if you had the right friends. It felt like nothing was ever created on Tumblr; it was just endless pithy comments and jokes about things created elsewhere.

The things that made it different than Facebook were (1) that they didn't screw around with your feed (it was your friends' posts, sorted by date), (2) that discoverability and networking was user intentional and exploratory (pull, rather than suggested / push), & (3) access controls were simple, understandable, and obeyed user intent.

What could fb do to enable this kind of experience for those that want it? Not that they would, but I’d really like to have a vision of what they should do.

https://dreamwidth.org is a community fork of LJ that has a large and active userbase, is open source, and invests a lot into mentoring users › contributors › maintainers. Dreamwidth is a Google Summer of Code participant, for example.

LJ was cool because you had quite a diverse group using it. Artists, musicians, teenagers, etc.

This was before MySpace siphoned away the youth crowd, fifteen years ago or whenever it was. I wouldn't see them ever coming back to blogging. In fact I don't really see anybody returning to blogging.

(No disrespect meant to blogs. Blogs are awesome. That was a really good era for the internet.)

"If writing them a physical letter is too much work, what kind of friendship are you really worried about maintaining?"

That sounds strawman-y, but I have a (annoying) family member who legitimately expresses this thought regularly.

I don't use FB but I would imagine if I did and I wanted to get off it and there were dozens of people I wanted to keep in touch with but would lose touch with I would send these dozens of people a message a week before, saying "I am going to get off facebook, can you send me your email / phone number, my number is X, as I would like to maintain contact."

Or does FB not allow you to do that?

But people might not see your "hey, leaving FB post." They might not check FB often. Or it just kind of gets buried. etc.

Phone numbers and emails change, though. "Contact rot" happens. So, I don't know. I guess I like to have multiple ways to contact people.

This is all predicated on the fact that FB is absolutely not a distraction to me. I look at it maybe once or twice a month. I have all notifications turned off. So, it is not a drain on my (fragile) attention span.

Maybe most importantly, a lot of the folks I keep up with on FB aren't necessarily people I talk to directly. We would not really be keeping up by email/phone/letter/whatever. Some people see that as evidence that, hey, those are obviously people you don't need in your life. Perhaps that's true for some. For me, I enjoy having acquaintances as well as friends.

Facebook's network effect was overwhelmed twice, once by instagram and again by whatsapp... shame both those ended up squarely in Facebook's court. Remains to be seen how much dent can TikTok / Twitch / YouTube / Snap / Azar / Telegram can make on to that once-in-a-generation trifecta.

That's why Facebook is investing in VR. Not because they're optimistic about it, or because they want to own the space, but because it's the closest horizon that has the potential to fundamentally change interaction.

If it does, they have a foot in the door and can flood resources into it. If it doesn't, small price to pay for hedging an existential threat.

This doesn't seem accurate, do you have evidence to back up this claim? Instagram had 30 million users and no revenue upon acquisition. Facebook had over a billion, and billions in revenues.

One way to counter a scale-free network is to create adjacent scale-free networks that replaces its competition one part at a time. This is what, I believe, WhatsApp (with messaging) and Instagram (with images) were on the verge of doing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network#Immunizatio...

I can argue that my friends now use all use email, eclipsing facebook, whatsapp and instagram, better buy those stocks in SMTP. ;)

Some people use Facebook to communicate. To not use Messenger is to not communicate with them. And some of us like people. Sorry?

Email, probably.

With Facebook, it doesn't matter how much you dislike the company or how good some competitor is. You still can't talk with people on Facebook (and often, even view content) without being logged into an active Facebook account.

Worth noting that Gmail also 'solved' spam, which was the strongest reason to change email addresses/providers.

But neither of those things are network effect.

"Network effect" refers specifically to "the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products."

> "Network effect" refers specifically to "the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products."

Sorry, I skipped a couple of logical steps.

Gmail/Google accounts are a namespace where the identifiers are persistent long-term, thus the ordinary network effect that email has is undiminished, unlike previous email providers where you had to change the account every so often largely to cope with spam. [0][1]

Also, Gmail participates in the associated network effect of every Google service that has one, and there are quite a few, though Google has a bad habit of killing them off.

[0] The idea being that you're trying to reduce the email network's utility for spammers to reach you more than you're reducing it for yourself to be reached by non-spammers, which is like chemo killing the cancer faster than it kills you.

[1] Spam per-se wasn't the only reason, of course. In the Before Times I had to change my address due to a few older relatives repeatedly setting in motion endless Reply-All storms / email chain letters, and of course I also changed ISPs occasionally.

I was thinking of proprietary platforms such as FB, not open protocols like email.

If we're counting protocols then I suppose we'd have to include the phone networks and MMS and I think those would eclipse email.

Although, I don't think it's useful to compare proprietary closed social networks to open protocols; seems very apples-vs-oranges.

The only way it can sustain it's growth and profitability would be to find more ways to hijack your mind and your feelings and keep you more "engaged" and addicted, and keep repeating that behavior to more and more people on earth. To become more toxic.

Unless they decide to completely remodel their business, and lose money (never going to happen), it's only going to remain a force for bad in the world. Nothing can change that really because we all know that after spending an hour on Facebook, we feel worse. I don't feel like this after using Google search for an hour (although I know there are negatives too that too).

What's happened is, it's unmasked now, everyone can see that it is bad, studies have shown it's negative effects, now we're just working out what we do with it, how do we get away from it. Do we kill it, ignore it, put warnings on the login page that it' addictive, how do we cure ourselves from Facebook?

