
Now would be a good time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign - imartin2k
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/21/now-would-be-a-good-time-for-mark-zuckerberg-to-resign/
======
cronjobma
Rather: Now would be a good time for Facebook users to resign. Zuck is doing
exactly the same things when he started Facebook. It’s the users; The users
that need to leave the platform. Does anyone really believe that a FB without
Zuckerberg will all of a sudden be great for people? Reporters like these
should inform users better about how their data is being used and how they can
change things for themselves by simply leaving the platform. That’s 1. more
practical and 2. the only actual solution to the problem.

~~~
neor
I've been wanting to delete my FB account for years. Stupid me has it
connected to a bunch of other services though by using single sign on
feautures... Most used of those services is Spotify and they still don't offer
a way to disconnect Facebook from the account.

~~~
kristianc
Spotify should work absolutely fine when FB is deactivated, just send a
'Forgot Password' email to the email you used to sign up for Facebook.

~~~
neor
Wow never knew, I had looked into it a year ago and they only said that you
could cancel the current FB shared account and register a new one based on
e-mail account.

However; that would make me lose all playlists, stored music and I'd have to
move my subscription around. Too much hassle at the time.

Going to try the trick you just posted.

------
firasd
Barring egregious criminality, it doesn't make sense for someone who took a
company from nothing (well, maybe a concept pioneered by Friendster and its
antecedents) to $500 billion in market cap to suddenly resign.

I feel this Cambridge Analytica story is a bit overblown. When the
whistleblower says “target their inner demons”, he is just referring to
campaigns placing Facebook Ads with certain parameters about who should see
them.

Now the question of political targeting data being re-​purposed from a
personality quiz app, and issues of data privacy in general, are worth
investigating. But the fall in Facebook stock price is a giant overreaction
(unless the story invites legal regulation.)

The shock of Trump’s election and Brexit have prompted more scrutiny of social
media, which is warranted. But there’s a limit to the benefit of worrying
about Youtube algorithms, Facebook targeting, and Russian trolls. Changing the
political situation will mostly require old-fashioned door-to-door politics.

~~~
noobermin
Not only that but it ignores the elephant room here. And the ironic thing is
the annoying phrase has been used so often it's lost its power, but this is
literally the biggest "evidence" for 2016 in front of people's noses.

Clinton _won_ the popular vote. She _won_ CA for example, so clearly Cambridge
didn't mush people's brains up that much. The swing states in the Midwest she
_didn 't_ win she didn't campaign in. Is it that hard to understand?

Why do we have to constantly relitigate 2016? If you don't like what Trump is
doing, why not fight against that instead of this constant reporting and talk
of conspiracies? People who peddle/love this stuff are taking away the _wrong_
lessons from 2016.

------
tomsmeding
The article goes on and on to describe how Facebook has tried to do and be
many things that it wasn't before, and how it has failed in those attempts to
expand beyond a basic social network.

Fine, let's assume that that's true. Facebook did indeed do some useless
things. But how is this a reason for its CEO to resign? Facebook did nothing
wrong! Yes they failed to become better, and their platform became bloated,
but so does every other platform in the world at the moment. But since when is
failing to become better now suddenly a really good incentive for it to buckle
down completely like the article is suggesting?

I feel the article's argumentation is completely unsound. Premises I have no
say about, but its conclusion definitely doesn't follow from those premises.

The author didn't even rein in the privacy stories that are all over the news
suddenly. Now that would give their argument leverage, but they didn't.

Go hate Facebook all you like, I do too, but this article doesn't make sense
and doesn't deserve to give a reason for you to hate the company or its CEO.

------
shpx
At this point I've hidden at least 10 threads relating to this. I'm starting
to think that this is a coordinated PR "attack" on facebook.

~~~
jakebasile
It's getting out of hand. The hate train is running off the rails here.

If this was Reddit, I'd suggest the mods pin a megathread to contain it but HN
doesn't work that way. I'm generally against heavy moderation but at this
point I'd vote for a moratorium like we did with politics awhile back.

~~~
adventured
Peak post Trump hysteria, hopefully.

There aren't very many more entities left to blame, tar and feather for his
election at this point.

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jacquesm
It would be but there is no way that it will ever happen. Besides that he has
things set up in such a way that even the board can't force him out. The only
people that can fire Zuckerberg are the users.

~~~
acjohnson55
It's almost as though a corporate structure set up to enshrine its founder as
BDFL is a really bad idea. Go figure.

