The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion. Meta are a particularly bad example of this, but as long as there's money to be made by providing a platform for polarising politics and fake news, then I think someone will do so.
Who knows, maybe in that alternate universe you'd be posting "if Yahoo hadn't made such savy choices, I wonder if we would have the political climate we have today?"
This has always been the case for as long as society has been consuming the news. “Business tycoons” have bought up newspapers and media outlets since forever to push their narrative.
I think one component that has changed is the sheer volume and diversity of media makes competition for your attention (clicks) all the more fierce. Enter The Algorithm and optimizing for metrics above all else.
I dunno. That doesn’t invalidate anything about the original question about what present day would be like without Facebook. Would something else similar have replaced it? Is Facebook really “the problem” or is it algorithmic content because algorithmicly driven content was going to happen facebook or not.
It was only applicable to broadcast media, and rarely enforced. Nearly all of the enforcement was on behalf of private individuals wanting free airtime to respond to negative new stories about them.
In my opinion it's a very bad idea to want political appointees to decide when an issue hasn't been given fair news coverage. The very idea that there is only 2 sides to an issue reinforces the two party system that has made media so biased in the first place
America has always been polarized - institutions just never gave them a voice.
For all of unregulated news's flaws, government controlled news would be worse.
Ironically, we (the UK) have the BBC which is fairly literally, government funded (not controlled) news. It's much more even handed than a lot of commercial news.
Then through basically an ongoing refusal to engage with political realities they've managed to transition to the number 5 and dropping economy in nominal terms and, realistically, probably don't have the industrial oomph to back up the paper numbers. There was political debate recently over whether the country should even be able to produce steel. Per capita the picture is a bit worse, and on a PPP basis they're actually a hair below the European average. They've also managed to become relatively politically isolated because no view seems to have gained ascendancy over what their foreign policy should look like.
Now it'd be unfair to blame it all on the present crop given the huge amounts of damage done in WWII, but it is a bit difficult for me to accept the trendlines of the UK compared to the recovering USSR countries or China/Taiwan while believing that there is a healthy political discourse. The high performing countries have done amazing things even from a standing start in the 70s, 80s and 90s. From such a dominant starting position, with the momentum of the old empire and technically being on the winning side of pretty much every major conflict and ideological UK politics seem to have done rather badly. The country is wildly average for somewhere that was so ahead of the game relatively recently and with so many opportunities to succeed in the interim and such poor quality of candidates allowed to hold power.
We're seeing the opposite, though. As the traditional media companies declined and the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own views, polarization increased.
As someone who tries to avoid the news and politics, it's pretty easy to avoid the companies selling them. But I keep running into them because there are lots of users on Hacker News/Reddit/etc. who try to interject it into every discussion they can . Invariably, these people don't come at it from the point of view that they might be wrong and the other side might be right; they act like zealous crusaders on a mission to vanquish evil.
It is the bot farms voicing opinions IMO. For regular people one account equals one human, and it is a difficult feeling to uproot for many people.
Believe in flat Earth? Are you a holocaust denier? Think the moon landing is fake? Is the government gang stalking you? Welp you are in luck, there's thousands of other people just like you and here is a forum.
Kinda wild when you think about it.
Yes, but, would they be any where near the level of what FB achieved? Take Truth Social as an example. It started because people wanted a place they get out of the larger group to dedicate to like minded. In this Philip K Dick style rewriting of history where FB was created by those behind Truth, would it have ever achieved critical mass?
Just because someone else attempts to fill in the vacuum of something else not being there does not mean that it will succeed in filling the void. Truth only survives on the cult of personality, not because people really want to be using it or because it's like a good product
Not at all. It started because Trump was banned from Twitter. That’s it. The whole point was to give Trump a platform. There is nothing organic or natural about Truth Social and if it is the symptom of anything, it’s that some people just have too much money.
As a let down as it is for readers interested in how the author handles and solves time paradoxes (it is better than the insipid and sloppy multiverse solution, though) - Time Patrol are mostly history-focused action stories - this theory makes sense to me. At some point the world gets "ready" to discover things because all the pieces of the puzzle are in its hands. In the case of Facebook, I believe it is not an accident or "because Zuckerberg"; a massive social network had to emerge, in particular due to network effects.
Why are people acting like this is ancient history when my still living parents grew up in the segregated south and as recently as 2014 there were cities that still had segregated proms?
