"Facebook was not originally created to be a company, it was originally envisioned as a collective chronicle of who was hot, and who certainly was not."
Good job with the scan. I started reading the book and began to feel rage so I stopped after about 20 pages. Is it the most self-unaware book or just people trying their hand at PR?
Actually you can download the whole thing by using https://github.com/ofou/graham-essays , and then I imagine you can pipe it into pandoc or something of the sort to create a PDF. And then you can send that over to https://www.blurb.com/pdf-to-book or similar providers to get it printed.
When I attempted this once, I couldn't get the pages to be formatted nicely like a book, and the number of pages I ended up with was close to 1500 or something along those lines, which ends up costing you $100+ to print out with one of these services.
However I suspect that if someone were to typeset the essays nicely, it'd be an amazing coffee table book.
This was 2012. There was still hope and optimism in the tech space. The Internet had helped overturn powerful regimes and given voice to the disenfranchised. There was the idea that person to person public discourse could resolve many societal problems. Smartphones had exploded just 6 years prior and they were already making inroads into traditionally underserved and neglected communities around the world, helping farmers improve yields and young women become self sufficient so they could escape forced marriages.
The idea that we could join together and share ideas and make the world a better place isn't a wrong idea, it is just one that got subverted once it was realized that inciting anger in users lead to more usage and thus more ad impressions.
That might be the most blatant "no true Scotsman" I've ever seen. Practically out of a textbook. I'm educated. I and hundreds of coworkers at multiple companies still believed it in 2012. You said something that is simply, provably untrue.
I still believe technology can be used for good. Diseases get cured every day, more people are able to make art of all kinds than ever before, families can keep in touch all around the world, people with disabilities can use technology to overcome what would have previously been hard limits.
It is unfortunate that we have allowed algorithmic social media content to destroy so much, and to allow for targeted ad based services to cause such drastic harm to society. However society pretty much now knows what the root problems are and if there is a will, many of the worst offenders can be legislated away.
Remove gacha/lootbox mechanics from games and remove personalized algorithmic social media feeds.
It turns out, as a species, it isn't good for us to carry around machines 24/7 that can hit the dopamine center in our brains, or that can deliver targeted outrage on demand.
How about all the other stuff though? A connected world where I can play games with people around the globe? Forums that let fans share their love of their favorite media/artist/singer/author. The hundreds of amazing YouTube chefs that have introduced authentic, sometimes hyperlocal, world cuisines to a global audience. The sheer number of in-depth documentaries that are getting made about every possible niche topic now. The independent media organizations that have popped up (Curiosity Stream, Dropout, to name just two).
Why not? It is mostly correct. One on one most people are reasonable. In large groups, or when posting online with the need to show in-group behavior, or when posting publicly where everyone in one's social group can later judge, people start doing the herd mentality thing, and they also become rude to anyone not in their same social circle.
I have no proof, but I dare say the majority of angry people posting horrible stuff on social media are rather pleasant when around friends and family.
But all of a sudden, when they get up on stage, they feel the need to copy the behaviors of those around them, which means anger and vitrol.
When I first joined the Internet (1995!), there was more of an expectation of civility (IRC being a notable exception), and that is the behavior pattern I picked up upon.
> When I first joined the Internet (1995!), there was more of an expectation of civility (IRC being a notable exception), and that is the behavior pattern I picked up upon.
Also netiquette, learning to lurk before posting, meeting people outside your normal groups and getting along with them and other behaviors I'm sure I'm forgetting. Being a tech person on the early internet, despite the flame wars, was a positive experience for me. People wanted to make this work, and that early internet full of tech-minded people and engineers did work to some degree. The idea that this could become a place where people could be what they wanted to be but were still accepted was the idea going at that time, at least according to my experiences. Niches mostly kept to themselves, you could find the groups you wanted to be a part of, and you could avoid those you didn't. When everything we had started to go mainstream, it started to crack and fray. When everything went commercial, it all came crashing down.
I'm thinking mostly of pre-web, and early web. I remember thinking when I came across the first URL in a movie that it was likely the start of the end of the internet as I knew it. I think it was "The Net" which was probably mid-90s.
Where were you during the "arab spring" ? I'm not of the opinion that twitter actually made any difference on-the-ground but that didn't stop the mediascape from preening at how hopeful the future was now that individuals could get information in and out of otherwise closed societies.
I thought I'd try and find some evidence from that time period, 2008-2012, and found this article summarizing a metastudy [0] on perception and outcomes of social media on civic engagement.
Among all of the factors examined, 82% showed a positive relationship between SNS use and some form of civic or political engagement or participation.
Provide evidence. 2012 is pretty late to have been drinking the techno-utopian koolaid but millions of people, and IMO, maybe half of silicon valley tech workers, took this assumption as ground truth.
This breathless article from 2009 [1] (found in 2 seconds by searching "tech will change the world year:2009") is a good example of what most people thought. You can find blog many posts and articles from the time saying basically the same thing. If you forget, back in 2012 people used to tune into Apple's yearly keynote with bated breath in anticipation of what marvelous innovation Apple would grace us with next. An app to replace your therapists? Uber for dogs? Solve poverty and racism? That was the attitude I remember among my peers (college kids and yes, professors too).
Technology has lifted a lot of people out of poverty.
Telemedicine reaching remote villages, drone deliveries of medical supplies, mobile phones giving farmers weather forecasts, and even allowing those farmers to find more competitive buyers for their crops.
Even within the US, for the longest time technology was the only field that was not ruled by elites. Any kid who was smart enough could get their hands on a computer somehow, learn to program, and have a career ahead of them. No medical associating limiting applicants, no elitist law firms, no unions only giving membership cards to children of existing members.
A lot of poor kids in the US, myself included, got lifted up by technology.
I can kind of understand having that kind of optimism back in the Internet of, say, 1998, before we saw how vampiric venture-backed winner-take-most tech companies would be. But by 2012, it would be incredibly naive of tech employees (of any company) to seriously believe they were some kind of force for good.
There _was_ backlash. It just didn't operationalize very effectively. For instance, news organizations mostly saw FB and Google as a way to undermine and ultimately replace vetted news with unvetted, unprofessional hot takes. Anyone above a certain age likely saw these viewpoints and agreed with them but not enough to start a movement.
When facebook became generally available I was maybe 14-15, and even back then I remember thinking "this feels very much like it's going to ruin some young womens' lives". But what the hell was I going to do? I mean - the platform _was_ used as a sort of early Tinder, where sexual attraction could play out in a semi-anonymized way.
The problem regarding news orgs is that they have previously sounded the alarm about bloggers, insisting that the sky was going to fall down now that any random person was allowed to just say anything they wanted and have other people read it!
But many of those blogs (which now take the form of subscription newsletters) had incredibly valuable insight and perspectives that were otherwise not being reported on. The news media's alarmism about bloggers was (IMHO rightfully) ignored.
So when a couple of years later they started freaking out about Facebook/Twitter/etc, well, same old story, new platform.
The difference this time was that FB and Twitter algorithmically fed articles to people, instead of articles naturally spreading virally from person to person.
Not that the platforms were that bad at first! Remember that in the early 2010s Facebook was largely a platform for Farmville! It was drowning in spam for free to play social games, but the feed was still largely a timeline. Twitter only released their Apple client in 2010, and there were still a large number of third party clients in 2012.
A few years later Facebook would become inundated with political spam and vitriol, but 2012 was still an insane time of growth and optimism.
All I'm saying is that there were people who would have called it naive to be optimistic about such things- and that they were ultimately correct even though they didn't have the numbers or a proper movement.
That's a fair point, I would just contend that I imagine a cohort of techies shared my views on the subject although i can't prove that and I wasn't old enough to be employed by a tech company when these issues were around.
I was that naïve in 1998, owing to that being roughly when my pocket money first stretched to buying a modem. Almost the first thing I stumbled into was a flame-war.
Yet even today, I see people regard the lack of moderation on certain sites as an unadulterated axiomatic good. Is that blindness really naïveté, or is it just a political stance like all others? If so, I would not call that naïveté even if the effect is the same, for it is a thing all suffer from, it's the blind spot in our thoughts, no matter how experienced and sophisticated and pragmatic we may otherwise be.
Some additional context: morale at Facebook was relatively poor around this time period, partially due to the disappointing stock performance right after the IPO, as well as a one-time company-wide reduction in bonuses a bit after that. So parts of this book may have been intended to help inspire a workforce that was becoming slightly disgruntled over compensation.
fwiw they were still giving the red book to all new hires in ~mid 2013. Personally at the time I found parts of it to be interesting from a "company telling its own history" perspective, and other parts to be extremely cringe-inducing. That said, I'm sometimes a grumpy cynic, and I'm also familiar with some random rare aspects of FB history due to previously working for Harvard IT. (I started working there a year after Zuckerberg dropped out, so didn't have any overlap, but some of my colleagues there were directly involved in the disciplinary hearings regarding Facemash.)
There's a school of thought in change management that suggests that a time comes when current stories aren't working for the culture you're trying to move an organisation towards. A few here have said morale was low at FB right then.
At times like that, restating some important old stories and legends, salted with some useful new ones can help to galvanize people and create the culture change you want.
A good example is someone mentioned in this thread is Zuck's beat up old car. That's a great old story for the early days, but probably needed burying at the Red Book time. Clearly he's not going to drive that forever, so you need some more up to date motivational culture lore which embraces more excess while retaining how the Devs are still world-changing hackers who should work all nighters because 'we're all in this together for mankind, team'.
The car wasn't beat up (I don't see anyone claiming that here) or even all that old... it was just a very modestly-priced choice of vehicle for someone of Zuckerberg's wealth and position. I believe he was still driving it at the time of the red book.
Nor does the book really "embrace more excess" financially, at least as far as I can remember (and I don't see any of that flipping through my dusty copy briefly just now either). Instead it's the opposite: "Facebook was not originally created to be a company", "We don't build services to make money, we make money to build better services", etc.
