A/B testing isn't a new thing - I'm sure the inventor of the wheel experimented with different shapes, and the buyer of the hexagonal wheel probably didn't have the best user experience.
Multiply that by the number of people in the world and the number of products people use, and A/B testing is really up there as possibly one of the most beneficial ideas ever.
I really don't understand those who claim it should be banned - I see no way that testing two different versions of a website with people who desire to use that website can bring sufficient harm to outweigh those massive benefits.
It's a great tool, and its impact all depends on how you use it.
The major issue with A/B testing in the workplace is it causes confusion and slows people down when you change things. Which makes these tests really expensive even if they are seemingly easy to preform.
If you're building a tool to make life easier for the user, something that gives them a better experience is your optimal outcome. This seems like a scenario where A/B can produce a good outcome.
The challenge is when you throw in an ad-based revenue model, and the A/B testing is then optimized for the opposite (eyeball-hours, linear metres scrolled per session, ad spots passed, ads clicked) - engagement-based business models end up (I'd argue) A/B optimizing for the opposite of what their users want, to get them to spend longer doing a task they could have done quicker.
The funny thing is - the ad-based revenue model is not the only possible variant. Last time I’ve checked Facebook’s profits per user were $7 per quarter, that is $28 a year. At the same time I am paying LiveJournal $25 a year for the ad-free version. Just taking my money looks like a much better model in many respects:
- less overhead: a lot of people doing these studies how to force me to look at something I do not want to look at will be free to do something more useful to the society;
- streamlined relationship between me and my publisher: in this model there is no advertiser who can say “I do not like these texts, no revenue for you”.
That’s why I prefer to pay for some Substack authors, like Matt Taibbi and Glen Greenwald, than to try to fish their texts for free amid some sea of “clever” advertising (hey AI testers, I bought this thing already, what’s the point of forcing it on me again and again?).
I kinda wish that Brave model (my money distributed between sites I visited) got more traction. It looks much more healthy.
I bet by at least 4 orders of magnitude and likely 5 or 6.
Perhaps you should just agree that, "not all a/b testing is the same".
Quote - "Speaking from work experience: A/B testing doesn't look into the nuances of usability or productivity, it looks at easy-to-quantify metrics like conversion rates and money spent"
I was in the "B" group, and felt so humiliated at how many times I tried to reset my password to get into Facebook.
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...
There's also a neat sleight of hand here. Your inventor of the wheel surely tested multiple variants to optimize for the utility of his invention to the user. The A/B testing that's problematic is about optimizing taking advantage of the user. That doesn't lead to better experience, but the opposite. This is what's increasingly popular, and this is what people complain about or want to see banned.
Related: attention economy is predicated on bad user experience, because it makes money from friction.
The primary goal of A/B testing is to see what's more profitable.
If that happens to result in better UI that's a side effect.
In fact, it could result in less usability (relevant to this conversation, it probably resulted in the frustrating "algorithm-based" timeline at FB/Twitter/etc).
Well, I think I'll provide a disagreeing opinion. :)
I assume this opinion probably comes from your past experiences, and I believe it is true in many cases. Since I'm not American and have never worked in an American corporate environment, I can't say what is true over there... but my experience in EU and Canada with A/A/B, A/B/C and typical A/B testing (as well as building such testing tools for others) was not like that.
For example, when building tutorials for users, profitability is far from being the primary objective. Same goes for building documentation, programming languages, open-source software, internal tooling and other such things.
Of course, I get that in the end, profitability is the primary goal of the company (with some exceptions). But I maintain that not all A/B tests have profitability as their primary goal, which makes the previous statement an incorrect generalization IMO.
A/B testing lead to the development of effective "dark patterns" in UI that trick users into doing things they don't want or don't understand, and then making it difficult to undo.
Totally the same as A/B testing button placement. Totally.
Consider yourself that inventor, would you A/B test hexagonal vs round?
As for the other aspects they sound like great targets for testing within different use-cases, but I'm not sure why that'd be an A/B test as we think of them now.
