Walt Mossberg Quits Facebook

I don't think it detracts from previous viable points like OP, but I do think the headline might at first trigger an eye-roll on a lot of readers. It sounds like an irrelevant piece of trivia that the NYT wants to blow up in an attempt to just keep throwing mud at Facebook.

If one reads the article there's a few interesting points-- it includes some statements by Mossberg and info on his book which will probably include some thoughts on Facebook.

I try to at least skim stories before commenting on them which is the only reason I opened this one. The title reads like cheap celebrity journalism. Something more fleshed-out, like an interview going in depth about his thoughts on Facebook and tech's impact as a whole, leading to his book, would've been more "NYT worthy" IMO. And a better title.

Do you know if the NYTimes wrote an article when mossberg opened his facebook account? If mossberg opening a facebook account isn't news, neither is his closing of his account.

Also, mossberg is a journalist. I was under the impression that journalists being the news themselves is bad journalism. Isn't that why most journalists go out of their way to not to be part of a story?

If rupert murdoch, in his war with facebook, pressured mossberg to close his account, that would be news. Otherwise, this is just the nytimes and a journalist creating news, not reporting on news.

Mossberg had a long career or tech reviews and CEO friends, but I've personally never thought of him as a "thought leader". Moreover, he's unfamiliar to a lot of people.

IMO statements by Chomsky would be more news-worthy. Or by people who might have bigger stakes in staying in the platform-- say if the NYT themselves announced they were gonna be leaving the platform. Mossberg is retired.

I guess the relevance of this piece depends on each person's admiration for Mossberg.

Having worked in tech my whole life and been a frequent visitor of the site, I have never heard of him.

Regardless, this is still fair criticism. This would be like seeing in the scrolling banner of "Breaking News" on CNN "<Insert Well Known Person in their field> quits job at <Insert large company>"

Belongs in maybe the entertainment or business section, maybe, section, but wouldn't classify it as "tech news"

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Having thought about it a little more, I can see a valid case when said person in question, considered monumental enough, leaves a platform, business or field and is reported as news. I guess it's more of a reflection of how little HN'ers (including myself) think of Facebook in the grand scheme of things. It's just a website. What's next, we report that he or she has left Flickr or Reddit? That's kind of what I think GP and myself were getting at. Now if this person was the founder of Facebook, or instrumental in the success of the platform, and then decides to leave, I think absolutely it would be tech news.

Um. Yes? What has this guy done in the past 5 years? All the linked commenters saying how great his work is posted 10 year old videos of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Maybe the better question is, is Walt Mossberg still relevant to the technology scene?

To be fair, hacker news is a special kind of technology website. A place where many know a lot more about technology than walt mossberg. He wrote for the masses ( actually the business people - WSJ ), not for "hackers". For most us, he is just some dude. For the masses, he is the technology guy. But ultimately, he was a journalist, not a technology guru.

I don’t think this will have any real world impact. There has been an all out media assault on Facebook for some time now with no real usage impact. Mossberg‘s audience in particular seems like the least likely group of people to quit FB. Grandparents are going to stay on FB as long as they can keep seeing pictures of their grandchildren, etc...

I don’t think anyone uses Facebook because it is “cool” (and thus susceptible to media tarnishing). They use it because their social network is on it and they value that.

It was. In the 90s, people's email address changed pretty much any time they changed jobs or schools. Their phone numbers changed too, every time they moved. For college students, it often meant multiple complete changes of contact info per year.

The churn is much lower now.

I agree in the sense you want to keep a large circle of contacts and attribute a name to a face quickly.

I agree with you completely. And that is kind of my point. At its core, it has some parts that are great. The trappings paying the bills are what have created so much damage. I think ultimately, the world would be a better place if people who wanted privacy could just buy it. I’d pay money to have Facebook without any tracking and without any ads. The trouble is that I wouldn’t pay as much as that policy would cost.

If everyone now is worth $5, but everyone rich enough to pay $5 just “bought out” their own ad space, advertisers would flee immediate and Facebook would lose most of their revenue.

The struggle with Facebook is that they can’t afford to sell privacy to those who want it, except at a cost that nobody would want it. They are interesting to advertisers because at least some Data is fair game for everyone. If that goes away for those that are most able to pay, it drives a spiral away from advertisers, and therefore away from privacy being affordable.

Apologies if it was unclear. My intent in posting his message was to summarize the article and because I personally found it concise and inspiring. I do not think it is unreasonable at all for him to have posted it there. In fact I think it’s a powerful statement.

I think we can talk about this in a non-gotcha sense, so for what it's worth, it is interesting that he felt the best way to reach his audience with this message was the platform he's leaving.

If he had a better way of reaching his audience, why not use that instead?

> I don’t think it’s unreasonable to post a final “I’m leaving Facebook” message there so everyone sees it.

Especially if an important part of that message is to disseminate a forwarding address.

I believe you are misinterpreting my point as discussed in another previous reply. To be clear, I am not calling “gotcha” on Walt Mossberg, I am supporting his statement.

