I can't find it now, but I remember a story from somebody in the Lean Manufacturing world about a place that was having safety problems, so they appointed somebody Safety Director. This signaled to everybody that safety was that one guy's problem, not theirs. Accidents went up further and stayed up until they got rid of the Safety Directory position and made everybody responsible for safety.
That resonated for me because I've seen that happen in software, that classic pattern where cowboy coders ship garbage to QA. The lowest bug rates I've seen are where everybody cares about quality.
With Facebook, I expect that "Chief of Advertising Integrity" is sort of light a lightning rod. The job is not to solve the problem, it's to take the hits.
There are pros and cons of having dedicated teams for work that also has to be accomplished by other teams. For instance, it's not a good idea to skip having a security team using the logic that "other teams will just think its that one teams job." The security team provides expertise and (with cooperative management or other teams) can enact policies that influence the rest of the organization to the benefit of security. That can't happen without a set of people dedicated to thinking about those problems.
For your QA team example, the mistake made in some organizations is explicitly removing testing from developer's responsibilities.
It's a matter of BOTH/AND -- you need to have BOTH central teams responsible for long term health of {safety,privacy,security,testing,etc.} AND hold developers responsible to deliver the recommendations of and use the tools developed by central teams.
Aww, c'mon, tell me that QA/security/accessibility/whatever isn't regarded as a meaningless hoop to be jumped through as quickly and with the least effort possible so that you can get real work done. Ain't nobody got time for that rigamarole.
If you make these things Big Process, each of which requires spreadsheets and certification by high level manager and weeks of delay, etc, then yes, people will think of them as meaningless hoops. If you can avoid dumb red tape then things can go quite well.
In games, when QA reports into the same person managing the product, things run smoothly and everyone remains aligned towards shipping a good product. When it's a separate org that loans people out and has OKRs that don't connect to individual products, they become horrible trolls who are only out to fuck the product up by submitting so many bug reports that it can never be released. Sim with whole-company legal teams ("never ship anything, we might get sued") and shared security ("never run services or we might get hacked") and ops ("never use servers or they might crash"). Alignment is everything.
That's why i think devops has some good ideas - you are responsible for the shit you ship. Also developer on calls - if you ship shit that goes down or causes errors, you get woken up in the middle of the night or during your vacation.
I was part of a group that inherited a really buggy service platform, maybe a dozen services, 3 generations of most services still around, no logging, nothing. The previous team had kept some foreign engineers on-call and never taken shifts - and there were daily pages, absurd processes to "fix" things, etc.
In about two weeks of putting engineers on call for their own services, most of the major problems were fixed.
It's easy to write buggy software when you aren't the one who gets called at 2am to fix it. Once you start being responsible for your software, the urge to take shortcuts really evaporates. On the other hand, a team that is not responsible for their output will always cut corners - it's just the way it goes.
there is no model where that becomes unnecessary. If someone who did not create the product is on call, they become the poor sod stuck solving a problem of not their own making.
> half at work on their time off
i mean not constantly. Also if you're on call, you're always paid for doing so regardless of what happens. This talk isn't about compensation, but about the model of work.
There is. You split the team or hire additional engineers in other time zones, such that no one is relied upon to work on their time off. There should always be someone working at all times around the globe, available to support.
In games, QA is taken very seriously. I know with games like Cybepunk people think game developers don't care about QA, but I am sure that is a certain circumstance where they chose to ignore problems. On big games you count on QA for feedback.
This story explains why every workplace safety exam I ever took had at least one question similar to "who is responsible for fire/machine/... safety" where the only correct answer was "everyone".
This goes for computer security as well, but in practice without at least a voice in the management security will get axed on every turn because it is seen as all cost without benefit to the company. This is changing slowly, mostly on account of the GDPR, but it is still the prevailing view.
> That resonated for me because I've seen that happen in software, that classic pattern where cowboy coders ship garbage to QA. The lowest bug rates I've seen are where everybody cares about quality.
On the flip side, I get nervous when I hear something akin to "We don't have QA here", sometimes as a matter of pride. Think of those times when you've heard someone snear at "Safety First", but for QA or testing.
Perhaps one ideal would be to promote a "everyone cares about quality" environment whilst still having some people focused specifically on QA.
It’s the plus and minus of specialization. When you have a dedicated QA team it can be harder to hold the devs accountable for the defects QA doesn’t find.
Facebook uses “Integrity” as a friendly synonym for abuse / spam / illegal activity.
For example, it avoids them actively having to say they have a “fake accounts team” (which would in turn indicate they have a fake accounts problem). Instead it’s part of the “Community Integrity team”.
This is inaccurate, ‘integrity’ appears to just be a generalized term for any sort of content policing or support, including recovering passwords and memorializing accounts of the deceased.
Teams have absolutely been identified by specific problem areas, so your reasoning doesn’t hold up. For example, “FNRP” stands for Fake, Not Real Person (which distinguishes from celebrity impersonation etc) per https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/21/revealed-facebo...
The latest printing includes an afterword by the author reflecting on the financial crisis, but most of the book is the original text.
I recommend this book to everyone with a white-collar job. It's an incredible read. The research is a bit out of date, but the truths still hold. If anything, the age of the research is somewhat helpful. The phenomena these days are more subtle, and many of us work in companies with flatter hierarchies than the 25+ level pyramids the author studied. So the distance in time forces you to reflect on what has changed and whether the results are relevant to you.
You will recognize so many of the situations as reminiscent of things you have experienced and haven't been able to put into words. It is 100% worth the read.
Moral Mazes is one of the rare books I return to and read multiple times. Far from being out of date, 40 years later it is more relevant and the research lines up more directly with corporate behavior than really any other research on this topic written since then. It really is a tremendous book.