Worse for whom? I feel like a lot of the A/B testing results in more revenue, a more addictive app, and less user satisfaction, because they're not testing for anything beneficial to the user, because at least with FB, you're not the customer, their advertisers are the customer.
For example, I have used A/B testing to see find ways to help users get a task done with fewer clicks, saving them time.
I have not experienced a product become better for the user as a result of involuntary A/B testing in my entire adult life.
Producers and consumer have both an adversarial relationship and a mutually beneficial relationship, and the distinction between these two is essentially the split between voluntary A/B tests and involuntary ones. In the adversarial component, the producer is trying to figure out how to extract more money from the consumer, without improving the product. Alternatively, (and equivalently), how to make the product cheaper, but also worse, in a way that yhe customer doesnt notice (with their wallet). A proactive version of the "market for lemons".
For instance, if you A/B test your cancellation process to minimize the number of people who cancel their subscriptions, you will almost certainly do something that makes you some additional money, and is also unambiguously evil.
Any A/B testing that is mutual benefit to consumers and producers can be done with consent, by volunteers. And the miniscule amount of scientific rigor you would lose by doing so is not worth the tremendous sacrifice we have seen in quality of consumables in the past 2 decades (probably longer, but i do not have the personal experience to go longer)
You might be compelled to describe involuntary A/B testing as a strategy for maximizing evil subject to the constraint that it be legal, but it often dips its toes into seeing what is illegal but still profitable, and is capable of fundamentally undermining our legal system and even our political system.
The technology has grown more powerful. The addition of computers that can optimize essentially arbitrary objective functions has serious existential implications for humanity.
A blanket ban on the practice, incurring the total dissolution of any corporate entity found guilty of the practice of involuntary A/B testing, would be a start.
If you did, how would you know?
When craigslist added the map that shows you where all of the people are offering the thing you are interested in. That was a very good change, but thats pretty far from how craigslist operates.
When dominos stopped serving hot glue on cardboard, its pretty easy to see how that didnt come about by furtive A/B testing. They were pretty confident people would like the new pizza more than the old pizza. So they told them about it. Boy did that work for dominos.
That actually speaks more generally to my point. If you're making a change that you think people will like, you tell them about it, because even if it turns out that they dont like it more, the fact that they thought they would and you did it generates quite a lot of good will for them.
Do we live in the same universe? As far as I can tell, software keeps trending worse. Usability is terrible, options and settings keep getting moved around and hidden, software is less responsive than it used to be...
But the majority of people choose to use a modern computer, presumably because they find it overall more useful than their old MS DOS computer and software.
Sure - there are gripes, but they must be outweighed by something pretty big for 99.99% of people to choose a new computer over a 30 year old one.
Imagine thinking that seriously.
To me the latter view is the one that’s hard to take seriously.
Within a university, research with human subjects is required to pass an ethical review before it is allowed to proceed. Given the scale and impact of the research conducted by Facebook on its users, it is entirely reasonable to hold them to the same standard.
So we agree that ab testing is good for optimizing toward a numerical objective. You then seem to think that either:
A) There are simply no numerical objectives that correlate with good ux or
B) Every software company ever is optimizing toward perverse incentives by which they take more money from their users while making their products worse
It’s probably B that you believe, and this is such a myopic and paternalistic view. There are a couple cases where it’s a problem, eg cancellation flows. But this problem is orthogonal to AB testing (try cancelling your newspaper subscription in 1994). AB testing is mostly just trying to improve the rate at which people sign up or buy something, and in this case, your objection hinges on the hidden premise that people are idiots.
> Within a university, research with human subjects is required to pass an ethical review before it is allowed to proceed. Given the scale and impact of the research conducted by Facebook on its users, it is entirely reasonable to hold them to the same standard.
One man’s ponens is another’s tollens. See: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
My qualms are not so much with the method as the morals that guide it. It's agnostic but when operationalized in a faulty moral framework can definitely lead to bad results.
Read the whistle blower report, witness the evolution from seeing content from your friends posted in less addictive chronological feed to addictive content your friends like in the internet sorted by addictive news. Hell, the site started as a PHP hack to creep on pretty women. They sold a bunch of data to foreign adversaries. For years, they let people sell ads to Nazis. They don’t give the people faced with the psychologically brutal jobs of moderation get benefits. They have been a platform for genocide and government surveillance.
