Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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> The top-voted comment on this thread really should be words of praise for what Zuckerberg and his team have accomplished.

The top voted comment actually is an excerpt from a book by a man that I respect a whole lot more than I respect Mark Zuckerberg. For one he seemed a genuinely nice and modest human being. He also influenced the lives of countless people by being creative rather than by selling off their private details to the highest bidder. I really like that top voted comment, instead of gushing admiration for a pile of virtual money it causes you to reflect and think.

Making a lot of money does not automatically equate accomplishment.

Contrast this with the SpaceX announcement on the homepage at the moment. If Elon Musk succeeds, which I certainly hope for then that will be an accomplishment. Even if SpaceX fails it will still be a huge and daring move. Compared to giving humanity a new window on access to space photo sharing seems a little underwhelming.

If you can't understand anyone who actually wishes them ill then please consider that we do not all have the same goals and we do not all have the same vision of what the internet could be like. As a creator, as an business person and a hacker I would happily see facebook replaced by a company or an entity that gave us 80% of the functionality with our joint privacy in tact. That would be progress.

Facebook is just AOL re-invented for the new millenium.

Facebook is the new AOL.

Exactly.

And the worst part of it is there is a kid acting as CEO calling himself a "hacker".

Hackers do not turn websites into corporations. Imagine if all ISP's were turned into "AOL's".

Facebook did not connect billions of people. They were already connected. All they needed to do was share their contact details. And the facility for that already existed in thousands of other websites.

People chose one website, Facebook. That's a good thing. And the credit should go to people for encouraging each other to all sign up at one website.

But alas it is the website of a sociopath who took people's contact details (calling them "dumb fucks" for giving him their info), the way a spammer collects email addresses, or a cybercriminal collects credit card numbers, and then sold the information for financial gain (your info is worth maybe .85 to a few bucks at most in this market). He's creating the next generation of mailbox stuffed full of junk direct marketing.

If Mark Zuckerberg is your hero you need think more carefully about what he has done and re-examine your principles.

I think we can all agree that Zuckerburg is indeed a Hacker (in the HN context). He's been hacking since he was a kid, and he built facebook (duh). When he was at StartUp School a few years back - he was clearly in his element.

If we are bashing fb for using personal info to sell ads - the same principal basically applies to any major social site in the world.

Hate him or love him - fb has been a huge boon for the everyday people, tech startups, and hackers; and along the way has made Zuck and many others massively wealthy. Don't hate.

Maybe it's not "hate" of Zuckerberg. Maybe it's just looking at a person's actions and disapproving. "Hating the game." And every person with the skills has a choice whether they want to play it. Zuckerberg can do the right thing. He's just not doing it. And there's no reason we should expect everyone to celebrate this choice, no matter how much money is being poured in.

Are you attributing the "boon" to one web developer when it really is a result of the inevitable growth of the web, mobile computing, internet connectivity, dropping costs for hardware, etc.? Or maybe it's the amazing feat of acquiring a billion users? Maybe you think that was heretofor impossible?

If it wasn't the Facebook site, it would have been another site. Do you disagree? To think that Facebook made something possible that would not have been possible without one web developer seems irrational. It could have been anyone.

People can connect. Not because of one person and his website, but because of technology.

If a billion people choose to sign up and use your website as a hub for personal communication, I think that places some responsibility on you.

Whether you become a billionaire or not should not affect that responsibility.

>>Facebook is the new AOL.

There is nothing wrong with that actually.

>>And the worst part of it is there is a kid acting as CEO calling himself a "hacker". Hackers do not turn websites into corporations. Imagine if all ISP's were turned into "AOL's".

Please define what a hacker is. Seriously you make it look as though a hacker as just somebody who keeps doing tech work for free or a throw away price. What is wrong with hackers running companies? And making money?

By the way he wrote a good enough part of the early website himself, hired people and sold it to investors. He built stuff which people wanted to use purely on his technical and selling skills.

If this isn't good hacking I don't know what is.

>>Facebook did not connect billions of people. They were already connected. All they needed to do was share their contact details. And the facility for that already existed in thousands of other websites.

You could say the same about the telegraph, telephone, postal services, mobile phones or anything on the earth that connects people. Basically a way of 'contact' is what is needed for connecting people.

>>People chose one website, Facebook. That's a good thing. And the credit should go to people for encouraging each other to all sign up at one website.

Why did those people choose only Facebook? Why did people choose only iPhone, Why did people choose only Twitter? Why did people choose only <insert any useful thing>?

