Have we really gotten to the point where "some dude quit Facebook" is considered news? The fact that the NYT has degenerated to this is disappointing. While there are certainly fair criticisms of Facebook, this trigger friendly news coverage of the company is becoming outrageous and is detracting from any previous viable points.
Well, when some dude is a veteran tech journalist whose access to information and networks may depend on him having a facebook account, I'd say it's interesting enough to be newsworthy (although maybe not new york times newsworthy), in my opinion.
I may be misunderstanding your claim that it's "detracting from any previous viable points". What points are you referring to that this detracts from?
I don't think it detracts from previous viable points like OP, but I do think the headline might at first trigger an eye-roll on a lot of readers. It sounds like an irrelevant piece of trivia that the NYT wants to blow up in an attempt to just keep throwing mud at Facebook.
If one reads the article there's a few interesting points-- it includes some statements by Mossberg and info on his book which will probably include some thoughts on Facebook.
I try to at least skim stories before commenting on them which is the only reason I opened this one. The title reads like cheap celebrity journalism. Something more fleshed-out, like an interview going in depth about his thoughts on Facebook and tech's impact as a whole, leading to his book, would've been more "NYT worthy" IMO. And a better title.
Do you know if the NYTimes wrote an article when mossberg opened his facebook account? If mossberg opening a facebook account isn't news, neither is his closing of his account.
Also, mossberg is a journalist. I was under the impression that journalists being the news themselves is bad journalism. Isn't that why most journalists go out of their way to not to be part of a story?
If rupert murdoch, in his war with facebook, pressured mossberg to close his account, that would be news. Otherwise, this is just the nytimes and a journalist creating news, not reporting on news.
Having worked in tech my whole life and been a frequent visitor of the site, I have never heard of him.
Regardless, this is still fair criticism. This would be like seeing in the scrolling banner of "Breaking News" on CNN "<Insert Well Known Person in their field> quits job at <Insert large company>"
Belongs in maybe the entertainment or business section, maybe, section, but wouldn't classify it as "tech news"
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Having thought about it a little more, I can see a valid case when said person in question, considered monumental enough, leaves a platform, business or field and is reported as news. I guess it's more of a reflection of how little HN'ers (including myself) think of Facebook in the grand scheme of things. It's just a website. What's next, we report that he or she has left Flickr or Reddit? That's kind of what I think GP and myself were getting at. Now if this person was the founder of Facebook, or instrumental in the success of the platform, and then decides to leave, I think absolutely it would be tech news.
I don't care who his friends are.
I don't find people interesting because of the company they keep or track their career because they interviewed someone.
Galafinakis isn't worth fawning over because he mock-interviewed Obama. Baskets wasn't interesting either.
Any guy quitting facebook (who can sign up again for free in a heartbeat, it's zero risk) is an event, granted. Might as well talk about the time someone quit selling on eBay or had a video removed by Youtube or went to Ohio. It doesn't mean anything until you sensationalize it. This indicates that it is not news, but raw sensationalism.
I am not saying that to belittle the man in any sort of way, or diminish his accomplishments, I am just simply saying it shouldn't be surprising that people haven't heard of some other people, despite how famous others think he or she might be. Pretty sure there is an XKCD for this. I have my categories of people where I would react the same way ("What do you mean you have never heard of Carl Sassenrath!?" as an example).
;) He is the father of multitasking! Definitely an important figure in computing history -- he created the Amiga Computer operating system kernel and also was a pivotal figure in HP's early successes as well. I think he works at Roku now.
Also a reminder how crazy young the field of computer science is -- important figures are still as young as 62! Kind of cool in a way. I hope to get to meet him in person.
That's a fair point. In my world, Walt's name is as recognizable as Bjarne Stroustrup - one is for techies, the other is for the rest of the population.
EDIT: Right after posting this, I realized my world was ambiguous - "my world" is simply the people I interact with and the information that flows between us - not making a qualitative judgement.
I have not heard of any of the dudes on any of the comments in this thread. Neither Carl Sassenrath nor Walt Mossberg nor Bjarne Stroustrup. Now I am concerned.
Having worked in tech my whole life and been a frequent visitor of the site, I have never heard of him.
I suppose one could spend an entire tech career having never heard the name Doanald Knuth, but I wouldn’t wear that as a badge of honor.
Mossberg is hardly on the level of Knuth, but it does cause me to wonder if the cave you must live in is damp enough to cause problems with computing gear.
Don't see why it's necessary to condescend people this way, the fact is some people just don't care about people enough to remember their names. Have you heard of Ian Gibbons?
