Still better than serving only HTML5 video as far as I'm concerned. Until someone makes a browser that can natively (...or at least with some plug-in) block those players and make them click-to-play like I can do with almost any Flash.
uh... i'm not sure which crappy browser you use, but firefox mobile, the only browser you should be using this day and age, has this in the settings menu (don't even have to go to some hidden about:config) page.
Can you name a browser that can natively block Flash objects and HTML5 videos? FF can't as far as I know.
I'm talking desktop, mobile is irrelevant for me.
Edit: Oh, I didn't notice that "the only browser you should be using this day and age". That's enough to know about you to not be interested in anything you have to say. Have a nice day!
I came here to say just this. Considering he had no prior experience and by his own accounts he is quite the geek I thought he spoke very well. He was articulate, kept his answers on point and not too long, perhaps a little wordy but people tend to over talk when nervous.
"Two years ago, Dan Stillman and Matt Eaton, then sophomores at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, launched WesMatch.com, a site featuring a humorous, elaborate personality questionnaire. The service allows students to rate themselves and their potential mates in categories ranging from sex drive to "socialisticbutterflyosity." "
If you really go back and do some digging into the roots of facebook, you'll be amazed at how much press he got early on. He supposedly offered to do computer support work for the Harvard Crimson and in return he got press connections. Even before he launched thefacebook, he was getting write ups with facemash.
I think it really helped that they attached themselves to the "elite status" of ivy league universities / Harvard at the beginning. Those have worldwide recognition, so that when they eventually expanded beyond .edu, it still had some of the Brand value of those institutions attached to it, "the smart/cool/rich students of ivy league universities use it, so it must be good", something like that.
Him being on CNBC had nothing to do with privilege, Facebook had 100,000 users at this point (also, what about the other guy that was interviewed? His startup failed. So much for his privilege).
True, and you need inordinate amount of luck too. Stars have to line up just perfectly. There were other viable social networks that were much more engaging than FB at the time, but FB worked quickly to capitalize on their traction and momentum. Have to give them credit for that.
> Really shows the incredible privilege and connections he had
What possible grounds could you have for claiming that? The video I watched showed nothing of that kind. I'd say what it showed was the incredible focus and product sense he had.
If I can copy and paste what you're thinking, then yes. Otherwise, nope. Too hard to tell what's underlying the code in the case of a search engine, machine learning or artificial intelligence system. Large difference between the code behind intelligent algorithms and text entry boxes with DB calls.
BBSs, TheWell, Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL, TheGlobe, Geocities, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, what's next? Fill in the blank I guess.
DMOZ, Yahoo, HotBot, WebCrawler, AllTheWeb, Excite, AltaVista, Lycos, Google, what's next? Too hard to tell.
Google was founded on principles in artificial intelligence and now has a good handle on how to implement portions of AI along with all the other things they're doing.
Facebook was founded by a guy who was a voyeur and called its users "dumb f*cks" for giving out personal information while rocking a biz card that said "I'm CEO, bitch!".
Facebook today is equal if not more complex than Google. They process a huge amount of user data and it's all searchable. The relationships in that data are much more complex than in web search results.
What's with the hate in this thread? He achieved something quite remarkable. Back then, most people wouldn't have guessed that this silly campus site ever became as big as it is now.
And now, Mark created a business with thousands of employees, changing how we communicate, how we discover information about the cities we live in.
Give the man some respect. This isn't about his privileged background, but about the perseverance he showed for the last 11 years.
Meh - I'm on facebook all the time. Maybe they track my not very interesting interests and people use them to show ads which uBlock then blocks. His "flagrant disrespect and violation of my human privacy" doesn't really bother me. If I was doing anything I wanted to keep private I wouldn't do it on facebook - I just assume stuff on facebook is semi public. I'm not sure quite what the big problem is.
Your notion that you can simply maintain privacy by not using facebook is part of the problem.
For a long time facebook tracked people using flash cookies (also called Local Shared Objects) to track people with opinions flawed like your own around various website that are not facebook.
Perhaps, though I'm not convinced it was for the better. every time I log into Facebook I log off within five minutes wondering why I continue to waste my time with it. Maybe that's just my problem, I don't know.