>>But alas it is the website of a sociopath who took people's contact details (calling them "dumb fucks" for giving him their info), the way a spammer collects email addresses, or a cybercriminal collects credit card numbers, and then sold the information for financial gain (your info is worth maybe .85 to a few bucks at most in this market). He's creating the next generation of mailbox stuffed full of junk direct marketing.

When you information even secret at the first place?

>>If Mark Zuckerberg is your hero you need think more carefully about what he has done and re-examine your principles.

Well he will always be a hero to many people. Because a college kid with computer in his dorm, built a product, a team full of hard working people which bought several millions to use their product. He continues to execute strong and ship great things.

He also knows how to sell his work, the man just made the world $18 billion for his work! Do you think that is joke?

Everyone around here knows how difficult it is to raise money to do <anything>. And we might talking of just hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Here the man made the world pay in tens of billions.

Money, money, money. Valuation. Money. Rich. Money. Kid on dorm got rich. Money. Money.

I don't see much about ethics, changing the world, expanding the frontiers of science, moving people out of poverty, anything like that.

Now please play this right and tell me Mr. Zuck has donated lot of money he got from his business, how that's made the world better, etc.

You can hardly measure the impact Facebook has on society. Of course, FB and Zuck have their dark side. But people are looking on FB for the people they love for a reason. And hundreds of millions like to use FB in their everyday life - that's why the IPO is so celebrated. FB is now a huge brand.

I firmly believe the social networks - including FB - have a lot to do with the uprisings in the arab world. I think it contributes a lot to make the world flatter, allowing people to live where they want to while staying in contact with their family, former coworkers, etc. It also inspires so many other social tools that allow to transfer knowledge much more efficiently anywhere on earth.

Truth is, FB is still struggling to make money. The banks kept the stock at IPO level with huge bids. But whatever, they brought a fantastic story. And they extracted huge money from the ad market, for sure. But who knows if Zuck will not follow Bill Gates path later?

Define ethics?

If I keep my money to myself, is it unethical?

Frontiers of science?

Ever checked out Facebook's Github repo?

What do you mean to imply? Is it that a person must donate his wealth and distribute it among the poor to to qualify as a successful?

I am not going say that Mr Zuck has donated a lot of money he got from his business because I don't consider that as something he has to do qualify as successful.

Well he hasn't yet but he has joined Gates and Buffet in the giving pledge (you pledge to donate half of your wealth to charity).

http://www.fastcompany.com/1708405/mark-zuckerberg-joins-war...

"There is nothing wrong with that actually."

tell us how you really feel.

It must be thoughtlessness. You can't honestly look at Facebook's contribution to the Arab Spring (and similar social justice causes) or the millions of people it has reconnected (long-lost family/friends) and think that SpaceX has any chance of creating comparable positive impact at any point in the near future.

I like SpaceX too. It's every geek's childhood fantasy. It's a great thing. Elon is the real Tony Stark. But the reality is that far more humans benefit from relatively mundane advances in things like cell phones and social networking than rockets.

Facebook is connecting humanity together in a way that's never been possible before. Improving the lives of billions of people in a meaningful way is an undeniably Big Fucking Deal.

I think it's a bit of a leap to attribute the Arab Spring to Facebook's contribution. It was long overdue and it would have happened with or without facebook.

Would we blame it on facebook if the spring failed to lead into summer? If not then it stands to reason that we can't credit facebook with the success either.

The Arab Spring and all the good that may come out of it belongs to the Arabs, to those that laid their life on the line and to those that stood up to oppression.

Connecting humanity is an important thing but we have a very large number of ways to do that, facebook is but one of those.

I'm with you that connecting peoples lives in such a way is beneficial, but I'm not quite sure yet if Facebooks net value is positive or not if you factor in the massive privacy violations that have already happened coupled with those that are surely to come.

No social network has the potential for good as much as facebook does at the moment. But at the same time that potential needs to be realized and that needs to be balanced with a healthy respect for the privacy of the users of that network.

For a good read on the Arab Spring and the online movements:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/so-was...

The telephone, the internet in general, twitter, online news media and yes, Facebook all played a minor role. But in the end it was the people that made the change and they would have found a way to communicate. Possibly not as effective but there have been revolutions all over the world that pre-date the invention of the telephone so a new piece of technology is likely not an enabler but simply one more line of possible communication.

>Would we blame it on facebook if the spring failed to lead into summer? If not then it stands to reason that we can't credit facebook with the success either.

