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posted by janrinok on Monday December 11 2017, @08:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-saw-it-coming dept.

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


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 11 2017, @09:25PM (3 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday December 11 2017, @09:25PM (#608444) Journal

    Those are poor manners, but do they map to Facebook? When i was young adults blamed poor manners on tv and rock and roll. Later they switched to blaming dungeons & dragons and video games.

    Specifically, trailing off in mid-chat is something people started doing the moment chat was invented. Thus was not only an intrinsically rude medium created but also a terribly inefficient one. How else could you stretch a 2 minute conversation into 45 minutes?

    Institutionalized narcissism is rather how i would describe all of it. Smartphones, social media, narrower and narrower discursive bubbles, and over-scheduled people are layered on top of old school propaganda via mass media. Everyone is drowning, filled with a sense of impending doom about what should happen if they stop thrashing around.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 11 2017, @10:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 11 2017, @10:06PM (#608470)

    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.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Monday December 11 2017, @11:34PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 11 2017, @11:34PM (#608537)

    Later they switched to blaming dungeons & dragons

    Having been there, I assure you D+D didn't cause rudeness, it caused sex and violence; my first uni room mate signed a pledge at church to never play D+D because of all the sex and violence in D+D. So when when everyone on my floor but my roommate played 2nd ed (yeah, I'm old) with the guy down the hall who had all the books, my roommate got teased a bit because we were all asking where all the wild sex could be located because we were young men looking for that sort of thing all the time. People screaming in the dorm hallway, hey Joe get over here we're gonna play D+D in so and so's room which causes sex you don't want to miss out do you? Oddly enough D+D seemed to repel college girls almost as well as it repelled high school girls, so it wasn't going to be sex with females anyway. So yeah, D+D, it causes rudeness and wild sex, or, maybe not so much.

    Whatever young adults do, its always blamed. Not the kids themselves, because that's too close genetically to blaming the parents. The only problem must entirely be that "new thing". Its been that way for a couple millennia, far back as we have written records.

    narrower and narrower discursive bubbles,

    My favorite invented phrase "narrowcasting" as opposed to broadcasting. Everybody (more than 50%) watched MASH in the broadcasting era, nobody (less than 3%) watches Survivor in the narrowcasting era, both supposedly define pop culture of their eras.

  • (Score: -1) by fakefuck39 on Tuesday December 12 2017, @04:38AM

    by fakefuck39 (6620) on Tuesday December 12 2017, @04:38AM (#608626)

    The point of your conversations is to get to the end as fast as possible? Do you also watch videos sped up, because the point of a movie is to get to the end real fast?

    Hey - awesome. Guess what - no one gives a fuck about what you prefer. The rest of us normal people prefer a relaxed background 45 minute text conversation while doing something else (like being on a call) or watching a movie (w/o speeding it up 20%). When something is urgent we'll still have that 2 minute phone call instead.

    I love you people with autism. Your lives are sooooo sad and shitty, and you refuse to admit it to yourself and fix yourself, so the funny clown show is guaranteed to continue.

    And no, I've never had any social media accounts. I do love my lync and email though. loser.