
Walt Mossberg Quits Facebook - adrianhon
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/walt-mossberg-quit-facebook.html
======
yeuxverte
Have we really gotten to the point where "some dude quit Facebook" is
considered news? The fact that the NYT has degenerated to this is
disappointing. While there are certainly fair criticisms of Facebook, this
trigger friendly news coverage of the company is becoming outrageous and is
detracting from any previous viable points.

~~~
egwynn
Have we really gotten to the point where Walt Mossberg is considered "some
dude" on a technology news website?

~~~
jimmy1
Having worked in tech my whole life and been a frequent visitor of the site, I
have never heard of him.

Regardless, this is still fair criticism. This would be like seeing in the
scrolling banner of "Breaking News" on CNN "<Insert Well Known Person in their
field> quits job at <Insert large company>"

Belongs in maybe the entertainment or business section, maybe, section, but
wouldn't classify it as "tech news"

\----

Having thought about it a little more, I can see a valid case when said person
in question, considered monumental enough, leaves a platform, business or
field and is reported as news. I guess it's more of a reflection of how little
HN'ers (including myself) think of Facebook in the grand scheme of things.
It's just a website. What's next, we report that he or she has left Flickr or
Reddit? That's kind of what I think GP and myself were getting at. Now if this
person was the founder of Facebook, or instrumental in the success of the
platform, and then decides to leave, I think absolutely it would be tech news.

~~~
MR4D
Your comment surprises me.

Walt had a pretty impressive group of friends:

[https://www.slashgear.com/walt-mossberg-steve-jobs-and-
bill-...](https://www.slashgear.com/walt-mossberg-steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-
on-technology-at-wsj-all-things-digital-305511/)

~~~
jimmy1
I am not saying that to belittle the man in any sort of way, or diminish his
accomplishments, I am just simply saying it shouldn't be surprising that
people haven't heard of some other people, despite how famous others think he
or she might be. Pretty sure there is an XKCD for this. I have my categories
of people where I would react the same way ("What do you mean you have never
heard of Carl Sassenrath!?" as an example).

~~~
jeron
That's hilarious, I have definitely heard of Walt Mossberg but I have never
heard of Carl Sassenrath

~~~
jimmy1
;) He is the father of multitasking! Definitely an important figure in
computing history -- he created the Amiga Computer operating system kernel and
also was a pivotal figure in HP's early successes as well. I think he works at
Roku now.

Also a reminder how crazy young the field of computer science is -- important
figures are still as young as 62! Kind of cool in a way. I hope to get to meet
him in person.

------
abakker
At its core, facebook contains a useful service. It's messaging capabilities
are good, and the fact that identities and connections facebook are persistent
effectively combats the problem that plagued much of the early internet:
constantly changing pseudonyms and emails. I know that it is not necessary,
but it is convenient. Additionally, its support for multimedia posts, links,
profiles and other adds a nice, rich experience.

Unfortunately, many of the internet's great consumer businesses were built on
this premise that advertising will pay for everything. That premise has been a
good one for many years now, but, advertisers are getting savvier, and the
addressable market is getting addressed pretty well. yes, there is room for
growth, but, for many advertisers, that growth is not inside their target
markets. While targeted marketing does provide value, I think it is an open
question "how targeted is enough targeted?" Meaning that there is not
definitive and universal data on where the benefits of less privacy really
result in positive outcomes for advertisers. I would guess that in many cases
greater accuracy in audience targeting does not result in statistically
significant improvements in conversions when balanced against the increased
cost of hyper targeted vs semi targeted ads. I am sure this depends heavily on
many factors.

The challenge, though, is that facebook has to grow revenue, and, they have
pursued this with advertisers by attempting to differentiate their ad products
on the basis of hyper targeting. they _do_ have differentiated ability to do
this, and it gives them a competitive edge. It means that they spend the
majority of their time building products that the liminal areas around
personal privacy and ethics.

This puts them in a very difficult spot, because many of their competitors _in
the ad business_ are doing the same thing, and trying to get the same level of
detail. Google has not launched multiple social networks just for the fun of
it...they did it to serve their customers.

The monetization and differentiation that facebook has pursued has pushed them
to be on the bleeding edge of selling granular, user-specific data. This seems
unlikely to change without an outside force to force a change of behavior in
their competitors as well. If you take away the competitive pressure to do
something (by making it illegal, for example) then it can avoid further
progress in this arms race.

~~~
josefresco
> and the fact that identities and connections facebook are persistent
> effectively combats the problem that plagued much of the early internet:
> constantly changing pseudonyms and emails

This, was a problem?

~~~
tlb
It was. In the 90s, people's email address changed pretty much any time they
changed jobs or schools. Their phone numbers changed too, every time they
moved. For college students, it often meant multiple complete changes of
contact info per year.