So then what's the point? Since I deleted my account my relationships with my real friends and family has definitely improved. When I see them in person we actually have things to catch up on and talk about and those in person interactions have much more value for me.
Agree. facebook made me unhappy, but it does give value to a lot of other people. For example, the older members of my family use facebook to keep in touch with friends in a way that wasn't possible before. You didn't see lots of grandmothers on myspace.
Facebook stopped being a fad and became a staple. People who could not fathom using new technology bought a netbook and learned to use it just to find long lost acquaintances and keep in touch with their sons. It's not just chatting, but it's about the core experience: "We are in this together". Photos, silly daily updates and videos make distance less painful.
I met him around about this time - we were working on a variety of gigs in Cambridge, and ended up in a secret society house (don't ask me which, I honestly don't remember) at some point in a night out... someone might know - go in, up stairs, big withdrawing room with a pair of chesterfields perpendicular to a fireplace, wood panelling, that sort of thing.
Remember shooting the shit with him about this social network thing he was working on - he was wearing a dressing/smoking gown and drinking from a plastic bottle of vodka... down to earth guy, not above getting blotto with a couple of random brits - and I don't think at that stage even he expected it to go anywhere near as far as it has.
Not sure why I'm telling this tale, other than to illuminate that the guy's a human being, and an entertaining one at that.
Maybe to brag that you've hung out with him? That's not meant to be snarky. It's the same explanation for why people want the autograph of someone famous - to try to convince other people they know high status, powerful people, and by association they are one themselves.
We are often unaware of why we do what we do... or we tell people one reason and keep the real reason to ourselves :-)
If I wanted to brag I'd tell you who I am and who I actually know, rather than an anecdote about a passing encounter! Actually thought twice about posting for this precise reason.
> If I wanted to brag I'd tell you who I am and who I actually know, rather than an anecdote about a passing encounter!
Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn't.
Experiments in psychology and neuroscience show how little we know ourselves; how we retrospectively justify our decisions to ourselves and others, and how we are experts in self deception. So it's entirely possible that some part of you was driven by the primitive urge to publicly align yourself with high status people, but finding that disagreeable, you then seemlessly deceived yourself with a different purpose, because of course you aren't so egotistical.
Now I'm not saying that that is what happened, and no one can ever know. I am saying it is a pattern of human behaviour.
> Actually thought twice about posting for this precise reason.
That's kind of strange isn't it, when you think about it? I assume you mean that you thought twice about posting - in case people you'll never meet might think you were bragging - instead of thinking about posting your name? That doesn't really seem to make any sense to me. I mean, why should you care what people you don't know, and in all likelihood will never meet, think about you? From a logical stance, it doesn't make any sense. But then we aren't driven by our logical brains. It's been really fascinating for me to learn about this and then to see the walls of my logical reality crumble and realise how much emotion dictates my life and how little we actually know ourselves.
Don't make the mistake that people are a) logical, or b) that you really know yourself (unless you're superhumanly gifted) and your reasons for doing what you do.
Of course I don't expect you to like this post either, since this challenges our assumptions about ourselves at the most fundamental of levels :-)...
Sorry, but I think you have a slightly too naive perspective. I think the criticism of him and Facebook is valid front to back. Sure, some people move towards the rage range of the spectrum, but it is also warranted towards someone who openly said that he wants to replace the open internet and that privacy is dead.
Trash talking at that age is an embarrassingly normal thing to do. Accusing people of sociopathy without evidence is worse.
It's also hugely diluting of signal/noise ratio in threads. Grandiose accusations are noise, and no evidence means no signal. Please don't post such things to HN.
Re: accusatory tone - I adjusted my comment to reflect more clearly this is only my take away. But I think his words and actions are the evidence. I understand trash talk, but calling your users (behind their back) "dumb fucks" sounds like nothing but contempt.
Thanks for adjusting your comment. I want to expand on the point a bit further because I think it's important for Hacker News. But I don't mean to pick on you personally, so I hope you don't feel that way.
How many people have any real basis for knowing what Zuckerberg meant by those words? A line like that could mean almost anything. You'd have to have known him at the time. Also, how many people can truly claim never to have said anything just as bad or foolish? Those two groups must be minuscule, yet to be justified in making such an accusation, you'd have to belong to both of them.
Far more likely, what's going on here is wishful thinking, where the wish is e.g. to see someone else as a monster. The quote is just a convenient prop.
