[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.