> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies.
Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names. It had the best network effect because of its real name policy (you could easily find people you knew), but it didn't tell you about it, it just posted your name from the sign-up page, which was kind of a dark pattern at the time.
Facebook also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you. But don't try scraping your own contacts out of Facebook, that's wrong.
Remember the apps, like zombie games? Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs.
Facebook has always been ruthless and other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) as far as I can tell it's never really had any mission other than getting big.
The idealism is the current corporate story - "enabling communication" etc. - but you're right that there was no idealism to start with. Zuckerberg set up The Facebook so undergrads at Harvard could rate how hot girls were, scraping their images from unprotected university servers.
The main conclusion is that Zuckerberg is a pure, amoral opportunist, which is why Facebook has been so successful through an era of "ask for forgiveness, not permission".
This is the first time I heard about anyone buying into any sort of "idealism" of Facebook. Isn't Zuckerberg famous for calling Facebook users "dumb f***s" back in the early days for willingly handing over all sorts of information?
It wasn't so much "idealism" than it was the fact that social media was directly responsible for the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the US's first Black president. It also gave him a significant advantage in 2012. Nobody wanted to touch social media out of fear of putting future Democrat POTUS candidates at a disadvantage.
Notice how, in 2017, it's only after everyone starts post mortem evaluating the 2016 election that the "idealism" of social media begins to sour.
> It wasn't so much "idealism" than it was the fact that social media was directly responsible for the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the US's first Black president.
That's a very strong claim, hence needs strong evidence to be taken seriously.
I can't cite sources since it would involve trying to piecemeal together tons of almost 20 year old Twitter posts (the ones that are still even online in some capacity). But I'd strongly encourage anyone interested to research both the 2008 campaigns of Barack Obama and the late John McCain. Obama went hard into social media like FB and Twitter with almost daily updates, and also used those platforms to directly connect with voters. McCain's campaign, if I remember right, largely stayed off of them until right before the election. And even then, McCain/Palin only used it like an RSS feed and really didn't engage with anyone.
It's the same strategy that propelled Bernie Sanders to the national stage in 2015/2016. It's the same strategy that got Donald Trump elected, legitimately or otherwise, both in 2016 and 2024. No one wanted to touch it until it made both Trump become POTUS and made a Clinton lose an election.
> Facebook also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you.
I remember FB recommending me a contact, I thought "Why does that distinctive name sound familar?". I looked through my e-mails and I had sent a few emails back and forth with the person because of an eBay transaction.
I know I never told FB to scrape my email account, but I'm guessing this person did. And it's certainly not even the address book, but the email addresses from people's inboxes (and why not the names from the "From" field as well. If I was tasked with this I'd even suggest scraping any signature fields).
Several years ago (~2016), I was working on writing a facebook integration for the company I was working for at the time. I'd deleted my personal facebook account years before that, so I created a new facebook profile to test with. I faked all the information (My actual first name, but the company I worked at for last name, used my company email, made up a birthdate, etc.) I was using a different computer than I'd ever logged in to facebook before, and I was on the company network.
On the first page after signing up, it wanted me to "Add some Friends", and suggested a bunch of people I knew. Including my cousin with a different last name, and who lived several states away.
I've always been fairly privacy conscious, always using an adblocker, but that was downright creepy.
A guy I used to work with was super proud of his privacy stance, and "look at my new IPhone" levels of telling everyone about it. He was routinely bellowing how HIS phone number would never be in Google's hands, by god.
I told him "Don't worry John, they already have it. You're in my contacts list." and the realization that hit him was almost physical.
I find it "amusing" that FB (or well, a lot of phone apps) can see how your relationship with people ebb and flow.
E.g. for a dating situation: new WhatsApp contact, growing frequency of texts, growing frequency of WhatsApp calls, culminating in a night where both phones were connected to the same SSID / locatable in one geo-location throughout the whole night, without their users checking them.
When that happens it'd be time to show them ads with the text "Your new love interest is highly interested in these products"...
It'd also be "amusing" to big-data the whole thing and get the computer to spit out the answer to the question "Where is this relationship going?"
It definitely uses connection IPs as some heuristic.
I exclusively used Facebook for family (years ago before deleting it) and received recommendations of otherwise socially-unconnected roommates who habitually accessed FB through house wifi.
