My experience tells me that FB has been better off in the long term having Mark's dictatorship than having to deal with a horde of short term investors that wanted a way to make quickly a return even if it meant burning users down.
I think you're right. If we think that Zuckerbergs decisions where bad, in terms of user privacy, just wait until impatient shareholders are in charge.
In many ways I believe that Zuckerberg is the sole reason that Facebook hasn't crashed and burned at this point.
Tend to agree. I'm no fan of either Facebook or Zuckerberg. My attempts to leave it all behind have thus far proven unsuccessful, and the fact that FB owns both WhatsApp and Instagram doesn't help.
Still, I'm almost shocked by how viscerally unsympathetic I feel towards these shareholders. I genuinely believe their stewardship would be worse for both Facebook and its users: they'd mismanage Facebook into the ground and, along the way, would utterly compromise users in increasingly desperate attempts to turn things around.
Not necessarily. If they start making increasingly scummy deals (even more so than what Facebook is currently doing) to sell user data in return for quick profits, then things could get far far worse as Facebook burns to the ground.
Mark Zuckerberg, as bad as he is, is not the worst case scenario.
I think if that happened, something even worse than Facebook would take over. The social media Pandora box as been already opened, it's not going to get better unless there is a sustained and orchestrated effort to rein in social medias and how they deal with personal info.
There are several of those in the form of alternate networks, (Minds.com, Mastodon, etc) which could very well rise to prominence if Facebook were to fall.
The issues with corporate social media are now well understood by large swathes of the public.
The incumbents are still standing due to their powerful network effects - if they lose those, the public may be a bit more discerning in where they head next.
"The issues with corporate social media are now well understood by large swathes of the public."
Are they? Most of the people I know are still all "gimme my feed, gimme my like buttons", and couldn't care less about anything, as long as they get to read about their parent's neighbour's cat's cousin's trip to Whereverville, or see latest pictures of our Nancy's baby boy.
I intended "large swathes" to mean "a significant enough plurality to potentially carry influence" not necessarily "overwhelmingly large majority". Maybe I'm overly optimistic.
I visited a mastodon site, and browsed for a bit with a new account. It didn't seem that different from Twitter. They are going to really need to push the envelope and take whatever advantage possible from its decentralized architecture if there is any hope of gaining mainstream traction.
That is kinda hard to predict. All those efforts by various people to create a decentralized social networks might finally find traction, if FB crashes. At least we can hope. I suppose it could go either way
Problem with decentralized social networks is there’s no money to pay designers and developers and so the software is primitive. The ICO model is the closest anyone’s come to a funding story, and that has its own problems.
Why is there a need for changing software? What are all the FB devs doing all day really except ads tuning.
I want a feed of freinds writing everyday bullshit and that just got worse by time untill I no longer use Facebook. It's like chat apps like MSN Messenger that stayed the same for years with no problems what so ever.
I enjoyed the first years of the Internet as well, but as fun and exciting the early web, IRC ad Usenet forums were, there was no Google Maps, no Wikipedia, no next-day shipping of almost everything, no Youtube... many things I could live without today as I did at the time, but overall I think they have a decent utility.
What the Internet has lost in terms of mystique and pioneering freedom, it has gained in terms of utility and convenience, IMHO.
The main reason I would like to go back to 1999 would be because I would be 20 years younger :)
> What the Internet has lost in terms of mystique and pioneering freedom, it has gained in terms of utility and convenience, IMHO.
Maybe I've got a bad case of the "back in my day", but I feel more and more that "mystique" is what makes life worth living.
Watching a lot of movies from the 60s-90s recently, it's striking how much more effort we needed to put into everyday life back then.
Want to meet a friend? Call their number, hope they're home and arrange a time. Want to watch a movie? Drive to the video store and hope they've got what you want. Out of food? You're driving to the nearest restaurant, no Uber Eats. Want to find out the median rainfall in Fiji? You're waiting for the library to open and digging through a stacks of musty old books.
Nowadays, everything's instantaneous - you want something, you get it. We've lowered the bar for almost everything.
If consumption and enjoyment no longer require any effort, doesn't that devalue the entire experience? What does that mean for life in general? Don't you think that humility comes from knowing the effort required to know or acquire things?
Hear hear. It's like the programming mindset has been applied to day to day life. Ruthless pursuit of efficiency and automation, maximum and continuous delegation to the system and machine - these things suffuse everything and are even elevated to the status of values. It makes sense with something as error-prone and cognitively challenging as code, especially considering how well suited machines are to handling it. But now these values have been transferred into the business of daily human living and taken to an extreme. How good an idea that is, and what the end results will be, those things aren't obvious to me.
> If consumption and enjoyment no longer require any effort, doesn't that devalue the entire experience? What does that mean for life in general? Don't you think that humility comes from knowing the effort required to know or acquire things?
