Facebook faces a reputational meltdown – What Zuckerberg should do | Hacker News Reader

Facebook faces a reputational meltdown – What Zuckerberg should do

economist.com

35 pointsmastazi22 comments

Is there any evidence that Mark Zuckerberg has any actual foresight or insight on privacy, security or Facebook as a product?

If so, it never seems to be evident from outside the company when he needs to present himself.

All televised interviews of him shows a person who seems to lack any deep knowledge of the issues, the long term consequences of his decisions or strategic planning.

Based upon this (lack of) evidence, I increasingly think he was simply in the right place at the right time and hired good people to steer the company to where it has succeeded. In the end, Facebook's success is probably more due to people like Sheryl Sandberg. There seems to be a long-term Facebook PR strategy of keeping Mark out of the limelight so his incompetence isn't on display.

There’s actually plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Facebook could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and hand out everyone's personal information to passers-by and it wouldn't lose any users.

I understand the desire to throw one's hands up, but it's this attitude that imbues the Facebooks of the world with power. They have power because people give them power by using Facebook. Stop using Facebook and tell everyone you know to stop using it and why. Make a stand. It's worth it.

I think OP is making reference to this quote by Trump

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkz7xgsPGmQ

Ah, thanks for the reference. :)

I LOL'ed at your comment but seriously, they lost me months ago. I don't miss it.

Zuckerberg should invest in a competing startup. Something that can cash in on the anti-Facebook mania of the moment. Give users a cut of the ad revenue specifically generated from their pages and let them decide how much they will get paid per ad. If somebody doesn't want any ads on their content, they can demand 5 cents per ad. But everyone could have some skin in the game. Or do something else that will generate a lot of buzz and attract Facebook quitters.

Put some spare $millions into it, pump it to a $2 billion valuation and decide from there.

That's the official strategy of FB. They estimate the half-life of any social service to be ~7 years. They fully expect that FB-the-feed will eventually decelerate and then gradually slide into obscurity. That's why they have a bunch of services that aren't FB-the-feed: to prepare for that inevitable eventuality.

That sounds interesting. Do you have any sources for that claim?

As CNN would say, it's "from sources familiar with Zuck's thinking". I guess that's not the kind of "sources" you were looking for. I know this from people who work there.

Think about it: it just makes sense. Nothing lasts forever, and they have to sustain their business, so they buy popular "social" stuff from time to time (Instagram, WhatsApp), and unbundle the stuff that may survive without the feed (Messenger).

Since you're on a throwaway, any chance you could ask them why WhatsApp is so low on features? Everyone I know uses it for many of their social interactions, and I find myself mostly frustrated that they don't use Telegram with its many useful features (especially for developers).

So far my theories are that 1) FB still doesn't want to give up on its flagship product, or 2) FB doesn't want to seem too actively investing into WhatsApp for either PR or legal reasons.

From what I heard, WhatsApp is still semi-separate, and still relatively small. They just let them be, for now at least. Which, IMO, is wise. Google has ruined many an acquisition by forcing it onto Google infra and letting the Google mafia move in.

As an aside, I like WhatsApp precisely because it doesn’t have a ton of “features”.

Let me start by saying that I quit Facebook six months ago because I disliked the person I was becoming as a result of heavy use.

That said, the calls for regulation are misguided. A wildly successful platform was built that took the world by storm. Like any tool, unanticipated consequences were inevitable. And now that people know the true costs of the trade off between access to Facebook and privacy, they can make a choice. It’ll be a hard one since the addiction is real (it took me years of trying before I finally broke the habit), but making it a regulated utility won’t change that.

If you use Facebook, you trade privacy for access. And a lot of people are willing to accept that. Let them.

Or build a new platform that provides the same benefits...without the revenue generating engine. It’ll likely be less innovative and influential. That’s okay.

The path of progress isn’t a straight line.

I don't know how good your Swedish is... but if you can read it, alternatively can convince one of the on-line translation engines to transpile the article into something almost, but not quite resembling a language of your choice, here's an article from 1971 (!) warning for the privacy consequences of unlimited data collection:

http://www.friatider.se/h-r-varnar-professorn-f-r-vervakning...

The conclusion is as follows:

I princip bör information om individen behandlas som individens egendom, innebärande att han måste tillfrågas innan någon vill utnyttja informationen. Individen bör skyddas mot olovlig användning på samma sätt som mot övergrepp mot personlig egendom. Dataexperterna kanske hävdar att det skulle bli för dyrt att tillfråga alla dem, vilkas data skall användas varje gång detta skall ske, och att det är tekniskt svårt att genomföra. Svårare problem har man lyckats att lösa och kostnaden bärs ändå av "den svage".

In English this would be:

Information about an individual should in principle be treated as that person's private property, meaning that the person should be asked before someone wants to use it. The individual should be protected against unwanted use in the same way as he is protected against unwanted use of other private property. Data experts might state that it would be too expensive to ask all individuals for permission any time the data is to be used, and that this is difficult to implement. More challenging problems have been solved and the costs are born by "the weak" anyway.

These consequences are far from unanticipated. People outside the organization have been predicting the catastrophic use of the data facebook is gathering and this is just the first time a problem has been this noticeable, but tons of abuses have been happening for years. Facebook was happy to continue to engage because it's about profit.

Facebook is a hostile platform and that should be checked. This isn't just about free markets and what people will use. People used to really enjoy cars without seatbelts.

The path of progress often involves regulation after consequences, unanticipated or otherwise, make it clear that it's necessary.

I am quite uncomfortable with this, personally, because I'd prefer it if people were allowed to choose for themselves. But in some cases, cigarettes being a good example, regulation does seem to be worth the trade-off, and it most definitely seems to be effective.

This particular issue I find complicated enough that I don't have a strong opinion on the way forward. But I strongly disagree with your claim that 1) regulating things doesn't change things, and 2) calls for regulation are misguided. The broader privacy issues are real, very serious, and have been neglected as a 'mainstream' discussion for way too long.

To me, the interesting thing about the recent facebook 'scandals' is how effective artificial outrage is. Everybody always knew facebook's business model was selling user information. Getting upset about them selling too much user information is absurd.

Clearly what's happening here is facebook is being targeted by traditional media.

I don't like facebook, and I don't use it - but honestly, when there's such a perfect storm of 'breaking' non-events, it's probably bullshit.

> Clearly what's happening here is facebook is being targeted by traditional media.

I suspect that it is more that it is being targeted by people who want to distract from the Trump / Cambridge Analytica / Russia side of things, and people/organizations, including in the traditional media, who had pre-existing biases against Facebook are being “useful idiots.”

Find another way to make money, tighten up on data. Here's an idea - give everybody crypto wallets and become a banking platform for the unbanked. Yes Zuck, I'm happy to come and help with this plan. If you are still bitter about the Winlkevii, just only list with other non-BTC protocols and give some weak reason for it like governance or transaction speed.

Zuckerberg should not run for president.

Zuckerberg fucks up an entire election, but gee, he's such a nice guy and all, so let's give him a hall pass, because we know he didn't mean it.

Kalanick fucks up one poor, poor college grad's career aspirations as a site reliability engineer, and because he must bear the responsibilty for the toxic subculture of the corporation he founded, he must be crucified.

Both of them are millionaires (or maybe that's with a B) several times over, so neither will ever actually know the meaning of the word "punishment" and with that in mind, it wouldn't cost me a wink of sleep to see Zuckerberg ousted from his company for everything that has happened.

What's the real story here? Hell hath no fury? Is that the lesson to learn?

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