Again, this was a period of disappointing post-IPO stock performance. The market wasn't convinced yet that FB could successfully transition to focusing on mobile. It took about 15 months after the IPO for the share price to start looking more positive.
So that was a factor, combined with an obvious desire to keep aspects of "chaotic small nimble startup" vibe/culture at a company that was definitely no longer a startup.
Fb did actually accomplish a huge feat. They connected in a defacto social network pretty much everyone in the world that wanted to be connected via a social network. They had just hit a billion users in 2012, took them 8 years, and the internet existed with a lot of hype and similar pretty much failed attempts of this before they succeeded. I think a lot of people probably forget or are too young now to know what even the early successful internet was like. It had a ton of hype, promise, etc. but just doing something simple like talking to other people was kind of clunky. It was cool because it had all the BBS and forums and niche community stuff. But, I'd venture to say for most people it was a solo experience. You got online, did some reading or research or gamed a bit, but didn't really start talking to other humans online until the late 2000s or later. You definitely didn't have a way be connected with people you actually knew, to your social network as we know it today. Sure, you had email, but we all know that has a very specific purpose and is not exactly social or hitting the same spot. This was actually a world changing product, there was a lot to be optimistic about.
All that said, I am not much of a social media user and never really used Fb much myself. I see the appeal and I see the bad sides of it. I think we'd be much better off without it. I don't necessarily like the way in which it changed the world, but there was a lot to be excited about at this point in time. Not liking the product/company/industry/etc doesn't negated what they achieved.
I think in 2012, SV startups (and especially social media startups) were still getting high on their own supply: there was a seemingly genuine groundswell belief that unilaterally connecting the world would be a force for good, rather than a mere reconfiguration of powers.
(I don't think Zuckerberg himself is a true believer, but I do think that the people who wrote and read this book in 2012 probably believed it. This was the same year as the Arab Spring, after all.)
Yes, this. I was at Uber in SF around 2016 or so when they did their "pixels and bits" rebrand which felt very similar. It felt very... "we are messiahs"? Most people felt it, only the people with the highest paychecks (or managers) played into it.
After hearing the core values of the company thrown around in regular speech so often most people got kind of numb to anything corporate (e.g. "I really like that you're always hustling so hard but I would love to see you do a bit more toe stepping").
I left SF a year or so after that so I wonder if that whole approach has changed in the bigger offices or not. Being in Europe now most people here (most ..) wouldn't play into it I don't think. Retrospectively feels very American.
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EDIT: Actually it's kind of hard to find info on the rebrand now. There's the announcement[0] but that only seems to allude to the weird philosophical aspect of it in the description, which leads me to believe they never published it publicly.
> The new Uber brand system is made up of primary and secondary components that tell the story of technology moving the physical world. Today, we're rolling out a new look and feel that celebrates the cities we're in and the technology that brings people what they want, when they want it.
It was more than just "primary and secondary components", they had somehow likened people and pixels together and were trying to create some weird (but similar) narrative of "connecting everything through transport" or whatever. I think the idea was that they wanted to start breaking into more verticals, a la UberEATS and whatnot, but I distinctly remember hearing a lot of "what ifs" about freight, air, etc. that I think were mostly fluff chatter to hype up the rebrand.
Most people, even internally, hated it it, and shortly after that started monthly, then weekly, then at times daily new public scandals about the company or TK, so many people left shortly thereafter.
For better or worse, social media (I’d even go as far as saying Facebook) has changed the world. As cringey as that book sounds, people loved hopium of early 2010s. Maybe I was young and naive as well, but I also believed that such connections will unite the world somehow.
I could never figure out how much of the employee directed propaganda was from people who were doing it ironically and how much was from people who were drinking the Flavor Aid.
I don't think I saw any posters about carpooling, but if there were any, reprints of the classic [1] would have fit right in with the rest of the posters.
I'm pretty sure I saw this book, but I don't think I saved a copy I don't think they were still printing it when my employer was acquired.
Unfortunately, the propaganda doesn't work Page 110 talks about building trust, but what has FB done to earn your trust lately?
I think the way to read it is as a few things:
- An artifact intended to try to help solidify a sense of unity of mission and values
- Internal cheerleading
- A stake in the sand about things which did not fit in with the values.
I read this at the time it showed up on everyone's desks (I wish I'd kept it, but I have no idea where it is). Employees naturally rolled their eyes at some of the excessive optimism in some places, but generally it got the ethos right. That some of the boldest statements have fallen by the wayside ("We don't build better services to make money; We make money to build better services", "Build Products around people, not data") is obviously disappointing, but I'd view what it was trying to do in the light of a piece of art that fell short of its goal rather than merely self-unaware.
It was never intended as PR. It delivered its message via anecdotes and the experiences of working there, not in any way that would have anywhere close to the same meaning to the broader world.
page 17. android operating system on an iphone 4. i'm crying right now, particularly the way this is juxtaposed with so many critical moments in history.
I think it is meant to be a generic phone, the edges and front camera are wrong for an iphone, but then the home button is very distinctly an iphone. It is weird.
The "Little Red Book" is the name of Mao Zedong's propaganda book. It's an example of indoctrination.
Marshall McLuhan introduced the idea that the "medium is the message," which is heavily alluded to in this book with images of the printing press, etc. The idea is that changes in how information is shared play a bigger role than the actual content of the messages being exchanged. Chris Cox, the Chief Product Officer, used to regularly talk about McLuhan.
McLuhan also envisioned trends in the change of information media culminating in a "global village," which Facebook echoes here in its mission of "making the world more open and connected." McLuhan expected that this would divide us more than it would unite us.
So I think what the person you're replying to was saying Facebook's appropriation of Mao Zedong and Marshall McLuhan is... weird. Facebook is directly drawing from dictators' propaganda and a philosopher who predicted what Facebook would bring about, and didn't think it was a good thing.
No, they didn't. Facebook was just a less trashy, more exclusive version of myspace when it came out. Geocities, livejournal, blogger etc. were earlier iterations on the same concept - personal websites for non-techies. The only thing new about Facebook was their relative success in signing up a broader userbase, which was probably just a right-place, right-time thing of being around when computers and high-speed internet were becoming cheap and ubiquitous rather than anything different about what they were doing.
It's hilarious to see people desperately put the blame on the connectivity platform when deep down they themselves know, it's the users. Just as always, the platform itself is indifferent; it is the people spewing poison.
I think Google aped Facebook on world-changing by harvesting data and running algorithms to get you to scroll through a list. Changed the US might be more accurate.
I’m quite confident this would have been based on metadata collected by Facebook from its user activity. The company has been extremely analytical about its own growth, and id be surprised if this wasn’t a conclusion from an in-house data scientist that just got Zuckerberg’s name stamped on it.
While I’m sure Facebook had data to roughly justify this, just like Moores Law, I’m sure this is equal parts back-projection as prophetic declaration of intent.
For Facebook, they needed the cultural expectation to be ever-increasing data sharing. They (along with other companies) facilitated the creation of tools to share ever-increasing amounts of data.
Before we started using "share" to mean "post" or "upload", and long before it meant "rent", it meant other things. Now it's so normal that we don't even think of how that word is a particular framing of those activities.
What I find interesting about this "law" is that for a while it seemed true, but things seem to have reached some kind of peak for some of us, and nowadays, I rather share very little online.
As far as I know that was a distinct, previous endeavor. Only afterwards did the Vinklevoi approach him to make the website, an idea which he then allegedly ran with on his own.
I think people here are too young to remember the tech industry in 2012. None of the images and ideas conveyed in this book (printing press, cave art, fall of the Berlin wall, Arab Spring, particle accelerators) were outlandish for the time and space it was printed in. Tech was all about optimism and idealism. Everyone in silicon valley knew they were changing the world for the better, and tech was the missing piece all along. Silly people would finally all stop fighting and get along now that they had Facebook and Twitter and iPhones.
OP didn’t make a statement about the facts on the ground, but the culture and myths of the time. (If you think the villainy myths we tell ourselves today are more grounded in truth, they’re not. We’re always in a narrative. And there is nothing wrong with collective narratives.)
Narrative is the correct word for what this is. This is what Facebook leadership wanted to persuade the Facebook rank-and-file that _this_ is what they're about. This is purposeful internal propaganda.
Yes but people talked about it even less than they do today. Back then you could say connecting people is always a good thing and people didn't challenge that openly like we do today.
This site is from that era, a bunch of posters on this thread are registered from then or before.
There was plenty of cynicism in tech back then too, plenty of posters who always complained about 'micro$oft'. How Oracle had been corrupted, etc.
What seems to be different now is that the optimism hype fades quicker. Back then Google kept it going for years. Recently things like Tesla and OpenAI the optimism gave way to the harsh reality of greed a lot quicker.
There was plenty of cynicism in tech back then too, plenty of posters who always complained about 'micro$oft'.
I think the anti-Microsoft sentiment (outside of some internet forums, and justified IE6 hate) had been dialled back by the early 2010s.
.NET was a thing, they were post-Gates, post-antitrust, making significant efforts at developer outreach. Windows 7 was a hit.
Despite working in the Microsoft ecosystem, I didn't feel trapped, and the walled garden was coming down, with awareness of non-Microsoft technologies being widespread.
I think the movie The Social Network was responsible for bringing this into the public consciousness, and constructing it to some extent. It kind of framed the discussion about the software industry for at least a decade.
I think that’s maybe reversed. The Social Network was telling a narrative through a contemporary lens, and part of the reason it became a phenomenon was because it hit on something people were already feeling. It may have helped a lot of people better articulate their own unease. I know I had already identified the anxieties in myself, and started discussing the potential negative impacts to social cohesion and political polarization, as these things were already fairly stark to anyone who was interested in exploring them. Although, I am not a CS grad, but rather Media Studies, so I had been primed to look for unrest and fraying of social fabric as a result of the communications revolution of the internet, just generally. So maybe mine isn’t the best benchmark perspective on this after all?
