Mark Zuckerberg on the next 10 years of Facebook

I think it comes down to how one measures progress. Sometimes you have to work with corrupt governments and monopolies because the alternative is really null. I'd much rather give a lot of people access to basic services than no access at all--in fact, one hypothesis is that people will eventually be able to afford standard internet service (censored or not).

Eventually, more informed citizens will demand better regulations and more accountability from said corrupt organizations. We can't do it for them, they need to do it but they must first be empowered. Hell, a lot of the people who will benefit could care less about net neutrality when they're starving and have very few opportunities!

It's the startup way--minus the complete disruption, isn't it? MVP, then iterate, iterate... A complete disruption is just laughably impractical.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Facebook, but these opinions are entirely my own.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair

He's not a moron. He absolutely knows this is what we want. He just doesn't care, because he's rich enough from selling our privacy to buy all the mansions around his to protect his privacy.

A whole generation of poor people in India and elsewhere growing up believing that Free Basics === The Internet? Sounds like the sort of captive audience most tech companies can only dream of.

I wouldn't be surprised if everything he writes went through 10 layers of PR and lawyer approval and departments making sure that it absolutely certainly doesn't offend anyone, cause any potential for lawsuits, doesn't divulge off-brand information, or hints at things that haven't been approved by the rest of the company.

"Corporate speak" is shorthand for that ^. It happens when you're the face of a big company.

The fact that they apparently share the same edifice and orifice is a reasonable source of confusion, but nobody should be under the illusion that "Mark Zuckerberg" and Mark Zuckerberg are the same thing.

I thought there were some smaller positive changes in him after his daughter was born. Time will tell what kind of a world he wants his daughter (and future children) to live in and what he would like to be known for.

It started as a place for dudes to see if girls had boyfriends. Now, it's all about using people's baby pictures to sell advertisements.

I don't know why women would want to use a service that is so inherently anti-woman.

So from FB's point of view, they probably don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a more connected place than them.

[1]http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-18/bad-moods-...

I don't know about anyone else, but giving people Facebook-only service and calling it pretending that's the same as full internet access is not my idea of "more connected". Free or not, that's an insane level of lock-in.

After reading it, my conclusion is that it will be negative, unless we consciously discipline ourselves because of how self-reinforcing it can be (ie we start consuming only media that we agree with, unless we consciously decide that could be bad).

As Facebook keeps accumulating users, and as users accumulate "friends", the SNR decreases and makes the product experience less valuable, notwithstanding the efforts they make to "optimize" the feed. Mine is mostly filled with things I'd rather never see.

Facebook is a social network that mostly reproduces geographic social networks, but that doesn't connect people based on affinities. The people discovery mechanism is close to non-existent. People in your Facebook neighbourhood are people who most likely live in your current, past, or "work" neighbourhood.

Are there any social networks that try to dynamically create communities/"neighbourhoods" based on behavior? (e.g. upvote a post and you get "closer" to the poster, with symmetric behavior for downvoting, and second order effects propagating to other users based on their own upvote/downvote of said post).

Apologies if that's too vague, I'm thinking out loud here.

EDIT: For those who aren't intimately familiar with the Google & FB plans for global internet coverage.... you shouldn't so quick to assume that it will only provide access to facebook.com (I happen to know many of the people working on both projects). This is like the people deriding Elon for building the Tesla Roadster first for the wealthy. Progress is a process that requires strategy, planning, and thoughtful rollouts.

Musk wants to change the world ... by selling you the products to do so.

All these narratives you're repeating--you probably picked it up from some news article or tweet--is just another way people package their own agenda. What you're saying is equivalent to saying police is much more important than scientists. The truth is both are important and it's foolish to say one is more important than another.

Basically you're comparing apples to oranges and saying oranges are bad because the guy who sells apples started a well packaged propaganda to sell more apple and you believe it word for word.

Mr Musk wasn't known for wanting to save humanity in that phase of his life.

Or are people just wiping his bottom because he happens to be making money (for now)?