"Advertising" for example could mean the benign "show me a picture of some product" or it could mean "identify who I am, how I behave, where I work, how much I make, who I know, and maintain and share a dossier on all of it"
I can't find a definition like that. Wikipedia has it as "Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words." Which seems to fit perfectly for Facebook's behavior.
I’d say doublespeak would be if “advertising integrity” were the department charged with respecting users’ privacy and (informed) choices, while said dept. executed Facebook’s policies that go very much against these things.
But if parent is correct, the role is to enforce things users want (regarding spam/fraud/illegal goods), which matches standard notions of integrity, so it’s not doublespeak.
I don’t know that I’d call it doublespeak. There’s a lot to be said for defining a job in terms of what it’s trying to produce rather than what it’s trying to fight.
In principle, good point. In practice, it really depends on where your levels of cynicism are at. Crediting FB with wanting to "produce 'integrity'" or even that they're "trying to fight" the myriad of destructive externalities their money-geyser has spewed forth is.. generous.
I think the point is more that they are fighting click-spam and other kinds of advertising fraud, to maintain the integrity of their advertising platform, in the sense in which an antivirus is maintaining the integrity of your system; NOT the sense in which an anti-graft law is maintaining the integrity of a politician.
I mean, "Advertising Integrity" and "Facebook" shouldn't appear in the same sentence. Amazon is bad enough with fake reviews and retailers that ship terrible products when advertising them as something better.
So it takes a lot to make me think something is worse and meaner to consumers than Amazon. But sure enough, Facebook is it. Their ads are about 60% complete scams, from what I can tell. I get all these ads for $200 Lego sets for $30! And there are hundreds of comments from people who have bought. Guarantee they all got 1 Lego brick in the mail 8 weeks later, and the site that sold it to them is gone.
This would be bad if it was an occasional thing, but most Facebook ads I see are EXACTLY like this. Bait and switch. They send you a thing so you can't claim they didn't send you anything, but Facebook is making bank off of these dishonest scammers and seems not only not to care, but to encourage it. Oh and the thing they send you is from China, so sending it back costs more than you spent.
I am certainly no fan of FB or MZ, but if I am being open-minded and fair, that article doesn’t seem so bad. I’ve said stuff like that sarcastically/ironically that would sound really bad if taken out of context.
In this case it’s something expressed by a developing brain over instant messages. The way it comes across to me is as posturing by a very insecure person.
Something I’ve learned by observing judgments people around me make about others is that I’d rarely deserve or want to be judged the same way, and that the people making judgments would typically feel the same. If I were Mark being judged by messages sent online as a teenager/young adult, I don’t think I’d feel like it was rational or kind, and more opportunistic rather than necessary, productive, or helpful at all.
Having said that, evaluating him by more recent information doesn’t make me feel great about him by any means. I’m not defending him. I just don’t believe the messages are very useful information anymore - even if at the time they were perhaps an indicator of what’s to come. It’s probably more useful to look to current events to understand who he is in the present.
I see these messages passed around and referenced often and frankly it has begun to appear like a crutch for trashing the guy. Given his position in society and the amount of information available, we should all be able to collect and reference more recent and relevant information.
secretely retracting messages he sent to others from their inboxes, a feature exlcusively made available to him[1], with a straight face telling people that discourse on his website does not have influence on elections, tying his donations to having his name put on a hospital which is petty as hell, I mean pick your poison
> tying his donations to having his name put on a hospital
Isn't that normal? There's a reason so many buildings have a person's name on them. Carnegie Hall, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Guggenheim Museum, The Getty, The DeYoung, Coit Tower, ...
AFAIK Half the buildings on any college campus are named after the donor that paid for it.
You want hospitals, how about the Huntington Hospital, Sutter Hospital, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital, Helen Diller Medical Center, I'm too lazy to go look up more
Yes, that's just one of your points but if you're reaching that deep to find fault it detracts from your other points as it makes them suspect.
Yes it is normal, for people with the net worth of Zuckerberg most of which are full of themselves. Doesn't really detract from my point as much, it just means he's not the only guy in the club, and it's a boys club btw, I don't see McKenzie Bezos putting her name on everything.
Maybe you and I and countless of other people chip in some money at the end of the year. (in fact in proportion to our income we donate more), and I don't see ordinary people forming a union to name a hospital, we just click the donate button and go on with our lives. Like Chuck Feeney btw, to name one very wealthy person that is way less vain.
Yes, it is a question of vanity, not necessarily integrity. Even worse is when politicians do this, so you have Erdoğan University, or Nur-Sultan city.
How about his “copy, acquire, kill” strategy for startups and how he even pretends it’s even remotely fair for a fledging startup to compete with a multi billion dollar company?
I think it’s easy for him to convince himself of this because he started Facebook from nothing. I’m not saying he’s right, but he can point to that and say “why can’t anyone else do that?”
It’s something I’ve witnessed a lot of successful people doing.
He didn’t really start Facebook from nothing though. Peter Theil pumped half a million in it right from the start and it always had VC backing to the tune of hundreds of millions. Having a rich backer fund your startup is far from starting at nothing.
I agree. I should have chosen words more carefully. I think essentially all success on a large scale occurs due to chance, incredible fortune, and various forms of charity or luck. Whether that be cash injection in a startup or having loyalty from a great team who empowers you to accomplish your goals. No one does any of this alone.
At least for me my impression of Mark Zuckerberg lowered significantly once I learned the details of him pressuring native hawaiian people via lawsuits from their ancestral lands so he can have an island to himself.
It sounds a bit less clear-cut than that. It seems that, through inheritance, 138 relatives each owned a tiny share of 2.35 acres of land, with one of the relatives, Carlos Andrade, owning a larger share and having been the only one living on the land. Andrade sued his relatives to force them to sell and compensate them for their shares. Zuckerberg sided with Andrade. I'm not sure of the details, but it sounds like he doesn't have the island to himself, since Andrade is living there, and it sounds like the other relatives weren't using the land.