This happened in 1985
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WErjPmFulQ0
This is no media exaggeration. Forsyth county was notorious for this until the early 2000s. I (a Black guy) had a house built here in 2016 and sold it just last year when I relocated. While my son was one of the five Black guys in his entire school, we never experienced any issues so I don’t want to cast any aspersions toward Forsyth as it exist today.
One analogy is local news media ecosystems across the US, which have generally looked pretty similar though not 100% identical over the past ~125 years or so, suggesting some determinism based on broader culture and technology.
If Facebook had stumbled, something else would have gotten the next microgeneration of college students and then their parents and grandparents.
It’s possible to me that an independent Instagram would have filled Facebook’s niche a few years later, and something like Snapchat would have taken the current Instagram niche. Maybe Twitter would have played a different role.
It’s also possible a web 2.0 answer to classmates.com would have grabbed the older crowd, and we’d have a slightly more profound age split.
But ultimately I think we’d end up where we are — a set of platforms algorithmically curating feeds of user-generated content — with a few cosmetic differences.
that's exactly where my thoughts went
A different MySpace clone takes over the same niche.
Twitter: all the journalists and elected officials signed up and decided the stuff that went on there Mattered and was News. The shitposts that showed up in their feed became social trends.
It is a widespread failure, but if we had to pick a thread that we should call the start of that part of the unraveling, I’d point at Twitter. I mean, that’s just the social media bit. Social media didn’t cause, like, Afghanistan or whatever.
https://news.microsoft.com/source/2008/02/01/microsoft-propo...
So for about $44 billion.
I had read the news at the time on multiple channels.
They didn't take the offer.
https://www.businessinsider.com/2008/5/jerry-and-steve-playe...
Doesn't Zuckerberg have majority control?
At the time in 2006 there were plenty of competing networks and any one of them could have climbed to the top.
Facebook wasn’t unique tech wise by all accounts one huge 20k line main file not like Google with PageRank or pegs viaweb written in Lisp or Amazon with early aspects of AWS.
FB could have been replicated and with right money scaled by anyone else , the challenge was there were series of spectacular growth and failures in the social network space
The tech innovations started first with Hack as a PHP compatible language couple of years later then things like relay , graphQL, react and so on.
Genuinely asking, what other software company did something like this back then? I'm tempted to say (tounge in cheek) FB was the original PaaS, but maybe im not old enough
The killer thing others couldn’t do Facebook did was make available social APIs for the app developers to integrate into their platform to make the apps viral, which benefited both them and Facebook.
OG PaaS in the Web 2.0 age IMO was the google app engine , it predated all AWS offerings and gave an actual application runtime .
Tumblr, del.icio.us, ROI. Probably all should have continued growing and becoming established properties.
…god remember the “tags” phase of content organization?
Flickr incentivized uploading a lot of photos with metadata and was highly searchable. It was great for photo hobbyists building a personal archive for others to peruse.
Instagram was for smartphone photos and playing with filters to set a vibe, and ephemeral sharing with friends and people you wanted to impress. It’s hardly searchable at all.
Who cares, it gave Paul Graham money for the Y Combinator.
They failed to buy Google and Facebook, instead they bought GeoCities, Tumblr, and Broadcast for billions and ran them into the ground.
I never liked Tumblr.
there is neocities now.
what was broadcast about?
I'm ambivalent as to how they became trillion-dollar behemoths, but I think that Yahoo would have strangled them in the crib; possibly, deliberately.
I've seen exactly that kind of thing happen, before.
Yeah exactly. Also I would consider the Overture acquisition extremely successful because their patent lawsuit v. Google gave them 8% of Google pre-IPO. If held (which it was not), that is a substantial asset today.
Yes, Overture what the best Yahoo! acquisition ever made.
But Yahoo!'s greatest mistake was to settle the Google lawsuit for a few million dollars - which meant that Google could keep using Overture's (parented) invention of keyword bidding based advertising; without it, Google may never have found a way to become profitable.
So Yahoo! bought its own gravestone for $50m, when all they would have had to do is stand firm and go to trial. If Y! exercised its government-awarded monopoly rights for keyword auction based advertising, there may still be that Y! portal that was so prominent in the early 2000s.
