Facebook engineers lurking on HN reading this: you are complicit in things like this by developing the technical infrastructure that makes it all possible. If your motivation is money, you can absolutely find that employment elsewhere.
This is a perfectly valid opinion to make, but I think everyone doing so should disclose where they work.
Additionally, I would hope they apply the same scrutiny to all companies that are harmful or don’t provide value; for me, that would include (non-exhaustive list): tobacco, alcohol, soda, fast food, junk food, high-frequency trading, gambling, and any company that is currently not or does not have an actionable plan to become carbon neutral, and that’s just off the top of my head.
Or we could just let people (and by extension advertisers) decide for themselves.
A lot of the industries you mention don't try their hardest to get my attention and monopolize online social discourse. Facebook does.
Alcohol bottles, cigarettes, sodas, burgers and high-frequency traders don't follow me around everywhere to get me to drink them. Facebook does.
Alcohol bottles don't monopolize socializing and drinking; I can still go to the bar with alcohol-drinking friends even though I would only order a soft drink. Facebook tries to, there's no way I can communicate with Facebook users unless I am also on Facebook and accept the ToS and "privacy" policy.
One thing to consider: we clamped down on a lot of those industries when we determined the hard was great and that's why you might not see them in your life as much.
How is Facebook monopolising social discourse? Have you not heard of Reddit, Twitter or Instagram?
> A lot of the industries you mention don't try their hardest to get my attention
Huh? You don't think those industries run any advertising campaigns?
> there's no way I can communicate with Facebook users unless I am also on Facebook and accept the ToS and "privacy" policy.
This is the strangest complaint I've ever read. Are you suggesting anonymous people are able to message Facebook users without agreeing to any terms of service? I definitely can't see anything going wrong with that. Why not ask them to message you on one of the 1000 other messaging apps? No one's forcing you to sign up to Facebook, it just sounds like it's being successful at providing an easy way to message between friends.
> How is Facebook monopolising social discourse? Have you not heard of Reddit, Twitter or Instagram? [emphasis mine]
Well.... Don't you see the problem in your own text? Yes, Reddit & Twitter exist but they are different. You wouldn't typically use those to keep in touch with family for example.
> You don't think those industries run any advertising campaigns?
Most of these industries' advertising is limited to places where advertising is accepted and relevant. I don't mind seeing branded glasses/beer taps/etc at the pub, or Coca Cola branding in fast foods. I do mind seeing these in my communication tools, even more so when a monopoly essentially forces me to use said tools.
> This is the strangest complaint I've ever read. Are you suggesting anonymous people are able to message Facebook users without agreeing to any terms of service?
I can call or text someone in America right now without accepting AT&T's terms of service. I can email someone on Gmail right now without accepting Google's ToS. Why is it so controversial?
I definitely agree with your point that Facebook is not a singular problematic entity and not even in a singular problematic industry, it's just the one this thread is about.
> Or we could just let people (and by extension advertisers) decide for themselves.
That's the idea of shunning though. People can make their own decisions to work wherever they please, and in response to these choices other people can likewise decide to disassociate with them.
> That's the idea of _shunning_ though. People can make their own decisions to work wherever they please, and in response to these choices other people can likewise decide to disassociate with them.
Immoral and unethical practice, unfortunately a lot of people here today fail to realize that, just because they allegedly are "in the right" camp or have the "right politics", it doesn't mean they are the right to behave like garbage toward others.
It's wrong if you think HFT belongs in a category like tobacco. HFT has significantly reduced rents collected by market makers and significantly reduced bid offer spreads, and most importantly it doesn't kill people and doesn't destabilize democracies. They've automated market makers and brought scale economies and the efficiency of technology to the game. It's a great thing on net. The race to the bottom incentive for speed leads to some waste but that pales in comparison to the benefits.
Of those companies, the only one that's a big employer of HN audiences would be HFT companies, which are more in the space of "don't provide value" than "harmful". Arguably most social media is actively harmful.
