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Comment by edzitron | Hacker News Reader

Please elaborate! I'm genuinely curious.

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

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.

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.

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