You're likely too young to remember anything much before 2012. Honestly, this stuff has been around for 50 years. Go watch a video about Steve Jobs at NeXT from the 1980s.
True, but for me, the techno-optimism started with Google. I was a young kid back then, but the idea to catalog all of the world's information under a search engine (that worked) sounded wild to me at the time.
I was early to Match as well. When I first started, there were a total of 8 women in the entire Bay Area. I kept that free account for years and eventually found my (now ex-)wife through the site.
David F. Noble's "The Religion of Technology" is a quite good read to see how we arrived at this from monastic origins.
There are some points in the book that after reading became extremely obvious, like the belief that technology can (and will) overcome human limitations, restoring us to a perfect/divine state; that technological progress is the path to transcend physical and moral limits (all of which we see in the techno-optimism of the tech industry).
It's been around forever, we are just seeing a new dress up of it with the information age, the way tech "leaders" speak has been mocked to no end in Silicon Valley because of how insufferably close to religion all of this is...
But except for the Arab Spring of 2011 none of these events had anything whatsoever to do with social media. It is just absurd to see Facebook try to associate themselves with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It reminds me of the 1990s ad campaign Apple used to have about "thinking different" featuring people like Einstein, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi, none of whom obviously used Apple's products.
I watched the arab spring from online, and I am certain that tech companies were actively involved in fomenting the various rebellions. Unfortunately, evidence has been lost to censorship overtime. The internet is much more malleable than people want to believe
Is that based on any sort of actual data or are you just going off the scientifically supported totally unbiased data collection method known as ~:/vibes/:~ ?
I imagine the future looked pretty bleak during world war I, and then again during II, and maybe something else during the civil rights movement, or there was also the cold war. Cynics and optimists have existed since there was something to have feelings about. what's different about today to say that the cynics outweigh the optimists, in a way they never could in the past before?
Of course it's vibes. How would you even get data on that? But just going through life, most of the people you meet now, or met then, are not silicon-valley idealists. Maybe they were if you lived in Silicon Valley? Living elsewhere, everyone I ever knew rolled their eyes at it, and maybe transparently parroted it for the money if their job required it.
But every once in a while you came across a person who seemed to genuinely believe the corporate kool-aid they were saying, usually working at Facebook or Microsoft. These people are horrifying: completely manipulated, willing to not only say but believe whatever it took to, basically keep earning their money. I have no doubt that if the winds in America turned towards some kind of communisty cult-of-personality thing they would be first in line: a true believer of anything that it's convenient to believe in.
(and I'm thinking of the USSR-type of cult here, the type described in Milan Kundera novels here. Trumpism is rather different.)
I agree if by "cringey utipianism" you mean the carefully formulated messages CEOs pass on to their employees (especially businesses where the user is the product)
I think this is the reason why I feel so much nostalgia for the sort of 2012-era vectorflourish sort of aesthetic. Look at the first Google image result for "Zune" for an example[1]. Gradient-type stenciling with references to the organic world and a sort of optimism implied overall (the same sort that proponents of Frutiger Aero talk about but this is not quite the same thing, I think it's somewhat flatter but not ultra-flat like everything is now).
This aesthetic represents to me the dead tech-optimist future we were promised but never got. It's a "ghost future." Mark Fisher had a lot of interesting writing about this phenomenon as applied to music, termed hauntology[2]. It's about how some genres/labels of music (like Ghost Box) were characterized as a misremembered past that was perceived as more rosy than in reality.
I suspect but cannot be certain that "vectorflourish" aesthetics like those and/or simple but not condescendingly dumbed-down ones like Bootstrap 1.0 will experience a resurgence in the coming decade, the same as the "Windows XP" aesthetic of ten years prior had a while ago, in the name of reclaiming such a lost future. With today's CSS I imagine it would be much easier to recreate such an aesthetic than in the past when mostly you had to use Photoshop to create all the raster assets.
It's funny; as I've been working on Haven[1], one of my guiding lights is what Facebook _could have been_[2]. To that end the opening section is really inspiring. This is describing a world where digital tools enhance your friendships. I think that's still possible and still a worthwhile goal--I just don't think it can be done by an entity with a corporate incentive structure. Those incentives will always tend towards enshittification[3].
In 2010, facebook changed. Twitter was cooler. Myspace was more money. So facebook took a page out of their platforms.
In 2012, facebook went to Washington DC.
In 2016, Washington DC went to facebook.
When did facebook change? When zuck lost control of it after sandberg came on board. When did zuck get control? When zuck changed to be in alliance with the master plan… which was take control of the world… politically. Remember zuck running for election?
Zuck had — and I believe still has — complete control of the company. Demonizing Sandberg and lionizing Zuckerberg is a complete disservice to reality. It was the focus on growth and not money that ruined everything.
Many changes occurred in this period. I was there.
A big change is that ads became profitable. I think it’s fair to say this change was sudden. Facebook went from being scrappy and underfunded to being wealthy and powerful.
At the same time, the growth had eclipsed competitors and Google Plus came and went. The media tone and coverage changed from “oh this startup is doing neat stuff” to a point concern for data privacy and the implosion of journalism revenue. So they became a lot more influential culturally.
Being suddenly wealthy and influential but with a cultural mentality of being a scrappy and upstart— something this book accurately reflects — lead to hubris.
The focus on hypergrowth which had served them well from a small startup — under the umbrella of this hubris — led to events like the Cambridge Analytica disaster. Insufficient care was being placed on how data could be collected and misused by others, growth took priority.
This focus on Hypergrowth meant that changes that responded well in metrics got pushed. The longer-term damage of people not enjoying their experiences wasn’t a high enough ranked metric compared to engagement and user metrics.
None of this was Sandberg’s fault. She was an extremely competent manager and is brilliant. Absolutely she was instrumental in leading Facebook to profitability but this push wasn’t a big factor in their decline.
Instead, Facebook got too big way too fast and the employees and Zuck didn’t have the mindset shift needed to consider everything as it was happening. Yes, money ruined everything eventually — but that came later.
The most crucial damage had already happened — people gave up on trust that Facebook could handle their data responsibly, and trust that they’d have a good experience on the site.
I don't think what car he was driving was a factor at all. He had incredible wealth even before this, driving a cheap old car is effectively just a stunt to promote a specific kind of public image. Which is fine, but it's somewhat irrelevant.
The change happened because FB didn't internalize quickly or deeply enough that the mindset that got them to defeat MySpace wasn't the mindset they needed to become a trusted service for the long-term. Obviously yes it still exists but it's an absolute shell of what it could have been had this not been squandered -- which is the point that the parent comment was addressing.
I know like three people who bought cars they couldn't park near their employees in good conscience, and I think there's a point where obvious disparity starts doing things to your brain.
Almost like a "I don't owe, but I should pay more, but I don't owe..." thought process that leads to moral vapor lock.
I think there used to be more release valves for this pressure. There aren't any tithing billionaires, for example.
> The most crucial damage had already happened — people gave up on trust that Facebook could handle their data responsibly, and trust that they’d have a good experience on the site.
I think it was also that people were beginning to see the consequences of “over sharing” with people you’d never normally share things with. The vision of connecting everybody sounds great but not everybody needs, wants or even should hear everything everybody else says. And once such a realization comes about, away goes the linear timeline and in comes a more algorithmic approach. Suddenly your own posts get algorithmiclly ranked, sorted and filtered by every person on your friends list. And to get your post to show up on their feed you have to please an algorithm first in order to get permission. Thus comes a whole host of negative social interaction and toxicity.
I dunno. Maybe the decline of things like Facebook are simply because society “figured out through lived experience” what the end game of a tool like facebook looks like.
But encouraging people to share to the widest audience was another aspect where short-term growth of metrics was prioritized over long-term health of the platform.
There was a possible future where FB leadership didn’t get worried about/envious of Twitter and push so hard on public sharing. But that type of call was solidly on Zuck and not Sandberg.
I'm not aware of that personally, but I believe it. The revisionist history trying to paint Zuckerberg as being manipulated here is so just insulting to reality. Zuck deserves the credit for both driving the decisions between both the successes and the failures that arose here.
She mentioned it in a performance session that was recorded before I joined FB (I joined in 2013, I believe the talk was from 2011).
I completely agreed with her, but after watching the talk came to the conclusion that if she couldn't change it, then I certainly wouldn't.
More generally, younger people tend to be OK with everyone knowing everything, while as you get older you want to share with smaller circles to avoid conflict. Sheryl was quite a bit older than Mark and Chris at the time, which may have been the difference.
The points you illustrated is part of what I think caused Zuckerberg to lose control: hyper growth, fast money, an emerging market of personalized ad tracking. Sandberg being the more experienced manager steered the company well enough during this time but in a direction that I don’t think Zuckerberg felt at home with. Hence This red book was a way to bring back some of his spirits.
I also think so much potential for political influence had a weight on facebook but was not in the roadmap from Zuck’s POV. But it surely was for Sandberg because she had already been at Google witnessing the power of influence. Her husband’s own successes with SurveyMonkey emphasized some of that. This success+money+potential+(emerging ad tech) for facebook combined with a young startup spirit led to many scenarios that young Zuck was not prepared for. It definitely steered the company away from its founding vision. The company was suddenly infused with professionals that did not embody the spirit. And Zuck was quietly observing during this period.
Today, he looks around FB and says that things need to change. “And if people are not happy about this, then I am ok with them finding something else.” (i am paraphrasing).
Zuck has doubled down on a different vision now: Oculus VR. It seems his desire for FB social networking has plateau’d.
Web 2.0-era peak hubris. A decade later, its hard to decide if this looks delusional or prophetic - they did change societies, but probably not in the ways they ostensibly wanted to be recognized for changing.