If FB had intuitively decided that too many positive posts had a negative effect on users (as contemporary research was suggesting) and amplified negative post visibility, there’d be no controversy. If FB decided intuitively that positive posts were good and they should reduce visibility on negative posts, there’d be no controversy.
Since FB A/B tested the effect of both and let academics analyze the data, that somehow means they are demonic.
Grandstanding about transferring all his wealth for tax purposes under the guise of it being "charity", obnoxious attempts to man-in-the-middle most of India's internet connectivity, screwing over users with "privacy zuckering" that causes settings to revert, etc.
The joy of my life was seeing Zuckerberg getting absolutely owned on his own Facebook page by thousands and thousands of Indian people who wanted nothing to do with his money-grubbing initiatives.
I'm impressed with whatever branding exercise came up with Chief of Advertising Integrity. So much meaning and non meaning at all in the same four words.
I would not take any titles at Facebook seriously. We know that they create titles like this and assign them when useful for PR purposes.1 I think that is just one more thing that prevents me from taking anything about "Facebook, Inc." seriously. Powerful yes, legitimate no.
1 The story of the Onavo founder they took on after the Onavo purchase was one example.
My local fish and chip shop sells fish that's fish and chips that are potatoes. They don't take my money for nothing, and they don't take my data to sell me ads.
I'm sure you can think of a few other for-profit businesses that do what they say and say what they do.
One of the most highly moral and conscientious doctors I was lucky enough to attend school with is now a medical equipment director having been a incredibly young board member of a major American pharma Corp. I definitely agree with your views here.
As a corporation, Facebook truly seems to be trying to improve its behavior for the benefit of society at large, but the company is finding it very difficult to do The Right Thing, because it would reduce future revenue growth, shrink long-term profitability, and hurt the company's competitive standing against the many other companies that are trying to eat Facebook's lunch every day.
In the extreme, Facebook's choices appear to be: (a) act in the best interest of society and get f#cked by competitors; or (b) remain a dominant force in the market, but as a side effect, f#ck everybody. All options for Facebook appear to be a mix of those two horrible choices.
> As a corporation, Facebook truly seems to be trying to improve its behavior for the benefit of society at large
Sorry, that's a hard disagree from me and I think you couldn't be further off the mark.
Facebook's entire raison d'etre from day 1 is to take as much data from as many sources as possible, then use the most powerful computers, programmed by the brightest minds, to use that data to maximise their profit with no regard for what damage that may do to you or society at large - look at what Jonathan Haidt talks about wrt to mental health problems and social media.
They use the dirtiest psychological tactics to ensure that you never put down your phone and to ensure that you only see what they deem to have maximum engagement (whatever the f that means) and only put their hands up to any nefarious shit when a spotlight is on them for it.
I can understand Facebook wanting to clean up their image from a PR perspective but it's nothing to do with altruism or wanting to serve the public better... if they can make more money from looking like a decent bunch, they'll do it.
> Facebook's entire raison d'etre from day 1 is to take as much data from as many sources as possible, then use the most powerful computers, programmed by the brightest minds, to use that data to maximise their profit
My impression was that on Day 1 it was really just to rate the attractiveness of the coeds at Harvard.
My point is that Facebook can improve its behavior only by putting its business at risk.
If Zuckerberg, Sandberg, et al could improve Facebook's behavior without putting the business at risk, they would do it in a heartbeat. But it appears they can't.
Their efforts are thus sincere but highly constrained: They will never voluntarily do anything that would put the business -- their life's work -- at risk.
If I may use an imperfect analogy: Facebook is a "polluter of society" that can't afford to stop polluting until all its competitors are forced to stop polluting society too.
> If Zuckerberg, Sandberg, et al could improve Facebook's behavior without putting the business at risk, they would do it in a heartbeat. But it appears they can't.
I think the point is they literally can't improve Facebook's behavior because their behavior is their business. They don't have any products that can function without their panopticon and Skinner boxes.
It's not that they can't compete by changing their behavior but cease to be a viable business that can even operate.
Of course it’s profitable to be a monipoly and doing the “right thing” might be to allow competitors in but one could basically never truly do that while the bottom line is the most important thing.
It’s so strange to me that so many truly believe a profit motive is all that’s needed to have good outcomes. It was never so, only starting in the 80s did companies care about shareholder value over everything else.
> It’s so strange to me that so many truly believe a profit motive is all that’s needed to have good outcomes.
Not strange. In the U.S. at least, we're acculturated to this ideology our whole lives through education and media.
That said, many/most of the wealthiest or influential market participants, fortune 500 CEOS, academics from top biz/econ programs understand the importance of trust in the economy and the role that an effective government (contracts, the rule of law, and regulation) play in enabling that trust.
If you or your industry are the target of regulation, though, government BAD, regulation BAD, regardless of what you philosophically believe.
People still think they’re getting a good deal which is mostly laughable. I’ve been in industries while wanting more regulation in them - it’s always shocking for me to imagine the amount of unreturned loyalty businesses will get from their employees.
> Facebook can improve its behavior only by putting its business at risk. ... They will never voluntarily do anything that would put the business -- their life's work -- at risk.
I don't understand how, given this, you could possibly sincerely open your original post with
> As a corporation, Facebook truly seems to be trying to improve its behavior for the benefit of society at large
I can't tell what your position is. Your opening sentence sounds like you think that Facebook should be given the benefit of the doubt because they mean well, when what the rest of what you're saying is that Facebook needs to have costs imposed on it in order to enable it to improve its behaviour
Your original point says that they are looking to change for the benefit of mankind...
They aren't. They have no sincerity. They will do what makes money. Period.
They have shown time and again they don't give two fucks about humanity, mental health, regulators etc until they are about to generate bad PR from it.