I honestly would really like to know what you think and feel about this. I'm so curious because your perspective seems like it must be so different from mine, so I'd like to understand.
How serious do you think the problem really is? How much of it do you think Facebook is responsible for? What would you do if you were in charge?
I've railed against FB and employees in previous threads, but this is already a negative thread. Thank you for engaging openly and honestly. I find your perspective refreshing, and shockingly similar to my own. I'm a self-employed contractor, for reference.
Ditto. Issues like Facebook's role in society are nowhere near as simple as reddit and twitter make them out to be. Posts this naive and simplistic being upvoted is kinda ominous for the future of HN.
Moreover it's gross that Jack Dorsey is put on a moral pedestal and Zuckerberg/FB employees are villainized. I'm not saying there's an exact equivalence between Twitter and FB (due to lack of transparency around news feed, Instagram's impact on young teen girls, FB's history of lying) but the disparity in rhetoric and treatment is concerning given that Twitter has undeniably played a role in some of the same societally destabilizing things that FB is involved in, such as extreme echo chambers, abundance and virality of fake news, abundance of bots and scams.
I haven't figured out the reason for the out-of-whack disparity yet. Is it because Zuckerberg lacks charisma, because he has Aspergers and people hate the awkwardness, or because FB is the tallest poppy, or because journalists have found a credentialed home on Twitter (blue check mark)?
> journalists have found a credentialed home on Twitter
This.
Twitter made a deliberate decision to recruit opinion-formers early on.
The face of Faceache is Zuck, with his blank expression and absurd haircut (surely after 20 years, he could find a decent stylist). The face of Twaddle (in the UK) seems to be Stephen Fry - a comic that I used to admire. Now, not so much.
I think Twaddle did a better PR job than Faceache from the beginning. I think they're still doing a better job.
Highly agree in the means, not the ends. I'm also rabidly anti-FB, to the point it's had a detrimental impact on my social life. It's a cost I knowingly walked into and one I'm happy to bear. Take a look at my public posts: I categoricaly think FB and their employees to be immoral.
I think it's the implication that anyone that works for facebook is inherently immoral and exchanging their own ethics for cash, which is not true imo.
There are lots of great people doing great things at FB, and if we apply this standard to FB we should also be applying it elsewhere. I'm not entirely sure many major companies have been completely controversy-free... Work for Apple? well you are complicit in sweatshops. Work for Uber? Complicit in sexism and workers being taken advantage of. Work for Spotify? Complicit in artists not getting paid what they should get. I would be interested in hearing where I am allowed to work if we follow this to it's conclusion.
(NB: I don't work for facebook or any of these companies...)
I’m just saying it’s a standard we don’t apply consistently, even across the tech world, never mind to other industries.
Besides, different people have different moral perspectives, and I assume most people at Facebook probably think the company has had a net benefit on society (even if you don’t).
Tax status is determined by factors that are (close to) non-optional, such as birth location or country of residency.
Employment status – especially at the top strata of a high-skill industry – is determined entirely by individual choice. You must first choose to apply to the company, then choose to accept the job, and then continue to make the same choice each day you don’t quit.
Every single engineer at Facebook could walk out the door and get a new job within a week. But if you’re a US taxpayer, good luck renouncing your citizenship. There is no legitimate comparison between the moral obligations of which megacorp direct deposits $10k a month into your bank account, and which geographical lottery you won based on your mother’s birthing location.
Software engineers earn pretty fat paychecks; they don't have to check their ethics as they enter their workplace.
I once refused to work on a project for the USAF, and I think that decision limited my pay and promotion. But I still own my own home, and have an adequate pension.
Isn't "I'm just a cog" what the defendants at Nuremberg have usually said?
How about /not/ getting the same amount of compensation, and being able to spend every day making the world a better place (or at least, not a worse one)?
I have made that choice. For me it was a simple one to make.
Every employee and Engineer that is currently at Facebook is involved in this mess. Every one of them are complicit. To the FB Engineers reading this: it is a saddening you have chosen to use your talents to build dangerous technologies instead of technologies that improve our lives.
