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Comment by hedayet | Hacker News Reader

Ex-facebook employee here: abandoning ethics in facebook didn't start in near past. And it's not only the legal team; engineers and PM team are even worse in this matter.

Only people ready to do "anything" to optimize their performance rating and team goal are successful at facebook. And remember, facebook only hires smart people. So they do know what they are doing.

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I've met ex-Facebook employees who don't see what the fuss is about. I wonder what fraction of them hold that view.

many prefer to remain ignorant about the consequences of their deeds; it helps them sleep better at night.

I would think that fraction is directly related to how much Meta stock they own, and how long they've had it for.

Ethics are for the little people, when your stock holdings grow by several multiples ethics are just hindrances.

I'm thinking about the study by Erich von Holst where few minnows were lobotomised and returned to the shoal.

Afterwards these were returned to the shoal and they started dominating.

Moral development levels by Kohlberg tell a similar story where L1 is the narcissist (Zuck, Trump,...) level. Lobminmows. The current societal level or at least the direction.

L2 is the conventional moral as in the shoal that most of us follow. This level imitates the normal. See Musk as a prime example of the change. You can also revert to L1 by trauma, addiction...

L3 is the post conventional level where you do what's right and can differentiate between normal and right.

So L1 arrested development.

L2 herd moral and narrow empathy. Them vs. us being the right thing.

L3 being universal compassion.

L1 controls the airspace and L2 follows the loudest even though everyone (except the very few who are L1) wants the society to be L3.

So whether we dare to grasp this will decide the faith of our children and also us as the time is running out and the power has concentrated to very few L1.

And IMO the left and the right in the politics are both L2, with minor differences and both have failed us and served L1.

L1 is zillionaire mindset.(Rushkoff and the Mindset) L2 is Banal evil (Hannah Arendt and Banality of Evil) L3 is true ethics or ephics where ethical theory comes to praxis.

Sorry, perhaps bit off-topic but this is fascinating in light of latest news from Greenland and Davos. The current wouldn't have happened though without the help of Zuck, Cambridge Analytica etc.

Anyone interested in learning more about this should read https://theauthoritarians.org/

Thank you. This fits nicely in my Kobo curriculum.

Okay and thanks again.

I started reading this and it seems to be a good summary of what I'm thinking.

The authoritarian right wingers on both sides of the isle and the banal followers of the autoritarians.

Probably because they don't allow their own children to use the product.

I mean from a privacy perspective alone its clear that Meta throws its ethics out the door in that regard. There's the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the more recent incident with Instagram bypassing Android OS restrictions for more tracking, and many many other examples.

Their apps also regularly nag you to allow access to stuff like contacts and the photo gallery when you've already said no the first time.

And for a personal anecdote: I was recently helping a senior setup Whatsapp Desktop on her Windows computer. It could chat fine but refused to join calls, displaying an error that said there was no microphone connected. I mean, there is a mic connected and it could record voice notes fine. Turns out that error actually meant that there was no webcam connected, and a webcam is required to join calls. I think it's the same way in the mobile app where you need to give it the camera permission to join a video call even if you turn the video off. Meanwhile Zoom, Teams, Webex, and others allow you to join any call without a mic or camera.

As she didn't have a webcam I first tried the OBS virtual camera but Whatsapp refused to recognize that despite all other apps working fine with it. Somehow Droidcam with no phone connected worked fine, displaying a black screen in the virtual camera feed, and that got Whatsapp to join the call successfully. Absolutely ridiculous and it's clear to me how desperately they want that camera access and that sweet data.

See, this is why I made a comment in that Apple thread (see my post history) about stopping Facebook doing things like this. I was told "Android can do it too". Yes but no. Apple may do evil things but they punished Facebook for their bullshit, revoking their certificate. The landscape of contact info (phone numbers, email addresses, social media services, people just submitted it, they trust me, dumb f-) means you can't have bad faith actors like Zuckerberg Zucking about. Whatsapp is such a clear case of antitrust just for starters

Edit: sorry, not entirely clear, I mean we need Apple's system of granularity. "Deny access to contacts" needs to work even when the asking company (Facebook) tries tricking people

"they know what they are doing". Individually? Maybe! I hear Meta pays among the highest, if not the single highest salaries of FAANG.

But as a company? Meta has been entirely incapable to innovate since it was renamed. Betting billions on an obviously flawed idea of a Facebook-owned VR universe, then shortly pivoting to a cryptocurrency that ended up being little more than a rugpull, and, after investing billions in expensive AI staff, they're now pulling the plug on that, too

The most successful products like WhatsApp and Instagram were purchased, not internal developments. Nobody cares about Threads and it mostly only exists because Elon Musk destroyed Twitter.

I sure hope Instagram and WhatsApp are bringing in enough money because Meta is running out of things to do, other than milking their current customers dry.

Do they know what they're doing? Do they really?

The game they’re playing isn’t to make new products or to make the products they have better. They’re playing the game of making the line go up and as much as I dislike them I have to say that they’re being successful

That's fair I guess they really are successful at that.

It comes across as boorish, on an article about widespread sexual exploitation including children and 17-strike sex trafficking policies, to write a long rant about whether the trillion dollar company has a long-term business strategy that'll give it more power.

That is quite clearly not what they are asserting, discussing, or even adjacent to conversationally.

It doesn't help when you're exaggerating to make it have some foundation, and obviously so. (they pivoted from VR to crypto? pulled the plug on AI?)

They could have had their ecosystem if they would have been a little less greedy. I think this was the reason last gen VR wasn't overly successful, despite the advancements. No hackers and enthusiasts were able to do cool stuff with VR hardware because every hardware vendor sucked and nobody was exactly in an nvidia position.

They didn't offer support for devices that were just 1.5 years old. I will never buy any Facebook hardware again, even if the financial loss isn't important to me. It is a matter of respecting the customer.

If you start with enshitification outright, people might just skip your product.

So many companies have devised a system where only sociopaths can get ahead and now a bunch of sociopaths are running them. We're still supposed to be able to hold those psychos accountable for the harms they cause the reset of us. It's not just facebook's lawyers who have abandoned their duties. The government is failing as well and I suspect a large part of that has to do with how comfortable they've gotten with bribery and corruption.

>facebook only hires smart people

So it is true, they really do only hire insufferable pricks.

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