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

I'd sign up for such a social-graph-based service that just did individual messaging, group discussions, and events (invitations + pictures).

Identity is an issue with social graph export... But on the other hand, doesn't the existence of LinkedIn show that people are willing to re-create their social graph on multiple services?

Is there currently any alternative? All the alternatives I'm aware of ATM are Twitter clones; i.e., meant to be public microblogs, rather than restricted audience microblogs.

Recommend me a good alternative and I'll see if I can get some of my network to join it. (And don't say "Mastodon" unless they've added a FB-like mode where you can restrict your posts to a specific set of people.)

Were all AOL's mergers dumb? IIRC, they used their sky-high stock price to buy Time Warner (among other things), and once AOL was no longer the cash cow they turned out to own a lot of valuable things.

For AOL shareholders, by 2002, between the merger and the dotcom bubble bursting, 2002$200 B (so about 2021$5.5 T?) had been wiped from AOL's market cap.

So that was, presumably, not good.

But my point was if it wasn't for the merger, the AOL stockholders would have lost far more in the dotcom bubble bursting. Pointing out they lost a lot in the combined events isn't really a counterargument.

The news feed could get less interesting, resulting in fewer visits.

Families stay in touch and plan events on FB. Your mom, aunt, and uncle-in-law are rather likely to be on FB, but not Twitter. If they are on Twitter, Twitter doesn't hector you to "connect" with them with nearly the same fervor as FB.

That has somewhat profound implications. If one ditches FB, one loses access to your family to some small or large extent.

On the mild end of things you miss out on baby pictures and invitations to picnics. On the more distressing side of things, unfriending a family member or leaving FB altogether may be seen as a rejection of parts or all of the family.

Perhaps this doesn't apply to your family, but we can agree it applies to many.

The "family" aspect of FB also makes it much more of a fertile breeding ground for misinformation relative to Twitter. The boomers using FB are (on average) much less tech-savvy and don't know how to verify claims. But, as your neighbor/uncle/mom/dad/whatever, they are much harder to ignore than some Twitter rando.

    To me, this is what makes Twitter (and Instagram 
    and anything else aimed at talking to the public) 
    mostly useless. I don't want to hear about the 
    day-to-day lives of Twitter randos at all or 
    follow celebrity gossip. 

It's about 50% friends I know personally and 50%... well, not "celebrities" but like... local personalities, independent musicians, leaders of open source projects, etc. The ones I follow are actually very responsive to replies which is very very cool and useful to me.

I'm not sure where else I could easily and enjoyably aggregate that stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Some admins of private servers blocked its IPs for the same reason IRC mods did. AOL got ordinary people on to the internet, so they were a poorer fit for any existing community on average.

Some time later, a person who had an AOL email account (who some of you might recognize, so I won't name names even though I'm dying to) contacted the sysadmins, complaining that the email-to-news gateway wasn't working. When she learned that AOL addresses were blocked, she threw a tantrum, threatened to contact various newspapers, complained about UT blocking public access to things paid for by public money, and so on. As a result, the mail-to-news gateway was shut down.

That's my AOL story.

- Talking to more senior friends, both within the company and with offers to join— few people want to join product, and those who do would usually rather join Oculus and not one of the apps. Lots more interest in infra. Working to raise engagement metrics and the news cycle are always factors behind this.

- I know plenty of people who just straight up don't like to work at Facebook. They "like their job" because they love the pay, the people and talking about the perks but dislike their projects and dread Mondays. Some are coasting while they can, some are figuring out their departure, and others are tortured week-to-week blaming themselves for their lack of motivation and trying to salvage some productivity.

- To some degree it feels like the more you care about something, the harder time you'll have, and the more your motivation will be hit. A lot of the battles are uphill battles, because a lot of the things people who care want to do are not considered impactful (or have negative impact).

Of course, there's plenty of people that don't feel this way at Facebook and a lot of pros to working there, but I did notice these patterns after working there, especially towards the end. Either I was paying more attention or they did seem more common than at other places I've worked at before.

And yes, everybody games it. At the end of every half there's a flurry of "brag posts" about everyone's impactful projects. Better braggers get better results. Sometimes the metrics and measurements and analyses are pretty obviously suspect, but who wants to be the one to say so and never get positive feedback on their own review from that person or their friends ever again? Again, it comes down to consensus on whether the claimed improvements are real or not.

I was in infra (storage) so I don't know how it might be different in more product-oriented parts of the company. However, when the fundamental philosophy behind measuring and rewarding impact is questionable that sets an upper limit on how good things can be over there.

I actually disagree with this. When the company is forcibly broken up there's a chance that it's "power" (what?) is reduced but if we look at Standard Oil, that quicky is shown to be not-what-happened. SO became Esso and Mobil, who became ExxonMobil, and ostensibly went right back to doing what it did best (owning most of the domestic oil market). Breaking up the company doesn't actually change the practices or culture of what got the company there in the first place. The new companies which are spun off oftentimes don't even know how to operate as companies and so they're easy pickings for the nucleus of the original company.

How many competitors to Windows popped up after the microsoft antitrust suit? Is there a "windows specific browser" to compete with Edge or IE which is from a former microsoft company?

The same thing for smoking. If we look at smoking as "I light something on fire and jam it into my food hole" then yes, the numbers look promising according to the CDC website. If you look at a Vice article (https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xxx83/the-shady-link-betwee...), however, all the tobacco companies did was shift their business into providing alternatives to cigarettes. But they're still made from nicotine. It's just smoking without the smoke. That's the other reason why they're pushing so hard to regulate vaping - the idea that there's an "open source" "anyone can make this" alternative simply cuts out their business.