The government seems to be aiming at them right now although I suspect that once the brown envelopes stuffed with cash start passing around that will be diluted down to "honest gov, we'll start doing right!".
Their clock is about to be cleaned by Apple when they roll out the changes to apps requiring them to tell people the data that's being harvested... Facebook will quite rightly be worried right now.
If Google did the same... well, we'd see some folks bailing quick-sharp I reckon... rats and sinking ships and all that.
I'm finding these two sentences hard to reconcile.
> If Zuckerberg, Sandberg, et al could improve Facebook's behavior without putting the business at risk, they would do it in a heartbeat. But it appears they can't.
> Facebook truly seems to be trying to improve its behavior for the benefit of society at large
Imagine yourself as the CEO of a manufacturer that pollutes rivers, and you sincerely want to stop polluting, but if you stop polluting, the company's costs would increase to the point it would no longer be able to compete against all the other companies that continue polluting -- and they're trying to eat your lunch you every day. So, if you stop polluting you would quickly lose relevance, be forced to shut down plants, be forced to fire lots of decent people, and eventually go out of business.
Moreover, when the company was started, no one anywhere realized that polluting rivers was so bad for everyone. No one knew back then; no one thought of it as a problem.
Your choices are: (a) act in the best interest of society and get f#cked by competitors; or (b) remain a dominant force in the market, but as a side effect, f#ck everybody. All your options appear to be a mix of those two horrible choices.
Not just a company that pollutes rivers, but Filthy Frank's River Wreckers Pollution Distribution Specialists LLC, A company who's entire core mission, and reason for existing is the polluting of rivers.
I can imagine it of course but can't see parallels to Mark Zuckerberg. He hasn't done a substantive thing to show societies health is a priority. A tax break foundation that works on ways to spread Facebook further is not it.
Agressively lobby for criminal penalties (as in all the CXOs go to prison) for any company that continues to pollute after <date the law passes + 1year or so>, while loudly telling everyone that you will stop polluting as soon as your competitors are forced to do likewise.
Please cite any privacy legislation supported by Facebook/Zuckerberg under which CEOs or other responsible parties (not disposable middle managers) actually end up in prison (not pittance fines) for violations.
I think as many companies have started to do today, one can spin green manufacturing as a PR thing, and possibly market your product towards customers who are willing to pay more for greener manufacturing practices. Along the way, hopefully you could invest in green manufacturing improvements to make the tech cheaper at scale.
I don’t think it has to be an a or b situation. I think the best and brightest could solve the problem without decimating their profits. Perhaps I am not that smart, but surely Facebook is. (They have significantly more resources than their competitors, I imagine.)
Is it really true that Facebook would go bankrupt by being more ethical? I’m not so sure. They have a captive user base. A lot of older folks who aren’t great with tech are on Facebook, and they won’t be going anywhere that quickly. With as many users as they have — a seventh of the world’s population - I can’t imagine people will leave in droves that quickly. One of Facebook’s biggest advantages is the network effect of “everyone you know is already here”.
My opinion is that Facebook does in fact have the resources to be more ethical without loosing so much profit that they go out of business.
I think the problem partially is maximizing revenue at the cost of everything else. I’m not sure I buy into the idea that they must maximize revenue. Couldn’t they be more ethical at the cost of some money, and then that new revenue amount still is enough to cover expenses?
> I don’t think it has to be an a or b situation. I think the best and brightest could solve the problem without decimating their profits.
I hope you're right! But so far, it appears no one at Facebook has figured out how to escape this "tyranny of horrible choices."
> I think the problem partially is maximizing revenue at the cost of everything else.
I disagree. I think the problem, from the perspective of Facebook, is figuring out how to do The Right Thing while remaining relevant and competitive against the many companies trying to dislodge Facebook from its dominant position. Many of Facebook's users are addicted to the social-media-crack; if Facebook stops providing it, they will migrate to other social networks that provide it. And many of Facebook's customers -- advertisers and propagandists -- want Facebook to continue to modify user behavior on their behalf; and if Facebook stops doing that, those customers will migrate to the competition.
> the many companies trying to dislodge Facebook from its dominant position
Such as? Can you find me one company that provides a similar feature set to Facebook (cross-platform messaging & calling, personal & business pages with unlimited media uploads, groups, marketplace, dating and the network effects of everyone you know already being on it with their real name and no usernames to worry about)?
Furthermore, if Facebook stops or tones down paid advertising and unpaid spam/clickbait it will be yet another reason for users to prefer them versus the competition.
> Facebook's users are addicted to the social-media-crack
Are they? Facebook users are primarily there for keeping in touch with their friends, and happen to get sucked down the rabbit hole of bullshit by Facebook's algorithms which prioritizes engagement. Removing the engagement-generating crap won't suddenly remove the need for people to socialize.
> many of Facebook's customers -- advertisers and propagandists -- want Facebook to continue to modify user behavior on their behalf; and if Facebook stops doing that, those customers will migrate to the competition.
These customers want to go where the users are. If Facebook stops advertising but all the users remain (partly because of the lack of advertising), advertisers do not have a magic wand to move people across to another platform where they can advertise, short of paying those people to move (in which case it would be a win-win situation as people would be compensated for their time & attention).
I would choose to use my skills working for a different company in a different industry.
If Zuckerberg really had a problem with what Facebook was doing, but didn’t feel he could ethically risk the company’s growth and financial performance by changing its direction, he could quit and sell all his shares. He might take a financial hit, but he would still be one of the world’s richest people.
> If Zuckerberg really had a problem with what Facebook was doing, but didn’t feel he could ethically risk the company’s growth and financial performance by changing its direction, he could quit and sell all his shares. He might take a financial hit, but he would still be one of the world’s richest people.
He is one of the world's richest people. He seems to have concern (or at least feigns it) for the problems Facebook is causing. If he resigns and allows someone else, who is more hungry and motivated by money to take over, you believe Facebook's behavior would improve?