I don't think that they'd go as far as scanning mailboxes, the return on the effort doesn't seem worth it. More likely the person you were connected to added you to an address book (or perhaps their mailer added you automatically) as someone they have dealt with before. Some anti-spam measures use a source address existing in a connected addressbook as a whitelisting clue.
I'll bite. When I worked there I didn't see the management as idealistic, but the news media vis a vis the employee base had a lot of power. Many times I saw fiery journalism create direct confrontations between Zuck and ordinary employees about things like the company's moderation reaction to the shocking "napalm girl" wartime photo. Back then employees often won, creating shifts on company policy that felt like would not have happened otherwise. At some point it seems that the company decided that it wanted its people to have less of that kind of power though, presumably because it created a liberal company and Zuck seems to see the idea of Facebook as a liberal entity as a serious threat to his company
> Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names
No, FB was a much better product, it was far more connected, any way easier to talk and make friends online. It also was a lot more reliable.
> Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs.
Indeed, they were not kind, mainly because they realised, way too late, that the API they had designed gave third parties way too much access to the "social graph". (see Cambridge analytica, although actually its much more smoke and mirrors than you might imagine)
They needed to cut down that access because 1) they'd been told to 2) they realised that people could extract that data for free, thus denting their analytics advantage that made advertising so lucrative.
FB used to have granular privacy controls and no "feed" -- you wrote on someone's wall, they wrote on yours, and people had to actively click on your profile to see the messages rather than have them thrust front and center.
FB abandoned that commitment to privacy and has suffered as a result.
It's more accurate to say the community has suffered. This is the change that lead to Facebook being one of the leading misinformation platforms, because they shovel garbage at people to drive engagement.
I have a throwaway profile with no friends that follow now pages. In the absence of anything else, Facebook has somehow decided I would most like to see anti trans nonsense, flat earth conspiracy theories and child sexual abuse material.
(They don't remove the latter if you report it, of course.)
It was also born by the guy - Zuck and arguably in a similar spirit - who initially created a hot or not webpage to rank female college classmates by "fuckability". No clue how any of this would come as a surprise if you know his history.
Brian Cantrill talks about how social media was born crocked [1] while referring to the eerily similar friendster backstory.
> and other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) as far as I can tell it's never really had any mission other than getting big.
I sometimes wonder what motivations these orgs have in contributing to open source.
My cynical side refuses to believe that the reasons are altruistic (although I'm sure there are altruistic individuals in those orgs!).
I think that the decisions to contribute to open source are calculated business decisions made to benefit the organization by:
* Getting outside contributions to the software that's widely used inside an organization
* Getting more people familiar with the software so that when they're hired they are already up to speed
* Attracting talent
* Improving PR
* Undermining competition (Llama?)
Regardless of the reasons, I think that there's a huge net benefit to society from large companies open-sourcing their software. I just don't think that's an argument to view these companies more favorably.
In other words, wiping out your competitor's business moats. If their cashflow is dependent on selling phones, open source your phone operating system to lower the value of the proprietary system.
It can also be used to quickly gain market share where you previously had none and wants to catch up on your competitors. You're bleeding money any way to try to pry open an established market, and open source might be the cheaper route. Most famous examples are perhaps Apple (webkit, cups) and Facebook (AI).
> other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess)
Not to detract from your main point but I think this misses a lot of contributions, eg Cassandra, Hive, Presto, GraphQL, the plethora of publications coming out of FAIR (fundamental AI research) and of course the Llama family of models which have enabled quite a few developments themselves
At least with GraphQL I think the world would be better off if it had never seen the light of day. It's a steaming pile of hyper complex dung.
And for the other projects, their paths are littered with the dead bodies of engineers who had been ordered to chase down one of Facebook's hype technologies just because "Facebook does it so we can follow their best example".
It's funny to think of a scientific office tool that doesn't auto-generate macro-type operations for you as needed. Both would be on the dull side, I suppose, for somebody like me, with limited expertise in how to quantify what I guess would do the kind of thing you would most often want done with software with the name GraphQL, making graphs, but it would feel to me, I believe, more like real business work if you were asking for each graph task as needed.
> At least with GraphQL I think the world would be better off if it had never seen the light of day. It's a steaming pile of hyper complex dung.
Of course not. GraphQL has vastly simplified our backend development, and has also resulted in better coordination between backend and frontend teams. There are so many things which GraphQL gets right - TYPES and schemas, traversing entity relationships, selectively querying fields, builtin API explorer etc. We use REST only for super trivial projects.
