
The Infuriating Innocence of Mark Zuckerberg - schrodinger
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-infuriating-innocence-of-mark-zuckerberg
======
Animats
The real problem is advertising. "You're not the customer, you're the
product".

We've been here before. Back in the 1950s, when TV commercials appeared, the
ad industry was portrayed as a villain. "Selling out to Madison Avenue" was
considered a despicable act for a writer. There were books on the evils of ads
- "The Hidden Persuaders" (Packard, 1957). The US Congress held hearings on
the evils of television. TV did change the world. For the first time ever,
ordinary people had more free entertainment coming in than they could consume.
That had never happened before in all of history.

Facebook is a new technology for delivering ads. The problems come from being
ad-supported, not the nature of a social network. If Facebook were a paid
service without ads, most of the intrusiveness would go away.

What we need to regulate is advertising, not networking.

~~~
cafard
In the 1950s, and much more recently, the ad industry had to make guesses,
based on very limited data, about who was seeing what ads on broadcast media.
Sure, the ads for auto batteries and tires ran with football games, not with
soap operas. But compared to what you can do with on-line media, they were
working in the dark.

------
nambit
How are people still obsessed about facebook. Where was all this rage for the
equifax hack? It boggles my mind.

~~~
microwavecamera
Because Equifax was hacked while Facebook knowingly provided or sold people's
personal data. I fully agree Equifax was criminally negligent and should have
been nailed to the wall for it, but what FB did/still does is premeditated.

~~~
prostoalex
FB had two levels of opt-out - first one for the users not consenting to
provide their data to the app (a “cancel” button on the app permissions
dialogue) and the second one a global Facebook Platform opt-out when you
wanted to prevent your friends from passing on same data.

Equifax had none.

------
cirgue
The way to fix Facebook is to build a better platform and allow Facebook to go
the way of myspace.

~~~
Thriptic
It's not a platform issue, it's a monetization issue. Somehow social networks
have to make money, and that either involves charging users which pisses
people off, or relying on the fact that people don't properly value their time
and / or information and selling them ads. Selling ads incentivizes aggressive
data mining, and then you're right back to the situation we have now.

~~~
microwavecamera
I think the best solution would be to create an open, non-profit, publicly
funded platform similar to Wikipedia. Besides I believe it's possible to have
advertising on commercial sites and still be ethical.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
ActivityPub [1] is a W3 recommendation for protocol for social networks
communicating a federated p2p manner. It is used by open source social
networks like Mastedon and PeerTube to interact with eachother.

[https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub)

~~~
18pfsmt
Practically speaking, all of us that care about these sorts of things already
know about Mastodon, if not ActivityPub and GnuSocial, etc. We have lots of
potential FB competitors to root for right now.

~~~
microwavecamera
There's a few other good ones too:

[https://www.opensource-socialnetwork.org](https://www.opensource-
socialnetwork.org)

[https://www.humhub.org/en](https://www.humhub.org/en)

[https://www.oxwall.com](https://www.oxwall.com)

[https://elgg.org](https://elgg.org) \- site seems to be having issues right
now

[https://friendi.ca](https://friendi.ca)

------
Irishsteve
The article paints a picture of how hard Mark has it - just remember for all
the suffering he is going through he has billions of dollars. It's tough being
at the top :-)

~~~
elorant
So what, billionaires don't have problems?

~~~
trophycase
He could step down, dissolve the company, or tell the truth and all of these
"problems" would just go away.

~~~
elorant
Dude get real, please. He couldn't dissolve the company even if he wanted to.

------
mtgx
Also these were Zuckerberg's talking points, which he had prepared for all the
potential questions. I think it does show that his answers are mostly
"scripted" and not necessarily genuine or coming from a place of honesty.

[https://twitter.com/becket/status/983846618263891968](https://twitter.com/becket/status/983846618263891968)

Direct image link:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DadTMxlW4AAUz_h.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DadTMxlW4AAUz_h.jpg:large)

~~~
d1zzy
That's not what it shows, it simply shows he has prepared for a number of
questions. If he was the one to come up with those answers (potentially
running them by lawyers and PR just like you have to do for any public
communication when you are a CEO of a publicly traded company) then it's still
coming from a place of "honesty", it would be his genuine opinions. In order
to say that he wasn't being honest you have to prove that those answers were
prepared by someone else.