I don't think this one really illustrates your point very well. There are no former Microsoft companies because Microsoft was never broken up. That was actually on the agenda until we elected a Republican president who decided MS just needed a slap on the wrist. Add this to the "ways in which the Bush administration hosed America" pile.

They kept making money from Windows, Office, etc. But the tech industry exploded in growth around them, leaving them behind in many ways (technologically, financially, culturally).

Can you please elaborate? I'm pretty familiar with Xbox's history but I'm not aware of any lies.

https://www.shacknews.com/article/95635/how-the-original-xbo...

https://www.amazon.com/Renegades-Empire-Software-Revolution-...

You realize there is about 88 years between step one and step two there?

"The same thing for smoking. If we look at smoking as "I light something on fire and jam it into my food hole" then yes, the numbers look promising according to the CDC website. If you look at a Vice article (https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xxx83/the-shady-link-betwee...), however, all the tobacco companies did was shift their business into providing alternatives to cigarettes. But they're still made from nicotine. It's just smoking without the smoke. That's the other reason why they're pushing so hard to regulate vaping - the idea that there's an "open source" "anyone can make this" alternative simply cuts out their business."

Do the new products cause as much harm as cigarettes?

Isn't this okay? Asking genuinely -- I haven't followed this one way or the other. But my understanding was that the health problems were mostly caused by the smoke. Does nicotine itself cause problems when delivered via gum or vape or whatever?

Certainly the current ingestion methods make it easier on those of us standing around not consuming them, compared to clouds of smoke. Which is a plus for me.

I quit smoking years ago by using a vaporizer and quickly learned to mix my own liquid in order to lower costs, keep track of what was in it, and get lower nicotine than what was available in most commercial stuff at the time.

Not claiming it's as healthy as breathing fresh mountain air, but it's hardly some innately toxic "witches brew" of unknown compounds. Made a huge difference in my health and I haven't smoked in 7 or 8 years now. Sadly, despite the lengths many reputable producers of vape liquid went to regarding ingredients and preparation, many have been put out of business by harsher restrictions than those on actual smoking tobacco.

This is about the only known-to-be-true statement in that paragraph.

Pure nicotine is dangerous, and I see someone else has discussed the "witches brew".

Nicotine addiction per se (or caffeine addiction) can be harmful to people, but the scale of harm is orders of magnitude away from the harms of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. In small doses and in moderation, nicotine alone (e.g. taken as patch or gum) can be an effective medication, is not especially addictive, and has relatively mild side effects. https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

Side effects of vaping should be studied more carefully (and the contents of vape fluid should be regulated): it is dramatically less harmful than smoking but plausibly still harmful. A massive quick dose of some stimulant (e.g. downing several espresso shots in a row) is not the most effective, and breathing stuff other than air is generally a bad idea.

The nicotine is not the harmful thing in cigarettes[1][2] - the "without the smoke" bit is pretty important.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Adverse_effects [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette#Health_effects

Sure the tobacco companies are making money off of selling addictive chemicals to people, which is not a particularly ethical business practice. But "selling addictive chemicals with adverse effects roughly in line with caffeine" is still a big improvement over "selling addictive chemicals that kill people".

I suspect a big American corporation like Facebook would have a hard time persuading an EU court that it wasn't technically feasible for it to automatically duplicate your Facebook posts onto a competing Fediverse instance where you have an account, and the court could even decide that the "natural" technological implementation would be to broadcast your Facebook posts directly to your friends across the Fediverse.

Sadly the language of the GDPR seems to only mandate the export of personal data from the site where it is stored, and not grant the complementary right to have data imported. This means Facebook wouldn't have to show you the posts of any of your Fediverse friends, and it also wouldn't export your Facebook friends' posts to be viewable on your Fediverse account (unless they also had a Fediverse account and chose to export those posts themselves).

[0] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/

Really? Are they forced to pay more because people are actively avoiding the company, or because they have to pay more for top talent due to competitors?

Like, they pay people $10-$99 more, or they pay people 10x-99x more?

Neither seems a plausible interpretation of the statement.

Edit: Ok, ok, percentage!

In my experience, Facebook's offers do tend to beat Google's by $10k or so. But it's all so random and all over the place that it's tough to know if that's a consistent number.

Go look at levels.fyi. Facebook pays close to market for senior engineers (~450k), more or less in line with companies like Uber, Robinhood, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. In fact, Facebook doesn't even crack the top 5 on levels for senior SWE comp so this idea that they have to overpay to recruit is clearly false. If anything, if you hang out on Blind, people will pick FB over other companies precisely because it's perceived as having a stronger engineering brand than those other companies.

I think Facebook executive team is full of liars but there are also these weird PR games in play. Uber had a woman complain about not getting a jacket in her size, Google gave Andy Rubin 10 figure bonuses after he credibly raped a report, had scandals with Vic Gundrota/Kelly Ellis, etc. yet Google is still a relatively well perceived company but Uber/TK are mysognistic/sexist companies.

Google got caught literally forwarding private user data to the government without warrants, nobody cares (except Glenn Greenwald I guess).

Sergey Brin and Steve Jobs got caught explicitly and literally illegally colluding to suppress wages but nobody cares.

Google execs were caught lying multiple times w.r.t them building weaponized AI for drones for the DoD in the Maven scandal and that largely washed over.

Eric Schmidt sends out email after email to Google employees to contribute to his SuperPAC and nobody cares. Google builds Dragonfly to censor Chinese political opponents and nobody really cares.

