>It was a tight-knit cult convinced of its mission to connect everyone
Did anyone ever really buy the "making the world a better place" kool aid?
Could you imagine if other companies were expected to act so grandiose and sanctimonious about their mission? Imagine a world where McDonalds bills itself as a crusader to make the world better fed.
It was not too long ago that facebook attempted a surreptitious mission of "making the world a better place" with the failed attempt of "free basics" and "internet.org"
Unfortunately it wasn't a complete failure. While India did reject Zuckerberg's attempt to become the internet there, it is my understanding that the program is widespread in other parts of the world.
> Did anyone ever really buy the "making the world a better place" kool aid?
I don't know if many people buy it anymore, but many certainly did back in 2009-2012. Tech giants were patting themselves on the back for fostering revolutions and helping spread "democracy." The media called Arab Spring a "Twitter Revolution." Making world a better place was in vogue. SV was not making social platforms for goldfish, it was writing a new chapter in human history.
It took years for the world to see how empty those promises were, and I am not sure if everyone has gotten the memo yet.
Yeah, I was in Egypt during the revolution, a revolution built on a social networking app is a revolution built on sand. The liberals claimed that the Muslim brotherhood "hijacked" the revolution, but the truth was that none of the liberals had the first clue about what it took to make a polity.
> Did anyone ever really buy the "making the world a better place" kool aid?
I had a friend who believed it, he is a very argumentative libertarian who liked using it to argue with people. He described it as a great place for you to shove your opinion down other people's throats. He got a job offer there at that time
Does anyone know why Facebook enforces the standardized, totalitarian blue-and-white theme for everyone?
I really want to hear what the internal discussions are, about restricting the color palette and UI appearance to a one-size-fits-all look and feel.
Is the reasoning psychological (blue light as an anti-suicide placebo), practical (everyone has to look at the same portal, and resolve techsupport themselves, helping each other), quasi-biological (blue as a circadian rhythm disruptor, not unlike gambling casinos), capricious (because mark zuckerberg just likes that format), or something else?
I find it oppressive to have to look at this unchanging furniture for the Facebook front end. It seems to severely dumb down the appeal to a lowest common denominator. Maybe that’s the reason?
MySpace allowed extensive customization. MySpace failed. Facebook wants to avoid the same fate, so they avoid presenting users with the paradox of choice. This could be scientifically grounded or it could be UX-design voodoo, but "any color you want as long as it's black" is gospel among those designing products/services to be used by the hoi polloi.
I'd be very curious to hear from any current (or recent) FB employees on what the internal climate is like lately. Do the rank and file view the recent controversy with distaste towards the company, or towards the media/press?
I can only offer hearsay since a friend is employed by FB. With that disclaimer, I will say that, apparently, FB employees are all across the board on the issue...HOWEVER, there are an increasing number of FB employees privately revealing that they no longer tell people exactly who employs them.
A friend works there and told me that that they have the feeling that the issues are being addressed and that all things considered the net contribution of Facebook to the world is positive
"Look at enough bullshit highly curated vacation photos on Facebook and you're bound to find the truth of your life gradually, then suddenly, more depressing than it probably is.
...
I quit Facebook a year ago, and when people ask me why, I tell them candidly: I don't want to look in people's windows anymore to see what they're doing. Even if they want me to. Especially if they want me to.
Don't waste your life crafting an advertisement for how great your life is. Get out there and live a great life."
I don't know if it is sour kool-aid or just a maturing company. I got to watch Sun go through it, NetApp's journey, and some of Google's progress, and I guess its now Facebook's time in the barrel.
What I experienced was a general dissatisfaction by the 'old guard' on where the company was going. Typically they would vote with their feet and start leaving to start other companies or other lives. A few of the old guard hung on, with an increasingly solid position because they had institutional knowledge that was no where else, eventually those folks can sleep at their desk and they will still reliably pull down the 'senior person' paycheck. And the company will refill with new employees who never knew what the company was like before so this is like how it is now. The company becomes more stagnant and less nimble, more unaware of what it doesn't know and more vocal about things it believes to be true but aren't. At this point the company becomes less competitive and depending on its residual DNA either fades away into the sunset (Sun) or turns into something else entirely (NetApp).
