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Comment by ilovecaching | Hacker News Reader

Could you ever consider that Zuck has enough money, and that he really believes in making a product to connect people for the greater good and use ads to make it available to everyone?

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If someone had told me 15 years ago that Bill Gates would become one the greatest philanthopists of our generation, I would've laughed in their face.

Why? Some of the most venal, greedy, and ruthless people in history made their money then turned to philanthropy to improve their image. I would argue that it was downright predictable, and so would Alfred Nobel. In fact using charity to either improve your public image (as in Gates and many others) is probably only matched by people like Jimmy Saville using charity to give themselves license to continue committing crimes.

What’s surprising to me is that it still works!

Right, the then world's richest started a charitable trust purely so he could improve his public image.

I'm sure the competitive drive to dominate (in generosity) plays a role. Look at the rivalry between Rockefeller and Carnegie for example. Once they grew old and their companies either bought out (Carnegie) or broken up by the feds (Rockefeller) they basically switched to seeing who could get their names put on the most public buildings by building libraries, universities, etc.

What else is he going to do? At that level of wealth, the marginal returns on greed have diminished to almost zero.

So one must find another way to feed ones ego. What is left apart from fulfilling the god complex and saving the world?

Edit: has->have

> What is left apart from fulfilling the god complex and saving the world?

Well one thing I can think of is wanting to make the world better

That's a pretty dark view.

I imagine that Gates played to win in business, as many others do, it's just that he was particularly good at it.

Now he's playing hard and to win in philanthropy.

I doubt he gives 2 bits what the average person thinks of him, at least not enough to throw money at rehabilitating his image. If that was his goal, his philanthropy targets would be different.

Not a chance. I'd trust him about as far as I could throw him. If there is one exec of a major web property that has lost all benefit of the doubt then it is Mark Zuckerberg.

Privately he has enough money, sure, but as the CEO of Facebook he has a responsibility to maximize the value of the company.

Personally I believe he should pull a Bill Gates, hand over the reigns and take his philanthropy private.

No, because Facebook is a public for-profit company, not a non-profit seeking to benefit society.

As a person, maybe if I squint very very very hard.

Legally, he has a duty to maximize value for his board and investors. And there hasn't been a business model that provides a free consumer web product without monetizing user data.

Why does this shareholder value meme keep getting perpetuated?

Because that's who a CEO reports to and that's how a CEO gets fired.

Some CEO's like Elon and Jobs can spin a great story and hold on by sheer force of personality, but pension funds aren't buying FB in bulk to get more green cars on the road.

> Because that's who a CEO reports to and that's how a CEO gets fired.

That has nothing to do with the legal requirements of the company or the CEO. That would be the same as saying I am "legally required" to go to work tomorrow, because I could get fired for not showing up.

> Legally, he has a duty to maximize value for his board members and investors.

Please stop repeating that nonsense.

Legally, he has a duty to maximize value for his board and investors

You should probably stop using the word "legally" in this context. There have been thousands of companies over the decades that put other things before shareholder value, and somehow managed to not run afoul of the law.

Also, it might help if you provided a citation to this law to bolster your argument.

And there hasn't been a business model that provides a free consumer web product without monetizing user data.

Also false.

I'd love to read a blog post talking about how to make free consumer web apps without monetizing user data. I really would. That's the crux of the issue here -- is there an alternative to the ad-tech playbook?

There's all the Redhat / enterprise open-source examples, but I'm specifically talking about consumer web products. Redhat's product is enterprise infrastructure.

There's free as in a trial or limited functionality to get you to buy the premium offering, but then the business model isn't really based off a free product... the free product is a promotion, not a business model.

You can have one group of premium users subsidize all the free users. In social, the main examples would be LinkedIn or Angelist, but again, access to the user data is the product these companies eventually sell.

There's Wikipedia, but that's a non-profit. Nothing wrong with that, people make a living that way and we need more like it, but I'm talking about companies where profits can serve as a strong motivator. This also excludes government services.

Maybe Google Maps qualified as free in the beginning, but any free service that Google makes is pretty much some clever way to acquire more user data to support other parts of the enterprise. HN itself falls under this category: HN is an ingestion pipeline for YC (the YC app asks for your HN handle, hello future YC app reviewer!).

I know it's a trite and a tired saying, but it really is true: if you're not paying for it, you are the product. That's not bad per-se... another way of looking at it is in the same way the sharing economy unlocked underutilized physical assets, these services have unlocked a new source of wealth not measured by our wallets: our attention. Lets describe it as we pay for these services with our attention-dollars.

My point is anything that's a "free consumer service" business model is really some kind of machine that converts attention-dollars into cash-dollars.

I would love to see a discussion of non-cash-dollar, non-attention-dollar business models. If you can think of a way of giving away Something that People Want (TM) for free without the corrupting influence of optimizing for their attention, well, you've found the next genuinely interesting unicorn.

Absolutely none of what you wrote has anything to do with legal duties.

Yep. When people have dug-in to their trenches, shouting even louder is pointless.

This was about the other half of the reply that hasn't been explored. Lets make threads here more interesting than an infinite uh-huh!/nuh-uhh!/uh-huh! loop.

Duckduckgo seem to have a good way to make money without compromising privacy [0].

I'm certainly not an expert on this subject but monetizing based on relevant content is reasonable. You can still make money without gathering a tremendous amount of user data.

[0]https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates

>Legally

Citation needed!!!

It is not illegal to have other goals than maximizing shareholder value.

For example, Costco. Publicly traded company but the employees are paid well, customers are well taken care of, and the CEO is rewarded for this. In the short-term, Costco could generate an enormous amount of value by automated, reducing wages, and finding cheaper supplies and lowering quality, selling their customer's membership information, etc.

But they don't. And there is nothing illegal about it.

No, because I wasn't born yesterday. There is no limit to human greed or hubris. Facebook is a publicly traded company and is expected to maximize value for its shareholders.

>...and use ads to make it available to everyone?

Could you ever believe that's not all that he does with ads?

That's irreconcilable with his actions.

Why would a person who believes those things have made the "dumb fucks" quote?

I'm no fan of Zuckerberg, but he said that quote over a decade ago, and people can change their beliefs and values.

He's done plenty in that decade that affirms the quote.

All of his fairly recent congressional "testimony" fills in the gaps quite nicely. He might not have used identical curse words, but, to me, the same attitude shown through quite brightly. I really don't see a change whatsoever.

Yes, people can.

He very obviously hasn't.

That's a nice ideal, but Zuckerberg hasn't lived up to it.

I see that quote being referenced a lot, and given when it was made I'm curious what it says about whether or not we believe that people have the capacity to change.

Do something mildly stupid when you're 20, and if someone finds out about it when you're 40, you lose your job.

That's the upside-down society we live in today.

Showing complete contempt for the privacy of your users and then using your massive monopoly on social networking to propagandize the death of privacy isn't "mildly stupid".

Such is life in the age of post-privacy. By the way, Zuck didn't explicitly renounce that horseshit when he announced the new privacy-focused Facebook. Probably hoping nobody remembers to avoid detracting from the believability of the current horseshit.

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