~~~
adrianN
Doesn't seem so bad for the founder.

~~~
tim333
Not so bad for the shareholders really either. $500bn isn't a bad market cap
for a photo sharing site. The people being hurt here are the general public.

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dblotsky
When under pressure, I'd expect a strong CEO to fix things, not to crawl away
from the problems and toss them on someone else.

~~~
RandomInteger4
What are you even talking about? His response to this issue was anything but
"Crawl away from the problems". Did you even read it?

~~~
dblotsky
I'm talking about this article, which is calling for Zuck's resignation. I
disagree with the article, and I think resigning would be crawling away from
the problems.

~~~
RandomInteger4
Oh, my apologies. I misread your comment.

------
kalkut
All of this is overreacting. People have the choice to leave Facebook or to
accept the terms and deal with them.

This is some serious cognitive dissonance to expect to be free to share
personal data but to still retain privacy regarding those. Anything you share
with your friend can then be shared to a 3rd party. This is even true in "real
life"

And data is not nearly as powerful as we make it to be. Populism did not win
because of social networks, populism won because of increasing inequalities in
both wealth and skills in a world where globalisation and automation are
making more and more people uncomfortable about the future.

All data did is to identify who is who and sell them what they actually
wanted. The problem is not about using data to understand audiences. It is
about having people lacking enough common sense to actually check if they are
told the truth. It is also about the eagerness of politicians to play with
tribalism of any kind. Western democracies are responsible of those failures
and they are trying to find anyone else than themselves to blame.

I left Facebook a few years ago and I don't regret it. I doubt that Facebook
is worth it for most people and WhatsApp with SMS is enough for me. People
more social that me could leave FB to go to Instagram though. So in any case
Zuckerberg is fine.

The only way to beat Facebook is to give people an alternative they prefer. It
is definitely not to try to scare them with data scandals most of them don't
care about.

------
symbolepro
I want to keep Facebook only to be connected with my friends. But I do not
want to see their status updates. I just want to be digitally connected with
them so that I can contact them. Instead of seeing their photos/posts, I would
rather like to talk to them personally.

I always think about pre-facebook era and want to go back again to those
times.

~~~
roadbeats
Get their e-mails and phone numbers. It'll be a significant improvement in
your life, trust me.

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stretchwithme
I think that is very unrealistic.

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thisisit
While I want him to resign, it is not for the failures of Facebook. But
because once things starting to blow up, he was MIA.

It was only after, stories about his missing "statements" started to appear
that he came forward.

~~~
RandomInteger4
Or maybe he and his team wanted to actually take the time to come up with a
useful and intelligent response rather than a vapid response only meant for
the spectacle?

~~~
thisisit
So, you are saying he and his team waited 5-6 days to come up with a useful
and intelligence but not a vapid response?

Sure, that sounds feasible given how just a day ago everyone went after
Zuckerberg for keeping silent and a day later he releases a statement.

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panchicore3
> Attempts to make Facebook an infrastructure provider have arguably so far
> failed

Adding to this list how failed to us with Parse.com

~~~
inlined
Yeah.. the feels. For a hot second I thought Parse would get a shoutout when
it mentioned Facebook's attempt to be an infrastructure provider.

------
mjfl
This is hysteria. You people are crazy. This is not nearly that big of a deal.
I beg my fellow hacker news readers, get ahold of yourselves.

This is a stellar opportunity for this community to have some introspection.
Are we capable of it? These kinds of posts are a mirror to what we badly want
to be true, whether it is actually true or not. We, apparently, badly want
Facebook and even moreso Mark Zuckerberg to fail. Why do we want that so
badly?

~~~
sleavey
I understand the anger directed at them. Facebook are the spearhead of the
closed, privacy-invading web, and this is the straw that broke the camel's
back. Most people reading HN probably remember the days when the web was open
and free and you actually had to remember URLs to read interesting content on
interesting websites, usually run by enthusiastic hobbyists, written as flat
HTML sites without JavaScript bloat or supercookies.

They're obviously not the only company at fault, but they're one of the
biggest.

~~~
greenyoda
_" Most people reading HN probably remember the days when the web was open and
free and you actually had to remember URLs to read interesting content on
interesting websites, usually run by enthusiastic hobbyists, written as flat
HTML sites without JavaScript bloat or supercookies."_

That open and free web is still out there, and as a non-FB user, that's the
web I see every day. OK, my RSS reader remembers the URLs for me, and some of
the sites are a bit bloated (which we have browser add-ons to fix), but
there's definitely lots of good independent content still out there (and I've
found lots of it by reading HN).

------
_jezell_
Just like it was great for Microsoft when BillG left...

