Hilariously, this is kind of how I felt reading the comments here. I thought every commet would start of by saying this is such a pathetic superficial ploy for the trial in question that it's idiotic to respond to it in earnest outside of a courtroom. But then obviously the comment would go on to explain why that's the case.

Whatever sort of business Facebook, Insta, TikTok and Twitter are called now, it's pretty clear they co-evolved into it near identically by watching the others' product. If fb isn't social media, then neither are the rest. If fb is a purple cow then so are the others. The point is they were called "social media" at the time FB purchased Insta.

If Zuck is going to show a graph illustrating how force fed cows in a cage were unable to walk by themselves as time progressed, then someone should put up a graph tracking the number of Whatsapp groups that were created as time went by. If that number was going up, what is left to talk about for fuck's sake.

As anti-Zuck as I am, I argue this is simply human nature. I've seen the same effect all across internet interactions, from Gamefaqs to 4 chan to Tumblr to Tiktok. controversial content will simply draw in more discussion (i.e. flamewars) than any other kind of contnet. sad content, happy content, funny content; it all falls to rage bait.

The only blame on Facebook's end is a failure to moderate and mitigate it. But at that point you ask if that would have simply pointed the controversy to the moderators (something also commonly seen).

Generally this is relevant advice for thinking about important people. We know little about them, almost all of it is projection that reflects more of my perspective than any reality of the object’s psychology.

Humans love to think we know why someone behaves the way they do. We love to diagnose disorders in strangers based on a very very tiny bit of information.

It is best to treat the decisions as black boxes, or else we are just projecting. I think it’s called the fundamental attribution bias?

All decisions based on numbers and vibes.

To be fair, the demise of the major BBS hosts / platforms + Reddit and then Discord was what killed off small web fora.

I remember Facebook group - somewhere in the early 2010s, the group feature disappeared. Years later, group appeared again and I had to re-apply to get back into the group. Perhaps group was killed to boost public sharing.

I know too many rich people to know this isn’t true.

> hire top-tier advisors

The circle of top-tier leaders who know how to manage giant tech companies is a tiny circle with Zuck being one of them.

In fact that’s what the board of directors did - they used their money to hire Zuck to run their company.

Should they be holding cash instead?

The boat is constantly rocking though, and it's actually incredible how he's kept the boat afloat and increasingly profitable. You can despise their impact on society, but he's an incredible example of a very successful CEO.

Political investigations, anti-trust, terrible media and brand image. GDPR. DMA. Etc. A literal genocide associated with their product.

The shift from desktop to mobile, and the continued evolution of the distribution channel - eg. the "Anti-tracking" requirement on apple devices.

The shift from text posts to images, to stories, to short-form video. From broadcast to DMs and groups.

The shift from "social" media to celebrity and influencer followings, to a feed entirely algorithmic.

The shift in advertisement formats, the shift across what gets advertised (eg. apps didn't exist at all when Facebook started, now they track ad-click-to-install rates through ML models).

The annoying hijacking of a thread was a visible faux pas and helped keep the order of the message board with downward social pressure as opposed to an unbreakable rule (like forcing threaded boards).

Meritocracy vs. benevolent dictatorship

Spam killed it

Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other ones.

Corporate valuation isn't about short-term thinking. It's actually all very long-term. Plenty of companies are not paying out all their profits to shareholders, and their valuation is entirely based on expectation that it'll happen in the distant future and the discounted perpetuity value will equal the initial investment, probably after the current investors are dead.

There are still plenty of vulture investors who find a way to trick the market in the short-to-medium term. I'm not convinced Facebook is a case of that, even though I hate what they do.

The interest rate "right now" is only relevant if you are playing a short-term game.

Wikipedia runs on donations. Most of FB is a massively bloated interface to maximize engagement, shove as much “content” as they can anywhere and everywhere, track everything you do, and add more “features” to find the next mechanism to get people more addicted.

For over a decade, I used Facebook lite messenger app which was built for countries with spotty, slow internet. It was less than a tenth of the size of the US messenger (of course it was unavailable in the app store and had to be installed via apk), was fast and easy to use (no stories, feeds, money sharing, animations), and was much better at doing the one thing it was supposed to be for, messaging people. It finally stopped working a couple of years ago and the regular app is a bloated mess where chats are an afterthought.