People bring it out at the slightest provocation. It has become an internet reflex, so it no longer adds any information. More importantly, it's the opposite of the principle of charity—i.e. giving the other person the benefit of the doubt—which we try to practice here.
> How many people have any real basis for knowing what Zuckerberg meant by those words? A line like that could mean almost anything. You'd have to have known him at the time. Also, how many people can truly claim never to have said anything just as bad or foolish? Those two groups must be minuscule, yet to be justified in making such an accusation, you'd have to belong to both of them.
I did know him at the time. He was not a friend, but I saw him every day. My friends were his roommates and in the same circles as some of the early fb people, so I saw and heard a lot to explain the guy and his motivations.
It is not an exaggeration to say he has done sociopathic things. He didn't hurt people physically (obviously), but he exploited them to the maximum extent that he has been allowed. Harvard attracts people like this guy, but honestly he was a bit extreme, maybe even out of our league. If you don't care about what people feel or think beyond what they can do to you, you can make the most optimum decisions for yourself.
He demonstrated this capacity in impressive form on several occasions which are now public so don't need to be described here. My initial reaction, before the media had taken up and transmitted its own interpretation of these stories, was exactly what many here are saying. So you don't need to moderate the discussion by noting that no one involved knew the guy at the time--- what people are saying is on point. His character is evident in his life's work.
Life requires compromise, so it's unlikely that he can do anything really bad now, due to the size of the operation and how many people are working together toward the greater goal of making "the" communication platform. That said, the idea that people need facebook to communicate on the internet is a conceit. The goal of this company is to centralize your communication and social life so it can be analyzed, exploited, and manipulated. That structure has grown from the motivations of this 19 year-old, aloof, and rather arrogant kid. The world has accepted it. Fair enough.
Assuming the details are true, your comment does count as substantive: it describes concrete personal experiences. It also seems to have an agenda, but readers can evaluate that for themselves.
The moderation point is off, though. An unsubstantive smear doesn't suddenly become a good comment just because someone else shows up and posts a better one.
Your comment feels like cross-examination—not my idea of a "fun exercise"! Conversation is ok though.
Calling people dumb fucks for trusting you could easily have been for comic effect. The combination of bravado and self-deprecation is something comedians use for shock value and laughs. Adolescent boys (and not so adolescent boys) ham up outrageous stuff up around their friends all the time. Those things aren't sociopathic.
I have zero idea what he meant, and so does everybody else who has only those words to go on. People are just projecting onto a blank screen a few convenient details to create the image that they want to see, a monster and a sociopath—in other words a cartoon villain. You don't have anything close to the information you would need to draw that conclusion if you were inquiring seriously. What really gives the phenomenon away, though, is the cartoonishness of the picture.
The interesting question is why people do this kind of projection. I think it's that the brain works with contrasts, and creating a bad picture of someone else is a cheap way to create a good picture of oneself. But who knows. What's for sure is that this phenomenon is (a) not intellectually serious, and (b) ubiquitous. Even the comment in this thread that was apparently based on personal experience showed signs of it.
> I have zero idea what he meant, and so does everybody else who has only those words to go on.
Again, incorrect. You know what we all have to go on? The meaning of those words, and their collective meaning when put together in a sentence. We all have a very good idea what he meant. Well, except for you obviously because willful ignorance seems to be your strong suit in this discussion.
What I think is the real interesting question is why are you taking up the position of Zuckerberg public relations evangelist on HN?
I dislike FB and don't have an account, but (or because of that) I never understood the criticism. I think he was completely right, even if he said it in coarse terms.
I quit using facebook after I watched him exposing people on the site to everyone who happened to be hanging out in the computer lab (basement Harvard science center). He came off as incredibly inhumane. I got the impression that he feels other people are beneath him, to be used by him for his ends. I see this pattern in every aspect of his company, and it saddens me to see how much it is idolized by people.
Thing is, Zuckerberg is pretty right. The media frames it as a "scandal" or "indiscretion". But if only everyone had convenient access to education that enables us to consider this perspective obvious...
If you want to watch the video without having to install Flash, just replace "www" with "m" - Not the best video quality since it's optimised for mobile, but a nice productivity tip for Safari users ;)
86 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadsigh.
