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Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg (sfgate.com)
wisty 2 hours ago [-]
> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies.

Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names. It had the best network effect because of its real name policy (you could easily find people you knew), but it didn't tell you about it, it just posted your name from the sign-up page, which was kind of a dark pattern at the time.

Facebook also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you. But don't try scraping your own contacts out of Facebook, that's wrong.

Remember the apps, like zombie games? Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs.

Facebook has always been ruthless and other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) as far as I can tell it's never really had any mission other than getting big.

netsharc 38 minutes ago [-]
> Facebook also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you.

I remember FB recommending me a contact, I thought "Why does that distinctive name sound familar?". I looked through my e-mails and I had sent a few emails back and forth with the person because of an eBay transaction.

I know I never told FB to scrape my email account, but I'm guessing this person did. And it's certainly not even the address book, but the email addresses from people's inboxes (and why not the names from the "From" field as well. If I was tasked with this I'd even suggest scraping any signature fields).

Hey, at least it bought Zuck a $900K watch.

frereubu 1 hours ago [-]
The idealism is the current corporate story - "enabling communication" etc. - but you're right that there was no idealism to start with. Zuckerberg set up The Facebook so undergrads at Harvard could rate how hot girls were, scraping their images from unprotected university servers.

This is a great podcast centred around the film about it - The Social Network - but it delves really interestingly into the story and motivations of the early years: https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/the-great-political-films%...

The main conclusion is that Zuckerberg is a pure, amoral opportunist, which is why Facebook has been so successful through an era of "ask for forgiveness, not permission".

tasuki 39 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
rajman187 1 hours ago [-]
> other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess)

Not to detract from your main point but I think this misses a lot of contributions, eg Cassandra, Hive, Presto, GraphQL, the plethora of publications coming out of FAIR (fundamental AI research) and of course the Llama family of models which have enabled quite a few developments themselves

__loam 1 hours ago [-]
I think React and GraphQL are pretty impressive in terms of how shitty they've made the developer experience at so many companies. GraphQL especially seems to attract the kind of people who love to misuse technologies built for massive orgs in companies with fewer than 100 employees.
pcthrowaway 30 minutes ago [-]
> GraphQL especially seems to attract the kind of people who love to misuse technologies built for massive orgs in companies with fewer than 100 employees.

This is almost exactly how I feel about Kubernetes

ajb 30 minutes ago [-]
There's actually a well-known effect in standards, that large orgs want to overcomplicate them, as having implemented a bunch of overcomplicated standards becomes part of their moat against competitors. This is definitely done deliberately; the most blatant example is Office Open XML but it's true of others too. They know that they have the staff to waste effort on it, and others don't.

I'm not sure anyone is thinking 'lets open source our most dumb ideas to hobble potential competition' - but they would do it if they thought of it.

mschuster91 1 hours ago [-]
At least with GraphQL I think the world would be better off if it had never seen the light of day. It's a steaming pile of hyper complex dung.

And for the other projects, their paths are littered with the dead bodies of engineers who had been ordered to chase down one of Facebook's hype technologies just because "Facebook does it so we can follow their best example".

3np 1 hours ago [-]
There was plenty of koolaid around.

https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook

Voultapher 1 hours ago [-]
It was also born by the guy - Zuck and arguably in a similar spirit - who initially created a hot or not webpage to rank female college classmates by "fuckability". No clue how any of this would come as a surprise if you know his history.

Brian Cantrill talks about how social media was born crocked [1] while referring to the eerily similar friendster backstory.

[1] https://youtu.be/0wtvQZijPzg?t=482

guax 2 hours ago [-]
I remember de people graph search when no privacy settings really existed and people kept complete and updated profiles. It was the ultimate stalker took. Absolute batshit crazy that it existed even for the short time it did.
isoprophlex 3 hours ago [-]
Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos...

I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, spiritually toxic shit:

> Wynn-Williams’ critiques aren’t limited to Zuckerberg. She describes the working culture under Sandberg as so intense that Wynn-Williams felt pressured to send her talking points while in labor, her feet in stirrups.