Imagine that you invent the idea of polluting rivers, and you set up a company to monopolize polluting rivers, and you tell people for decades that you want to stop polluting rivers, but every year the rivers get polluted by you.
The logical conclusion of your argument is this - Facebook cannot be operated safely and still make a profit and should shut down as soon as possible.
> The logical conclusion of your argument is this - Facebook cannot be operated safely and still make a profit and should shut down as soon as possible.
Personally, I wouldn't even start or be part of such a company, simple as that. I cannot imagine somebody polluting rivers on purpose just to make money but those people exist regardless. So this question is moot for quite a few people (me including) that could never ever get in this mindset and predict what they would do.
It doesn’t matter to the people forced to drink the polluted river water if the person doing the polluting feels bad about it, or doesn’t. Feeing bad does not absolve the CEO of anything.
This analogy also ignores that Facebook is putting huge amounts of money into lobbying efforts to ensure that they continue to be able to figuratively pollute the river.
> Moreover, when the company was started, no one anywhere realized that polluting rivers was so bad for everyone. No one knew back then; no one thought of it as a problem.
Zuckerberg called early users “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their data. That’s the demeanour of someone with bad (selfish) intentions from the start. Just because the damage he ended up doing is worse than the initial damage he predicted, it doesn’t excuse his continued morally bankrupt behaviour.
When you are build on a certain core you can't change who/what you are.
Facebook is built on getting / using user data to determine what to show.
Google is built on geting / using user data to determine what to show.
To betray those goals wouldn't make sense. How they go about it can change. Facebook has always gone hard and fast. They treat you more like a raw piece of meat. They will run ab tests on you and treat you like a variable in a ongoing experiment. Google has such reach that they can make minor changes and capture vast amounts of data.
Other companies are doing the same way but instead of using it to determine what to show you they use it to determine what ads look like so you can buy their product.
I don't think it's a justifiable for risk mitigation reasons to act as the oil industry has. What they can do more of is invest in more R&D for moonshot energy products. Or invest into existing green energy areas. I believe there are just better short term returns on PR (deceiving the public as much as possible), buying help & protection from regulators, and the status quo generally. I also believe the powers that be in that industry, like many others, are old, uninspired, and unreasonably resistant to change. Like Zuckerberg, they're more afraid of lost profit than destroying the world, whether by a lot or a little.
I think you are making broad statements because you don't like facebook, this is fine, but its fails to add anything.
So here's the thing, Facebook has a few big issues they can see:
1) the FB brand is toxic
2) the Facebook app/site is being seen as a ghetto for extremists and arseholes
3) instagram is a fragile cashcow.
4) AR is the next platform, which they have to nail stay in the game, which requires trust.
We all know that facebook proper is full of arseholes. Its profitable for now, but if it continues to be a ghetto for karens and racist kevs (or is seen to be) then people won't advertise. They also know that content moderation is fucking hard.
However, those are the excuses. They have good, clear, well written content guidelines. The issue is, they are not enforced equally. Trump broke the rules, he should have had his pubic hair pulled out. However because he's a politician they don't want to be accused of editorialising content.
This is because The management team are moral cowards. They want to do the right thing, but they are scared of the blowback from politicians. As they have the power to really shit on their parade. Add to this mix, a strong hysterical bunch of activists shouting at them, inside and out.
This causes the management team to withdraw into their shell. They see themselves as an island of reasonableness. the oversight committee is a step to being a useful tool to measure policy change. However it requires trust.
The bottom line is this, being a mirror of society is tough, because society has a whole bunch of toxic noise shitbags. Modelling your self on free expression means allowing these dicks to tarnish you.
Also - you could say the same and yet much much more about Google.
Google represents 10x the threat of FB because we all use it and essentially need it - and it's more broadly deployed.
FB is just FB. Use it or not.
FB can 'have it's cake and eat it'.
There's nothing wrong with using learned user behaviours to place some ads. There are reasonably narrow contexts in which privacy really isn't invaded, there's no harm really.
Where it 'gets bad' is when they follow you across the internet (like Google does ...), or when they use 'nasty algs' for interactivity (I don't think this is as bad as it seems).
Google is reading all your email and knows every search you ever made, I find that far more invasive.
FB has overstepped their bounds but there's no reason the can't go back in.
As far as 'anti trust' - it makes very little difference that FB owns WhatsApp and Insta. Break them up - very little will change.
The 'anti trust' issue is almost entirely with Google and Apple.
Google uses their search to promote their own products over others, rips off content for their search summaries, and uses Chrome and Android as a kind of 'market dumping' to ensure Search success.
Apple's 'App Store Only' rule for content distribution is questionable.
> As a corporation, Facebook truly seems to be trying to improve its behavior for the benefit of society at large.
No, it's not. Their social network is engineered entirely and unsurprisingly in support of their bottom line. A social network does not need to be a centralized, free-for-all like Facebook is, but Facebook is that way because that is what works best for their ad revenue. The rapid proliferation of disinformation and hate speech is a consequence of this broken system, but the company has always treated those very real problems as a necessary evil, a nuisance to be patched up with the least effort/cost as possible to keep the ball rolling. This does not benefit anybody but them.
I see you're getting some downvotes, but I agree with you. Put another way, though: the problem is not Zuckerberg per se, it's the business model of advertising-supported, general-purpose social networks. If you took everybody out of Facebook and replaced them all with other equally qualified people, they would behave the same, as an organization. The problem is not Who, it's What. You can't
"fix" Facebook, because the problem is pretty fundamental to what they are.
