
Former Facebook exec says social media is ripping apart society - SREinSF
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-exec-ripping-apart-society
======
bootsz
I'm always a bit ambivalent about confessions/apologies of this sort by former
execs and employees of these powerful companies. On the one had I'm glad they
are speaking up and recognizing the harm being caused by the businesses they
helped create.

On the other hand, it's hard to ignore the fact that typically these people
have already profited enormously from these companies and they will never have
to face any sort of real ramifications or consequences for the net harm that
may ultimately be brought to society.

It's one thing to be sorry, it's another to avoid being complicit in such
ventures to begin with. But that's the thing... where is the incentive to "do
no harm" in Silicon Valley? There isn't any.

It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine what the world might look
like if people were held accountable indefinitely for the externalities caused
by the work they conduct.

Not saying this is practical or even desirable, but clearly it would change
people's priorities quite a bit. As a software dev there's very little keeping
you from accepting a fat job offer from Facebook unless you happen to have a
particularly strong & discerning conscious/moral code. I'd like to believe
that I'd turn it down... but I'm not so sure. No wonder the world's brightest
minds are working at companies like this.

~~~
ace_of_spades
Even if you have a particularly strong moral code you may reasonably take the
job as there is a higher degree of probability that you may affect change from
the inside vs. the outside... and if that isn‘t possible you may try to go the
snowden route...

It might be a little counter intuitive but in terms of jobs it is always good
to exercise some counterfactual thinking: What would happen if I didn‘t take
the job? Another dev without a strong moral code would likely simply do what
they are told without thinking about consequences and long-term impact. Having
loud voices within FB itself (hopefully in important positions) might have a
big impact! Imagine Zuckerberg getting the low-down for all of his probably
well-intentioned but horribly excetued ideas BEFORE they are rolled out...

~~~
watwut
I don't see anything bad with working on social network. That being said, that
chain of thought is wrong. If you take that job, you share responsibility for
what you do and you are no better then that other dude. You don't get points
for someone else theoretically being worst - that is just arrogance.

~~~
ace_of_spades
I don’t think it is wrong... it is optimistic in the sense that I consider the
possibility of affecting positive change within FB as likely or at least non-
zero. You don’t just have to be the waterboy, you could be on the coaching
team and really influence where things are going. Obviously a lot of
conditionals and hurdels there though... the incentives won’t be neatly
aligned for you.

------
zapperdapper
My new favourite person.

"In his talk, Palihapitiya criticized not only Facebook, but Silicon Valley’s
entire system of venture capital funding. He said that investors pump money
into “shitty, useless, idiotic companies,” rather than addressing real
problems like climate change and disease."

Amen brother. Nailed it.

I caught up with a friend the other day. He has a first class honours degree
in Physics from Cambridge University. He went on to do a PhD in Quantum
Mechanics. He is the smartest person I have ever met. He works for a company
that trawls social media looking for "trends". This is a guy who could
probably be building the warp drive, or a nuclear fusion reactor - instead he
spends his days writing code that helps clients sell people shit they don't
need - _because that is what this insane "market" puts value on_. It is a
terribly toxic culture exacerbated by social media. I did a "hard break" from
social media a year or two back and have never regretted the decision.

~~~
zodiac
> because that is what this insane "market" puts value on

It is an unfortunate outcome, but how would you change the systems (e.g.
capitalism) that produced this outcome?

~~~
zapperdapper
I don't need to change the system. I only need to change my own behaviour.
Eventually, when enough people have got sick of the current situation, and
have changed their behaviour too, we will have a new system...

~~~
wolfgke
> I don't need to change the system. I only need to change my own behaviour.

Already done for a long time (and still doing). It does not change anything
since most other people do not change their behavior.

~~~
zapperdapper
> Already done for a long time (and still doing).

Yes, me too. It has been a process.

> It does not change anything since most other people do not change their
> behavior.

I disagree. People do change their behaviour. You did. I did. There are many,
many others. It's just not reached a critical mass yet, but give it time, it
will. There are whole communities out there that didn't exist ten or fifteen
years ago that are kicking back at the system because it gives them a better
life.

Keep doing what you are doing, keep the faith, look for ways to accelerate
change (something I've become increasingly interested in). It will happen.