PS: Yahoo Inc. is not full gone - Yahoo Japan remains the last independent part of the former Y! - see https://www.yahoo.co.jp .
didn't they get bought by the koreans
And I’m not saying that only Page and Brin were the only ones who could have made Google, only that they clearly were two people who were capable of doing it. However, Yahoo was not run by such people. So Yahoo would have bought Google and would have made Google conform to Yahoo’s culture, probably relegating Page and Brin to lesser roles where they couldn’t drive company culture.
Feels like a cliche at this point, but I’m not sure it’s true.
How successful were the six companies they aquired?
Is that true?
Zuck still controls 57% of all voting shares and that’s today, yearly 20-years later.
How could the Board force him to sell to Yahoo.
https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-s...
Isn’t the Board supposed to act in the best interest of the shareholders?
And if one person holds a majority of shares, wouldn’t that mean the Board is effectively acting based on that individual’s direction?
Someone who understands it well should explain please.
Like the Astronomer CEO that was forced to resign, could the sane thing happen to Zuckerberg in similar circumstances since he has majority share?
What If it was something entirely different, could they force him out? I don't understand it.
i.e The only way to prevent this from happening would be to stay private?
Also, I’m not sure of the ownership structure, but he may own 57% of voting stock but a minority of non voting stock, and the non-voting members may have certain rights irrespective of voting rights. I’d be shocked if they didn’t negotiate some kind of escape hatch.
In practice I would guess there would be lawsuits filed immediately to hold up any such activity until he had time to exert control of the board, but it would have been interesting nonetheless.
I absolutely agree.
One fundamental reason why Yahoo failed is that they prioritized short-term revenue from search partners, over long-term reputation. One of the key people behind that was Prabhakar Raghavan.
And now, Prabhakar Raghavan is at Google. Where he has proceeded to make the same mistake, with the result that Google Search quality fell off of a cliff.
If Google had been acquired by Yahoo, he would have been in a position to destroy Google earlier than he actually did.
See https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ for more.
In this case, name checks out. He carried his duty with full honor of the name both at Yahoo and Google.
WTH :D
Raghavan != Ravana
(Only relation is that they were on the opposite sides and that made pretty much the whole epic Ramayana)
Raghavan comes from "Raghu" (another name for Ram). Raghavan kinda means "from Raghu" or so like "His descendants" or so.
AFAIK
Also,Raghavan is most probably his father's name and Prabhakar will be his given name.
Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago. Instead they chose to rest on their laurels (pagerank even still plays a significant role!), and secure market control by anti-competitive behavior.
Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo, but there's no extrinsic reason for it in the same way there was no reason for Yahoo to become what it became. In 100 years people will be searching the corpus of human writings (or whatever medium is dominant then) for information that's relevant to them. So there's in intrinsic reason for any search related company to just naturally die. It simply needs to keep innovating, or at least evolutionarily improving.
This is also the type of search that Google makes no money from.
The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader.
>Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago
Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations.
You can't really blame the prevalence of SEO slop on Google. It's not the lack of want of trying, it is hard technically (see how long it took to develop modern AI capabilities), expensive computationally (as we can see with the unsustainable cost of test-time search in ChatGPT) and in terms of user-experience.
>Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo
Really, it isn't. Google is in the unique position of being the closest technology company to achieving full vertical integration of their value chain, from silicon to software to data to end-users. They are also at the forefront of frontier AI, including productising the research output. I don't really get the Google hate on HN, apart from maybe the YC/sama bias.
Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you.
>searching for up-to-date relevant product information
I realise I'm not a typical user, but I would never trust Google for any searches hinting that I'm looking to buy something, because the results are almost guaranteed to be inorganic. Someone will have paid Google money to be promoted for "best clothes dryer".
This is such a flippant and facile response.
Google isn't a advertising company, it is a tech company that gets the majority of its revenue via selling advertising. This can change, and also likely to change in the next decade or so.
The reason things are is that nobody was willing to pay for search - it's a product with a very low incremental cost. The market dictated this operating model, and nobody has been able to upend this model so far, not even OAI. The numbers just don't work out. Do you think OAI can continue to subsidise free ChatGPT queries with paid ChatGPT Plus subscriptions? Almost certainly not.
You can't eat your cake and still have it. If they refuse to develop an income stream that isn't related to advertising while using practices that use their dominant place in the market to buy other technologies or shut them down, then saying it isn't their fault that the revenue is only advertising is either disingenuous or naive.
