Is Facebook evil or merely incompetent? | Hacker News Reader

Is Facebook evil or merely incompetent?

networkworld.com

23 pointsbhavin8 comments

I'd say Facebook is opportunistic more than anything. They know how badly people can't sit still or be alone and they simply profit off that. Like Tocqueville said 'people get the government they deserve.' This is what happens when people don't think about how closely freedom, privacy, and selfhood are linked. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Exactly. For social networking, people go to the big, nice-looking site that all of their friends seem to like. It sells your grandmother on the slave market? Oh, too bad, no one told me this!

I think Facebook has survived long enough in a very competitive market segment that they can't claim to be stupid. They do care about privacy etc. - to the extent that they need it to remain in the market, but not one ounce more, and to some extent their business model (not charging their users, ever) means they have to do scary stuff on the side (with all privacy implications) to remain competitive with for-fee sites (e.g., Xing, LinkedIn) as well as sites that are financed through generic advertising.

At Facebook the motto is said to be "move fast and break things". I think that explains pretty much everything about them, the good and the bad.

Any sufficiently entrenched incompetence is indistinguishable from evil.

[Paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke]

I'm having a hard time buying that they're incompetent. I mean, we just had all those stories about one of their biggest partners leaking data to advertisers, then they go on to ban the practice and remove other (far less profitable) programs made by different companies from their systems and pretend that we won't notice....

Now, it could be that they hired away the 10% of Google that's the least competent, but I don't really buy that. And somebody ought to have noticed all the news stories about selling Facebook data to advertisers.

So if they're "incompetent" it's because they're sticking their heads in the sand.

"The present king of France is bald."

Neither. Facebook has consistently pushed the privacy (or lack thereof) envelope since they launched the newsfeed, and they have consistently profited from it. The regular press backlash hasn't done shit to their bottom line, so until the misstep that actually causes the general public to care (which could come shockingly fast), they are simply a brilliant company.

While I don't disagree with the author's points of discussion I do disagree with the tone and attempt at humor. Sometimes even if you do have something valid to say your words won't be sweeter by sitting on a bee hive.

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