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Comment by jackmott42 | Hacker News Reader

Back in ~2016 I deleted my Facebook account, because it was a horrible place that brought out the worst in people. A few days ago someone alerted me that my account was live again and posting weight loss scams.

So I logged in and changed my password and deleted my account again. Facebook tells you that it will take 30 days to delete your account. This is obviously user hostile bullshit.

Meanwhile somehow the scammer is still posting weight loss stuff on my account. Feel like I've jumped through enough hoops so I'll just let that person pollute Facebook more. Their problem now.

And I won't call them Meta, what a joke. Everyone should quit, get ahead of the layoffs, useless company. Your work there makes the world a worse place. You can do better.

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I deleted my account circa 2016 as well... Far as I can remember, they force you to suspend your own account for 30 days before being able to apply for a full deletion, but that takes 90 days, if at any point you log back in within the 90 days, the whole process is restarted. And this bullshit was only after you went through a squid game tier UI Olympics just to find the place where to kick off the process.

Facebook is one of the most end-user-hostile companies ever. No interface is what it seems to be.

Even downloading your own pictures is very difficult with the actual image hidden in some weird link in a maze of javascript. And the original one can never be downloaded - only a crummy scaled down version. It is a one-way trap.

> Everyone should quit, get ahead of the layoffs, useless company. Your work there makes the world a worse place. You can do better.

This is everything I wanted to say about FB. Always wondered why so many talented folks (with PhDs) choose to work there.

Probably because they pretty consistently had the highest total compensation packages for engineers.

People will say it's their compensation but there are many many places that pay well that don't make the world a shittier place. One doesn't have to sell their soul to the highest bidder.

> there are many many places

Can you please name 5 of those alternatives which pay as well as Facebook and yet are a better corp for the world?

Nit: they did say "pay well" not "pay as well".

"Pay well" might mean less than Meta but still at a comfortable level, subjectively.

Okay, let's start with "pay well" then.

Edit: I cannot reply to barbazoo so will edit here - you still haven't provided me 5 names who "pay well".

It obviously depends on where you live and what you consider good pay. I get that. Personally, being in the situation of earning >2x the median household income where I live, which is one of the HCOL areas in NA, I consider myself unimaginably lucky. But that level of income isn't uncommon here for senior devs.

You are not seriously claiming that there are less than 6 companies that “pay well”.

I never claimed that. Just want to know the actual alternatives to test OP's claim about well-paying companies which don't make world shittier.

Could also go and work for a hedgefund, pays well or better than Meta and doesn't have a negative impact on the world.

That depends entirely what the hedgefund is investing in

"Better corp for the world" is subjective.

"Pay well" but maybe not quite as well as Meta, and for our purposes I am excluding other FAANGs (except Waymo, sort of I guess):

- Roblox

- LinkedIn

- Robinhood

- Databricks

- Bytedance

- Box

- Stripe

- Two Sigma

- Lyft

- Uber

- Instacart

- Cruise

- Doordash

- Waymo

- Airbnb

- Pinterest

Companies which imo have a more positive impact on the world than Meta:

- Waymo/Cruise (autonomous driving)

- LinkedIn - close call, but a more professional social network with the intent of matching employers with employees and taking most of their profits from the advertising of those jobs without influencing global politics

- Stripe - value comes from payments processing for companies big and small which is a valuable product in its own right

- Lyft/Uber - close call again, but I think the disruption of the taxi industry and the additional options for transportation have really revolutionized how many people get around day-to-day.

Thanks for answering the question honestly. Looking at that list, I can see only LinkedIn / Databricks / Box / Cruise / Waymo as qualifying for "not making the world shittier" criteria. But quitting Meta to go work for another variant of social media like Roblox / Bytedance / Pinterest? Or Airbnb / Uber / Lyft / Instacart with lots of negative externalities by exploiting labor arbitrage? That doesn't really make any sense.

Sure, but that does answer your original ask. There are options, especially if you're willing to work for just slightly less (or in some cases you can still get a raise by switching) to work at a company that pays well and makes a more positive impact on the world.

> especially if you're willing to work for just slightly less

Well, in that entire list, following are the companies who don't make the world shittier: LinkedIn / Stripe / Databricks / Box / Cruise. (I will omit Waymo because its parent is Alphabet, which fails shittiness criteria).

Box stock is flat since 2015. Databricks / Stripe are private so no liquidity. So only LinkedIn qualifies for "slightly less pay but not shittier world". Though I agree that there is an option if someone wants.

I mean FB stock is negative if you count people who joined in the last year...Even flat is better than that

Let's compare Apples to Apples? I was citing Box stock since 2015. FB is more than double its 2015 price.

Roblox? This Roblox? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247034

I never said it was a better company than Meta?

Just that it paid similarly.

Well, the whole point is about "pay as well as Facebook and yet are a better corp for the world". So citing Roblox is pointless.

You can also work there and do the bare minimum until you're fired, cashing in some nice paychecks in the meantime.

I was contact by a recruiter from FB a couple of years ago. I knew I would never work there, but I talked to the recruiter long enough to get a comp number, and... suddenly my resolve to never work there took another day to firm back up.

That's mostly why, I think. In the end, I still said no, but it was much harder with the number in front of me.

My friend works there. In 2021 they made $1.5 million. Last year it was less I guess with the stock drop, but still, I can't fault them.

