You make it sound like it's a bad thing that it aligns with their business goals. I'd turn this around: if it didn't align with their business goals I would be worried that they would course correct very soon.
No, just that they shouldn't be showered with praise for doing what is in their best interests - commoditizing their complement.
For the same reason Microsoft doesn't deserve credit for going all in on linux/open source when they did. They were doing it to stave off irrelevance that came from being out-competed by open source.
They were not doing it because they had a sudden "come to jesus" moment about how great open source was.
In both cases, it was a business decision being marketed as an ideological decision.
I really don’t understand this weird, almost zealous resistance to admitting that a company can do a good thing once in a while. You’d think Meta had kidnapped people’s families and held them at gunpoint or something.
It's not. It's resistance to the idea that their demands to be lavished with praise should be acceded to because their single minded focus on profit aligned with a good thing once or twice.
They're supposed to do good things all the time without praise. That's why society grants them the right to profit.
Where is Meta demanding to be lavished with praise? As far as I can tell, nobody from Meta is demanding or asking that. The only thing that’s happening is people in the comments here on HN saying “wow this is neat, and it’s cool that it’s open source”, and then getting UM ACKCHYUALLY’d by reply guys telling them that Facebook is actually full of corporate genociders who occasionally write open source to fool us all.
Morality aside, I do like the open source work coming out of Meta. It's possible for a company to be "bad guys" in one area, and "good guys" in another.
Preposterous, it’s not like Zuck got on the horn with his algorithm devs and was like “let’s get rid of some people in Myanmar in a really roundabout way.” Do you hold the guy behind Curl to the same standard every time his software gets used in a way he didn’t intend?
Basically it's accusing Meta of should have knowing that their algorithm and their user generated stickers was spreading this content.
Yes in an ideal world they should catch any campaign of this sort, but global moderation is difficult and they offer no proof that Meta knew about this.
It's disingenuous to say that Meta agitated this event. Those specific users of Meta agitated it and Meta did not catch it.
> Yes in an ideal world they should catch any campaign of this sort, but global moderation is difficult
It really isn't, it just is expensive to do it. They could just hire people to do that. Thats the accusation. Of course they don't catch it if they don't try.
Meta (or TikTok or Twitter or any other social media company/product) can't both algorithmically create specific types of discourse (because higher engagement means more ad views) and deny responsiblity for the side effects of said discourse.
