Mark Zuckerberg Is Totally Out of His Depth | Hacker News Reader

Mark Zuckerberg Is Totally Out of His Depth

bloomberg.com

45 pointssmacktoward36 comments

I have thought a lot about this over the years, in particular because I went to high school with Dustin Moskovitz, who was Mark's roommate and cofounder at Facebook. Dustin and I are only the barest of acquaintances at this point, so nothing I say should be construed as inside information.

Mark started Facebook when he was 18. Being the CEO of Facebook is the only real job he's ever had, and it's been a rocket ship since Day 1. Kudos to his brilliance, but it doesn't change the fact that this is literally his first job.

It's a very unique situation he is in - running a company that took over 1/6th of the world being the only job you've ever had. Perhaps that does deserve some sympathy.

But you learn from being exposed to a variety of situations. You develop tremendously more perspective by getting out and doing different things. You are forced to consider things you never would have considered if you had not moved onto something new. It gives you a much deeper view of how most of society works.

If this were a mom-and-pop grocery shop, it wouldn't matter so much if the boss had been doing it since 18. There are other competitors who can step in if you suddenly start selling all of your customers' purchase information to the local banks and real estate agents.

That isn't the situation with Facebook, though. They are too powerful at this point. The author of this article is correct in saying it would be best for society if someone more civically minded were running the company.

While I agree Zuckerberg is out of his depth, I think there is some magical thinking in this article that there are just a cadre of imminently well qualified people waiting in the wings who could save the day if only given the chance.

These people, by and large, don't exist. I may think Zuckerberg has some issues, but I don't think there is some hidden group of folks who could do much better of a job than he could.

That was my thought, too. The problems aren't personal, they're structural and regulatory.

Assuming that there is a more intelligent, more capable person available is the optimistic outlook. What if the reality is that the current crop of CEOs are the best-equipped people available to deal with this problem and it's not enough?

That was my point too. If such people can be found then by all means this is a testable proposition. I had another idea though.

Give these journalists what they ask for and attach betting markets to news articles as bets on media bullshit - then we'll see what happens next. I'm sure it will be illuminating.

The bets could come in many forms from "Is X true?" where X is measurable to more complex bets like "If X then Y result" where Y objectively measurable. This incentive will balance against the clickbait incentive of journalists and the bookmaker will make more money if more people accept the terms of the bet - so the third party has an incentive to resolve for good quality propositions. Sports bookmakers already slice up complex scenarios into betting proposals so I'm sure this can be accomplished in a way reasonable to all partisans.

Mark is 34. Sure must feel good to be all pedantic about his maturity, but that's not actually the problem. The problem is that the CEO of Facebook or Twitter, whoever it is, is in a Catch-22, they can't solve the disinformation/hate-speech/trolling problem without massively increasing costs on moderation, decimating some growth/engagement metrics and in the process destroying a ton of "shareholder value". If they don't solve the content problems, the platform will slowly die anyway as users start to flee the toxicity. So we're all hanging on as these guys try to awkwardly walk some impossible to find line between the two paths. The last FB earnings were a step in that direction but barely an inch, and things will get much worse.

You're spot on. And I would add that if and when they finally succeed in removing Zuckerberg from the throne (I'm convinced they're working on that; bad press is step 1) just to make space for another king, Facebook won't change a dime because making it better would make it also less profitable, so it's just a matter of taking away his seat for someone else in exchange for X (votes?).

Looking past these "issues" with Zuckerberg & Facebook, Jack whatever & Twitter, and the whole "social media" space in general, I find it totally hilarious (in a deeply tragic sense) that we as the "enlightened west" have been collectively blowing our trumpets about "free speech" ever since the start of the Cold War - free speech always having been rolled out as one of the arguments of our social and moral superiority over the "enemy".

That was all great for exactly as long as the People in Power had the direct and indirect means to control this "free speech". Now we have the technical means to allow anybody anywhere to exercise their free speech in a manner that is actually meaningful, we are all freaking out and looking for ways to shut them the fuck up, as soon as fucking possible.

Appears to me that free speech is fine, as long as you are sticking to the rules about what is acceptable speech, which is deeply hypocritical, if you ask me.

I guess it is a slippery slope on a path towards someone yelling "fire" in a theater when no such threat exists and as a society we determined that that is not acceptable. It would have something to do with intent to mislead, harm or knowingly distort some truth. We see "truthiness" and its damaging negative effects on society. Also "free speech" in the constitutional sense is to protect you from government prosecution but it has limits. It is not a license to say anything you want in any context anywhere. Society imposes editorial control through law and order. And by order I mean through organized groups of individuals.

