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Comment by worik | Hacker News Reader

> He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around.

This. Yes.

Facebook came within a whisker of establishing themselves as the central communications hub for the planet. They ruined their own business from greed. Grew it huge (instead of long steady growth) and it has collapsed.

Greed

It would not have been a good thing if they became "... He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around. " so we are all better off, probably.

I hope the story of Zuck and FB become business school lessons on "greed is bad and will destroy you". Not what they taught me at business school (I was there in 2008) but they should have

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There's a classic Tim O'Reilly line about the importance of "creating more value than you capture."

Early Facebook was very good at this! I used their ads platform a lot in 2009-10 to raise engagement for a small non-profit that I was helping. The Facebook experience was simple, easy and great value for the money.

And then the ads ecosystem gradually got "optimized." Our nonprofit still kept using it for a while, but it was clear that the focus no longer was in providing great experiences for us -- or our intended audience. Pricing went up; as did efforts to steer me into packages that worked better for FB than me. It was as if someone said: "Stop creating 2x the value you capture. Move toward 1.01x"

FB made many billions over the next decade. But it drained the ecosystem's goodwill. Old-economy industrial giants usually took 80-100 years to paint themselves into this corner. Kind of amazing that FB has done it in less than 20.

How exactly were they greedy in particular? To me it seems they are doing what every other company is, I’m unaware of Meta engaging in anything greedy that is out of the ordinary, is that not the case (genuinely asking) and why do you think that is tied to these layoffs?

There's the video metrics scandal: https://www.ccn.com/facebook-lied-about-video-metrics/

They lied to content creators about how much money could be earned by switching to video on FB. This bankrupted multiple businesses, including Collegehumor and FunnyOrDie: https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120?l...

Zuckerberg was hauled in to US Congress more than once and was chastised for all kinds of wrongdoing. E.g. spreading foreign propaganda in US elections, encouraging extremist violence. FB chase for user engagement has made it into the modern version of a gladiatorial freak show. If broadcasting two one legged gladiators fight to the death will draw eyeballs, Zuckbot will do it.

They tried to connect people, but that didn't make money. So they pivoted to ads, but that didn't bring steady growth. So they fueled participation with tools like the Like button which stoked conflict from the start. Had they been cautious about their steps at any point then problems could have been avoided.

One word: maximizing advertising revenue

Greed and arrogance. Zuckerberg doesn't respect his users and everyone knows it. Eventually you break trust to a degree where it can't be repaired--no "investments" or "metrics" or "new offerings" will fix it.

You can fool some of the people some of the time...

> Greed

No, incompetence and naivety.

They were young, dumb and all from the same college/upbringing.

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