My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!

kelnos 3 hours ago [-]
> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!

Sure, but you can look at this in one of two ways. One is the way you seem to be angling for, where we have an employee who is so disturbingly eager to please that she continues to do work at absurd times when no one should ever expect to be working. The other way is of an employee who has seen how her boss treats employees, and believes that her position, career, and livelihood would be in jeopardy if she wasn't working even in situations where no one should be expected to be working.

I think the second take is more likely. And even if we think it's bizarre that someone could get to the point where they believe that kind of devotion to their job is necessary, it's still alarming and raises red flags that a company culture could cause someone to get to the point that they'd feel that way.

theK 2 hours ago [-]
I am inclined to agree with you but I do have a bit of nuance to add. Pretty sure this is not going to be a popular opinion but I think the second POV you present is apt but dependant on hierarchy level as well as each individual's drive to succeed.

From my understanding that incident happened while she was in a directorial position, not some IC level. At that level one has to constantly actively balance private life and work, no one will do it for you. I am all for supporting employees on all levels (and sure her superior could and should have done some things differently) but if your aspirations and perseverance get you to the point where you are flirting with the C suite, you should also be aware the you own your decisions now.

zelphirkalt 1 hours ago [-]
On the other hand, if you are that far in, that you are "flirting with the C suite", it is almost impossible not to have knowledge about you having joined a data gobbling sect/mafia, that will eat you up alive, if you upset them. So while she should have been aware that she makes her own decisions, she might also have been aware of what happens, if she does.
theK 3 minutes ago [-]
> while she should have been aware that she makes her own decisions, she might also have been aware of what happens, if she does.

I don't understand. In my world view, owning your decisions includes understanding the paths those decisions might lead to and finding your piece with that.

stef25 6 minutes ago [-]
If you have a job at Facebook today, you can get an impressive job somewhere else tomorrow. Nobody should be that connected.
blitzar 2 hours ago [-]
If Sandberg was a man it would not have happened.

Woman-on-Woman violence in the workplace has to stop, instead of trying to constantly take each other down they need to be better allies to other women.

Especially true for those that aspire to be role models for successful women and write books about how to "Lean In".

lynx97 2 hours ago [-]
I am sorry, but this attitude is sexist. My allies are those I can relate to, those which I can cooperate with. I don't pick my allies based on gender, and nor should you. And you shouldn't coerce anyone into forming alliances based on gender. It is the person that matters, not their gender or race or whatever other random attribute.
blitzar 2 hours ago [-]
Its sexism all the way down - Sandberg would not have done that to a male subordinate (who's wife was giving birth) and a male boss would not have done that to Wynn-Williams.

Women should not discriminate against women in the workplace because they are women.

zelphirkalt 2 hours ago [-]
In an alternative version of reality, she would be so distracted, that she failed to give birth and the child died as a consequence of her being completely absorbed in a toxic work culture. That alternative version of reality would be completely believable, and probably many would not be more surprised than now reading this news. This tells us all we need to know about FB.
spoonjim 2 hours ago [-]
I agree for something like a McDonalds employee or even entry level software engineer but this is a senior managerial role at Facebook. Nobody needs to do this job. Unless your spending is out of control you do not need this income. So if it comes with unreasonable demands, I don’t really care. There are problems worth caring about and this ain’t one of them.
pastage 1 hours ago [-]
What the leadership does will be mirrored down to the grunt. I have never lead a multi billion dollars corporation but from my view if your team can discard someone easily, they can also bear not having that person around for two weeks. Or a year.

Honestly I feel that father and mothers getting back from a years parental leave usually comes back with better focus.

raverbashing 3 hours ago [-]
> The other way is of an employee who has seen how her boss treats employees, and believes that her position, career, and livelihood would be in jeopardy if she wasn't working even in situations where no one should be expected to be working.