Facebook is an unethical company but companies like Google have objectively far worse scandalds but don't become the media targets. There are weird groupthink/PR plays at work here and it plays out even on Hacker News where accuracy takes a backseat to narrative building.

You have a curiously selective memory if that's what you took away from Fowler's post.

Her manager propositions her for sex on her first day. HR gives the manager a pass because he's a high performer and they claim it's his first offense.

Only it wasn't his first offense, multiple other women reported him for inappropriate behavior in the past.

That is a wilful and bad faith misrepresentation of the Susan Fowler situation to such a degree that I am skeptical of everything else you've just written.

Anyway, I'm not convinced that's causal. Doesn't FB have a reputation for paying well to get smart people, and don't many people aspire to work there so they can get paid well?

I personally don't believe I would ever work for facebook because of how uninterested / opposed I am to their mission. But I don't see any evidence, including lots of people I know that went to work for them, that a few people like me actually materially impact their ability to hire

I find this comment so strange because the comment you're addressing never claimed that anyone else claimed users will abandon Facebook. You are actually creating a strawman argument here while accusing the other comment of it.

That's an odd way of putting it. Do Google and Netflix and other big tech companies face the same "headwinds"? Their compensation is comparable.

Facebook pays a premium because it's drawing from the top of the talent pool and is facing competition from other companies trying to acquire people with the same level of exceptional skill. The idea that FB has to pay extra to convince regular people to work at FB because FB has a bad reputation is HN fantasy. The world doesn't work that way.

No, Facebook is not a stain on anyone's resume no matter how fervently a few very online activist types might want it to be. The rest of the industry laughs at the idea.

Anyone saying that he won't fire FB alumni just has a bad case of sour grapes and couldn't attract people of that caliber anyway.

They'd use the interview for practice and free food.

Having said that, I'm not sure you can really tell in the stats that FB needs to pay more for similar talent?

Not sure how MIT comes into it though, isn't that a university?

I say MIT, because of it's tech prestige. I could have said Harvard for lawyers. Would you hire a paralegal coming from a prestiguous school to fill an average position ? Maybe, but for many it's not worth the time trying to catch a fish that won't fit on the boat.

That said, I wouldn't want to work at FB unless I had a significant pay bump, and I'm used to other FAANG offers so make of that what you will. I do think FB will start trying harder to hire. Moreover, how many young engineers do you really think want to work at a company that is constantly under threat of litigation? If I were on an H1B, then threat of litigation is very real threat of my visa being invalidated. People who think FB looks bad on a resume are letting their personal beliefs cloud their view of the world, but conversely people who believe that a company under constant threat of litigation will not have retention issues are equally clouded by their personal beliefs.

"Yeah, my favorite off-site was that time we ritually sacrificed infants to the flaming icon of Moloch. Lots of fun and smelled great! Does your company do off-sites?"

Have you ever actually interviewed someone from FB?

Or is all this about just filtering candidates for people who match your personal political views about, say, the role of advertising in society?

My price premium to work at Facebook would be very high and I wouldn’t feel good about the deal. Sure not everyone feels that way but there is talent that they have alienated with their long history.

This was always a terrible idea, and would have died regardless of who had proposed it. From the people I talked to (i knew some people on the core team) it seemed to be a retirement home for FB execs who didn't want to do useful work anymore.

(I don't disagree with your overall point, just stating that it's not the sole predictor).

I wonder if they have interview questions to weed out potential candidates that want to work there long enough on these ridiculous salaries while they gather juicy tidbits to leak later?

Lately they've actually done really well, especially as Google, Amazon, and Facebook have stumbled with privacy and reputation. There was a while though were M$ was the definition of EvilCorp

I'd argue the opposite. We got Exxon out of the Standard Oil breakup and Microsoft is just as scummy, if not even more scummy than ever. AT&T got broken up and several of the Baby Bells just ended up all merging together and now we have Verizon. Antitrust enforcement has had a net-zero effect at best.

The latter had a pretty big impact.

I was just pointing out that antitrust enforcement is pretty ineffective at it's intended use.

Personally, I don't think antitrust should exist at all.

They pay for it on the front end (because they have to compete with other FAANGs) and back end (because there is a point coming soon where Facebook on a resume will be a detriment to a candidate). I will not interview or hire any applicant with Facebook on their resume, and I sincerely doubt that I’m alone in this regard.

fwiw, this applies not only to Facebook. I also extend this policy to anybody who has worked for a military industrial complex death machine, any free to play game maker, and any social media company.

Similarly, if you were an advertising exec at pfizer, would you choose to pay millions of dollars to advertise your meds to a continuously shrinking audience on something like CNN, or would you spend significantly less directly targeting "oldsters who need meds" on FB or Goog's platforms?

I'm a huge cynic but it seems like most of the critiques of social media coming from big / old media are just symptoms of having their revenue bled away, not any meaningful calls for change for the better

I feel that so many people blindly hate Facebook that they overlook this point. The loudest critics of social media are the old vanguards of news who are upset that the new kid on the block took their ad money.

Also activists who are clearly engaging in motivated reasoning in arguing that Facebook needs to do more to censor conservative opinions.

That's what mainstream liberals are deeply concerned about, not conservative ideas about taxation.

In actual fact I think, as per usual, the situation is more complicated than that. Some of the censoring may be for fabrications, but the people who decide what is and isn't a fabrication are biased, and therefore leads to opinions at very least being caught up in the mix

So be concerned about people calling Clinton a Gila Monster if that's your most pressing concern. But by censoring it, you will also miss out on contrarian reporting that's actually true.

censor _everything_

That's an interesting way to say "misinformation".

