
Who Will Fix Facebook? - howard941
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/who-will-fix-facebook-759916/
======
AndrewStephens
Facebook is operating exactly as designed. To hear people talk you would think
Facebook was some kind of public utility or perhaps a system where Mark
Zuckerberg does you a favor by hosting your cat pictures out of the goodness
of his heart.

This is not so, you do not have a Facebook page - Facebook has a page on
you[0].

The real solution to the power Facebook is probably regulation, but nobody
wants to tackle that big ball of hurt.

[0]
[https://sheep.horse/2013/10/the_seven_realities_of_social_ne...](https://sheep.horse/2013/10/the_seven_realities_of_social_networking.html)
(I wrote this several years ago, today I would be harsher on some of
Facebook's policies)

------
decebalus1
It will fix itself when enough users really start abandoning it. And by fix I
mean disappear.

~~~
hw
Or when shareholders and board members oust Zuckerberg and Sandberg. Employees
get fired for making mistakes that cost companies millions - why aren't
executives held to the same standard especially when it's cost them billions
in their market cap with no real solution in sight? The smart people are
leaving (Chief Business Officer of Whatsapp being the most recent one), and
the bleeding is only going to continue if there's no trust in the top ranks at
FB.

~~~
strictnein
Zuckerberg owns ~20% of FB and ~30% of its class A shares. So that's all
easier said than done.

~~~
cityzen
maybe there is a lesson buried in there about letting a child with no previous
experience having that much control over a global advertising corporation.

~~~
dblohm7
I thought that young people were just smarter? /s

~~~
cityzen
Totes!

------
LinuxBender
I imagine if there was a Jira created to fix Facebook, the status would look
something like:

    
    
        [ Closed:  Works as designed ]

------
apo
It's hard to conjure sympathy for anyone booted from Facebook. They built on
someone else's platform and that platform pulled the rug out.

That's the price of admission to the Walled Garden.

~~~
nwah1
They knew they were joining a private platform. How could they not? If the
walled garden is the de facto way people get their news, then as a media
company you're just a fool to ignore it.

~~~
anticensor
Facebook is fenced yard. Instagram is the walled garden one.

------
parliament32
>Who will fix Facebook?

Hopefully nobody. It's a relic of a bygone era, and while many people are
hanging on for sentiment it's really a social wasteland of advertising and
inactive accounts.

Unfortunately FB's other properties are following in the same path. My
Instagram feed seems to be approaching a 1:3 ratio of ads to content and I
find myself using other platforms (TikTok, recently) more and more.

------
revskill
Facebook doesn't care if you're the owner of a page or a group. That means
when you assign someone else as an admin of your page, they can remove you
from the page and you are no longer the owner of the page. Crap. Why not
holding `owner_id` to original page , so that in case of being hacked, you're
still the owner ? Facebook never tries to protect your (or their ?) things.

~~~
jermaustin1
This is for a reason. When Company hires Agency to design a social media
presence, Agency doesn't have to wait for Company to create pages, assign
rolls, and probably spend hours on the phone wasting everyone's time. Agency
can just create a page, set everything up, then with the knowledge they
already have, assign admin rights to Company, and Company can remove Agency.

~~~
revskill
It's not related to the ownership here. Assigning admin rights doesn't relate
to the owner concept. In your case, transferring ownership is the right way to
do, being admin is not enough.

------
soq2
No diff between Reverb and Alex Jones in my book.

My rule is pretty simple about who I follow - anyone using "us VS them" style
language and communication techniques gets autoblocked. Complex issues can
never be solved by bullying the other side into submission.

I don't care if they are liberal or conservatives, these are panderers and
should be called out as such.

~~~
yesenadam
_anyone using "us VS them" style language and communication techniques_

Isn't that exactly what your comment is doing?

~~~
kopo
Probably the same, but why do panderers need a broadcasting platform?

------
thoughtexplorer
Probably not Facebook. Just check out this interaction between a NYT
journalist and them.

[https://twitter.com/sheeraf/status/1065988154308538368](https://twitter.com/sheeraf/status/1065988154308538368)

~~~
naravara
Legends speak of one called Tom: a great Entrepreneur of old, taken away to
sleep in a secluded space of his own, who will one day wake and return to
social media in our time of direst need.

~~~
te_chris
Tom is my friend. Tom is all our friends.

------
olivermarks
I like Matt Taibbi's writing but this piece is unusually naive by his
standards. The whole 'clamp down on fake news, Russian trolls and Nazis'
schtick is just an excuse to limit free speech, which FB have every right to
do in their walled garden.

It's v unclear to me what FB is actually _for_ these days. It's clearly not a
high school yearbook style 'facebook' any more. The closed groups are AOL
redux and the whole 'newsfeed' thing is a mess.

My more paranoid side suspects it will be sunseted soon as a newer, more
sophisticated surveillance system becomes ready. A Yahoo style security breach
will flush everybody off FB and onto a shiny platform with exciting new bells
and whistles...

