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Comment by tj-teej | Hacker News Reader

Blaming the like button for the end of the "soft cuddly" side of Facebook is spurious from someone who was an investor.

Facebook didn't have to build a surveillance machine, it didn't have to extract every possible penny out of it's user's data, Facebook didn't have to stop being "cuddly"...until it raised money at an outrageous valuation and had an outrageous IPO.

Blaming the Like button for actions necessitated by Facebook selling out their users for a higher valuation/money seems a bit rich coming from one of the investors.

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I think he's alluding to the `like` button being a symptom of the changes that were driven by things like IPO valuation.

I don't think the like button is to blame as such, it's just an indicator of where the purpose of the company started to move in the direction of mining its users for profit.

Ofcourse it is to blame. It has added a number next to every expressed human thought.

What do you think that does to behavior and thinking?

No effect?

I'll upvote THAT sentiment!

> until it raised money at an outrageous valuation and had an outrageous IPO

Lots of companies go public without developing a psychopathic culture. As Tim Cook has said, supposed conflicts between privacy-versus-profits or privacy-versus-innovation are false choices [1].

These are strategic choices Zuckerberg made and which his employees fell into step to execute. They are strategic choices investors profit from and voters tolerate. Each of these constituencies could, relatively unilaterally, knee-cap Facebook.

McNamee is making good points. This is a classic case of ad hominum.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/7fafec06-1ea2-11e9-b126-46fc3ad87...

I don't believe any CEO taking stance on topic like this.

Tom Cook is picturing Apple as a privacy guard, while they deploy icloud servers in China. Take with a grain of salt everything that's said by people who want to sell you things.

>while they deploy icloud servers in China

That's literally a requirement of the Chinese government for anyone offering web services in China. What exactly would you suggest they do as an alternative?

Very easy - not do a business in a country, which practices go so deeply against core values that Tim Cook claims Apple stands for.

The USA does too, as evidenced by the NSA’s spying and Trump being Trump. ICE issues iPhones as government furnished equipment. They’re almost certainly being used to help coordinate the caging of children.

So Apple just shouldn’t do business anywhere then?

They can do business anywhere, just not while lying about what they are doing.

What’s the lie exactly?

I think what he's getting at is that Facebook's path became clear as soon as:

1. the reciprocity effect started (photo-tagging) and then;

2. social validation started (the like button)

That was always there anyway, but the like button made it that much easier to validate.

Facebook didn't have to build a surveillance machine, it didn't have to extract every possible penny out of it's user's data,

Actually it pretty much did, in order to attain the revenue goals it was after.

Which has been its core flaw since the very beginning.

yeah, I mean, the like button is an example of exactly what the internet is good for: sorting and summarizing information. It makes far more sense to me that the pathological culture is created by the perverse incentives of a social network monetized by ads.

Which is the cart and which is the horse?

Especially given how the like button wasn't exactly a novel concept, nor something that wouldn't have otherwise come about. These systems existed prior to Facebook and if it hadn't have introduced it, some other service in the same niche would have done exactly this.

And Facebook's privacy issues and general sociopathic business attitudes predated all of it.

Right, FriendFeed had Like before Facebook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_button#FriendFeed

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