The Infuriating Innocence of Mark Zuckerberg | Hacker News Reader

The Infuriating Innocence of Mark Zuckerberg

newyorker.com

28 pointsschrodinger32 comments

The real problem is advertising. "You're not the customer, you're the product".

We've been here before. Back in the 1950s, when TV commercials appeared, the ad industry was portrayed as a villain. "Selling out to Madison Avenue" was considered a despicable act for a writer. There were books on the evils of ads - "The Hidden Persuaders" (Packard, 1957). The US Congress held hearings on the evils of television. TV did change the world. For the first time ever, ordinary people had more free entertainment coming in than they could consume. That had never happened before in all of history.

Facebook is a new technology for delivering ads. The problems come from being ad-supported, not the nature of a social network. If Facebook were a paid service without ads, most of the intrusiveness would go away.

What we need to regulate is advertising, not networking.

In the 1950s, and much more recently, the ad industry had to make guesses, based on very limited data, about who was seeing what ads on broadcast media. Sure, the ads for auto batteries and tires ran with football games, not with soap operas. But compared to what you can do with on-line media, they were working in the dark.

That's an interesting take. Facebook is basically Television 2.0, with all of the advantages (free entertainment) that come with inherent costs (advertising), and as was pointed out in a sibling, with TV the advertisers didn't have nearly as much information as they do now.

I wonder if the same parallels would be applicable to broadcast vs cable TV? Namely: ad supported (broadcast), versus subscriber supported with additional ads (cable). More broadly I wonder if that is a direction we'll see social networks start moving into, to date, I don't believe any pay-for social network has gotten any real traction.

I’ve always liked your historical perspectives (often times controversial). I’m not really into regulations at all, but it’s not the advertising that is such an issue, it’s the surveillance required to accomplish ‘targeted advertising’ that’s more of the issue these days. Infomercials on broadcast TV are one thing, but actual tracking of your viewership is entirely different (connected to your home address/credit score/demographic specifics).

>...you're the product”

I know pithy sayings are popular right now, but HN should probably stay away from that sort of demagoguery. November 29, 2010 is the first time I can find that phrase being used on HN (in a Lifehacker post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1952292

How are people still obsessed about facebook. Where was all this rage for the equifax hack? It boggles my mind.

I'm convinced this is a media-created tempest in a teapot. From what I've seen, regular people just don't care all that much. The media latches on to any issue with facebook because it brings in more eyeballs.

> The best and the brightest have been heading to Silicon Valley because they want to build the future. ... “Tech” implies an intellectual practice in which engineers build neat things to improve the world. The major tech companies are businesses. That’s all they are. They innovate how to make money.

This extends far beyond Facebook or the recent scandal, and gets to the heart of a deep rift over the last few decades. Many people have had a deep skepticism over technology and its motivations, and the broad-scale beliefs about "making the world a better place" are really being called into question now.

> They innovate how to make money

I've never heard this before but that's a very interesting point!

Facebook is in direct competition with old media. Equifax is not.

Name recognition.

Because Equifax was hacked while Facebook knowingly provided or sold people's personal data. I fully agree Equifax was criminally negligent and should have been nailed to the wall for it, but what FB did/still does is premeditated.

FB had two levels of opt-out - first one for the users not consenting to provide their data to the app (a “cancel” button on the app permissions dialogue) and the second one a global Facebook Platform opt-out when you wanted to prevent your friends from passing on same data.

Equifax had none.

I mean, most of my interaction with hacker news is through the bot that reposts to facebook. The UI is better and since it’s half of my FB feed I effectively have one less homescreen icon to think about

I mean, there was a lot of equifax rage where I live ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The way to fix Facebook is to build a better platform and allow Facebook to go the way of myspace.

Facebook is not the problem we need to fix, it's a symptom of an underlying problem.

You simply need to elaborate on the, "underlying problem" or you are blowing smoke.

There is a treadmill effect where someone builds a site without all of the terrible misfeatures of the old and starts gathering huge numbers of people. Then they need to pay for staff/servers/bandwidth/shareholders/etc... and have to start monetizing and pretty soon they have all of the stuff that people hated on the old site.

That's really only a problem for centralized services, though. Federated services (like Mastodon[0]) don't really have this problem, because they scale horizontally over lots of small instances that can be supported by donations or co-op membership fees. And distributed services like Secure Scuttlebutt[1] don't have this problem at all, because every user pays for their own use.

Beyond the self-inflicted problem of trying to scale one system to support the whole world, having to make a profit rather than just be self-supporting drives the need to monetize and use dark patterns.

[0]: https://joinmastodon.org/ [1]: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

It's not a platform issue, it's a monetization issue. Somehow social networks have to make money, and that either involves charging users which pisses people off, or relying on the fact that people don't properly value their time and / or information and selling them ads. Selling ads incentivizes aggressive data mining, and then you're right back to the situation we have now.

I think the best solution would be to create an open, non-profit, publicly funded platform similar to Wikipedia. Besides I believe it's possible to have advertising on commercial sites and still be ethical.

ActivityPub [1] is a W3 recommendation for protocol for social networks communicating a federated p2p manner. It is used by open source social networks like Mastedon and PeerTube to interact with eachother.

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub

Practically speaking, all of us that care about these sorts of things already know about Mastodon, if not ActivityPub and GnuSocial, etc. We have lots of potential FB competitors to root for right now.

There's a few other good ones too:

https://www.opensource-socialnetwork.org

https://www.humhub.org/en

https://www.oxwall.com

https://elgg.org - site seems to be having issues right now

https://friendi.ca

> It's not a platform issue, it's a monetization issue.

This is kind of what I was getting at. I agree, the business model of the platform is the defining variable in how it will develop and how it treats users. Unfortunately there is no general willingness to pay for a social network. Facebook's ARPU in the US is something like $100/year. I would be willing to pay that for a social media platform that did zero business with advertisers. I don't think most people would though.

The article paints a picture of how hard Mark has it - just remember for all the suffering he is going through he has billions of dollars. It's tough being at the top :-)

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

So what, billionaires don't have problems?

He could step down, dissolve the company, or tell the truth and all of these "problems" would just go away.

Dude get real, please. He couldn't dissolve the company even if he wanted to.

Also these were Zuckerberg's talking points, which he had prepared for all the potential questions. I think it does show that his answers are mostly "scripted" and not necessarily genuine or coming from a place of honesty.

https://twitter.com/becket/status/983846618263891968

Direct image link:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DadTMxlW4AAUz_h.jpg:large

That's not what it shows, it simply shows he has prepared for a number of questions. If he was the one to come up with those answers (potentially running them by lawyers and PR just like you have to do for any public communication when you are a CEO of a publicly traded company) then it's still coming from a place of "honesty", it would be his genuine opinions. In order to say that he wasn't being honest you have to prove that those answers were prepared by someone else.

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