Honestly, they need to grow a pair

This kind of pressure (might) have worked for me if I was just out of university and such. But with experience you get to learn your boundaries

You're a top-level executive and you're afraid of being let go by such a silly thing? They can't wait 2 or 3 days for "top level bullet points"? Seems like they depend on you more than you depend on them

amval 2 hours ago [-]
Big companies tend to develop cult dynamics. This is not an exaggeration, but a consequence of how humans tend to operate in large amounts. And I'd wager that in the case of Silicon Valley tech companies, this is also something that they embrace and nurture. I don't think this is a controversial take at all, and rather obvious.

She was probably not "afraid of being let go" (fired), but had convinced herself that it was of the utmost importance to have this level of committment. The book probably reads similar to those books of someone who leaves their church or cult.

spoonjim 2 hours ago [-]
They tend to have cult dynamics because the people who subscribe to the cult dynamics are the ones who get promoted. If you’re happy to just make a living as a software engineer instead of trying to propel your way up the ladder of the world’s richest companies then you can live very happily and comfortably.
linotype 2 hours ago [-]
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. These cowards are ruining workplaces everywhere by having no backbone and subjecting their subordinates to the whims of psychopathic leaders.

Edit: it’s OK Meta employees. The best time to quit was years ago, the second best time is today.

raverbashing 1 hours ago [-]
At least they were not sleeping under their desks to stroke Musks's egomania.
wodenokoto 2 hours ago [-]
> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!

Kind of reminds me of this Simpsons joke: "Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, and one to listen."

jocaal 3 hours ago [-]
None of the people you mentioned's companies sell products your life depends on. If you don't like them, don't use or buy their products. I'm of the opinion that AWS, facebook and tesla cars are genuine trash. I don't know why people use that stuff.
TeMPOraL 3 hours ago [-]
Because your opinion is wrong. Problems with social media notwithstanding, just because you don't like the person who's running/ruining/most associated with the brand, doesn't make the product itself bad.

Most people don't give two fraks about who Bezos or Musk or Zuckerberg are, and they definitely don't think of them when using products and services from the companies you mentioned.

close04 18 minutes ago [-]
> just because you don't like the person who's running/ruining/most associated with the brand, doesn't make the product itself bad.

And just because that product does something you need doesn't mean it's not trash. GP didn't say "all cloud, all social media, all cars". Heck, literal trash is not all trash, people throw away a lot of good stuff.

Many people thought Tesla cars are diamond studded trash since Musk was still an idol. And it was pretty objective, great motor/battery surrounded by bargain bin components.

HenryBemis 2 hours ago [-]
> Because your opinion is wrong.

I was having a strong argument/discussion yesterday with a friend who is a communist. A real "I want hammer and sickle" kinda guy. He owns two homes, works for big-pharma, his wife works for big-logistic, scuba-diving vacations across the planet, very 'communist' way of life.

His opinions (just as the parent-commenter) are not 'wrong'. His/her/our/their (not pronouns, just groups of people) are different to ours. They got a different vision of this world (which of course it costs them nothing - until Communism settles and they are beheaded for having two homes, SP500 investments, and going scuba-diving across the planet!!)

> Most people don't give two fraks

"What are you talking about dude?? I got all these Gmail, and OneDrive, and Webex stuff for free!! It's like modern day communism!!" /s

kubb 1 hours ago [-]
This post is such a cocktail of confusion with a dash of McCarthyism that I have to say thank you for existing, and keeping the torch of this muddled thinking all the way from the post-war period.

Thank you for never learning what communism means, for staying embattled and internalising the narrative, for your anecdotes about your rich friend who doesn't realize that communists are lurking out there, waiting to kill him and everyone with wealth, once they get in power.

I'd ask you to never change, but I know that you won't, you'll paint your future thoughts through the same stencil that I've heard and seen so many times. When you express this it feels like I get a taste of the real America, a trailer park with the metheads, the uncle that just got back from jail, educating his young nephew about how the world works.

"You see son, there are rich people and they are good. And there are bad folks called communists that are jealous and want to kill the good rich folks. Be sure to carry your gun with you and if you see any of them communists, shoot them up. Because we will be rich one day. God bless America."

kubb 2 hours ago [-]
> just because you don't like the person...

