Ask HN: Why do I have this weird feeling that noone working at FB posts on HN?
I see many Googlers, Applers (?), Amazonians or Netflixers posting and commenting on HN - but almost nobody working at Facebook/Meta. This is weird, because FB employs ~60K people, including lots of engineers (and probably good ones, according to the company's average salary), so there's definitely a lot of FB people reading HN.
I wonder if, because Facebook regularly gets very bad press here (stories about Facebook are overwhelmingly negative, and so are comments), FB people don't feel confident to speak. Do you share that feeling?
85 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadFor some, posting "I work at FB" is an admission that "I am part of the $PROBLEM" for any of the many, many ills people attribute to Facebook / Meta which garner that negative opinion and bad press.
EDIT: typo
I think people just don't like having a mirror held up to the very negative parts of human nature.
Social media as an industry may be joining tobacco, oil, "wall street" finance, gambling, and weapons as one where if your employment is involved in it, some people in some way will feel you're profiting from exploiting society and making it worse.
I personally don't think Facebook does anything wrong aside from being a normal social media company.
But any social media that wants to be "successful" in terms of revenue and usage will have to exploit vulnerabilities in human nature like our increased interest in negative rhetoric about "out-groups". Any of the other companies in the stigmatised industries will either have to exploit human nature to be successful or be regulated such that their competitors can't do the same (like with tobacco advertising being heavily regulated). Regulation of social media seems to be the only real solution for society if we aren't happy with the status quo.
As an aside, I think if people can be so easily misled with "fake news" and radicalised along partisan lines, the issue lies with the U.S. education system and culture rather than the site that simply hosts the content.
At what point do people have to take responsibility for their own reaction to a world full of misinformation and tactics that seek to exploit them? If anyone reading this wants to post happy stories and accurate information on Facebook all day there's nothing stopping you, so why won't that fix the problem? Because of the issues with the users themselves.
I've personally stopped using Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, ect. because I've seen the harmful effects it has on my psyche. If consumers aren't smart enough to recognize that and willingly give it up, the issue is with the individuals who lack the education, cultural standards, and willpower to do so, and Facebook is not responsible for how 300+ million Americans were raised and educated such that they can't consume media healthily.
Perhaps then maybe FB will understand why it's unwise to create and maintain such bubbles.
You get downvoted because there’s actual evidence the interview process is deeply flawed and essentially a proxy measure for tolerance of anxiety (and of course raw intelligence), but does not correlate well to actual performance. You shouldn’t necessarily be downvoted, especially since there might be some merit to the overall thrust of your argument in defense of the tech interview. However at some point it’s entirely possible you sound like the person espousing homeopathy to the local skeptic club.
Free exchange of ideas does not mean each is given equal weight. That’s only a lie those who spread misinformation and peddle pseudoscience propagate.
HN, as anywhere, has an echo chamber, sure, but it also does have better dialog even around the sacred cows than others (i.e., perhaps the biggest one here, "startups are great!", is balanced with "They're lotteries. Go to a FAANG if you want to get rich, and anywhere established if you want better work/life balance")
They care more about the money that they're making.
Personally Twitter is more of a stain of society, but for some reason HN has a stiffy for anyone who shits on FB.
We have some awesome stuff because of FB open source; React, PHP, HHVM, JSX, etc.
I agree they should stay out of politics, but they seem the most reserved of all services w/ the censoring.
Maybe that's why they are hated? They don't censor enough and that's where the conservatives are?
I didn't say anything of the sort -- was just talking quoting my friends who work at Facebook.
> Personally Twitter is more of a stain of society, but for some reason HN has a stiffy for anyone who shits on FB.
I don't have any friends at Twitter.
> We have some awesome stuff because of FB open source; React, PHP, HHVM, JSX, etc.
The Church has tons of good causes but also has priests that literally fuck kids. Should they be above criticism for it? Should we give them a pass even though they actively covering up such vile villainy? Facebook's actions are a fairly good analogue...