Zuckerberg holds 90% of class b shares which have 10x the voting rights of normal shares and gives him 4 billion votes. There are -2.4 billion class A shares. He has stacked the board with loyalist yes men. It is a dictatorship bent on maximizing profit. The business model and how they operate is defined by Zuckerberg. It seems to me that he should hold the majority of the blame.
strong disagree that a Facebook staffed with different folks would behave the same. Zuckerberg has a majority of the votes due to his super voting shares. Leadership matters, individual actions matter. Twitter, for all its faults, has a leader who is leading the company down a different path than the pure money chasing and dominance, and i can imagine a differently lead Twitter being making more money and being worse for society. Zuckerberg is motivated by dominance, nothing else, and he has the ability to change course. Their actions are constrained along a set of possible outcomes but the leaders of both companies are choosing where in that set they want to land.
Exactly, except that we don't have to imagine anything. If Facebook were to disappear today, there already exist many companies with similar business models willing to take its place. Some more willing to cross the line than Facebook.
This is the critical point virtually all criticism of Facebook often fails to address. Sure, you could regulate to death/kill Facebook tomorrow with legislation in country X. All that happens is a clone launches immediately overnight from a country with less onerous regulation, one that anglosphere legal systems will have even less direct control over than the Facebook we have today.
FB, for all its flaws, is at least still based in a democratic nation and operates within a (_relatively speaking_) fair legal system. That the FEC is able to demand (and force implementation of!) regulation already at FB is evidence this works, at least a little. Better the devil you know as they say...
We can't remove the natural human desire to connect to one another on the internet (and associated problems). For me personally, the cat is out of the bag - you can't rewind time and uninvent the underlying communication infrastructure. If people want a social network, the internet will make it for them again and again and host from whatever polity/region allows.
Regulations are never for particular companies, that would be legally untenable. Whatever regulation a country comes up with for Facebook will also affect any other company trying to get into their footsteps. Regulation is the only way to prevent companies from abusing their positions of power. The idea is illusory that they would do it voluntarily even if they could make a profit. Some of them might under some leadership, but not in general and not all of them.
Yes. This is surveillance capitalism taken to its extreme. Facebook didn’t invent it, they’re just doing it in a way that makes the consequences more difficult to ignore than Google, which has been able to largely sidestep the blowback by being mission critical to so many people and also having massive goodwill projects that don’t directly point to being profit driven.
It’s up to citizens of the US and EU to reign this in. We can hate the player but we gotta hate the game even more.
I would argue they basically invented it. A lot of the dirty tactics in play today are because companies feel the need to catch up to Facebook, who set the ecosystem as it is by continually being dishonest and predatory
>Surveillance capitalism was invented around 2001 as the solution to financial emergency in the teeth of the dotcom bust when the fledgling company faced the loss of investor confidence. As investor pressure mounted, Google’s leaders abandoned their declared antipathy toward advertising. Instead they decided to boost ad revenue by using their exclusive access to user data logs (once known as “data exhaust”) in combination with their already substantial analytical capabilities and computational power, to generate predictions of user click-through rates, taken as a signal of an ad’s relevance.
>Operationally this meant that Google would both repurpose its growing cache of behavioural data, now put to work as a behavioural data surplus, and develop methods to aggressively seek new sources of this surplus.
>The company developed new methods of secret surplus capture that could uncover data that users intentionally opted to keep private, as well as to infer extensive personal information that users did not or would not provide. And this surplus would then be analysed for hidden meanings that could predict click-through behaviour. The surplus data became the basis for new predictions markets called targeted advertising.
>Here was the origin of surveillance capitalism in an unprecedented and lucrative brew: behavioural surplus, data science, material infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic systems, and automated platforms. As click-through rates skyrocketed, advertising quickly became as important as search. Eventually it became the cornerstone of a new kind of commerce that depended upon online surveillance at scale.
>The success of these new mechanisms only became visible when Google went public in 2004. That’s when it finally revealed that between 2001 and its 2004 IPO, revenues increased by 3,590%.
>Surveillance capitalism is no more limited to advertising than mass production was limited to the fabrication of the Ford Model T. It quickly became the default model for capital accumulation in Silicon Valley, embraced by nearly every startup and app.
I mean, GDPR is a step in the direction. Many websites, and by extension, people seem to think that you comply by 'gdpr' by putting up a stupid cookie banner.
But the real compliance is not storing PII, then you don't even need a cookie bar!
Asking companies not to retain PII is like asking a crack addict to please ignore the crack pipe and torch while you step out for an hour. The only solution is to make PII radioactive. Tax it. Burn companies that abuse it or leak it to the ground. HIPAA is a fucking nightmare but companies still figure it out:
GDPR is mostly that; the penalties for data breaches are essentially a tax on PII. GDPR also restricts how you can process data and the user should always be informed and has the right to object.
The problem is that the GDPR is not being enforced seriously.
I think you're on the right track, but it's not just because it's an "advertising-supported" business model. It's the fundamental laws that govern our society: profit. Replace Zuckerberg, Bezos, et al. with anyone else, and the new CEOs' decisions will be bound by the same constraints.
Thought experiment: Cory Doctorow becomes CEO of Facebook with Zuckerberg's entire stock allocation and equivalent voting control. Do you stand by your assertion that nothing changes?
One of two things happens:
1) Cory Doctorow gradually morphs into Zuckerberg
2) Another social network, run more like Facebook is currently, replaces the one that Cory Doctorow is running. The reason Facebook didn't go the way of Friendster, Livejournal, and MySpace, is that he figured out how to play the game (as it currently exists) better than anyone else. Cory Doctorow would be like someone trying to win the Tour de France when everyone else was doping. In this analogy, Zuckerberg is Lance Armstrong, playing the existing game the way you need to play it to win that game.
Reddit isn't perfect, but it is run totally differently from Facebook, including: offering paid subscriptions, having an open API, and not trying to justify widespread surveillance as an ad-targeting tool.
>"As a corporation, Facebook truly seems to be trying to improve its behavior for the benefit of society at large, ..."