Do we need that person to keep having the product though?

> Most people don't give two fraks...

They sure don't. These products and services are more like a... public good, used by and available to everyone.

But if it's a common good then should it be managed like a dictatorship?

The people using them don't have an equivalent alternative, and the companies have moats on a scale never seen before. Is that an issue?

Zuck is selling his customers wholesale, and squandering the resulting cash on asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse. Maybe he should have just stayed with the initial product?

Maybe these public platforms would better serve the people using them without the person running/ruining/most associated with the brand?

CorrectHorseBat 3 hours ago [-]
That's a very naive take, not using their products doesn't stop them from negatively impacting society. Look at what Musk is doing over the whole world (and the other two aren't much better, just not as obvious about it). It's not about being fair or jealous or whatever, a single individual having so much wealth and thus power is simply not healthy for society.
z3t4 2 hours ago [-]
The problem is these companies buy competitors or bribe hardware/platforms in order to get market monopoly. So often it's impossible to find alternative products.
whatever1 2 hours ago [-]
You cannot avoid FB. They literally stalk you everywhere and sell your info to advertisers. You are their product whether you like it or not.
linotype 2 hours ago [-]
It’s easy to delete your account though. They may still track you, but you’re not feeding the attention machine.
HenryBemis 2 hours ago [-]
It won't 'protect' you. They still track you and have a shadow account for you, and sell the data. FB is a cancer that won't go away until we/you do.

You can protect yourself by blocking all 'social media buttons' (as LI or Pinterest do the same), and for FB block every domain they use and their range of IPs. But there are so many trackers that will (eventually) get the 'job' done, so you either do 'more' (replace hosts file, add firewall on your Android and block ad broker, doubleclick, adjust, mopub, google analytics, etc. etc (loooooong list).

Surveillance capitalism is not going anywhere. Where money can be made, money will be made.

disgruntledphd2 44 minutes ago [-]
> It won't 'protect' you. They still track you and have a shadow account for you, and sell the data. FB is a cancer that won't go away until we/you do.

Firstly, this is just not true. Like basically all users who couldn't be mapped to a FB person were given userid=0, which I guess is a shadow account, but it's pretty crap as a method of tracking people. Source: worked at FB for half a decade.

2 hours ago [-]
cess11 1 hours ago [-]
Have you tried figuring it out? It's not magic or miracle, there are reasons why they're profitable and if it's not obvious you might get surprised and learn something if you try to study it.

One reason is that they are extremely manipulative and strategically exploit people with power over other people's money, notably taxes and what labour generates.

goodpoint 2 hours ago [-]
Boycotts might work occasionally but they are often not enough.
frereubu 1 hours ago [-]
These kinds of amoral corporate hierarchies will by their nature promote people who give themselves over entirely to the business. It's not that everyone who works there turns into that kind of corporate drone, it just weeds out the people who value more of a work/life balance. If someone is willing to send talking point while they're in labour, a company with the corporate culture of Facebook isn't going to stop them, they're going to be rewarded.
touwer 2 hours ago [-]
Don't foget the less visible guys (yes, it's a gender issue ;) like Thiel, Andreeeesssssen etc
MarceliusK 1 hours ago [-]
It's not just about one individual pushing for more... it's the entire system that values work over personal well-being and creates an environment where people feel they can't step away, even during life-changing events.
blitzar 2 hours ago [-]
It's Facebook though - I can not think of a lower stakes workplace.

Should the photo grid be 3 wide or 5 wide... Thank god ChatGPT can now pump out the mindless talking points for them.

poincaredisk 1 hours ago [-]
It's Facebook - a website that is a large part of life to over 3 billion users. A website that can influence elections in major countries, that sometimes shows fake ads and is responsible for (roughly) millions of frauds caused by them, that incited genocides in African countries.