I might be missing some examples of them missing some money to do the right thing, but nothing comes to mind.
Absolutely, go bananas A/B testing different colors for a “Sign Up” button or testing different pricing models.
But let’s not go bananas optimizing algorithms that are damaging to users mental health at a massive scale.
In research, these types of experiments typically require consent..
obviously "A/B testing" is not "hiring psychologists", because one is in the category of experimental methods the other one is about human resources
yet there are obvious connections. A/B testing is used to increase "conversion", which is profitability. which is the same fuckin' thing as addictiveness in case of a site where you pay with your eyeballs
That is untrue.
A/B testing is not the same thing as seeing how bad your users' mental state becomes if you muck with what they read.
A/B testing is a tool. It can be used for good or evil. That was Facebook's choice how to use it.
They did it to make sure they could keep people's attention, despite the psychological damage.
(This is not an attack on you or your otherwise valid point. Just a reminder that people should be mindful of their ethical obligations to get informed consent and not cause harm to others with their experiments).
Link pls
>The Obama campaign collected data with its own campaign app, complied with Facebook’s terms of service and, most important in my view, received permission from users before using the data.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/clarence-page/ct-pers...
CA lied to users and violated FB's ToS.
>And numerous other developers, including the makers of such games as FarmVille and the dating app Tinder, also used the same Facebook developer tool that Cambridge Analytica used.
>Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. His app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” Approximately 270,000 people downloaded the app. In so doing, they gave their consent for Kogan to access information such as the city they set on their profile, or content they had liked, as well as more limited information about friends who had their privacy settings set to allow it.
>Although Kogan gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels that governed all developers on Facebook at that time, he did not subsequently abide by our rules. By passing information on to a third party, including SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, he violated our platform policies. When we learned of this violation in 2015, we removed his app from Facebook and demanded certifications from Kogan and all parties he had given data to that the information had been destroyed. Cambridge Analytica, Kogan and Wylie all certified to us that they destroyed the data.
https://about.fb.com/news/2018/03/suspending-cambridge-analy...
Please stop trying to use what-aboutism to fuel a partisan divide.
[0] https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/obama-campaign-advisers...
Now if you had said “fuck meta because my feed is filled with an unintelligible mix of baby photos and political screeds,” I’d totally follow.
"On 6 December 2021, approximately a hundred Rohingya refugees launched a $150 billion lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that it did not do enough to prevent the proliferation of anti-Rohingya hate speech because it was interested in prioritizing engagement."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_co...
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
I think maybe your beef is with the nature of technology today and/or our current culture that enables/glorifies it's mass use. What's the solution?
I have seen many people brainwashed by highly targeted ads and conspiracies that found them on facebook. Those people vote, break into congress, etc.
deleting your individual account doesn't change that
It shows, that a life without FB is possible. The more people do it, the easier it gets.
Until the network effect is overcome.
I feel engaging in commerce in any way at all is impossible without being "evil" under this definition.
Aren't advertisements at their core unconsented psychological manipulation? What about retail store design? Is providing customer service altogether just manipulation?
I think I take issue with the word "evil." It seems to imply a certain malice or intent to harm, which just isn't logical, given the context.
And no, I can't give you a clear brightline test right now to determine this. It takes homework.
But.
If you want to A/B test whether people prefer blue chewing-gum to green, be my guest.
If you want to A/B test for literal depression and sell stuff to people based on that, you're probably evil.
The line's somewhere in between there. Now we know where Meta has chosen to go on some of this; and again, this is from WHAT IS KNOWN TO BE PUBLIC.
The safest thing is to assume the worst, then. May they rot.
"They" is unnecessarily vague I guess. It's not fair to write off the entire population of Facebook staff... There are surely a substantial chunk of employees who were entirely unaware of these tactics.
It's easy to claim an organization is evil. Less so for individuals, and with good reason. There's something to be said for remembering to humanize people, even those most "undeserving."
