Facebook failing, Zuckerberg and Sandberg absent: commentary | Hacker News Reader

Facebook failing, Zuckerberg and Sandberg absent: commentary

cnbc.com

89 pointsJerry232 comments

Facebook is facing hurdles in a lot of arenas but this article is a hit piece that is pretty fluff and misses the big picture.

I really dislike facebook for what its worth, but even with the current issues I dont expect it to be more than a speedbump. The author says that it was a misstep to help with the Trump advert campaign. That is just letting politics blind you, helping Trump and being "friendly" to that administration is likely good for business.

Building a reputation of helping both sides of major political campaigns and capturing a slice of their crazy spending seems completely sensible.

One thing that could become a mis-step though is if their staff supporting the Trump campaign knew enough from seeing their advertising submissions to realise the sort of data they must hold on their users.

We know from the Guardian report that Facebook have security protocols that trigger when you eg. download 50m user profiles as an app, and the response given was that it was academic. So Facebook should have been suspicious, if the campaign were running adverts in a way that showed a possession of that sort of data and nobody could explain where it came from. Of course, maybe Facebook's staff embedded in the campaign were kept in the dark and Cambridge Analytica managed those targeted ads themselves.

If they knew, and let it slide, and let senior Facebook leadership tell politicians that CA had no data though, that could be a huge mis-step.

According to the women who ran project Alamo, Cambridge Analytica were in house - and the Facebook etc. Representatives were too. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/magazine-40852227/the-digital-g...

This: “There's no outside attacker bringing Facebook down. It's a circular firing squad that stems from the company's fundamental business model of collecting data from users, and using that data to sell targeted ads.”

It always was the corporate equivalent of Harvey Weinstein, and now seeing its #metoo moment. The world will be a better place without Facebook.

The amount of global bullshit they have enabled in so many spheres of social life is going to take generations to repair.

Can't wait for heads to roll at Facebook/Twitter/YouTube. And they will. It's high time.

It doesn't cease to amaze me how a few years ago social media was the beacon of democracy, back when they were part a wave of political revolution in the Arab world.

But now the US has another bad election (IMO not as bad as the one that landed Bush as far as elections go, though which president is worse is up for debate), and social media is trash that have just enabled "global bullshit".

USA, if your population is largely gullible consumers taught to rely on their "feelings" and be egotistic, proud patriots instead of critical thinkers, that's your own fault. Social media, if anything, has been a net positive as far as politics go in my country.

I really doubt the US population is any more or less gullible than any other population and the ability of social media to be destabilizing is not uniquely American either. There is no mob of critical thinkers, it's always just a mob.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/14/technology/facebook-news-... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/14/how-400-russia...

Nice perspective. A revolution for other countries, garbage bullshit in our own.

Those revolutions evolved into garbage bullshit in all(?) of those countries, so we got off fairly easily since we didn't have to face an active, public military crackdown on US citizens across the US.

> It doesn't cease to amaze me how a few years ago social media was the beacon of democracy, back when they were part a wave of political revolution in the Arab world

Almost all of those revolutions failed or dissipated. Similar "social media driven" revolutions in the US, like Occupy Wall Street also died with a whimper. The enabling power of social media has always been greatly overrated. The effect of social media, and in particular Facebook, has largely been a net negative.

I find it surprising how much people underestimate the long-term impact of Occupy. Now when people say “the 1%”, everyone knows what they are talking about. The most popular Democrats, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, would not be where they are if OWS had not lain some groundwork ahead of time by introducing wealth and income inequality as mainstream conversation topics. And maybe they will have a successful presidential run in the future.

In my country, the big media companies and the state are highly colluded. Social media has come as a welcome alternative for broadcast and dissemination of information by reporters who don't follow the state's agenda.

Independent and small-party candidates opposing the ruling party have also found in social media a vehicle to reach their constituents being they can't rely on the big networks. Social media has been used to make wrongdoings public, including during the election, and raise the public's awareness on stuff TV networks don't report.

I can't and won't speak in absolutisms, and I think you shouldn't either. IMO though, in my home country and in terms of political action and public awareness I disagree with you.

I used to share a lot on Facebook - with intricate control over privacy of my posts using Friend Lists. Over time my usage decreased until I finally cleared out my profile, likes, activity, apps, friends, and devices. Now I only use it in a separate desktop browser once every few weeks as a means to check the profiles of family and close friends.

I harbor no resentment towards Facebook because they've been largely transparent via their terms of service, privacy policy, and developer API. Nobody forced me to use it. In the end, I am responsible for sharing my own information, not Facebook.

I can’t help but notice that some entity with deep pockets is leading this entire media war against Facebook. Articles like this don’t write themselves. These are classic zero information articles that keeps popping up systematically as if someone is running media puppet. There were couple of guys going out on limb in to conferences and media strongly making a case for “regulations”. Guys like those don’t do it for free to travel all over and keep making same points over and over while getting expensive media minutes.

Question is who is pulling all these strings and why?

I don't know if there's a larger conspiracy, but media companies are probably retaliating against news feed changes. After Facebook rolled out their news feed change, news media have gotten fewer clicks and less money.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/28/how-publishers-will-surviv...

https://digiday.com/media/facebook-news-feed-changes-will-im...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Letter-to-Mark-Zuck...

