Speaking as someone who worked in this field for a couple of decades, it's more likely that one or more New York Times reporters have developed good sources inside Facebook, and are milking them.
The New York Times didn't make Facebook a monster, Facebook did.
> The New York Times didn't make Facebook a monster, Facebook did.
Did the parent assert anything like that?
That’s what newspapers are supposed to do.
But the bias doesn't matter because everyone on the internet hates them (and Google) so they just rush to pile on. Anything negative about Facebook gets to the front page very quickly. The thing is, Facebook has billions of users and you don't get billions of users by being evil. People may not love Facebook, but there really isn't a better way to keep up with friends, family, and to organize get togethers. I don't use Facebook that much, but I'll never delete it. It's just too valuable in my life.
As an aside: we're all engineers here, and if Facebook offered you guys a job, almost everyone here would take it. Their engineering team, quality of life, and compensation is extremely hard to beat. The NY Times found a couple college kids who don't want to work for Facebook. Okay. As a recent college graduate I can assure you that almost everyone in my graduating class would have taken a job at Facebook if given the chance. Facebook came and hired the smartest of my graduating class and the "hackathon" crowd puts Facebook at close to the top of their list of companies to work for. Facebook isn't hurting for talent and they have the compensation packages to compete for the best of the best.
Tobacco companies would disagree, no, actually, they would agree, full-heartedly, and pay well for your study that backs that up.
> Their engineering team, quality of life, and compensation is extremely hard to beat.
Working for Facebook in any meaningful technical capacity makes one a Machiavellian opportunist. For some, that's never worth it.
> As a recent college graduate
Yes, money is great and alluring. You can buy stuff with it, except for stuff you can't buy.
> there really isn't a better way to keep up with friends, family
Facebook puts a tax on being human, on trying to exist outside of a social vacuum. Doesn't that bother you?
I don't know what "trying to exist outside of a social vacuum" means. I also don't know what type of "tax" Facebook puts on being human that isn't levied--to at least some extent--by every other technological advance (telegraph, phone, internet, email, SMS...)
Pretty much everyone (whether you're a Facebook user or not) got their privacy violated by Facebook. The majority doesn't know it but we're on HN and everyone is aware of what's happening, so it's not too surprising that people feel bitter about it. I feel bitter about it too.
> Facebook has billions of users and you don't get billions of users by being evil.
They got billions of users back when they actually had a decent product, nowadays it's just network effects - nobody signs up for the product itself. In fact, they're perfectly aware that Facebook (the product) is on its deathbed, otherwise they wouldn't be chasing new trends by buying Instagram & WhatsApp.
This is such an obviously nonsensical thing to say. What about the tobacco industry? What about sweatshop-manufactured clothing? It’s easy to find examples where being evil is in fact a necessary prerequisite of getting billions of users...
You might want to talk to Pablo Escobar about that.
You don't think writers see and care about how many clicks or views their articles get? Everyone knows these metrics are _directly_ correlated with revenue.
FB used to drive an insane amount of traffic to these publishers back when our news feeds were full of news articles. They pivoted very sharply and suddenly away from that, which hurt publisher revenues (and views) very substantially.
I think they care, but even so, they would write about FaceBook because it gets clicks, not because the org is mad at Facebook. The Times being mad at Facebook isn't what makes people click on the articles. It's people being mad at Facebook that gets them to click. There is no one in the chain of approval for content that would care about the loss of revenue from Facebook and specifically tell them to target Facebook for bad articles.
They would say, "hey writing about FaceBook gets us lots of views, do more of that".
Well I don't disagree with that.
> The Times being mad at Facebook
You're trying very hard to separate the corporation from the people. There's plenty of evidence that the journalists themselves are mad at Facebook. As another commenter notes, it's not hard to find podcasts with them complaining about the rise of FB.
There's another reason for journalists to be mad at FB: it's goal is to give everyone a voice. If everyone gets to publish their opinion, and not just people who work for big companies, that makes journalists a lot less important in society.
Before that it was fairly flat, after being in free fall from the mid-$40s range in 2004, to like 5 bucks in 2009 (which is coincidentally the rise of social media: Facebook 2004, Youtube 2005, Twitter 2006, etc).
Related: (low quality journalism) https://mobile.twitter.com/mikeokuda/status/1019964820618035...