There is no harm in me saying out loud "Facebook is an evil company" even if I'm completely wrong, because they are so powerful. It would valuable for everyone to scream at Facebook at being evil because that would force them to show and prove that they are not.
We shouldn't get stuck on being "accurate." Throwing rocks is not just okay, it's a good idea if it forces the powerful party to act/respond.
As for the individuals -- it's their job to defend the company. If that hurts their feelings or whatever, too bad. I don't care and neither should you (presuming that Facebook is potentially very harmful.)
Yes. 100% yes.
> What about retail store design?
Also yes.
Advertising exists to try and make you purchase product “x”, regardless of whether you need it, or it meets your requirements. Even “harmless” display advertising exists to gently push to mind into forming the desired emotional association with a product.
Store layouts are well documented for being deliberately anti-efficient: they make you walk past everything else to find the things you need, with the goal of exposing you to more advertising and product placement. Combine that with strategies like putting sweets and other “low friction” products at the checkout, where you’re more likely to make a spur of the moment emotional decision under pressure, or be hassled by your children for sweets, and you have something that is inherently exploitative and morally questionable at a minimum.
Evil is probably too high-modality, but unethical and exploitative are definitely suitable.
I only took issue with the choice of "evil" because I am working on curbing my own hyperbole and sweeping generalizations.
Nothing wrong with calling "Facebook" evil. It's not a person, it's an artificial entity. It can take it. (I too would be more reluctant when it comes to people)
If a store owner puts two different candy bars at the register to see which one sells more, is that an evil thing?
When someone tries out a different way of greeting strangers at a party, are they being evil? What if they write down the results?
This is a really malicious way to describe showing two users the same button but in different locations
Consider how this may have helped you to develop your opinion.
The Cambridge Analytica thing probably didn't have a meaningful impact on the elections. Facebook was dumb to allow partner apps access to so much data and rely on those partners to follow Facebook's policies, but they recognized the mistake and probably overcorrected.
All the other coverage probably serves to reinforce and amplify negative sentiments about Facebook, and a ton of it wasn't deserved. People cite the Rohingya, I remember also a news cycle about Facebook profiting from hate speech.
Those things happened, but Facebook had also built probably the most expensive and effective hate speech filtering operation in the world. That it be 100% effective is not a reasonable goal. With billions of pieces of content even 99.999% effectiveness will result in examples that the press can point to reinforce a narrative about Facebook profiting from hate speech.
I doubt there ever was any profit in serving hate speech. The ad revenue from filter misses would not have been big enough to pay for the filtering operation itself.
That's a pretty big claim to make without evidence. At the very least I think we can agree that political parties wouldn't be investing so much money into social media campaigns (analytics, marketing, etc.) if they didn't think it was impactful.
https://towardsdatascience.com/effect-of-cambridge-analytica...
> Sumpter analyzed the accuracy of Cambridge Analytica’s regression models in his book ‘Outnumbered.’ He used a publicly available dataset created by Michal Kosinski and his colleagues, a psychologist, who created an anonymized database of 20,000 Facebook users. Of the 20,000 Facebook users 19,742 were US-based, and of that amount 4,744 had registered their preferred political party Democratic or Republican, and had also liked over 50 Facebook pages. Sumpter first aimed to test the accuracy of regression models in general, and so created a model which predicted political party allegiance based on Facebook page likes. He concluded that the regression model worked “very well for hardcore Democrats and Republicans” but “does not reveal anything about the 76 percent of users who did not put their political allegiance on Facebook” (Sumpter, pg. 52–53). He also describes how just because the model may have revealed, for instance, that Democrats tend to like Harry Potter, it does not necessarily mean that other Harry Potter fans like Democrats. Therefore, a strategy employed by Democrats to aim to get Harry Potter fans to vote, may not necessarily benefit them.