I was an avid Facebook user in the earlier years (2008-2010), and a regular several-times-a-day checker from 2010 until early 2017. I griped often about how it had become ”boring”, full of random looking stuff interspersed with occasional nuggets I was really interested in. I tried to write a filter to strip out the boring stuff and failed, and it hit me that they were deliberate and optimal in their mixture of crap and good to keep me just within my tolerance level. I turned off notifications on my iDevices in late April and have checked it occasionally whenever I feel like it. I might look at it two or three times a week. I can’t quite bring myself to abandon it (because it serves a useful purpose in terms of communication and keeping up with far-flung friends and family) but on the whole it’s pretty useless and obnoxious on a daily basis. They overextended themselves by a wide margin. They went a Like too far. ;)

>There are deep sociological and psychological issues that have been uncovered over the last couple years, that have always existed beneath the surface in society. At a time of hyperconnection, if it wasn't Facebook surfacing them, it would have been YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or whoever else.

i see this rationalization very consistently by all sorts of people. "if we didn't do this bad thing, someone else would be doing this same bad thing -- and maybe even worse!"

it isn't convincing. if there is a lesson we have learned from the social media space it is that copycat products do not necessarily remain alike or make the same mistakes. you don't see anyone complaining about fake news on linkedin, after all. other unethical things, sure. but not the same ones as facebook.

furthermore, the spoiler here is that nobody else needs the solutions to problems that the platform itself causes. developing an anti fake-news algo on facebook isn't going to solve any problems because the problem is that people can't think critically. likewise, you didn't even mention the largest problem with facebook: selling user data to advertisers.

the company needs the solutions because they make the platform look bad. that doesn't imply any net gain to society.

> There are deep sociological and psychological issues that have been uncovered over the last couple years, that have always existed beneath the surface in society. At a time of hyperconnection, if it wasn't Facebook surfacing them, it would have been YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or whoever else. I am not saying grave errors haven't been made and the future does look scary.

> But now that the issues (from fakenews, to terror recruiting, to child abuse, to identity theft etc etc etc) have surfaced in a manner that cannot just be wished away, who else out there has the skills to do something about this stuff?

I appreciate you having the courage to reply as an employee there, but but this is exactly the type of Zuckerberg-esque deflection I would have expected from the man himself, or a C-level, but not an everyday tech employee. Have they really brainwashed everyone there to the point that they've bought into the narrative that they have no culpability in any of this? Sure the root issues were there, but you are paid to surface them and exploit them. If in the pre-internet age of television and radio, do you think people let stations get by with that lame excuse of throwing their hands up and saying "well it's deeper societal issues, we are just the transmission mechanism!"

> The good stuff happening is not going away

The problem is small groups of bad people, creating a small amount of bad content are having an outsized affect on society using your tools. Even a mountain of good content cannot fully mitigate these damages. Facebook has not demonstrated any capabilities to deal with this and is in fact, playing catch-up by stumbling behind investigative journalism with feel good PR pieces about how "we're going to change starting tomorrow!".

> There is seriously no one out there, besides the Chinese govt with experience handling/understanding data flows at this scale. The expertise being built up in Facebook is going to be fundamental in addressing and eventually finding solutions to these problems. I have no doubt about that. Nobody else is seeing the data we are seeing. It's going to be a hard couple years ahead, with lot of turmoil, but we have a much better idea about what the issues are and therefore solutions are more likely to be found not less.

This right here - this is exactly what freaks me out. I don't want a Ministry of Truth telling me what to believe in. I don't want a "responsible" entity controlling what information flows to me and how it flows to me. I don't want another entity to assume authority to judge my words and deem them safe to be forwarded to my friends and family.

Epistemology is hard. Even those of us with advanced degrees are often misled by data from our own experiments and analysis. It is presumptuous to assume that a single entity can judge and identify the veracity of information.

Additionally, a single entity that's going to control flow of information is a single point of failure. There are historical instances where much larger and more diverse sources of information have been collectively infiltrated or actively misled by those with clearly malicious purposes ("Iraq has WMDs" anyone?)

The fact that somebody has sold this idea that information must be policed for "the better good of humanity" to the point that this is being discussed here - that's the single most frightening thing about the world we live in today.

Edit: Just re-read the article and realized that Walt Mossberg might have quit Facebook because he believes Facebook isn't doing enough to police information flowing through it's network.

> Mr. Mossberg has argued that the government should take an active role in protecting the internet, and that Facebook has “a direct responsibility to get rid of fake news.”

sigh

Hmmm... yes. Facebook and the Chinese government. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Maybe you're right - maybe Facebook is doing all this bad stuff and Walt Mossberg happened to notice and decided to follow through.

But I'm skeptical - I think the more traditional news media (aka the folks who write stories and collect facts) tends to view news aggregators as a threat to their business model. I think the idea that Facebook ought to be required to screen whatever news it aggregates for "truthfulness" is absurd and I (sometimes) think that the constant refrain of "Facebook did X Bad Thing" is closer to activism than journalism.

But I could be wrong - I'm not as certain as my first post indicated.