Mark Zuckerburg's superpower is being like Jack Sparrow at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: he steps off one boat just as it's sinking onto another, and he has the humility to not really give a damn which ship he's on. (I say "humility" even as someone frustrated by his net impact on society.)
I think on the How I Built This Instagram episode the Instagram founder said that Zuck was basically reading the data from Facebook's interactions and saw that the demographics and sharing tendencies of Facebook users meant that it was in a death spiral: people were moving interactions to private channels, reducing the available "friend" content. IMO, the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing and the result was FB pivoting away from "social network" (OG Facebook) to "social media" (2010-2015 FB) and eventually just "media" (Instagram, Reels).
Looking back at what I posted on FB in 2008-2012 is like observing an alien from another planet: it was a completely different platform.
> people were moving interactions to private channels, reducing the available "friend" content. IMO, the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing and the result was FB pivoting away from "social network" (OG Facebook) to "social media" (2010-2015 FB) and eventually just "media" (Instagram, Reels).
Adding to that, the people who kept posting as if nothing changed typically were extremely low-value posters. Political ranters, zero-commentary meme reposts, etc…
Like a large room full of people talking until an event starts, and that moment when half the crowd has realized that someone has gone on stage while the other half has gotten sucked into an argument/discussion and forgotten why we were all here in the first place.
Hilariously, this is kind of how I felt reading the comments here. I thought every commet would start of by saying this is such a pathetic superficial ploy for the trial in question that it's idiotic to respond to it in earnest outside of a courtroom. But then obviously the comment would go on to explain why that's the case.
Whatever sort of business Facebook, Insta, TikTok and Twitter are called now, it's pretty clear they co-evolved into it near identically by watching the others' product. If fb isn't social media, then neither are the rest. If fb is a purple cow then so are the others. The point is they were called "social media" at the time FB purchased Insta.
If Zuck is going to show a graph illustrating how force fed cows in a cage were unable to walk by themselves as time progressed, then someone should put up a graph tracking the number of Whatsapp groups that were created as time went by. If that number was going up, what is left to talk about for fuck's sake.
>> people who kept posting as if nothing changed typically were extremely low-value posters
absolutely not, ... these were (and are) always there. instead it was Facebook management decisions choosing to amplify exactly this. Let's not blame a minority of (misguided) content creators for the shortcomings of Zuck and his sycophant senior managers.
As anti-Zuck as I am, I argue this is simply human nature. I've seen the same effect all across internet interactions, from Gamefaqs to 4 chan to Tumblr to Tiktok. controversial content will simply draw in more discussion (i.e. flamewars) than any other kind of contnet. sad content, happy content, funny content; it all falls to rage bait.
The only blame on Facebook's end is a failure to moderate and mitigate it. But at that point you ask if that would have simply pointed the controversy to the moderators (something also commonly seen).
They actively amplified any content that got high engagement, not ragebait specifically. That's why you see this trend across nearly all social media, not just Facebook. There's a strong financial incentive to get people to engage with your service, and amplifying the content that is already getting the most engagement is a simple way to do that.
You could blame this on advertising, but I think even if Facebook were a paid service (ignoring for a minute that that would have killed any chance it had of being successful in the first place) there'd still be an incentive to prioritize content that people's revealed preferences indicate they want to see more of.
Countering this natural human tendency requires a significant, thoughtful, concerted effort on the part of everyone involved.
> Encourage online tribalism that exacerbates the societal division....creating exploitative products that drive conflict over conversation, division over unity, and misinformation over truth
Highest engagement and ragebait are apparently the same thing.
I see no disagreement here. Due to human nature, ragebait is a subset of content that gets high engagement, so it gets amplified the same as any other high-engagement content.
I think you under estimate how much of the angry political stuff is driven by paid for content by people with an agenda - and companies like Meta have just taken the money.
Sure in the end it sweeps up indviduals but money and professional narrative shapers are often behind these things.