Bingo ... let's not confuse a techie for a messaging app selling ad data as a tech savant (almost) brilliantly predicting the future because it tries to bootstrap itself into the stratosphere with a flourish of art copy & paste by association with pictures of CERN, Egyptian hieroglyphics and so on.
The latter are cool ... and stand well in time. CERN requires something a tad more complicated that pushing around "lol :)" over tcp-ip done before them + "big data" analysis to sell it to morons on madison street.
Claude Shannon, von Neumann, creators of the transistor, capacitors, languages, algos etc are the cool+smart kids ... not Zuckerberg. Not Facebook.
"Move fast and break" things has some tactical truth in larthargic companies, but averaged over time is asymptomatically a zero. It's just SV frat boy talk. Enough.
particularly the bit where they are painting over the old Sun Microsystems sign.
a solid engineering company that actually build good stuff, destroyed in collateral damage from the dot-com bust, sold off to oracle of all things. now further being humiliated by this narcissistic, exploitative, personality-disorder-masquerading-as-a-service company?
Huh? That's a weird take. What should they have done? Left the entrance to their headquarters with a Sun Microsystems logo rather than their own? The Sun Microsystems sign continues to be there at the end of Willow Road, just facing toward the campus vs toward the street.
This is doing more to honor Sun than any other realistic choice they could have made.
which is just so narcissistic! the way i see it sun failed because it was a well run sensible company that made good products, that were liked by its customers, and not eat the world.
and that's not what succeeds. so FB will do just fine, if i'm right about that.
i didn't say there was anything that FB should have done different. it's just sad.
it's sad to see a genuinely good company gone and replaced by a slimy one. actually if you include oracle, two slimy ones. who are both inarguably far more successful.
it's sad because it's a statement about what our current economy values and what it does not. and to any of you who have the word "engineer" or "scientist" in your job title: it's definitely not those things.
I find it sad, but am also glad, because Zuck and their colleagues came very close to owning Internet communications.
They still rule the roost with that spyware WhatsApp
But at the point they were connecting people as a priority Facebook was an astoundingly good product.
Their greed ruined it (much like Google - it is a characteristic of public corporations in the capitalist system I guess).
If they could have been happy with simply being astoundingly rich they could have built on what they had, developing an ecosystem of software, and developers, to aid in connecting all the people of the world.
Instead they got deep into ad tech. Squeezed every dollar. Ruined it.
Two copies have sold on ebay over the past month, with each listed at $1000 despite being later prints and having slight damage. That price seems absolutely bonkers to me.
The copy in the scan has a 2014 date, suggesting they were still giving the book to new hires in 2014 or maybe 2015. (I was hired in mid 2013 and my copy has a 2012 date.)
So based on company headcount those years and accounting for turnover, I would guess the total print run was at least 10,000... there are definitely copies of it around.
You're right - but also very wrong. People can be optimistic while still having an existential crisis about what they see/feel is happening. That's what makes them believe they can influence and change the world, and why they even try.
What we're seeing in tech today feels like it started in the 80's, and before that point computers, etc. were viewed by some as the downfall of humankind and by others the saviour.
Oh, man, I can still remember how when barcodes started showing up on products in the late 70s that there were people saying it was the mark of the beast or a precursor to it or that it was some government ploy.
i'm sure there's lots of tech optimists in absolute numbers, but my personal experience in the bay area has been that a vast majority of my friends in tech and tech adjacent have become highly pessimistic of the current tech landscape, AI, VR, etc.
All you have to do to see this is to look at how some of the biggest tech CEOs and moguls like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Elon, Jeff Bezos, etc. treat giving their children screens to babysit them. Pretty sure most of them don't, because they know how bad that is.
They explicitly share that they don't let their kids use so much screens etc. And they have always been huge advocates of this because they want responsibility for their technology's effect on children to be shifted to parents. So, by themselves modeling how to set boundaries for their kids, they bolster the claim that good parenting is the issue, not the apps designed to be addictive
Yeah, the dreams of what computers could do around Windows 95, and what the Internet could do around Windows 98/Windows 2000... it felt amazing as a teenager who wanted to go into computer science. IMHO social media heralded the beginning of the end, although no-one knew that at the time.
A lot of the 90s nostalgia is just the same rose-tinted glasses as all generations experience, but I think in this one dimension it truly felt a lot better back then.
I have a serious problem with calling everything social media and (more importantly) how it spells doom for this that and the other
If you want to criticize specific companies - yeah. But I literally do not understand what people are talking about when employing the usual "Social media was a mistake" type stuff
People typically refer to the data brokerage economy that sprung up thanks to social media. As well as being experimented on (A/B tests) for dubious reasons.
But, the data brokerage economy was the only way such a thing could connect people from different economic backgrounds, etc.
Without that, to pay for social media, the options would have been paid apps, which would never have had the escape velocity to be what current social media is today
> the data brokerage economy was the only way such a thing could connect people
For people profiting from that economy, of course. For everyone else? Not at all.
> what current social media is today
...the social media of today is undesirable. People would absolutely pay for social media if the product was good enough. In fact, I believe we're heading towards that future[1].
"Free" search exists. However, so does paid[2].
The idea that companies need hyper growth, "escape velocity," or whatever to succeed is outdated.
> For people profiting from that economy, of course. For everyone else? Not at all.
How else can such a site exist, grow to such scale, and not fall over if it doesn't make money?
> People would absolutely pay for social media if the product was good enough. In fact, I believe we're heading towards that future[1].
People won't do this. A very very small percentage of people will do this. Time and time again that's been proven to be true. Which is fine, but the globally connected social media could never have existed by charging every person on Earth.
Mark my words, paid search will not overtake free search. The people who value paid social media over free social media enough to actually pay are always going to be a very small minority (albeit well represented in this forum)
I think it boils down specifically to the social media pivot towards algorithmically curated feeds designed to prioritize engagement above all else. Platforms that did not make this change in the '10s still feel much healthier than dumps like Facebook and Xitter.
One of the big selling points of Bluesky right now is that it does not do this and that is why it feels so much like 2010-era Twitter.
(apologies for the ridiculous length of this, and totally understand if you pass up reading the comment, it's also a bit incoherent/lazy/quickly put together)
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To me, the real problems are the following. All related to "social media" but not social media in itself.
1) The Stream (timeline, whatever you want to call it). Instead of static single "pages" that linked to each other as separate entities with their own internal logic, everything became one flow, and more importantly "impermanent" (e.g. the way we think of "content" is no longer about an archive or repository of things, but rather, moment to moment). A reverse chronological sorting isn't bad in itself. Even the old long form setups like blogging and livejournal etc all supported this method of viewing content - but add in the following issues for a perfect storm.
2) Limited text length (blame Twitter and Facebook, and item 3). By limiting the length of text we create another "short attention span" mindset. Twitter, by it's origin, did have a specific need for short text due to its SMS origin. W/FB - the old 420 char entries was limit to what one can say and encourages short, quick, non-discursive entries. This may have been prudent both to reduce data retention costs and keep people "engaged" (though I don't think the side-effects of this were intentional at first)... This helps to feed the short dopamine burst/feedback. Neither of these were intended for deep discourse.
3) iPhone (and Android; But, frankly it was the iPhone that really got the phone and modern style of apps/ecosystem to where we are now). Having a smaller screen that was "always on" helped to push short text & images instead of longform content, plus the instant feedback loop, wherever you were.
4) "Always On" internet via small devices vs "Log In" standalone bulky systems. Instead of coming home to a computer as a separate space that you had to intentionally log into (in dial up days; or at least turn on in cable/fiber days), we no longer had to set aside a sort of "sacred place". The space no longer being localized, it was everywhere. While this is part of item 3, the form factor of 4 meant that longer form content is still easy to produce whereas with the form factor of 3 means interaction is limited and more difficult to use due to the limitations of onscreen text/keyboards (though advances made it easier, it's still not the same as sitting down and writing a big ass blog post).
4) The death of "blogging"/Google Reader. While blogs exist and come and go in fashion, Google killing reader really was a sort of deathknell. This was more due to the rise of "social media" though, not a precursor. But it helped to cement that long-form content was "dead". Blogs still exist, but aren't near as popular.
5) Images and Embedding/Walled Gardens: The removal of easy interactivity between platforms locking people in to the systems. While in some ways this is a nice convenience (take a URL and past into FB and BAM there's the image all formatted nicely (usually)) - unlike say Livejournal where you still had to type in the img src tags (or use the visual editor that would pop up a window for you to paste the url, that would, after saving/posting the page, would render the image). Sharing memes and other content with a "share" button meant you no longer had to create the content, you could just share what someone else said if you thought it was funny, were angry about it, etc. Meme replication become much less intellectual and lazy. "Engagement" didn't come to mean actual long thoughtful replies, but just an emotive "click" on an emoji to signal ones preferences towards said content. No need to discuss. Sure the option to do so was there, but who has the time when the internet is always on and there's always mor...
I agree with all of this, but would add:
The "social media" we see isn't the entire landscape. There are lots of small communities hanging out in spaces like unpopular subreddits, random internet forums, discord servers. It's just the 10GW burning sun that is popular social media can feel like it drowns that all out. And, I think there's a bit of a nagging feeling of irrelevance that can creep in when you're in these niches.
In the old days, you were small groups exploring the uncharted. You were in the minority because you were part of a group of pioneers, and I think there was a sense of optimism and excitement around that. I think a lot of the magic is gone precisely because tech is now ubiquitous and mainstream.
I can't help but wonder if it's my nostalgia as well, but I feel like 1995 - 2005 was the golden decade. It was at the point that technology was actually good enough to enable a lot of stuff (broadband, large storage media, etc), but it was still enough in its embryonic state that the novelty was still there.
Good point. The early exploration did make it a lot smaller. I think moving to where people end up adding IRL friends instead of "random strangers with similar interests" (I still think Livejournal had the best way of finding online people and building those relationships as people and not just meme-sharers/reacters to dopamine). I use another age-old online community that's been around since before 2000, and with good moderation and community support, while it's been up and down, generally "keeps the faith" with the users. And that's a pretty good timeline I think 95-2005.