I'm sorry but I just don't buy it. There is no indication that Zuckerberg wants to change anything about how Facebook operates or that he has regrets for how things have turned out. On the contrary it seems he has no respect for human rights and doesn't give two shits about privacy, except his own of course. I can understand that running a multibillion corporation turns you into an unsocial prick but the problem with Zuckerberg isn't how he behaves towards those who are close to him (see Jobs) but how he treats society. For him everyone is just an audience for an advertisement. Just last week we read that he wanted access to bank accounts. There's obviously no such thing as remorse for him, everything is up for sale.

He said during the Congressional hearing that he would take measures substantially impacting FB's profitability, and a few months later profitability fell (in a very surprising manner). If this is not evidence that has prosocial motivations -- what is?

As much as I agree that what we currently have at the head of most big tech companies may be ill-equipped to handle the current task at hand regarding the political minefield that big tech has stepped into, I really believe that they are, simultaneously, probably the best-equipped people that can be found.

I mean, to say they are not the right people for the job is one thing. I'm saying that there probably _isn't_ a right person for the job of internet censorship. What we need is to increase education regarding critical thinking so people don't take literally everything they read on the internet at face value.

I doubt that we'll ever have a New Internet Citizen; we have to presume current levels of cupidity/ignorance.

You can loathe the actions of these companies and also think it would be hilariously worse if typical 'leadership' were tasked with solving these very obviously novel, unprecedented, and truly challenging problems.

A good first step would be to get rid of the perverse incentives these companies have to manipulate and surveil their users due to their business models. I don't think these problems can be solved as long as the way these companies survive is by charging for the ability to manipulate people's views and actions.

Agree in principle. But in practice, what is the alternative business model you propose?

Also, changing the business model away from surveillance capitalism, in my eyes, is not a first step but a massive and complicated (though perhaps very necessary) end goal.

Yeah I didn't mean to imply this first step would be easy or result in the survival of these companies. To me it probably looks like the government stepping in, either threatening legislation or imposing it immediately that forces companies to transition off these business models if they meet some criteria which defines them as a public forum of a certain scale. (Of course this is full of potential negative unintended consequences, like cementing their dominance, so my guess is things will end up worse before they get better if this happens.)

Hopefully companies do this on their own accord before we get there. A model where a subset of users pay for the services would be a healthier model. This would likely result in a major loss of market cap and head count for these companies, but I'd imagine it would be sustainable in terms of keeping the services available and would enable these companies to charter a positive future for their users without having a conflict of interest.

I propose a betting market or a prediction market in my other post here.

I'm also a fan of paying for services. I pay for Fastmail instead of Gmail - am happy with that. $10 per year.

What is the profit made per real user of Google?

I'd pay about $50 per year for a search engine that was entirely aligned with myself. I suspect that is higher than what is made by surveillance.

A bit of nerd-hate there, eh? Financial types must really hate that nerds have taken over 1/2 of the stock exchange.

There's a solid argument past the flamebait though. When your company becomes the de facto public commons, a forum, and isn't, de facto, just a private brick and mortar shop(the usual concept of a private space that you can arbitrarily ban people from) anymore, what is the appropriate response? That requires some education in history, political science, philosophy, etc.

I agree. I have long said that they have a very difficult problem. The trouble is that too many people just say "oh they should do something about it" without having even close to enough knowledge to see what a hugely insurmountable problem it actually is to 'do something about it'.

When you consider the vast amount of words, pictures, and videos that are posted constantly, to check everything for 'bad' content would take a huge army of people working 24/7.

And then of course, people don't realise that checking everything means some stranger going through all their posts and making a decision as to whether to allow it or delete it.

And with these sites reaching so many jurisdictions, whose model of decency and legality do you use to decide what should be censored?

And finally we have the looming issue of 'Truth'. Who decides it? Truth can be a slippery thing in some cases. It is not always easy to ferret it out. Hell, if there was a law that journals could only publish established truth, every newspaper in every country would have to shut down immediately.

Oh, it's a terribly difficult issue, requiring a deep education in the humanities.

That article reeks of bitterness, hatred, and wealth envy. Really, it's not worth reading. The content is irrelevant, it's an incoherent rant against rich nerds.

What exactly makes Zuckerberg nerd?