There is a logic fallacy in this statement: Facebook was the tool to call and organize millions of people for the Arab Spring; organization is the obligatory step 1 for a revolution; if they fail at step 2 or 3 it haves nothing to do with Facebook; it would be like pretending that telephones do not help in emergency situations because when the fireman doesn't arrive fast enough we don't blame the telephone company.

Here is 2 leaders of the Arab Spring laughing at the suggestion of Facebook contributing to the Arab Spring: http://youtu.be/HdVoBlABSpc?t=13m44s

Also, in Syria, the authorities tortured people for their Facebook profile information. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/8...

Please distinguish my reporting of facts from taking a position on this issue.

Facebook was not made with intent to spur political unrest, thats a side effect, a collateral.

And anyhow, the effect on arab spring of social media such as facebook is highly overstated, as one rebel said in an interview "We turned to facebook and twitter only after we had destroyed 90% of the police stations in our town."

I got to disagree. Not in the part that Facebook was important to Arab Spring and reconnect people long seen. I desagree in the part that rockets doesn't give benefits.

Rockets and all 'complicated' science, push the human race forward. Your cellphone is only able to connect to the internet because of the rockets that were send to the atmosphere, long time ago. Better than me, I have to people to talk about this.

Read Science and Culture, by Thomas Huxley : How often have we not been told that the study of physical science is incompetent to confer culture; that it touches none of the higher problems of life; and, what is worse, that the continual devotion to scientific studies tends to generate a narrow and bigoted belief in the applicability of scientific methods to the search after truth of all kinds. How frequently one has reason to observe that no reply to a troublesome argument tells so well as calling its author a "mere scientific specialist." And, as I am afraid it is not permissible to speak of this form of opposition to scientific education in the past tense; may we not expect to be told that this, not only omission, but prohibition, of "mere literary instruction and education" is a patent example of scientific narrow-mindedness? source: http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Best/HuxleyScienceC...

And the great Neil deGrasse Tyson , in the pretty "We stopped Dreaming": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIZU8cQWXc

You can't possibly think I was saying scientific progress isn't good, right? We're comparing the positive impact of Facebook and SpaceX to date.

I think he's saying SpaceX is a "Bigger Fucking Deal" than Facebook.

No..he didn't even mention SpaceX. He's just talking about scientific progress in general.

> You can't honestly look at Facebook's contribution to the Arab Spring (and similar social justice causes) or the millions of people it has reconnected (long-lost family/friends) and think that SpaceX has any chance of creating comparable positive impact at any point in the near future.

You absolutely can. The telephone did those things, too. So does Twitter. If it weren't Facebook, something else would've been used instead.

This is like celebrating the "success" of a new hammer design. There will be another tool in five years' time that will replace Facebook, too.

>>You absolutely can. The telephone did those things, too. So does Twitter. If it weren't Facebook, something else would've been used instead.

Why wasn't something else you say was actually present when it was needed?

Why didn't somebody else execute it and build it.

The fact is that <somebody> who can build awesome <anything> is difficult to find is the crux of this whole debate.

I imagine it was useful simply because it was the biggest social site online. If facebook had not existed I'm sure they would have found other ways to accomplish similar goals.

It's not as if they set facebook up with the intent on making it easy to organise revolutions.

If they could have got similar eyeballs by posting a video on xtube.com would that have made xtube a great innovation?

That's the point. Facebook brought social network to the masses. In my environment, Twitter is still a tool for geeks. Facebook has brought to hundreds of millions the broadcasting and sharing features. You can't deny that. It could have been something else than Facebook, but it hadn't. Someone else than Neil Armstrong could have landed on the moon, but he was the guy. And he deserves the credit rightly. Past and events are what they are.

I will agree on the timing of benefits to mankind; however, I'm willing to bet far more humans benefit from advances in rocketry over the long run.

Consider what we have done already with rockets. There are many satellites orbiting the earth that make huge communication networks possible. Rockets sent them up there. SpaceX may not have immediate applications, but someone needs to be pushing the frontiers of science and technology. If there wasn't a space program going back decades, I seriously doubt we would have the ability to communicate the way do today.

a. Facebook != social media

b. Doesn't matter how many social networking sites are built if we run out of room.

c. Mapping, telecoms, climate, nuclear proliferation.

Does Facebook sell user data to the highest bidder? I thought they used the information to target ads, not to actually sell.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8917836/Faceb...