The churn is much lower now.

~~~
josefresco
Useful maybe for extended friends and family, but (when I used FB) I never
even considered it as a viable option for contact beyond that small group.
Maybe there's a generation that accepted Facebook this way that I'm not aware
of (my kids don't even use it)

Also, there's a large gap between the 90's and when Facebook took hold that it
could be considered the "default" online identity for anyone. In that time,
free email that lasted years/decades exploded and we were no longer tied to
work/school email.

------
mindgam3
“I am doing this — after being on Facebook for nearly 12 years — because my
own values and the policies and actions of Facebook have diverged to the point
where I’m no longer comfortable here,” he wrote on Facebook.

~~~
finaliteration
I’m not totally clear on how his posting on Facebook invalidates his message
(assuming that’s the argument being made by posting this comment). Facebook
is, for better or worse, one of the best ways to get a message out to many
people, especially if they are friends or followers. I don’t think it’s
unreasonable to post a final “I’m leaving Facebook” message there so everyone
sees it.

~~~
diminoten
I think we can talk about this in a non-gotcha sense, so for what it's worth,
it is interesting that he felt the best way to reach his audience with this
message was the platform he's leaving.

If he had a better way of reaching his audience, why not use that instead?

~~~
ska
Because this is the best way to reach people who wouldn't see it any other
way?

If some subset of your friends/connections are only reachable by Facebook,
they are the ones you are going to disconnect with by doing this. Makes sense
to me.

~~~
diminoten
Well yes, but it's interesting, to me anyway, that Facebook is that platform
for him, the platform where he can connect with the biggest number of his
audience.

~~~
ska
It holds even if it isn’t the biggest number. It could be a small number, but
how else would you reach them?

~~~
diminoten
If Facebook is the only way to reach your audience, maybe don't quit it?

It clearly isn't here, so his post would have made more sense outside of
Facebook.

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mikestew
If it's out of principal, I'm surprised it took him this long, but hey, we all
have our own breaking point. I especially appreciate the non-hysterical tone
of the message, rather than the too-common table-wiping rant.

~~~
reaperducer
_If it 's out of principal, I'm surprised it took him this long, but hey, we
all have our own breaking point_

My personal breaking point is coming.

In the early days, I would post on Facebook a couple of times an hour.

It's become less and less as Facebook became more and more obnoxious, both on
the front end and the back end.

Today, I'm down to using Facebook only on weekends. And even then sometimes
it's only on one of those days. Facebook has made it easy for me to not care
about it anymore.

~~~
qubex
I was an avid Facebook user in the earlier years (2008-2010), and a regular
several-times-a-day checker from 2010 until early 2017. I griped often about
how it had become ”boring”, full of random looking stuff interspersed with
occasional nuggets I was really interested in. I tried to write a filter to
strip out the boring stuff and failed, and it hit me that they were deliberate
and optimal in their mixture of crap and good to keep me just within my
tolerance level. I turned off notifications on my iDevices in late April and
have checked it occasionally whenever I feel like it. I might look at it two
or three times a week. I can’t quite bring myself to abandon it (because it
serves a useful purpose in terms of communication and keeping up with far-
flung friends and family) but on the whole it’s pretty useless and obnoxious
on a daily basis. They overextended themselves by a wide margin. They went a
Like too far. ;)

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pasbesoin
I remember when and after a friend twisted my arm to join, my reluctance in
part due to having read how the young(er) Zuckerberg treated his nascent
online property and his classmates.

Well, I considered, perhaps people can improve. And, it's not just him
anymore, it's an institution that and whose people will establish and enforce
more acceptable, accountable norms.

Not so much, I guess. Shame on me, for overriding my intuition.

~~~
tracker1
One has to strike a bit of a balance. I wouldn't want them to be as heavy
handed as YouTube, by contrast.

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russdpale
Remember when facebook first came out, and we laughed at people with AOL
accounts? Now its facebook in aol's old position, laughable.