Um. Yes? What has this guy done in the past 5 years? All the linked commenters saying how great his work is posted 10 year old videos of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Maybe the better question is, is Walt Mossberg still relevant to the technology scene?
To be fair, hacker news is a special kind of technology website. A place where many know a lot more about technology than walt mossberg. He wrote for the masses ( actually the business people - WSJ ), not for "hackers". For most us, he is just some dude. For the masses, he is the technology guy. But ultimately, he was a journalist, not a technology guru.
Facebook has massive reach, feels essential to most people, has gone through a difficult news cycle, issues bad news on a weekly basis, may have undermined democratic stability in some countries, and is a significant component of most corporate marketing PPC strategies.
When influential tech personalities, especially ones who are as corporate and CEO friendly as Mossberg, say the are leaving because of a values mis-match, it might be the tipping point for a broader exodus.
Mossberg had a long career or tech reviews and CEO friends, but I've personally never thought of him as a "thought leader". Moreover, he's unfamiliar to a lot of people.
IMO statements by Chomsky would be more news-worthy. Or by people who might have bigger stakes in staying in the platform-- say if the NYT themselves announced they were gonna be leaving the platform. Mossberg is retired.
I guess the relevance of this piece depends on each person's admiration for Mossberg.
Writing it off as "some dude quits Facebook" is pretty narrow minded.
For better or worse he has a big audience, and the fact he's publicly quitting Facebook has more real world influence than a bunch of HN geeks doing so.
I don’t think this will have any real world impact. There has been an all out media assault on Facebook for some time now with no real usage impact. Mossberg‘s audience in particular seems like the least likely group of people to quit FB. Grandparents are going to stay on FB as long as they can keep seeing pictures of their grandchildren, etc...
I don’t think anyone uses Facebook because it is “cool” (and thus susceptible to media tarnishing). They use it because their social network is on it and they value that.
The NYT is only good for headlines and even then it's mediocre, every time they have some interesting headline and I open the article and it always starts with some stupid personal anecdote. It's almost as if their journalists are paid by the word.
At its core, facebook contains a useful service. It's messaging capabilities are good, and the fact that identities and connections facebook are persistent effectively combats the problem that plagued much of the early internet: constantly changing pseudonyms and emails. I know that it is not necessary, but it is convenient. Additionally, its support for multimedia posts, links, profiles and other adds a nice, rich experience.
Unfortunately, many of the internet's great consumer businesses were built on this premise that advertising will pay for everything. That premise has been a good one for many years now, but, advertisers are getting savvier, and the addressable market is getting addressed pretty well. yes, there is room for growth, but, for many advertisers, that growth is not inside their target markets. While targeted marketing does provide value, I think it is an open question "how targeted is enough targeted?" Meaning that there is not definitive and universal data on where the benefits of less privacy really result in positive outcomes for advertisers. I would guess that in many cases greater accuracy in audience targeting does not result in statistically significant improvements in conversions when balanced against the increased cost of hyper targeted vs semi targeted ads. I am sure this depends heavily on many factors.
The challenge, though, is that facebook has to grow revenue, and, they have pursued this with advertisers by attempting to differentiate their ad products on the basis of hyper targeting. they do have differentiated ability to do this, and it gives them a competitive edge. It means that they spend the majority of their time building products that the liminal areas around personal privacy and ethics.
This puts them in a very difficult spot, because many of their competitors in the ad business are doing the same thing, and trying to get the same level of detail. Google has not launched multiple social networks just for the fun of it...they did it to serve their customers.
The monetization and differentiation that facebook has pursued has pushed them to be on the bleeding edge of selling granular, user-specific data. This seems unlikely to change without an outside force to force a change of behavior in their competitors as well. If you take away the competitive pressure to do something (by making it illegal, for example) then it can avoid further progress in this arms race.
> At its core, facebook contains a useful service. It's messaging capabilities are good
At its core, the turkey farmer provides a useful service to the turkeys - it feeds them, gives them shelter, protects them from predators and thiefs, and also takes care of their health.
There's just this inconvenient thing that happens occasionally, often around thanksgiving.
I ran away from facebook in 2015. I maybe check once a month to see if a random cousin reached out to me, and the service fails even at that. I don't understand how anyone uses this firehose of irrelevant information anymore. I check the notifications bar, and it says I have dozens and dozens of notifications, but really I have zero. All of these dozens of alerts and badges are nothing more than "Ashley commented on derricks post" I don't know a derrick at all, or "Jerry liked russian_troll_page's video."
The feed is completely polluted. Out of all the mismatched and randomly shuffled posts from the past week that pop up, maybe 5% are original content from my friends, and not someone liking a page or commenting on a video with 300,000 other comments.
