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Chamath Palihapitiya, a former vice president for user growth at Facebook, feels (some) guilt about his role in expanding the social media giant:
Palihapitiya's criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. "The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we've created are destroying how society works," he said, referring to online interactions driven by "hearts, likes, thumbs-up." "No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it's not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem."
He went on to describe an incident in India where hoax messages about kidnappings shared on WhatsApp led to the lynching of seven innocent people. "That's what we're dealing with," said Palihapitiya. "And imagine taking that to the extreme, where bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want. It's just a really, really bad state of affairs." He says he tries to use Facebook as little as possible, and that his children "aren't allowed to use that shit." He later adds, though, that he believes the company "overwhelmingly does good in the world."
[...] In his talk, Palihapitiya criticized not only Facebook, but Silicon Valley's entire system of venture capital funding. He said that investors pump money into "shitty, useless, idiotic companies," rather than addressing real problems like climate change and disease. Palihapitiya currently runs his own VC firm, Social Capital, which focuses on funding companies in sectors like healthcare and education.
From a partial transcript:
You don't realize it, but you are being programmed. It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you're willing to give up. How much of your intellectual independence, and don't think, yeah, not me, I'm a genius, I'm at Stanford. You're probably the most likely to fall for it. Because you are check-boxing your whole damn life. No offense, guys.
Previously: Facebook Founding President Sounds Alarm, Criticizes Facebook
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 11 2017, @10:06PM
Compared to chatting on the phone, text based chat allowed me to dramatically shorten many conversations I would otherwise have over the phone since I could type and others could read faster than we could speak/listen/reply.
Furthermore it allowed me to multitask multiple overlapping conversations where one person would be taking time to word their reply/research/handle RL responsibilities, while the other conversations could continue at whatever pace was acceptable. Back in those days however MOST people would tell you if they needed to BRB, or were going to AFK, or if they had to leave for the day/night. The generation *AFTER* them was the culturally insensitive and socially uncouth. The digitally ignorant who got a computer from a nerdy relative, or heard about the internet and wanted in, thinking it would be like 'cyberspace from the movies'. They could never be bothered to read the internet etiquette faqs that were posted over and over, nor remember specific rules even if stated to them along with a reason you found their behavior offensive.
Those same people are mostly who were responsible for myspace, then facebook becoming popular, and then the later generation of apps leading up to the mostly cell-phone based proprietary app ecosystem everybody is utilizing today. The 90s were mostly proprietary, there were some wins early in the new millenium, but by the late '00s were were right back to proprietary dominance. And the majority of internet users are genuinely too stupid to be able to understand why it is a danger, because they have been indoctrinated to believe open source is always bad and proprietary is always good, unless the open source has been coopted by the proprietary system, which they usually consider good and obviously what open source was meant for.