It would be but there is no way that it will ever happen. Besides that he has things set up in such a way that even the board can't force him out. The only people that can fire Zuckerberg are the users.
Not so bad for the shareholders really either. $500bn isn't a bad market cap for a photo sharing site. The people being hurt here are the general public.
Mark Zuckerberg has always been incapable. I'm amazed that he has been able to stay at the helm of the network for so long.
Negligence gives cause regardless of terms. We all know that claiming negligence would be the softest explanation for his architecture. Outright nefarious and evil is a better description of every move he has made since inception.
Rather: Now would be a good time for Facebook users to resign. Zuck is doing exactly the same things when he started Facebook. It’s the users; The users that need to leave the platform. Does anyone really believe that a FB without Zuckerberg will all of a sudden be great for people? Reporters like these should inform users better about how their data is being used and how they can change things for themselves by simply leaving the platform. That’s 1. more practical and 2. the only actual solution to the problem.
I've been wanting to delete my FB account for years. Stupid me has it connected to a bunch of other services though by using single sign on feautures... Most used of those services is Spotify and they still don't offer a way to disconnect Facebook from the account.
Wow never knew, I had looked into it a year ago and they only said that you could cancel the current FB shared account and register a new one based on e-mail account.
However; that would make me lose all playlists, stored music and I'd have to move my subscription around. Too much hassle at the time.
Spotify used to be exclusively Facebook login, but introduced email login a long time ago. When that happened, I immediately disconnected my Facebook from Spotify.
This is hysteria. You people are crazy. This is not nearly that big of a deal. I beg my fellow hacker news readers, get ahold of yourselves.
This is a stellar opportunity for this community to have some introspection. Are we capable of it? These kinds of posts are a mirror to what we badly want to be true, whether it is actually true or not. We, apparently, badly want Facebook and even moreso Mark Zuckerberg to fail. Why do we want that so badly?
I understand the anger directed at them. Facebook are the spearhead of the closed, privacy-invading web, and this is the straw that broke the camel's back. Most people reading HN probably remember the days when the web was open and free and you actually had to remember URLs to read interesting content on interesting websites, usually run by enthusiastic hobbyists, written as flat HTML sites without JavaScript bloat or supercookies.
They're obviously not the only company at fault, but they're one of the biggest.
"Most people reading HN probably remember the days when the web was open and free and you actually had to remember URLs to read interesting content on interesting websites, usually run by enthusiastic hobbyists, written as flat HTML sites without JavaScript bloat or supercookies."
That open and free web is still out there, and as a non-FB user, that's the web I see every day. OK, my RSS reader remembers the URLs for me, and some of the sites are a bit bloated (which we have browser add-ons to fix), but there's definitely lots of good independent content still out there (and I've found lots of it by reading HN).
There’s a spectrum of understanding of what is being done with data. If you’re outside tech and data then it’s not easy to grasp and people underestimate what they are trading drastically, but they are lead to do so.
It’s important to remember that you’re trading with other people. Regardless of the contract or their policy: it’s just humans on the other side with all the usual trappings.
I think you have a good point - there are plenty of people who would love for Facebook to fail, and for something better to take its place. The promise of Facebook was great but it has nothing to do with the website anymore. They’ve paywalled and gatekept catching up with people with their network effect, to the point that a lot of reasonable people don’t think it’s worth the price. In a sense, Facebook has taken something away by changing people’s social behavior to feed their ad network.
But then, I’m one person and not all hacker news readers.
Because Facebook used to be a place where you could go to see status updates from friends/family in chronological order. People posted what they were up to, and people left comments. Things were simple, and great.
But then Facebook decided they needed to make some money. So they started allowing advertisers to inject things into your feed. They often tried to hide it in the form of "things liked by a friend of a friend", but it was still obvious.
To make even more money, Facebook decided to do away with the pure chronological feed, and they replaced it with something much more vague. The vagueness of it all made it all that much easier for them to inject "recommended" content that they were getting paid to show to you.
Nowadays, Facebook is completely unrecognizable. The vast majority of a typical Facebook feed is nothing more than memes, ads, and the equivalent of shitty email forwards. Scattered throughout the noise are just enough tidbits of things you actually want to see, from friends and family. Just enough to keep you hooked.
People put up with it, but a sort of deep resentment has started to take hold. A lot of people are sick of being farmed by ad companies. They are tired of being a product. They are tired of seeing nothing but ads and stupid, tired memes. They long for the content and direct connection that made Facebook popular, but alas, it is never coming back. That kind of content doesn't make money for Facebook.
