The People Deliberately Killing Facebook | Hacker News Reader

The People Deliberately Killing Facebook

wheresyoured.at

127 pointsbgrainger42 comments

Not sure where to start with this one.

Can anybody briefly explain what a “rot economist” is? Is it meant to be capitalised “ROT economist” which stands for something? Has my browser not rendered the characters correctly or something?

This story of course includes the now almost mandatory attack on e2e encryption, which according to this account when coupled with the people you know feature is “a dangerous tool” - with little explanation as to the nature and size of the danger.

This part is interesting: “Worse still, accounts that were less than 15-days-old now made up 20 percent of all outgoing friend requests, and more than half of friend requests were sent by somebody who was making more than 50 of them a day…”

The explanation leaves a lot to be desired though:

“…heavily suggesting that Facebook was growing its platform’s “connections” through spam.”

Doesn’t this make perfect sense where a new user joins Facebook with no friends to start with, then in the first few weeks of using it finds all of their friends and adds them?

The whole thing reads like a grab bag of grievances rather than a forensic takedown, shame.

"Rot economists" appears to be a pejorative invented by this newsletter to describe an ecosystem of graphs-go-up growth-at-all-costs venture capital firms, management consultants, and corporate leaders who are pushing companies away from building things customers actually want: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/

It's "rot" as in the companies/society are (metaphorically) rotting.

Companies make profits because people spend their money on what those companies have to offer.

Facebook offers a dopamine hit. And so does X and TikTok. To some extent also HN.

The infinite scroll slot machine.

At the end of the day, we are an evolved version of dopamine driven apes.

Meta family of Apps (Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram) has total WAU of 3.05 billion. Almost half the planet.

---

Sam Altman, Sundar Picchai, Mark Zuckerberg saying that AI will somehow cure cancer and solve climate change seems pretty far fetched.

The closer reality is that as the AI models advance, they will figure out ever better ways of making their apps as addictive as cocaine.

Facebook does not profit because of user fees, but selling user data, and selling adspace seen by users.

> Companies make profits because people spend their money on what those companies have to offer.

And then you proceeded to list examples of cases where that is not true. No one is spending money to get dopamine hits from Facebook or TikTok. If that cost money, they would have a fraction of the users. Other companies spend money on those platforms so they can manipulate you where your attention is.

Ad payers are people too.

Even if a user not directly paying, they are indirectly paying by clicking on ads and buying from the advertiser. In which case the cost of advertising is baked in.

Meta made $130B in revenue. Thats a ton of ad payers and ad clicks.

Would be more interesting without the ginormous chip on the author's shoulders.

Please elaborate! I'm genuinely curious.

The author seems to have deep dislike for Facebook, and specific executives, like Zuck and Sanberg. This historical interpretation would be stronger without all that emotion. Edit: I'm guessing you are the author?

I get it! But at the same time, this is opinion work - and also, what would this look like without the emotion? A bone-dry analysis of the text? Would it say "this is bad"? Not arguing at all, there're all kinds of valid analyses to be made, I just don't know how else I'd pull this off.

I like the recent work you've been doing Ed, but I think stylistically you can improve by seeing the truth in some of these criticisms. Your analysis can use a stronger systemic account of both the external cultural and market forces at work and even more so of the internal dynamics within large firms. It can also be more cutting by being concise --- avoid repeating yourself and non-substantive elaboration, especially in an emotional tone, which can be fatiguing. This will help you keep me as an audience member.

So you’ve chosen to use more emotionally charged language to increase user engagement with your content?

that's an inane misreading

I love the language of it.

> This historical interpretation would be stronger without all that emotion.

I'm not sure I agree. If you believe something is destroying civil society, you're going to have a strong emotional reaction. That should come through when you write about it. Otherwise readers won't get the full impact of what you're trying to say.

Placing so much blame on individuals like Zuck and Sandberg is already a stretch. Though leaders have a huge influence, and should bear the responsibility, this piece tries to make it seem like it is those individuals that caused the perceived problems. It even implies that they had "bad" motivations, which is really reaching. Describing the stock classes, the article implies an enormous amount of detailed control on company behavior via stock ownership, which is generally not the case at any large company. Corporate boards don't generally get into features and implementations and stick to strategy. The argument is further undermined by what seems like some sort of personal vendetta from the author.

You are trying to suggest that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t have a detailed knowledge and control over core Meta features, nor knowledge of the societal damage they can do?

No, I am not. You are employing a logical fallacy known as "Denying the antecedent". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent

Not intentionally if so - I must be missing something more subtle in your comment.

I read it exactly as you did.