You'd probably have better spent your money by using party-owned voter databases to create custom audiences based on email addresses. Everything I've seen points to Cambridge Analytica being mainly an operation to grift campaign dollars. From the same article:
> CEO Alexander Nix himself corroborates these results. He claimed in his testimony to members of the British parliament’s ‘Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee,’. He contended that Kogan’s dataset wasn’t very useful and that made up a tiny part of their overall strategy for the 2016 United States presidential election. How do we resonate this admission, with his presentation at the Concordia summit, in which Nix openly bragged about the ability to wield Facebook data to tune an incredibly powerful instrument that significantly impacts elections? The answer to that came from Nix himself in his testimony, claiming that he has in the past used hyperbole when pitching his company to potential clients. This view is corroborated by Kogan who mentions how “Nix is trying to promote (the personality algorithm) because he has a strong financial incentive to tell a story about how Cambridge Analytica have a secret weapon” (Sumpter, pg. 54).
There is plenty to lay at the feet of Meta, but I've always thought the CA scandal was an overreaction.
With that in mind, I'd like to point out root merely expressed an anecdote about above and beyond humane treatment of employees from the CEO. Parent described the hacker-friendly culture. Those appear to be first hand accounts.
How does your comment relate contribute to that discussion?
Further, how does over the top and genericized outrage and harm wishing on a cohort of innocent people advance society in any meaningful ways?
All I'm saying is that the harm they inflict on billions of people outside the company outweighs the good they do for thousands inside. Just because there's both good and bad doesn't mean the degree of each cannot be weighed at all.
I asked a question, no conclusions drawn. If I had a point, it's that the comment was off topic with regard to the comment it replied to, and warrants its own tree of discussion. It was a rant; There wasn't even an attempt at a segue or good faith effort to provide contrast.
What "gives me the right to decide how the discussion is framed" are the hn guidelines (which you violated yourself by presenting a strawman).
But humans are complex beings, and it's just realistic to view us all with some nuance rather than casually tossing everyone into good/evil baskets. The gp outlined an example of decent behaviour, and it remains just that regardless of our attitudes on other grounds towards Zuckersnuffles and/or Meta. Even murderers can be kind and decent people given in some contexts (witnessed at first hand).
A lot of people here agree with you about Meta's faults, even me. But that doesn't mean we can't appreciate the good they've done. Even if it isn't much and even if it is vastly outweighed by the bad. We should still use positive reinforcement to pressure companies to do the right thing.
But you are totally right. We must celebrate with he good in others and life or our critical observations lose all merit.
What's frustrating is that they currently have a near-monopoly on friend-to-friend publishing, yet unlike about 5 years ago, they now gatekeep a lot of those communications -- many times I post something on my Facebook or Instagram that I want friends to see, and Meta doesn't show that content to my friends, just because it isn't a "Reel". Friends in my age range (+/-10) who grew up in North America tend to use only Meta's products, so I basically feel like I'm talking to a wall most of the time.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo... 2. https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-... 3. https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-services-are-used-to-s... 4. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/08/985143101/stop-lying-muslim-r... 5. https://theintercept.com/2019/12/07/facebook-mark-zuckerberg...
Analysts stealing nudes isn't the mission.
90% of the work they do is purely defensive. The offensive work targets bad actors and foreign governments/militaries, compared to other countries intelligence services that also engage in economic espionage.
In a perfect world they wouldn't need to exist at all. But we don't live in that world.
They also basically have zero real congressional oversight.
And just because 90% of what they do is purely defensive doesn't make the 10% any more acceptable (x key score, data mining, hooking into Google, etc.)
They don't work within the bounds of the law and constitution, and thus their mission is bad by my simple definition. I don't need to know what they do in secret.
So what has your research on this uncovered?
It is wrong, and there has to be better ways. I don't remember the exact procedure, but NSA didn't need much clearance to spy on any American citizen.
That is what Denmark is trying to find out:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/denmark-charges-spy-chi...
You know what they say, "if they cheat with you, they cheat on you too". A liar is a liar. If your job involves seeking people's trust in order to betray it, you're not very smart if you think your boss wouldn't betray you.
You have literally no idea whether that’s true. Even if you somehow did, you couldn’t prove it here.
You could be right—but your assertion has zero credibility.
Strong "trust me bro" vibes.
Hand-waving and baseless assertions don't contradict the fact that it conducts activities against it's country's most basic founding principles and laws.
This regrettable line of argument is in line with blindly defending the police in spite of all the police murders, abuse, and outright corruption.
