[flagged]
A surprising number of teams are NOT involved in things like news feed, story ranking, "engagement", etc. Some teams, like my own, were building foundational technology for things like AR/VR, wearable devices, mapping & navigation, etc. A concrete example of "impactful" work done by such teams was just posted on LinkedIn, which is a focus on building maps geared towards pedestrians walking around, not cars driving. This is a building block for eventual AR use cases, among other things. The team building this then enables other teams up the food chain to use this in building what eventually becomes part of an end-user product.
I suppose it's a matter of weighing "a set of many small utilities which make life a bit easier for N people" against "two big dangerous social networks which make life a lot harder for M people". Because the money from the former helps the latter as well.
How you decide to judge this is up to you :)
Years ago, I met someone that boasted about doing auto-play for videos in your feed so that get sucked into related video after related video. He was particularly proud of implementing a feature (he worked it out with the PM) where you could only delete one video at a time from your history instead of in batch. The goal was to make it harder to purge your data and frustrate the customer so they give up. Ultimately they wanted more data on you so that they could further "optimize" the app to better suit/manipulate you. Pretty sure this is what they mean by their company core value of "focus on long-term impact."
No other app has gone to such extraordinary lengths to make sure you can only view a piece of content once, and then hide it from you forever after.
I'm not trying to troll.
I just genuinely don't understand why someone would consider working there as a positive thing.
So I would like to know!
But I have no way to figure it out as I know zero people who work there, and talking to a human who works at these companies is impossible because their websites are geared towards not allowing you to talk to them.
So now that I just saw someone in the wild to ask, I figured I should use the opportunity to figure something out which I absolutely do not understand.
> There are only a few places where if you implemented, for example, an effort to reduce "body dysmorphic disorder", it could instantly improve the lives of 3 billion users worldwide. Meta is one of those places.
It surely is a zero-sum to fix the problem which your company has created in the first place???
What about people working on WhatsApp, or infra, or people working at FAIR or people building React, etc? The list goes on.
Meta creates a shit ton of positive impact which is not at all related to "millions of teenagers with body dysmorphic disorder thanks to Instagram".
1. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Oddly enough, this didn't get reported on very much by the media.
There are other js frameworks.
"Meta" does not do any good that comes close to outweighing all the bad they do.
Do you talk to family members in Algeria through FB or WhatsApp? WhatsApp would have been just fine if Zuckerberg didn't buy it before US regulators rolled out of bed.
I think it's hard to argue that anyone's life is improved by a company that shows such a lack of respect for its users. We could have social networks that respect us, but Zuckerberg systematically purchased them or squashed them in the cradle.
In fact, the same research that likely was used to see such an opinion for you about Instagram in fact showed that it was more likely to improve stuck disorders than to make them worse.