The real threat to Facebook is the Kool-Aid turning sour

What I experienced was a general dissatisfaction by the 'old guard' on where the company was going. Typically they would vote with their feet and start leaving to start other companies or other lives. A few of the old guard hung on, with an increasingly solid position because they had institutional knowledge that was no where else, eventually those folks can sleep at their desk and they will still reliably pull down the 'senior person' paycheck. And the company will refill with new employees who never knew what the company was like before so this is like how it is now. The company becomes more stagnant and less nimble, more unaware of what it doesn't know and more vocal about things it believes to be true but aren't. At this point the company becomes less competitive and depending on its residual DNA either fades away into the sunset (Sun) or turns into something else entirely (NetApp).

It is a great time to plant the seeds of something new. If it is cool enough you can recruit a lot of engineers out of these fading companies.

Did anyone ever really buy the "making the world a better place" kool aid?

Could you imagine if other companies were expected to act so grandiose and sanctimonious about their mission? Imagine a world where McDonalds bills itself as a crusader to make the world better fed.

Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.

Humanity is a superorganism. Thanks to the internet, it’s more connected than it’s ever been, and can “think” and change faster than it’s ever been able to before. Facebook is trying to build a neutral platform and useful tool for communication & socialising. Because of that neutrality, it has no inbuilt “immune system” for preventing the superorganism from being infected by memes created by individual humans. Quite the opposite: it rewards memes and viral popularity because the humans who run its “brain” can extract value from that effect. Most of these memes are benign (jokes and entertainment, advertisers trying to sell more widgets and widget-related services) but some are malignant/parasitic (e.g. influencing political outcomes for personal gain).

Any sufficiently large social network is going to have to contend with this and make the hard choice: do you remain neutral and let humans influence humanity, or do you try to prevent “social infection” when it’s deemed detrimental? But what are the criteria for intervention—sharing false information, for example? Who has the power to dictate what’s “true” or whether to intervene? Facebook? Governments? A benevolent AI—developed by whom? &c.

If you are a tech company and you are being immoral and trying to keep secrets, you have to not only try and weed out any overly unscrupulous employees as they may sell your data to other organisations, but also any overly scrupulous employees, as they may leak to the press, regulators, or police. This severely diminishes your hiring pool, or guarantees that you will leak.

If the reputation of your company is reliant on plugging leaks then there's probably something really, really wrong with your company.

For example: before the Snowden leaks most people thought the NSA was a relatively benign organization...

...

I quit Facebook a year ago, and when people ask me why, I tell them candidly: I don't want to look in people's windows anymore to see what they're doing. Even if they want me to. Especially if they want me to.

Don't waste your life crafting an advertisement for how great your life is. Get out there and live a great life."

Source:

http://time.com/5208108/facebook-cheating-infidelity-divorce...

I really want to hear what the internal discussions are, about restricting the color palette and UI appearance to a one-size-fits-all look and feel.

Is the reasoning psychological (blue light as an anti-suicide placebo), practical (everyone has to look at the same portal, and resolve techsupport themselves, helping each other), quasi-biological (blue as a circadian rhythm disruptor, not unlike gambling casinos), capricious (because mark zuckerberg just likes that format), or something else?

I find it oppressive to have to look at this unchanging furniture for the Facebook front end. It seems to severely dumb down the appeal to a lowest common denominator. Maybe that’s the reason?