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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday November 12 2017, @10:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the write-a-strongly-worded-letter dept.

Both takyon and Phoenix666 bring us news of some harsh words that ex-Facebook president Sean Parker has for the company:

Ex-Facebook President Sean Parker Criticizes Facebook

Facebook's first President has sharply criticized the behemoth he helped shape:

Sean Parker, Facebook's first president, had some harsh words about the social network during an interview this week. The tech investor, also a co-founder of Napster and, perhaps most recognizably, the guy played by Justin Timberlake in "The Social Network," said Facebook was designed to exploit the way people fundamentally think and behave.

There have been "unintended consequences," Parker said, now that Facebook has grown to include 2 billion people -- two out of every seven people on the planet. "It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other," he said in published Wednesday night by Axios. "It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains."

[...] Parker on Wednesday drilled into the addictive nature of Facebook that keeps so many of us coming back. He said it's all by design, because receiving a "like" or a comment on your post gives you a little hit of dopamine. "It's a social-validation feedback loop ... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology."

But that didn't matter to people like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, he said. Or Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram, which Facebook owns. Or even himself. In addition to co-founding Napster in 1999, he started Airtime, a video social network that never gained traction. Now he's the founder and chair of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

"The inventors, creators ... understood this consciously," he said. "And we did it anyway."

Also at The Verge and Business Insider.

Facebook Founding President Sounds Alarm

Even Facebook doesn't like Facebook?

"God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains."

A view on social media shared not by some uninformed luddite, but by one of the people responsible for building Facebook into the social media titan it is today.

Sean Parker, Facebook's founding president, unloaded his worries and criticisms of the network, saying he had no idea what he was doing at the time of its creation.

Speaking on stage to Mike Allen from Axios, Mr Parker said: "The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'"

"That means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Monday November 13 2017, @01:40AM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday November 13 2017, @01:40AM (#596035)

    My wife and I don't have cell phones: it always amazes me how many guys miss the really hot girl walking by because they've got their noses stuck in the damn phone! (When I was young, that was one of the great pleasures in life: standing on the corner, watching all the girls go by.)

    I don't see the problem. What exactly are these guys missing? The chance to be reminded about how they'll never get to date one of those hit girls? They're doing the rational thing: finding something else to absorb their attention so they don't get distracted by pretty things they can't ever have, and helping to avoid depression.

    Plus, it's not like anyone ever meets dating partners that way anyway (that's considered creepy, to hit on people walking by you). Instead, people are turning to online dating apps like Tinder to find dating partners that actually are interested in them, which is far more efficient and also considerate than hitting on women on the street who have no interest in you. This is probably what some fraction of these guys are doing with their phones as they ignore the hot girls walking by.

    I entirely agree with this Parker guy about Facebook, but there's a lot more to using a smartphone than FB. I don't even have FB on my phone.

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