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Interesting rant, though I don’t agree with it. I think Facebook is a Hanlon’s razor company. Those who leave believe it is malicious. Those who stay (like me), believe it is incompetent. In a specific way — the product side isn’t strong enough to resist capture by the ads side.
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#Facebook is a rotten company, rotten from the top down, its founder, board and top execs are sociopaths and monsters, committers of non-hyperbolic, no-fooling crimes against humanity. They lie, they cheat, they steal. They are some of history's greatest villains. 1/
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Mark Zuckerberg onstage, speaking in front of a large stock-report chart that shows a descending line, captioned with a Facebook 'Delete My Account' button.
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Any business that relies on ads is a 2-sided market. And ads-sales sides of all businesses, be they paper magazines/newspapers, city public transit, or social media, are the same. They attract the same kind of sales/marketing ops people, who operate under the same moral hazards.
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What determines whether or not the product side gets captured, subverted, and undermined by the product side is a function of revenue share and the conceptual integrity of the product itself, which is a function of the simplicity of the function.
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Transit systems may sell ads on vehicles, but also have ticket revenue, tax subsidies, and a strong and simple product conceptually — get you from A to B. It’s not that managers of transit systems are any more noble. The product is simply less susceptible to capture by ads.
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Ads are not just the default business model, but the product design’s null hypothesis. If you don’t have a strong design intent the intent will get eaten by into selling ads. To the extent Google has a cleaner design intent (search experience) it has been captured less.
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This so-called wall in old media was an illusion of ethicality even when it was intact and hadn't been eroded by tech. The moral mazes simply gravitated a level or two up. Cf. Chomsky Manufacturing Consent, regulated Big 3 TV, etc.
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Replying to @vgr
Media co's used to have a wall between product and business… might that be appropriate here for the same reasons?
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Good point, but ads are uniquely uncorrelated to almost any core nominal function. In most non-ad businesses, the primary revenue driver is aligned well with the primary design intent of the function being offered.
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Replying to @vgr
Where in tech is any division strong enough to resist capture by the primary revenue drivers? I see this a lot in infrastructure and platform teams — a Red Queen’s race to keep budget and roadmap from being subverted. Maneuvers are key to maintaining agency if only temporarily.
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To be clear there definitely seem to be pockets of malice, and specific processes and groups that are explicitly run in malicious ways. But it's par for the course for any company that size, new or old. But the emergent presence is incompetent rather than malicious.
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Good point. Infrastructure gets taken for granted and understaffed but at least it’s acknowledged as an unavoidable component of bringing the core products to market. Ads on a social network are like the vampire’s curse — the host gains both immense power and new fatal flaws.