Hm? There are lots and lots of people and companies trying to censor conservative opinions.

I don't know if you've managed to read/consume the whole news spectrum over the last years, but I recommend that you pay regular attention to both progressive/liberal AND conservative outlets. Then you would know better than to say something like this.

I’m talking about Facebook. I’m talking about the conservatives that complain that FB is censoring their posts. Posts that are largely, if not completely, mis/disinformation about a myriad of topics.

Of course there exists people who want the censor conservative voices, full stop. I’m aware those people exist, but that’s clearly not who I’m talking about in this context and I think you know that.

Exactly. There's there a popular bit of spin that tries defend mis/disinformation by confusing it with political opinion.

One of the signs of American decline and weakness is how several bits of blatant mis/disinformation have lodged themselves in the conservative discourse, and the conservatives who have problem with that are too weak to do anything about it.

I'm not saying that couldn't also be true of liberals, but that doesn't and shouldn't mean conservatives are off the hook for their own problems.

“All over the world, elite institutions from governments to media to academia are losing their authority and monopoly control of information to dynamic amateurs and the broader public.” --Marc Andreessen

This coordinated attack against facebook is merely the mechanism through which they are trying to reassert control over the flow of information. It's the justification to create a new federal agency with gatekeeping powers over the internet: https://twitter.com/gillibrandny/status/1445451624005001217

Is there any doubt this agency, The Ministry of Truth let's say, would have flagged `Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction` as misinformation in 2003? Or `masks do work` in March 2020? We're not far from this as it is. Indeed, facebook was removing counter narratives with regard to the origin of Covid-19, which it only reversed when it became untenable: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-...

My concern is for the open internet, for the people, for the ability to challenge and dissent, for free speech in practical terms.

Polarization and vitriol precedes these platforms. Facebook, twitter, reddit, they all make it worse, I agree with that. And I would be in favor of requiring them to make their algorithms public at the very least.

But we must not give an even more centralized authority power over what's considered `harmful` or `misinformation`. You have to imagine this tool in the hands of your enemy because at some point it will be.

To believe that “the ruling class” oppose Facebook because people say mean things there, you have to maintain a crazily tortured definition of who is and is not in the ruling class.

To believe that Facebook, a huge company that recruits heavily from the Ivy League and pays huge salaries across the board, is not an elite institution, requires willful ignorance about what they do and who they work for. Who do you think buys most of the ads on Facebook? Dynamic amateurs and the broader public?

Isn't the economist subscription-based?

Regardless, I'll bite: Isn't an important reason because someone wants to signal to the world that "everyone knows" their company is a sexy, category-defining beast?

E.g., there are Coca Cola machines that span both physical space (can be found in any region of the country) and time (everything from a machine built yesterday to half a century ago). When a human notices this their long-term memory probably goes, "Oh, Coca Cola has been and must still be one of the most important soft drinks," and-- just guessing here-- that increases the probability that their impulsive choice is for Coke in cases where thirst is involved.

If someone asked the question, "Why would Coca Cola want their soft drink ad in a rickety old gas station in an area of Northern Georgia that's still associated with the movie Deliverance?" they'd be confusing cause and effect.

Same logic applies here. I'd assume that advertising in [old media's digital presence] is an effect of an ad campaign that seeks to deliver an image of said ubuiquity.

On the one hand, it can be argued that “people are interested, because of the movie.”

Except the stories usually start long before any “official” advertisements appear.

It’s about “building buzz,” and the American advertising industry (they refer to themselves as “communications”) is the best in the world, for this kind of thing.

The term “dog whistle” is used in a derogatory manner, but it’s actually a fairly apt metaphor. Dogs won’t respond to the whistle (which they hear just fine), unless they have been trained. "Building buzz" is training, so the paid ads will be much more effective. It works very well.

I don't mean to be rude here, but how do you know? How could you even know? Did they tell you they're the best, by any chance?

I'm not a fan of the industry. Recognizing that someone is good at something, is not the same as approving.

They have ads in the printed version.

A large portion of it is people who find advertisement inherently distasteful (or, at the least, targeted advertisement) and that optimizing everything entirely for engagement causes massively negative effects for society and individual psychology. Fine-tuning everything for addiction and intense emotional reaction is great for advertisement revenue, but really bad for people.

I think you might be underestimating how many people are actually seriously upset about how they've seen the national conversation degrade to a lower level of discourse, and blame that on social media (whether they're right or wrong). There are clearly people who are upset about modern social media that aren't associated with old media.

Because they don't trust that that data is accurate.

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mksc.2019.118...

Facebook has a problem in that it seems to frown on "intelligent" content. Long form journalism, in depth analysis, professional content (industry journals, tech blogs etc.), none of this content really exists on facebook.

I have friends that read hackernews, we find similar articles from hn interesting. But I would never think of sharing one on facebook, and I would be surprised if a friend of mine did so. For some reason, facebook is just not the place where content like this is shared.

This is the advertising proposition of non-facebook media.

Long-form content with more depth gets fewer initial likes, resulting in being hidden from most of your ancillary friends altogether.

This has behavioral impact on all of its users. Do you want to post content that only gets 5 likes versus what gets 50 likes?

You’re probably already aware but this only applies in the US (and a few other small places like New Zealand).

Direct to consumer drug advertising is fraught with issues and therefore banned in most the world.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/harvard-health-ad-watch-...