The site used to be excellent when the content was 100% generated by the people I personally knew. Nowadays, I don't know how you get any valuable information out of it without spending hours and hours sifting through the junk. The platform regressed.
I still use social media everyday. On instagram I follow my friends, and a handful of nature pages. Most of the posts I see are from people I know, an interesting story across the world, or a poorly targeted ad. On snapchat I only chat or look at stories posted by my friends; I only click the crap on the discover page if my thumb misses. I don't use twitter, I prefer daily newsletters from NYT, and follow other publishers and magazines with RSS (including this site). I've cut the fat by living within inoreader and rarely straying elsewhere.
You can save a lot of time if you don't have to sift through algorithmic advertising pollution to read the headlines and see what your friend Dave did today. Start now. Drop facebook, drop twitter, unfollow everyone you don't know personally on everything else, and use an RSS reader to filter in the content you actually want to engage with, not what an advertiser wants you to see to buy something, or vote a certain way.
I agree with you completely. And that is kind of my point. At its core, it has some parts that are great. The trappings paying the bills are what have created so much damage. I think ultimately, the world would be a better place if people who wanted privacy could just buy it. I’d pay money to have Facebook without any tracking and without any ads. The trouble is that I wouldn’t pay as much as that policy would cost.
If everyone now is worth $5, but everyone rich enough to pay $5 just “bought out” their own ad space, advertisers would flee immediate and Facebook would lose most of their revenue.
The struggle with Facebook is that they can’t afford to sell privacy to those who want it, except at a cost that nobody would want it. They are interesting to advertisers because at least some Data is fair game for everyone. If that goes away for those that are most able to pay, it drives a spiral away from advertisers, and therefore away from privacy being affordable.
This is a problem only for some people who are fortunate in life. For many other people — kids discovering the internet, persecuted minorities, dissidents, victims of domestic abuse, victims of stalking — pseudo-anonymity can be helpful.
> and the fact that identities and connections facebook are persistent effectively combats the problem that plagued much of the early internet: constantly changing pseudonyms and emails
It was. In the 90s, people's email address changed pretty much any time they changed jobs or schools. Their phone numbers changed too, every time they moved. For college students, it often meant multiple complete changes of contact info per year.
Useful maybe for extended friends and family, but (when I used FB) I never even considered it as a viable option for contact beyond that small group. Maybe there's a generation that accepted Facebook this way that I'm not aware of (my kids don't even use it)
Also, there's a large gap between the 90's and when Facebook took hold that it could be considered the "default" online identity for anyone. In that time, free email that lasted years/decades exploded and we were no longer tied to work/school email.
“I am doing this — after being on Facebook for nearly 12 years — because my own values and the policies and actions of Facebook have diverged to the point where I’m no longer comfortable here,” he wrote on Facebook.
I’m not totally clear on how his posting on Facebook invalidates his message (assuming that’s the argument being made by posting this comment). Facebook is, for better or worse, one of the best ways to get a message out to many people, especially if they are friends or followers. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to post a final “I’m leaving Facebook” message there so everyone sees it.
Apologies if it was unclear. My intent in posting his message was to summarize the article and because I personally found it concise and inspiring. I do not think it is unreasonable at all for him to have posted it there. In fact I think it’s a powerful statement.
No worries. HN is a tough crowd and sincerity or sarcasm can be hard to interpret over text. I have seen people using /s to reduce confusion here and I try to follow that convention when I can’t resist revealing my jaded and cynical side.
I think we can talk about this in a non-gotcha sense, so for what it's worth, it is interesting that he felt the best way to reach his audience with this message was the platform he's leaving.
If he had a better way of reaching his audience, why not use that instead?
Because "his audience" in this case is Facebook users? If he were quitting MySpace in 2018, it would make sense to post a message there. The users of the service are the ones who might miss him, and who might benefit from a warning.
Because this is the best way to reach people who wouldn't see it any other way?
If some subset of your friends/connections are only reachable by Facebook, they are the ones you are going to disconnect with by doing this. Makes sense to me.
Well yes, but it's interesting, to me anyway, that Facebook is that platform for him, the platform where he can connect with the biggest number of his audience.
But this is obvious, otherwise leaving Facebook wouldn't be noteworthy at all. That's ultimately why he's on Facebook in the first place. If Facebook were ineffective at providing people with network effects, it would not be necessary to get people to leave it.
The confusion around this comment may have been avoided by putting double quotes around the whole thing (since it is lifted verbatim from the article) and single quotes around Mossberg's statement. Or even just prepending a right angle bracket (>) at the beginning of the quote. Surrounding the text with asterisks to italicize it is also an option, but may be less recognizable.