It is a great time to plant the seeds of something new. If it is cool enough you can recruit a lot of engineers out of these fading companies.
I think the start was the breaking up into "planets", and really it was the "gee if we charge $10 for every NFS client we will make bank!" attitude that Ed Zander brought to SunSoft.
Zander certainly didn't help, the whole "planets" didn't help, but for me it was definitely Solaris. It took the wind out of my sails and I eventually left.
I looked at Solaris recently and it still sucks. Sad to see all that work come to naught but it happens.
Honest question: what systems/distributions do you like?
What Unix (or unix like system) doesn't suck? The linux distributions are all fairly sloppy, the BSDs are fine but starting to have issues as so much open source code isn't being tested there.
Not defending Solaris here, but it seems to me that all the unix systems have become a little sloppy recently.
I'm pretty happy with Linux. Yeah, I wish it were better but it mostly just works for me.
Commercial Unix is as dead as commercial compilers. Which is to say not completely dead, but pretty darn close. Trying to make money off of an OS, a compiler, a source management system is a non-starter these days. Yeah, Github is a thing but that's not source management (even though everyone thinks it is), that's a UI and a very very constrained work flow.
If you are a tech company and you are being moral and trying to keep secrets, you have to try and weed out any overly unscrupulous employees as they may sell your data to other organisations.
If you are a tech company and you are being immoral and trying to keep secrets, you have to not only try and weed out any overly unscrupulous employees as they may sell your data to other organisations, but also any overly scrupulous employees, as they may leak to the press, regulators, or police. This severely diminishes your hiring pool, or guarantees that you will leak.
Any large organization can have its reputation seriously damaged by strategic leaks. If tens of thousands of people get together for years and years, someone is going to do something that looks terrible when amplified in the national media.
“It’s tough to build if you think you’re building a weapon. Especially if you thought you were going to be making helpful tools.”
Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.
Humanity is a superorganism. Thanks to the internet, it’s more connected than it’s ever been, and can “think” and change faster than it’s ever been able to before. Facebook is trying to build a neutral platform and useful tool for communication & socialising. Because of that neutrality, it has no inbuilt “immune system” for preventing the superorganism from being infected by memes created by individual humans. Quite the opposite: it rewards memes and viral popularity because the humans who run its “brain” can extract value from that effect. Most of these memes are benign (jokes and entertainment, advertisers trying to sell more widgets and widget-related services) but some are malignant/parasitic (e.g. influencing political outcomes for personal gain).
Any sufficiently large social network is going to have to contend with this and make the hard choice: do you remain neutral and let humans influence humanity, or do you try to prevent “social infection” when it’s deemed detrimental? But what are the criteria for intervention—sharing false information, for example? Who has the power to dictate what’s “true” or whether to intervene? Facebook? Governments? A benevolent AI—developed by whom? &c.
Interesting fact I was not aware of until recently: the phrase “to drink the kool-aid” was introduced after Jonestown Massacre, where hundreds of members of a religious cult willingly drank Kool-Aid laced with cyanide, and died.
40 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 82.0 ms ] threadDid anyone ever really buy the "making the world a better place" kool aid?
Could you imagine if other companies were expected to act so grandiose and sanctimonious about their mission? Imagine a world where McDonalds bills itself as a crusader to make the world better fed.
But yeah, the restaurant chain doesn’t claim to.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_McDonald_House_Charit...
I don't know if many people buy it anymore, but many certainly did back in 2009-2012. Tech giants were patting themselves on the back for fostering revolutions and helping spread "democracy." The media called Arab Spring a "Twitter Revolution." Making world a better place was in vogue. SV was not making social platforms for goldfish, it was writing a new chapter in human history.
It took years for the world to see how empty those promises were, and I am not sure if everyone has gotten the memo yet.