I genuinely feel like shaming and social ostracization should be way more commonly used. If suddenly you stop hanging out with friends who work at outfits like Facebook, if they stop being invited to dinners, are socially shunned, then I genuinely believe it will have a net positive effect.
The problem is that bad behavior is normalized and rationalized in our society, 'everyone needs a paycheck.' This legitimizes working for companies like this.
>The problem is that bad behavior is normalized and rationalized in our society, 'everyone needs a paycheck.'
The movie Thank you for Smoking, about a tobacco lobbyist, calls this the "Yuppie Nuremberg Defense." All manner of immorality, even shilling for a tobacco firm, will be excused away with hey man, I've got a mortgage to pay.
I once applied for a job at Phillip Morris in VA. On the reception desk (you had to walk about 30 yards from the entrance through the marble-lined lobby to get there), there was a sign saying "Enjoy smoking!"
Every office had ashtrays everywhere, and staff were provided with a carton of 200 free cigs every week.
There's a book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, that investigates a few cases of internet lynch mobs, and the history of shaming as punishment.
The book's conclusion (as I recall) is that shaming is far more cruel than we commonly think, and shaming used to be more common until people realized its cruelty.
I think there is a stark contrast between something like a digital lynch mob and disassociation. The latter is simply doing things like not interacting with people whose behavior you find egregious.
The book covers that form of shaming too, in the context of close-knit towns in the last few centuries. But it's been too long since I read the book to discuss that in detail.
I doubt that shaming individuals works. But having thoughtful discourse about it is probably much better - let people hear the arguments and make up their mind.
With this being said, I do find it a waste that some of the best minds in the world are working towards ads and engagement businesses. Having a tool for global communication is wonderful, but their unethical behaviors are unexcusable.
> I doubt that shaming individuals works. But having thoughtful discourse about it is probably much better - let people hear the arguments and make up their mind.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Have a nice long thoughtful conversation with your friend about why you disapprove of what they're doing with their life, offer to help them find a new job if you're so inclined, but cut contact if/when they refuse to reform. Tell others what you've done and encourage them to do the same.
Shaming almost certainly does work, otherwise humans wouldn't be so inclined to try it all the time. I'm quite certain that shaming is a tactic baked into our social instincts by evolution.
It does work, but it has to be truly pervasive. If it's 1 out of 9 personal interactions that the person might have, the very proportion becomes a self-justification: "if it really were that bad, why don't all those people bring it up?"
But e.g. you don't see many people openly self-identifying as racists anymore.
I believe that in a society that has free speech, there is a duty of the member's of society to exercise their free speech and disassociate from those acting unethically. Particularly for unethical actions that cannot be prosecuted due to the rights afforded to all.
Now while there are a lot of things that facebook probably can be prosecuted for, there are many things that they probably can't be. So I think we have an obligation to shame and shun those who act in reprehensible ways. And obviously in proportion to how culpable/complicit those individuals are.
It might also work in a sense that FB has less qualified engineers than they would otherwise have. Which would cause their quality of service to be less, hopefully. Which would provide some advantage to their competitors, and/or annoy some of their users into leaving.
There is no real competition for FB, all the users that leave (like I did several years ago) are self-inflicted wounds.
However FB is part of the FAANG group that pays top dollar. That is attracting enough good engineers, especially the type that don't care too much about the ethics of their work results.
FB is not the only large company that pays well. They might pay better than others, but when you're in that income bracket, we're not talking about making ends meet either way. So when you introduce ethics into consideration, it does affect their ability to attract talent.
FWIW their recruiters seem to be getting desperate in the past couple of years. Until then, I'd see a FB recruiter ping me about once every year. But from 2019 on, it's much more frequent, and I know it's not just me - there's many other people I know who have observed that, and you can find more testimonies along those lines in these comments. Furthermore, I have explicitly told them to GFTS in no uncertain terms, and I still got recruiters contacting me after. This tells me that they are feeling the crunch.