Yeah, you didn't say anything of substance, just slander.
> admits that they've sold their sold (soul)
> and acknowledges that the company is doing harm.
> They care more about the money that they're making.
None of those are quotes btw, they are secondhand anecdotes mixed in with your opinion.
> The Church has tons of good causes but also has priests that literally fuck kids
Yeah well until you break the case that FB is fucking kids how about you find a better analogy.
Or maybe come up with an actual reason you want to state about why you don't like FB and why you are singling them out over other terrible social media companies.
> Should we give them a pass even though they actively covering up such vile villainy?
Vile villainy. Good one. Care to expand? Nothing you said is specific, just angry feelings.
What do YOU really want them to do?
-- edit --
None of that was clear until your last comment, it's still not fully clear.
You kept saying FB, not social media companies.
It seems you have a generic issue with social media, not FB.
Does that stop at forums, news aggregators, or what?
Is Reddit included, is Hacker News? What's the core issue for you?
The same way that dumping toxic waste isn't legal.
I've been perfectly clear in expressing my intentions. I don't know what this political bias you're accusing me of is from but if you look at other comments I've made you'll see you're way off the mark.
It seems that most people on here don't post who they work for, Facebook or otherwise.
But definitely if there were a post about why fb is evil and I worked at fb I probably wouldn’t mention that. You don’t see that many google rms defending google on HN either.
I’m not saying journalists are scum by any means, just saying it’s kind of a natural outcome.
Meanwhile most people are looking at dog photos and pictures of their friends’ kids and not worrying about these issues. Or saving money on Amazon even as their downtown hollows out.
So why would any Facebook employees volunteer to be part of that? If you say anything neutral or even positive about Facebook as a non-employee your comment will attract rapid downvotes here. Imagine commenting as an employee on the inside of the company.
FWIW, I know several people at FB who also comment on HN. They have no interest in discussing FB on HN because we all know exactly how the discussion will go regardless of the veracity of any claims or content.
I mean... refusing to look at things you don't like or don't fit your narrative/content bubble is pretty much the reason Facebook exists. Stands to reason it applies to HN too.
For the most part, HN does a great job of criticism and opposing viewpoints when it comes to technical topics. But for political viewpoints, it is a cohesive, tightly bound and impenetrable monoculture primarily echoing Silicon Valley zeitgeist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
For this thread, though, I'm not sure the negative slant is enough to explain it. There is a ton of negative on most every topic.
Privacy, algorithmization of feeds, etc. are important to me but I’m much more afraid of opinions being seeded now, which get turned into votes, which determines the people we elect, which in turns determines the type of policies we enact, which then plays out in 5-20 years, when I’m still alive and also the people who come after me.
For example, we have to deal with the TSA now because of a series of many unfortunate events that transpired since WW1. You can’t go back and undo certain mistakes.
Facebook is unfortunately where a lot of people seem to get their news and that is scary. Primary sources should be people’s news sources.
If not, why not?
I get a general fear of social media. And I am not trying to give anyone a pass. I don't see a distinction, though.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-algorithm-sex-drugs-mino...
NYTimes would never do a serious negative story about Tiktok because it goes against their political bias. It matches exactly with HN's bias. Here is a praise-worthy Tiktok story that boggles the mind: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/10/arts/TIK-TOK....
It is all partisan and not very objective. I think all social media is terrible for the society.
1. https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/10/business/cnn-poll-facebook/in...
Clearly the campaign against FB is to get Zuck to censor more, the media lackeys at CNN are on the case!
> zero regard for actual human happiness and societal well-being.
You said nothing actionable. "Actual human happiness." Lol. "Societal well-being" Whoa.
Have you compared their happiness output levels to other social media companies?
Where's the study that the societal well-being meters for Twitter are better than FB?
Form a clear criticism of what you want FB to do. I assume it has something to do with censoring dissent?
