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Comment by test6554 | Hacker News Reader

Back in the day... 2004-2005 facebook was amazing. Spread like wildfire, and lots of fun to use. Just you and your college friends, and their friends.

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Even the original idea (if The Social Network is a trustworthy source) was copied -- Zuckerberg just has a complete lack of vision, but is clearly an intelligent operator with good business sense. Jagged intelligence, like an LLM.

Or he’s backed by the CIA?

Unlikely, since he is extremely hated by the Democratic party establishment. He's treated like a scorned ex.

Any resemblance to a voluntary mass surveillance and personalised sentiment profiling network is entirely accidental.

Or maybe you are backed by the CIA?

Except there is plenty of public evidence Facebook was. I think they were even on the cap table and thiel / palintir are explicitly partners in wiring up tech data pipelines into the knowledge graph. Thats why thiel was an early investor, this is known public info.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9374977

Thanks for that. I am confused about your prior comment. Maybe we are both cia and have forgotten because we were part of mk ultra and melted each other's memories

That's entirely possible, I was joking of course

Possible. Probably.

https://whyy.org/segments/facebook-a-computing-pioneer-a-sec...

has zuckerberg done anything productive of his own accord? facebook was ripped off. most meta companies were acquired. it could be argued that propagandizing the entire world was productive relative to vested interests but that was done on the behest of those interests, not zuck himself. the only thing im aware of zuck actually spearheading was the metaverse, a conclusively unproductive pursuit costing tens of billions to achieve literally nothing. it isnt objective to unilaterally behave with vitriol ... still this person seems more comparable to cancer itself than any actual human. i guess you could collapse productivity to 'making money' in which case clearly he is productive, im more referring to accomplishing anything useful for humanity. i also dont consider mass surveillance to be useful for humanity as bad actors will always get away with it whether they are on or off camera.

> has zuckerberg done anything productive of his own accord?

It probably will surprise no one to learn his "next big thing" is a prediction market app.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/technology/meta-predictio...

Hits the Meta product trifecta perfectly:

* Derivative

* Late to market

* Harmful to society

Zuck is Equally Excited about all things, as noted by Demis. Zuck is that kid who wants his hand in all cookies jars.

In 2001 France had Copains d'avant https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copains_d%27avant for school based networking. So not a new idea

Lol I was working on a social network site when FB came out and there were many sites like it (MySpace). Some of them even still exist like VK.

We just had a thing that would export MSN messenger contact list, you'd add your email there and everyone would add you on MSN. Way less creepy than the stalking fb was doing.

I don't think you can say that the idea was "copied". It was a very obvious idea. I had the same idea before I heard of the Facebook. Do you know why it's called the face book?

You may as well say Bezos copied the idea of Amazon from book shops.

Really, he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

It was US only as you had to have a .edu email address to join, which most universities around the world did not get as it was mostly a US thing. It took forever for them to open up to non-US universities.

It would of been nice keep it that way. MySpace was just fine.

The hook that Facebook had over MySpace (and the million other "Social Network" platforms of that day) was that you couldn't embed shitty HTML intot he profile

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