Thanks/YW. Yeah, a lot of those old 90s libertarian/community building/better world idealism hit me right when I was coming of age. I'm a pessimist now, but those early days were inspirational in what could be.
I agree, but you don't get to weigh everything out on a scale and be measured by the balance - even if you could. How would you compare say, GraphQL, with providing a mechanism for 24/7 cyber bullying, or sharing photos with grand parents? Which side of the ledger does React even go on?
From the viewpoint of developer culture I think Facebook is better night and day than Google.
Google's culture is hire 15 geniuses from the Ivy League with 130+ IQ and make them fight with a 40 minute C++ build and a balky Kubernetes culture because "we only hire the best"; YouTube and the advertising system are a money printing machine, the team works for 3.5 years at something that get canceled at the last minute.
Facebook is much more oriented towards greasing the skids with the goal that a fresher developer would be able to push a change to a shared development system the first day on the job.
Look at React vs Flutter.
Like Microsoft, Google is thrashing around looking for "the next big thing", sometimes like a mindless beast. I've met person after person who told me that they went there because they believed they could make an impact and came to the conclusion within a year that they couldn't make any impact at all.
Facebook on the other hand is still run by the founder and it is pushing hard to develop a technology that he believes in even if the rest of us don't. It's a riskier strategy than Microsoft or Google who are likely to stumble on another multibillion dollar business despite themselves.
Was thinking the exact same thing. My hypothesis is that Facebook is behind because just as the Red Book suggests, its overall culture has been to build things primarily for people (freeloaders), and not for enterprises (who are actually the ones paying) like Microsoft (originally) and Google (eventually) do. If you look at Microsoft and Google, a lot of their garage projects are to build products that are useful to enterprises first and are hence more successful because it's easier to bring in cash with them. Their end-user products, meanwhile, eventually end up getting extinguished.
I worked at a Microsoft shop circa 2007 on ASP.NET/Silverlight systems and we had a subscription to MSDN. This was a pretty good value in terms of the headliner products like SQL Server, Visual Studio, Sharepoint, etc. We were getting discs for everything in MSDN and had a cabinet filled with discs and had an employee whose job it was to catalog it. I was amazed how many discs we had of enterprise software from Microsoft or some company that Microsoft had bought that I'd never heard of we had.
I have mixed feelings about marketing to the enterprise market. On one hand you can build some large and interesting things that deliver a lot of value, particularly in the semi-custom area. For many reasons I can understand the viewpoint of a salesman on commission. On the other hand I was really depressed after I'd talked with about 20 vendors in the "enterprise search" space and found that none of them particularly cared about search relevance and didn't regularly do evaluation work unless they were participating in TREC to gain industry visibility. Sometimes enterprise products have a lack of refinement or even basic quality compared to consumer products.
If I was going to get back into business development I'd do it with a keen understanding that getting the politics right and the software wrong is better than the reverse when it comes to making a living. I think I'd find myself hard to motivate in that situation.
I think Microsoft's end user area where they are the most pathological now is XBOX, Game Pass and all thought. Looking from the outside it looks like Dr. Evil has decided to buy the whole game industry to put it out of business and force people to pick up another hobby.
When I started at Facebook one of things everyone did during orientation was to put up a diff changing the default text of the search bar at the top of the homepage. This was a good way to familiarize people with the end to end flow of making changes. They didn’t say this explicitly but I think it was also intended to give people a “holy shit” moment when you realize that your silly code change is one button press away from 10 figure page views.
The idea was you make the change, take a screenshot of the result on your dev instance, get it stamped by your “mentor” and then abandon it. AFAIK this had been going on for a while before I got there.
Fast forward a few months and I see a sev pop up. “Default text on www.facebook.com search bar says ‘I am a search bar!’”
Giving corporate welfare,tax cuts, and bailouts to mega corps. While not equally helping small businesses, in fact quickly shutting them down when they fail to pay taxes or get permits. Regulatory capture and certain regulations too, preventing people from ever breaking out and owning their own business. It's technically possible but practically not. So they (many blue collar workers) get stuck as working poor.
None of that has anything to do with Cuba specifically keeping salaries for their government workers and most industries below 1 USD a day, a common bar for poverty.
This has always been the case, particularly for Facebook. Even when they acquired Instagram, the vast majority of the comments were negative (the top comment called it well though).
I do think that HN has gone from indie entrepreneur/ real startups to Big Tech and then back again over the time I've been hanging out here.
Okay, so Facebook started as a way to interconnect people. But it's a business, so it has to make money to survive. So they added ads. And now my feed is 99% ads, 1% updates from my friends. Sooooo mission accomplished, right? Right?
There is no shared experience of social media - that's what makes it hard to talk about, and keeps everyone in disagreement, because everyone has different perspectives. By design.
I think it's my own fault, I should never have engaged with the numpties. But I do wish the Facebook feed would include more stuff from the cats groups I follow instead of the rage bait.
Facebook was started as a way for college boys to gleam full names, pictures, and other personal information of college girls. When it was just this, it was actually wonderful and mostly innocent kids having fun. But Zuck was greedy, and eventually it evolved into yet another of the online behemoths that can only thrive by selling as much of your private data as it can get away with. As such, it is no longer special, and therefore it is ripe for disruption.
There are STILL people drinking the techno-utopian kool-aid.
Plenty of folks think Musk will do something smart someday, for humanity's benefit, despite all evidence to the contrary.
I was here when the web showed up, and I can honestly state that we featured blatant techno-utopian rhetoric in nearly every aspect of the industry, as well as our underground nocturnal allegedly musical entertainment.
I now feel rather dumb, aka a product of my time, but the notion that inventing tools would lead to them automatically being used for good was prevalent, if specious.
I think I’ve become some variety of techno-determinist pessimist. We are what technology lets us be, including when it comes to ethics and government. And major inventions aren’t guaranteed to push the space of the possible in the right direction—but neither can we avoid these changes, as effectively sounding the alarm early enough to matter, while also correctly calling which are bad and how they’re bad, is too hard to practically happen.
Freedom’s a fleeting gift of circumstance, and the world is a machine none of us control and that’s often bad and sometimes destroys important things, I guess is where I’m at now. I’d definite press a button to permanent un-invent the Internet, if someone put it in front of me.
Tools which are not invented cannot be used for good, there is some logic behind that. It is necessary but not sufficient for good. There is also fundamentally a tension between freedom and good. Since being free to use technology also includes being able to use it for evil. Not to mention the track record of trying to enforce "goodness" has been less than promising historically.
And that is before the inherent fundamentals of dual use. There is nothing we could do to keep fire from being fundamentally capable both of keeping someone alive by preventing freezing to death, and sterilization and is usable as a self-replicating weapon of destruction. Basically you can only control how well our surroundings handle being set on fire, not make arson an impossibility.
There's a lot of altruistic sounding stuff about connection in there, but it's hard to believe it's sincere when their product is a space where paid accounts don't have to bother with consent.
If you're working for Big Tech now, you're basically working for a defense contractor. Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Meta are really no different to Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.
Meta was culpable in the Rohingya genocide [1], builds AI for the military [2], silences content about Palestine (with deep ties to the Netanyahu government) [3] and Zuckerberg is cozying up to the incoming Trump administration [4].
We're so far away from Sergey Brin's principled stance against China [5]. You can find similar lists to the above for Google, Microsoft or Amazon.
re: 4 -- Facebook and reactionary politics have been hand in hand from the beginning of general public access to Facebook -- the world would be in a much better place without it.
I work at a fruit company in Cupertino and I felt disgusted when the CEO of said company was in the list of tech CEOs groveling to the incoming president. As idealistic as I am, I do understand that certain things need to be done for waves hand reasons, but...ugh. At least I'm not (directly) supporting war? I think?
The world is feeling rather Cyberpunk 2077-ish so it's only a matter of time before I have no choice to trade in my values for the ability to support my family. I feel for people currently in that position.
I think its a very good sign to see people deep within the industry having emergent intuitions about the direction of the entity that puts food on their table…
But please, please dedicate more time to reading outside your sphere and beyond video games. They can be a part of the path to enlightenment, but there is much more going on.
None of the current status quo is a surprise to anyone who has been studying media or history or polemics or even poetry. In fact it’s just been agonizing to watch the cycles.
Equip yourselves, because if you don’t people will use those unknown ideas against you and the wider world.
If you want to change your neighbourhood, you could start every morning by sweeping the pavement. Or you could leave a random dog turd. Both will accomplish your stated goal.
That was Aaron Sorkin’s story in The Social Network, but it seems to have been a fiction. Steven Levy’s history of the company is much more detailed (and Levy is trying to be faithful to the historical record, unlike Sorkin) – and it argues that there’s no evidence for this Sorkin story about Zuckerberg‘s motive.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadI hope the cover is orange.
When I attempted this once, I couldn't get the pages to be formatted nicely like a book, and the number of pages I ended up with was close to 1500 or something along those lines, which ends up costing you $100+ to print out with one of these services.
However I suspect that if someone were to typeset the essays nicely, it'd be an amazing coffee table book.
The idea that we could join together and share ideas and make the world a better place isn't a wrong idea, it is just one that got subverted once it was realized that inciting anger in users lead to more usage and thus more ad impressions.
Nobody thought this.
It is unfortunate that we have allowed algorithmic social media content to destroy so much, and to allow for targeted ad based services to cause such drastic harm to society. However society pretty much now knows what the root problems are and if there is a will, many of the worst offenders can be legislated away.
Remove gacha/lootbox mechanics from games and remove personalized algorithmic social media feeds.
It turns out, as a species, it isn't good for us to carry around machines 24/7 that can hit the dopamine center in our brains, or that can deliver targeted outrage on demand.