I can tell you my reasoning. Facebook latches onto a deep human need (for social embedment and human interaction), and cynically pushes a hollow substitute of that, while dishonestly invading your privacy, for money.
Our body craves nourishing food and wholesome, sweet fruit, and has evolved preferences for fat and sugar. Then, today, along comes McDonalds and serves BigMac and Coke, carefully engineered for maximum alignment with our taste receptors at minimum cost.
Facebook is the McDonaldisation of social. It's carefully engineered to exploit the hooks in your brain to keep you online as long as possible, make you reveal as much about you as possible, and come back as soon as possible.
But it's even worse. McDonalds at least sells its stuff honestly and employs lots of people, somewhat ameliorating inequality.
We here on HN know how Facebook monetises: data and ads, but most people did not know the details and depth of the tracking - that's why this story is such a ruckus.
Facebook scales easily, so you get a few (relatively speaking) very well paid people, worsening inequality.
And does it bring anything positive? Before Facebook, people were meeting, organising in clubs and associations, and communicating just fine, using newsletters, the phone, later mailing lists, etc. Increasingly now, with some organisations, it's hard to even stay informed or be invited to events if you refuse to use Facebook!
Lastly, what galls me with Zuck is the pure hypocrisy. Talking about how nobody wants/needs privacy anymore, but purchasing the 4 houses around his in Palo Alto to have more privacy.
Oh, and FWIW, your Econ 101 textbook free market can't fix this, as that theoretical model is predicated on full information and negative economies of scale.
TL;DR: To me, Facebook is a despicable cynical near-monopolistic money making machine (for the few), run by a hypocrite peddling a fake, counterproductive "solution" to real human needs using the worst form of monetisation in a dishonest way.
It's getting out of hand. The hate train is running off the rails here.
If this was Reddit, I'd suggest the mods pin a megathread to contain it but HN doesn't work that way. I'm generally against heavy moderation but at this point I'd vote for a moratorium like we did with politics awhile back.
I'm talking about this article, which is calling for Zuck's resignation. I disagree with the article, and I think resigning would be crawling away from the problems.
I want to keep Facebook only to be connected with my friends. But I do not want to see their status updates. I just want to be digitally connected with them so that I can contact them. Instead of seeing their photos/posts, I would rather like to talk to them personally.
I always think about pre-facebook era and want to go back again to those times.
The article goes on and on to describe how Facebook has tried to do and be many things that it wasn't before, and how it has failed in those attempts to expand beyond a basic social network.
Fine, let's assume that that's true. Facebook did indeed do some useless things. But how is this a reason for its CEO to resign? Facebook did nothing wrong! Yes they failed to become better, and their platform became bloated, but so does every other platform in the world at the moment. But since when is failing to become better now suddenly a really good incentive for it to buckle down completely like the article is suggesting?
I feel the article's argumentation is completely unsound. Premises I have no say about, but its conclusion definitely doesn't follow from those premises.
The author didn't even rein in the privacy stories that are all over the news suddenly. Now that would give their argument leverage, but they didn't.
Go hate Facebook all you like, I do too, but this article doesn't make sense and doesn't deserve to give a reason for you to hate the company or its CEO.
Barring egregious criminality, it doesn't make sense for someone who took a company from nothing (well, maybe a concept pioneered by Friendster and its antecedents) to $500 billion in market cap to suddenly resign.
I feel this Cambridge Analytica story is a bit overblown. When the whistleblower says “target their inner demons”, he is just referring to campaigns placing Facebook Ads with certain parameters about who should see them.
Now the question of political targeting data being re-purposed from a personality quiz app, and issues of data privacy in general, are worth investigating. But the fall in Facebook stock price is a giant overreaction (unless the story invites legal regulation.)
The shock of Trump’s election and Brexit have prompted more scrutiny of social media, which is warranted. But there’s a limit to the benefit of worrying about Youtube algorithms, Facebook targeting, and Russian trolls. Changing the political situation will mostly require old-fashioned door-to-door politics.
> Now the question of political targeting data being re-purposed from a personality quiz app, and issues of data privacy in general, are worth investigating.
The data from the quiz wasn't repurposed. The data from the quiz itself has nothing to do with this. The quiz was merely a gateway to get the user to hand over a laundry list of their profile data on themselves and all of their contacts.
Not only that but it ignores the elephant room here. And the ironic thing is the annoying phrase has been used so often it's lost its power, but this is literally the biggest "evidence" for 2016 in front of people's noses.