I'm talking desktop, mobile is irrelevant for me.
Edit: Oh, I didn't notice that "the only browser you should be using this day and age". That's enough to know about you to not be interested in anything you have to say. Have a nice day!
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-19/mark-zucke...
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,689438,...
"Two years ago, Dan Stillman and Matt Eaton, then sophomores at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, launched WesMatch.com, a site featuring a humorous, elaborate personality questionnaire. The service allows students to rate themselves and their potential mates in categories ranging from sex drive to "socialisticbutterflyosity." "
It's always about who you know to give your work wings (which is apt, since his project was a social network)
What possible grounds could you have for claiming that? The video I watched showed nothing of that kind. I'd say what it showed was the incredible focus and product sense he had.
BBSs, TheWell, Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL, TheGlobe, Geocities, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, what's next? Fill in the blank I guess.
DMOZ, Yahoo, HotBot, WebCrawler, AllTheWeb, Excite, AltaVista, Lycos, Google, what's next? Too hard to tell.
Google was founded on principles in artificial intelligence and now has a good handle on how to implement portions of AI along with all the other things they're doing.
Facebook was founded by a guy who was a voyeur and called its users "dumb f*cks" for giving out personal information while rocking a biz card that said "I'm CEO, bitch!".
Big difference and big difference in revenue too.
And now, Mark created a business with thousands of employees, changing how we communicate, how we discover information about the cities we live in.
Give the man some respect. This isn't about his privileged background, but about the perseverance he showed for the last 11 years.
He got us here by tricking us with cheap tricks. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfa...
The way I see, he is one of the worst things to happen to the Internet if not the worst, but that's just my opinion.
For a long time facebook tracked people using flash cookies (also called Local Shared Objects) to track people with opinions flawed like your own around various website that are not facebook.
What if they use some more devious tricks now? You might say that you use noscript, adblock or something else, but what about profiling you based information created by you browser. Browser fingerprinting - https://panopticlick.eff.org/ - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint
I would rather simply avoid facebook and deal with people without a history of ethical issues.
Perhaps, though I'm not convinced it was for the better. every time I log into Facebook I log off within five minutes wondering why I continue to waste my time with it. Maybe that's just my problem, I don't know.
An RSS reader wouldn't be compelling if you're just subscribed to Buzzfeed, after all.
I keep in contact with my actual friends, but not via FB.
Guess your idea is better, but it's actually kind of fun to de-friend ppl. You should try ;)
so in your logic, because somebody don't use facebook, he/she does not communicate with his/her friends?
wow
Facebook stopped being a fad and became a staple. People who could not fathom using new technology bought a netbook and learned to use it just to find long lost acquaintances and keep in touch with their sons. It's not just chatting, but it's about the core experience: "We are in this together". Photos, silly daily updates and videos make distance less painful.
Remember shooting the shit with him about this social network thing he was working on - he was wearing a dressing/smoking gown and drinking from a plastic bottle of vodka... down to earth guy, not above getting blotto with a couple of random brits - and I don't think at that stage even he expected it to go anywhere near as far as it has.
Not sure why I'm telling this tale, other than to illuminate that the guy's a human being, and an entertaining one at that.
Maybe to brag that you've hung out with him? That's not meant to be snarky. It's the same explanation for why people want the autograph of someone famous - to try to convince other people they know high status, powerful people, and by association they are one themselves.
We are often unaware of why we do what we do... or we tell people one reason and keep the real reason to ourselves :-)
Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn't.
Experiments in psychology and neuroscience show how little we know ourselves; how we retrospectively justify our decisions to ourselves and others, and how we are experts in self deception. So it's entirely possible that some part of you was driven by the primitive urge to publicly align yourself with high status people, but finding that disagreeable, you then seemlessly deceived yourself with a different purpose, because of course you aren't so egotistical.
Now I'm not saying that that is what happened, and no one can ever know. I am saying it is a pattern of human behaviour.
> Actually thought twice about posting for this precise reason.
That's kind of strange isn't it, when you think about it? I assume you mean that you thought twice about posting - in case people you'll never meet might think you were bragging - instead of thinking about posting your name? That doesn't really seem to make any sense to me. I mean, why should you care what people you don't know, and in all likelihood will never meet, think about you? From a logical stance, it doesn't make any sense. But then we aren't driven by our logical brains. It's been really fascinating for me to learn about this and then to see the walls of my logical reality crumble and realise how much emotion dictates my life and how little we actually know ourselves.