And now that their core product is getting worse I am paying for search
It was an obvious way to create a better user experience but instead search today is comparable to, if not worse than, search 20 years ago - because at least 20 years ago companies were ahead of the SEO guys, whereas that relationship has long since flipped.
Also, what makes you think that NLP would solve the problem you're describing? Only LLMs has proven that it could fully understand and process the queries in the way you're describing, hence why I brought that up. However it is expensive computationally, and only recently was it even technically possible to do.
Poll only the subset of people that are actively aware of how to change their search engine and I suspect Google's dominance suddenly completely disappears. Remember, there was a time when Internet Explorer was the leading web browser across all age groups. Then Microsoft was forced to make it easier for people to change their default browser, and suddenly nobody was using IE anymore.
Actually for products, a lot of people just go to Amazon has a thriving ad business.
> Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations.
The problem with Google is that they can’t produce good profitable products. Innovation means nothing for a for profit company if it doesn’t make money.
Seems logical to me, but then my 71 year old mother with doctorates in both science and literature pulls out her phone and trusts Google AI results without thinking twice.
there are so many factors to this, its the same issue when target stock drops 10% over a year and people are like "oh it's because they stopped selling plus size bikinis! the crowd has spoken!". you can attribute it to anything but you're basically always wrong if you're not attributing it to at least a dozen different things
In the early 2000s Internet Explorer had 95% market share.
> After working 14 years at IBM, he became senior vice president and chief technology officer at enterprise search vendor Verity in 2004.[16][14][12] In July 2005, he was hired by Yahoo! to lead Yahoo! Research in Sunnyvale, California.[17] At Yahoo!, he worked on research projects including search and advertising.[15][18] In 2011, he was appointed as Yahoo!'s chief strategy officer.[1]
> In 2012, Prabhakar joined Google after severe funding cuts in Yahoo!'s research division.[19] In 2018, he was put in charge of Ads and Commerce at Google and in 2020 his scope was expanded to include Search, Geo, and Assistant.[20] [21]
It sounds like you are either unintentionally spreading misinformation, or misinformed.
Please edit swipes out of comments on HN.
"Acquiring" is meaningless. Even "plans for the company after the acquisition" is meaningless. Credible reports of motivations that would lead the acquiring company to take a hands off approach to the company acquired means at least a little bit, having now seen companies taking that approach not immediately killing the golden goose.
Having worked for Yahoo, I have to agree. Acquisitions were always seen in terms of "what can they do for the Yahoo brand?" and "How can we cut costs by migrating this to Yahoo tech?", not "How can we grow this business?". A Yahoo owned Facebook would have been suffocated like Tumblr and Flickr were.
This is really the story for most acquisitions in tech. Interesting that Facebook was able to really do positive things with WhatsApp and Instagram.
Ouch! That's pretty awful.
People also like to point to how foolish of Blockbuster it was not to buy Netflix when they had the opportunity to, but I’m also inclined to believe that the merged companies would never have made the decisive moves involving streaming video and content production. It’s tempting to say that Amazon would have filled in the streaming video gap (although perhaps late enough for feature film and TV piracy to proliferate a little further into the mainstream), but I wonder whether Apple would have adapted its iTunes service into Apple TV first. (Another dark horse I like to think about here would be RealMedia which may have identified a niche.)
They would stop the company by buying it.
Because Yahoo buying a company kills the company.
If only Yahoo hadn't run out of money before... (certain companies that are now too powerful and ruthless to be called out safely).
Then what's that Zuck always having >= 51% votes since the beginning?
True, but they also wouldn't have developed into companies reducing Yahoo's reach ..
Having lived through several acquisitions - both as a founder exiting and as an employee being acquired/acquiring...
Very rarely does the acquirer have the vision to see when the acquired company has a better long term trajectory. The CEO who does the deal might, but the senior management team and line managers usually just intentionally and unintentionally rob the acquired company of resources (cash, people, marketing, facilities) and then the exodus of smart people begins. It takes a very special team to make acquisitions actually add up to 1+1=4 most are lucky to get 1+1=0.5.
> In 2002, Google offered to sell again for $1 billion. Yahoo hesitated and Google raised its price to $3 billion. Yahoo declined at the higher price. Google went on to become a trillion dollar company.
> Yahoo attempted to acquire Facebook for $1 billion in 2006, but Mark Zuckerberg turned down the offer. Had Yahoo increased its offer by just $100 million, Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it. Facebook also became a trillion dollar company.
In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.