There are a cadre of highly competance professionals in the advertising/PR area that were massively enabled by the tools that Meta et al provided ( for money ) - suddenly you could run campaigns that were highly effective, relatively cheap, and almost invisible.
This has been ruthlessly exploited by people and organisations with more money that morals.
Goverments have in part been asleep at the wheel, but also too keen to use such tools for their own ends.
In Imgurs case it's all left leaning. Lots of scaremongering about what project 2025 and how close we are to dictatorship and lots of alarmist ragebait.
I saw a post just over a week ago from a user who predicted that Trump would declare martial law on April 20th because that was the day such and such report would advise him to do so.
It made the front page with hundreds of upvotes and comments agreeing. it's an extreme example but the site is full of this kind of stuff, most often bringing your attention to some obscure ruling or decision, some new political depth plumbed that will mean x,y, and z will now happen.
The aspect of real people posting worthwhile stuff stopped regardless of Zuck's decision to amplify engagement bait. IMO, it was because many of them had their life stage progress beyond college and had better things to do than post to social media.
I think you got cause and effect mixed up. One would normally move on in life and tune down college life rather than shut it down entirely.
I've made a fb account very early on and a new one periodically. Each time I add few friends who have few friends. I post some content daily for two weeks, content these friends would always respond to. The feed had nothing they posted and my posts never got any engagement.
I didn't simply move on, they actively disqualified themselves.
Users are much better of making a whatsapp group. You don't have to leave the college group (you could ofc) but you can mute and archive it or add a few contacts from it (before leaving)
> Mark Zuckerburg's superpower is being like Jack Sparrow at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: he steps off one boat just as it's sinking onto another, and he has the humility to not really give a damn which ship he's on. (I say "humility" even as someone frustrated by his net impact on society.)
That's like saying a tapeworm is humble because it doesn't care which colon it's sitting in.
The tapeworm lacks the faculties to care about the colon. It just needs nourishment. Same with Zuck. You can't blame the worm, because it's got no concept of reality beyond the things needed to serve its survival. Zuck, as a human, can only do that by very likely having a serious personality disorder.
A reference to Larry Ellison as a lawnmower, perhaps? [0]
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)
Generally this is relevant advice for thinking about important people. We know little about them, almost all of it is projection that reflects more of my perspective than any reality of the object’s psychology.
Humans love to think we know why someone behaves the way they do. We love to diagnose disorders in strangers based on a very very tiny bit of information.
It is best to treat the decisions as black boxes, or else we are just projecting. I think it’s called the fundamental attribution bias?
No, the takeaway from that talk isn't that we shouldn't judge Ellison's intentions. Quite the opposite, actually. Bryan Cantrill states that Ellison's motives are simple. It's only about money and no other human emotions are involved.
There are so many quotes indicating this:
"What you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle."
"This company is very straightforward in its defense. It's about one man, his alter ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity! That's it!"
"If you were to about ask Oracle, 'Oracle what are you about? Larry, what are you about? Why Oracle? Tell me about Oracle.' 'Make money.' ' Okay, yeah yeah I get it.' 'Make money. Make money. Make money. That's what we do. Make money.'"
I have to disagree with your interpretation. “Inflict”, for example, is a very loaded word that speaks to intent or at least the mindset.
I think we all feel like we know who movie stars and celebrities really are. When, in reality, not only do we not know their motivation - often we don’t even know our own.
I mean you can personally disagree with the talk, but what's being said is pretty clear here. The quotes in my previous comment alone make what's unambiguously a judgement about Ellison, and there's so much more from the original talk. Bryan Cantrill even likens Ellison to Nazis in a number of his other talks btw, so it can't get any clearer than that.
Me personally, I think it's fair to judge people by their actions. When a person is amassing billions in wealth at the expense of everyone else, there's nothing more meaningless than wasting time imagining about how that person might possibly be kind and well-meaning deep down.
When you own 98% of Lanai, have a net worth equivalent to the annual gross product of a mid-sized American metropolitan area, and still feel the need to lay off thousands of people to increase your net worth at age 80, that's not a very, very tiny bit of information.