And why? Ads. You need more engagement so you can show people more ads. You need more content, so you have more things to attach ads to. You to autoplay videos to get people to watch more and see more ads. You have to run trackers so you can better target your ads. It’s the ads, not the functions, that make the modern internet too expensive to be funded by individuals.

2000s Facebook was able to run just fine on 2000s internet and storage. It would take a trivial amount of modern data and a fraction of modern storage to run now.

As positive social networking disappears, the market demand for one you can pay for with no ads increases. Pricing would be difficult but every year the average consumer learns more and more about how much "free" costs.

I agree a non-profit approach might be the only option to avoid the same long term problems we've seen time and again.

> All those photos and videos cost bandwidth, and that ain't free.

Facebook made $160bn last year, and profits were about $70bn, an almost 50% profit margin, and that's considering they're investing in a lot of crap.

There should be a middle ground between "minting gold coins" (Facebook) and "no money to pay the image hosting bills" somewhere in there.

There are structures that are more immune to this such as non-profits or cooperatives, but otherwise that distrust is warranted given the way it's all gone.

I feel like you have that exactly backwards? To me it was a shift in roles in the old field of dreams storyline. I.e. "if you build it, they will come".

In Web 1.0, you posted content and an audience came. In Web 2.0, you tried to open an empty field and commenters came and played with each other.

If anything, what happened next was a sort of halfway reversion, as the platforms tried to stratify and monetize two types of user. A subset who were the Web 2.0 contributors and another tier of more passive consumers. I think a lot of the "likes" stuff was also less about self-moderating channels and more about making passive users feel like they're engaging without actually having to contribute anything substantive.

There was plenty of discussion online prior to XmlHttpRequests, see vBulletin, Fark, Digg, etc. The only thing new about “Web 2.0” was a page refresh not being needed after an http request.

No, metrics and growth always existed and could be measured there wasn’t some technological breakthrough to enable that with Web 2.0. They, Facebook, decided to use it as their guiding principle. They decided to force the feed on their users. They knew their users had no real alternative and the value they had built with getting everyone on the network itself.

If anything, their move was anti-web 2.0. As they moved forum and blogs and news, pretty much all open and accessible content into their walled garden. Even the famous quote “know what’s cooler than being a millionaire? Being a billionaire.” Or however it goes, is a ruthless capitalist telling Zuck he needs to wake up and realized how valuable this thing he’s built really could be.

Carry on if you want but I think you’re very much the one that gets it backwards? Do you remember how it all transpired or are you too young to really understand what it was and what Web 2.0 really was about?

uhh what? Social media has been a thing since the very inception of the internet. What did feel like a massive transition is the massive prevalence of corporatized social media.

I feel like if you asked the a random warez group in 2010 if they would purposely make a "business" friendly version of themselves on a social media site owned by Microsoft they would have laughed in my faces.

So you think consumer engagement ultimately drives what types of tech that companies invest in building? I can see that argument.

Why do companies want consumer engagement to start with?

Letting unchecked greed guide decision-making is not a new phenomenon that came out of Web 2.0 though. To use your metaphor, the heroin was human attention. Web 2.0 was, at best, the syringe.

What I’m taking issue with is you disagreeing with the GP assertion that Facebook made purposeful business decisions.

I agree that a Facebook had a powerful incentive to act this way. But they didn’t have to. The fact that they chose to reflects on their moral character.

Internal leaks let us know that Facebook has pretty advanced sentiment analysis internally. They knew that they were (are) making people miserable. They know that outrage causes engagement.

Other internal leaks let us know that Facebook was aware of how much disinformation was (is) being used on their platform to influence elections. To attack democracy.

They didn’t just look the other way, which would be reason enough to condemn them. They helped. When they saw how much money the propagandists were willing to pay, they built improved tools to better help them propagandize.

After the UK was shattered by the Brexit lies, when Facebook were called in front of parliament and congress to explain themselves over the Cambridge Analytica and related misinformation campaigns, they stalled, they lied, they played semantic word games to avoid admitting what is clearly stated in the leaked memos.

These were all choices. People should be held accountable for making awful choices.

Even if those choices result in them making a lot of money.

It sounds kind of crazy to even have to say that, doesn’t it? But that is where we are, partly because of arguments like yours from otherwise well-meaning people.

Don’t absolve them. Hold them accountable.

Zuckerberg wants to own the whole world and thinks you’re an idiot for trusting him. An egocentic sociopath who can’t imagine trusting anyone else because he knows what he will do when you give him your trust.