How about all the other stuff though? A connected world where I can play games with people around the globe? Forums that let fans share their love of their favorite media/artist/singer/author. The hundreds of amazing YouTube chefs that have introduced authentic, sometimes hyperlocal, world cuisines to a global audience. The sheer number of in-depth documentaries that are getting made about every possible niche topic now. The independent media organizations that have popped up (Curiosity Stream, Dropout, to name just two).
All that stuff is good.
People might have been wrong, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a somewhat common belief.
I have no proof, but I dare say the majority of angry people posting horrible stuff on social media are rather pleasant when around friends and family.
But all of a sudden, when they get up on stage, they feel the need to copy the behaviors of those around them, which means anger and vitrol.
When I first joined the Internet (1995!), there was more of an expectation of civility (IRC being a notable exception), and that is the behavior pattern I picked up upon.
Also netiquette, learning to lurk before posting, meeting people outside your normal groups and getting along with them and other behaviors I'm sure I'm forgetting. Being a tech person on the early internet, despite the flame wars, was a positive experience for me. People wanted to make this work, and that early internet full of tech-minded people and engineers did work to some degree. The idea that this could become a place where people could be what they wanted to be but were still accepted was the idea going at that time, at least according to my experiences. Niches mostly kept to themselves, you could find the groups you wanted to be a part of, and you could avoid those you didn't. When everything we had started to go mainstream, it started to crack and fray. When everything went commercial, it all came crashing down.
I'm thinking mostly of pre-web, and early web. I remember thinking when I came across the first URL in a movie that it was likely the start of the end of the internet as I knew it. I think it was "The Net" which was probably mid-90s.
I thought I'd try and find some evidence from that time period, 2008-2012, and found this article summarizing a metastudy [0] on perception and outcomes of social media on civic engagement.
[0] https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/soci...This breathless article from 2009 [1] (found in 2 seconds by searching "tech will change the world year:2009") is a good example of what most people thought. You can find blog many posts and articles from the time saying basically the same thing. If you forget, back in 2012 people used to tune into Apple's yearly keynote with bated breath in anticipation of what marvelous innovation Apple would grace us with next. An app to replace your therapists? Uber for dogs? Solve poverty and racism? That was the attitude I remember among my peers (college kids and yes, professors too).
[1] https://www.rferl.org/a/Science_And_Technology_That_Changed_...
Telemedicine reaching remote villages, drone deliveries of medical supplies, mobile phones giving farmers weather forecasts, and even allowing those farmers to find more competitive buyers for their crops.
Even within the US, for the longest time technology was the only field that was not ruled by elites. Any kid who was smart enough could get their hands on a computer somehow, learn to program, and have a career ahead of them. No medical associating limiting applicants, no elitist law firms, no unions only giving membership cards to children of existing members.
A lot of poor kids in the US, myself included, got lifted up by technology.
It was evident where the trends were heading, but that optimism that was heavy throughout the tech boom in the late 2000s was definitely still there.
When facebook became generally available I was maybe 14-15, and even back then I remember thinking "this feels very much like it's going to ruin some young womens' lives". But what the hell was I going to do? I mean - the platform _was_ used as a sort of early Tinder, where sexual attraction could play out in a semi-anonymized way.
This comment is in no way exhaustive either.
But many of those blogs (which now take the form of subscription newsletters) had incredibly valuable insight and perspectives that were otherwise not being reported on. The news media's alarmism about bloggers was (IMHO rightfully) ignored.
So when a couple of years later they started freaking out about Facebook/Twitter/etc, well, same old story, new platform.
The difference this time was that FB and Twitter algorithmically fed articles to people, instead of articles naturally spreading virally from person to person.
Not that the platforms were that bad at first! Remember that in the early 2010s Facebook was largely a platform for Farmville! It was drowning in spam for free to play social games, but the feed was still largely a timeline. Twitter only released their Apple client in 2010, and there were still a large number of third party clients in 2012.
A few years later Facebook would become inundated with political spam and vitriol, but 2012 was still an insane time of growth and optimism.
RTFC:
> It was evident where the trends were heading
I'm stating that tech in general still held the optimistic viewpoint, not that outside groups weren't tiring of techs optimism.
Yet even today, I see people regard the lack of moderation on certain sites as an unadulterated axiomatic good. Is that blindness really naïveté, or is it just a political stance like all others? If so, I would not call that naïveté even if the effect is the same, for it is a thing all suffer from, it's the blind spot in our thoughts, no matter how experienced and sophisticated and pragmatic we may otherwise be.
fwiw they were still giving the red book to all new hires in ~mid 2013. Personally at the time I found parts of it to be interesting from a "company telling its own history" perspective, and other parts to be extremely cringe-inducing. That said, I'm sometimes a grumpy cynic, and I'm also familiar with some random rare aspects of FB history due to previously working for Harvard IT. (I started working there a year after Zuckerberg dropped out, so didn't have any overlap, but some of my colleagues there were directly involved in the disciplinary hearings regarding Facemash.)
At times like that, restating some important old stories and legends, salted with some useful new ones can help to galvanize people and create the culture change you want.
A good example is someone mentioned in this thread is Zuck's beat up old car. That's a great old story for the early days, but probably needed burying at the Red Book time. Clearly he's not going to drive that forever, so you need some more up to date motivational culture lore which embraces more excess while retaining how the Devs are still world-changing hackers who should work all nighters because 'we're all in this together for mankind, team'.
Nor does the book really "embrace more excess" financially, at least as far as I can remember (and I don't see any of that flipping through my dusty copy briefly just now either). Instead it's the opposite: "Facebook was not originally created to be a company", "We don't build services to make money, we make money to build better services", etc.
Again, this was a period of disappointing post-IPO stock performance. The market wasn't convinced yet that FB could successfully transition to focusing on mobile. It took about 15 months after the IPO for the share price to start looking more positive.
So that was a factor, combined with an obvious desire to keep aspects of "chaotic small nimble startup" vibe/culture at a company that was definitely no longer a startup.
All that said, I am not much of a social media user and never really used Fb much myself. I see the appeal and I see the bad sides of it. I think we'd be much better off without it. I don't necessarily like the way in which it changed the world, but there was a lot to be excited about at this point in time. Not liking the product/company/industry/etc doesn't negated what they achieved.
(I don't think Zuckerberg himself is a true believer, but I do think that the people who wrote and read this book in 2012 probably believed it. This was the same year as the Arab Spring, after all.)
After hearing the core values of the company thrown around in regular speech so often most people got kind of numb to anything corporate (e.g. "I really like that you're always hustling so hard but I would love to see you do a bit more toe stepping").
I left SF a year or so after that so I wonder if that whole approach has changed in the bigger offices or not. Being in Europe now most people here (most ..) wouldn't play into it I don't think. Retrospectively feels very American.
---
EDIT: Actually it's kind of hard to find info on the rebrand now. There's the announcement[0] but that only seems to allude to the weird philosophical aspect of it in the description, which leads me to believe they never published it publicly.
> The new Uber brand system is made up of primary and secondary components that tell the story of technology moving the physical world. Today, we're rolling out a new look and feel that celebrates the cities we're in and the technology that brings people what they want, when they want it.
It was more than just "primary and secondary components", they had somehow likened people and pixels together and were trying to create some weird (but similar) narrative of "connecting everything through transport" or whatever. I think the idea was that they wanted to start breaking into more verticals, a la UberEATS and whatnot, but I distinctly remember hearing a lot of "what ifs" about freight, air, etc. that I think were mostly fluff chatter to hype up the rebrand.
Most people, even internally, hated it it, and shortly after that started monthly, then weekly, then at times daily new public scandals about the company or TK, so many people left shortly thereafter.
[0] https://youtu.be/axjXNEordH8?feature=shared
Smiling people drinking Pepsi, oil companies showing sun filtered through cornstalks....what's the difference?
I don't think I saw any posters about carpooling, but if there were any, reprints of the classic [1] would have fit right in with the rest of the posters.
I'm pretty sure I saw this book, but I don't think I saved a copy I don't think they were still printing it when my employer was acquired.
Unfortunately, the propaganda doesn't work Page 110 talks about building trust, but what has FB done to earn your trust lately?
[1] https://fdr.artifacts.archives.gov/objects/17472/when-you-ri...
I read this at the time it showed up on everyone's desks (I wish I'd kept it, but I have no idea where it is). Employees naturally rolled their eyes at some of the excessive optimism in some places, but generally it got the ethos right. That some of the boldest statements have fallen by the wayside ("We don't build better services to make money; We make money to build better services", "Build Products around people, not data") is obviously disappointing, but I'd view what it was trying to do in the light of a piece of art that fell short of its goal rather than merely self-unaware.
It was never intended as PR. It delivered its message via anecdotes and the experiences of working there, not in any way that would have anywhere close to the same meaning to the broader world.
It's the Facebook Phone!
(probably)
Or at least a mockup of one.
It has the front-facing camera in the top right corner, which is a hint!
Googling suggests the Facebook phone was an HTC device?
Marshall McLuhan introduced the idea that the "medium is the message," which is heavily alluded to in this book with images of the printing press, etc. The idea is that changes in how information is shared play a bigger role than the actual content of the messages being exchanged. Chris Cox, the Chief Product Officer, used to regularly talk about McLuhan.
McLuhan also envisioned trends in the change of information media culminating in a "global village," which Facebook echoes here in its mission of "making the world more open and connected." McLuhan expected that this would divide us more than it would unite us.
So I think what the person you're replying to was saying Facebook's appropriation of Mao Zedong and Marshall McLuhan is... weird. Facebook is directly drawing from dictators' propaganda and a philosopher who predicted what Facebook would bring about, and didn't think it was a good thing.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
> Zuckerbergs's Law: The amount each person shares doubles each year.
I initially thought wealth, ideas and love was meant but no ... it's just data.
But I was referring to the fictional version from the Foundation series, not the apparently real (pseudo-)science that I didn’t know existed.