I don't think the stakes are that low.

avgd 29 minutes ago [-]
> website that can influence elections in major countries,

I think this sort of power transferred to twitter, with most of the users who haven't left facebook being boomers who keep reposting AI slop over and over and over.

The rare times I look at my facebook account, all I see is the older members of my family spamming AI garbage like shrimp jesus, "look at this nice dog sculpture I made out of wood" (that I didn't actually make), videos of random nonsense like dogs taking care of toddlers and behaving like humans etc.

FB has become AI slop no man's land.

I don't even understand how facebook continues to operate at this point.

roywashere 2 hours ago [-]
> Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos...

People amassing more money than entire countries just should not happen. "Eat the rich"!

hermannj314 10 minutes ago [-]
Tuvalu has a GDP of $70 million. Is that the line?

It is a very small country.

Galanwe 1 hours ago [-]
> Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos...

There should be a level of market cap where you company has to split, period. Megacorps create oligarchs, ruin competition and cheat antitrust.

smokel 2 hours ago [-]
> Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Might it be an option that correlation and causation are reversed here?

Given the amount of criticsm a typical leader of a large company, or even a country, gets these days, it is no wonder that people with narcissistic traits have an advantage. Somewhat more empathetic people would've given up already, either when they received a large enough reward, or whenever they got serious criticsm on bad practices.

Free tip for a better society: stop worshipping success.

max_ 3 hours ago [-]
>Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos...

What should be the maximum of how big someone should be?

Humans are not perfect, whether "big" or "small".

fire_lake 3 hours ago [-]
Presumably this is intended to lead into an argument that because we disagree on exactly where the limit should be we shouldn’t have a limit at all. We could make the same case against drunk driving, speed limits, age of consent laws, maximum sentencing…
ratmice 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I don't know why we would need a limit, I'm sure if a temper tantrum devolves into one of them building their own robo army. The others will follow suit and it will all just balance itself out.
kelnos 3 hours ago [-]
Certainly the "maximum big level" is something that reasonable people could disagree about, but I don't think a society is healthy when people can get as big as Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, and Bezos have gotten.

Individuals should not have that much power. It's not healthy.

max_ 3 hours ago [-]
It is definitely not healthy.

But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.

I think the real problem is abuse of power, not accumulation of it.

Power cannot be eliminated. It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros) or remain in hands of wealth creators.

What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.

supriyo-biswas 1 hours ago [-]
Somewhat similar to Paul Graham's essay _Inequality and Risk_[1]:

> I realize startups are not the main target of those who want to eliminate economic inequality. What they really dislike is the sort of wealth that becomes self-perpetuating through an alliance with power. ... But if you try to attack this type of wealth through economic policy, it's hard to hit without destroying startups as collateral damage.

> The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption?

[1] https://paulgraham.com/inequality.html

mola 1 hours ago [-]
Power can be diffused. Wealth accumulation is power concentration. When it's legal to buy politicians then what is corruption? How can you go after corruption when those with power define what is corruption?

Concentrated power is corrupt, there's no power without the will to wield it. If you have more power than 99 percent of humans, they become insects for you.

vnorilo 2 hours ago [-]
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.

In communism, an individual can not own any means of production - effectively 0% of the society's total capital. I don't think it follows that any non-communist system must permit any single individual to gain up to 100% of the society's wealth.

I don't know what the limit could look like or how to make it work, but societies commonly called capitalist already implement various brakes on free trade, from regulation to capital and immigration controls, subsidies, tariffs...

piaste 2 hours ago [-]
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.

Is that your actual objection? It sounds more like a smear by association.

Famously, the USA under Eisenhower had a top marginal tax rate of 90% on income over $200K - "merely" a few million dollars in modern-day money.

Was the Eisenhower administration Communist? If it wasn't, would it have become Communist if they had gone a bit further and added a marginal rate of 99% for income over oh, let's say $20M (a few hundred million dollars nowadays)?