I believe you are misinterpreting my point as discussed in another previous reply. To be clear, I am not calling “gotcha” on Walt Mossberg, I am supporting his statement.
If it's out of principal, I'm surprised it took him this long, but hey, we all have our own breaking point. I especially appreciate the non-hysterical tone of the message, rather than the too-common table-wiping rant.
If it's out of principal, I'm surprised it took him this long, but hey, we all have our own breaking point
My personal breaking point is coming.
In the early days, I would post on Facebook a couple of times an hour.
It's become less and less as Facebook became more and more obnoxious, both on the front end and the back end.
Today, I'm down to using Facebook only on weekends. And even then sometimes it's only on one of those days. Facebook has made it easy for me to not care about it anymore.
I was an avid Facebook user in the earlier years (2008-2010), and a regular several-times-a-day checker from 2010 until early 2017. I griped often about how it had become ”boring”, full of random looking stuff interspersed with occasional nuggets I was really interested in. I tried to write a filter to strip out the boring stuff and failed, and it hit me that they were deliberate and optimal in their mixture of crap and good to keep me just within my tolerance level. I turned off notifications on my iDevices in late April and have checked it occasionally whenever I feel like it. I might look at it two or three times a week. I can’t quite bring myself to abandon it (because it serves a useful purpose in terms of communication and keeping up with far-flung friends and family) but on the whole it’s pretty useless and obnoxious on a daily basis. They overextended themselves by a wide margin. They went a Like too far. ;)
I remember when and after a friend twisted my arm to join, my reluctance in part due to having read how the young(er) Zuckerberg treated his nascent online property and his classmates.
Well, I considered, perhaps people can improve. And, it's not just him anymore, it's an institution that and whose people will establish and enforce more acceptable, accountable norms.
Not so much, I guess. Shame on me, for overriding my intuition.
People that work at Facebook here, does it make you uncomfortable about the future, and make you question what you are doing, when things like this happen?
No because the issues are not just Facebook issues or technical issues. What is happening involves society as a whole.
And society does not have perfect systems and even known solutions in place to handle this stuff.
There are deep sociological and psychological issues that have been uncovered over the last couple years, that have always existed beneath the surface in society. At a time of hyperconnection, if it wasn't Facebook surfacing them, it would have been YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or whoever else. I am not saying grave errors haven't been made and the future does look scary.
But now that the issues (from fakenews, to terror recruiting, to child abuse, to identity theft etc etc etc) have surfaced in a manner that cannot just be wished away, who else out there has the skills to do something about this stuff?
There is seriously no one out there, besides the Chinese govt with experience handling/understanding data flows at this scale. The expertise being built up in Facebook is going to be fundamental in addressing and eventually finding solutions to these problems. I have no doubt about that. Nobody else is seeing the data we are seeing. It's going to be a hard couple years ahead, with lot of turmoil, but we have a much better idea about what the issues are and therefore solutions are more likely to be found not less.
Read Walt Mossberg's own columns after Obama got elected in 2008 about the promise of social media. That hasn't changed. My mother has cancer and her biggest support system day to day is a group on Facebook. So I know personally what value a well functioning social network can create. How it can contribute to well being. The good stuff happening is not going away.
> There are deep sociological and psychological issues that have been uncovered over the last couple years, that have always existed beneath the surface in society. At a time of hyperconnection, if it wasn't Facebook surfacing them, it would have been YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or whoever else. I am not saying grave errors haven't been made and the future does look scary.
> But now that the issues (from fakenews, to terror recruiting, to child abuse, to identity theft etc etc etc) have surfaced in a manner that cannot just be wished away, who else out there has the skills to do something about this stuff?
I appreciate you having the courage to reply as an employee there, but but this is exactly the type of Zuckerberg-esque deflection I would have expected from the man himself, or a C-level, but not an everyday tech employee. Have they really brainwashed everyone there to the point that they've bought into the narrative that they have no culpability in any of this? Sure the root issues were there, but you are paid to surface them and exploit them. If in the pre-internet age of television and radio, do you think people let stations get by with that lame excuse of throwing their hands up and saying "well it's deeper societal issues, we are just the transmission mechanism!"
Television and radio are broadcast mediums. Facebook is a different medium altogether and not an apt comparison IMO, since all individuals produce the content... it's a sort of "democratized broadcast content".
Facebook can and is taking responsibility over policing this content to some extent but you have to realize the two extremes the whole enterprise has to flirt with: (1) respect individual liberties but allow for the full spectrum of negative human behavior, or (2) try to play god and create a global set of moral conduct and use it to silence and thought-police those that don't comply.
