Facebook hired a full-time pollster to monitor Zuckerberg’s approval ratings | Hacker News Reader

Facebook hired a full-time pollster to monitor Zuckerberg’s approval ratings

theverge.com

59 pointsdsr1244 comments

Seems like panic is starting to take hold. Unfortunately, neither this or the news feed update is gonna change the tide, its just too late. The transformation to Orkut/MySpace has already began and I am loving it.

The social media experiment has failed, its become too big and caused too much psychological damage on individuals. I look forward to more and more niche communities :)

What evidence is there that Facebook in particular or social media in general is actually declining, rather than occasionally inspiring cranky articles?

There is a bit of evidence in that US and Canadian daily users declined for the first time last quarter. [1]

[1]: https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily-act...

Regarding other social media, such functionality is longer seen as a perk by users.

Interesting example may be Strava. They seem to be gravitating more towards "social" than "data crunching" kind of app. Nobody in my circles use it as "social" tool. People are not happy they're investing in bullshit functionality rather than fixing long-standing "data crunching" issues. Few mistakes here and there and people may start leaving for less "social" counterparts.

There's little lockin in fitness apps anyway. Strava may be trying to steal a piece of Facebook's cake and solve lack of lockin. But IMO they're shooting themselves in a foot.

Evidence? Perhaps too early for that, but the article notes the pollster publishing the results of a survey after he left Facebook and started his own company:

"Among tech companies, 32 percent of Americans said Facebook is harmful. A separate survey, which placed Facebook among other large brands including Walmart, McDonald’s, and Marlboro, found that 27 percent said it is harmful."

There was an old article about which companies people could abandon first, among companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon. I believe Facebook was pretty high on that list.

If you look at what happened to a company like AOL (just typing that seemed weird) or even Myspace, it's quite easy to imagine Facebook fading hard, mostly because people WANT it to fade, or they lose interest.

On my own side, I only keep it around to share photos of my kid with my close friends and family. Beyond that, among the FB friends I have from years of working in tech, very few of them ever post anything at all. There's a silent percentage of the demographic who basically use FB as an RSS reader. How valuable will that be over time?

Sadly, I think this is wishful thinking. What's happening is that internet and tech companies, like all state-supported monopolies eventually, are explicitly becoming primarily political organizations.

Transitioning into (or starting as) a "platform", when your infrastructure is a basic CRUD app, is indistinguishable from rent-seeking, and ultimately leads to becoming a new layer of government. The real infrastructure is audience-capture through transition costs, the acquisition of potential competitors, deep relationships with and/or direct control of media outlets, and specific government subsidy through specificity in legislation, regulatory capture, government contracts and sustained quid pro quo relationships with specific government officials and institutions (revolving doors and kickbacks.) The CRUD app is just a peppercorn.

None of these companies can afford to not compete on that level and expect to have the growth that their investors require. The potential that they will have a future de facto monopoly on entire forms of interaction between individuals is already priced into these companies. That's why the fight between Google and Uber over Waymo is so important (to them.) It's ultimately deciding who will have the monopoly over the only forms of transportation that they plan to allow. This is the only situation in which one could feel sorry for Uber, who is outclassed.

About facebook, who is looking to take over all peer-to-peer interaction on the internet, and all consumption of news (or ideas in general, ultimately); I'd say to compare a 30% dislike poll on facebook to a poll on any other piece of government. It's really not so bad. And while Zuckerberg is repellent to a lot of people currently; if he can't pull a Bill Gates turnaround by strategically pandering through throwing cash around, he could simply fade into the background and make the face of the company somebody people liked. Depends on whether his lust for power or his lust to be loved is higher.

/rant

I genuinely have no idea where people like my parents or siblings would go if Facebook vanished tomorrow. Many many people that rely on current social media platforms don't have the desire to spend time investigating and experimenting with different social tools, nor do they have a desire to fragment their communication across multiple separate platforms.

Do you know of any new communities that might replace it?

How do you think they should look like?

That sounds a lot like wishful thinking. As much as I would like it to be true, I don't see it happening.

I have never had a Facebook account so I don't know what people find in it, but it really is unclear if people are leaving it in droves?

Anyway the problem isn't Facebook per se, it's "social networks" in general; if Facebook is replaced by something similar with a different name, that's not progress, that's more of the same.

Maybe this is just Mark falling victim to his own machine. Now he, too, has become obsessed with social media preening, and has to hire a professional to tell him what people think about his party pics.

Remains to be seen if it's only another yes man or not

"McGinn declined to discuss the results of his polling at Facebook, saying nondisclosure agreements prevented him from doing so. But he said he decided to leave the company after only six months after coming to believe that Facebook had a negative effect on the world."

I don't think he's a yes man.

I would perhaps be far less cynical about FB and Zuck if he, and other senior people, used FB as we're expected to. He seems, from what I've read, to deeply value his privacy whilst FB does everything possible to gain more clicks, time and tracking from us. FB isn't even much good for keeping up with friends and family any more!

At least when Google was trying to push G+ there were many senior people actually just using it. You could actually have conversations with them!

If he wants to gain stellar ratings then perhaps he should set his sights a little higher. Like a certain Mr Musk recently did. :)

I'm not sure we're in the same class of paparazzi-attention as those folks. So there's some excuse for more paranoia from them.

> I'm not sure we're in the same class of paparazzi-attention as those folks. So there's some excuse for more paranoia from them.

Yes, but that shouldn't matter when it comes to social media use. Paparazzi are about invading privacy, but social media posts are about voluntarily giving it up in order to share. I also believe Zuckerberg once characterized privacy as a kind of dishonesty.

