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Comment by warp_factor | Hacker News Reader

Let me disagree on this.

I think You joined Facebook, and they showed you the "Employee side" where everything is beautiful, with free food and free toys and you became convinced. Yes, they treat employees super well, nobody contradicts that. But how does it change anything related to how bad the product is (and all the bad things it does to people that use it a lot).

It is easy to let the beautiful inner side of Facebook take over the product side of Facebook that everyone else is seeing from the outside.

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I get that you have a fundamental disagreement with the opinions expressed by this commenter, but please don’t invalidate their experience like that. Saying, “Sorry but no” is a flippant way of dismissing their experience without actually being sorry for doing it.

It’s frankly not for you to say “what happened” when it comes to their opinion, which is based on what they’ve witnessed and experienced. Note that this entire thread does not concern facts, it concerns impressions and opinions. This isn’t the place to “Actually, ...” what someone else has said.

It strikes me as particularly condescending that you’re telling this person they only feel this way because of “free food and free toys.”

You make a good point and I edited my comment. Thanks.

> But how does it change anything related to how bad the product is

From OP:

> I hear real change from leadership

> Fb has invested hugely in protecting elections, possibly more than any single government. They have doubled that on integrity, etc.

> I think FB, and especially Zuckerberg, have done a great job responding to these issues to try and solve them.

You might think they're misinformed or incorrect, but you can't say they didn't address product/company issues.

I don’t think the product is bad, nor do I think it’s evil. The people who decide to use the service every day get value.

I think the negative fb news of late has really enabled people to strengthen their confirmation bias against fb.

For every super negative story that HN latches onto, there are a dozen internal projects that help the world in some way.

I guess I just see the intentions and a broader Perspective in some ways. When I saw how the sausage was made, I was actually impressed with the earnestness of peoples intentions.

Put simply, I don’t think anyone on HN has enough facts and measurements of outcomes to judge FB.

"how bad the product is"

What makes facebook so much worse than email? The fact that its default sorting algorithm is based on how relevant it thinks stories are to your interests? Any spread of false information could happen basically as easily through gmail. I dont see people getting mad at gmail and outlook for allowing chain letters to keep existing.

The utility_function of facebook (what it maximizes for) is for your attention grab. This in itself makes the product bad. They will hack the endorphin in your brain in order to keep you hooked.

the utility_function of email is utilitarian. No email server wants to keep their user hooked on their emails.

I wish the person who replied didnt delete their comment. They asked you if you felt the same way about netflix. Are products who want to keep people hooked, and have all their attention universally bad?

I replied on another thread on this topic where the same question got raised. (TLDR: Not perfect, but definitely a magnitude better).

Obviously so. If you're into music/movies/arts you should come up with a crappier product. I hope you don't come up with tunes that are addictive and get people hooked to your music.

Same with sports teams: I hope they all play crappy so that people are not hooked onto them.

How are you measuring this utility function? What is the evidence that facebooks objective is to hack endorphins?

All the conversations I’ve heard discuss how to make products better for users. Even if it hurts standard metrics.

For example, the goal of the feed team hasn’t been to increase engagement for a couple of years now. The metric of choice is meaningful interactions.

The outsiders perspective of FB seems to be a couple of years out of date, compared to what I’ve seen.

I mean, those notifications everyone gets that have no actual pertinent info/are super blatant engagement hacks have been widely discusssed/experienced, and there's no strong argument that those make products better for users (and it's obvious what metrics they're attempting to inflate).

This sums up the advertising industry as a whole.

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