Dear Mark Zuckerberg (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Dear Mark Zuckerberg (2012)

daltoncaldwell.com

77 pointsmartinesko3640 comments

The proliferation of these so called "prophetic" articles coming out now amuses me greatly. Am I really alone in thinking FB was cancer from the get go?. Was Snowden and PRISM not enough? Why is this new CA crap even news? I feel like the signs and warnings have been there the entire time, finally mainstream outlets take it seriously and make an issue of it all, and therefore now it's a big deal. SMH

Some of us got the message loud and clear when room 641A was being made public.

Some more got it when Zuck said his users were "dumb fucks" https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb...

There are still some people who don't get it at all.

People are acting supprized that there are links to Palantir with cambridge analitica -- I am not because Theil and Zuckerberg are two peas in a pod.

Funny how this turned out: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-bias/facebooks-z... they took the "people" out of the news feed in the process -- enable much?

Lets rewind even further - to the days of slashdot and the 2000 election. Diebold was the big issue and "how to secure voting" --- we screamed for a paper trail then and we still are today.

Honestly for those of us who have been keeping up we aren't shocked or supprized at all "we told you so" a long time ago - you just chose to ignore us.

Yep, great points. I was highly skeptical of closed sourced voting machines as well. Hopefully this new wave of awareness makes an impact, all you can really hope for really.

I don't exactly have a lot of hope that "this time" it will be any different. People were pretty salty after the Bush election and still NOTHING happened.

Lets be honest for a second - most of the American public's eyes glaze over when we get into the heart of these issues. All they hear is blah blah blah techno babble just fix my computer please -- why is my internet slow.

Honestly - we (the technologists) are the only ones who can hold ourselves accountable... And we haven't done a very good job thus far.

Maybe we should organize and withhold tech support, a la Lysistrata.

Perhaps people have been looking for something to blame since Trump was elected, and have a different lens on this issue now.

I think that's a really good point actually, thanks for mentioning. I think people shrugged off the overarching privacy and surveillance issues of PRISM et al, even as egregious as it was, but once it comes out that FBs data shenanigans were being used to aid the most hated political figure in recent history, THEN it's a big deal. Thats kind of my point really. TBH though I'm just glad that people are catching up now and its reaching the masses. I thought the whole Snowden thing with PRISM etc was going to be a game changer, just this unbelievable revelation that confirmed the worst fears of the big data adtech industry and its potential for abuse, but had to sit in stunned silence as it was brushed off entirely without incident.

My guess is that this is absolutely spot on.

People don’t care about surveillance if it doesn’t impact take them.

Seems like there's an equal number of prophets in the comments section.

Many criticisms of FB's business model and practices in the past were immediately downvoted on HN and other forums. Articles that were critical of FB or Zuckerberg were flagged frequently and sometimes even HN moderators deleted comments critical of FB.

It's not that people weren't critical, but during the heyday those voices were suppressed. Now that sentiment has slowly shifted, these articles are seeing traction

This exactly! I've been very surprised by the Facebook lover's faction on hn and definitely refrained from posting anything anti Facebook as a result. zer00eyz's comment above is already getting down voted and it's the truth!

Whoops meant to pro Facebook faction! I Can't believe I didn't catch that sooner!

But in hindsight I guess either one works.

Interesting points indeed, especially as I see my comment being downvoted :)

I must admit, while I was always aware of the data collection, the scale is still pretty staggering. The use in manipulating governments was also not how I thought it would go down. I figured it was just about commerce and selling people stuff until the day it was compromised by the government, then it would be about coercing persons of interest. This was an interesting spin.

It will go away in few months. The only reason media are attacking Facebook now is that it's claimed that Facebook "made Trump win", just like it was a year ago with the "fake news" outrage. I guess the Russian collusion narrative was dying so liberals needed another excuse for their failed platforms.

>Russian collusion narrative was dying

When you've indicted several foreign nationals for violations of federal election law and have established to a court that Rick Gates coordinated with a foreign intelligence agency to penetrate an email server and strategically leak the contents, I have trouble seeing how the "Russian Collusion narrative" is dying.

> Am I really alone in thinking FB was cancer from the get go?

Definitely not, but it also wasn't a mainstream view. Of my whole family I'm the only person without a Facebook account. And their way of interpreting that is that I'm anti-social, because after all it is 'social media'.

> Am I really alone in thinking FB was cancer from the get go?

Not at all! Most surprisingly my parents are the ones who looked at this and instantly followed their guts once they felt that something was off and removed their fb accounts years ago.

Still, the majority won't fully understand any of this until all their private photo's start circulating on the web.

Don't worry, the hubbub will calm down quickly when the 'next big news story' happens and mainstream media concentrates on that. The general public will have completely forgotten this incident in a month or two.

"Instead of Zuckerberg, Facebook said it would send either its Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer or Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, to appear in front of U.K. lawmakers.

On Wednesday, Collins said he accepted the offer of evidence from Cox, and suggested the Facebook executive answer U.K. lawmakers' questions on April 24.

"However, given the seriousness of these issues we still believe that Mark Zuckerberg himself is the right person to give evidence," he said in a letter to Rebecca Stimson, Facebook's head of public policy.

"Mr Zuckerberg has stated in interviews that if he is the right person to appear, he will appear. He appears to have acted on this belief with respect to appearing before Congress. We now request confirmation as to whether he will make the same decision for us."

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/28/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg...

"Facebook wont confirm whether CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress, even though he already said he was open to it.

...

Officially, Facebook says that it is still undecided, and a spokesperson declined to confirm CNNs story, which states Zuckerberg has come to terms with the fact that he will have to testify before Congress within a matter of weeks, and Facebook is currently planning the strategy for his testimony."

https://www.recode.net/2018/3/27/17168614/facebook-mark-zuck...