I'm more of an ops person and had the misfortune having to assist an inherited Drupal/static site generator project that heavily used GraphQL. It was not fun to debug this crap, and that is my biggest issue - as if the SSG setup itself isn't already a pain in the ass, adding GraphQL to the build stack was just the icing on the cake.
(One of the issues the dev team faced was the insane amount of RAM that was consumed by the GraphQL crap in both the FE and BE containers, which was a pain to debug for the FE side because that was an ephemeral container on an EKS environment)
IMHO, GraphQL entices developers on both ends to just be lazy and throw the complexity to the other team, and Ops who has to support both teams and mediate between both sides who just blame the other side for being too dumb.
The home-baked solutions it replaced where even worse hyper comlex dung though. Graph databases are a hard problem, so the solutions are never going to be as nice as key-value with an index.
> Graph databases are a hard problem, so the solutions are never going to be as nice as key-value with an index.
The key question is do you even need to use a graph database, and for almost everyone not being a social network or other multibillion user count service, the answer is a clear "no, postgres/mysql (depending on familiarity and pain tolerance) is more than enough".
Unfortunately, many developers and even more architects are following "resume driven development" instead of going for something old and tested...
I think React and GraphQL are pretty impressive in terms of how shitty they've made the developer experience at so many companies. GraphQL especially seems to attract the kind of people who love to misuse technologies built for massive orgs in companies with fewer than 100 employees.
> GraphQL especially seems to attract the kind of people who love to misuse technologies built for massive orgs in companies with fewer than 100 employees.
This is almost exactly how I feel about Kubernetes
That explains some of the experiences ive seen at small companies! From my pov it was "design-by-resume." People wanted to play w tech for their next job, with less concern for what the business needed.
There's actually a well-known effect in standards, that large orgs want to overcomplicate them, as having implemented a bunch of overcomplicated standards becomes part of their moat against competitors. This is definitely done deliberately; the most blatant example is Office Open XML but it's true of others too. They know that they have the staff to waste effort on it, and others don't.
I'm not sure anyone is thinking 'lets open source our most dumb ideas to hobble potential competition' - but they would do it if they thought of it.
>Zuckerberg's Law: The amount each person shares double each year.
Anecdotally, this is almost certainly false. I (and most people I know) are posting ("sharing") less and less. Faced with a surveillance panopticon, I think many normal people are opting out. Peer-to-peer networks are withering.
The internet is reverting to the format of traditional media, with two distinct classes of broadcasters ('influencers') and audience members.
So not only is Facebook historically engaging in creepy contact scraping, but when they finally do get the world connected (for various definitions) they don't even do a good job with that
The strong possibility Zuckerberg just doesn't care about people
That law exists at least since 2008, over a decade and a half ago. It’s plausible it was true and born from observation at the time. The first Snowden documents were published half a decade later, in 2013.
Yeah, so a decade-old now-dead trend isn't a "law" or we could be talk about the "Iron Law of jQuery: All sites will expand until they include at least three incompatible versions of jQuery".
The number of people who drank the kool-aid is astonishing. To the same tune, I think that if you tell people that politicians lie, majority of them will be deeply shocked, hurt, and offended.
I’m not sure that’s true in general. I see many people do the polar opposite: spout “every politician is the same, they’re all crooks”. Which isn’t helpful either.
Could be a generational or cultural thing, though.
If you do it as a blanket statement — i.e. all politicians lie all the time — then yes, I will be pretty irritated.
Some politicians spout dangerous nonsense most of the time.
Other politicians can be trusted most of the time, and when they lie it tends towards 'spin' or 'being economical with the truth' (such as: "we are spending more on education than ever before" — when this is true in nominal/absolute terms but false in real/per-pupil terms).
There is a world of difference between these positions, and treating them alike (as many do) undermines democracies.
Never saw Twitter as idealistic. Seems to just want to show you celebrity gossip. Substantially worse product than Facebook from the start, and really pioneered the attempts at trying to continuously grab people's attention as opposed to just being a tool. Not really a defense of Zuck's products as a whole as Instagram seems to be the same.
>Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names
That was (and is) a fantastic feature, and I remember being aware of it when I signed up. It was super easy to meet people in real life then find them on Facebook, and then invite them to future events in real life or keep track of what they're up to.