For Facebook, they needed the cultural expectation to be ever-increasing data sharing. They (along with other companies) facilitated the creation of tools to share ever-increasing amounts of data.
We still dont see it yet today. Not fully
Even non-technology companies stole a bunch of marketing buzzwords from this era that are still in use today.
There was plenty of cynicism in tech back then too, plenty of posters who always complained about 'micro$oft'. How Oracle had been corrupted, etc.
What seems to be different now is that the optimism hype fades quicker. Back then Google kept it going for years. Recently things like Tesla and OpenAI the optimism gave way to the harsh reality of greed a lot quicker.
I think the anti-Microsoft sentiment (outside of some internet forums, and justified IE6 hate) had been dialled back by the early 2010s.
.NET was a thing, they were post-Gates, post-antitrust, making significant efforts at developer outreach. Windows 7 was a hit.
Despite working in the Microsoft ecosystem, I didn't feel trapped, and the walled garden was coming down, with awareness of non-Microsoft technologies being widespread.
But for me, the world started with my youth. I was a young kid back then...
Seriously, it was probably Usenet that kept me engaged. The web was exciting to browse but the conversation was on Usenet.
See Catholics and Protestant See Muslim and Jews
No form of communication would have stopped the racism, inabilities to see other cultures and work together
People suck. Connecting them doesn’t result in utopia
There are some points in the book that after reading became extremely obvious, like the belief that technology can (and will) overcome human limitations, restoring us to a perfect/divine state; that technological progress is the path to transcend physical and moral limits (all of which we see in the techno-optimism of the tech industry).
It's been around forever, we are just seeing a new dress up of it with the information age, the way tech "leaders" speak has been mocked to no end in Silicon Valley because of how insufferably close to religion all of this is...
There is an argument I saw made in a documentary that the Arab Spring also had nothing to do with social media.
Unless you received assurances otherwise, trying different things every week seems like the default expectation for a big company.
I imagine the future looked pretty bleak during world war I, and then again during II, and maybe something else during the civil rights movement, or there was also the cold war. Cynics and optimists have existed since there was something to have feelings about. what's different about today to say that the cynics outweigh the optimists, in a way they never could in the past before?
But every once in a while you came across a person who seemed to genuinely believe the corporate kool-aid they were saying, usually working at Facebook or Microsoft. These people are horrifying: completely manipulated, willing to not only say but believe whatever it took to, basically keep earning their money. I have no doubt that if the winds in America turned towards some kind of communisty cult-of-personality thing they would be first in line: a true believer of anything that it's convenient to believe in.
(and I'm thinking of the USSR-type of cult here, the type described in Milan Kundera novels here. Trumpism is rather different.)
This aesthetic represents to me the dead tech-optimist future we were promised but never got. It's a "ghost future." Mark Fisher had a lot of interesting writing about this phenomenon as applied to music, termed hauntology[2]. It's about how some genres/labels of music (like Ghost Box) were characterized as a misremembered past that was perceived as more rosy than in reality.
I suspect but cannot be certain that "vectorflourish" aesthetics like those and/or simple but not condescendingly dumbed-down ones like Bootstrap 1.0 will experience a resurgence in the coming decade, the same as the "Windows XP" aesthetic of ten years prior had a while ago, in the name of reclaiming such a lost future. With today's CSS I imagine it would be much easier to recreate such an aesthetic than in the past when mostly you had to use Photoshop to create all the raster assets.
[1] https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61hOqru2AWS.jpg
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology?wprov=sfla1
[1]: https://havenweb.org
[2]: https://havenweb.org/2022/11/02/facebook-lie.html
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#
In 2010, facebook changed. Twitter was cooler. Myspace was more money. So facebook took a page out of their platforms.
In 2012, facebook went to Washington DC.
In 2016, Washington DC went to facebook.
When did facebook change? When zuck lost control of it after sandberg came on board. When did zuck get control? When zuck changed to be in alliance with the master plan… which was take control of the world… politically. Remember zuck running for election?
Zuck had — and I believe still has — complete control of the company. Demonizing Sandberg and lionizing Zuckerberg is a complete disservice to reality. It was the focus on growth and not money that ruined everything.
Many changes occurred in this period. I was there.
A big change is that ads became profitable. I think it’s fair to say this change was sudden. Facebook went from being scrappy and underfunded to being wealthy and powerful.
At the same time, the growth had eclipsed competitors and Google Plus came and went. The media tone and coverage changed from “oh this startup is doing neat stuff” to a point concern for data privacy and the implosion of journalism revenue. So they became a lot more influential culturally.
Being suddenly wealthy and influential but with a cultural mentality of being a scrappy and upstart— something this book accurately reflects — lead to hubris.
The focus on hypergrowth which had served them well from a small startup — under the umbrella of this hubris — led to events like the Cambridge Analytica disaster. Insufficient care was being placed on how data could be collected and misused by others, growth took priority.
This focus on Hypergrowth meant that changes that responded well in metrics got pushed. The longer-term damage of people not enjoying their experiences wasn’t a high enough ranked metric compared to engagement and user metrics.
None of this was Sandberg’s fault. She was an extremely competent manager and is brilliant. Absolutely she was instrumental in leading Facebook to profitability but this push wasn’t a big factor in their decline.
Instead, Facebook got too big way too fast and the employees and Zuck didn’t have the mindset shift needed to consider everything as it was happening. Yes, money ruined everything eventually — but that came later.
The most crucial damage had already happened — people gave up on trust that Facebook could handle their data responsibly, and trust that they’d have a good experience on the site.
I could go on but that’s enough.
The change happened because FB didn't internalize quickly or deeply enough that the mindset that got them to defeat MySpace wasn't the mindset they needed to become a trusted service for the long-term. Obviously yes it still exists but it's an absolute shell of what it could have been had this not been squandered -- which is the point that the parent comment was addressing.
Almost like a "I don't owe, but I should pay more, but I don't owe..." thought process that leads to moral vapor lock.
I think there used to be more release valves for this pressure. There aren't any tithing billionaires, for example.
I think it was also that people were beginning to see the consequences of “over sharing” with people you’d never normally share things with. The vision of connecting everybody sounds great but not everybody needs, wants or even should hear everything everybody else says. And once such a realization comes about, away goes the linear timeline and in comes a more algorithmic approach. Suddenly your own posts get algorithmiclly ranked, sorted and filtered by every person on your friends list. And to get your post to show up on their feed you have to please an algorithm first in order to get permission. Thus comes a whole host of negative social interaction and toxicity.
I dunno. Maybe the decline of things like Facebook are simply because society “figured out through lived experience” what the end game of a tool like facebook looks like.
But encouraging people to share to the widest audience was another aspect where short-term growth of metrics was prioritized over long-term health of the platform.
There was a possible future where FB leadership didn’t get worried about/envious of Twitter and push so hard on public sharing. But that type of call was solidly on Zuck and not Sandberg.
I completely agreed with her, but after watching the talk came to the conclusion that if she couldn't change it, then I certainly wouldn't.
More generally, younger people tend to be OK with everyone knowing everything, while as you get older you want to share with smaller circles to avoid conflict. Sheryl was quite a bit older than Mark and Chris at the time, which may have been the difference.
I also think so much potential for political influence had a weight on facebook but was not in the roadmap from Zuck’s POV. But it surely was for Sandberg because she had already been at Google witnessing the power of influence. Her husband’s own successes with SurveyMonkey emphasized some of that. This success+money+potential+(emerging ad tech) for facebook combined with a young startup spirit led to many scenarios that young Zuck was not prepared for. It definitely steered the company away from its founding vision. The company was suddenly infused with professionals that did not embody the spirit. And Zuck was quietly observing during this period.
Today, he looks around FB and says that things need to change. “And if people are not happy about this, then I am ok with them finding something else.” (i am paraphrasing).
Zuck has doubled down on a different vision now: Oculus VR. It seems his desire for FB social networking has plateau’d.
I’d like to know how big this “book” is actually?
The latter are cool ... and stand well in time. CERN requires something a tad more complicated that pushing around "lol :)" over tcp-ip done before them + "big data" analysis to sell it to morons on madison street.
Claude Shannon, von Neumann, creators of the transistor, capacitors, languages, algos etc are the cool+smart kids ... not Zuckerberg. Not Facebook.
"Move fast and break" things has some tactical truth in larthargic companies, but averaged over time is asymptomatically a zero. It's just SV frat boy talk. Enough.
a solid engineering company that actually build good stuff, destroyed in collateral damage from the dot-com bust, sold off to oracle of all things. now further being humiliated by this narcissistic, exploitative, personality-disorder-masquerading-as-a-service company?
This is doing more to honor Sun than any other realistic choice they could have made.
and that's not what succeeds. so FB will do just fine, if i'm right about that.
it's sad to see a genuinely good company gone and replaced by a slimy one. actually if you include oracle, two slimy ones. who are both inarguably far more successful.
it's sad because it's a statement about what our current economy values and what it does not. and to any of you who have the word "engineer" or "scientist" in your job title: it's definitely not those things.
They still rule the roost with that spyware WhatsApp
But at the point they were connecting people as a priority Facebook was an astoundingly good product.
Their greed ruined it (much like Google - it is a characteristic of public corporations in the capitalist system I guess).
If they could have been happy with simply being astoundingly rich they could have built on what they had, developing an ecosystem of software, and developers, to aid in connecting all the people of the world.
Instead they got deep into ad tech. Squeezed every dollar. Ruined it.
Mēh! Better off are we now!
The copy in the scan has a 2014 date, suggesting they were still giving the book to new hires in 2014 or maybe 2015. (I was hired in mid 2013 and my copy has a 2012 date.)
So based on company headcount those years and accounting for turnover, I would guess the total print run was at least 10,000... there are definitely copies of it around.
What we're seeing in tech today feels like it started in the 80's, and before that point computers, etc. were viewed by some as the downfall of humankind and by others the saviour.
