
The Decline and Fall of the Zuckerberg Empire - ganeshkrishnan
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-zuckerberg-empire.html
======
ignoramous
> Amazon delivers things to your house. Google helps you find things online.
> Apple sells actual objects. Facebook … helps you get into fights? Delivers
> your old classmates’ political opinions to your brain?

Strawman. The article's writer can do better than view Facebook as a one trick
pony. It is an internet behemoth. Instagram aside, there is so much media
sharing on WhatsApp alone that it might blow away most of the other internet
properties away. WhatsApp with VoIP now has the mobile network operators by
their balls. No one is logging out of that, by far.

> Some empires fall because they’re invaded from the outside or rot from
> within. Zuckerberg’s could be the first in history to collapse simply
> because its citizens logged out.

Couldn't be further from the truth. People might get dis-interested in
Facebook, over time... but existence of Facebook is more than folks just
logging out.

~~~
jayalpha
WhatsApp? Is this so difficult to program? Just VOIP and messaging? The
Chinese WeChat hat much for features (e.g. send money, pay etc.)

And even my mother has installed Threema on her phone because a friend of her
asked for it. This tells you something. It is hard to come up with another
social network like facebook. But a chatting client on the phone? The tide can
change very fast there.

Threema gets used more in Europe than in the states. But even a US buddy
recently suggested we switch to threema. It is closed source but claims to
offer more privacy.

[https://threema.ch/en](https://threema.ch/en)

~~~
statictype
Chat apps also have network effects.

People use Whatsapp because that's what everyone else uses. I would prefer
Signal but no one I know uses it.

Everyone I know uses Whatsapp.

So I use Whatsapp.

~~~
josteink
Clearly anecdotal.

Nobody I know uses WhatsApp. So I don’t use WhatsApp.

See how that works?

~~~
function_seven
If you count the number of anecdotes on the WhatsApp side vs. Signal or other
similar networks, you will find that a massive quantitative difference. There
are about 1,000 WhatsApp users for every 1 Telegram or Signal user.

The anecdote is supposed to show _why_ one can't just write their own app. It
doesn't work that way.

~~~
jayalpha
No, it does. I am not going to post the same story on five different social
networks. But I can easily have 5 different chatting clients on my phone.

~~~
statictype
How many people do you know who are happy to have 5 different chatting apps on
their phone and remember which one to use to talk to which person?

Consider that you're a distant outlier.

~~~
jayalpha
Most people have facebook and instagramm on their phone which could be already
seen as "chatting apps". I don't use them for chatting.

I use

1\. WeChat

2\. WhatsApp

3\. Threema

4\. Frozenchat, a Jabber client with OTR support

Don't have signal yet.

Ah, and I can "chat" via Text message too :-)

~~~
kkarakk
1\. no one uses this outside of china,they failed in their push to even india

2\. global leader right now

3\. as compromised as whatsapp,has data compliance with multiple countries

4\. no name fork of a no name

~~~
jayalpha
1\. Clearly anecdotal evidence

2\. correct

3\. Multiple countries? You would need a court order from Switzerland. I am
not even sure they can access your messages if they wanted to.

4\. Irrelevant because it is a client to an open protocol. Which client you
use does not matter. I just named mine.

------
eksemplar
I think Facebook is wrong to blame the EU or the GDPR on its faltering status
in Europe.

The GDPR is certainly making people more aware of what privacy means, and I
think that’s a good thing, but it’s also came into existence because the
people asked for it. It’s not really a new thing, in the public sector we’ve
had stricter regulations for many years, but we’ve had them individually, and
we’ve had the because people voted for them. The EU simply gathered all these
things as a centralised ruleset, that also happens to apply to the private
sector.

Slowly more and more people are waking up to find that they have and want the
power to make demands on how their data flows. And I think a lot of American
tech companies are having a hard time to adapt.

There is an old saying, that the US typically has good governments that are
not trusted by its people and terrible companies which are trusted. Well, the
EU is the exact opposite of that, and I think it’s hard to be Facebook in a
world where people genuinely don’t want their photos used for facial
recognition software that will eventually be used for evil, have their feeds
flooded by probaganda or see their data used to overturn democracy itself.

Facebook isn’t really struggling yet though. But they’ve basically become like
climate change, everyone knows they have to quit eating social media to save
the planet, but knowing is easier than doing.

Facebook hasn’t done a single thing to help themselves though, so the
comparison to Augustus, who did indeed build an empire and who was so popular
that many historians consider him the root of the emperor cult, is a little
ridiculous.

------
submeta
Key sentence: "a majority of Americans across the political spectrum now
believe that social media hurts democracy and that the government isn’t doing
enough to regulate it."

"social media hurts democracy"

The arab spring (supported and brought to a tipping point by messages spread
on social media) was not only possible in northern africa or in some arab
countries (Libya, Egypt, Syria,...) Social media has introduced a new
dimension into our western societies. Political will was for decades built by
discussion in small groups but more importantly by a small group of media
(newspapers, magazines, tv channels). These news channels had some commonly
shared values, operated within those values.

Now we have "news" spreading publicly on Twitter, on Facebook or in closed
groups of Facebook or other social media. And these "news" are not fact-
checked by any authority anymore.

If I was a rogue actor I would weep for joy because of the possibilities that
social media created to manipulate the masses.

So yes, I strongly believe that social media is hurting our democracies
massively. And Facebook has a major role in this.

~~~
Meai
Probably ironically you're arguing for a very authoritarian, nationalist view
of the world where we can't allow any foreign information to hurt the fragile
minds of our brittle citizens. In my opinion the tool called Facebook has
shown us the real state of our society, the poor state of critical thinking in
people and possibly the lack of morality in general. To call for simpler times
back when only our own country was able to manipulate us, is a splash of
romanticism.

~~~
ben_w
I don’t read it that way — GP seems to say “rogue actor” rather than “foreign
actor”, so I think you’re actually in agreement.

~~~
Meai
"Rogue actor" is currently a highly political term, so I left that aspect out
on purpose. For China you would be a rogue actor if you reported truthfully on
free speech issues. For the USA you are a rogue actor if you report on their
unconstitutional spying apparatus. It's neither morally nor politically
unambigious what a rogue actor is. Such is life in a world where we all have a
different morality, talking becomes hard!

~~~
hannasanarion
Lol no. The intercept isn't a rogue actor. The US government might not love
them, but they are not assaulting democracy.

In this context, the "rogue actor" is the Macedonian kid writing about the
activities of Kenyan Muslim Obama for abcnews.info

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Animats
This is an article about a New York Times article. It doesn't link directly to
that article. It links to another article which links to go.redirectingat.com
which links to go.skimresources.com, which is blocked by Ghostery as hostile.
This is thus clickbait.

The actual New York Times story is here.[1]

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-
data-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-
election-racism.html)

~~~
lordgrenville
While I agree that the redirecting is dishonest, I think this article adds a
level of commentary to the original NYT piece.

------
random878
This is a low quality piece which is only serving to clutter more of
hackernews with more opinion pieces on Facebook / Mr Zuckerberg.

This is not deeply interesting.