   Symbol: ZUCKERBERG.063018
   Start Date: 03/20/2018
   End Date: 06/30/2018 11:59 PM (ET)
   Shares Traded: 98,254
   Today's Volume: 124
   Total Shares: 33,948
   Today's Change: NC

"Subsequent to the launch of this market and on or before June 30, 2018, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg shall testify in person, under subpoena or otherwise, before an open hearing of any committee or subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives or U.S. Senate. A hearing officially described by such a committee as "open in a closed space" and/or otherwise not accessible by the public or press in a manner typical for an open hearing will not qualify as an open hearing.

Should Mr. Zuckerberg appear at such a hearing, but decline to answer any and all substantive questions asked by committee members upon invoking his 5th Amendment rights, this market will resolve as No, whether or not Mr. Zuckerberg submits a sworn statement or reads all or part of such statement aloud during the hearing."

https://www.predictit.org/Contract/9916/Will-Mark-Zuckerberg...

Two months later, Caldwell launched App.net [1], a subscription-based ersatz Twitter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net

I think that the idea is nobel but it misses a core concept of how users interact with their platforms, they don't want to pay money.

Sometimes I see comments on HN about how that person would gladly pay for an ad free version of the service but experiences have shown over and over that it just doesn't work.

Normally that would be the end of the story. Users won't pay for something, there is no market and in turn there is no product. VC money distorts this, they create the product get their users and then try to monetize it. By this point the only thing of value (defined as something people are willing to pay for) they have is their users data. Take out the VC money and these problems might solve themselves.

So true. And as much as techies think people care about their privacy they care more about free. Everyone's on the build on the blockchain, distributed this, privacy centric next gen app kick but these things don't move the needle, they're just nice to haves.

I like the riches in niches but even there it's increasingly more challenging getting a share of wallet because consumers are getting incredible value from services like Netflix/Spotify/Office/etc. They've been programmed for free or subsidized.

The problem with offering any free tier is that it lets people keep their wallet in their pocket.

It's impossible to determine but as a thought experiment imagine if the only way to subscribe to Facebook after the .edu phase was to pay $1 / £1 / €1 per year.

Overall revenue would be lower but they wouldn't have to maintain enormous sales and ad-tech teams.

app.net flunked IMHO because noone understood what it was, not because it required payment.

App.net was something I loved paying for, though.

It came with a block of cloud storage, an ad free social network, an API for devs to build on top of... those three ingredients alone were fertile ground for developers to make some very engaging, unique apps. It also felt much more communal.

I was a fan and definitely miss App.net

I wanted to give app.net my money but they didn't want it. We Germans aren't big fans of paying by card. I asked them if the offer other payment methods. A year later they offered BitCoin. No, thank you.

> users...don't want to pay money

I don't think this was as obvious in 2012.

It was just as obvious in 2012, if not more. It's just that they worked hard on pulling off a small but surprising crowdfunding/preorder-like campaign among a specific group right after they were pissed at Twitter for restricting client apps (betrayal) and basically pulling the plug on the protocol idea in favor of an ad business.

Their approach, however, by building a paid Twitter clone as the "killer app" of their platform, which isn't a very useful use case when you have free Twitter, awfully reminds me of what Dennis Ritchie wrote in Anti-Foreword of Unix Haters Handbook[1]:

"Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it"

They really wished they owned Twitter, and they did it their way, although if they really were Twitter owners, they too would have likely opted for the proven, lucrative, and more straightforward ad business over the protocol business at that point.

Criticism aside, it was probably worth trying anyway, and the fact that they raised funds in their initial campaign ($5/user if I remember correctly) was not easy to pull off and surprising.

[1]: https://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf

Yes it was. The options were to pay money for a lower populated platform (App.net), vs a higher-populated platform for free. The only benefit was that App.net claimed it was going to be nicer with your data. Everything else was worse. App.net couldn't compete against Twitter with only one pro and several cons. It's only hope was to survive long enough until Twitter's investors got tired of sinking money into it and pulled the plug. Unfortunately for App.net Twitter managed to turn a profit.

It was obvious ever since the internet started.

There's a non-resolving link to join.app.net in the post. It seems like it was already active or, if not, launched within a week of this post.

$FB closed at $21.50 on the day this article was posted and at $153.03 yesterday. The stock price at the time was being beaten down by concerns over whether the company would be able to adapt to a shift to mobile, and not any issues with how tactfully (or not) acquihire offers were being made.

Here is the thread on HN when the article originally appeared:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4325231

Facebook stock price quadrupled by the end of 2013.

> The executive apologized and said he would take my feedback under consideration.

Wow software 'entrepreneurs' are really pathetic sometimes. This is not the normal cutthroat business that normally happens in the real world... So the Facebook executive apologised for giving OP a generous offer to buy their startup which Facebook doesn't even need anymore? Sounds like charity to me. OP is a spoiled brat in my opinion. Based on my experience, what should have happened is the executive should have laughed at him all the way to the door for being so foolish/arrogant.

Now you understand why Facebook is full of entitled jerks... They acquihired them.

I didn't realise that OP works for YC now. This explains why Facebook execs treated him so nicely. It just shows the double standards people have in the industry when dealing with financially well connected people vs regular people.

Unrelated to the article content, but what ever happened to Dalton Caldwell? I was very into the Dustin Curtis/svbtle hype in 2009-2013, and remember reading Dalton's articles from way back when. Is he blogging elsewhere now or has he dropped off?

Dalton is currently a Y Combinator Partner (http://www.ycombinator.com/people/).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com