
Mark Zuckerberg is ‘dictator’ of Facebook ‘nation’: The Pirate Bay founder - Jerry2
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/27/mark-zuckerberg-is-dictator-of-facebook-nation-the-pirate-bay-founder.html
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iaw
>"We censor a lot of things, why not censor Facebook?"

That seems like a really odd sentiment for the founder of The Pirate Bay. I
was hoping he'd have a more creative solution than censorship given the
history of his site.

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benbenolson
> Mark Zuckerberg is a rich white dude from a really privileged background

Since when does this mean that he knows nothing of culture? I feel like he's
making a lot of generalizations: Europe is a giant continent with over 50
countries, most of which contain white people. How can he claim that
Zuckerberg is "interfering with our local culture" of ALL of Europe? Seems
fishy.

Still, Facebook's privacy policy, as well as its usage, are quite annoying,
and comprise the reason that I don't use the service. It's extremely easy to
avoid: simply tell people that you know that you don't have a Facebook, and
they communicate with you via SMS, calls, etc.

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bordercases
"Our" might be a stretch; the children of Mother Europa are quite diverse unto
themselves, so one person claiming to be "European" only begins to make sense
under "enemy of my enemy..." conditions.

But "all of Europe" seems feasible to me. Facebook does have a massive
outreach coming from the Internet, after all.

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jbob2000
"And really you can't opt out of Facebook. I'm not on Facebook but there are a
lot of drawbacks in my offline world. No party invitations, no updates from my
friends, people stop talking to you, because you're not on Facebook. So it has
real life implications."

I've never experienced this. Perhaps if you are some ultra-socialite, yes, but
I have a couple close friends and we reach out to each other in various ways
which mostly don't involve facebook. I think this is a phrase that just gets
repeated without people actually thinking about their own situation.

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tekklloneer
Just because you've never experienced doesn't mean it's real. I have
experienced it.

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mbrameld
That isn't a result of Facebook, that's a result of inconsiderate friends.
There are a couple friends in my group that aren't on Facebook, so we text
them.

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tekklloneer
If all of my friends (coworkers, work friends, casual acquaintances) are using
Facebook for events, and I'm the one insisting they contact me directly, then
I feel like I'm being the inconsiderate one.

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__abc
Really? I wouldn't think this of a friend not on a particular social website
or if I myself was the one on a particular social website.

I guess I'm old (mid thirties) and rely so heavily on text et al

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wutbrodo
A reasonable analogy would be someone who didn't accept texts and insisted on
party invitations (and communicating) through post or in-person visits. It's
easy to say "Well a real friend would make the time to drop by", and that's
perhaps a consistent definition of "real friend". But the fact remains that
there's a whole host of pleasant social interactions (many of which others
would define as "real friends") that you'd miss out on if you only relied on
more inefficient communications technologies.

I'm not a heavy Facebook user, and I've considered deleting it multiple times,
but each time I couldn't convince myself that there was any advantage to doing
so over just using it as an inbox. Particularly with things like the News Feed
Eradicator Chrome extension, I can basically pretend that all the irritating
parts of Facebook don't exist when I check my messages and events. Having a
single place where all the members of a group can see and share information on
their own schedules is infinitely more convenient than trying to hack together
the same thing over multiple bilateral communication channels (i.e
texting/calling). Sure it would be better if it was federated, but given that
there is no such widely-used solution, it's not hard to understand how people
refusing to participate in FB groups can be fairly perceived as being the
inconsiderate one (or else being left out altogether).

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kruhft
Facebook is a 'free'[1] community and every community has some form of leader.
Sometimes those with direction _are_ dictators (sometimes), as in they dictate
orders so that others can follow the direction. Facebook is very successful
and I don't see how this leadership style is failing them, yet.

[1] Yes, I understand 'you are the product' on free sites like this.

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Lasher
Is this article for real? I start a website and it becomes insanely popular
then someone suggests it is wrong that I "wasn't elected" to be the leader of
it. Only in Europe...

Facebook has its issues and is ready to be replaced any day now, but it's
still a private site with private rules and use of it _is_ optional.

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hasenj
> if you look at it from a democracy standpoint, Mark Zuckerberg is a
> dictator. I did not elect him. He sets the rules

You kind of did, when you signed up.

> And really you can't opt out of Facebook. I'm not on Facebook but there are
> a lot of drawbacks in my offline world. No party invitations, no updates
> from my friends, people stop talking to you, because you're not on Facebook.
> So it has real life implications.

Oh yes you can. Facebook is just about the worst place for actually expanding
your social life.

When I was there, when I would make a post, it often felt like I was talking
to everyone and no one at the same time.

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megalodon
> You kind of did, when you signed up.

Problem is many people signed up years ago and I bet they've changed their ToS
and privacy policy 100 times since then without people noticing.

