In many ways I believe that Zuckerberg is the sole reason that Facebook hasn't crashed and burned at this point.
Still, I'm almost shocked by how viscerally unsympathetic I feel towards these shareholders. I genuinely believe their stewardship would be worse for both Facebook and its users: they'd mismanage Facebook into the ground and, along the way, would utterly compromise users in increasingly desperate attempts to turn things around.
Mark Zuckerberg, as bad as he is, is not the worst case scenario.
The issues with corporate social media are now well understood by large swathes of the public.
The incumbents are still standing due to their powerful network effects - if they lose those, the public may be a bit more discerning in where they head next.
Are they? Most of the people I know are still all "gimme my feed, gimme my like buttons", and couldn't care less about anything, as long as they get to read about their parent's neighbour's cat's cousin's trip to Whereverville, or see latest pictures of our Nancy's baby boy.
I want a feed of freinds writing everyday bullshit and that just got worse by time untill I no longer use Facebook. It's like chat apps like MSN Messenger that stayed the same for years with no problems what so ever.
That would be absolutely glorious.
What the Internet has lost in terms of mystique and pioneering freedom, it has gained in terms of utility and convenience, IMHO.
The main reason I would like to go back to 1999 would be because I would be 20 years younger :)
Maybe I've got a bad case of the "back in my day", but I feel more and more that "mystique" is what makes life worth living.
Watching a lot of movies from the 60s-90s recently, it's striking how much more effort we needed to put into everyday life back then.
Want to meet a friend? Call their number, hope they're home and arrange a time. Want to watch a movie? Drive to the video store and hope they've got what you want. Out of food? You're driving to the nearest restaurant, no Uber Eats. Want to find out the median rainfall in Fiji? You're waiting for the library to open and digging through a stacks of musty old books.
Nowadays, everything's instantaneous - you want something, you get it. We've lowered the bar for almost everything.
If consumption and enjoyment no longer require any effort, doesn't that devalue the entire experience? What does that mean for life in general? Don't you think that humility comes from knowing the effort required to know or acquire things?
This is an interesting perspective, surely. But the premise for reducing effort in some areas, as has always been the case with economic growth, is that we can focus that same limited effort on exploring new horizons, standing on the shoulders of giants, living in paradises of dreams past.
Look to the stars, for they will never limit your ambition.
I think you mean that you enjoyed the first years of the Internet after it became known to the general public in 1993.
The first year of the Internet was 1969.
Added in anticipation of a nitpick: some writers like to reserve the word "Internet" to refer only to the period after the great switchover to Internet Protocol in 1986, but it was the same hosts hosting the same services (e.g., mailing lists, FTP sites, Netnews and Telnet) before and after the switchover.
We probably need a better filter. I stopped using fb years ago, same for twitter. No regrets
I also find it puzzling. Then again, as with cults or other bottom feeding fads and the increasingly ubiquitous, various and sundry addictive mires and dark patterns, to avoid the trouble in leaving, it is best not to enroll in the first place.
Why not take real voting rights away from all stocks, and leave it with the company/effective owner?
It is indeed really difficult to sympathise with the shareholders.
Generally speaking, this idea we have these days that activist shareholders can come in and dictate how a company is run is insane.
And you don't vote by selling your stock, you vote via proxy ballots. Which too many individual investors don't do.
Him and Sheryl Sandberg.
And as for those that don’t get acquired, I think we can all take a quick look at Snap’s market performance and bleeding execs. That’s not to say that FB will not be disrupted - everyone eventually is. Just that it doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime in the near future.
Then again, maybe societies would be better off if Facebook crashed and burned.
I think businesses whose primary source of income is advertising to their users can't really avoid being unethical. Facebook is just one of the biggest case studies of that model. The business model is rotten from the core, but I don't think it's Zuck's fault. Any other CEO would also have to grapple with that in a way that will inevitably hurt users and help advertisers.
If I were Zuck I would maybe consider trying to start a new tech company with a completely different business model. "They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." aside, I don't really think he's a bad guy. No worse than Schmidt or Dorsey etc., at least.