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Alyson Shontell writes at Business Insider that Peter Thiel, a longtime friend and mentor of Mark Zuckerberg, recently gave a talk that imagined what a Zuckerberg-less world would look like and it's pretty grim. According to Thiel, the web would be a not-very-safe, not-very-fun, totally anonymous place and it wouldn't be baked into our social lives at all. "You can imagine an alternate history in which people don't become comfortable using [the Internet] to meet their friends and family," said Thiel. "It could have remained a wild and dangerous place — maybe an exciting place to escape for a while, but maybe not part of your daily social life. Facebook has led a long and subtle but deeply important trend away from mob behavior, away from the kind of nastiness that hides behind masks and rules in shadow."
Thiel added that without Zuckerberg, information would be at the center of the Internet, not people. "If you could go back to the first years of the new millennium in Silicon Valley, you would hear a lot more about 'information' than about people. 'Organizing the world's information' was the idea of the age," Thiel told the audience. "While the implicit goal of computer science had been to build a machine that can do everything a human can do, Facebook has made software that only makes sense as a tool for humans. Its success in doing so has helped to gradually orient software developers away from the mania for replacing people." Thiel made his speech while Zuckerberg received the first-ever Axel Springer Award for being an outstanding entrepreneur (Google translation) in Berlin. Thiel and Zuckerberg have known each other for a long time and Thiel was an angel investor in Facebook who invested $500,000 in Facebook in 2004 and cashed out in 2012 for $1 billion.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Monday February 29 2016, @05:50PM
Oh, we're all aware of the typical equation "anonymity + audience = asshole/troll". Facebook tries to get rid of the anonymity, but all that it really accomplishes is growing the audience. It used to be hard to spread misinformation on the internet because we formed smaller communities that actually knew each other. Now with Facebook, we are bombarded with something a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend wrote or forwarded or liked, without much discussion about the idea itself and without really knowing who that person is.
The equation is more like "anonymity * audience = probability of being an asshole". And the anonymity part isn't really about anonymity, it's about lack of consequences. And on Facebook, even though there are in fact serious consequences to your "permanent record" so to speak, people don't always realize that and are still assholes. So really it's "lack of perceived consequences * audience = probability of being an asshole". This can be written even better since "lack of perceived consequences" is really the inverse of "perceived consequences".
Therefore, the Asshole Quotient: "Audience / Perceived Consequences = Probability of being an asshole". Remind me which part of this equation Facebook is supposed to make better?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday March 01 2016, @03:08PM
You just ignore them. Really, it's easy. The internet figured this out years ago.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?