Clinton won the popular vote. She won CA for example, so clearly Cambridge didn't mush people's brains up that much. The swing states in the Midwest she didn't win she didn't campaign in. Is it that hard to understand?
Why do we have to constantly relitigate 2016? If you don't like what Trump is doing, why not fight against that instead of this constant reporting and talk of conspiracies? People who peddle/love this stuff are taking away the wrong lessons from 2016.
Or maybe he and his team wanted to actually take the time to come up with a useful and intelligent response rather than a vapid response only meant for the spectacle?
All of this is overreacting. People have the choice to leave Facebook or to accept the terms and deal with them.
This is some serious cognitive dissonance to expect to be free to share personal data but to still retain privacy regarding those. Anything you share with your friend can then be shared to a 3rd party. This is even true in "real life"
And data is not nearly as powerful as we make it to be. Populism did not win because of social networks, populism won because of increasing inequalities in both wealth and skills in a world where globalisation and automation are making more and more people uncomfortable about the future.
All data did is to identify who is who and sell them what they actually wanted. The problem is not about using data to understand audiences. It is about having people lacking enough common sense to actually check if they are told the truth. It is also about the eagerness of politicians to play with tribalism of any kind. Western democracies are responsible of those failures and they are trying to find anyone else than themselves to blame.
I left Facebook a few years ago and I don't regret it. I doubt that Facebook is worth it for most people and WhatsApp with SMS is enough for me. People more social that me could leave FB to go to Instagram though. So in any case Zuckerberg is fine.
The only way to beat Facebook is to give people an alternative they prefer. It is definitely not to try to scare them with data scandals most of them don't care about.
48 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadNegligence gives cause regardless of terms. We all know that claiming negligence would be the softest explanation for his architecture. Outright nefarious and evil is a better description of every move he has made since inception.
https://joinmastodon.org/
https://instances.social/
However; that would make me lose all playlists, stored music and I'd have to move my subscription around. Too much hassle at the time.
Going to try the trick you just posted.
Adding to this list how failed to us with Parse.com
This is a stellar opportunity for this community to have some introspection. Are we capable of it? These kinds of posts are a mirror to what we badly want to be true, whether it is actually true or not. We, apparently, badly want Facebook and even moreso Mark Zuckerberg to fail. Why do we want that so badly?
They're obviously not the only company at fault, but they're one of the biggest.
That open and free web is still out there, and as a non-FB user, that's the web I see every day. OK, my RSS reader remembers the URLs for me, and some of the sites are a bit bloated (which we have browser add-ons to fix), but there's definitely lots of good independent content still out there (and I've found lots of it by reading HN).
I personally find it disgusting. If you don't like the service, stop using it and shut up.
It’s important to remember that you’re trading with other people. Regardless of the contract or their policy: it’s just humans on the other side with all the usual trappings.
But then, I’m one person and not all hacker news readers.
But then Facebook decided they needed to make some money. So they started allowing advertisers to inject things into your feed. They often tried to hide it in the form of "things liked by a friend of a friend", but it was still obvious.
To make even more money, Facebook decided to do away with the pure chronological feed, and they replaced it with something much more vague. The vagueness of it all made it all that much easier for them to inject "recommended" content that they were getting paid to show to you.
Nowadays, Facebook is completely unrecognizable. The vast majority of a typical Facebook feed is nothing more than memes, ads, and the equivalent of shitty email forwards. Scattered throughout the noise are just enough tidbits of things you actually want to see, from friends and family. Just enough to keep you hooked.
People put up with it, but a sort of deep resentment has started to take hold. A lot of people are sick of being farmed by ad companies. They are tired of being a product. They are tired of seeing nothing but ads and stupid, tired memes. They long for the content and direct connection that made Facebook popular, but alas, it is never coming back. That kind of content doesn't make money for Facebook.
I can tell you my reasoning. Facebook latches onto a deep human need (for social embedment and human interaction), and cynically pushes a hollow substitute of that, while dishonestly invading your privacy, for money.
Our body craves nourishing food and wholesome, sweet fruit, and has evolved preferences for fat and sugar. Then, today, along comes McDonalds and serves BigMac and Coke, carefully engineered for maximum alignment with our taste receptors at minimum cost.
Facebook is the McDonaldisation of social. It's carefully engineered to exploit the hooks in your brain to keep you online as long as possible, make you reveal as much about you as possible, and come back as soon as possible.
But it's even worse. McDonalds at least sells its stuff honestly and employs lots of people, somewhat ameliorating inequality.
