Slashdot Mirror
We've Toned Down the 'Destroying Society' Shtick, Facebook Insists (theregister.co.uk)
Facebook has taken the unusual step of responding to comments by former VP Chamath Palihapitiya that the social media giant was "destroying how society works." Palihapitiya said that executives ignored cautionary instincts when creating Facebook, and he now regretted the consequences. In a statement, Facebook said: Chamath has not been at Facebook for over 6 years. When Chamath was at Facebook we were focused on building new social media experiences and growing Facebook around the world. Facebook was a very different company back then, and as we have grown, we have realized how our responsibilities have grown too. We take our role very seriously and we are working hard to improve. We've done a lot of work and research with outside experts and academics to understand the effects of our service on well-being, and we're using it to inform our product development. We are also making significant investments more in people, technology and processes, and -- as Mark Zuckerberg said on the last earnings call -- we are willing to reduce our profitability to make sure the right investments are made.
I'm a different man than I was 6 months ago when I fucked your best friend. I've grown SOOO much since then!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Implement Slashcode's lameness filters and 30 second posting limit timer on facebook.
It may not cool the flame wars, but it will at least make them more interesting to read.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The only way it would toned down is that they closed up shop.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
> We take our role very seriously
What role? what is their purpose? What do they create? Are they useful?
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Now featuring 1/2% less Social Destruction. YAY
Agree. I have never had FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Instagram, and whatever other mental defect sites that I don't even know the names of. It is actually possible to have a great life without the black hole for time that is FaceBook.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Facebook has always been invasive and unethical, that part hasn't changed because their entire business model is built upon it. What has changed and grown is the number of people who have become aware of how Facebook operates. This isn't totally unexpected and it's still a small minority as plenty of people are still addicted to social media and their "smart" devices which are spying on them 24/7.
I love technology and the web but social media and "smart" devices aren't worth what they actually cost.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
If Zuck hadn't gone derp, derp, derp earlier this year about what was actually happening inside his company, some microscopic crumb of this story might now be believable.
Facebook still has a long way to go in comparison to Twitter. If some moron I went to high school with posts a link to an article that says "Hillary Clinton under the control of communist, ISIS loving illegal immigrants from Mars" and the dude says he believes it, many people just shrug their shoulders and conclude the guy is an idiot and get on with life. On Twitter, major sources (CNN, Yahoo, and many many more) post comments by nobodies ranting or raving about this or that and act like what this unknown person just said is just THE ... MOST.... IMPORTANT... THING... EVER... SAID ...IN... HISTORY. Facebook certainly does or did a lot to spread nonsense, but I still see Twitter as far more destructive because nobody in the media seems to think that anything on Twitter can just be ignored.
And by the way, doesn't "Mark Zuckerberg for President" have a certain ring to it?
Who scares you actually more . . . Donald Trump or Mark Zuckerberg?
Donald Trump is a greedy business bastard like too many other folks in world economy. He might hurt us, but he is not going to kill us. Remember, he is a real-estate Shylock . . . he knows that nuclear wars decrease the value of real-estate. This is why he will never start a war with North Korea . . . unless he can find a way to make a business profit out of it, and that is a long bet. West Germany fought to digest the former East Germany, and that was something most of the Germans wanted, and were willing to pay a "Solidarity Tax" for it. Reuniting the Koreas will be a nightmare that no one wants. (Oh, yeah, the Chinese will be absolutely thrilled about having a second South Korea in their Economic Zone.
Mark Zuckerberg believes he is on a mission from God. Whatever he does with Facebook improves the Human Condition. He's not in it for the money . . . he has enough of that . . . but he gave it away . . . or maybe not. When Zuckerberg is elected President, Air Force One will be ditched for Über. Your IRS returns will be done using Facebook.
Um, . . . I hate to say it . . . but I'll take a Devil who admits that he is a Devil as opposed to a Devil who pretends to be Jesus Fucking Christ.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Facebook was so massively invested in because its potential to break down society was realized by its big investors. It wasn't a shot in the dark with their billions of dollars. It wasn't a surprise that social media would transform our society. They knew what it was to become and it profits them immensely.
Why do they want to break down society? Because they want to increase the level of control they have. Instead of programming society on the scale of groups, they want to control every atom; every individual, and open up new roads to exponentially more power.
People always explain away things like this saying "well that's just what people want and the company is just giving them what they want and making money, so this isn't really bad, this is progress! There's no conspiracy! People are smart, they aren't so easily suckered into things! They know what's good!"
The thing is that people are actually not that picky. They will accept just about ANY given solution for their basic needs as long as authority backs it consistently enough. So it becomes a question of what exactly we are progressing towards and who's interest it really is in.
Humans are not some transcendent creature with the guarantee of self awareness and intellect and rationality because of how much inherently better they are than all other life on Earth. These are optional features supported by a certain way of life. If you take away the nuances from the human way of life, if you take away the culture that support these higher functions, people go into "backward compatibility mode"; they re-adapt to a simpler, savage, prehistoric world. Simply put they devolve.