Also Myspace allowing HTML resulted in a bunch of entirely unreadable pages. And the Myspace extended friend network didn't really work because everyone was friends with Myspace Tom (who by all means seems to be a chill guy IRL)
>Remember the apps, like zombie games? Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs.
If anything, Facebook was too friendly to third party devs (which does track with your comparison with Amazon, which I think is far too friendly to third party sellers). Third party apps are anti-features IMO. Should've just stuck to its core functionality, connecting you with people you know, and showing you content from groups that you have chosen to join (which you can still get in your newsfeed if you aggressively block and hide almost everything, which I do lol)
> Substantially worse product than Facebook from the start
I disagree. When Twitter first started taking off at SXSW twenty years ago it had very little in common with Facebook. There wasn't an algorithm, there were no ads, and there was barely a website. You just received text messages from people you followed. You mostly interacted with it via your phone and for many of us, that meant text entry on the digits keys of a Nokia or Motorola phone. It was delightful. You likely personally knew all the people you were tweeting with.
Facebook was something you did on your computer. There were lots of ads and they had just launched the algorithmic news feed. It was the beginning of something bad IMHO.
I think I got an account in late 2007 or 2008, so perhaps it was different in 2006 or early 2007. But I do remember in 2009, Ashton Kutcher was in the news for having a million followers on Twitter, so the time where it was not for celebrity gossip was certainly brief.
I also generally prefer not to be notified by things on my phone if I can avoid it, computer use is more deliberate.
>You likely personally knew all the people you were tweeting with.
But I certainly knew all the people I was friends with on Facebook, they were people I first met in person, and it had their names.
I think fundamentally, I dislike the asymmetric nature of "following" people on Twitter (or Instagram or whatever). On Facebook you are friends or you are not. Obviously you can hide/mute people or whatever but the fundamental interaction is mutual.
> Never saw Twitter as idealistic. Seems to just want to show you celebrity gossip. Substantially worse product ...
That may have been late stage Twitter, but early stage twitter was _not_ that. It became _the_ (only) way to be able to get near real-time information on some unfolding event, usually by the people actually involved, and very useful in that regard. It facilitated realtime communications in a way that FB did not.
Back then, it was always different at the start. This was when digital services were built with the service, not exit, in mind.
Or maybe it's just me looking at the past through rose-colored glasses? Yet I really feel the rot wasn't always there, it set in over time and eventually encompassed all. Today, I pretty much assume that any new service is an exit-seeking scam until proven otherwise; I don't remember having much reason for that 15 years ago.
Facebook had the same kind of noble mission Google once had. Google's mission was to make information universally accessible. Facebook's was to connect people.
There are lots of reasons FB beat MySpace. MySpace was really a different product. It was focused on your homepage, really. Facebook was one of the first to introduce an algorithmic feed. I would also disagree that people were "tricked" into using their real names. This greatly helped with discoverability and it's actually what most people want.
As for Facebook scraping third-party sites... citation needed. I mean this was great for Facebook's advertising business but it's really no different to the DoubleClick (and ultimately Google) pixel, which is to say it's a high-level profile of pages you visit (that have the pixel).
As for the games, Facebook didn't kill those. Mobile did. And I'm sorry, but nothing will make me feel sorry for Mark Pincus and Zynga [1].
Agreed, a lot of companies I can make an argument for believe in many being "idealistic" at some point. (admittedly I'm using "idealistic" as a very wide ranging concept here)
Not Facebook... if there was some idealism it was way way before I found Facebook.
I know several people that worked there back in the growth days of the company. They had all drunk the kool aid hard on the work connecting people and making the world a better place. Several of them became very disenchanted when scandals like Cambridge Analytica or the manipulation of the public during 2016 election occurred.
Zuck and the leadership there had really spun a positive, world changing narrative to employees.
I remember de people graph search when no privacy settings really existed and people kept complete and updated profiles. It was the ultimate stalker took. Absolute batshit crazy that it existed even for the short time it did.
Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies.
Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names. It had the best network effect because of its real name policy (you could easily find people you knew), but it didn't tell you about it, it just posted your name from the sign-up page, which was kind of a dark pattern at the time.
Facebook also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you. But don't try scraping your own contacts out of Facebook, that's wrong.
Remember the apps, like zombie games? Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs.
Facebook has always been ruthless and other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) as far as I can tell it's never really had any mission other than getting big.