I would characterize it as more annoying than anything else. It’s not like we couldn’t work or we had productions issues because of it.
People are really starting to hate Facebook these days, and your guys' attitude doesn't seem to be changing much because of it. I, for one, LOVE this, because it means by the time you do recognize your sliding favor among customers, it will be too late for you to do anything about it. You will become the new Myspace, which is exactly what you deserve to be.
If you don't work for Facebook, then none of the above applies to you.
[EDIT:] the parent comment was deleted. The comment stated something to the effect of "It wasn't a big deal, it didn't affect our workflows or production applications."
I completely understand now what my friends at Uber were saying about the Internet hivemind and especially the HN hivemind.
Journalists routinely manipulate their stories to tell the story they want to tell, and right now it’s “Facebook is evil.” You are entitled to your opinion but nothing I or my coworkers do is evil and we would never engage in anything unethical. In a large company there will always be bad apples but to paint an entire company as somehow being a conspiracy is frankly mind boggling.
I would love to turn the mirror on all the haters and see how their lives would be if journalists reported manipulated facts on the worst moments of their lives.
This is somewhat of a pet peeve of mine, but there are relatively few cases where there is near-universal agreement of what is or is not ethical (i.e. "ethical" is a value judgment); that's why ethics courses teach methods and structures to argue one way or the other.
Your particular case is, I am fairly sure, not one of those "universal agreement" cases. I don't know what exactly you do at Facebook, but a number of people conclude that some or large parts of Facebooks operation are unethical.
Additionally, individual conduct in a larger system is generally not pertinent to the outcome of said larger system. An usual example is people in the Manhattan project not knowing that they are working towards offensive nuclear weapons, and of course various examples related to Nazis, but that may not be the best example when you (the recipient) seem to be trapped in a world of absolute ethics.
Yes, that makes an awful lot of other companies—not just tech-first companies—pretty damn evil, too. "Everyone's doing it" and "it's not illegal and is making us money" aren't defenses I accept for this disgusting behavior.
[EDIT] that said, piling on people for working at evil companies is probably unproductive and unfair for many of the same reasons that e.g. boycotts are wildly ineffective, plus such a large percentage of the economy's kinda-evil that the whole thing would get confusing and nasty and kinda pointless. Piling on someone for being delusional about whether their employer is evil, though... well, that's an awful lot less unfair.
Don't you see? Everyone who turned out to be evil in the end would have said and felt the exact same way while they were actually doing their evil. People and corporations do the things they do because they feel they have the right to do those things, and that they are justified in doing those things, in virtually all cases. That is the case for people and corporations who, in hindsight, did lots of evil and unethical things as well.
In the future that may very well include Facebook. And every last Facebook employee will claim that they had no idea what was going on, and/or that they weren't a part of the "evil side" of Facebook, or whatever they have to say to themselves to maintain the illusion that they did nothing wrong.
Your actions alone are not what decide if what you are doing is immoral. If you are in the armed services and you assemble or maintain weaponry designed to kill people (as I did in the US Air Force) then that work is arguably evil and immoral. I feel that what I did was immoral, and at the time I would have laughed at anyone that said turning a torque wrench is immoral. I was doing my job. I was tightening bolts to 100 in/lb and I was putting guidance systems onto test equipment to make sure they worked. I was making sure that those devices would kill when someone set them loose. I definitely did not believe that I was doing anything wrong at the time, and I definitely believe that I was in the wrong today, depending on how those weapons are or will be used. If they are used to sate some evil maniac like our current president then I did immoral work. If they are used to keep peace, then I did not. Weapons are rarely used to keep peace, however. Grenades are not peacekeeping weapons. Scatter bombs are not peacekeeping weapons.
Facebook spying on children without consent is not a justifiable action. Facebook working around the language of their agreement with Apple in order to do something forbidden by that agreement is not a justifiable action.
Could you point to something that was reported in the main-stream press about a Facebook incident that was untrue?
It’s going to be hard for me to take this seriously on a website where the traditional way to read WSJ and NYT articles is by using services that violate the newspaper ToS. It just sounds like pseudo-sanctimony.
The guidelines also ask you not to snark on HN. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here.
Find a way to have a serious objective talk with the greater community on the extraordinarily global reaching issues of the impact of Silicon Valley on society, community, culture as a whole.
Look at what we have to just emerge in the last 1.5 decades alone from "unicorns" in silicon valley:
* US policy seemingly being set/disrupted via twitter
* Mental health studies coming out on the negative impact of Facebook
* Election manipulation through ad-powered platforms such as Google and FB
* Massive cultural dialogue and political revolutions being fueled through twitter
* Assassinations being corroborated through Apple an watch
* Global spying and surveillance conducted through all our connected technology
Just to name a few of the globally impactful issues of our day which directly stem from the efforts of Silicon Valley in specific and the tech industry in general.
As the preeminent VC company in the minds of any young entrepreneur who wants to build the Next Big Thing, I would pose that YC actually has a social responsibility to, at a minimum, foster a conversation on these issues in a meaningful, serious and deep manner.
What are the consequences of MASSIVE success of a company?