I completely agree. Something strange is going on here. It reminds me of how hundreds of short, poorly written articles hyping bitcoin were released just before the bubble grew. Of course, that sort of thing creates its own news, but there was obvious paid help to add to the frenzy. It’s sad that we can’t trust much of what we read online because content publishers are so easily bought and sold.

This is an interesting article, which suggests that the Mercers are among the funders from the right. I don't know if attacks from the left are as organized.

"New Foils for the Right: Google and Facebook"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/business/media/paul-schwe...

They've probably just noticed people click on them. Media companies often flagrantly copy each other once they see an article theme succeeds in getting readers.

Newspapers are dying. Their ad traffic has been taken over by Google , Reddit, and Facebook. Also, all of them complain that fake news is on their platform. Well if you have a system with no editors except for computers thats what you get.

Answer should be fairly obvious: old media. The parent companies to CNBC (Comcast) and WSJ (Fox) don't really get along with Google and Facebook and won't give up their advertising revenue without a fight. After all, they had several decades of advertising monopoly (television), and guess who's eating their lunch now?

I mean, in a purely big picture sense, all these big media companies are now not only largely dependant on big tech for distribution, but are also directly competing against it in terms of media production and revenue streams.

Why do you suppose that this is part of some international conspiracy against Facebook instead of Facebook finally being called out for their BS?

> Facebook users are slowly learning that almost anybody can use Facebook to collect detailed information about them, and that — at least some of the time — Facebook cannot control where this information flows, or how it is used. Using Facebook is like writing your life story down on a piece of paper, then taping it to a lamppost.

> For the time being, advertisers are grumbling about Facebook and warning their clients to stay away from certain ad products, but they're still putting their money there — with an audience over 2 billion and some of the most accurate ad targeting available, Facebook is still impossible to ignore. But if usage continues to decline, advertisers will start eventually follow.

Unless the definition of "failing" has changed drastically, this is clickbait.

There is no evidence of a lack of on-the-ground leadership; the argument seems primarily based on divestment by executives. And one of the two anecdotes used to justify the "trend" that Facebook's executives are selling stocks faster than normal for technology leaders was Dorsey's purchase of a mere $9.5 million of stock last year (a lot of money, but two orders of magnitude less than the ones in the article and hardly a comp).

There may be reasons to be worried about Facebook's long-term viability, but this article makes a poor case for someone to be worried.

It may not make a good case for long term viability but CNBC is an investment outlet and it does beg the question is this the type of company that warrants a valuation of over 500 billion?

that implies massive clips of growth and strong leadership which it claims Facebook has demonstrated not to have with clear cut examples which I thought are simple but is worth considering...

I think it's more of the long term pattern of the leadership of facebook: anytime things get difficult they just sort of teflon their way through it and ignore everyone. Remember the Facebook Beacon fiasco? That was the first scandal in dozens, all following a pretty similar narrative.

In that sense, yes I would say leadership has been absent or maybe unaccountable is a better word.

So this comment aged well...

My general impressions are that Mark Zuckerberg has just gotten really bored of running the company.

Bit of a clickbait title, but considering how much bad press they've been getting since the last elections, I would expect the CEO to be front and center of it.

Facebook may not be failing but it's glory days are way past (and have not really expanded beyond the social networking sphere - with probably Oculus their only expansion beyond their core focus - unlike say Google/Alphabet).

But one thing that truly baffles me is Comrade Mark's incessant courting (bordering on being a puppy dog) of Emperor for Life, Xi. (HN user seanmcdirmid in a previous thread said that he could potentially be a bit of a closeted sinophile)

1. He asks Xi to name his child

https://mashable.com/2017/09/18/zuckerberg-chinese-president...

2. He then plugs Xi's book

https://www.amazon.com/Xi-Jinping-Governance-English-Languag... Absolutely no idea how the media has not caught this, ever since Xi declared himself President for life.

After the whole FB Basics thing (free access to “Facebook-approved” internet) that India rightly told him to go shove, China is his shot at a consolation prize.

> Facebook has been deflecting stories about how its platform was used during the 2016 presidential election.

Serious question: on what grounds can a Facebook page be banned? Just because it was “cute cats” page a while ago Andreas suddenly it became a pro-trump or pro-Hillary page?

Such an obvious hatchet job. You can tell the news media companies are on their last legs when they can’t even be bothered to hire quality people who can FUD the market with a modicum of nuance.

> He addresses some of these issues on personal Facebook posts, but seldom talks to the press about them. Last year, he spent most of the year doing photo ops with people around America, but did not show up when Congress asked questions about how the Russians used Facebook to influence the 2016 election.

So he is not absent and communicating directly to users.

> This year, he announced his annual personal challenge would be fixing Facebook — in other words, doing his job as the CEO of a publicly traded company worth more than $500 billion. In past years, he's taught himself Mandarin and hunted his own food.

The job of a CEO is to keep the shareholders happy (which has always been the case since IPO AFAIK), not to fix it. I stopped reading at this paragraph, Zuck is not perfect but his personal challenges are impressives and dismissing them like that is not what I consider journalism.

His statement earlier this year regarding what he'll do to fix FB in 2018 is gonna be interesting, his last posts have shown a work in progress and we can expect a post-mortem in December that wil be more important than this clickbait article.

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