Could you provide some examples how "FB truly seems to be trying improve its behavior for the benefit of society at large"? Just using one very recent example - how do you reconcile that outlook with FB threats against the Ad Observatory[1]?
You’re apologizing for a company that makes hand over fist money. Has a single competitor in its space (online advertising), and that’s Google.
There is no “getting fucked” when it’s a monopoly controlling its market. Right now, legislation is helping Facebook by increasing the barrier to entry to compete with them.
So what you’re saying is Facebook created this entire situation but would not have if you know it didn’t have to. The only thing is we are only as shitty as we let ourselves be. Stop accepting shitty behavior from people and trying to justify for no reason.
I'll be honest, judging from my experience with Facebook's ads system, I'd wager they have accumulated some technical debt and their content evaluation (aka censorship) systems don't really work or don't scale. There are numerous reports of incorrect flagging of business accounts and ads managers and insanely long review processes (which, by the way, never result in an apology) on forums outside Facebook. Advertisers were moving to other platforms because Facebook became unpredictable and ads costs were skyrocketing just before the US elections.
It's a bit better now but they still seem to have problems identifying objectionable content. If the system doesn't work for ads, it won't work for orders of magnitude more user posts either.
based on your own set of possibilities it sounds like they chose b and "f#ck everyone else" contradicts "Facebook truly seems to be trying to improve its behavior for the benefit of society at large".
>As a corporation, Facebook truly seems to be trying to improve its behavior for the benefit of society at large
Based on what? Lip service? Empty gestures? Those are worth as much as Google's "Don't be evil" motto and Apple's and Nike's social justice campaigns...
Facebook could use its wealth and influence to lobby for government regulation that would rein in bad behaviour while ensuring a level playing field so less-ethical competitors would be penalized.
As a corporation with a huge amount of investment money involved, they will bend every rule and law to maximize the ROI for those investors. Also, these companies will extract every bit of data from their customers (product) that they can, in obscurity, to accomplish their goal.
Isn't there really no choice? Doesn't the corporate responsibility force them to only consider the greatest financial gain, regardless of the downsides for society?
It's almost as if capitalism requires outcomes which are exploitative. Whether that is the labor force, the environment, minority populations, civil society, population health.
Too bad no one has written a book or three looking into this. I'd read it.
Facebook is a company that never stood by small businesses. It's also the company that manipulated users into a free basic services just to create their own walled garden in the internet.
Still, sardonically they created two ad campaigns: Apple vs free internet and vs small businesses. Their whole marketing stunt was laughably wrong. No wonder their chief left the company.
> Facebook is a company that never stood by small businesses.
Curious what makes you say this? Knowing a handful of small business owners, I hear lots of good things about how great FB ads are for reaching their customers without requiring multi-million dollar ad spends, agencies, etc.
I find that argument unconvincing. If there were no ads, would have people starve to death because they would not be able to find restaurants?
Also, local businesses can da a lot to turn heads without having a giant IT system spying on the people.
Sure, FB provides value to its users but when they don’t provide the service, they don’t provide it for everyone.
Local businesses spending on better signs and better service could be actually much better for the local community as the resources remain local and they get better service instead of sending their money to FB in exchange for reach shortcut.
I am always a bit surprised that Facebook ended up as reliant on advertising revenue as they are. I feel like they missed opportunities to replace Craigslist as the de facto online classifieds and to offer a payment system like Apple Pay. Perhaps these are only obvious in hindsight.
I feel that most of their issues stem from their complete revenue reliance on advertising. It forces them to make decisions about their core product that reduces utility, but makes it superficially a more sticky user experience.
> I feel like they missed opportunities to replace Craigslist as the de facto online classifieds and to offer a payment system like Apple Pay. Perhaps these are only obvious in hindsight
I think they're trying to rectify both of these exactly. I don't know about in the US but here in the UK, Facebook Marketplace is pretty much now the de facto online classifieds site, at least for everybody I know. As for payments, they seem to be struggling more, but that is, I assume, one of the purposes of Diem (formerly Libra).
The thing is that ads made them a lot quite quickly. Anything else will need time to grow to notable revenue streams. It's similar to Google in that regard, who always had revenue streams aside (like search appliances) but only now with different cloud-related (enterprise apps etc. included) projects.
But yeah I wonder about their thoughts for embedding payment into WhatsApp. Given Facebook's size they of course get a lot of regulatory attention, but they seem to think in that direction with Libra and other projects.
The thing about ads as a user/product is that it doesn't feel like you're giving away resources at every interaction. You're just reading about grandkids and adrenochrome. It's about the lowest friction transaction there is.
I used to work at the biggest social network in the Netherlands. They tried to make a push for becoming a classifieds site and also payments before Facebook, but neither of these worked out.
TIL Facebook had a "chief of advertising integrity."
Be that as it may, I'm not sure we want to be dependent on Facebook to regulate the businesses and political organizations that advertise on its platforms.
Perhaps the US should consider creating a Federal Trade Commission that could regulate advertisers, and perhaps a Federal Election Commission to regulate election-related spending, including advertising.
> After almost 4 years, I made the difficult decision to leave Facebook, and 12/30/20 was my last day at FB. I've had a great experience in a difficult, fun, fast-growing and impactful role at the company working with amazing people
From internet:
> At Facebook, RSUs are subject to a 4-year vesting schedule: 25% vests in the 1st year (5% every 2.4 months), then 25% in each of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th years (6.25% every 3 months)
I guess good for him to enjoy his wealth now. I wish him good health.
And even those who receive just a standard "Meets Expectations" rating receive sufficient refreshers that there isn't that big a cliff after four years either. It may go from something like $500k to $450k.
There's a lot of jumping around at the 3-year mark, especially for people who want to cash in their FAANG brand for a similar package somewhere else. But once you get to E5 and higher there is significant financial incentive to stay with FB for longer than the initial four years.