Did you go into the profile and find where it lists signed in devices and log them all out? It’s buried in there somewhere but they don’t automatically do it when you do a password update because they’re afraid of causing any friction in the process of browsing their ads.

To be fair, it's common for people to want to 'undelete' their account, so that's why they have a 30 day grace period. I can easily imagine the opposite situation where someone says deleting with no delay is 'user hostile bullshit'.

> my account was live again and posting weight loss scams

Disappointed but not surprised.

I kept my accounts because I feared they'd become sock puppets. Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Now I'm just squatting on my own IRL user name. No content, no profiles.

100%. after all the evil they did in the world i dont understand how are they able to retain so much talent working for them. do people dont give a f* about their impact to the world? many shake their heads after someone exposes engineering team working in rusian army configuring Iskanders yet the same people work for facebook that spreads worst dissinfos, sells user data and basically plays parts in genocides.

People have to eat. Maslow's hierarchy of needs and all that.

Fact of the matter is Meta has problems almost no one else has. Acting like people will choose less pay and boring work over interesting work and more pay on a moral basis is a little naive. But I see you apparently have a political axe to grind. Meta is not a morally acceptable place to work I agree. However, if you were offered 350,000 USD to work on something hard like a compiler or a data pipeline designed to ingest petabytes of data I'm sure you'd at least think twice about it. For example, you could work at Meta and use the money they pay to fund organizations you support that run counter to Meta's mission. This all not even mentioning having Meta on your resume is basically a golden ticket to the industry for the rest of your career.

> Acting like people will choose less pay and boring work over interesting work and more pay on a moral basis is a little naive.

That's a bit simplistic. There is plenty of well paid meaningful or at least less destructive work than working for FB.

i really don't understand why people don't like facebook. they're no worse than apple or your ISP (now they're truely evil).

dissinfo? just unusubscribe or don't follow that account? do you really want facebook censoring everything you can see or don't see based on political correctness? or some other filter?

and how is it "selling user data". I've always found this to be wholly inaccurate. it's targetted advertisement. do you really prefer untargetted advertising?

I'm no facebook fanboy. personally i don't use it much. i've read articles on the matter but they never make any sense. Is there an article somewhere that explains all the vitriol towards facebook, because i really don't get it.

I don’t think they are some evil scourge on humanity, but I also don’t like them and won’t work for them.

For a few reasons: they copy/steal or acquire all their new ideas, have diluted most of the real human element of their social network products into “promoted” content or “recommended” reel spam - leading to an “Instagram culture” of flexing and showing off to gain an audience.

But I do agree with you that “misinformation” and user data issues are blown out of proportion.

Here’s one: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

Here’s another one: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...

Another: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/facebooks-...

Re: “no worse than Apple”: Apple implemented features to make my phone give me less notifications by default when I am driving, at work, or close to going to bed. These features are helpfully turned on by default. Contrast this with Facebook’s design philosophy of increasing the amount of time a user spends staring at their phone at all costs.

Apple’s tracking prevention has put such a huge hole in Facebook’s panopticon-like internet-wide surveillance scheme that it is almost certainly one of the causes of these layoffs. You ask “who wants untargeted ads,” and it turns out, when you give users a choice, the answer is “most people, actually.”

There is no rational basis for saying that Facebook is “no worse than Apple.” Facebook is an actively malign force in society, worldwide, and we would all be better off if they shut down completely.

here are the reasons I hate apple more than facebook: 1. they force developers to buy mac os x to work on their platform 2. their app store monopoly is extremely hostile towards developers and thus democracy 3. they force me to enter my financial information when I sign up with them 4. they won't allow me to use their products without an apple account which means I need yet another password to sign in 5. they won't even allow me to download apps without signing into my apple account. 6. the whole apple ecosystem kinda locks you in. 7. planned obsolescence, which I really hate.

On the other hand for facebook. I can just ignore it completely for months on end and easily block all my notifications or emails from it. or block them one by one if I choose. if i dont like the feed, then I just don't spend time on it. nothing about facebook isn't easily circumvented whereas apple has a death grip on you, as long as you need to use it's products.

> and how is it "selling user data". I've always found this to be wholly inaccurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo

Of course it's Israeli too. Gosh I hate my country sometimes.

Ctrl+F "sell" doesn't have any matches on that page. It seems like FB was using Onavo to spy on people for its own competitive advantage. That's obviously extremely shady and unethical but it's not the same thing as 'selling'.

Because companies paying as much as Meta have their own dirty laundry. Google, Wall Street, Crypto... you name it.

> do people dont give a f* about their impact to the world?

It is very hard to connect dots to Rohingya genocide when your job is to tune machine learning models to increase the engagement with feed. And if one starts going that rabbit hole, again, one will never be able to find a good well-paying job.

Deleted my account around them. I've just valued privacy more as I've aged. I don't want to "connect" with people I have no interest in connecting with.

I deleted my FB account ages ago and two years later a friend pinged me that I should look at my FB account. I was like what account? I never looked there afterwards anyway so not sure what was going on.

Did you revoke all your oAuth tokens? While a password reset should do that (as should account inactivation) I wouldn't put it past FB to goose retention numbers by not automatically doing this.

In the first instance you probably did not delete yor account, you just declared that you are deceased or some obfuscation of that sort (talking from personal experience - and I am not calling in from the dead yet 8-)

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