This is an interesting perspective, surely. But the premise for reducing effort in some areas, as has always been the case with economic growth, is that we can focus that same limited effort on exploring new horizons, standing on the shoulders of giants, living in paradises of dreams past.
Look to the stars, for they will never limit your ambition.
>I enjoyed the first years of the Internet as well.
I think you mean that you enjoyed the first years of the Internet after it became known to the general public in 1993.
The first year of the Internet was 1969.
Added in anticipation of a nitpick: some writers like to reserve the word "Internet" to refer only to the period after the great switchover to Internet Protocol in 1986, but it was the same hosts hosting the same services (e.g., mailing lists, FTP sites, Netnews and Telnet) before and after the switchover.
I agree. Going back in time wouldnt be too bad. I miss the first days of twitter where i would have discussions with other engs on tech, or days where fewer but higher quality content was the norm.
We probably need a better filter. I stopped using fb years ago, same for twitter. No regrets
>> don’t understand why anyone has trouble leaving
I also find it puzzling. Then again, as with cults or other bottom feeding fads and the increasingly ubiquitous, various and sundry addictive mires and dark patterns, to avoid the trouble in leaving, it is best not to enroll in the first place.
Also, it's no secret that Zuckerberg has preferred stock, and anyone deciding to invest in FB goes in with their eyes open knowing that they will have no say in how the company is run.
It is indeed really difficult to sympathise with the shareholders.
Second this motion. These shareholders are not family holding shares in a family business. If they’re not voting by selling their stock then can we really say they’re fed up?
I think Sandberg may be part of the problem at FB. I do concede, despite my FB hate, that having Zuck is about 15 thousand times better than having shareholders in charge over there.
Sandberg is a major liability and should be gotten rid of ASAP. Mark has a vision and has made some good choices, prescient moves and (most importantly) great long-term bets but Sandberg looks to me like a career opportunist, completely out of touch with technology.
What are you talking about? If you know anything about the history of Facebook as an entity, you'll recognize her contributions to the business. Facebook wouldn't be the juggernaut it is today without her. She is extremely effective and perhaps one of the best technology executives in recent history.
True but its a bit of a problem when your hegemony keeps getting threatened by the latest flavor of the month social network and quarter after quarter your getting pressured by shareholders to keep increasing advertising revenue.
True but future companies’ decisions to sell will in almost all cases not be based on FB’s reputation - even if it goes down the gutter - than the material terms of the acquisition.
And as for those that don’t get acquired, I think we can all take a quick look at Snap’s market performance and bleeding execs. That’s not to say that FB will not be disrupted - everyone eventually is. Just that it doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime in the near future.
I'm not sure it's clear that the shareholders are the driving force of short term greed or just an excuse for businesses to do so. After all businesses set their guidance and a lot of shareholders would probably prefer medium-long term returns, aside the speculators.
He doesn’t get credit for all the good stuff and always makes it a point to more-than-generously _attribute_(not share) the credit to the leaders within FB responsible for that stuff.
Or you could say he gets credit for all the bad stuff when society is often to blame, and not much credit for the good stuff. That seems to be the most common response from everyone, including the tech community.
I think businesses whose primary source of income is advertising to their users can't really avoid being unethical. Facebook is just one of the biggest case studies of that model. The business model is rotten from the core, but I don't think it's Zuck's fault. Any other CEO would also have to grapple with that in a way that will inevitably hurt users and help advertisers.
If I were Zuck I would maybe consider trying to start a new tech company with a completely different business model. "They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." aside, I don't really think he's a bad guy. No worse than Schmidt or Dorsey etc., at least.
To be more specific, I think FB could reach the valuation that it did because Mark Zuckerberg's voting power, not despite it.
He had explicitly talked about the average SV' short term mentality multiple times: "It's still a little short-term focused in a way that bothers me," Zuckerberg says of Silicon Valley. "There's people who want to start a company not knowing what they want to do, or just to flip it." ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2011/10/31/mark-zuck... )
When it is time to cash out investors do whatever they can to pump up the valuation of a company even if it ends up creating handicaps for the future. When that happened to FB, Mark Zuckerberg was able to oppose to it.
This is sort of just the wide-spread symptom of the free-market-ish system practiced in America. Everything is being reduced to how to maximize RoI, reduce the cycle to realize that RoI and ensure that RoI will be realized. Going for a profit isn't a bad idea from a company, but focusing a company on achieving a localized maxima of profit misses out on the larger benefits long term planning can yield.
While it may be bad for individual companies, their failure does not prevent somebody else from doing whatever it is they failed to do because of short term thinking.
He doesn’t. He has always run Facebook as a copy of current trends..
Fb was like Friendster/MySpace then it copied twitter then they bought ig and copied stuff from there. Snapchat.