[0] Cost-per-[Click, Mille/thousand, Action]

And no, I'm not interested in doing extra work to set up Mastodon.

Free, how? As in freedom/beer/something else?

Money, you know, is not the only currency there is.

"The firm risks joining the ranks of corporate untouchables like big tobacco. If that idea takes hold, Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff. Even if its ageing customers stick with the social network, Facebook has bigger ambitions that could be foiled if public opinion continues to curdle."

Spot on, and not just young, liberal. Old-ish and privacy minded. Mid-aged and right.

Two crowds are critical though:

- this is the talent pool: college campuses. FB's changing tone (sponsoring scholarships, sponsoring scholarships for non tech -> tech transfers, etc) is evident.

- this is the management pool: mid-30's to 40's, married, coastal EMs or PMs, that have to explain at dinner parties where they work and why they do it. See: the whistleblower.

It’s the lack of work/life balance that gets to them, not the reputation of the employer.

There are millions of talented Engineers who'd die to work for Facebook, Google, Netflix.

Top 0.1%ile of 8,000,000,000 is 8 Million.

Most woke, liberal graduates were protected from competition from other countries due to their location advantage. Ironically these woke employees are demanding remote work, displaying their usual cluelessness about unintended consequences.

Like Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, its time for CEOs of tech companies to voluntarily kick out these entitled SJWs and hire true Capitalists, Libertarians, Indians, & Chinese. There are millions of them in this world and they are extremely talented and hard-working.

My comment wasn't directed at 0.1% pile. It's directed at mid-tier, good-not-great CS programs that FB is both targeting in ways that other FAANGs don't, and also have put on heavy marketing programs at. Signal or noise, hard to say, but they wouldn't be doing it if the need didn't exist .

What matters more is the self-fulfilling prophecy of if the PMs/EMs with the cultural sway decide to check out. It's incorrect to think these types don't matter due to the externalities tied to them, not just their management talent (there are a lot of good managers). An example is will the future Sheryl Sandbergs work, or not work at FB. These dinner table conversations are what starts to decide that, and their decision has a material impact on the company's future.

A lot of talented libertarian, conservative people can't work at facebook because it's too woke.

May be a Sheryl Sandberg will make way for Peter Thiels...and it's a fantastic thing for FB.

At this point too many FBers have to walk on eggshells.

A clean cut of SJWs will make FB a better and more powerful company

As a FAANG engineer from the enterprise world, plenty of enterprise developers would excel here. But they're not willing or able to sufficiently practice the leetcode grind.

> to voluntarily kick out these entitled SJWs

Another way to think of these people are the most talented, highly educated pool and casting them as somehow less capable or more entitled is just pure political spin. (There's people from this pool that are right leaning, but just a lower proportion of them.)

"All of humanity" a silly denominator.

There are fewer than 30 million software engineers in the world [1], so at 0.1% we're talking about 30,000 people worldwide. That's... not a lot of people. At all. There are waaaaaay more than 30K "we'll pay anything for the best" SWE positions in the world.

> Most woke, liberal graduates were protected from competition from other countries due to their location advantage.

On the contrary, I think those "liberal graduates" understand the US SWE labor market better than you do.

Tech is one of the least protected occupations in the United States. Driving up the supply of tech talent has been an explicit goal of the United States' immigration policy for 30+ years. Unlike medicine or engineering, there's no licensing barriers. And outsourcing has been an option for decades.

A lot of the labor market disruption you're predicting already happened. Stuff that could be effectively outsourced to IIT grads was outsourced over a decade ago. At this point, I'd bet good money that over the last 10 years or so automation (aka cloud and devops) was responsible for more IT layoffs than outsourcing.

> Ironically these woke employees are demanding remote work, displaying their usual cluelessness about unintended consequences.

I thought this would happen as well, but data seems to suggest exactly the opposite.

Also, while we're on the topic, outsourcing and skimping on engineering compensation obviously works -- just look at how IBM has taken over the tech industry while domestic firms like the FAANGs have languished ;-)

--

[1] https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-software...

An Analytical mind can be productive from 12 to 75; All of humanity is a pretty decent proxy for the talent pool.

Fortunately, there are many who are seeing the cancer of woke culture and are creating alternative pipelines and being very successful at it

The IITs are truly world-class computer science programs. Better than most US colleges/universities. To say nothing of the fantastic engineers in Canada and Europe that can be had for fractions of American labor prices. MOOCs are noise.

> slack/remote-infrastructure

Slack-like technologies existed during the outsourcing wave in the 90s, and high-quality video conferencing existed during the wave in the early 2010s.

We've been through this rodeo before.

In college I was warned to major in Accounting instead of CS because all the programming jobs would be outsourced. Today, I make north of $600K and all of the entry level positions at the Big 4 ask for some programming knowledge, or at the very least strong SQL/Excel skills.

Again, I've lived through some of these waves. IBM et al. tried this twice and lost both times.

> An Analytical mind can be productive from 12 to 75; All of humanity is a pretty decent proxy for the talent pool.

I'm... not even going to engage with this.

> Fortunately, there are many who are seeing the cancer of woke culture and are creating alternative pipelines and being very successful at it

I don't really know where this moral panic about woke culture in tech is coming from. It's not something I've experienced in the workplace. I don't doubt that there are microclimates within FAANGS where this is a problem, but I've never seen it and at this point have to assume it's not as pervasive as the panicked folks seem to think.