-- edit --
Cute, you linked a Wikipedia article about whataboutism. Linking to it doesn't make it relate to this though.
Please expand on your criticisms so we can debate them, everything you said is subjective and obscure so I'm trying to figure out what exactly you are taking issue with, hence the other social media services offered as a comparison. Do they do that too in your opinion? Is it Facebook only? Did you see them sacrificing babies? Do you want them to censor more?
Comparisons are how you find contradictions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contradiction
(look I can do that too!)
-- edit --
Them: Facebook is bad You: What about Twitter and TikTok ?
I'm pointing out that you are not refuting their point while still defending Facebook.
It seems you believe social medias are the way they are because that's all they can be.
It shows a lack of imagination and understanding of how they influence each others rather than compete to the benefit of users and society.
I don't understand accusations of whataboutism. They oftentimes seem hypocritical: accusing someone of whataboutism is as relevant (and therefore, by its own logic, as rhetorically valid) as the thing it seeks to criticize.
Why is exposing double standards and hypocrisies via a relevant example not a valid form of argumentation?
I believe social media behemoths have been biased in their moderation / censorship and they should make their mod logs public.
That's a specific criticism and suggestion. What is your specific criticism and suggestion?
Crying whataboutism is a cop-out, you only replied to my comparisons. I said much more, including questions trying to drill their point out of them.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Is it a bias if it is a representative sample of coverage of the company from around the web?
Are there positive stories about the company being posted that somehow don’t make it to HN? I never, ever come across anything positive about the company - HN or elsewhere.
What’s the positive angle that we are missing?
For example, in the US >20% of people are unwilling to take a covid vaccine, citing reasons ranging from fear of unknown side effects, to intentional government orchestrated mass steralization, to nanobots controlling their minds. I doubt more than 5% of the HN crowd is anti-vaccine, and those that are probably stick to the more realistic objections (side effects).
On the other hand, rationality is basically thrown out the window during discussions about FB (and to a lesser extent other big companies). All of a sudden, large conspiracies with thousands of people keeping silent for years are possible, impossibly sophisticated mind control technology exists, pure-evil or amoral actors pull on hidden strings to control society, etc.
In reality, people aren't interested in those posts, so nobody upvotes them and they die. Also most content like that would be created by FB itself, and even I don't want to read self-aggrandizing crap.
Somewhat related: I remember seeing some stats where ~25% of Americans thought there's a 10% change you die if you get Covid...
Alternatively, news about FB is overwhelmingly negative, possibly because they actually are that bad.
If you go down the to stories: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=facebook
it's virtually all either FB doing something unethical or someone taking action against FB (because they're unethical).
Most of us come here for free spirited discussion and interaction of ideas, and ultimately to optionally contribute and mostly to learn.
On that note I have seen many identify where they see relevant that they work at Meta/FB just as much as any of the other FAANG participants.
I share that feeling, but also... Apple, Amazon and Netflix have some halfway decent customer support, whereas Google and Facebook have next to none so I think part of the cause may be people tired of being abused as unpaid customer service / "grievance counselor".
Even when people say who they work for, they need to be cautious of the content they write. Defending a company against negative press is the role of CEOs and other personnel.
This attempt to bind HN participation to employer is confusing to me. Is this not a (mostly) anonymous board? I usually have zero idea who anyone is working for at any given moment unless explicitly mentioned in whatever comment.
A more likely middle ground conclusion is that you are partially correct - perhaps most FB employees who post on HN just don't disclose who their employer is at the same frequency as others, so the aggregate perception is that fewer FB employees frequent this board.
That said, probably most people are aware that most companies are ambivalent - in fact even some NGOs. The more you find out the worse it gets. But still most people continue using those companies products or open source creations. Speaking of React, Angular etc. etc. Although in theory it would be possible to slalom around that.
Still, it's a great place to work for in many ways, and while a lot of the criticisms from outside somewhat exaggerate and misrepresent things a bit, I kind of agree with a lot of them too. A few years back I worked for Microsoft and felt quite similarly when they got bad press for whatever.