That's a person being presented with the knowledge that his choices will have a very clear set of consequences for society and proceeding with them anyways. Know the "if you press the button, you'll become a millionaire, but someone you don't know will die" thought experiment?
Larry has, multiple times, been told that if he presses the button, he'll get millions of dollars at the extreme expense of people he doesn't know, and done it. I think it's fair to say that at least one person has died from it; mass layoffs result in one additional suicide per 4200 male employees and one per 7100 female employees [0]
It would be, but individual businesses (particularly those with the resources of Oracle) don't like paying the taxes necessary to offer that sort of social safety net past a certain point.
Interesting how helpless voters (and those who could vote but don't) are portrayed, especially in the age of instant access to information in everyone's pocket.
> The tapeworm lacks the faculties to care about the colon. It just needs nourishment. Same with Zuck. You can't blame the worm, because it's got no concept of reality beyond the things needed to serve its survival. Zuck, as a human, can only do that by very likely having a serious personality disorder.
Isn't that behavior massively rewarded in the current system of VC-driven capitalism as a general rule? Such founders/companies leach off the society, leave it worse and are given huge valuations and riches. Infact the incentives mean we will see more of such people rise to the top in a ever-worsening feedback cycle until the society puts some checks on them. Which is a extra difficult in this deliberately fragmented environment. Same old loop we can't break out of.
That was intentional. I recall testing this out every time there was a new "oops, we're sorry, we reset your privacy settings to default -- AGAIN".
The privacy settings were carefully designed to have vague wording that how they worked on the surface wasn't how they really worked. Each and every one of them which had a different functionality than what the wording suggested on its surface resulted in you sharing to a much wider audience than you thought you were.
I recall carefully testing it out with a burner account which my main was not friends with, and it consistently taking 2-3 tries to get the privacy settings back to where I wanted them to be.
I would take those days over what Facebook is today - which is to say, useless. The only thing I use it for is groups, which have the good sense to only be about the thing you want to learn about when you look at the group. Still though - it is sad that FB Groups killed off small web forums.
I remember Facebook group - somewhere in the early 2010s, the group feature disappeared. Years later, group appeared again and I had to re-apply to get back into the group. Perhaps group was killed to boost public sharing.
Definitely true, but back in the day that was sort of the fun of it -- similar to putting up an AOL Instant Messenger away message, it was just... a blast of a funny thought to the people that you knew.
Over time, that network got stale and it included "people you sort of used to know", and then it included your grandma and uncle and rest of the world. There are few things that are at the intersection of the Venn diagram of "things I want to share with all of those people", especially as I get older.
> the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing
Instead of chatting shit in a "public" area (rip wall to wall) limited to just my uni friends, there were suddenly home friends, relatives etc reading. And obviously it only got worse with algorithms pushing dross and hiding the zeitgeist from you.
You might manage the same if you’re rich enough to hire top-tier advisors. Let’s not kid ourselves—OG Facebook wasn’t a tech marvel or even particularly original. It just landed in the right place at the right time and snowballed from there.
This makes no sense in Zuckerberg's case: he was never hired by the board and they've never had a chance to fire him. Investors can sell the stock if they don't like what he does, but that is not a "professional advisor" relationship.
It's mostly a cult of personality relationship, and you're deep in it with your belief that Zuckerberg is an unusually capable operator.
Independently on what you think of Zuckerberg as a human being, on the basis of acquisitions alone, he can be judged as an insanely effective CEO. The way Meta managed the shift from Facebook to Instagram is impressive from a strategic point of view.
Heck, Meta literally controls the world most popular chat application. I never liked social media, spent most of the past fifteen years avoiding them as much I could while maintaining just enough presence to stay reachable and a Meta application still remain my most used one.
Let's not forget that Google, for all their billions, utterly failed to significantly attack Meta market.
Meta has been effective at being the owner of Instagram, even though that's because they've smartly mostly been staying hands off on it besides integrating it with Facebook wherever makes most sense. And also even though the platform is also getting long in the tooth, becoming a place dominated by brands rather than the hip kids' club it was in the past. Now it just seems like the default social media profile for people to connect with one another, like how FB was before it.
