
Apple CEO Tim Cook to MIT Grads: Don't Measure Your Life in Likes - gbugniot
https://www.inc.com/emily-canal/apple-ceo-tim-cook-mit-commencement.html
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mi_lk
Can't even find the source video[1] from the article.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckjkz8zuMMs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckjkz8zuMMs)

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TheAceOfHearts
Most modern media sites are absolutely despicable. They rarely link to the
source. Heck, even when writing "articles" about recent scientific
discoveries, most sites won't even mention the paper's title. Even worse, some
sites will just add tags for common words and link to other articles with
similar flags.

They want to make you depend on their site, which is a terrible idea. Why
would you possibly need to go review the sources, eh? In my personal ratings,
I give all sites like these the lowest possible score.

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cbhl
Replace "likes" with "ad impressions" and you'd get what's wrong with the
media today.

The answer is money -- if a journalist no longer needs to worry about having a
roof over their head, or making ends meet, then they can go try to make the
world a better place, rather than just writing click-bait headlines. I don't
know how that will come about -- maybe UBI, maybe a new distribution model --
but the alternative is the slow rotting of the media industry.

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booleanbetrayal
"Measure it in app downloads!"

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racl101
I wish someone would appropriate the Trainspotting speech into their grad
speech (i.e. 'Choose Life').

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azeirah
If you're looking for an alternative to the likes metric, check out the "time
well spent" metric.

[http://www.timewellspent.io/](http://www.timewellspent.io/)

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dogruck
Should I "like" this post?

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ben_jones
Measure it in emojis instead!

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sogen
Sounds like he just saw Fight Club

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racl101
Shhh! Rule 1! & Rule 2!

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nnfy
Isn't this just a generic graduation speech? I'm curious as to why anyone
finds this noteworthy. It wouldn't surprise me if Cook didn't even write the
speech himself.

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two2two
Parts of Cook’s speech are somewhat generic, but the point I believe to be
important is a CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world is pleading
with our future producers to acknowledge the damage certain aspects of online
culture, such as likes, have on one’s psyche. It’s a subtle, “hey, somethings
wrong. We can fix it by acknowledging it.”

I, for one, am thrilled with Tim Cook and others, helping to bring these
issues to light. It is a huge problem. I know someone in the other room right
now that is fishing for likes and depending on her success, will determine her
mood for the rest of the day, maybe week.

It's psychological slavery that many have slipped into somewhat innocently.

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muninn_
Social media is the new smoking. Facebook et all. are hiring the most
intelligent people in the world, software engineers, psychologists, and
cognitive scientists to get you to click on things and stay on their site. The
studies are already starting to come out suggesting that social media is bad
for your mental health, and it's largely a huge waste of time as you think
you're maintaining relationships with people when you're really not, or you're
afraid that if you don't use Facebook you can't ever reconnect with somebody
you haven't spoken to in awhile.

On top of everything else, Facebook in particular is a monopoly and needs to
be broken up. There's no good reason that they should own like 4 of the top 5
social media platforms unless we're fine with monopolies. I'd like to see a
federal anti-trust lawsuit, but the government doesn't understand how
impossible it is to do the social media thing and not be crushed by Facebook.

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xj9
you compete with facebook by doing things that facebook _cannot_ do.
gnu/social and mastodon are one step in that direction b/c they are ad free on
purpose and provide a much more personal experience via gift economy. sure,
some instances have a tip jar, but its easy enough to find a friend who has a
private instance you can live on for free b/c they like you.

of course, to compete properly things have to go further. #p2p applications
and decentralized authentication systems to compete with "Sign-up with
Facebook" and creating an ecosystem for competitive applications that don't
rely on centralized infrastructure. facebook can and will crush you if you
need to spend your way to victory. they're huge and rich. this is p obvious
imo. so, to compete you have to make cost to the rando dev ~$0 so they can
face the behemoth forever.

that isn't to say you can't make money. totally possible to sell cloud
services to boost performance or increase storage for users. the point is that
it doesn't cost you anything to run in the first place and provides acceptable
performance without the cloud speedups.

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thisrod
Facebook's killer app was being the phone directory.

Once upon a time, there were paper mail and landline phones, with a directory
where you could look up pretty well anyone's address and phone number. That
was really useful; it was lost in the email years between letters and Facebook
messenger.

Since no one got a distributed internet directory to work back then, it's hard
to imagine that there will be one in the future. And so we're doomed to
Facebook.

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xj9
\> doomed

this _is_ the doomed timeline, i suppose. no need to be so, uh, defeatist
about it tho. building a facebook alternative/competitor isn't impossible,
just hard. took forever, but #ostatus is finally making some headway against
twitter. could happen again, right?

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harry8
Why should MIT grads listen to this guy? He's a suit, a politician. His
contribution to the world is 2 parts of three eights of stuff all. Why is he
even asked to give this speech? Fame. Because he's a suit at the top of the
"APPLE" political ziggurat.

Let's have George Clooney or a Kardashian give speeches to engineering grads
telling them how to think? They're more famous than Cook. And arguably have
done more in tech, not much less.

Then there's this asshole who literally uses a commencement speech to bash a
tech rival. If apple had "Likes" would he be saying this? MIT are supposed to
be better than this.