~~~
csallen
I disagree that removing yourself from the system changes much of anything.
It's effectively no different than committing suicide. The rest of the world
goes on. And, in fact, they have more power, because now a smaller percentage
of conscious individuals control any resources.

~~~
zapperdapper
There's a difference between simply removing yourself from the system and
doing things differently. It's simply a behavioural change. You live with a
new set of priorities, or you can think of it as playing by a new set of
rules. Why live with a set of priorities and values that makes you burnt out,
ill and depressed?

You don't have to believe me though - research it yourself, if you want
further proof that the current system is not working look at suicide rates,
rates of medication use, self-medication (drugs, alcohol, food) and so on. We
are living in a very sick, literally, society. Pick anyone of these and you
will see trends near exponential.

I am not suggesting anything new or something that is not currently being
done, right now, by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, and it
does, slowly but surely, change things. I am not saying we are anywhere near
there yet though.

------
dawhizkid
I wonder if the same can be said for internet porn. I too used to think people
who wanted to ban porn were just kooky evangelicals, but at some point
realized myself how empty and depressed I felt after watching it.

I'm almost more curious about the societal consequences of young people
(mostly male) being raised on abundant internet porn and its role (if any) it
plays in how men emotionally and physically connect with women or other men.

~~~
an_ko
What is it about porn that makes you feel depressed? I've heard that opinion
before, but I just can't relate, despite being one of those people raised on
abundant internet porn. It has been a very clear net positive for me. I'm in a
successful long-term relationship.

Are single-player games tearing society apart? Is a deck of cards wasted on
solitaire? Must all bicycles be tandem?

~~~
xapata
Keep in mind that one's personal experience may not be representative of the
"average" person.

> single-player games

I get obsessive about some games. A completionist, one might say. And when
I've achieved what I want to in the game, I suddenly wake up and realize I
haven't been outside for a week and I've ignored my friends, family, and
colleagues. Worst, the guilt of that realization can be so overwhelming that I
am tempted to ignore it and simply start another game that takes over my
consciousness.

I've observed similar behavior in some others. It was most obvious among World
of Warcraft (WoW) players when I went to university. I knew more than a
handful of WoW players who dropped out of school because they found their in-
game social circle more important than just about everything else in their
lives. Rather than studying or going out, they needed to be present for the
next raid (WoW session).

~~~
scrollaway
> _I 've observed similar behavior in some others._

You'll observe that in more than just porn and games, you'll observe it in
life in general. In fact for a lot of people that's the definition of a mid-
life crisis: Suddenly waking up, realizing that you've been _wasting your
life_ slaving at a job you don't like, to make money that pays for things you
don't own which you only have to offset how shitty your job makes you feel.

If your doctor told you _right now_ , "you have exactly two weeks to live",
would your life be unchanged for the next two weeks, or would you suddenly
wake up and think "Holy hell, what have I been doing for the past age(self)
years?"

~~~
SapphireSun
Man, if only instead of buying a Jet ski these poor souls would find
socialism.

~~~
scrollaway
Or, you know, call their parents to say "I love you" before they lose the
option to.

~~~
SapphireSun
Why not both? :D

~~~
giggles_giggles
you'd be too hungry to drive the jet ski

~~~
SapphireSun
Seems unlikely. < 1% of the US population is engaged in agricultural pursuits.
Distribution is about to get self driving cars.

------
avenoir
I always found it amazing how vastly different internet communities are from
real-world communities. Skim through just about any YouTube video and the
comments are filled with some of the most vile garbage. We'd all be murdering
each other had this been the case in real-world communities. But, instead, we
think twice about what we tell others we meet face-to-face and we deal with
the impact of our actions right then and there. If we get angry, we might say
something terrible to someone and quickly see the pain in their eyes before
realizing the terrible thing we've done and regret ever doing so. The feedback
is immediate and necessary for our personal growth. Social media just
amplifies the worst in us without ever seeing the impact of the words that we
put online. It pushes people in disagreement further apart who would easily
understand each other by simply communicating face-to-face and sharing the
emotions surrounding their differences. Instead, everything is lost in endless
pile of Twitter or Facebook feeds which regurgitate apologies of "caught"
offenders and cries of the offended. All of this, in all likelihood, would've
never happened in real, physical world.

~~~
wolfgke
> I always found it amazing how vastly different internet communities are from
> real-world communities. Skim through just about any YouTube video and the
> comments are filled with some of the most vile garbage. We'd all be
> murdering each other had this been the case in real-world communities. But,
> instead, we think twice about what we tell others we meet face-to-face and
> we deal with the impact of our actions right then and there.

If you come to this conclusion, you are living in a deep filter bubble in your
real life. I often say to people (in Germany): Just go to work by tram at a
later time (when hardly any people use the tram to go to work) and you will
see how large amounts of "ordinary" people really are/look like.

~~~
jononor
How are they like?