I wonder what if Facebook's attempts to buy Snapchat had gone through. Would they have been an effective steward of that platform as well, or would it have gone the way of Twitter-acquired Vine? Would Snapchat even have been a good acquisition target? Okay, maybe it's not productive to discuss counterfactuals, but it does make one consider if we're self-selecting for big hits here and ignoring all of the duds that never amounted to anything- and the potential duds that didn't go through because the founders didn't want to just take the money.
WhatsApp I'll grant you, hard to think of any alternate chat app that could've gotten as ubiquitous as it did. Though, again, was that also mostly WhatsApp's own success, amplified by Facebook's ubiquity? Not to mention, Google being as incompetent at chat as it is at social, Apple unwilling to entertain servicing other operating systems, and Blackberry, AOL, MSN Messenger, etc. having disappeared long ago.
Interestingly, Meta hasn't seem interested in trying to compete with "channelized" IRC chatroom-style apps in the vein of Slack or Discord. Maybe there's some enterprise Messenger for Businesses that does that, idk.
I already agreed with the correction - he has voting control.
What is still incorrect is imagining that billions of dollars gets you advisors who know how to run a company - and those people aren't just high level executives already running companies.
> you're deep in it with your belief that Zuckerberg is an unusually capable operator.
The burden is on you to show a successful CEO for over a decade is actually an idiot.
I don’t want Meta to do anything. All I want to do is mock the idea that Zuckerberg has been some sort of exemplary CEO the last few years in the face of the Metaverse project being such a resounding dud- what’s the punchline, billions spent to add feet to the avatars? Not to mention how he’s allowed his actual site to go fallow, between the Feed being inundated with AI slop and Reels being an imitation of Instagram Shorts being an imitation of TikTok and Snapchat shorts and Vine.
The boat is constantly rocking though, and it's actually incredible how he's kept the boat afloat and increasingly profitable. You can despise their impact on society, but he's an incredible example of a very successful CEO.
Political investigations, anti-trust, terrible media and brand image. GDPR. DMA. Etc. A literal genocide associated with their product.
The shift from desktop to mobile, and the continued evolution of the distribution channel - eg. the "Anti-tracking" requirement on apple devices.
The shift from text posts to images, to stories, to short-form video. From broadcast to DMs and groups.
The shift from "social" media to celebrity and influencer followings, to a feed entirely algorithmic.
The shift in advertisement formats, the shift across what gets advertised (eg. apps didn't exist at all when Facebook started, now they track ad-click-to-install rates through ML models).
I suppose I just don’t find any of those things very admirable? The fact that their product is associated with so much bad shit and still alive is a terrible thing for society. I just cannot reasonably call someone that led all that a ‘good CEO’, because they represent nothing that I’d like a CEO to be, regardless of what Wall Street things.
I’d also argue that it just means that Facebook was very successful at following all the trends and purchasing what they couldn’t replicate.
Your definition of "good" is weird, man. He's good at making money, that doesn't make him a good CEO. A good CEO should be able to make money and have some goddamn principles.
It's like staying that Putin is a good leader, because he's managed to stay in power for so long. Like what the fuck?
Each one of these platform empires from IBM to Microsoft to Google to Amazon to Uber has been very successful at foreseeing and executing on trends, until they're not. Meta was so for a long time, but not necessarily in recent years. That will, inevitably, be the fate of TikTok and whatever future empires arise from the current environment.
I am not saying Zuckerberg hasn't achieved much in the past. It's just funny to crow about his "super power" when Facebook reached critical mass over a decade and a half ago and has been able to coast along as a money printer based on network effects. And also as a Xerox copy printer- I always like to bring up the time they cloned HQ Trivia.