Huh? Like Gates and Musk, he's not even a highly skilled developer, even less a hacker.
I first heard it used to traditionally describe computer security whizzes like Kevin Mitnick, Diffie & Hellman, Robert Morris (Morris worm) etc. But apparently the last ~15 years it's just a compliment for the next random corporate grifter who has 0 technical experience and is just in for the $$$.
However Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years before or right after dropping out of Harvard by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=922367...
Strange because Mitnick puts most of his exploits down to social engineering, not technical prowess.
But then taking anything a self-confessed social engineer says about themselves at face value is obviously problematic.
Still, I prefer having someone like Kevin in mind when saying the word instead of any other desperate "growth hacker" that is trying to mislead VCs with their trite ideas that will forever change tech the way we know it.
Article says his paper on it was published in 1979, which was 43 years ago. I wouldn't call that 'a few years back'. I interpreted your comment as he took a break from his philanthropy to come up to an efficient solution to the problem like 3-5 years ago.
Spot on.
> However Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years back by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.
Wait, what?
https://dodona.ugent.be/exercises/189028897/media/gates1979....
Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years back by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.
If we aren't talking about computer security, hacker imo would be someone with remarkable technical/scientific contributions. Indeed, there may be some personal bias for math hackers (cryptographers, theorists) but then their skillsets with the respective programmer ones converge.
Certainly, some of what they hacked on might be related to security. Or maybe they wrote little games. Or threw together a curses-based interface to the Unix shell. Or some other cool utility.
As I recall, there was a concerted attempt to distinguish between people who exploited security vulnerabilities (aka "crackers") from people who could quickly build these useful things ("hackers").
I feel like the modern use of hacker (ala "hackathon") is actually pretty well in line with the usage I grew up with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537629
https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
>I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond. Dave Winer has recently and mercifully moved his essays off to audio, but you can still hear him snorfling cashew nuts and talking at length about what it means to be a blogger[7] . These essays and this writing style are tempting to people outside the subculture at hand because of their engaging personal tone and idiosyncratic, insider's view. But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.
I found this article (I only skimmed it and didn't look for counter evidence, sorry) https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/a-short-...
https://m.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-jarvis...
Pick a different line of attack if you want to slag Gates; there are several others to choose from.
Facebook's failures were always with business morals and product direction, and it's the latter that they really really screwed up on this time with the attempt to turn their cash cow into TikTok and the investment into the metaverse.
TLDR: by KLOC Google might have more, but arguably Meta's have more impact.
From his statement it sounds like he really believed people would accept the pandemic’s restrictions as a “new normal” and this would leap-frog humanity into the virtual world for good.
I am a highly cynical and pessimistic person and even I knew this wasn’t happening. People around the World were literally risking their lives and their loved ones for a little physical connection. Our generation, it turns out, is still very human centric and we are still ultimately social beings, not just social minds. Maybe kids born into YouTube, who are now coming of age, will be different, yet I still would not bet 11 thousand lives on it.
Other people kept working their blue collar jobs at mines and oil pads as if nothing had happened. Once I was on the mine sites, there was no indication of anything different. No masks or any other BS.
My 'rona experience was totally different than the wfh keyboard careers.
[0] https://associationsnow.com/2013/04/how-the-future-of-associ...
Which fundamentals?
The $117.9 billion in revenue and $39.4 billion of net profit in 2021 [1]?
The price to earnings ratio of 9.22, which is far lower than the NASDAQ average of around 28.0 [2]?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-... [2] https://ycharts.com/companies/NDAQ/pe_ratio
And they are vaporizing all of their FCF by reinvesting into the metaverse. Or were until the stock continued to collapse.
It’s fair value here if you assume the metaverse is actually something they can monetize in a big way. Too far off for most investors
Sadly, today's layoffs were probably related to it not being just about the money then... no matter how good your intentions are, when the money runs out, it's gone.
"Fundamentally, we’re making all these changes for two reasons: our revenue outlook is lower than we expected at the beginning of this year, and we want to make sure we’re operating efficiently across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs. "
He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around.