In meatspace, I've had a number of friends who've complained about cancel culture/wokeness. Mostly in our small group at church. TBH, if I had to guess based on my interactions with those folks at church, all of them are struggling in their careers because they are abrasive, argumentative, and have a tendency to steamroll conversations. That lack of social graces is the sort of thing people put up with in church/friend groups but have less patience for at work (particularly in non-executive roles).

I don't doubt that cancelling is a thing, but my general anecdotal experience has been that most people complaining about it are wrong about the motivation for their firing/non-promotion. For prideful people, it's often easier to believe the world hates Christians or Conservatives than to own up to the fact that people just don't like working with or especially under abrasive personalities.

Same here - it's an easy agenda to outrage about that's destroying the quality of discourse here on HN

What a strangely composed list, full of odd ducks, no?

Also, and ya I know how this sounds, but if Coinbase keeps it up they and similar companies will and are grabbing some of the same talent.

(And yes, you can point out reasons not to work at Netflix, but it seems like a whole nother level than the rest of FAANG.)

Yeah, mostly cos they make no money ;)

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/19/netflix-says-cash-flow-posit...

Netflix have needed external financing to stay in business up till this year. This is very unlike the rest of FAANG (Amazon is similar, but do throw off a lot of free cash).

What liberals can't stomach is a company allowing the spread of nasty election lies.

One halfway responsible way: "here is a paid announcement from someone that doesn't necessarily reflect our views: ${LIES}".

On the other end of the spectrum are sneaky, dark patterns and whatnot.

Maybe it's time for the old crusty developers making $60k on embedded systems to take a shot at it.

Well you're dead wrong about that.

+Not sure what counts as old and crusty, but...

So any institution that's considered repugnant by young liberals can now breezily be compared to big tobacco? Should the Republican party restructure its platform so that it can have snazzier candidate webpages?

Big tobacco is big tobacco because the product is widely seen as addictive and harmful, even by its biggest users. The nuance needed to argue that Facebook is bad but Twitter and Reddit are fine will never have this sort of broad appeal. Social media for me but not for thee?

But the sentence that matters is this one: "Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff".

If Facebook can't attract/keep the best staff (especially hackers/devs/engineers), it can't stay at the top.

Even Microsoft of 1998 didn't become as toxic to solid tech talent as Facebook risks becoming if they keep this up.

Idk, I think being the only big tech employer in Seattle at the time helped keep them afloat. Telecommuting was still nascent at the time and moving is always daunting. Today the environment is very different, Facebook is in the heart of SV, but even more importantly, now everyone is suddenly totally ok with indefinite remote work, so you’re no longer limited by not wanting to move, the only thing holding you back is $$, and at a certain point all the money in the world isn’t gonna make you fe good about what you’re doing.

Facebook losing its young, liberal staff could be the best thing that has happened to the company in a long time, but that's not what's going to happen.

Curiousity might lead some to actually look at the article. It is very short.

For those who won't, the tag line is "The problem starts at the top". Perhaps that is a reference to Zuckerberg.

The topic is reputation. The article quickly summarises the recent complaints being made against Facebook.

Then it cuts to the chase.

"The most damaging claim this week gained the least attention. Ms Haugen alleges that Facebook has concealed a decline in its young American users. She revealed internal projections that a drop in teenagers' engagement could lead to an overall decline in American users of 45% within the next two years."

This is where FB could potentially run afoul with the SEC.

Its also where FB is continuing to provide material for lawyers representing large instutional investors who want to sue Facebook.

The parent comment, typical of others routinely shared on HN, seems to suggest the only thing that matters is what "most people" think. IOW, whatever is discussed on HN should be ignored because people who do not read HN have no opinion on it. (If they do not read HN, then how would they.)

Here, the Economist suggests otherwise. What matters to the Economist is not what "most people" think. Instead it focuses on what the people who work at Facebook think.

"Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return. Even when it set out plausible responses to Ms Haugen, people no longer wanted to hear. The firm risks joining the ranks of corporate untouchables like big tobacco. If that idea takes hold, Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff."

In sum, TFA suggests that the business may need a better spokesperson. The business model isn't going to vanish, but it is very dependent on perception.

The threat to Facebook is not mass consumer hate and abandonment. It’s that no one likes them enough to stand up for them anymore, which empowers the relatively few people who seek advantage against them.

A lot of things in politics and policy become possible with relatively small shifts in public sentiment.

73 yo dad is not quitting Facebook anytime soon. He genuinely uses it to find old friends and coworkers and goof around in the comments.

I’ve gone to close my account a bunch of times, but for so many old friends it’s my only link to them, I could not bring myself to do it.

Any app is doing that and will find other friends on that app with shared contacts. You can even do it in a future FB account.

With that knowledge it is easy for me to delete FB account, even if there are active group chats there.

I always do download + delete

I haven't missed anything, and friends/family that lost my phone number usually reached out to someone else to get it. They also don't mind using other platforms to get in touch with me.

Surprisingly, my mother formed a Signal group with my extended family and that's how we chat now. She's not exactly tech savvy, but found it very easy to use.

Someone the other day was mocking to me the idea that collective, voluntary, cooperative action could accomplish anything. Did they ever use the Internet (in fairness, they aren't in IT and may not be aware of FOSS - but Wikipedia?)? Every non-profit? The all-volunteer soldiers of the American Revolution and of today? All the democracies born of the people overthrowing the tyrants? The great reduction of smoking, increase in exercise and healthy diet? All the people that are wearing masks (~everybody, where I am)? The response to natural disasters? Does anyone critically examine these graphite-thin arguments?