Not sure how your response can be framed as 'Denying the antecedent'. :-/

My casual reading of the thread says you are falling for a variance of the fallacy

Someone isn’t knowledgeable and responsible for every detail of every feature means they are responsible and knowledgeable for none

> Placing so much blame on individuals like Zuck and Sandberg is already a stretch.

This clearly implies that sime blame is warranted.

CEO sets the culture of a company, the how to get to the generic make money target. They are not the best engineer, sales or accountant. They have a massive influence on how those are done on across dimensions like ethics, risk, legal

Honestly, I found it super interesting and the tone worked for me. It’s a comprehensive summary of the poison that is engagement and metrics above all else development.

But I will say the tone makes me stop short of sending this to my parents, who actually need to be swayed (whereas I don’t).

So if your goal is to be interesting and informative to people who are already on your side, you did well. That’s a worthy enough goal imo.

There's a fair amount of insight in this article buried under layers of insults and ad hominem attacks. Perhaps it's a bit ironic that the author feels the need to frame things in this way to drive engagement because that's what the internet has become. It might feel cathartic to blame Zuckerberg for this, but honestly he was just a fucking kid when these wheels were set in motion, manipulated by forces larger than himself.

The incentives created by capitalism + internet + global web/smart phone adoption mean a lot of what happened was inevitable. If someone in Zuck's position had taken a moral stand along the way, you could just swap out their names with any of a million opportunists ready to swoop in. I say this not to absolve Mark, Sheryl or anyone else involved, but just to recognize that these are systemic failures that need systemic solutions. Pinning the blame on individuals doesn't get us any closer to solving the general problems that all social media platforms invite.

> but just to recognize that these are systemic failures that need systemic solutions.

For literally decades, the institutions and laws that may have provided those solutions have been gutted or eliminated.

Collapse is inevitable.

Notably absent from article: the surprisingly equanimous opinion of Boz —- Agrippa to Zuck’s Augustus. I have to reread his post on perverse incentives now

https://boz.com/articles/incentives

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39277516

> [...] thanks to Meta’s outright abusive approach to social media where the customer is not only wrong, but should ideally have little control over what they see.

It's trite at this point, and yet worth reiterating: You are not the customer.

HN rules/ethos don’t agree but the lack of ‘politeness’ in these posts is refreshing. ‘Manners’ have long been a way to reinforce power imbalances and avoid scrutiny. Us plebs shouldn’t shy away from calling out corporate scumbaggery for what it is - what is more damaging, impolite prose or what this company is doing to our society?

I'd say the latter. Though I do try and keep it polite when talking to people about my work. I think that more people should be more willing to talk about the powers that be and the way they're acting toward their users.

Indeed - well, thank you for the piece. Just like the Google Search one it’s clear that plenty of work has gone into digging through corporate docs and giving them some much needed daylight!

I think that we have some of the best investigative reporters in the world working in tech right now, but insufficient context behind things. I am obviously an opinion writer, and thus a little biased, but I think there is something very useful about saying "here's what I found and why I'm upset about it" with research backing it up.

It depends whether you want to facilitate insightful discussion, or not.

I think that when you put yourself in the mindset of writing something with the intent of facilitating discussion you're at times drawn toward making inferior content to satisfy an imaginary person (or group of people). Some people are good at it! I don't really get into it, as everything I write is personally-driven.

HN has insightful discussion? Very few people read the article and post anyway. And then its against forum rules to call that out.

HN has terrible insightful discussion.

> HN has insightful discussion?

Well that's the hope anyway. :|

Generally for HN the request for politeness is positive I think, but in the technology area and especially journalism I think there is an unhealthy aversion to calling people out for anti-social behaviour, leading to a chilling effect on discussing it.

yep. This article is about specific people who did specific things.

there's always r/technology if you wish to join likeminded folx and chant 'capitalism le bad' to your heart's content.

WHAT DO WE WANT? WE DON'T KNOW!

WHEN DO WE WANT IT? RIGHT NOW!

This guy just keeps trying to make money! How dare he increase profits!

You joke but the drive to increase profits at any cost is having pretty insidious impacts on the world. Enshittification is everywhere now with companies being forced to degrade customer experience to appease shareholders. Nothing wrong with making a profit but making additional profit every single quarter is making the western world hostile to most people on average wages. It's too expensive to even live here with only a small percentage of people doing well under these circumstances.

The median US household income has increased significantly above inflation in the last few years and the lowest-income households have done significantly better than that because we reached "full employment" and that allows more job changes.

The largest price issue left is housing costs and that has nothing to do with "corporate profits", it's about bad land use regulations.

(Another funny thing about the "ever increasing corporate profits" argument is that it's literally anti-Marxist, as Marxism says the problem with capitalism is its profits continually /decline/ due to over-production.)

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