I think if you traveled back in time and proposed such a bill, the reaction from folks like Senator McCarthy would not have been "that's Communism" but more likely "that's a ridiculous and useless bill, how could anyone ever accumulate that much personal wealth? It would be absurd".

cjfd 2 hours ago [-]
One question is why communism is a problem. It is a problem because it is a totalitarian regime. I.e., a non-democratic government. I am not sure limiting peoples wealth is the actual problem with communism.

Sure, the real problem is the abuse of power. This is the nature of power, though. Give a person or an organization too much power and it will find a way to abuse it. In democratic government, the power of the government is limited by having three independent branches where, at the least, the laws are being made by representatives of the people. In democratic government there are some evil politicians but not too many. In the US the situation went completely off the rails and one of the parties completely deteriorated. I cannot help thinking that statements like 'politicians, who are genuinely more evil' are part of the problem. I.e., this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The party where people tend to believe this turns out the consist of crooks, is maybe not that surprising.

'What we should do is focus of punishing people who abuse their power.'. Well, this presumes that there are institutions capable of doing this. For instance, a democratic government.

js8 2 hours ago [-]
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.

What is wrong with calling it communism? It's just a name.. You so much internalized "communism bad" that you look at a good idea and think it is bad because it reminds you something else that was implemented badly.

And by the way, you can also call it democratic socialism (democratic is really redundant).

sethammons 1 hours ago [-]
There are several faults with this reasoning. Capital attracts capital, and with too low of marginal taxes, it pools at the top, increasing wealth inequality, hurting the non-elite's ability to compete, and squeezes the middle class. To say marginal taxes is communism is just wrong.

Capital attracting capital is as natural as power corrupting people. Instead of hoping people play nice and punishing the few who get caught and hoping against nature, the better alternative is to set up systems that encourage healthy, competitive markets through sensible rules, regulations, and redistribution.

Edit: re the socialism/communism scarecrow, back when woman started wearing pants in the US, they called it socialist. That same logic is oft applied today.

palata 2 hours ago [-]
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.

Of course you can. Those billionaires don't pay much taxes, but normal people do. And we don't call that communism.

> It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros)

This is a very weird take. In a functioning democracy (which the US are not at the moment), politicians are elected to represent the people. If they are evil, we change them. Tech bros are not elected, period.

> What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.

That's where you completely miss the problem: the problem is that when people get too powerful, we cannot punish them anymore.

Similar with companies: you have to prevent companies to become as big as the FAANGs before they do. Otherwise they become too powerful and do whatever they want.

mola 1 hours ago [-]
You probably don't have an issue with limiting government power. Why is limiting an individual reaching power of governments so difficult to fathom?

The problem is power accumulation, "small" people have a harder time limiting my freedoms by abusing their power.

I don't want a king, whether they got to be king by swords or money.

cjfd 3 hours ago [-]
The imperfections of 'big' people have much more ramifications than the imperfections of 'small' people. Humans work best together in much more egalitarian groups where the imperfections of individuals are compensated by the strengths of other individuals.
js8 2 hours ago [-]
> What should be the maximum of how big someone should be?

In democracy, the maximum should be 1. One vote per person. That's it.

In practice, we can delegate stuff, but I don't see reason why should people (as adults) accept any sort of authoritarianism in their lives.

3 hours ago [-]
palata 3 hours ago [-]
> Humans are not perfect, whether "big" or "small".

Still, I've never seen a poor human becoming an oligarch.

The problem is not that those billionaires are not perfect, rather that they have too much power.

CaptainZapp 3 hours ago [-]
She said Wynn-Williams’ allegations about Kaplan are false, and in a Thursday statement, she called the book “defamatory” and alleged that Wynn-Williams had skipped “the industry’s standard fact-checking process.

(emph, mine)

This, coming from a Meta spokesperson, is rather rich.

aoanevdus 2 hours ago [-]
I’m curious what would be considered the industry standard for fact checking in tech. Does Google Search, Apple App Store, TikTok, Snapchat, Amazon store, etc. apply fact-checking to the content posted by users/sellers?