------
JohnJamesRambo
People that work at Facebook here, does it make you uncomfortable about the
future, and make you question what you are doing, when things like this
happen?

~~~
jens4
No because the issues are not just Facebook issues or technical issues. What
is happening involves society as a whole.

And society does not have perfect systems and even known solutions in place to
handle this stuff.

There are deep sociological and psychological issues that have been uncovered
over the last couple years, that have always existed beneath the surface in
society. At a time of hyperconnection, if it wasn't Facebook surfacing them,
it would have been YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or whoever else. I am not
saying grave errors haven't been made and the future does look scary.

But now that the issues (from fakenews, to terror recruiting, to child abuse,
to identity theft etc etc etc) have surfaced in a manner that cannot just be
wished away, who else out there has the skills to do something about this
stuff?

There is seriously no one out there, besides the Chinese govt with experience
handling/understanding data flows at this scale. The expertise being built up
in Facebook is going to be fundamental in addressing and eventually finding
solutions to these problems. I have no doubt about that. Nobody else is seeing
the data we are seeing. It's going to be a hard couple years ahead, with lot
of turmoil, but we have a much better idea about what the issues are and
therefore solutions are more likely to be found not less.

Read Walt Mossberg's own columns after Obama got elected in 2008 about the
promise of social media. That hasn't changed. My mother has cancer and her
biggest support system day to day is a group on Facebook. So I know personally
what value a well functioning social network can create. How it can contribute
to well being. The good stuff happening is not going away.

~~~
jimmy1
> There are deep sociological and psychological issues that have been
> uncovered over the last couple years, that have always existed beneath the
> surface in society. At a time of hyperconnection, if it wasn't Facebook
> surfacing them, it would have been YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or whoever
> else. I am not saying grave errors haven't been made and the future does
> look scary.

> But now that the issues (from fakenews, to terror recruiting, to child
> abuse, to identity theft etc etc etc) have surfaced in a manner that cannot
> just be wished away, who else out there has the skills to do something about
> this stuff?

I appreciate you having the courage to reply as an employee there, but but
this is exactly the type of Zuckerberg-esque deflection I would have expected
from the man himself, or a C-level, but not an everyday tech employee. Have
they really brainwashed everyone there to the point that they've bought into
the narrative that they have no culpability in any of this? Sure the root
issues were there, but you are paid to surface them and exploit them. If in
the pre-internet age of television and radio, do you think people let stations
get by with that lame excuse of throwing their hands up and saying "well it's
deeper societal issues, we are just the transmission mechanism!"

~~~
news_hacker
Television and radio are broadcast mediums. Facebook is a different medium
altogether and not an apt comparison IMO, since all individuals produce the
content... it's a sort of "democratized broadcast content".

Facebook can and is taking responsibility over policing this content to some
extent but you have to realize the two extremes the whole enterprise has to
flirt with: (1) respect individual liberties but allow for the full spectrum
of negative human behavior, or (2) try to play god and create a global set of
moral conduct and use it to silence and thought-police those that don't
comply.

I hope you can see the trickiness here and that there is no utopian panacea to
easily solve this issue.

~~~
jimmy1
That is very fair. I think it would be more stomachable to people if
Zuckerberg wasn't making billions off of it in the process.

------
classichasclass
Nit: the TRS-80 Model 100 didn't come out until 1983. I realize the NYT is
just quoting the Verge article where the original error is, but portable
computers like that were merely a dream in 1977.

------
tlynchpin
gotta rep Tru Thoughts, I'm listening to the latest Unfold [0] and reading
here about dear Walt, selector dishes up this gem:

Homeboy Sandman & Edan - #NeverUseTheInternetAgain (Stones Throw)

life imitates art!

[0] [https://www.mixcloud.com/truthoughts/tru-thoughts-
presents-u...](https://www.mixcloud.com/truthoughts/tru-thoughts-presents-
unfold-161218-with-miink-flowdan-and-sampology/)

------
chrissam
He probably quit Facebook due to Facebook being constantly defamed in the
media - and now the media is reporting on him leaving. It's like that Jake
Gyllenhaal movie where he starts off as an ambulance chasing freelance
reporter and ends up causing crimes so he can film them.

~~~
CPLX
He literally _is_ the media.

What’s wrong with the idea that that he observed something, made a decision,
and then acted on it? Or is he presumed to have no agency?

~~~
chrissam
Maybe you're right - maybe Facebook is doing all this bad stuff and Walt
Mossberg happened to notice and decided to follow through.

But I'm skeptical - I think the more traditional news media (aka the folks who
write stories and collect facts) tends to view news aggregators as a threat to
their business model. I think the idea that Facebook ought to be required to
screen whatever news it aggregates for "truthfulness" is absurd and I
(sometimes) think that the constant refrain of "Facebook did X Bad Thing" is
closer to activism than journalism.

But I could be wrong - I'm not as certain as my first post indicated.

~~~
asdff
I don't think news media outlets are very concerned about social networks
anymore; NYT is on literally every app in everyone's pocket, whereas before it
was just in the hands of their direct subscribers and sales.

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simplecomplex
Values?

I understand not using Facebook because it’s annoying and filled with ads...
but what values is one upholding when they quit Facebook because they show
ads? That advertising is evil?

I don’t watch TV because it sucks and is filled with ads, in other words it’s
not worth it. But I don’t pretend that is some kind of moral victory.

~~~
gk1
You're conflating privacy violations with advertising.