Targeting ads, selling to advertisers, giving it to advertisers so they can better target their ads. It's probably a matter of degree rather than an absolute. Fact is, if you give your information to facebook you have no idea where it's going to end up and you have relatively little control over it. Yes, you can control what other web users see about you (to some extent, some data is always public). But what happens behind the scenes, which apps have access to your data and to what extent and what advertisers are able to get out of facebook is very murky.

Since the $ is king here I'll assume the worst and hope for the best.

Doesn't your argument apply to google and most search engines too? They also sell ads targeted according to the information they have about you.

And hey, just like google and others, they allow you to adjust your privacy settings to a great degree, have you visited the privacy settings lately? Yes, they have few controls in the past, but such is the nature of building and iterating, you can't get everything right in the first try...

To the argument of giving information to facebook and not knowing where it will end up, heck, that's true for every company and person that you come across!

My search engine(s) have much more private information about me than Facebook. If I had to disclose one of both dataset, I'd go for FB anytime. Facebook is the friendly persona of us, the search engine - the real private one.

Eventually, when Facebook reaches their sunset, the information will be sold off. It will be used in direct marketing by other companies. This is an opinion not fact.

Aha! You know what- Surprise, Nearly everything is a reinvention + addition of a few extra things from the past.

You think SpaceX isn't a reinvention of what NASA has been doing since decades? Let alone that, if SpaceX is even doing all that its because somebody like NASA and space research organizations of various countries have contributed to fundamental things required for Space exploration.

Nearly everything you wrote applies to any other company. Every company can be replaced with any other company. That is the most beautiful and scariest part of it all.

>>Making a lot of money does not automatically equate accomplishment.

It does actually. Just because some of us can't, it doesn't mean others who can are wrong.

Now let me explain you why it is important. People trust their money with other people whom they think can execute, build value and make more money. In other words they trust them to be successful.

You and I know its no joke to raise that kind of money.

>>He also influenced the lives of countless people by being creative rather than by selling off their private details to the highest bidder. I really like that top voted comment, instead of gushing admiration for a pile of virtual money it causes you to reflect and think.

Now this comment shows some element of envy and jealousy. Because discrediting some one's work by calling them evil. And justifying your own failure as made look success because you are not that so called evil won't work.

Where have we seen this before. Calling profit making corporations as evil, rich people as evil, movie stars as evil, bankers as evil... etc..

May be you don't have the same goals as he does, that is ok. But that in itself doesn't mean your goals are divine and his goals are satanic.

At most it means, his goals lead to better profits than yours. And there is nothing wrong in that.

Dude, you're the one describing things as "evil", "evil", and "satanic." The single worst thing jacquesm had to say about Facebook is that it makes money by getting people to give it information and then selling it, which is a fact.

Respond to what people actually say, not what you read into their remarks.

Dude, the only thing you guys are constantly doing is to find reasons to make Facebook look bad and discredit them for their success.

Facebook, has something called as 'Terms and Conditions' of usage like any other piece of software/product on earth. Any piece of software/service/product you are likely to use has clauses that may not fit into what you would like to hear. And people accept those clauses because the net utility of the product is more than what they trade for the clauses.

But these constant rants about why Facebook doesn't deserve the success they have earned is getting boring and is not making sense anymore.

Any piece of software/service/product you are likely to use has clauses that may not fit into what you would like to hear. And people accept those clauses because the net utility of the product is more than what they trade for the clauses.

By the way, this is absolutely not true. The majority of the software I use is licensed with terms that I agree with completely, and does things that I find totally reasonable. You make it sound like behaving counter to users' interests is a prerequisite for creating good software, and that couldn't be further from the truth.

"these constant rants about why Facebook doesn't deserve the success they have earned is getting boring and is not making sense anymore."

So is the constant 'defense' of Facebook from these 'rants'. Both sides should probably just give it a rest and move on?

> Now this comment shows some element of envy and jealousy. Because discrediting some one's work by calling them evil. And justifying your own failure as made look success because you are not that so called evil won't work.

Your comment shows a complete lack of reading comprehension and puts words in my mouth.

My 'failure' is good enough for me, thank you.

You have several items in your pocket that I had a hand in, and you've probably used a piece of software that I wrote at some point in your life.

I don't call profit making corporations evil, I don't call rich people evil, I don't envy Mark Zuckerberg.

The top comment has shifted place.

No it hasn't :)

Anyway, what the top comment actually is will not change my feelings towards what it was when I wrote that. I thought it was quite appropriate and a lot more in line with what I'd expect of HN than gushing praise.

Unless the top comment is also the very oldest, then by definition the order must have changed at some point. I do like the Vonnegut quote though.

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