It's not all or nothing - FB operates in society, and they do things and will do things in response to pressure and to avoid other problems. They aren't canceling all moderation tomorrow, for example.

The public can be persuaded. Why do many spend so much advertising on Facebook?

one very real impact of their malfeasance is their reputation among their prospective and existing workforce.

It is not an exaggeration to say that I have never—not in 25 years in the industry—known or known of or read accounts of people who variously quit over their amorality, have turned down offers (including at VERY high levels) over it, or confronted recruiters with challenges around it (historically resulting in cessation of recruiting efforts; hottake: they will not be able to do that any longer, because it will winnow their pool too aggressively).

I myself harbor acute emnity to them and have been ignoring a persistent recruiter for many months over this; and am regularly down-voted here for saying what I'm going to say again:

If you work for them, quit.

If you do business with them, don't.

There should be consequences for this level of amorality. If you think it's the status quo, you're simply factually wrong; there is no shortage of other companies, working in related domains, who do not feel that damage to the health and wellbeing of either their clients or the society in which they operate is a natural, inevitable, and excusable cost of doing business.

They are not the root cause of, but are massive enabler of, forces which pose an existential threat to our democracy.

Their reputation is merely coming into alignment with a truth they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars suppressing.

This is the lesson of our generation: makes money by delegating the consequences to society. Nothing will happen to you. In fact, in 20 years, you could buy the service of some PR firm, and they will even make you a hero in the eyes of the public eventually.

Group messaging and engagement algorithm amplified social media are different things though.

Group messaging like WhatsApp, iMessage, and SMS, and photo sharing like Google photos or iPhoto have an inherently limited distribution of a given piece of content. It's not that you can't do nefarious things using these products, it's just harder to scale those.

Engagement amplified social media, as found in varying degrees on Facebook, TikTok Instagram, YouTube, etc, have far more potential to move society as a whole - for better or for worse.

Therefore it's not unreasonable for people to continue to use something like WhatsApp for limited group conversations while refusing to use Facebook or similar products due to the increased risk of exposure to harmful content.

One is free to despise any product Facebook or any company creates just because they are Facebook, but that's a whole different discussion.

Like Friendster, ClubHouse, and MySpace, there is a life cycle for every app. All the redisign and rebranding can't cure a good idea that has festered into a bad idea.

Facebook's tenure has been long indeed, but it's best time has likely passed.

Many people also don't realize the tactics that platforms use to try to uphold the illusion that they are still active, including paying influencers to post, and in even creating totally fake accounts. I won't say any names, but this is why most sites no longer publish their active user numbers like they did when they were growing, because many were caught as well back then in overstating their active user numbers.

I think you are speaking from a soft eng perspective. Most people don't actually care about the product features / reputation. It's a social media and that means that the only thing that matter is that other people are on it.

No service currently has the critical mass of user to outshine the FB group, and i think this will be the case for a long time.

When you open the apps the only thing written on the screen, besides their name, is "From Facebook", so I doubt that's true.

Most don't give a shit though, you're right about that

You're assuming people reading what's on their screen.

News at 11: they don't. They just look at the colors and quickly focus on the thing they are used to actually reading (like the thread content).

Yes. But those people will die eventually. And younger people aren't adopting FB or care about it.

They would have found out this week when they all went down. Most people know who owns what. They just don't care that much. We know Nestle is terrible but still buy their products because they taste good.

Citation needed.

My loading screen in WhatsApp clearly states "From FACEBOOK".

Maybe WhatsApp was affected by some people who, so I've heard, rely on it heavily. They may have (smartly) switched to a more decentralized platform to handle their critical communications.

So did they shed some edge-case users? Sure. Will it matter in the long run? Not at all.

Why is that relevant at all?

If I have a blackout for six hours, I'm gonna go back to using electricity once it's back.

Consider this: Nestle has a terrible reputation. Absolutely, truly awful. Has that meaningfully impacted Nestle's sales? Probably not.

Morally questioning a company with that kind of salary and benefits requires a position of incredible privilege.

Interesting thing is we have both left and right aligned that FB is bad but if you ask them why they are bad, they would not agree on a single thing.

This is why nothing is going to be done and it's all a cycle which will keep repeating itself.

Sure all these companies have their share of evil doings, but FB is probably the one that tends to affect people on a much more personal level (resulting in bullying, depression, anxiety, etc)

If a larger percentage of "us" are repulsed by facebook, it just means that they have to pay more. There's always hundreds of "us" willing to do anything for anybody; I'm sure somebody is helping some Syrian warlord with the spreadsheet keeping track of the books for his open air slave market, and designing a distributed facial recognition network to track the movements and contacts of political dissidents.

i.e. there's no useful "us" except when we're talking about craft.

Algorithms is where the attention needs to go. The regulation probably needs to target the techniques Facebook and others are using rather than the organisations. It's the same crap as lootboxes in games training people to gamble. Newsfeeds and engagement optimization leads to attention grabbing and rage baiting posts. Just give us back the simple date based feed like Instagram has. Cut the algorithm weighted ordering. That's not everything solved but a lot of the overt manipulation of people is based on that.

Money.

(AOL seems to be surviving and generating revenue, I suspect generations must disappear to end this)

FB has definately taken a reputational hit that will effect that quality. Which will effect the solutions they come up with. And given the list of issues they have to deal with, they will stay in the news for all the wrong things for a long time to come.

They don't have to care. They just shouldn't be surprised if I refuse to hire them because I was able to find them on Facebook/Instagram. Likewise, if they worked for Facebook I won't hire them. They're tainted. LOL