So just look what the trend is. And currently there is ig and messaging. So you see they’re putting back messaging in the main app bc people have abandoned messenger.
I find Zuckerberg's decisions largely indistinguishable from what I'd expect of an investor demanding short terms gains over long term vision and sustainability.
For sure Mark has made a bunch of decisions looking at the short term gain in his life. But he also did not see or largely underestimated the long term repercussions.
We all make mistakes. The important part is to learn from them and do not repeat them.
Since the beacon, Mark has always been sincerely recognized his mistakes, ask for forgiveness and try to fix those mistakes.
I see maturity and integrity of character in this.
As far as I can find he's only asked for forgiveness once, in a Yom Kippur message, and not in relation to any specific mistake(s). Not that I find "forgiveness" to be a legitimate ethical standard, since "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission" has been used to do bad stuff on purpose for a long time.
It's amazing that asking forgiveness would have any value at all, words are so cheap as to be free; there's little stopping him from saying whatever suits his agenda in that area
I thought FB was generally making clever decisions up until they released, and subsequently deprecated (much of) the Graph API. Despite the many privacy issues that I didn't really think about beforehand, I thought the idea was genius: Facebook becoming a platform that offers a social layer on top of the internet, rather than just another data silo trying to keep users inside.
Even with all the privacy issues, I think the original idea has merit and could make Facebook more than just what it is now. And while I haven't thought this through properly, I think it's possible to find a way to pull off much of what they promised while respecting the privacy of their users.
Perhaps I'm wrong, and they gave up on the Graph API because they knew what would happen, but I can't help but wonder if the main reason they went the route they did is because of lack of imagination and a desire to 'make money' in a more conventional way (advertising?).
API's tend to be too hard for users to understand the security and privacy ramifications of. I don't think any new service today can really get away with sharing private user data via an open API, even with explicit user consent.
Buying IG and Whatsapp doesn’t seem to be in line with what investors would do, is it? Especially the latter. The treatment of Messenger and Whatsapp as well.
Countries work differently than companies. In a country, you could assume that vast majority of citizens think of it as their home and wants to protect its long-term interests (however bad they may be at it).
In case of both VC-funded and publicly traded companies, investors/shareholders mostly don't give a damn about the company or the product, they just want to flip it for more than they put in. That promotes extremely short-term thinking and abusive business practices. A "dictator" who actually cares about the company and the product is better.
It's all about how social media companies are forced to pursue profit above all else and this harms society.
Your average public corporation has a fiduciary duty to maximize profit for its shareholders. So arguably, we are lucky that Facebook is not your average public corporation. Zuck has plenty of money, and he's pledged to give almost all of it away, so he is probably motivated by more than just profit. He has been talking the talk about fixing social media, let's see if he walks the walk.
If this is true then why go through the Kabuki theater of having a corporation at all. Zuckerberg is the central decision maker and there is no partial ownership in the company. Public corporations in theory are supposed to be owned by a wide array of investors. The fact is FaceBook skirts every regulation in existence. I'm pro Market in general but I do believe in some regulation. And FB effectively doesn't have any.
There's something much worse than investors who don't have more control over Facebook. It's that I don't own any Facebook stock.
The reason for that is that I didn't buy any. Shouldn't I get some for free? Maybe other people are willing to pay just like maybe other investors are on board with his ownership structure. But that doesn't give me any Facebook stock.
Maybe the government could step in? How can we fix this situation?
The reality is the opposite. In the long-term, you are screwed with this voting structure. This structure exists because right here and now, Zuckerberg looks like a good choice. Over the long-term, bad things happen. Human nature is what it is, and the company will be unable to respond (just based on what he has already done, he looks like a below-average manager).
Also, most institutions aren't particularly short-term in their outlook (if you are an institution buying a stock that has a valuation like FB...you have to be taking the very long view). Where the short-term "meme" comes from is analysts (whose bark significantly outweighs their bite) and the pressure that failing companies get to preserve shareholder value (and the real-world evidence here is that managers win close to 100% of the time and take shareholder's money down with them).
In my experience, I have seen countless companies decimated by unaccountable managers (no super-voting shares to my recollection, just weak oversight). I am not aware of any public company harmed by short-term thinking. The only possible exceptions are private equity (but for different reasons, still terrible) and acquisitions...but in the latter case, this happens for a ton of other reasons too. In most cases, there is no pressure.
Tbh, I don't even understand the logic...you can invest heavily, and that isn't showing up on your income statement immediately. It is true that most investors don't understand the difference between ROI and marginal ROI (these situations probably represent a good chunk of my lifetime returns) but companies feel limited in what they can disclose (and I have had conversations with non-US companies to that effect) and, in the end, the market always works it out.
See also: "Here’s an unpopular opinion: We’re lucky Mark Zuckerberg is in charge" ( https://medium.com/swlh/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-stock-drop-... )