I had a friend who believed it, he is a very argumentative libertarian who liked using it to argue with people. He described it as a great place for you to shove your opinion down other people's throats. He got a job offer there at that time
I really want to hear what the internal discussions are, about restricting the color palette and UI appearance to a one-size-fits-all look and feel.
Is the reasoning psychological (blue light as an anti-suicide placebo), practical (everyone has to look at the same portal, and resolve techsupport themselves, helping each other), quasi-biological (blue as a circadian rhythm disruptor, not unlike gambling casinos), capricious (because mark zuckerberg just likes that format), or something else?
I find it oppressive to have to look at this unchanging furniture for the Facebook front end. It seems to severely dumb down the appeal to a lowest common denominator. Maybe that’s the reason?
https://blog.bufferapp.com/the-science-of-colors-in-marketin...
...
I quit Facebook a year ago, and when people ask me why, I tell them candidly: I don't want to look in people's windows anymore to see what they're doing. Even if they want me to. Especially if they want me to.
Don't waste your life crafting an advertisement for how great your life is. Get out there and live a great life."
Source:
http://time.com/5208108/facebook-cheating-infidelity-divorce...
That is a truly great quote
What I experienced was a general dissatisfaction by the 'old guard' on where the company was going. Typically they would vote with their feet and start leaving to start other companies or other lives. A few of the old guard hung on, with an increasingly solid position because they had institutional knowledge that was no where else, eventually those folks can sleep at their desk and they will still reliably pull down the 'senior person' paycheck. And the company will refill with new employees who never knew what the company was like before so this is like how it is now. The company becomes more stagnant and less nimble, more unaware of what it doesn't know and more vocal about things it believes to be true but aren't. At this point the company becomes less competitive and depending on its residual DNA either fades away into the sunset (Sun) or turns into something else entirely (NetApp).
It is a great time to plant the seeds of something new. If it is cool enough you can recruit a lot of engineers out of these fading companies.
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/slowlaris...
I looked at Solaris recently and it still sucks. Sad to see all that work come to naught but it happens.
What Unix (or unix like system) doesn't suck? The linux distributions are all fairly sloppy, the BSDs are fine but starting to have issues as so much open source code isn't being tested there.
Not defending Solaris here, but it seems to me that all the unix systems have become a little sloppy recently.
Commercial Unix is as dead as commercial compilers. Which is to say not completely dead, but pretty darn close. Trying to make money off of an OS, a compiler, a source management system is a non-starter these days. Yeah, Github is a thing but that's not source management (even though everyone thinks it is), that's a UI and a very very constrained work flow.
If you are a tech company and you are being immoral and trying to keep secrets, you have to not only try and weed out any overly unscrupulous employees as they may sell your data to other organisations, but also any overly scrupulous employees, as they may leak to the press, regulators, or police. This severely diminishes your hiring pool, or guarantees that you will leak.
If the reputation of your company is reliant on plugging leaks then there's probably something really, really wrong with your company.
For example: before the Snowden leaks most people thought the NSA was a relatively benign organization...
Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.
Humanity is a superorganism. Thanks to the internet, it’s more connected than it’s ever been, and can “think” and change faster than it’s ever been able to before. Facebook is trying to build a neutral platform and useful tool for communication & socialising. Because of that neutrality, it has no inbuilt “immune system” for preventing the superorganism from being infected by memes created by individual humans. Quite the opposite: it rewards memes and viral popularity because the humans who run its “brain” can extract value from that effect. Most of these memes are benign (jokes and entertainment, advertisers trying to sell more widgets and widget-related services) but some are malignant/parasitic (e.g. influencing political outcomes for personal gain).
Any sufficiently large social network is going to have to contend with this and make the hard choice: do you remain neutral and let humans influence humanity, or do you try to prevent “social infection” when it’s deemed detrimental? But what are the criteria for intervention—sharing false information, for example? Who has the power to dictate what’s “true” or whether to intervene? Facebook? Governments? A benevolent AI—developed by whom? &c.
Check out double binds. Viral negativity, defined.