A lot of the 90s nostalgia is just the same rose-tinted glasses as all generations experience, but I think in this one dimension it truly felt a lot better back then.
If you want to criticize specific companies - yeah. But I literally do not understand what people are talking about when employing the usual "Social media was a mistake" type stuff
Without that, to pay for social media, the options would have been paid apps, which would never have had the escape velocity to be what current social media is today
For people profiting from that economy, of course. For everyone else? Not at all.
> what current social media is today
...the social media of today is undesirable. People would absolutely pay for social media if the product was good enough. In fact, I believe we're heading towards that future[1].
"Free" search exists. However, so does paid[2].
The idea that companies need hyper growth, "escape velocity," or whatever to succeed is outdated.
---
[1]: https://socii.network
[2]: https://kagi.com
How else can such a site exist, grow to such scale, and not fall over if it doesn't make money?
> People would absolutely pay for social media if the product was good enough. In fact, I believe we're heading towards that future[1].
People won't do this. A very very small percentage of people will do this. Time and time again that's been proven to be true. Which is fine, but the globally connected social media could never have existed by charging every person on Earth.
Mark my words, paid search will not overtake free search. The people who value paid social media over free social media enough to actually pay are always going to be a very small minority (albeit well represented in this forum)
taps the sign
The idea that companies need hyper growth, "escape velocity," or whatever to succeed is outdated.
> paid search will not overtake free search
There is space for paid and free to coexist. It's not a zero-sum game.
One of the big selling points of Bluesky right now is that it does not do this and that is why it feels so much like 2010-era Twitter.
1) The Stream (timeline, whatever you want to call it). Instead of static single "pages" that linked to each other as separate entities with their own internal logic, everything became one flow, and more importantly "impermanent" (e.g. the way we think of "content" is no longer about an archive or repository of things, but rather, moment to moment). A reverse chronological sorting isn't bad in itself. Even the old long form setups like blogging and livejournal etc all supported this method of viewing content - but add in the following issues for a perfect storm.
2) Limited text length (blame Twitter and Facebook, and item 3). By limiting the length of text we create another "short attention span" mindset. Twitter, by it's origin, did have a specific need for short text due to its SMS origin. W/FB - the old 420 char entries was limit to what one can say and encourages short, quick, non-discursive entries. This may have been prudent both to reduce data retention costs and keep people "engaged" (though I don't think the side-effects of this were intentional at first)... This helps to feed the short dopamine burst/feedback. Neither of these were intended for deep discourse.
3) iPhone (and Android; But, frankly it was the iPhone that really got the phone and modern style of apps/ecosystem to where we are now). Having a smaller screen that was "always on" helped to push short text & images instead of longform content, plus the instant feedback loop, wherever you were.
4) "Always On" internet via small devices vs "Log In" standalone bulky systems. Instead of coming home to a computer as a separate space that you had to intentionally log into (in dial up days; or at least turn on in cable/fiber days), we no longer had to set aside a sort of "sacred place". The space no longer being localized, it was everywhere. While this is part of item 3, the form factor of 4 meant that longer form content is still easy to produce whereas with the form factor of 3 means interaction is limited and more difficult to use due to the limitations of onscreen text/keyboards (though advances made it easier, it's still not the same as sitting down and writing a big ass blog post).
4) The death of "blogging"/Google Reader. While blogs exist and come and go in fashion, Google killing reader really was a sort of deathknell. This was more due to the rise of "social media" though, not a precursor. But it helped to cement that long-form content was "dead". Blogs still exist, but aren't near as popular.
5) Images and Embedding/Walled Gardens: The removal of easy interactivity between platforms locking people in to the systems. While in some ways this is a nice convenience (take a URL and past into FB and BAM there's the image all formatted nicely (usually)) - unlike say Livejournal where you still had to type in the img src tags (or use the visual editor that would pop up a window for you to paste the url, that would, after saving/posting the page, would render the image). Sharing memes and other content with a "share" button meant you no longer had to create the content, you could just share what someone else said if you thought it was funny, were angry about it, etc. Meme replication become much less intellectual and lazy. "Engagement" didn't come to mean actual long thoughtful replies, but just an emotive "click" on an emoji to signal ones preferences towards said content. No need to discuss. Sure the option to do so was there, but who has the time when the internet is always on and there's always mor...
In the old days, you were small groups exploring the uncharted. You were in the minority because you were part of a group of pioneers, and I think there was a sense of optimism and excitement around that. I think a lot of the magic is gone precisely because tech is now ubiquitous and mainstream.
I can't help but wonder if it's my nostalgia as well, but I feel like 1995 - 2005 was the golden decade. It was at the point that technology was actually good enough to enable a lot of stuff (broadband, large storage media, etc), but it was still enough in its embryonic state that the novelty was still there.
P.S. Your JPB quote from 1992 reminded me of Stuart Brand in 1985:
> "Computers suppress our animal presence. When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel."
Google's culture is hire 15 geniuses from the Ivy League with 130+ IQ and make them fight with a 40 minute C++ build and a balky Kubernetes culture because "we only hire the best"; YouTube and the advertising system are a money printing machine, the team works for 3.5 years at something that get canceled at the last minute.
Facebook is much more oriented towards greasing the skids with the goal that a fresher developer would be able to push a change to a shared development system the first day on the job.
Look at React vs Flutter.
Like Microsoft, Google is thrashing around looking for "the next big thing", sometimes like a mindless beast. I've met person after person who told me that they went there because they believed they could make an impact and came to the conclusion within a year that they couldn't make any impact at all.
Facebook on the other hand is still run by the founder and it is pushing hard to develop a technology that he believes in even if the rest of us don't. It's a riskier strategy than Microsoft or Google who are likely to stumble on another multibillion dollar business despite themselves.
I have mixed feelings about marketing to the enterprise market. On one hand you can build some large and interesting things that deliver a lot of value, particularly in the semi-custom area. For many reasons I can understand the viewpoint of a salesman on commission. On the other hand I was really depressed after I'd talked with about 20 vendors in the "enterprise search" space and found that none of them particularly cared about search relevance and didn't regularly do evaluation work unless they were participating in TREC to gain industry visibility. Sometimes enterprise products have a lack of refinement or even basic quality compared to consumer products.
If I was going to get back into business development I'd do it with a keen understanding that getting the politics right and the software wrong is better than the reverse when it comes to making a living. I think I'd find myself hard to motivate in that situation.
I think Microsoft's end user area where they are the most pathological now is XBOX, Game Pass and all thought. Looking from the outside it looks like Dr. Evil has decided to buy the whole game industry to put it out of business and force people to pick up another hobby.
The idea was you make the change, take a screenshot of the result on your dev instance, get it stamped by your “mentor” and then abandon it. AFAIK this had been going on for a while before I got there.
Fast forward a few months and I see a sev pop up. “Default text on www.facebook.com search bar says ‘I am a search bar!’”
FWIW I’ve noticed with some confusion that over the past years HN has become more cynical and pessimistic towards tech.
I do think that HN has gone from indie entrepreneur/ real startups to Big Tech and then back again over the time I've been hanging out here.
From the 2014 book:
Remember, people don't use Facebook because they like us.
They use it because they like their friends.
Where that went:
We have the power to cut them off from their friends.
So we can control everything they see.
Muahahaha!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Plenty of folks think Musk will do something smart someday, for humanity's benefit, despite all evidence to the contrary.
I was here when the web showed up, and I can honestly state that we featured blatant techno-utopian rhetoric in nearly every aspect of the industry, as well as our underground nocturnal allegedly musical entertainment.
I now feel rather dumb, aka a product of my time, but the notion that inventing tools would lead to them automatically being used for good was prevalent, if specious.
I think I’ve become some variety of techno-determinist pessimist. We are what technology lets us be, including when it comes to ethics and government. And major inventions aren’t guaranteed to push the space of the possible in the right direction—but neither can we avoid these changes, as effectively sounding the alarm early enough to matter, while also correctly calling which are bad and how they’re bad, is too hard to practically happen.
Freedom’s a fleeting gift of circumstance, and the world is a machine none of us control and that’s often bad and sometimes destroys important things, I guess is where I’m at now. I’d definite press a button to permanent un-invent the Internet, if someone put it in front of me.
It's taking a little bit longer than I thought, but isn't the destruction of Twitter a positive for humanity? :P
And that is before the inherent fundamentals of dual use. There is nothing we could do to keep fire from being fundamentally capable both of keeping someone alive by preventing freezing to death, and sterilization and is usable as a self-replicating weapon of destruction. Basically you can only control how well our surroundings handle being set on fire, not make arson an impossibility.
If you're working for Big Tech now, you're basically working for a defense contractor. Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Meta are really no different to Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.
Meta was culpable in the Rohingya genocide [1], builds AI for the military [2], silences content about Palestine (with deep ties to the Netanyahu government) [3] and Zuckerberg is cozying up to the incoming Trump administration [4].
We're so far away from Sergey Brin's principled stance against China [5]. You can find similar lists to the above for Google, Microsoft or Amazon.
[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/meta-allo...
[3]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
[4]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c87x98q8y08o
[5]: https://archive.is/tOWfY
The world is feeling rather Cyberpunk 2077-ish so it's only a matter of time before I have no choice to trade in my values for the ability to support my family. I feel for people currently in that position.
But please, please dedicate more time to reading outside your sphere and beyond video games. They can be a part of the path to enlightenment, but there is much more going on.
None of the current status quo is a surprise to anyone who has been studying media or history or polemics or even poetry. In fact it’s just been agonizing to watch the cycles.
Equip yourselves, because if you don’t people will use those unknown ideas against you and the wider world.
I didn't know the NYT has always been right-leaning and letting folks with dubious intentions guest write. I thought that was recent! Nope.
So funny!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T...
And then they did...
it was no accident
Ah, the importance of being specific.
If you want to change your neighbourhood, you could start every morning by sweeping the pavement. Or you could leave a random dog turd. Both will accomplish your stated goal.