I’m obviously biased since I work there, but I had the exact same concerns before starting two years ago. In reality things are much more different that what HN makes it sound like. There’s all sorts of people, and not everyone agree, and much like the current climate in the US people are getting more and more polarized. I think it’s pretty awesome that everyone in the company is free to express themselves and debate and openly challenge management during Q&As and other events, but I also recognize that at some point the debates can turn toxic and I can see why we would want to avoid that. Once you realize how things work from the inside, you realize that the majority of people do want to make the world a better place, and that it’s easy to pick on things that didn’t work quite well and forget all of the positive sides that social networks have brought to the world. You can tell me that I’m drinking the kool aid but IMO internally things are really not at all like HN likes to portray it everyday.
> Once you realize how things work from the inside, you realize that the majority of people do want to make the world a better place
It's hard to square that with the algorithmic feed, likes, etc, which are making the world worse every single day in favor of engagement metrics. We've known for many years how destructive these are.
Facebook and Twitter could literally make the world a better place simply by disabling those kind of features. Just remove them. It doesn't get easier than that to substantially improve the world, yet it's not being done.
> Facebook and Twitter could literally make the world a better place simply by disabling those kind of features. Just remove them.
I'm not sure about that. I agree that the world might be better, but I'm not sure they could just disable them. The next smaller competitor who won't will have more user engagement and grow. If something is a very effective advantage, I believe you can only remove it by coordinated action and enforce it on a global scale.
Modern weapons are terribly efficient at killing people. But if you're the only country that's removing them from your arsenal, you depend on the mercy of your neighbors.
This doesn’t need to be a secret flipped switch. It could be a very public announcement, which lots of supporting data and arguments. Nobody is going to build a successful competitor to FB based off of “we’re doing the same thing that Facebook just very publicly stopped doing because they took a stand against its society-destroying implications”.
Maybe, but I have doubts. Nobody likes predatory lending, but it's still a blossoming industry. I believe that works for small things, but if the advantage is large enough, somebody will step up and do it.
And it's not like people don't like it. They "want" to be engaged, to feel anger and surprise etc, those systems work because they're catering to peoples' instincts and desires.
I don't think the question is really about how the internal politics of Facebook work. The question is whether you should devote years of your limited working time and your talent to make the world a worse place to live in (which I think FB almost certainly does).
And I’ll say that you’re entitled to your opinion. If you do think that, then indeed I would not recommend to join. If you are on the verge, like I was, then my advice is to join because you will be surprised to see that it’s not what you thought it was.
Also there for the world to see. I just think on balance Facebook is a force for social destruction and individual harm on a scale never even imagined.
I looked at your blog; you seem like a talented, driven person. Why not apply those gifts to something meaningful? Why spend your limited working years building tools for this horrible company?
The problem is that we can't take your agreement or disagreement at face value. The OP that prompted this entire thread admitted, front and center, that their $400k total comp number was very seductive. People do and believe all sorts of things when their fat salary incentivizes them to do so, even if they don't consciously realize it.
What's that Upton Sinclair quote? Ah, yes: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I recognize that it might not seem fair to take this position, but understand that it's an easy one to take when I look at FB's negative effects not just on the world, but on the lives of actual people I know. It seems unlikely to me that a disinterested party could truly weigh FB's positives and negatives and think the balance is positive. But you are far from unbiased, and I hope you can at least realize that.
Oh yeah for sure, I am indeed biased and I recognize that. I still think that most people here fail to see how the app is used throughout the world in positive ways.
I don't think that's the case. Most replies I see absolutely acknowledge that FB has positive effects, just that the negative affects outweigh those positives (which is my position as well). And frankly I just don't think a current employee (who is relatively happy and in good standing) can be objective about this at all.
It's great that y'all discuss this sort of thing internally, but at the end of the day, FB and similar platforms have increased polarization, addicted users, eroded privacy, and allowed state actors to influence elections. And that's the incredibly short list.
Whatever internal discussions you're having, they're not working. I'd posit that they can't work, because FB's entire business model is predicated on user-hostile, polarizing behavior, whether anyone internally will admit it or not.
It frankly does not matter one bit what things are like internally when externally we can see the harm FB has caused, and there is zero evidence that harm is going to stop.
I suggest you try and talk to some people who actually get positive value out of Facebook for an alternate perspective. The HN audience (mostly young, nerdy white men) have always been one of the worst demographics for social networking products, and they might give you the impression that it's strictly bad for society because they don't personally derive any benefit from it. But if you step outside of that group, you will find there are actually a lot of people whose lives are enriched by social products.
Incidentally, this is why Google+ failed -- it was a social network marketed to the kind of people that hate social networking :)
> The HN audience (mostly young, nerdy white men) have always been one of the worst demographics for social networking products...
Wow, that's a very racist/sexist statement and you don't even leave a hint about why you think it's true. Worse, it reads like you expect it to be obvious. What about a person's gender or skin makes them "a bad demographic for social networking"?
Edit: Also presumptuous of you about the HN crowd. Where would you even get those statistics? HN doesn't collect that data.