Facebook satisfied our needs to connect with our friends when it arrived. Now
it's 100% ads. I used to have real discussions with friends, but the comment
quality today is basically on par with youtube (if not worse).

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simonsarris
> Problem is many people signed up years ago and I bet they've changed their
> ToS and privacy policy 100 times since then without people noticing.

Honestly that sounds functionally like democracy still.

People (not I) voted for policies years ago have have changed a thousand times
since, with or without people noticing.

Officials campaign promising to serve constituents in some way (we can call
this their Terms of Service), people elect them, then they change those terms
often, sometimes dramatically, sometimes on day 0. Whether people notice or
not seems to have little effect.

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methodover
Why would democracy be better in this case? When it comes to a business, I
don't know if I would prefer mob rule to a benevolent dictator.

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jessaustin
s/:/, says /

That is a confusing headline!

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drivers99
It should be other way around, like _speaker_ : _what_they_said_

So it would be:

The Pirate Bay founder: Mark Zuckerberg is ‘dictator’ of Facebook ‘nation’

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smashingmachine
The resemblance of Zuck to Ceasar is striking......

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meeper16
I remember when he called his users 'dumb fu*ks'. That told me everything I
needed to know about the DNA of that company.

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icebraining
I never had a FB account, and I've tried to discourage people from using it
every since Beacon came to light, back in 2007/8\. FB is a scourge on the web.

That said, I never really understood why here of all places he gets grilled
over that phrase. I mean, he was right - they were dumb for uploading personal
data and pictures to some unknown site owned by some unknown kid. Should he
pretend otherwise? Is hypocrisy or stupidity a requirement for running a
social network?

It reminds me of the quote from Red Mars, _" It was a mistake to speak one's
mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it
never did."_

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wutbrodo
> That said, I never really understood why here of all places he gets grilled
> over that phrase. I mean, he was right - they were dumb for uploading
> personal data and pictures to some unknown site owned by some unknown kid.
> Should he pretend otherwise?

Because everything he says and everything he indicates about his beliefs is
that sharing is a net good and everybody should be doing it as much as
possible (I'm simplifying a little bit, of course). Just because you (and many
here) feel differently doesn't mean it's impossible that someone could
genuinely believe in the mission of connecting everyone, as opposed to
thinking people are "dumb fucks" for wanting to do so.

Listen to Larry Page speak enough times and you'll get the same sense: he
genuinely believes (to at least some degree) 1) organizing all the world's
information from every possible source does powerful good that is more than
worth the risks/costs and 2) advertisements are effectively a human-curated
addendum to information-seeking and thus entirely consistent with the
"organizing information" goal. The fact that you or I may disagree with those
ideas doesn't make him a hypocrite for his true-believer status.

> Is hypocrisy or stupidity a requirement for running a social network?

This is a beyond-bizarre assertion. Loudly and constantly extolling the value
of less and less barriers to oversharing when you in fact agree with many
people that those doing so are dumb _is_ hypocrisy. To use the same analogy,
it's as if there were early records of Larry Page saying something like "once
everyone gets their information filtered through us, we can nudge them into
believing whatever we want". Do you think the absence of such records
indicates that LP is a hypocrite?

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icebraining
To me, there's a subtlety - though I realize Zuckerberg may not have meant it.
One may believe that sharing is good and should be encouraged, while
recognizing that there are dumb ways of going about it.

People were uploading their personal data, expecting it not to be completely
out in the open (back then, FB was even restricted to colleges), despite the
site being run by someone they have never heard about.

It's like believing that people should travel and meet new places, it doesn't
mean you can't also believe that entering in an unmarked "taxi" in a foreign
country in a high crime area is a dumb move.

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wutbrodo
That's fair, and I did think of that for a second. The fact remains that he
was providing a service while calling his users dumb fucks for using the
service; Effectively, he was peddling something that he clearly believed was
against the interests of his users.

When the person constantly trying to convince 7 billion people that sharing
every aspect of their lives on his platform is a good idea, it seems entirely
relevant that he has demonstrated in the past that he will gladly market you
something that he believes is damaging or dangerous or whatever. This is part
why people are more inclined to think of the guy as a snake than many other
tech leaders: while it's obviously in their interest to sell you their
product, you can make a much more plausible case that Bezos or Jobs or Page or
Brin actually believe in their pitch too.

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zxcvcxz
Well I agree I don't know why people trust big tech companies. I guess most
people don't trust them they just put up with the abuse. Even if you trust
facebook then you have to trust their employees and the third parties they
share your information with. Everything you do online probably exists on many
different servers, some of which are insecure, allowing the many world
governments (china, russia, five-eyes) to extract everything they want, thus
putting it on more insecure servers, where it falls into the hands of
criminals and gets sold on the dark web for bitcoin.

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dhimes
Tragedy of the commons. It's not worth it for individuals to withdraw.

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simplicio
We need a corollary to Betteridges law for headlines with more than one set of
scare quotes in them.