~~~
wolfgke
Let's say it this way: People you would prefer not to have to deal with in
your life. If I give a more direct descriptions, the "guards of political
corretness" come out their holes...

~~~
norlys
I'm imagining something like an anti-Klu-Klux-Klan demonstration on the
train... Let's not make a political discussion out of this, shall we?

------
mbesto
No offense to Chamath (what I know of him, I think he's generally pretty smart
and likable), but this is a bit of a stretch:

> He said that investors pump money into “shitty, useless, idiotic companies,”
> rather than addressing real problems like climate change and disease.
> Palihapitiya currently runs his own VC firm, Social Capital, which focuses
> on funding companies in sectors like healthcare and education.

[http://www.socialcapital.com/portfolio/](http://www.socialcapital.com/portfolio/)

19 Enterprise software companies

10 Financial services companies

5 consumer companies

including companies like this:
[https://www.bustle.com/about](https://www.bustle.com/about)

These companies are focusing on "real problems"?

~~~
l4yao
Your list isn't complete. In addition to what you mentioned, there are:

6 Education

3 "Frontier"

13 Healthcare

That seems like a pretty healthy mix. By only providing select points of the
complete picture, aren't you contributing to the problem he's describing?

~~~
mbesto
I provided those data points because they represent more than half of the
portfolio. I never said that SC didn't make investments in "real problems", I
was making a point that they were also investing in companies that could be
considered "shitty, useless, idiotic companies" and/or "weren't solving 'real
problems'".

> That seems like a pretty healthy mix.

Yes, these guys are _very_ good investors, no doubt. As a fellow capitalist I
too would have made the same bets. But that has nothing to do with my point -
which is the vision of the fund is inconsistent with what I would consider the
vision of the majority of the companies that are invested in.

> aren't you contributing to the problem he's describing?

How so?

------
rokhayakebe
I watched the entire interview previously.

Chamath makes a very good point. Basically that the same brain you are using
to respond to constant interruption from social media and its feedback loops
is the same brain you are using to do supposedly great works. The former tasks
train you brain to think in a pattern that is opposite to the way needed to do
meaningful work. In other words, social media products "machine teach" your
brain whether you like it or not. Take back control.

~~~
vermontdevil
I quit FB but didn’t delete my account. I just deactivated it.

Boy they would send me emails with one-liner teasers of my friends posts
hoping I would go back. They even sent me an email with one-click to
immediately activate my account. So I simply filtered these emails to the
trash.

They have texted me twice so far but I simply ignored it.

Been few months and it’s much better now.

~~~
wybiral
To quote myself from the last FB thread:

> Same here. But different people value different things out of relationships.
> I prefer to have a handful of people close to me and don't seek out daily
> updates on everyone else.

> In fact, I enjoy running into those people or meeting up with them
> periodically even more because then they can tell me everything they've been
> going through in person. To me that's more fun than getting a stream of
> micro updates on everyone.

Keeping up-to-date with multiple people using FB is like trying to watch
multiple shows in one line snippets concurrently mixed together. When you
could just wait a bit and then watch it all as a contiguous story or have a
real meaningful conversation with a person to catch up over dinner or
something.

------
bogomipz
His LinkedIn profile states:

>"Responsible for overseeing core growth components, building new systems to
maximize adoption and virality and growing Facebook adoption throughout the
world."

Then he's quoted in the article saying:

>"The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying
how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by
“hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation;
misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about
Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

Yes its a global problem sir, why wouldn't it be? This was exactly your
mission according to your LinkedIn summary.

It's interesting that these folks never seem to have moments or self-
reflection or concerns for the greater good while they are sitting in strategy
meetings and taking these company's money and stock options. How convenient
for him that he can now make such headline-grabbing pronunciations for his own
self-promotion.

~~~
GuiA
Your view is not an unreasonable one.

However, what makes you decide to espouse this one rather than the one where
he was younger and more naive, worked at the sausage factory for a while, and
eventually realized the magnitude and dishonesty of what he was overseeing?

Both seem equally probable.

~~~
bogomipz
Look at his LinkedIn profile and how long he has been in SV and tell me if you
think he might have been "young and naive" when he joined FB.

~~~
brucephillips
Would you have rather he not made this statement? It may be self serving, but
it also serves to validate and call attention to the problem.

~~~
bogomipz
Since when do we need a career SV executive to validate our own observations
and critical thinking?

The issue has been gotten plenty of attention without him.

~~~
brucephillips
Because "our own observations" are not everyone's observations.

------
wenc
I don't think it's social media itself. Social media merely amplifies who
people are. How one handles this amplification determines the utility one
derives from social media.

The HN crowd tends to be dismissive of social media (a lot of "get off my lawn
types" around here), but I came from the world of BBSes, and to me social
media is simply an evolution of what BBSes were. For years I tried to figure
out how to reproduce the sense of community that BBSes brought about, but
never found the right niche. Then I realized Facebook was actually a evolved
version of a BBS.

I am friends on social media with complex people (who understand nuance) who
tend to use social media carefully. They use it to share events, describe
experiences (in pictures and words), and once in a while write insightful
status messages. They usually don't have extreme views, and tend to debate
issues in an even-handed way. I find being on social media with these folks to
be enriching because I get to learn a thing or two.