It's good for a platform empire to spent some of its lavish riches on R&D, even if it's just to diversify its moat and further entrench itself. But less so when that ends up as a quixotic boondoggle no one asked for (Metaverse) or as a blatant unoriginal copy (Reels, Confetti). At some point it's not really brilliance to be "foreseeing and executing on those trends" when you have the resources to chase after every trend. Then you've just turned your megacorporation into a VC fund, throwing anything and everything at the wall until something sticks. As we can see, there are a ton of initiatives, projects, departments that don't stick, and some quite spectacularly (Metaverse, again).
Eventually you just end up with the unoriginal silliness of LinkedIn Stories or every single platform including FB having its own Clubhouse, even when Clubhouse itself was a fad that faded as quickly as it appeared during the height of the pandemic.
I get your point about what he has accomplished. But at the same time, right after saying he's an incredible example of a very successful CEO, you acknowledge "a literal genocide associated with their product." I really wish we could shift how we define success for these CEOs.
I always see comments like this, but I rarely have this problem myself, though I see it on others' accounts. Even my Facebook feed shows me lots of legitimately useful posts. Sure, updates from friends and family are a much lower fraction than they were, but I'm actually OK with what I see.
Interesting to read: I've always heard of Chrome and Gmail as two Google products that were the shining examples of "look at what these wacky engineers went off and built!"
It seems like that notion may be a bit romanticized.
I wanted to share this post with any other engineers that have struggled with the transition from "building what you're told" as a junior engineer to "figuring out what to build" as a senior engineer.
This post talks about a super pragmatic roadmap I came across from an experienced indie game dev dealing with exactly this problem: how do you balance between "building" and "figuring out what to build"?
Very cool idea! I could definitely have seen this being really useful at my last startup.
A few quick thoughts:
- I definitely would have loved to see some common travel filters (which I know as a programmer is easier said than done"). The recommended flight for me was spirit airlines, which sucks in the US and I wouldn't really want to force my employees to take that.
- Both origins and the destination that I tried were in the US, but the price was still listed in euros.
- In my head, I imagined that the suggested destinations would include some reason that they were compelling, not just a generic picture of the city. My suggested destination was Atlanta, but I don't know why we'd want a team offsite in Atlanta. I'm looking for something on the right continuum between "cheap" and "interesting", and this seems to really only help with the "cheap" aspect.
Very cool tool though! I'll keep it in mind for future work travel needs.
- We were thinking to add some more details as generic activities that you may do in that location, so we will consider that. Thank!
Btw, have you checked the the "Explore" button? We have an itinerary page where you have more details about the flights, some accommodation choices and activities from our partners like Viator and Ticketmaster.
Just a thought: this tool looks cool, but I'd love to see a demo video of it in action as the hero item at the top of the page. Without that, it feels a little... theoretical and hand-wavy.
If I were to guess, the one of these that has by far the most impact is the Google featured snippets. There's constantly a tension between Google and online publishers about Google wanting to serve people answers quickly (with "on the search page" being the fastest version of that), but that not actually helping the publishers.
I couldn't agree more about the toxicity, though. I don't pretend to know much about who's right in the Stack Overflow vs. moderators debate, but every time I visit an answer on Stack Overflow and glance at the right sidebar I feel like a kid who's just walked in on his parents fighting. The tension between the company and the community is palpable and it makes the site feel like an icky place to be.
It could have been a community, like Quora, but focused towards CS/IT.
But it absolutely missed the mark on that one. It is a high pressure, toxic, unwelcoming place.
I contributed a lot of Math and CS content to Quora where I had ~1.5m views on answers. I really liked engaging there. OTOH, SO felt like a toxic exam hall on a bad day.
Every year SO asked in the survey if I felt I belonged to the community or something similar, I chose the most negative response from the list- every year.
If SO behaved like a community, then it could have had organic growth, and organic visitors, not depending so largely on Google.
In my experience, the web has bifurcated between "web applications" (owned by React) and content sites (owned by Jamstack).
One dilemma I've faced is when you find yourself in the middle of those two areas and might want to develop an MVP in Jamstack to later add more web-appy features. Jamstack always left me feeling like it was sufficient for my current use case, but with much more complexity I was always one errant feature request away from running into something I couldn't do and having to rewrite everything.
