They just learned, like every single company, that nobody has willpower, ability or memory to keep up with the news. Wait a week or two, say nothing, people will forget. The product is intrenched enough in the society that nobody will move unless something happens to the product itself.

Frankly, can’t really judge them. That is probably the optimal thing to do in the current business environment.

People keeping up with the news doesn't do much either when our lawmakers are bought and paid for.

And yes its the right "business move" but I have plenty of hate left in my heart for buisnessmen.

Yeah totally fair. But honestly, I would blame the people. Eventually they are the ones that vote for politicians that result in uneven game field, so businesses end up playing ball. And I know, leadership needs to have some sort of shame, empathy, morality and etc., but US isn't Japan where some sort of participation of leadership in sexual misconduct between third parties can bring down a TV company to their knees. And i'm not saying whether one is better than the other, it's just what it is.

Lots of blame to go around. I can have it my heart to blame the voters, the systems set up to make sure the voters never get a good choice, the slavers that made that system, the apathetic, the opportunistic, the greedy, the domineering.

Overall though, I feel like if I'm going to single anyone out, its those with the most power and those benefiting the most.

Fair enough, and I agree with you! It is sad how over the years, I’ve lost my belief that one day we’ll all live in a fairly peaceful world where this is never a problem. I understand that it’s practically impossible, but I used to be a naive 12 year old decades ago.

This is a phenomenal comment that really resonates with me; thanks for putting it so succinctly.

> People keeping up with the news doesn't do much either when our lawmakers are bought and paid for.

This is not true and you'll never understand politics if you think this.

(What actually happens is that being in Congress is such a horrible job that only insane people would want to do it, so the people with money find congresspeople who /already agree with them/ and are trying to keep them from leaving for a less stressful normal career.)

I think it might be OpenSecrets' fault. They're great and all, but they report donations from employees of companies as if they're from the companies themselves, which produces nonsense like "health insurance companies donated to Bernie Sanders". No they didn't!

I don't think "keeping up with the news" is really the problem. The problem is that "the news" is primarily about entertainment, not information, and so it isn't actionable. If you care about being informed about actionable information, then your good sources of information are RSS, long-form articles, books, etc.

It has always been like that. Reading and doing all that already puts us into an extreme minority. But it is what it is, i guess.

Eh, you can still judge them.

Cambridge Analytica resulted in them largely closing off their API which depending on your view on platform monetization vs moat of less easily accessible social graph was a bullish thing for the company. It was quite a manufactured scandal in my opinion.

It was an API for making apps with Facebook integration, and after they closed it down, Facebook became even more of a walled garden. Perhaps no criticism of Facebook has ever been more trumped up, and it shut down a lot of people making useful, fun, interesting Facebook apps who were afterwards locked out of the platform. Facebook was probably all too happy to remove the functionality and use this as the excuse to do it.

Anyone that remembers the Graffiti Wall knows the real thing that was lost here. It had it's issues (Farmville was the worst / most annoying version of Harvest Moon ever made) but it was worth saving.

It was also worth building the infrastructure required to make it function, because it ultimately damaged Facebook in ways I don't think they really still understand. Their abortive attempt to build a metaverse or a Twitter that feels more like a prison, vs successful, beautiful, creative, wild interpretations of a metaverse that lead to things like Minecraft and Bluesky. They simply won't succeed a these endeavors without meaningful third party access. Improving upon that problem might be a more productive use of their time than kissing political butts if they want to actually succeed in this space.