If you follow the right folks on Twitter, you'll get to overhear a lot of
conversations about the important issues in Python, R, or what have you, and
gain a context that eludes most people who learn programming languages from
books. Social media is good for that.

Less complex people tend to share on whatever they found on Reddit, their
favorite political website or whatever trashy site that supports their
preconceived notions. They tend not to write a lot of prose, and when they do
it's not very well-thought out. Many of our older less tech-savvy relatives
tend to fall into this category. We tolerate these people because we're
related to them, but they are the ones who use social media in a somewhat
unhelpful fashion. And before social media they found entertainment in
forwarding fake news emails without verifying them on Snopes. But we mostly
dismiss them because their believability factor is low anyway.

In the middle are the really dangerous folks, the really intelligent but
extremely partisan folks. I won't name names, but if you follow certain
celebrities in the AI world, they will often share partisan and unexamined
articles that reveal their political bias. You would think the more
intelligent someone is, the more of a critical thinker they would be, but it
turns out that most people who are good at one thing aren't usually good at
everything.

~~~
Splines
> _If you follow the right folks on Twitter, you 'll get to overhear a lot of
> conversations about the important issues in Python, R, or what have you, and
> gain a context that eludes most people who learn programming languages from
> books._

I've tried this a few times, but discoverability on Twitter is impossible. I
don't know who's an authority, digging through someone's past posts is hard,
following a discussion is really difficult. It feels like I'm tasked with
digging through a SMS chat log looking for content. Am I just doing it wrong?
I can't keep up with twitter. I follow 20-30 accounts and inevitably every
time I open up the app and there's 600+ unread posts. I couldn't imagine
following any more than that.

~~~
wenc
It takes a bit of work to figure out who the influencers are.

For instance, in R you will want to follow Hadley Wickham (tidyverse), figure
out who replies to his threads and build out your list from there.

In Python, I started off following folks whose PyCon talks I liked. Certain
names come up often in the Python world, names like Dave Beazley, Raymond
Hettinger, Wes McKinney, Jake VanderPlas, etc. I started there and built out
my list.

I'll admit some days there is low signal to noise because lots of folks
interleave their technical tweets with tweets about their personal lives or
tweets of (sometimes very funny) jokes. But I accept it because life is like
that. When you meet people at a social gathering, you can only talk shop for
so long. Software development is as much sociology as it is code slinging.
It's often as important to know why (the motivations, use cases) something is
done a certain way as it is how it is done (algorithms). There is explicit
knowledge, and there is tacit knowledge, and the latter is harder to mine but
gives one a deeper understanding of the whys as opposed to the hows.

Yes it is easily to be overwhelmed, but that is the price one pays for picking
the brains of people who build the tools you use every day. Once in a while
you pick up something valuable which makes it all worthwhile.

------
SpikeDad
It's not necessarily social media it's people's belief in what they see in
social media. Our ability to analyze from a skeptical point of view has not
kept up with our ability to distribute information.

Sadly MSM did not help us in that matter as they adopted the "get it out
first" and "clicks are the only thing that matters" point of view.

Finally I put a lot of blame on the Murdoch/Fox propaganda machinery which was
very good at getting out media which was specifically designed to confirm the
hateful opinions of their audience. It made it possible for people to embrace
"double-think" \- distrust of media while at the same time trust in their
media.

~~~
socialist_coder
I feel like this is a, "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument.

If you create a product that is both an echo chamber for reinforcing your
beliefs, while also tricking you into believing fake news, and a huge percent
of the population is negatively effected by that - can you really keep blaming
the people instead of the product?

~~~
marshray
> can you really keep blaming the people instead of the product?

Yes. Freedom of the press/media is an agreement that as adults we individuals
are responsible for our own consumption.

Anything less is an extremely slippery slope usually leading to some form of
official 'Ministry of Truth' which, in the current political regime, would be
Fox.

~~~
NoGravitas
> Freedom of the press/media is an agreement that as adults we individuals are
> responsible for our own consumption.

I think that's a fair agreement for traditional media. Commercial social
media, though, uses psychological research to optimize engagement and promote
addiction. That is to say, that they are actively working around individual
responsibility. Are adults as individuals responsible for their own cigarette
consumption? Somewhat, but not entirely.

I _don 't_ think the solution is anywhere near requiring the commercial social
networks to regulate content. I think that would produce the worst possible
outcome. I think a better approach would be along the lines of banning
optimization for engagement, requiring chronological timelines, or user-
controlled, transparent timeline algorithms.

And ultimately, the goal needs to be to replace commercial social media with
decentralized social media.

------
remir
If this is problematic today, imagine how things will be in 20 years. It will
be nightmarish.

You're on Facebook, you have a baby, you post photos of your child on Fb and
he/she becomes an entity in Fb's database. Your child grows up and eventually
creates his own Fb/whatsApp/Instagram/whatever account and the cycle continues
with his own children. This is just the beginning, folks.