To be honest, I don't get why some people go out of their way to cheerlead for their employers. Not that it happens here much, but when it does, it's quite sad to see such naïve fealty. Personally I prefer the mercenary state of mind when it comes to employment, it's good to keep a healthy work-life attitude.
I've thought a lot about this, and I think it has to do with the innate human desire to belong to a tribe. I also think that's why army's will tend to recruit people on the younger side of adulthood, but also why companies that require a lot of hard work and long hours will do the same. Younger adults with less life experience (the under 25s), generally speaking (obviously there are always exceptions), will tend to be the target audience for companies and armies simply because they are much more likely to develop some form of loyalty/tribalism. I also think a part of it is due to the fact that most humans are still developing their worldview at that point, and so if you get them at this stage, you're much more likely to mold them to buy into your vision.
Imagine for a second that you felt passionately about internet social networking - all the possibilities it represents and all the problems it solves. And, you then discovered that there was a company solving social networking problems and they pay really well. And, they hire you, pay you well for the kind of work that you want to do.
Then, maybe you'll cheerlead for your employer.
You could also choose to work for some other company that's doing amazing work and perhaps doesn't pay as well but is better aligned with your values.
On shared values, I think it's wise to be skeptical of a company's declarations of their values, especially the tech giants. It's typically just a veneer over their actual values of making the largest profits possible and dominating whichever market they enter.
You also have to remember that these are public companies and engineers often work on stuff the public hasn’t learned about yet. There are too many land mines to be super open.
The problem is that presenting yourself as a Facebook employee gives you a deluge of angry HN responses that are normally unrelated to your current post. It's not the bad press alone, but the design of HN and other comment ranking systems make it harder for "unpopular" commenters to get a good signal to noise ratio.
Also, there's the media. Everyone has seen too many clickbait stories based on a single anonymous comment by an FB employee to risk writing anything.
I see people do this, but I also found people that i know to be facebooker not disclose it probably due to unrelated comments made on fb more so than topic on hand.
All in all, I don't like what most of these companies do, but I also don't like moralizing employees directly for it. Rarely if ever do they work on the things that make those companies a problem. That requires coordination that engineers are not typically involved in.
The phrase "making the world a better place" is also lost on me. How many startups have said this, only to make it better for some people but worse for others? It's an illusion we tell ourselves.
Let's see if this comment will go through...
The biggest reason you don't see comments from Facebook employees is exactly what others here have pointed out: HN is overwhelmingly negative in its attitude toward Facebook.
This leads to a super pragmatic reason not to post. If you post anything neutral or positive, you typically get downvoted a lot. If your comment somehow avoids going negative, then you get a ton of replies accusing you of being a paid shill, and people stalking you on other social media trying to "out" you as a shill. That's not fun and I assume it's enough to discourage most people from posting.
That being said, I used to post a lot about FB and still do, even when it gets me downvoted. I worked on recommendation ML and contributed to a bunch of different surfaces, so I think I have an unusually well informed perspective on how things actually work at FB and what sorts of processes/motivations lead to the negative outcomes that cause bad PR. I think FB has a lot of problems, but as an insider with no extreme political views, it was very difficult for me to convince myself that anything FB has done is morally wrong.
HN has some decent flamewar prevention automation to prevent me from spending too much time arguing here, so at the end of the day its a decent way to vent and represent an alternative point of view besides "FB bad Zuck evil".
Also, while I might sometimes have wanted to mention something, I certainly didn't want to answer follow up questions, and that provides unsatisfying dialog.
Could you enlighten as to what those are?
>I think FB has a lot of problems, but as an insider with no extreme political views, it was very difficult for me to convince myself that anything FB has done is morally wrong.