Furthermore, just doing simple things can require significant creativity on how to achieve that. It's fun, because the end result is something that's significantly more performant than anything you could squeeze out of React. I happily use Jamstack for my blog (FCP of 0.8s, Lighthouse score of 100!), but would feel reckless suggesting it for any professional work that I do outside of company blogs or something.
There's an excellent book called Gemba Kaizen that's all about kaizen and the Toyota manufacturing process that inspired a lot of the thoughts in the post. Lots of interesting parallels between manufacturing and software development (e.g. "factory management should lots of time working on the factory floor if they want efficiency wins").
An odd thing about Japan is that despite making great products it has a terrible safety culture. People from the UAW will point out the carnage in the typical Japanese car factory and it still seems little known that Japan was leading the world in nuclear accidents before Fukushima, such as the Tokaimura critical accidents, the time they tried to cover up a fire at the Monju fast reactor, then the time they dropped the refueling machine on top of Monju, just to name a few.
Fukushima itself revealed numerous lapses in safety procedures, including the fact that they built it at that site at all, that they didn’t have adequate emergency generators, that they never tested the isolation condensers (which would have prevented the meltdown and hydrogen explosion at Unit 1) etc. Contrast that to Nine Mile Point here in upstate NY where they test the isolation condensers every chance they get and the operators know exactly how it works.
Many of the Japanese ideas that lead to quality, efficiency and a seemingly harmonious society lead to death in nuclear work. Critical tasks are treated as 無駄 (waste).
And speaking of 無駄, there is a real tension between a heavier process and faster feedback. That missing header takes 30 minutes to fix but if the process to avoid that mistake adds 30 minutes of time you don’t come out ahead. For superficial problems like that the answer is to speed up your cycle and try to get that 30 minutes down to 20.
A better example of a “a stitch in time saves nine” is where people get the data structures behind the application wrong and fixing it is more like 30 weeks.
Definitely have never heard anything about that aspect of Japanese culture - thanks for sharing!
I have experienced the bit of "Japanese working folk being willing (or perhaps expected) to commit their lives fully to their jobs", and I wonder if putting your own health on the line comes as a byproduct of that? Definitely not an aspect of the culture I'd try to encourage.
(1) The UAW is maybe the best union in the world (been on their picket lines) so that makes American auto factories exceptionally safe
(2) As someone whose obsession with anime even annoys people at anime conventions, my take is that irony has a special place in Japanese culture. For instance they say they have filial piety but they have high rates of elder abuse. Allegedly they have a pacifist constitution but they have a large “Japan Self Defense Force”. There is always an outsider and insider view of a situation which is fertile ground for “normalization of deviance”, see
(3) “Continuous improvement” optimizes the happy path at the expense of resilience to exceptional events. For instance just in time production was crippled by the supply chain shocks of the pandemic. At Tokaimura they were mixing nuclear fuel and were (a) making a higher enrichment than they ever did before and (b) had modified their tools to speed production up. (b) is a competitive advantage in most places but in nuclear fuel processing you have to always avoid forming a critical mass and that is done through applying rules to the process. They got away with it… Until they didn’t.
Thanks for sharing your insight in #2: definitely an interesting view that I wouldn't have access to myself!
As for #3, the same thing occurred to me with regards to the supply chain shortages during the pandemic: the highly optimized, just-in-time supply chain that we'd work so hard to build meant that there was almost no room for extraordinary events. When those events do inevitably happen, they're far more disastrous than they would otherwise have been.
I don't think that _all_ continuous improvement needs to be this way: the classic example of "letting the factory floor worker work with a toolsmith to design a better wrench for their job" probably doesn't have negative consequences in extraordinary situations. However, I do think keeping in mind "is this a pure improvement or are we making a tradeoff, and at what cost?" is a worthwhile question to ask.
Can you imagine the sheer terror of skydiving for 40 minutes through a thunderstorm? Jeepers.