~~~
659087
I'm terrified to see what happens when the generation of children who are
being sold out to Facebook/Google/etc by their parents from birth grows up and
ends up in positions of power.

~~~
hinkley
If you don’t vote for this bill we’re going to post the video of you being
mean to a pony when you were eight.

~~~
659087
That wasn't really the point I was making, which had more to do with the fact
that having a middleman recording everything you do will be so normalized to
them that they'll never give it a second thought.

However, that is related to the point you made.. though you seem to be trying
to write it off as a non-concern by using the 8 year old with a pony example.

~~~
hinkley
I wasn’t trying to write it off, but I was trying to be funny.

To your point, I wonder what happens to people psychologically when they have
to be ‘on’ all the time. We’ve built up too much of a culture of
judgementalism and one of the aspects of recording everything is that everyone
knows your business. It’s like living in a small town. Which, incidentally, a
lot of people move to the city so they could just be treated as a random
person when they go into a store instead of Betty and Charlie’s boy.

------
sbarre
Is this the same debate as "rock and roll is the devil's music" or "TV is
rotting our kids' brains" that we have every generation, except now it's
social media?

Not saying I disagree with the overall position, but I feel like there's
always something to point to that is "ripping apart society"...

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Even those debates aren't remotely the same. Just because some people are
idiots and create a scare due to irrational beliefs they have been
indoctrinated with, doesn't mean that there aren't actually things to be
scared of for good reasons.

Rock and roll was mostly deviating from the mainstream and going against some
religiously motivated moral ideas, which is an idiotic reason to be afraid of
something. TV absolutely did and still does rot people's brains, so to speak,
because that is actually the goal of some of the actors behind it, and
similarly for the antisocial networks of today.

~~~
sbarre
Obviously they are not identical, but my point was about the social discourse
(good or bad, valid or invalid, etc) around new things that disrupt or
"bother" established parts of society, and are then vilified in the media, and
as a result become even more controversial..

I feel like this is where we are headed with social media now.. That's all..

------
StanislavPetrov
The flaws in the assertions made by this Facebook exec are exactly the same as
those who assert that Russia "attacked our Democracy" using "social media". In
both cases the issue isn't "social media", its our sick society where most
people are thoughtless, lack critical thinking skills, and are easily
influenced. When people are vapid and whimsical they are extremely susceptible
to any kind of external stimulus much like someone with a compromised immune
system is susceptible to disease. Unfortunately, by the very nature of our
national disease, introspection is absent. Consequently, instead of dealing
with the root cause of social strife (the nature and intellectual capacity of
our citizens), we seek to externalize the blame ("It was the Russians!" ..
"Social media is to blame for our national discord!"). Critical thinking,
awareness and presence of mind are not lacking due to some widespread genetic
problem. These are skills that have to be honed and developed from childhood.
Paradoxically, this problem only gets worse because those who sit at the top
of the pyramid of our society don't want a nation full of critical thinkers.
They want a nation full of people who are constantly worried about where their
next rent payment, credit card payment, or insurance premium are coming from.
The last thing they want is a nation full of people willing and capable to
challenge the status quo. As a result, things will continue to deteriorate as
the vast majority of citizens are more concerned with when the new Iphone is
released or what trouble the Kardeshians have gotten themselves into this
week.

------
arca_vorago
I think the real rot of social media is the filter bubble it creates (along
with social media merging with news, ala google censorship).

I remember my early days on BBS's and IRC, when if you were an idiot you got
called out for it. It was a generally more hostile atmosphere with less
patience for idiocy, which at first doesn't seem like a positive, but by
creating rules like the one HN foisted with little user input on us of
arbitrary enforcement of "don't be unecessarily negative", I feel we actually
create a worse space by coddling users. The same applies for users self-
coddling via filter-bubbles they put on themselves, or filter-bubbles imposed
on them by whatever company. (for example, reddit censorship and manipulation
has been getting out of hand for years, and it's obvious they have been
angling towards IPO, which will be their death I hope.)

This is why I still like irc and usenet to this day.

