Focus

paxys 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Takes some extraordinary lack of self awareness to write something like this while burning tens of billions of dollars a year spearheading the "Metaverse", which is as big a digression from the company's core competency as you could possibly get. And soon after publishing this he would go on to lay off a large chunk of the team and more than 20,000 employees total.

	▲	amazingamazing 10 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Christ sake, really? I dont want to say it since it is against the rules but common…
	▲	jimbokun 10 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I wouldn’t be surprised if he had the Metaverse in mind but found it less offensive to his colleagues to use charity as the example.
	▲	eldenring 11 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Did you read the whole thing? he is clearly talking about having lost focus which is directly in agreement with your take on the Metaverse.

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JSR_FDED an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Could this standpoint be any more unsympathetic?

I guess the culture at Facebook was set very early and we’re still seeing the effect of that play out today.

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nlawalker an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Each individual digression from our core competency like this can probably be measured positively on ROI when considered locally. But I believe they collectively add up negatively.

I’d love to see the official internal leadership stance on what Meta’s core competencies are today.

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TheAtomic 7 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Focus on making the world a worse place. Great. Please retire.

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amazingamazing 9 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I find the comments very ironic given the title and the contents of the article.

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LastTrain 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Focus, or, Where Humanity Went Wrong. Imagine being proud of this essay.

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aaronbrethorst an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[2023]

	▲	UnfitFootprint 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Right, that changes the reading

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popalchemist 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The banality of evil, everyone.

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gordon_freeman an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Boz, really? This is the guy who messed up Meta's "Metaverse" biz first, then introduced privacy invading tracking to all employees and now messing up their AI biz big time. Where is the Focus?

	▲	jimbokun 6 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I didn’t know that. Box was responsible for all those things? I never heard of him before reading this article just now.
	▲	rvz 18 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They don't care. Messing up is cheap for Meta.

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IncreasePosts 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think it was thought of that Facebook would be worth $1.5T some day, but I'm positive what was on the 10th employees mind while getting paged at the middle of night was "I'm in the process of getting filthy rich". That certainly would help me focus.

	▲	jimbokun 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They didn’t know if they would get rich. They certainly hoped that would be the outcome. But they would have been idiots to not know most startups fail.

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coolThingsFirst an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

What good has Meta even done?

They harm teen mental health with their products and farm user data. What an achievement of youth to waste it on that noble mission.

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allthetime 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The early iterations of Facebook, just like the early iterations of most internet community and social platforms legitimately brought and kept people together and helped them forge and maintain more solid group connections… I still communicate with a wider range of people from my past, high school, university, etc because of it and enjoy easy access to excellent information about certain vehicles and natural areas (hot springs) because of it. That core value still exists behind all the evil.

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esalman 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Thanks to Facebook I am finding out that those people I grew up with and had connections have become assholes and would behave like one in public forums, even at the matured age of 40+. No thank you.

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LastTrain 19 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The focus wasn’t making the world a better place, or even to provide any value at all to its /users/, who are not its customers. The focus it was and is making money and to take this essay at face value, nothing else. Nothing wrong with making money - honestly.

	▲	jimbokun 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I’m sure a lot of early employees convinced themselves Facebook had positive social value in addition to making them rich. That was the default mindset in the early days of the web.

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coolThingsFirst 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Fcb for me it's ads, ads ads and even more ads. The newsfeed is complete slop from news outlets. It's just extremely noisy. The only thing that I use there is the Messenger because my older friends aren't too savvy with Whatsapp.

And even the Messenger app is a sloppy behemoth of an app with barely working Search. This is coming from a company with thousands of engineers and the core features of the business barely work.

98% of newsfeed is recommendation slop.

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skybrian 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Before Facebook, after people lost touch with their high school or college friends, they often didn't have a good way to get back in touch again.

This is harder to do accidentally now, for better or worse.

But I suppose there are lots of other alternatives nowadays.