For an E5 you get ~600k initial grant and 120k refresher for meets all. So your equity comp goes
Year 1: 150k
Year 2: 180k
Year 3: 210k
Year 4: 240k
Year 5: 120k
That’s a pretty big drop. It’s less if you have higher ratings or promo of course.
not true. people usually have a large cliff after four years where their compensation goes down. because they ir initial grant is no longer vesting so they go from:
initial grant / 4 + (refreshers x 3) per year
to:
refreshers x 4 per year
in addition, refreshers are given at the current stock price whereas the initial was grant was given at the 4 years ago price which was much lower therefore appreciated considerably
It’s so gauche and embarrassing to see a serious executive announcing a principled career change through Twitter. “Tweet 6/12” ... a red flag should go up somewhere. Can you not buy a domain and link a short paragraph?
This isn’t an issue related to Threader or visual reconstruction of tweets. Rather, how did society get to a place like this? It’s bananas.
Can you elaborate why it's gauche? I'm assuming the intent is to share on the platform that has the audience you are seeing to share the message to. It's not user friendly to direct people to another channel.
Twitter lacks both document authoring features and professionalism context for anything like an announcement like this. It comes off like an out of touch person trying to stay “fresh” or “with it” shoe-horning a dry press release comment into a medium people use to laugh at cat photos. Even official Twitter accounts and journalists have the sense to link externally to more important matters. It undermines credibility to put those matters directly on Twitter. A single short tweet of that type is bad enough, but a 12 tweet thread is further forcing long discourse into a platform built to avoid it.
Alternative take: Twitter is where people are and information spreads by push vs having someone discover/navigate/link to your personal site for the announcement.
12 tweets is certainly a lot though but I don't get the idea that using Twitter to share important news is gauche. Maybe that was the case when they first launched but certainly not now.
They could have used Facebook if they wanted to write a longer post, but they wanted the audience from Twitter. Aside from that they are a private person, not a public good and can do whatever they like. Be it not announcing a job change at all or printing and distributing flyers or something in between.
People are the problem, not Facebook. Conspiracy theories, FOMO and interpersonal toxicity existed long before social media, in roughly the same proportions. FB can prevent overt scammers and bad actors from using their platform, but that's about it. Any organization with the thinnest patina of legitimacy can and should be able to participate.
Running a scam business tends to be low expense. They don't have much to invest in other than advertising, which is why scams dominate low value ad inventory. I don't blame facebook for this. It's just part of running one of history's largest advertising businesses.
I understand that many of us here aren't fond of social media, but the majority of humans really like it. And they bring with them all of the worst (and best) aspects of social interaction. I don't blame facebook for that, either.
Being angry at social media companies is like being angry at the mirror because you don't like your appearance. Facebook isn't the cause of humanity's problems. It's just the means by which we're observing them.
Flagged because this thread has no value beyond people who don't like fb kvetching. The guy who left loves fb, he didn't leave because fb is being unethical.
hahaha they just appoint and if something wrong happens "Chief of Advertising Integrity" can be blamed and Mark can be act as god providing free services to small companies and people.
Corporation has become so much evil and greedy, they have used every strategy so they cannot be taken down or cannot be regulate properly.
It could have passed as a troll question given that this is an old an well-known problem, but I guess it's best to err on the side of informing people than turning them away.
I feel strongly that we’re at the point where one can’t think of Facebook and be ignorant of the problems and the clear abusive practices they have and continue to be engaged in. Every time they get caught they feint an apology and proceed to either ignore the issue, continue that same practice but in a different way, or engage in some new abusive scheme. It is foundational to them because it is fundamentally part of Mark Zuckerberg’s ethics, or lack there of as the case appears to be.
So... in my opinion anyone going to work for Facebook, or continuing to work for them is no different than someone doing the same at a tobacco company. They know what is going on at those organizations and they are choosing to look the other way. That in and of itself is not illegal, of course, but they can’t cry foul when they get accused of doing immoral and unethical things while employed there.
Can you explain (with links please) how Facebook are ethically equivalent to tobacco companies (who's product literally (not figuratively) kills people).
If you can't, then I'm going to assume that it's mindless hyperbole (a straight to which Facebook, for whatever reason, appears to be prone to).
They are expressing their own opinion, and the comment clearly explains how they draw a parallel between Facebook and tobacco companies. Why do you need a link?
Also, while Facebook may not directly kill people, the hate speech that it helps proliferate does have real consequences for real people. One such instance was in the Muslim genocide in Myanmar. Since you appear to like links a lot, here is one for you:
The idea that Facebook “works on privacy”, and that this guy is going to “work on privacy” elsewhere now, is the most facetious thing ever. It’s like saying that Trump’s legal team led by Giuliani “works on election integrity”.
Who gives a sh*t? Why is this even shared here? HackerNews needs to get back to Engineering please. And, what the hell is Chief of Advertising Integrity ...
I will be first in line to cynically complain about inappropriate topics on HN, but why do you think this particular post is irrelevant?
Software culture is partly hacker culture, and Facebook is probably one of the most visible showcases of this culture - and therefore somewhat worthy of discussion on HackerNews, wouldn't you agree?
i completely disagree. i'm glad this person wrote that - it lets me know that this board isn't completely 100% dead and there's people here who think posts about 'facebooks integrity advertising chief' have no business being on a board about Hacker News. maybe everyone is afraid to speak up against this kind of useless B.S. for fear of being accused of not being 'constructive' enough or something.
I disagree. I don't think it added any value. It's self evident why something ends up on the front page right? I don't go around shitting on every topic I'm not interested in, it's a waste of our finite time.
Why do they hire people for positions such as "chief of advertising integrity"? Haters are gonna hate; the legacy media won't stop hating on them just because they have a "chief of advertising integrity".
