Zuck: Just ask
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
EDIT: It's pretty gracious to assume someone who directly called anyone who trusted him an idiot has somehow reformed himself into a someone deserving optimism, despite no evidence that he's changed.
Reasons at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10675203 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9722096, if anyone cares.
Having known him at the time, I will assert that this is not some random cherry-picked chat fragment of him being a dick. It just happens to be one of the few times he explained his thought process in the open.
I think it highly unlikely that he changed this much while no one else I knew at that age did. Among dozens of people of the same background, university, age, cohort, and activity, none have had such a remarkable transition from devil into saint. Their personalities are intact. And his?
EDIT: Then again, they might not vary. I'm not a personality expert.
Surely there is another angle of counter. I don't believe in winning argumentation by any means, especially by scientific disinformation without empirical cause.
You won't find adequate empirical backing on personality change over the lifespan, because the ecology of the evidence suggests that personality is stable. Disciplined speech is difficult and worthy.
People do mature, and people do change.
I'm not saying he still feels this way or didn't or couldn't change his thinking and attitude. Common decency would behoove him to and it's reasonable to grant that. I'm happy for him and his new family, but away from all that and his foundation (which sounds very positive), It's hard not to view a lot of what Facebook does with its users through the kind of cavalier attitude embodied in that old chat log. In fact, it helps makes a lot more sense of some of their moves if you do.
I don't think it's fair to judge anybody by their college/young adult years. Those years are some of the most influential and character changing any young adult goes through.
Go back and read something you wrote 5 years ago. I promise you will find something where you sit and think, "What could I have possibly been thinking about at the time...I wouldn't say that now." A lot of my facebook 'memories' appear at the top of my feed and sometimes I'm shocked I said something 5 years ago, no way I'm going to re-share that.
What life lessons would one learn from that? I've always tried to imagine how Mark himself really feels about it, because even if he's embarrassed, it's not untrue. Today, over 1/7th of the world does just "trust him" and its made him a billionaire. He was no dummy back then.
EDIT: Kudos to him (and Gates before him) for trying to give back now.
At some point in the growth of Facebook, Mark realized that what he had said back then was wrong and he is accountable for all the information people were giving Facebook. If he had continued with his attitude of people being "dumb" for giving him all the data after that point, I don't think Facebook would have succeeded as it has up until today.
So I guess you don't always have to 'fail' to learn a life lesson, but as you gain different perspectives on things you also learn from that.
I think a perfect example is politics. When you know only a little information about a topic, it's easy to say, 'just do this', or 'why are the idiots in office not doing it this way.' However, once you get more involved, and you see the repercussions of every decision you make, etc., you have a very different view.
He must be near about the only person in the world who has cause to grimace when they think back to how they used to act when they were younger.
I saved my AIM chat logs, I know of what I speak.