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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

Years ago when following what Zuckerberg did occupied more space in my brain, it struck me that he can "hate leakers" but not look inward and change his behavior in a way that doesn't upset people and make them want to leak. He is a very reactionary guy, and not a "how can I be the change" or "what did I do to cause this" kind of guy.

I thought of this during his various scandals at the end of the 2010s. Everything was a PR reaction for him, rather than looking inward. The best PR is not being an asshole. I wonder if he's thought about it.

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> The best PR is not being an asshole. I wonder if he's thought about it.

There are a lot of people in the world who lack basic human empathy to such an extent that it is nearly impossible for them to just not be an asshole.

I don't know for sure if this applies to Mark Zuckerberg but based on all the second-hand anecdotal information I've heard about him "empathy" as he understands it is a product branding feature rather than a human emotion.

hard to do anything about when it’s in your genetics. it’s a form of neurodivergence just like any other. and to deny it is just furthering the stigma against people with high cognitive empathy and low affective empathy

Then perhaps people like that shouldn't be in charge of a company like Meta.

I don't think there's any possible way to behave to satisfy every single employee of tens of thousands.

Can't please every human alive, so I might as well not try to do any better. This is a very Zuckerbergian take.

Do you want to prevent leaks, or achieve some other goal? If you want to prevent leaks, this isn't an effective approach. If you want to achieve a different goal, that's fine, too, but orthogonal to the stated goal. For leaks, it's probably better to just restrict communications to the necessary distribution and understand that anything widely distributed is more or less public.

You can prevent all the leaks by having nothing bad to leak. That is what is being suggested.

I don't think leaking is limited to "bad" things.

Leaking of good things is just good "PR" - people even pay good money for that to "accidentally" happen. Wonder why nobody thinks about actually doing the good thing and not bother with the rest.

No, Apple famously doesn’t want stuff leaked even if it would be good.

Apple isn't good, it's just materialistic. Let's not conflate the two, especially since both have no issues working with authoritarians of all strips.

I get why people have this idea, but it doesn't work. A culture of "don't have anything bad to leak" quickly and inevitably leads to "keep your mouth shut so there's nothing bad to leak".

You're saying it is impossible for good people to exist. I can't accept that?

It's impossible for someone to be so good that nothing they say would ever look bad when leaked out of context. Sometimes you have to make hard tradeoffs, or hypothetically evaluate something to understand whether it's bad or not.

He'd please a lot more people if the feed hadn't been filled with crap - out of order, at that - that nobody ever subscribed to in the first place, causing them to miss actual posts from friends (whatever you think of 'social media', his website is fucking broken) for YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS

FB works perfectly well for me.

80% of posts in my FB feed are groups or people to which I've subscribed or followed.

10% are interesting things it suggests outside that core, which I then follow.

10% are suggestions that I don't find interesting and which I mark as such.

> This is a very Zuckerbergian take.

No, it's just a common fallacy. If you don't like the guy, isn't "zuckerbergian" an example of helping him live rent free in people's heads?

I'm actually not kidding when I say that Zuckerberg likes that particular fallacy a lot and I've seen him use it. You're right that it's not at all exclusive to him.

Jesse Eisenberg captured this perfectly.

He's wealthy enough that he doesn't have to care. Sadly, he's one of many, most, who demonstrate what happens what you have unbelievable wealth: you do whatever you want to whoever you want without feeling remorse.

And why not? What does he have to fear? He controls the stock. He's not going to lose his company. He's not going to lose his wealth.

He's all but invulnerable as long as he doesn't do wrong (enough) by whatever government he lives under and sucks up enough that he can get away with the rest.

This is not an excuse. This is disgust. He, and most billionaires, are rotten bastards. It's not whether they're awful, it's how awful.

He probably has the same thing as Elon Musk, aspbergers to be honest. Eh I just looked it up, and apparently he does. Come to think of it, maybe Steve Jobs as well, he was insanely eccentric.

"Eccentric" != "Asperger's"

(As an aside, Asperger's is not diagnosed anymore; it's been folded into autism spectrum disorder.)

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