Zuckerberg Gives Public an Indication How He Lives in an Alternative Reality
medium.com
medium.com
That cute girl you hooked up with in Thailand that said she'd message you when she's visiting SF: gone. The cousin you really get along with that you never see anymore since her father passed away: no more casual reminders she exists. No more university friends.
There's such arrogance on HN about Facebook but it makes a bigger difference to ordinary people's lives than any other website.
There are challenges, but what do you expect Zuckerberg to do? Let fake news and bullshit, unchecked viral opinions go wild? The smart people are leaving the small towns for the cities and it's destroying the ability for smaller communities to make sense of the world. We need a way of protecting fake news and propaganda from spreading through our social networks.
The Facebook isn't run by some scheming cabal of evildoers.
I don't doubt that facebook provides some value, but I don't think that value is a sane relation to what we sacrifice as humans.
On the other hand, I do have lots of nice memories of actual physical meetings with people.
My conclusion based on my biased data set is that the value Facebook brings is ephemeral at best when laid against the skein of real world experiences.
My life is not a stream of posts on third party servers.
??? Do you not have phone numbers for your friends?
I am not a huge Facebook fan, but Zuck is right about that much. That potential could be squandered or worse. Right now Facebook is still largely a toy but that potential is there.
But Facebook is exactly that - thousand disparate bubbles. People are connected only to items they are analyzed to care about beforehand. If something irks them, rather than coolly analyze it, people get offended and react - often en masse - which triggers the social media rages.
Zuckerberg became massive rich through 'zeitgeist' being the first at something obvious.
Now he has so much power which shouldn't be in his hands.
We can only hope that states and countries are using the power to reduce his power over our socity.
And yeah fb is overrated. Its just another tool. It feels already super stupid when facebook whishes me a nice birthday or a good morning. Wtf go away...
I left FB (and social media in general) 4-5 years ago. I haven't missed any of it. My hope is that people will start swinging away from the frivolous noise of most social media. It provides a valuable service but the vast majority of it is garbage.
Zuck was the first to make social networking work, by getting rid of all the stuff that made earlier networks fail, and also adding new features.
If you get to the end, you'll see that Zuckerberg thinks that Facebook can AI moderate away shitty behavior. Look closely, that's a fundamental claim. Yet, at the end of the day, he's running a business, not a Non-Profit Human Welfare Organization, right?
I don't disagree that YT comments are just a cesspool. But how is that Zuck's fault?
This sends chills down my spine, because we're selling out kids to the same Surveillance-Industrial complex we sold out to before they even get a choice in the matter.
> This sends chills down my spine, because we're selling out kids to the same Surveillance-Industrial complex we sold out to before they even get a choice in the matter.
Absolutely! I don't understand how people are just letting this happen or even promoting it. I see Facebook pages, WhatsApp groups and such - all used to share sensitive information about children - fundamentally making it impossible for the children to reverse the effects of these actions when they're adults. I'd rather prefer an email group to these mechanisms. Or they might as well put everything on Twitter in public view to avoid any pretense of having private communications. I'm far too focused on privacy to consider any benefits as outweighing the dangers and damages.
People will vote for him because he's pragmatic, similar to Gore and Clinton . The nominee of either side gets at least 45% of the vote , so it comes down to undecideds
Being the US president is something that only 30 or so people in the past 240 years have done , so that does say a lot. Being president of the US would boost visibility of Facebook, possibly change legislation in his favor, etc.
It does seem like Trump has probably broken the mold permanently, in terms of the type of background one needs to become president.
I think it was a wake-up call for guys like Zuck, Mark Cuban, etc who desire influence but had never seriously considered running for president as a viable option.
> If Zuckerberg shut down Facebook for a month, he’d have a more positive impact Building Global Community than any of the high-minded things he wrote out.
Actually, if this were to happen (certainly not because Zuckerberg wants it to), people would suddenly find time to be more productive, to engage in things they've been putting off and find ways to get in touch with others through less-noisy channels (with a little more intimacy, perhaps). For all its merits, Facebook has turned into a place to navel gaze, pat each other in echo chambers, and shout out things to everyone else to get some reactions (likes and others).
Monitoring my own misgivings however I've noticed that there is a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater ...
So much of our most trenchant criticisms of Facebook stem from how it's an illusion and that's not rooted in reality. Zuckerberg seems to be trying to reattach its moorings, talking about these real-world communities that give us a sense of purpose and meaning and that Facebook complements rather than replaces or distorts.
Unfortunately his status as a billionaire undermines this argument. We're intellectually (if not actually) very skeptical of illusions (e.g. Plato's allegory of the cave) and view his net-worth being directly proportional to his malign influence in our society, pulling the wool over our eyes with an addictive illusion while voraciously funneling our private information into vast data-centers where AI is trained to new heights of persuasiveness...
But I think it is possible to rehabilitate Facebook's illusory component and get something useful out of it. After all it has been instrumental in some major movements across the globe, including the election of Trump and subsequent protests.
I've written about it here: https://iainmait.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.htm...
It's a bit like MZ's approach ... while also acknowledging OP's final point, that Facebook will never willingly optimize for dis-engagement.
http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
I used to think this a few years ago and consider that he might have changed (I wanted to believe this more so after his daughter was born). But I don't think it's true. He's very much the same person who said those things years ago, except that he's super rich now and has a lot more control over things.
Thank you.
I mean, I'm all for it. But it just feels like Medium writers are trying too hard.
If you aren't instantly put off by the corn syrup tone of Zuckerberg's piece then you're also missing out on a useful cynicism trigger.
Translation - these are adjectives I use to describe any viewpoint that differes from my own.