The secondary rot of social media is the surveillance dystopia it has created
and is enabling.

~~~
HammadB
You can call someone out for being an idiot without being hostile. I think
thats the true spirit of the HN rules.

------
notadoc
I strongly believe social media in current forms is bad for society and for
people individually, it is a digital addiction that feeds the worst of human
nature with no redeeming quality.

Everyone I know who still is used by the service always reports their
experience as some variation of outrage, gossip, fake news, distraction,
attention draining, rumor, innuendo, hearsay, time wasting, conflict,
narcissism, vanity, boasting, egotism, or at best some ultra staged
portraiture intended to signal how wonderful someones life is in a completely
artificial self-selected setting. Does any of that sound like a good thing?

------
bob_theslob646
"The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying
how society works."

Was there not a 60 minutes on this topic?

I wonder if being addicted to a smart phone will actually be a disease in the
future.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Calling it an addiction is problematic, IMO. Clinically, gambling is still the
only officially "recognized" addiction that isn't an actual substance one
abuses, so there's very little academic rigor applied so far to other
behaviors that we talk about as being addictive. Sex addiction (which I bring
up because it's also one of these "brain-becomes-addicted-to-hormones-that-
make-you-feel-good concepts) has been blamed for many a sexual harassment
lawsuit in which the "victim" of the "addiction" attends a luxurious
"treatment facility" for a week and is then "cured" until their next
"relapse". The business model is shady as hell, and even the most well-meaning
anti-porn groups base a lot of what they say on very shady science like brain
scans that happen to look similar, when you can get a lot of activities to
yield similar brain scans. Therapists who approach it as a symptom of other
issues (attachment issues, for example) rather than an addiction have had more
success actually breaking habits, but rigorous research is hard to come by in
that field so far.

------
chrischen
This guy’s legit. It’s refreshing to see a tech leader admit to the part luck
plays.

~~~
fjsolwmv
And yet he isn't donating all the money he made from it... He's just shilling
for his new company

------
pitchups
More than social media by itself, the real force that is accelerating the
harmful effects of this new "addiction" is the mobile phone - due to the fact
that it is with is all the time, everywhere. That together with push
notifications, and ease of use complete the instant gratification feedback
loop that feeds off and drives the addiction. So much of our attention is
consumed by it, that even in social gartherings, it is hard to have a
conversation with some one without being interrupted or distracted by the
device. It has almost become a joke - family gatherings and social get-
togethers become places for people to congregate huddled over their mobile
phones...

------
dmode
Social Media has been terrible for society. I say this as someone who spends
considerable time on social media. But it's full impact has only starting to
unravel. We have seen nothing yet, the end result of social media, IMO, will
be magnitudes of order more ghastly than what we have seen. In developing
countries, social media is playing havoc in sowing division among very fragile
social order. The kind of forwards, memes, jokes my dad receives from his
Whatsapp community is shocking. And at age 75, he has no capacity to
distinguish between real and completely made up propaganda. The effects are
slowly been realized.

------
bjt2n3904
> We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early
> successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has
> become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve
> the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.

Huxley

------
whiddershins
I recently marked 4 months with zero acces to my Facebook news feed. I used
the hacker news plugin to prevent the feed from showing on my laptop, and when
I realized how much I was still looking at the app on my phone, I deleted the
mobile app.

I can’t overstate how much of a positive change this has been for me. It was a
level of life altering freedom and a return of free time and mental clarity in
the ballpark of abstaining from alcohol.

The number of times it has inconvenienced me is precisely once. I still have
messenger for those people who like to reach out that way. I still can log on
and see events and notifications.

But the addictive news feed is gone from my life and I couldn’t be happier.

That’s my n=1 but I will never go back.

------
jokoon
I often browse /r/4chan and I have to admit than even though 4chan is not a
website I often go to or use at all, it seems like it's a much more attractive
and fun place to go to.

I really don't understand the point of stating your real identity on a social
media. Internet security is already not perfect to this day, so what's the
point? Facebook doesn't even let you meet new people outside your network, or
even interact with friends of your friends in a trustful manner.

4chan is like the local pub, facebook is like a bar where everyone has their
name and interests written on their face. Evidently 4chan seems more natural.

~~~
ndh2
4chan is entirely fictional. When go there, you expect to read lies and
bullshitting and thathappened. And you know that people put that out there not
for the sake of influencing others, but for the sake of entertainment and fun.

4chan is like a pub without regulars. You can't go there to meet specific
people.

~~~
jokoon
You won't meet anybody on facebook either.

------
rad_gruchalski
As I mentioned here a number of times before, I already removed fb from my
phone years ago. The best thing I did yesterday was to log out from fb on the
computer.

------
forapurpose
I think people doubt the power and threat of social media (and online porn[0])
because of their physical properties: They are images on a screen - how much
harm can such things do? They are not intravenous drugs.

But what if social media, or some aspect of it, or online porn had the same
cognitive, emotional, and/or physical effects on people as heroin? In fact,
isn't that what online businesses spend so much on, and a generation of smart
people work so hard on - addictive engagement? If someone developed engagement
that powerful, do you think they'd stop themselves and say, 'this is too
much'?

My point is not that social media and online porn have the same effects as
heroin; they do not. Whatever their effects, they are at least different. My
point is that we shouldn't dismiss their danger based on our preconceptions
about the medium by which their effects are delivered.

