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Comment by Maro | Hacker News Reader

"I think it’s clear now that ..." --- I worked there for a while. FB has a lot of empathy, and it's the most (internally) honest company, and the most efficient at fixing them [of all companies I've ever worked at]. You're a victim of highly biased reporting/information.

Having said that, FB lives and dies by 2 metrics: MAU and Timespent/DAU. An outcome of those is Ad revenue. If you want to understand how Facebook is doing, watch those metrics. MAU is still growing globally, but it has peaked in the US. Lately a big driver of growth is Instagram. Workplace is an awesome product, if it takes off, a lot of people will be using "Facebook" in the workplace, too. If VR ends up being a generally useful thing (eg. we have our meetings in VR), Facebook will dominate due to their lead with Oculus.

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> You're a victim of highly biased reporting/information.

I don't think this report on Facebook's role in the Rohingya massacres should be dismissed as biased reporting:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-45449938

"But there was also a much more fundamental issue - the lack of Burmese-speaking content monitors. According to the Reuters report, the company had just one such employee in 2014, a number that had increased to four the following year."

Facebook can work great for connecting friends, family and community groups but it's real world impact can be devastating when it strays into 'news' and politics. Across social media personalised feeds reinforce echo-chambers and attention metrics push users towards provocative content.

> FB has a lot of empathy, and it's the most (internally) honest company, and the most efficient at fixing them [of all companies I've ever worked at]. You're a victim of highly biased reporting/information.

Well, it may have a lot of empathy internally, externally, it just does not show.

FB & Twitter & YouTube seem to play the very same game: while they do provide great connection and progress with their tools, they also heavily contribute to setting the world on fire by giving everyone tools that highly benefit (and are incentivised by) extreme/clickbait/fake information.

And they seem not to be willing to act on it. Twitter is particularly demonstrative by its apathy (and its CEO discourse) regarding bot accounts. YouTube by its conspiracy contents. Facebook by its displayed ingenuity about their knowledge of what happened ("oh really? oups, sorry, nevermind, won't do it again").

It's like they act with social data & behaviour exploitation such as oil companies act with crude oil: a spill here and there? so what? we destroyed your ecosystem? listen, we bring so much more to the world, you can't blame us.

It's really like... boys with toys.

As somebody doing his own startup, that is absolutely mindblowing. At the size Facebook is currently, I envy their ability to keep things so focused on well-defined KPIs and still make the whole thing feel like a startup.

When you join, they tell you "FB is the world's biggest startup". It actually felt like that.

I guess OP listened to TWIT's last episode...

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