That's probably true but not at Facebook's scale. If the employees are willing to accept the argument "We could have increased profit but chose not to in the interests of users.", because everyone's bonuses and stock value is based on profit, you'd need to hire a lot of people who are happy to trade some amount of personal gain for user wellbeing. That would be difficult when you have tens of thousands of people.
Alternatively, maybe it'd be possible to run Facebook without giving the staff equity or bonuses. That would take a huge shift in the way tech renumeration works though.
That is not necessarily true. If FB where a place where people could feel proud of the good it does, a lot would be ok taking a pay cut.
Sure, maybe the ones that care the most about compensation wouldn't join, but that might be ok.
I worked previously for a for-profit company which was devolving a massive amount of their profits to charity. It was something I was proud of, and a part of my evaluation of how much I liked working there.
No. Due to network effect successful company must be large, and the large company lives by different rules. FB for example is a trillion dollar company. It is like a TeV energy level in physics. Different behavior of matter. At those energy levels chemistry for example just doesn't exist, and matter itself changes as protons break apart. Ethics in big business is like chemistry in high energy physics - it just doesn't exist at those levels of money. At these levels they can be affected only by comparable level of money or power, like the government power.
The social media is like tobacco, and FB increasing the engagement at all costs is like when Big Tobacco were increasing addictiveness of the cigarettes. Like with tobacco, the way to deal with the issue is to wean the population off by in particular educating the population about the damage it does to them .
Btw, "Statement from Mark Zuckerberg" - that reminded that foundational tenet of Facebook :
Zuck: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
Zuck: just ask
Zuck: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one?
Zuck: people just submitted it
Zuck: i don’t know why
Zuck: they “trust me”
Zuck: dumb fucks
And how do you break them up? By geographic area? People would be pissed because they have contacts with, or maybe want to watch vacation videos from people from different areas.
IMHO the only options would be:
* non-profit run by the UN or similar
* forced to open all data and APIs to make it a platform, with rules to make it an even playing field
In both cases with much less, and why not zero, "engagement" focus ( just show the latest stuff chronologically from the things you've liked/subscribed to). Could either work? No idea, but seems to me that they have better chance than a Facebook per country or region.
Of course, it does cost more, so the question becomes who is willing and able to pay for a socially less harmful means of networking individuals without having to put them all on a single data hoovering ad platform? Whether it's direct charge to consumers or subsidized by government, the money still ultimately has to come from people.
Hey, if they get that implemented for Facebook, maybe they can try to make it work with health care records too. Good luck with that...
Implement ActivityPub (an existing protocol recommended by the W3C), and offer their underlying social networking services as hosted and managed software for big orgs to operate on their own domain. With interoperability, they'll work across domains. Target customer is anyone with at least 100K followers (so gov, institutions, media, et cetera).
Did you hear about federation and inter-compatibility between different network? Have a look at how Mastodon works.
It should be run independently, like the WHO, not directly under the power of the security council. And before you say Taiwan, the Republic of China is not a UN member, and there's nothing the UN or WHO can do about it, it's between China and them.
I am familiar with the extreme lengths China would go through to prevent discussion on topics it hates though (e.g. if HN was based in China both of our comments would have been deleted immediately)
Yeah I don't know that anyone could have predicted these networks would become too massive to displace. Intervention should be on the table, no doubt about it. I hope they bring up net neutrality and Facebook's violation of it via internet.org. I thought "Free Basics" had died but apparently it's still going.
But FB isn’t a social network. It’s an engagement farm and advertising platform that abuses a social network to drive its business aims.
It’s quite hard to see how it’s just a business that doesn’t give one shit about you no matter now many followers you have or how many likes you got when you’re still using it.
An actual social network would care how you feel today.
As an aside, I'd like to make the broader point that boiling everything down to "Facebook=evil" doesn't seem like a productive way to get the changes that I think both of us would like to see. It walks right into the strawman arguments that Zuckerberg is responding to in his post ("Why would we invest so much in trust and research if we didn't care?"). And it doesn't capture the fact that Facebook is a huge entity comprised of a lot of people, many of whom have different incentives and some of whom are even trying to do the right thing (see: Anna Haugen).
In 2007 or 2008 I promoted the idea amongst my friends to “poison the well”, to feed bad data into FB’s algorithms. If they enjoy Coke, talk about Pepsi, I said. If they vote Green, share far right news. I called it Falsebook.
It didn’t work, because the problems inherent in the advertising auctions are not very visible to users. They mesh with the echo chambers of our friend circles and fizzle into the background. We seek out echo chambers in order to feel safe and validated. It’s mostly fine when it’s just humans relaxing with friends. But when that echo is robotically generated from an accurate model of all individuals involved, it can be leveraged for all sorts of big scale shady crap. Advertising is the village idiot of this town and corportate-backed political propaganda is the warring gang lord.
And Zuck does what any market owner does.. sits back and rakes in profit, cleaning up the mess when it suits him. And mostly it doesn’t.
I’ve never felt it could be fixed from the inside. I’ve never thought it was a good idea to begin with but I let peer pressure and my magpie nature suck me in. I regret signing up for FB and GMail back in the day because corporate surveillance has fucked our society hard and let sociopaths run rampant.
You will not change my mind. I wasn’t contributing to the conversation in good faith. I shall assume you were. My original glib comment about FB abusing social networks wasn’t an invitation to learn a new perspective, it was a war cry, a flag raise, a call for comrades. I was hoping someone would respond with links to a new Scuttlebutt implementation or tell me about a cool Masto instance. Or try to explain why I should bother with Matrix. Or something more interesting than all of those.
The web is sick. Personalised advertising has made it ill. We need to fix it and I don’t believe FB or GOOG are interested in trying.