Or more abstractly, is fact-checking the responsibility of authors and content editors, or of platforms and infrastructure that spread the content?

blitzar 2 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia is the gold standard. Good enough is asking Grok.
pcthrowaway 25 minutes ago [-]
A Youtuber I follow got in an argument a couple of days ago with someone who kept claiming the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 was primarily voluntary (not by force or a response to threats to their safety). The Youtuber kept asking him for sources (providing his own to the contrary), and the contrarian kept, I shit you not, asking Grok and then citing Grok as his source.

We are fucked.

26 minutes ago [-]
dep_b 3 hours ago [-]
It was fact checked: in Texas
kubb 3 hours ago [-]
My goodness, the audacity.
baxtr 6 minutes ago [-]
This triggers my cautionary nerve a bit. I think it is important to recognize that she wants to sell a book.

I am not saying she isn't doing this because she has a cause. I am also not saying she is lying or anything.

But if you sell a book you can't deny that there might be a conflict of interest. Potentially she paints things more extreme than they really were.

gchadwick 3 hours ago [-]
A dupe of my comment from another post on this (relating to the US arbiter ruling that she may not promote the book https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43351949)

People may be interested in the interview with Wynn-Williams (the whistleblower) on the News Agents podcast: https://www.globalplayer.com/podcasts/episodes/7DrpKCA/ (it's a UK news/political podcast very popular in the UK). From what they said at the beginning I think this is her first big podcast interview about the book/her claims. I wonder if she chose a UK podcast because of the US arbiter ruling.

lelandfe 3 hours ago [-]
She also did an interview with BI "hours before an arbitrator ruled in Meta's favor" https://www.businessinsider.com/former-meta-executive-sarah-...
3 hours ago [-]
Neil44 60 minutes ago [-]
All else aside Zuck was basically a kid when the whole Facebook rocket ship ride took off. Nobody is their best self all day every day. Personally I always thought he came over as kind of an asshole but you have to keep hit pieces like these in the right frame. The shortest accurate answer to what's Zuck like is "I never met him" the rest is just clicks and hot air.
MarceliusK 2 hours ago [-]
The fact that Meta is aggressively trying to suppress the book just reinforces the point. If it were all "misleading and unfounded," they wouldn't need to fight this hard to bury it.
2muchcoffeeman 1 hours ago [-]
That’s not true. Just look at the current climate. If I repeat lies often enough, people will repeat the same lies and start to believe.
MarceliusK 1 hours ago [-]
That's a fair point, repetition can make falsehoods stick. But if the book were full of outright lies, Meta could challenge it with clear evidence rather than legal pressure
__loam 1 hours ago [-]
Or actually sue.
2muchcoffeeman 2 hours ago [-]
Hahahahahaha, sore over losing in Ticket to Ride and Catan. Those aren’t even “serious” games.
dzonga 3 hours ago [-]
you don't become a global ceo without being an absolute killer and not having non-questionable morals. I can make up different stuff about how a ceo can be amoral, and those would still apply to zuck / {{ whoelse }} book meant to be sold at airports for bored people. non-story.
dep_b 3 hours ago [-]
This is probably true if you look at all big tech companies, but before Windows, MacOS, Oracle Databases or IBM computers did not have the responsibility of dealing with the communication and shaping of world view of billions of people world wide.

It's the same as owning a large share of news papers or TV channels. You own the public discourse.

If Larry Ellison is a greedy immoral bastard I switch to MS SQL Server, or something open source. When Zuckerberg or Musk became greedy immoral bastards, they started to shape the information fed to the world. You can decide not to buy a Tesla, but you cannot escape the results of brainwashing of other people that vote.

