SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Funny) by VLM on Monday December 11 2017, @11:34PM
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.
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.