[0] [https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-
facebook...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-
exec-ripping-apart-society)

------
djroomba
Its exacabating the problem of social division but I dont think its the root
cause.

We simply have two nations with radically different belief systems in one
nation.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
Three.

The third one believes both those two belief systems suck.

According to voting data, the third system has more believers than the others.

------
mikenew
I remember the first few years of facebook (back when you had to have a
university email address to sign up) and I genuinely think it was a positive,
value-added-to-the-world kind of experience. I had good friends on there and
we would share things, discuss different topics, and in general just interact
with each other in a way we weren't able to before. There wasn't even a "news
feed"; you just visited someone's page and looked at what they had posted or
posted something there yourself that you thought they would appreciate.

Facebook is nothing like that anymore, and while there's certainly a lot
that's changed, I think there are two specific things that turned it into what
it is now.

1) Every single thing you do; posting videos, sharing your thoughts via text,
leaving comments, joining a group, etc. runs on a point system. Everything is
scored via "likes", and not only do __you __evaluate how good a post was based
on the score it receives, but Facebook does too. The higher the score the
higher your post will appear in other people 's feeds and the more friends it
will be shown to. Facebook even shows a post to a subset of your friends to
judge how well it will perform, and if it receives a lot of likes it will be
pushed out to a broader audience. You are, quite literally, playing a game.

Not only does that change your value system from "hey I found something that
<friend> would like and I'm going to share it with them so we can talk about
it" to "hey I found something that will get me a lot of points"; it also means
that trivial content rises to the top. Cat pictures are kinda-neat to everyone
but not extremely meaningful to anyone, while a thoughtful post on a specific
topic probably doesn't appeal to everyone, but it will mean a lot to a few
people. But with the one-vote-per-person rule, the thoughtful post gets
buried.

2) Advertisements displace real content. YouTube, for all it's other flaws,
has a very straightforward ad model. Ads essentially just piggyback on videos.
If you make a really good video that means that lots of people will want to
watch it, lots of ads can be shown, you get lots of views, and all three
parties are happy without interfering with each other's interests. With
Facebook, ads don't piggyback on other content, they replace it. If you are a
company and you want to advertise yourself, you make a post and then pay have
Facebook show it to more people and place it higher in their news feeds. Real
content gets pushed down. And what's worse, there's no real distinction
between ads and content. I believe you can even pay to boost your own posts,
even as a normal user.

I think that there are going to be problems with any social platform, but
Facebook is gross. It's a social game that exploits people's natural behaviors
and ways of thinking, and does it without them realizing it to make a profit.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> I think that there are going to be problems with any social platform

The problem is the idea of a "social platform".

We need social technology, not social platforms. We need technology that
allows people to communicate and share, but we don't need a middleman that is
semantically involved in any of this. Telephone networks don't care about the
content of your calls, they simply allow you to talk to people. Parks and pubs
don't have people who monitor what you are talking about, they simply provide
you with a place to meet.

That is what the internet and technology building on it should provide.

------
mseebach
> _Palihapitiya currently runs his own VC firm, Social Capital, which focuses
> on funding companies in sectors like healthcare and education._

Oh, it's good that he at least doesn't have a direct, personal financial
interest in saying the things he does to the audience he's addressing.

~~~
asadlionpk
Even if that's the case, why not?

~~~
mseebach
Because it matters that we're discussing an ad that's carefully designed to
appeal to us, and elicit exactly the response it's getting here?

------
eternalban
He categorically stated [t=10m] that "150 [people], and they are all men, run
the world".

Watch the interview.

[https://youtu.be/PMotykw0SIk](https://youtu.be/PMotykw0SIk)

------
charlysl
Social media are like tabloids on steroids. Just like with tabloids, possibly
the only practical remedy is better education, but who is interested?

------
1290cc
Chamath is all about entertainment, his Q&A was fun to watch and filled with
brilliant one liners that are quote worthy in their shallowness. Ultimately
his advice is useless to a group of people that have to work for a living.

He also pontificates and chastises social media yet he is a prolific on
twitter.

------
braindead_in
Here's a rough automated transcript in case anyone's interested
[https://scribie.com/transcript/1c42571af44d45aea69d600f9a5a7...](https://scribie.com/transcript/1c42571af44d45aea69d600f9a5a766da3157e6e)

------
divbit
You know, if everyone on facebook would stop doing this stuff:

[link deleted since although it's all over the internet, who knows if that
subject agreed to it being everywhere anyway it's "Guy slightly changes his
friend's Facebook pictures"]

then I think it would help the platform. It was a great site when it was just
basically a nicely formatted yellow pages for people, with no news feed. Now
it's just another place trying (well it feels like it) to push, bot generated
news down my throat. This kind of sucks because I can tell they, do, put a lot
of effort into what they are doing (which means they must care about it) but
the result is still much worse than when it was just a personal homepage,
(imho of course). Also I get the creepy feeling that they it's the most likely
thing to turn into the people rating engine (like the black mirror episode),
so that kind of turns me off, quite a bit (I mean, that wouldn't be quite as
bad as having jew armbands in 1939, but... it's in that direction certainly).