Don't make the mistake that people are a) logical, or b) that you really know yourself (unless you're superhumanly gifted) and your reasons for doing what you do.
Of course I don't expect you to like this post either, since this challenges our assumptions about ourselves at the most fundamental of levels :-)...
"Mark Zuckerberg admits in a New Yorker profile that he mocked early Facebook users for trusting him with their personal information."
Edit: less accusatory
It's also hugely diluting of signal/noise ratio in threads. Grandiose accusations are noise, and no evidence means no signal. Please don't post such things to HN.
How many people have any real basis for knowing what Zuckerberg meant by those words? A line like that could mean almost anything. You'd have to have known him at the time. Also, how many people can truly claim never to have said anything just as bad or foolish? Those two groups must be minuscule, yet to be justified in making such an accusation, you'd have to belong to both of them.
Far more likely, what's going on here is wishful thinking, where the wish is e.g. to see someone else as a monster. The quote is just a convenient prop.
People bring it out at the slightest provocation. It has become an internet reflex, so it no longer adds any information. More importantly, it's the opposite of the principle of charity—i.e. giving the other person the benefit of the doubt—which we try to practice here.
I did know him at the time. He was not a friend, but I saw him every day. My friends were his roommates and in the same circles as some of the early fb people, so I saw and heard a lot to explain the guy and his motivations.
It is not an exaggeration to say he has done sociopathic things. He didn't hurt people physically (obviously), but he exploited them to the maximum extent that he has been allowed. Harvard attracts people like this guy, but honestly he was a bit extreme, maybe even out of our league. If you don't care about what people feel or think beyond what they can do to you, you can make the most optimum decisions for yourself.
He demonstrated this capacity in impressive form on several occasions which are now public so don't need to be described here. My initial reaction, before the media had taken up and transmitted its own interpretation of these stories, was exactly what many here are saying. So you don't need to moderate the discussion by noting that no one involved knew the guy at the time--- what people are saying is on point. His character is evident in his life's work.
Life requires compromise, so it's unlikely that he can do anything really bad now, due to the size of the operation and how many people are working together toward the greater goal of making "the" communication platform. That said, the idea that people need facebook to communicate on the internet is a conceit. The goal of this company is to centralize your communication and social life so it can be analyzed, exploited, and manipulated. That structure has grown from the motivations of this 19 year-old, aloof, and rather arrogant kid. The world has accepted it. Fair enough.
The moderation point is off, though. An unsubstantive smear doesn't suddenly become a good comment just because someone else shows up and posts a better one.
Actually no, you are incorrect. Calling people "dumb fucks" for trusting you and/or your site is a statement with a pretty specific meaning behind it.
For a fun exercise, how about you explain the multitude of meanings you were able to derive from it?
Calling people dumb fucks for trusting you could easily have been for comic effect. The combination of bravado and self-deprecation is something comedians use for shock value and laughs. Adolescent boys (and not so adolescent boys) ham up outrageous stuff up around their friends all the time. Those things aren't sociopathic.
I have zero idea what he meant, and so does everybody else who has only those words to go on. People are just projecting onto a blank screen a few convenient details to create the image that they want to see, a monster and a sociopath—in other words a cartoon villain. You don't have anything close to the information you would need to draw that conclusion if you were inquiring seriously. What really gives the phenomenon away, though, is the cartoonishness of the picture.
The interesting question is why people do this kind of projection. I think it's that the brain works with contrasts, and creating a bad picture of someone else is a cheap way to create a good picture of oneself. But who knows. What's for sure is that this phenomenon is (a) not intellectually serious, and (b) ubiquitous. Even the comment in this thread that was apparently based on personal experience showed signs of it.
Again, incorrect. You know what we all have to go on? The meaning of those words, and their collective meaning when put together in a sentence. We all have a very good idea what he meant. Well, except for you obviously because willful ignorance seems to be your strong suit in this discussion.
What I think is the real interesting question is why are you taking up the position of Zuckerberg public relations evangelist on HN?
What a system! Where being a terrible manipulative monster is encouraged.