This means there is an especially good chance that whatever you write and vote here will be eventually piped into Mark & Sheryl's eyes & ears. Time to unload those pent up opinions!

This is just what Facebook does for Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg initiative is separate from Facebook and they have hired very high level campaign managers for Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, GWB (Ken Mehlman) to work for Zuckerberg.

Seriusly? I can’t imagine him running for a president. What he is gonna do there?

Try in vain to prove to himself that his billions aren't just dumb luck and circumstance.

It's just an ego thing. He wants to be "popular" in the same way politicians do. He wants to be at the top of the list of "most powerful people" that those magazines put out.

He's probably super envious of Elon Musk.

Sounds like a Trump-type character flaw.

He has been making headlines regarding the possibility of running: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/15/mark-zuckerberg-could-be-run...

Why are people surprised he wants to run?

>Zuck: I don't know why. They "trust me." Dumb fucks.

Here he exhibits a defining characteristic of politicians.

It's worth noting the difference with Zuckerburg is this: we all suddenly become concerned with our civil liberties when those of our own are directly assaulted: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/05/the-nunes-memo-and-katie...

If I were hired to be on the team of twenty people that collectively compose a "candidate," I would have Zuckerberg go hard on pro-data-privacy right off the bat, just to cancel out his personal history. I'd write all of his early speeches to make him "better than Stallman," and once the whole Facebook thing had been forgotten the other 19 people could start their jobs. Accusations that he had abandoned his early platform mid-election could be countered with a heartfelt statement on the importance of other things - and the privacy line could finally slip away in the comfort of the oval office.

I hope nobody falls for that.

As I think about it, it seems like it would be pretty weird for the representative of a company trying as hard as possible to be fully international and gather as many users as possible from all over the planet to even try to run for, much less make a serious effort to win, a political position where you represent and are expected to support the interests of the people of one country.

One important thing the Trump presidency is teaching us, is you can have a President that does nothing, and the world does not end (and neither do the US).

The logical consequence is, we probably don't need Presidents.

> The logical consequence is, we probably don't need Presidents.

We don't want a political system that sacrifices resiliency for efficiency. Doing away with the presidency because the system is resilient to his dysfunction is doing exactly that. It's like the mistake of taking a two-node cluster down to one node, because one node is all you need to handle the load.

The lines between politics and business continue to blur.

Is there anything to prevent Facebook from fully funding a Zuckerberg campaign? I could see them arguing that it's a marketing expense as Trump went from household name to the object of everyone's attention during his run for President.

Not my scope of expertise, but I believe corporations are prohibited from donating money directly to a candidate based on federal campaign laws. They could of course give money to an action committee, but there are lots of restrictions on coordination between the two. So I guess Facebook could fund his campaign via a PAC as long as Zuckerburg himself had nothing to do with the strategy. That would be an odd campaign.

More likely Zuckerberg could fund the campaign himself via gifts or loans - this is what Trump did (not fully of course, but he did gift/loan some money).

"but there are lots of restrictions on coordination between the two"

This hasn't been true or enforced.

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/07/both-campaigns-enthusias...

> The lines between politics and business continue to blur.

welcome to the us of a.

Not limited to any single country. A few seem thus immune, but the facade always crumbles it time it seems.

I will draw immense personal satisfaction from not voting for Mark in 2020.

When I see Mark I feel queasy just looking at him. People don't like to have their privacy violated, even if it is a result of them willingly giving up their information.

He's definitely somewhere in the uncanny valley.

This is one of the key shortcomings of Mr Zuckerberg. If he was actually willing to behave like a normal, vulnerable human being that lives and learns over time more people would start liking him (no pun intended). But no, he has to be awkward about everything even after all those years.

What really concerns me about Mark Zuckerberg is his sister, Randi Zuckerberg. She has to be one of the least intelligent (for a Harvard grad), most entitled, narcissistic people I’ve ever seen.

I felt bad writing that about her, but Randi Zuckerberg desperately wants to be famous and popular and keeps putting herself out there, hence her radio show and book.

If you have a chance to look at her book, which is available for rock bottom prices on Amazon, it’s absolutely awful, full of cliches, and weirdly enough, lots of toilet humor.

Randi Zuckerberg scares the hell out of me.

EDIT: just saw this quote from the article. It’s almost Shakespearean in what a tragedy Facebook has become and sums up our era quite nicely:

>“I didn’t feel proud to tell people I worked at Facebook.”

>In 2011 Zuckerberg ['s sister] advocated for the abolition of anonymity on the Internet to protect children and young adults from cyber-bullying. Zuckerberg explained how anonymity is protective for perpetrators. (Wikipedia)

I'm really surprised to see anyone advocating anything like that, but I guess it goes to show that Hackernews is actually a little ways out of the mainstream.

I wish people would stop linking to AMP pages. They take about 8 seconds to load on non-mobile browsers with JS turned off.

I don't think your experience is universal.

For me, I got these results with the amp version [1]:

  javascript on:  ~350kb / 24 requests 
  javascript off:  ~85kb /  4 requests

Compare this to the full version [2]:

  javascript on:  ~10.5mb / 125 requests
  javascript off:  ~6.0mb /  24 requests

[1] https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/2/6/16976328/face...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/6/16976328/facebook-mark-zuc...

Are you loading that in a browser? My browser reports 12 requests and 1.06 seconds for your first link, but it doesn't render anything for about 8 seconds.

Clarification: block the JS files from loading from the CDN, like it's done with many privacy tools.

It looks like there is an 8 second delay in the style element with the attribute `amp-boilerplate` that makes AMP pages extremely slow when 3rd party JavaScript is blocked (as it should be by default).