My personal complaints would be:
- Mass censorship over certain topics (e.g. Kyle Rittenhouse)
- Forcing previously purchased goods (e.g. Oculus headsets) to be tied to a Facebook Account
- Paying for zero-day exploits of the Tails operating system
- the Real name policy
- Shadow profiles created by inserting hidden pixels into unaffiliated webpages
Generally speaking, I believe company leadership is directionally correct on most issues, with one very important exception (pre-CA data openness). The metrics that company leadership cares about are pro-social and correlate well with user happiness long term.
Because of hierarchical delegation, teams and individual's sometimes have incentives that aren't well aligned with company priorities. For example, suppose the company wants to encourage people to share more pictures they take in the app's camera. Sharing these pictures is (IMO) well aligned with user happiness. However, you can't task most ICs with causing users to share more videos, it's too hard to directly influence. So instead you task somebody with increasing the number of images captured (not only shared) because this is easier to change. The result? Lottery-style "which are you" camera effects that encourage users to take 10s of pictures for each share.
Stuff like that often plays out without leadership noticing for months or years. I think FB is getting much better at noticing these sorts of things and intervening more quickly, but it's not possible to fix everything instantly.
I'm not going to debate your other points, this isn't the right venue for that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772401
It’s a fresh perspective on targeted advertising in what is normally a boring discussion with the same predictable comments. Whether you agree with the post or not doesn’t matter. It’s a candid insider’s view that drives curiosity and precisely the kind of content that keeps me returning to HN.
I'm happy to endorse that comment using my real-world identity.
Facebook does not do "hypertargeting". The marginal cost of running text processing on messages or image processing on photos for specific users exceeds the value of that information for targeting by many orders of magnitude. Facebook literally cannot afford to "listen to your conversations".
The way I typically explain targeted advertising is something like this. You go to a website, you put something in your cart, but you don't buy. Facebook shows you an ad for that website the next day, you go back and buy the thing in your cart. That basic pattern probably accounts for 20-30% of ad revenue for Facebook, and the only "personal information" required is that you recently visited a particular website. The next 70-80% is similarly banal stuff, like "you're the sort of person who buys outdoor gear and you're likely to buy this quarter".
Who here is upset with some of the decisions of their employers? Who else is upset that the management they work under are scumbags? I would dare say most of us fit that category.
I used to work for a company whose product is pretty good, but the CEO and CTO behave unethically. They are fine with lying and cheating if they can get away with it.
For example, it was discovered that in some cases the company was double-charging customers. When it was fixed, the CEO and CTO noticed a drop in revenue and told the employee to "unfix" it. That employee has ethics and thus refused revert the change.
All my previous coworkers are good people trying to make a living. I was happy that my efforts were providing the users a good product and that the company was financially supporting my coworkers. I was unhappy that my efforts were enriching scumbags.
For the vast majority of employees, it's just tiresome to keep hearing negative hot takes being parroted over and over by people who don't have any insider insight, and often times not even the decency of verifying their sources before jumping on a bandwagon to bash some strawman for some internet points.
A lot of times, these hot takes are clearly victims of egregious cognitive biases, like suggesting that working for X employer must necessarily mean that you share the company ideology, or that getting paid more money is somehow directly associated with being morally corrupt. There's also armchair "hiring managers" who boldly claim they would never hire FB people (an actual hiring manager knows how hard it is to find talent and knows they don't really have the luxury of flaunting arrogance, and they certainly know that discrimination - even of non-protected classes - is a no-no). These threads often devolve into what-about-isms galore and I-dont-use-X-because-reason anedoctes that frankly are not very snowflakey or insightful at all.
These employees get it, they've heard them all. It's like asking which twin is older: people think they're so clever for having the "insight" that one must necessarily have come out first, but that's literally the first thing everyone and their brothers asks. So, put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself what you would do if literally everyone that met you made a remark about a facial feature of yours or something like that. Chances are, you'd grin awkwardly, roll your eyes and find some way to change the subject to something less tiresome. On the internet, you'd just find another less bothersome thread to spend your precious attention span in, and that's exactly what people do.