Comment by flunhat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flunhat | Hacker News Reader

The book is ok — it has plenty of interesting stories about Facebook during its heady IPO ish era. And a bunch of great startup-y tales.

But what kills the reading experience for me are the constant metaphors/analogies/similes/parentheticals/whatever the author keeps making. It’s funny if it’s done sparingly, but he just interlards every passage with them. Like so:

“After my day of interviews, I had imagined that MRM and Facebook would get along about as well as a Berkeley hippie and a Marine scout sniper, and I was right.”

It’s funny, but imagine an entire book (that’s otherwise a good read) filled with these sometimes successful attempts at humor. It gets tiring after a few chapters.

Just 50% less of it would’ve made the book waaay better IMO. Plus humor like that usually lands better if you use it sparingly.

I have to disagree. I enjoyed the use of metaphor, and actually highlighted several on my Kindle.

# "Zuck had once famously derided [Twitter] as 'a clown car that drove into a gold mine'"

# "One of the Harvard mafiosi got into the habit of theatening engineers that he'd "punch them in the face" if they messed up. Quod licet Bozi, non licet bovi. Gods may do what cattle may not."

# "Eventually, Russia, India, Brazil and parts of Africa will fall into the Growth team's patient ministrations. Then, Mark Zuckerberg, like a young Alexander the Great at the Indus River, will weep for having no more world to conquer."

It’s like eating a cake made purely out of frosting -- fun at first, but then it just becomes too much after a hundred pages or so.

I wish I could upvote you twice for the irony

Need to ask for that meta-upvote feature

> Then, Mark Zuckerberg, like a young Alexander the Great at the Indus River, will weep for having no more world to conquer

He got his shoehorned Plutarch wrong [1]. Alexander wept for being lord of not even one among infinite worlds.

This mistake turns the joke on its author.

[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/19/and-alexander...

My Latin is rusty, but I was skeptical about 'Bozi' there, not sure if the mistake is in the original text, but it's actually 'Jovi' (Iovi) [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bov...

I didn't catch this when I read it years ago, but it makes it more hilarious: It's a reference to FB employee Andrew "Boz" Bosworth as the asshole who threatens to punch people.

The preferred plural of Boz would be Bozos.

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