------
EGreg
I'm surprised that, in all this time, no one has done better.

Here is our manifesto from our site (qbix.com)

The internet has given us opportunities to connect with one another like never
before. Yet, most sites we use today have barely tapped that potential. We
believe in the power of well-designed tools to improve people's lives and
bring about positive social change. They are characterized by five main
aspects:

Time: Instead of priding ourselves on how much time people spend in our apps,
we want people to get in, get out, and get results.

Utility: Help people get things done in the real world, rather than building
an online persona.

Notifications: Let people control which updates they receive about things
happening in their life, instead of getting them addicted to notifications
like a slot machine.

Organic: In every context, pre-compute useful information and present it to
the user, enabling them to do more in less steps.

Business Model: Make money by helping people accomplish useful things as a
group, not just by selling advertising.

These aren't just empty words. They are actionable goals to aim for in social
apps.

------
YaxelPerez
Isn't facebook terrible because most people are terrible?

~~~
seppin
FB also uses addiction techniques to encourage the worst of people
(impulsiveness, tribalism, etc.)

------
butler14
"No wonder the world's brightest minds are working at companies like this."

This is a pretty absurd comment that would only really fly on a place like HN.

------
charlysl
Maybe I am a bit old school, but am I the only one shocked by his bad
language? This makes it hard for me to take him seriously.

~~~
epias
I also find it quite surprising nobody else seems to mention this. I checked
some other interviews, and it seems to be normal for him. This is probably the
way people communicate within Facebook. I don't think it's fitting in front of
Stanford students, and it definitely doesn't help bringing your message
across.

------
rblion
I deleted this comment. This isn't the right forum for this kind of thought.

~~~
BannedInSweden
Sure - maybe the wrong forum, but the depressive sentiment that our sore thumb
ideals are hammered down by the social media monster is mutually felt and
quite inline with the article. No one knows exactly what it is like to be you,
but many of us feel a similar desire to do more than use our best skills for
the mundane - to alter the conversation is a nobel aspiration.

I too struggle with knowledge that I am bright, but that I may not be quite
bright enough to be what I really want. Its a frustrating and lonely thought
many of us in this field share. Expressing it though - even writing it in a
public forum - is often an invite to the social monsters that prowl around
here to say "then you obviously aren't that bright". Don't listen. Walk your
path.

Just do your best and understand that luck and good timing means more than
hard work and brilliance (ask any lotto winner). To say anything else is a
like a banner ad for survivorship bias. None of us matter much in the scheme
of things and all radical ideas are seen as trash to those "in the know" at
some point.

~~~
rblion
I've come to terms with a lot of things I am powerless over. I've had to
accept that the Anthropocene extinction is happening and most people are only
vaguely aware, only a few people are willing to change their lifestyle
choices. I've accepted that billions of people just want to escape poverty and
live with a few of the comforts most of us take for granted. Who are we say no
to them? I've accepted that in order for humanity to keep growing, everything
else will keep dying little by little. I wish I was wrong but everything I am
saying is supported by observable facts.

I've started to grow disillusioned with the tech industry, how different is it
from Wall Street at this point? I've grown a lot as a designer, a developer, a
writer, a salesman but now I'm only interested in earning an honest living,
not so much to 'save the world' like I felt when I was 20. It's tempting
though, I struggle with the fact that I may live and die on this world without
having had much consequence on anything. Yet I'm beginning to realize that in
the end, all we may leave behind as a species is a lot of plastic, crumbling
buildings, cigarette butts, and toxic landfills. There is the slight chance
that we expand beyond the Earth but judging from geopolitics, I'm not sure we
have our priorities right at the most critical time in human history.

I'm afraid that I am too meek to swim with the sharks and in the event I do
succeed, then I have to be ready for the day when someone from my past will
get jealous and exaggerate something from my past to some desperate media
outlet trying to get views. I would much rather buy a cabin in the mountains
and grow my own food, enjoy the simple things that have always made me happy.
I'm content with a camper van, working remotely, and seeing what's left of the
National Parks with my camera and my dog. I'm at the point now where I don't
even think I want to get married or have kids, this is where I'm at age 27.

------
rexreed
I'm sure he's crying all the way to the bank.

------
junkscience2017
this is petty pandering and moral grandstanding. if he thinks his gains are
truly ill-gotten, he can purify his money by giving it to charity. instead he
is buying bespoke suits.