This. Yes.
Facebook came within a whisker of establishing themselves as the central communications hub for the planet. They ruined their own business from greed. Grew it huge (instead of long steady growth) and it has collapsed.
Greed
It would not have been a good thing if they became "... He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around. " so we are all better off, probably.
I hope the story of Zuck and FB become business school lessons on "greed is bad and will destroy you". Not what they taught me at business school (I was there in 2008) but they should have
They lied to content creators about how much money could be earned by switching to video on FB. This bankrupted multiple businesses, including Collegehumor and FunnyOrDie: https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120?l...
Early Facebook was very good at this! I used their ads platform a lot in 2009-10 to raise engagement for a small non-profit that I was helping. The Facebook experience was simple, easy and great value for the money.
And then the ads ecosystem gradually got "optimized." Our nonprofit still kept using it for a while, but it was clear that the focus no longer was in providing great experiences for us -- or our intended audience. Pricing went up; as did efforts to steer me into packages that worked better for FB than me. It was as if someone said: "Stop creating 2x the value you capture. Move toward 1.01x"
FB made many billions over the next decade. But it drained the ecosystem's goodwill. Old-economy industrial giants usually took 80-100 years to paint themselves into this corner. Kind of amazing that FB has done it in less than 20.
You can fool some of the people some of the time...
No, incompetence and naivety.
They were young, dumb and all from the same college/upbringing.
People are multifaceted. I'm sure he is good to
his employees, like people are describing, but that ain't it.
Of course, for those immediately impacted and hurt/angered by his actions I certainly wouldn't blame anybody for venting.
But it would be much more productive to talk about "thing Zuck did good" or "thing Zuck did bad."
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.Yea. Helpful to have a token girl to take the blame for the boys. Helpful
Sheryl was given credit for creating current facebook culture. Before Sheryl employees had unaudited to your private photos for example. Are you going to say she deserves no credit and we better credit the boys instead? If not then she must accept any failures that come from that culture.
You have no idea of what "sexism" is.
Not defending Zuck here, would just like to read about that if possible.
This is legal fiction that has no bearing in the kinds of subjects that it often gets brought up in. Simply put, those responsible for a company (e.g. officers of a corporation) have a fiduciary duty towards its owners (e.g. the shareholders), and it means that the owners would have legal recourse against the officers if they were provably pissing money away on things that don't benefit the company at all.
That latter part is a high bar and critically does not mean that they are, for example, legally required to prioritize quarterly profits over the long-term success of the company or to pay employees as little as possible, as is often mentioned. It just means that officers must take action that furthers the interests of the company in the way that they prudently and reasonably see fit.
Obviously this isn't a legal requirement, but pretty much every CEO would be out of a job if they choose country over company. Shareholders are generally not interested in furthering national geopolitics.
I don't think that's true. Look at all the corporate action about Ukraine for an example of interest in geopolitics - lots of donations, public statements, etc. And then there's companies actually in Ukraine, or next door - when politics gets unstable enough, contributing to the stability/security of the country over the short term of the company looks like the right move. Evaluating when that point is reached is probably about as contentious as any other decision in politics.
You are required to abide by shareholder decisions at official meetings, and generally not act against shareholder interests, but there is absolutely no law stating that you must act to maximize shareholder value. (And it's a damn good thing that's the case; things are bad enough as it is.)
It's not about producing profits it's about doing what the shareholders want.
He might have lost Costco and their low margins, but he picked up an army of high-margin D2C sympathizers who have been shown to be generous with their money (if the cause is right).
Google was the next to up the ante in mid-2000s with things like daycare, a ball pit, food, drycleaning. All equally mind-blowing to the populace who expected a workplace would have an elevator, and a coffee machine nobody refills.
Food might have been okay by 90s standards, but was pretty mediocre overall until ~2010 when they started redoing all the cafes to have a higher quality food. Still, it was slightly subsidized but not free and many, many employees went offsite or brought food from home.
There was a "coffee pool", where you joined to contribute a dollar or something a week and someone would buy the supplies.
At big companies there were often food trucks. Also a cafeteria, which probably sucked. There might also be a small library where you could hang out and read relevant trade journals.