We here on HN know how Facebook monetises: data and ads, but most people did not know the details and depth of the tracking - that's why this story is such a ruckus.
Facebook scales easily, so you get a few (relatively speaking) very well paid people, worsening inequality.
And does it bring anything positive? Before Facebook, people were meeting, organising in clubs and associations, and communicating just fine, using newsletters, the phone, later mailing lists, etc. Increasingly now, with some organisations, it's hard to even stay informed or be invited to events if you refuse to use Facebook!
Lastly, what galls me with Zuck is the pure hypocrisy. Talking about how nobody wants/needs privacy anymore, but purchasing the 4 houses around his in Palo Alto to have more privacy.
Oh, and FWIW, your Econ 101 textbook free market can't fix this, as that theoretical model is predicated on full information and negative economies of scale.
TL;DR: To me, Facebook is a despicable cynical near-monopolistic money making machine (for the few), run by a hypocrite peddling a fake, counterproductive "solution" to real human needs using the worst form of monetisation in a dishonest way.
If this was Reddit, I'd suggest the mods pin a megathread to contain it but HN doesn't work that way. I'm generally against heavy moderation but at this point I'd vote for a moratorium like we did with politics awhile back.
There aren't very many more entities left to blame, tar and feather for his election at this point.
I always think about pre-facebook era and want to go back again to those times.
Fine, let's assume that that's true. Facebook did indeed do some useless things. But how is this a reason for its CEO to resign? Facebook did nothing wrong! Yes they failed to become better, and their platform became bloated, but so does every other platform in the world at the moment. But since when is failing to become better now suddenly a really good incentive for it to buckle down completely like the article is suggesting?
I feel the article's argumentation is completely unsound. Premises I have no say about, but its conclusion definitely doesn't follow from those premises.
The author didn't even rein in the privacy stories that are all over the news suddenly. Now that would give their argument leverage, but they didn't.
Go hate Facebook all you like, I do too, but this article doesn't make sense and doesn't deserve to give a reason for you to hate the company or its CEO.
I feel this Cambridge Analytica story is a bit overblown. When the whistleblower says “target their inner demons”, he is just referring to campaigns placing Facebook Ads with certain parameters about who should see them.
Now the question of political targeting data being re-purposed from a personality quiz app, and issues of data privacy in general, are worth investigating. But the fall in Facebook stock price is a giant overreaction (unless the story invites legal regulation.)
The shock of Trump’s election and Brexit have prompted more scrutiny of social media, which is warranted. But there’s a limit to the benefit of worrying about Youtube algorithms, Facebook targeting, and Russian trolls. Changing the political situation will mostly require old-fashioned door-to-door politics.
The data from the quiz wasn't repurposed. The data from the quiz itself has nothing to do with this. The quiz was merely a gateway to get the user to hand over a laundry list of their profile data on themselves and all of their contacts.
Clinton won the popular vote. She won CA for example, so clearly Cambridge didn't mush people's brains up that much. The swing states in the Midwest she didn't win she didn't campaign in. Is it that hard to understand?
Why do we have to constantly relitigate 2016? If you don't like what Trump is doing, why not fight against that instead of this constant reporting and talk of conspiracies? People who peddle/love this stuff are taking away the wrong lessons from 2016.
It was only after, stories about his missing "statements" started to appear that he came forward.
Sure, that sounds feasible given how just a day ago everyone went after Zuckerberg for keeping silent and a day later he releases a statement.
This is some serious cognitive dissonance to expect to be free to share personal data but to still retain privacy regarding those. Anything you share with your friend can then be shared to a 3rd party. This is even true in "real life"
And data is not nearly as powerful as we make it to be. Populism did not win because of social networks, populism won because of increasing inequalities in both wealth and skills in a world where globalisation and automation are making more and more people uncomfortable about the future.
All data did is to identify who is who and sell them what they actually wanted. The problem is not about using data to understand audiences. It is about having people lacking enough common sense to actually check if they are told the truth. It is also about the eagerness of politicians to play with tribalism of any kind. Western democracies are responsible of those failures and they are trying to find anyone else than themselves to blame.
I left Facebook a few years ago and I don't regret it. I doubt that Facebook is worth it for most people and WhatsApp with SMS is enough for me. People more social that me could leave FB to go to Instagram though. So in any case Zuckerberg is fine.
The only way to beat Facebook is to give people an alternative they prefer. It is definitely not to try to scare them with data scandals most of them don't care about.