It is just my pet peeve. Businessman with ability to do people things and being good in business being considered nerds for no real reason.

This is getting downvoted, but seriously. The man build large company which definitely suggests strong business and social/political skill. You can talk about priviledge and yes he has some. Nevertheless, even equally or more advantageous people fail at growing companies, so it is absolutely achievement and proof of political and busines skill.

Nothing whatsoever to suggest anything nerdy through, unless everyone who ever touched tech counts as nerd.

Agree completely. They mention that they were "arbitrarily chosen" and list luck, timing, etc. The fact of the matter is that it isn't arbitrary at all and hard work, talent, risk taking, etc. are all very strong filters. Sure, there is always some element of luck and timing, but give me a break. They make it sound as if building facebook is only slightly more difficult than finding $5 on the ground. This was clearly written by somebody who has no idea how tech startups succeed and more often than not fail.

Also, why take a shot at the fact that they are mostly men? Completely gratuitous and betrays their ideologically rigid way of looking at things.

That many competitors did exist - Bebo, Orkut, MySpace goes against the luck/timing story. I think what Mark Zuckerberg hit on is that people like to belong to an exclusive club - so Facebook started out behaving like a night club to give the platform a feeling (now forgotten) of sophistication.

It seems to have a pretty coherent thesis to me.

"They started with some good ideas, some luck, great timing, got lots of people to believe in their rosy vision, and they won the unicorn lottery. Little did they know or care what problems they were creating. And now, they’re being asked to solve — or acknowledge, or something — some really big issues"

I'd go so far as to say that it doesn't offer any solutions because, as it alludes to, there really aren't any. At least no top-down ones. That's the scope and scale of the problems created. They're some of the oldest kinds of problems, ones we've been trying to tackle more or less since organized society began. Exacerbated and accelerated by devices that allow us to make mistakes faster than any other point in history.

I think these systems deserve a bit of bitterness and hatred. I'm really not sure where you're getting 'wealth envy' from. This is the same lament that occurs with any kind of dramatic power imbalance. When the wealthy and powerful become so powerful that they stop being private entities and start being society-altering juggernauts, the rest of the people will complain about being trampled. This seems fair and right to me.

This thread is very defensive.

Being angry at the hubris of zuckerberg and other tech bros is completely appropriate and justified. When rich nerds try to solve large complex problems from within the algorithmic confines of their solipsism, they inevitably run into the endless irregularities of the real world until the only option they have left is to destroy every irrelgularity with force or implode because they can't.

Referring to any successful male technologist as "tech bros" is just condescending on the face of it and really weakens your argument.

People (rightfully) don't go around referring to Sheryl Sandberg and Meg Whitman as "tech broads".

from what i read, facebook was literally a frat house until they brought in a grown up to clean up their graffiti and beer cans, so i think the term is appropriate here.

Is Mark Zuckerburg a rich nerd? Is that a good summary of him? Does that imply that if you've experienced nerds, then you can glean insight into Mark's head? If we understand nerds, can we understand Mark Zuckerburg? Or Bill Gates?

I feel so dubious at this label which is meant to provide psychological insight into a person.

Dismissing criticism of the wealthy as "envy" has disturbing elements in common with dismissing criticism of politicians - i.e. both groups have a kind of power over the public that means they deserve and can withstand hard critique (an attitude I consider to be one of the best parts of whatever can be called American culture). Therefore, I think we should allow a little more leeway when considering what might look at first glance like just anger, or just a rant.

*Edited to accurately quote your comment

Who is the correct person to trust with censorship?

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

They had a utopian vision, but like all those before them they failed to take into account that there are a lot of 'bad actors' out there, to be polite about it.

>As their fictional mom, I’d like to offer some advice. Retire, step aside. Maybe find a new hobby. Ask someone smarter and more educated, thoughtful, and civic-minded to decide on the future of your companies.

Trash. Really, who is the author to speak so condescendingly? I don't look up to these "tech bros" any more than she does, but this just reads like the results of a writing exercise rather than what someone would actually think or believe...

> Ask someone smarter and more educated, thoughtful, and civic-minded to decide on the future of your companies.

This would basically mean admitting failure. I can't imagine any of the guys mentioned in the article to be ready for that. They are looking for answers and solutions, but they want to be the ones solving the problem, and won't hand their power over to anyone else.

The people on Capitol Hill are situated at the correct depth?

Isn't it nice to have some positive news for a change!

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