Didn't he lie to congress, waste tens of millions of dollars on legal defense for himself and repeatedly turn a blind eye to human trafficking, voter manipulation, the spread of hate and division, genocide and more? He swept studies under the rug that show that his platforms directly led to increases in teenage suicides.
This man is not a good guy just because you feel he's nice to some people. People he depends on at that.
Anyway, you don't join Ticketmaster for anything approaching morality. Snakes eat snakes.
People were already angry on AM radio and cable "news" channels. Gerrymandering works on political maps and demographics - politicians have figured that by boxing voters into bins and away from the center, they can have their votes forever.
Truly excited to see how far they can push VR and AI.
> There was a blanket "don't worry about performance, take care of your families" guarantee that honestly was an enormous help.
Yet now he is firing people based on those same performance reviews. Plenty of people I know at Facebook feel betrayed because of exactly this.
Zuck's response to Covid definitely had upsides, particularly (as you mention) the continued payment of contractors even though offices were closed. There were downsides too. The "Don't worry about perf" also meant you couldn't get promoted that half and there was no recognition for better performance, which sort of sucked for people whose projects had come to fruition (where they reap the rewards of impact). Hypothetically you could get recognized in H2 2020 but in reality it didn't really work like that most of the time.
But look, the big problem with Facebook is twofold:
1. Apple's "do not track" feature really cut the ad business off at its knees. You can support that on privacy grounds but that shouldn't obscure the issue that a platform being able to do that while maintaining that benefit themselves is actually a huge problem (and it makes a big case for Apple acting anticompetitively);
2. (This is the big one) Zuck has no vision for the company. That's the core problem. Assuming pandemic growth would continue (as he claims) isn't the problem.
This first took form in response to the spread of misinformation in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Facebook decided to try and determine objective truth in posts. That's never going to work and never going to make anyone happy. Controversial topics get amplified. But labelling misinformation treats this as a content problem when it's a user behaviour problem. It's your weird uncle posting articles about chips in vaccines. The content doesn't matter. The behaviour does.
But here's the big one: Facebook has long viewed products on two axes: audience and medium. Twitter, for example, goes to a large audience. WhatsApp, small audiences. Medium is essentiaally this progression: text -> image -> video -> VR -> AR. It explains the purchase of Oculus and fits with the metaverse.
But there's literally no business case for the metaverse. Nobody wants it. Phones are convenient. Wearing headsets isn't. If we can ever build AR glasses (and that's far from a certainty) then maybe that might work but there are significant technical problems (eg matching focus, true blacks).
So 11,000 people got let go today because of bad decisions made at the very top that they had nothing to do with and no control over. Sure Zuck has lots a bunch of paper value but whether you have $100 billion or $30 billion, you're fine.
Could you expand on this? It's seems absolutely certain, with products like nreal Air existing: https://www.nreal.ai/air
What unsolved hurdle do you see? Heck, there were even prototypes of laser retinal projection at CES!
Drawing an opaque, dark line. Almost all these screens are adding light to an existing scene. The only way they can make black is to just not project light, which means you need to have a dark background to actually show dark.
Ever view a projector outside in a bright sunny day?
I've said this same thing a thousand times. It's not lack of content or use-cases killing AR - the tech just isn't there yet. Form factor is one of the very pressing issues. It seems inevitable that the tech will get solved, but it's not clear whether it's a couple years or a couple decades.
Less true today than yesterday. Less true tomorrow than today. Rinse. Repeat.
Exactly this.
Same here. I've been doing this since before the year 2000, and can't imagine any other company I've worked for treating employees this well. In this current cycle, I was laid off from my job and my severance was zero days. The only thing I got was the mandatory WARN act time and verting of option that were worth about 2 weeks of my base pay.
I wish there was a biotech with FB’s culture.
The thing that particularly struck me though was the way he handled contract workers like (some of) the kitchen staff, cleaners, etc. These people don't work for Facebook and he had zero obligation to them, yet he paid all of their wages for the full length of the pandemic just so they could stay afloat.
If it were just about the money, I doubt he'd have done this.