Zuckerberg's Side of 'The Social Network'

alkasem sent in a video clip where Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at Y-Combinator, tells his side of The Social Network. He says [the movie-makers] "can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things." I did really like that a monologue describing Zuckerberg building his first website was shockingly technically accurate — they mention tools, tasks and languages, and show screenshots that were all more or less exactly how we were doing things back then.

Comments

Zuckerberg is so full of shit.

[kuzb]

He didn't build it because he "likes building things". He built it because he wanted to make money. Facebook is designed from the ground up to do just that - violate your privacy and make the company money in the process.

Re:Zuckerberg is so full of shit.

[betterunixthanunix]

it started out as just an application he was building that he thought was cool

Perhaps, but I have to wonder why, then, did he ignore calls for interoperability, even early on before he was a billionaire. Perhaps he didn't think interoperability was cool?

The way I see things, he saw how profitable social networking websites were becoming, and thought he would give it a shot. I doubt he knew that it would become so popular, but he certainly knew the concept was popular (or should I say, the people who thought up ConnectU saw the concept was popular, then Zuckerberg ran with the idea).

Re:Zuckerberg is so full of shit.

[betterunixthanunix]

So why does /. hate Zuckerberg so much?

Perhaps because the boy doesn't believe that privacy is a good thing? He is on the record as saying that anyone who wants privacy must be unethical. He uses Facebook to try to undermine the very concept of privacy in our society, and he is doing that at a time when the 4th amendment is being attacked by the government.

Or maybe we were all perfectly content with communicating with our friends and families using interoperable systems that are not designed to lock us in. Everything about Facebook is designed like the Hotel California, and Zuckerberg knows that but refuses to make any meaningful changes.

Re:Zuckerberg is so full of shit.

[Dhalka226]

He is a biased source, yes. He's also the only source capable of 100% knowing the truth of why he decided to do something. It's up to the readers to decide if they prefer first-hand information from a biased source or second-hand information, guesses and suppositions from other, potentially also biased sources, or better yet, a mix of both.

Your simply dismissing somebody because he has a potential bias and, from the sounds of your post, runs a website you don't like isn't exactly the smartest thing in the world. Especially when you bring up things like him being a multi-billion-dollar-worth-guy (that is both debatable and entirely imaginary right now) and how the site is making cash "hand-over-fist" despite only being profitable for about the last year, which is questionable in general and totally unrelated to whether or not he is telling the truth about his original motivations.

I have no trouble believing that Zuckerberg is an ass. I have no trouble believing that his primary motivation now is money. But there is also good evidence that that was not always the case, such as the fact that Facebook used to be a fairly closed community available only to college students with a .edu email address.

Re:Zuckerberg is so full of shit.

[owlnation]

"So why does /. hate Zuckerberg so much? I think it is largely a generational divide. Many of you come from the gold old days of tech (command lines, walking five miles in the snow to get your code to compile, etc) and don't really understand that just because something wasn't challenging in a technical sense it is still HUGELY useful to millions of people"

I'd guess the reasons why people hate Zuckerberg here so much, are indeed due to an age difference, and experience. The current generation who grew up with Facebook, such as yourself, have a very different set of values and ethics from any previous generation.

Geeks, generally, tend to be quite ethically-minded. Most sci-fi, for example, has core ethical values. Zuckerberg barely qualifies as a geek -- his technical achievements are insignificant. He simply created a fashionable me-too product -- useful, but which none of us really NEED. It's not life-changing, and it will not last a lifetime -- give it another 5 years max. However his marketing abilities, or those of whom he's worked with, are exceptional. He's sold us something we do not need, and privacy-raped everyone not smart enough to check the privacy settings on the site at least once a week.

His ethics are most certainly questionable. I'm not naive enough to believe for a second that this was some hobby of his, and he just liked building things. Capturing the University demographic was a cold-calculated move -- students are a very richly-prized target market. There was still enough dot.com stupidity around for him to figure out that Facebook would either make money itself, or that some bigger firm would eventually buy it out for its database alone.

The current generation is not as obsessed with privacy as any previously. This may be due to naivete, desensitization, or an increased narcissism, arrogance and self-obsession that typifies the current generation. It's therefore not a surprise that they are not as concerned about the dark side of Facebook as any previous generation. Most older geeks are paranoid enough to know that privacy matters. Zuckerberg has therefore committed the cardinal sin.

Zuckerberg is a Barnum of the Internet world -- much like Cuban and Wales and others before him. He's become very rich through smoke and mirrors, and the worst crime of all -- marketing.

Indeed it's actually very hard to see why Facebook is discussed here at all. It's not really news for nerds -- it's news for ad execs, spin doctors and marketing droids. The fact that it's a coded site on the web doesn't make it any more relevant to nerds than TMZ, mlb.com, or cosmopolitan's website.

No shock there.

[jimicus]

[the movie-makers] “can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.”

No kidding. We've seen evidence of that from lots of big corporations - particularly in the entertainment business - for ten years or more.

It wouldn't surprise me if someone replies to this post with some sort of evidence of that mindset being so heavily entrenched that goes back much further - decades or even centuries.

Re:No matter what he says...

[Jimmy King]

I'm sure he's in it strictly for the money now, but it is possible that initially he built it just because it would be fun. I've started a number of projects just to see if I could do it, what kind of difficulties come up that I haven't thought of, etc. and then later realized that it was actually kind of useful and I could probably make money off of it with some marketing and time spent maintaining it. The difference being he wanted the money bad enough to follow through on that thought while I have decided it was going to be way too much work with a high risk of failure in the end to be worth quitting my stable day job to try.

Re:I still can't understand how this all came to p

[oodaloop]

Yeah, Mark knows about friendster. Check out his profile.

http://profiles.friendster.com/950378

Re:Lapdogs

[netsharc]

A few years ago people were batshit insane about Second Life... and now it's disappeared from the headlines. Hopefully this will be the Year of Facebook, i.e. next year it'll be yet another niche company.

Re:Is noone here aware of the actual history of Fb

[liquiddark]

This is a fallacy. Lots of internet sites don't have a financial model at the outset; that was practically the defining trait for dot-coms during the bubble. That does not mean the people building and running those sites do not have a financial incentive in mind, it simply means they're following a get big fast, Amazon-style growth model.