Mark Zuckerberg 2017 Challenge | Hacker News Reader

Mark Zuckerberg 2017 Challenge

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> Going into this challenge, it seems we are at a turning point in history. For decades, technology and globalization have made us more productive and connected. This has created many benefits, but for a lot of people it has also made life more challenging. This has contributed to a greater sense of division than I have felt in my lifetime.

I don't follow. What exactly has technology made more challenging for people? Certainly not communication.

What sense of division is he talking about? Are those weasel words for the US election?

The ease of communication makes it really easy to find like-minded individuals, of practically any opinion a person could hold. When you find a community of people that hold a particular opinion then it's easy for that community to turn into an echo chamber, and to turn that opinion into an identity. At that point, differing opinions become interpreted as attacks on a person's identity.

At internet scale, that becomes extremely divisive.

I suspect that passage is more about wealth inequality.

That he contributed to.

Marginally, yes he's loaded but Facebook didn't destroy thousands of smaller mom and pop businesses and concentrate whole sectors of the economy like Amazon, or hundreds of newspapers and advertising agencies like Google.

Facebook is totally too powerful and far too greedy but I wouldn't blame it for inequality.

> What exactly has technology made more challenging for people? Certainly not communication.

Killed a bunch of jobs maybe ?

Between this and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/12...

Is this Mark trying to better understand why 2016 election happened (going against the data), or maybe he's opening himself up for a potential political future.

With him recently having eschewed atheism [1], I'd definitely say the later.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13287304

Do you think he's going to try to compete against Trump in 2020 or just local politics in California?

I was thinking he has a lot of years before he'd be eligible to be president (has to be at least 35), but he'll be 36 in May 2020.

Not that Trump will still be president at that time... (Just like everyone said he won't win the primary, etc, etc)

I disagree with that. Like the ethics thing showed. The republicans without trump are more lost than the democrats.

If Trump survives the stress of being president, and still runs he'll win the primary. Or he'll pick his successor, maybe his Daughter or her husband.

Will his celebrity status prevent him from getting a "real" sense of the places/people he visits?

It will be as real as his visits anywhere else (not very).

I suspect that many/most people won't recognize him.

I think this largely depends on who he goes to visit. It's very probable his status will prevent him from meeting people, but I think he can get around this. I'd love for him to meet my father. He's a recently retired immigrant chef, doesn't own a Facebook account, doesn't care who Zuckerberg is, but would provide him with great conversation on his struggles and challenges with technology as well as the best meal of his life. If I know someone good to talk to that is this close to me while being in the field of tech, I'm sure he can find good people to meet as well.

Sorry about this, but I feel it is important:

doesn't own a Facebook account

Nobody owns their Facebook account.

I feel this is important because we need to be careful and aware of the language we use when talking about these services.

My personal challenge is to contact someone in every state with ham radio. It's far more energy efficient, and within my budget.

I've been in every state except Arkansas ... perhaps some day I'll have a reason to go there (or at least reroute a road trip to pass through).

Being able to claim that you've been to every single state is a great reason to go there!

so a mission to make the world more open and connected is being joined with a mission to figure out how the first mission made the world more closed and disconnected. snark aside, it's good to see, but if he's interested there's some very good analysis on root causes already.

A bit underwhelming

I think this whole PR circus for him has one important goal - he seems to be shooting to be a US president one day and this is him laying extensive ground work. We are going to see more of that in the future.

He can't get much higher in the business world and it's pretty clear he's an egomaniac who wants more power. That's my theory anyway.

My cynical side is agreeing and also putting a different context around the charitable LLC he announced a year ago in his daughters name.

I think it's a pretty scary scenario to have a person with such a high percentage of the world's personal information at his fingertips seeking the highest office in the land.

This is also the guy who decides the algorithms that control what news those people see (or don't see) on his platform and is also the guy who also carried out a study to see how his platform can manipulate his users emotions.

Published a study on how his platform can manipulate its users' emotions. There are hundreds/thousands of studies on millions of people being carried out each day. And we probably won't hear about any more of them (unless they're really really cute).

It's likely that at the time he'll become president, Facebook won't be significant anymore. That's probably what he's preparing for. He knows that his company won't last very long (because historically very, very few companies did), he lays the groundwork to start as a politician once Facebook isn't anymore what it is today.

tl;dr: My personal challenge for 2017 is to have visited and met people in every state in the US by the end of the year. I've spent significant time in many states already, so I'll need to travel to about 30 states this year to complete this challenge.

Also remarkable, imo:

This has contributed to a greater sense of division than I have felt in my lifetime. We need to find a way to change the game so it works for everyone.

It would be a bit more remarkable if he explicitly took some responsibility for it instead of just speaking vaguely of the role of technology in that sense of division.

Why would Zuckerberg be responsible for it?

Do you think that the Balkanization of social groups didn't occur before Facebook? Facebook is a reflection of one's social group.

Well it's a matter of degree. Facebook seems to be hundreds of times worse than the awful racist or left wing or fascist newspapers I remember from 15 years ago. I'm not saying that it's only Facebook but it is the world's biggest customised bullshit pipe. And it's both ends of the pipe. Facebook has enabled micro publishing that lets anyone make this stuff up and people just believe it.

Just to share an anecdote, yesterday I saw link bait content suggesting Obama's daughter was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And if you google that you find comments from people who believe that and think it's proof that the Obama's have stolen money from the government.

This is little different than people getting together and saying conspiracy theories in person to their social groups.

Facebook is by no means the exclusive place to find this behavior; Twitter is even worse. Email is the original vector for this bunk news. If you look back ten years in your email inbox you can find similar bogus forwards at the same frequency, when it was en vogue to send it via email instead of a Facebook post.

I think the issue that people have is that Facebook is in a great position to do something about, but instead they've varied between taking the position that the problem doesn't exist or that it isn't their job to fix it. Facebook isn't wrong that it isn't their "job" to fix it, but I can imagine that others besides me find it a bit strange that Zuckerburg decries the current state of divisiveness but doesn't seem that willing to combat it when he clearly has means far beyond the rest of us to do so.

Interestingly, "email news" were eventually just dismissed by everybody on account of the regular news networks not using email for broadcast: "If this email were true, I would have already heard of it in the TV/radio news."

But that signal isn't there anymore: the serious news networks publish on Facebook now, and all the bullshitters do too. There's no broadcast license costs, or paper publishing costs, to filter them out.

The filter bubbles are getting more severe imo because FB wants to be a news source.

Simple illustration: http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/

How do you get that feed on Facebook? I never see that stuff on mobile or desktop, just the terrible articles posted by my Facebook friends.

Thanks for posting that WSJ link. The example articles were horrifying.

I don't have much insight beyond their posted methodology which I have only a superficial understanding of.

http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/#methodology

I have this giant text file of things I come across that triggered a line of thinking. Mostly the purpose is for me to revisit it from time to time to remind myself of ideas worth considering a bit more.

Anyway, one of the entries I come back to a lot is this one:

"Zuckerberg says he is passionate about connecting people because connected people do great things. But Facebook doesn’t really promote doing great things with connected people. Where is Facebook falling short?"

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