Bill Gates had serious trouble for including a free Internet Browser in his Operating System, because he was not able to influence the public discourse. The new internet mass communication companies do. Google never really got into much trouble while their monopoly was stronger.

alex1138 2 hours ago [-]
I know your comment isn't about Elon specifically and I have my own reservations about some of what he does, but it's important to point out (and maybe this depends on what you call "misinformation", it shapes all future discussion) that Twitter absolutely was censoring for partisan reasons (before he bought it; I know some have complained Musk does indeed ban his critics) including silencing covid dissent, real doctors and researchers getting kicked off. Him acquiring it was absolutely necessary to break the deadlock

Edit: We do not want our platforms to be owned by someone like Susan Wojcicki who inflated her own importance and who thought mass censorship is ok (Google has really abrogated their responsibility here)

pastage 1 hours ago [-]
Everything is not partisan it might be political. The Republican vs. Democratic is hurting the US badly you can not continue to make everything ok just because you need the support from whatever extreme views is populist in your party.

Most of the things a party does is not extreme but you guys are going insane over there.

wqaatwt 25 minutes ago [-]
Seems like historical founders/CEOs like e.g. Hewlett and Packard were relatively decent people despite being immensely successful.

So at least it was possible back in the day (of course after this many years a lot of details were lost and overall standards and expectations were very different back then).

JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> you don't become a global ceo without being an absolute killer

This is nonsense. Plenty of good people are wildly successful. The difference is they aren’t addicted to the role, and so see a future for themselves beyond it. Connecting with that future self, in turn, effects their decisions today—at work, at home, in society.

We have a cadre of sociopaths leading our commercial giants. That is a fixable problem. Saying it’s a non-story is just being nihilistic and lazy.

blitzar 2 hours ago [-]
Boards have a lot to answer for, and in theory at least, this is their responsibility.

It did not work out that well for the OpenAi board however.

JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> Boards have a lot to answer for, and in theory at least, this is their responsibility

Boards have plenty of things they're properly responsible for. CEO sociopathy isn't one of them, especially not if it's the profitable type of assholery. The regulation has to come from outside.

wqaatwt 24 minutes ago [-]
How do you legally stop extremely ambitious sociopaths from obtaining positions of power?
tasuki 30 minutes ago [-]
Yes, well, she was fired. I'm sure she's completely unbiased.

If it was so bad, why did she work there? She was a senior executive, not a wage-slave.

kumarvvr 3 hours ago [-]
We still haven't found out how to use the internet to socialize, without resorting to giving power to a central entity.

If there is something out there that can do this, profitably, then we can kiss these mega social giants good bye.

I heard about the Blue Sky protocol, but it still feels primitive.

2 hours ago [-]
xoac 3 hours ago [-]
You realize people (including me) were socializing on the internet before any of these big companies existed, right?
ohgr 2 hours ago [-]
We also still do it!
Juliate 2 hours ago [-]
_Centralized platforms_ socialising happened around 2004, Facebook being one big survivor of that time. Because then, centralising stuff to provide a massive service proved more efficient (money wise: resources, investment, control, ads).

But socialising on the internet? There were plenty of options before, around and after then. Only, they didn't get the same support, convergence and effort since then. Because most people trusted the centralized services would opt to do the right things eventually. Ha. Fools were we.

kelnos 3 hours ago [-]
Not really surprised. It's good to have more people talking about how these people act out of the public eye. But all of this makes me a little less optimistic, and just reminds me that powerful people are rarely held accountable for all the messed up stuff they do.
ksynwa 3 hours ago [-]
My conception of world conquering ambition comes mostly from popular media so trying to imagine Zuckerberg trying to become the world's stenographer through a platform that is 90% boomer-bait AI slop is a bit disorienting.
blogabegonija 3 hours ago [-]
After all what Meta did? Who could have thought. And yet people love to upload photos of their children on pedobook.
readthenotes1 3 hours ago [-]
"Joel Kaplan, had sexually harassed her. ... and Kaplan, the company’s newly appointed president of global affairs;"

Nominative determinism?

--

On a different note, Obama, the ex-president with theoretically no official power, is calling up CEOs privately to get them to behave differently?

Seems like the Twitter files weren't the only corporate being influenced

kelnos 3 hours ago [-]
> On a different note, Obama, the ex-president with theoretically no official power, is calling up CEOs privately to get them to behave differently?

The article's phrasing was a bit murky, but I read that to mean that Obama called after or around the 2016 election, while he was still president.

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