Hacker News Reader

Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

This is just a few IM's of a kid joking with his college buddy about what was then nothing more than a side project. It's not like he could have known that in a few years it would have become one of the world's biggest web sites. It sounds like he's just having a laugh with a friend.

Honestly if I was in his position at the same time at that same age I would have joked in the same way. I doubt his views on the matter are the same now that he's many years older and his site has a dictionary entry. Give the kid a break.

View on HN

> It's not like he could have known that in a few years it would have become one of the world's biggest web sites.

That's the exact reason a lot of people see this as such an insight into his true nature. The true mark of character is not to behave morally when you know you are being watched. Any intelligent liar or psychopath can pull that off. The true mark is what you do when you don't think the information will spread.

Of course if he did still harbor the same underlying attitude now, one wouldn't expect some youthful prank if and when he decided to 'fuck them'. You have to imagine there will be many times when Facebook will have to decide between the honoring the trust of their users versus some other gain. When these decision are made that underlying attitude may still be calling the shots.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that as he was typing these IM's I don't think he was rubbing his hands and twiddling his mustache while cackling madly. There seem to be two camps of people on this issue: people who think he's a natural sociopath and was plotting on how to manipulate and cheat people from inside the womb (people who don't think personalities and opinions can change), and people who think he's probably just making a self-deprecating joke at a time in his life when this project wasn't yet as serious as it is now.

I'd rather picture the guy as an (extremely) socially clueless but generally well-meaning person whose sense of humor might be a little off. Sure he's had his privacy slip-ups in the past but the kid is captaining completely uncharted waters with one hand and beating back thousands of influencers throwing fistfuls of money with the other. I suspect that if anyone on this board, including me, found themselves with the almost overnight success of Facebook on their hands it wouldn't be too hard to find some out-of-context IM's to smear them with either. Let he who is without sin, blah blah blah.

Edit: To be clear I'm referring just to these IM's and how they relate to his running FB today, not to whatever history he may or may not have had with other developers. I don't know enough of that backstory to comment.

I would have joked, but not in the same way. Calling his own users 'dumb fucks' for trusting him is insulting and implies that he's unethical.

He may have been trying to say "Wow they trust _me_. Why would they trust me with anything?" But when you’re talking to close friends, not millions of people, you tend not to worry so much about phrasing.

You really seem to ignore the context. Sometimes, (the ability to be able) to do wrong can be "cool". Why do you think young people smoke?

Dude, calling your users dumb is fine. But saying you're going to 'fuck them in the ear'? When would that be cool? He wasn't 14 btw, when he said this...

"f them in the ear" was not in the context of users, it was in the context of ConnectU and competing websites. It's more obvious in the New Yorker article.

So he was talking about the company he worked for and probably stole the idea from? I'm not sure that's better...

Dunno. I call people that use my software idiots for choosing to use my software. It's more of a self-deprecating thing than me actually thinking they are idiots.

Phrases can have many meanings, and it's tough to draw a conclusion from a handful of sentences. I often have IM conversations where I pretend to be someone else and sarcastically say things that they would say, without any indication of that in the text. People I am friendly with online know that that's not me, and they read it as sarcasm. Post it on a blog, and people are guaranteed to have the wrong idea.

Everybody loves to hate the big guys, but this IM conversation doesn't really rile me up.

>>Calling his own users 'dumb fucks' for trusting him [...] insulting [...] unethical

That was written 16 hours ago and voted to +22??

Oh, please...

My remaining har is gray -- and I'd still add such a comment as an automatic joke about anyone trusting me.

It is an obvious self deprecating joke to say/write at that point, laugh about -- and forget in less than five seconds.

That said, I think Facebook as a non-open company is bad. An application with more information about people than Google should be distributed, for all our sakes. (No, I don't have any alternate ideas.)

But damning that kid for having a sense of humor is ridiculous.

And, worse, this might force me to stop joking... :-)

See my reply below as to why you are completely wrong. Normally I wouldn't emphasize a point so much; in this case it's quite personal and aside from my personal connection, I believe, quite important. Intellectual property theft affects a lot of people who work on software, and it's crucial that the community appreciate the nuance of a case as informative as this.

Did you have any contact with the producers of "The Social Network" movie coming out soon?

I'm just curious in the event that I get pulled in to see it.

Ben Mezrich asked me if I would co-operate with him for "The Accidental Billionaires" and I declined after considering his history of twisting characters in "Bringing Down The House," which got made into 21. I didn't hear from anyone after that, and my name was mis-spelled in his book.

I would give him a break if his more recent published opinions didn't sound like a more mature and intellectually vailed version of the very same attitude.

Exactly. This is what the Facebook/Zuckerberg apologists aren't getting. I think most people can get behind giving people a second chance, but Zuckerberg is basically doing a "git rebase newMotivation". None of the behaviors seem to be changing, just the claimed reason for them.

In 2006 Facebook was way more than just a side project. Zuckerberg had already dropped out of Harvard to work on it full time and had raised investment if I recall correctly.

The main link on this thread is incorrect. The IMs are from 2004, not 2006.

Agreed, the New Yorker mentioned 2006 as the date when the IMs were discovered and the boingboing article screwed it up.

http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com