I hope you can see the trickiness here and that there is no utopian panacea to easily solve this issue.
>There are deep sociological and psychological issues that have been uncovered over the last couple years, that have always existed beneath the surface in society. At a time of hyperconnection, if it wasn't Facebook surfacing them, it would have been YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or whoever else.
i see this rationalization very consistently by all sorts of people. "if we didn't do this bad thing, someone else would be doing this same bad thing -- and maybe even worse!"
it isn't convincing. if there is a lesson we have learned from the social media space it is that copycat products do not necessarily remain alike or make the same mistakes. you don't see anyone complaining about fake news on linkedin, after all. other unethical things, sure. but not the same ones as facebook.
furthermore, the spoiler here is that nobody else needs the solutions to problems that the platform itself causes. developing an anti fake-news algo on facebook isn't going to solve any problems because the problem is that people can't think critically. likewise, you didn't even mention the largest problem with facebook: selling user data to advertisers.
the company needs the solutions because they make the platform look bad. that doesn't imply any net gain to society.
> There is seriously no one out there, besides the Chinese govt with experience handling/understanding data flows at this scale. The expertise being built up in Facebook is going to be fundamental in addressing and eventually finding solutions to these problems. I have no doubt about that. Nobody else is seeing the data we are seeing. It's going to be a hard couple years ahead, with lot of turmoil, but we have a much better idea about what the issues are and therefore solutions are more likely to be found not less.
This right here - this is exactly what freaks me out. I don't want a Ministry of Truth telling me what to believe in. I don't want a "responsible" entity controlling what information flows to me and how it flows to me. I don't want another entity to assume authority to judge my words and deem them safe to be forwarded to my friends and family.
Epistemology is hard. Even those of us with advanced degrees are often misled by data from our own experiments and analysis. It is presumptuous to assume that a single entity can judge and identify the veracity of information.
Additionally, a single entity that's going to control flow of information is a single point of failure. There are historical instances where much larger and more diverse sources of information have been collectively infiltrated or actively misled by those with clearly malicious purposes ("Iraq has WMDs" anyone?)
The fact that somebody has sold this idea that information must be policed for "the better good of humanity" to the point that this is being discussed here - that's the single most frightening thing about the world we live in today.
Edit: Just re-read the article and realized that Walt Mossberg might have quit Facebook because he believes Facebook isn't doing enough to police information flowing through it's network.
> Mr. Mossberg has argued that the government should take an active role in protecting the internet, and that Facebook has “a direct responsibility to get rid of fake news.”
The problem is small groups of bad people, creating a small amount of bad content are having an outsized affect on society using your tools. Even a mountain of good content cannot fully mitigate these damages. Facebook has not demonstrated any capabilities to deal with this and is in fact, playing catch-up by stumbling behind investigative journalism with feel good PR pieces about how "we're going to change starting tomorrow!".
Nit: the TRS-80 Model 100 didn't come out until 1983. I realize the NYT is just quoting the Verge article where the original error is, but portable computers like that were merely a dream in 1977.
He probably quit Facebook due to Facebook being constantly defamed in the media - and now the media is reporting on him leaving. It's like that Jake Gyllenhaal movie where he starts off as an ambulance chasing freelance reporter and ends up causing crimes so he can film them.
Board members have a different level of culpability than the management at the firms which they help govern, due to the kinds of decisions they are commissioned to make and the information they have access to. Board members may also find themselves misled by management.
As part of the governance process, Walt Mossberg does bear a certain amount of responsibility for what Facebook management has allowed to happen on their network, and I interpret his action here is part of his taking that responsibility.
Maybe you're right - maybe Facebook is doing all this bad stuff and Walt Mossberg happened to notice and decided to follow through.
But I'm skeptical - I think the more traditional news media (aka the folks who write stories and collect facts) tends to view news aggregators as a threat to their business model. I think the idea that Facebook ought to be required to screen whatever news it aggregates for "truthfulness" is absurd and I (sometimes) think that the constant refrain of "Facebook did X Bad Thing" is closer to activism than journalism.
But I could be wrong - I'm not as certain as my first post indicated.
I don't think news media outlets are very concerned about social networks anymore; NYT is on literally every app in everyone's pocket, whereas before it was just in the hands of their direct subscribers and sales.
I understand not using Facebook because it’s annoying and filled with ads... but what values is one upholding when they quit Facebook because they show ads? That advertising is evil?
I don’t watch TV because it sucks and is filled with ads, in other words it’s not worth it. But I don’t pretend that is some kind of moral victory.