While most people don't know themselves well enough to see this, there are people who know this about humanity, and they know about it deeply. These people are leaders.
Leaders either choose to try to raise people up to their own level of awareness or leaders choose to plunge people down so they can never rise up. Leaders choose either cooperation or enslavement.
Humans are tribal creatures. They are beyond racist. They are beyond nepotistic. They will kill members of their own families who displease them. Humans are not only genocidal by default, they a fratricidal by default.
We can see this at every point in our history. We can see this in our close relatives like the chimpanzee that continue to live a way of life that we departed from eons ago.
Leaders cooperate and enslave in degrees. The closer you are to directly supporting the substance of the leader, that is, the more you share in common with the leader that you align with that leader's will, the more cooperation you will receive. The further, the more enslavement you will receive, up to the point that when your interests drift sufficiently you are immediately killed or otherwise neutralized.
What this amounts to is simple: as time goes on you will only become more distant and unable to adapt to the leader. The leader's own will replace everyone else. Eventually you drift into the zone of no return in relation to a current leader and unless the leader changes, your line will end: you, your family, your children all die and there are no more children thereafter.
Usually this takes a long time, so long that the diverse interests in the world shift and leaders change and most tribes survive at least long enough to make a compromise and intermingle with the dominant tribe. But things are becoming unusual: power is being consolidated on unprecedented scales with unprecedented stability, and it is making ever more exacting demands on its subjects as their numbers swell to challenge the Earth's ability to sustain them.
Humanity's genocidal nature has risen to the surface.
This all sounds very grim, until you consider the fact we've been up and down this situation for millions of years and have some pretty good solutions to the pitfalls and the problems that lead to them.
All the machinery is in place for us to CHOOSE our own leaders. Are you choosing yours? Are you prepared to? Can y
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
The problem here is cultural. What's on Facebook is just one symptom of many issues in the culture today.
I can't agree with this 100%. Yes perhaps the problem is cultural, but we were getting along pretty good prior to Facebook becoming a thing.
Facebook amplifies social issues quite a bit. It makes little shit really big and ugly. It polarizes people deeply. It encourages disrespectful, crude, uncivil and rude behavior. There's no consequence for telling people stuff you'd NEVER say face to face.
Prior to Facebook, if you wanted to say something really horrible about someone, there was a real risk of that person punching you in the nose. I'm not saying violence is a good outcome, what i'm saying is the possibility kept people a bit more civil and polite to each other.
Now adays, we can say anything and hide behind our screens. Not healthy. And heavens forbid someone threaten someone else for being a total dickwad, the terrorist police will swoop down and be all over you like a bad rash.
I hate Facebook, I hate everything it represents. It's outright evil. It needs to go away. Forget censorship, just shut the whole thing off, it's not doing anyone any good, except for the small handful of people making boatloads of money off society's malignancy site.
...I know for sure that if I am on the feed of posts and I refresh, some things will vanish and others will appear. Sometimes I want to go back to something I read earlier, sometimes it's impossible to find.
That's how they keep you scrolling. Also, I'm convinced that FB keeps track of what you've already seen and uses that to influence what they show you. "Going back" sometimes just isn't an option.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Agreed. Also, have you checked out the groups? I can't figure out how to browse through that damn things.
There are a few things I follow tech side (mainly related to home automation). I see allot of useful stuff and comments but it is next to impossible to go back and find the post I was reading to unless I actually respond. And even that seems to disappear. (I miss forums.) It also sorts strangely. It's not by date or number of comments - at least it doesn't appear so.
JackieBrown complained:
There are a few things I follow tech side (mainly related to home automation). I see allot of useful stuff and comments but it is next to impossible to go back and find the post I was reading to unless I actually respond. And even that seems to disappear. (I miss forums.) It also sorts strangely. It's not by date or number of comments - at least it doesn't appear so.
Two things may help you here:
1. Social Fixer. It's available for Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Firefox, and it lets you change a lot of the default behavior of FB (and other SM sites) in ways that make it a lot more user friendly. (Caution: FB frequently changes its code, sometimes in ways that break some of Social Fixer's functions - most notably CTRL+ENTER to post comments - but Matt Kruse, the developer, usually manages to figure out what happened and get a minor rev out to restore the fubared functionality pretty quickly.)
2. You can use "Save link" from the drop-down menu at the top right corner of each post. That allows you to "save" a copy of the post that you can access by opening the Activity Log page from the drop-down menu that looks like a little upside-down triangle in the FB menu bar (if you have SF installed, it's at the top of your screen, otherwise you have to scroll all the way to the top of the page - or just open a new FB window), then click MORE in the Filters menu on the left side, and, finally, click Saved, at the bottom of the list.
And, no, FB doesn't make it easy - but it IS possible ...
Check out my novel.
I don't have a Facebook account and I encourage everyone to delete theirs. I've succeeded maybe a dozen times.
This response just confirms that the guy was right at that time. I also don't think that big corporations can change that quickly, if at all.