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Comment by undefined3840 | Hacker News Reader

Surprised no one has mentioned this gem:

> The lawsuit claims that then-CEO Kevin Burns shot down that idea, saying, “Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods.”

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Reminded me of Mark Zuckerberg's infamous "dumb fucks" quote.

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

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

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

I mean, Zuck wasn't wrong though. People freely share everything with any app or website with zero thought whatsoever.

He didn't say anything that anyone who takes three seconds to think "wait, how is this free, what are they doing with this data" wasn't/isn't thinking.

That's way different than saying who cares if we poison people, they're alcoholic hipsters

There's a difference between "fools, they don't know giving that information to third parties is dangerous" and "fools, they gave that information to me, if you want me to exploit them just ask buddy".

And it's specially damning if that's a quote by a person that's now in charge of so much sensitive data.

>And it's specially damning if that's a quote by a person that's now in charge of so much sensitive data.

It's not damming at all. With no knowledge of where or when the quote is from, just looking at it I immediately go "likely a college student, with no business experience whatsoever, made a casual statement in conversation with a friend long before his product grew to the size it is today and now random people on the internet are vilifying for something he said in casual conversation probably a decade and and a half ago even though the comment shows no malice and is more a statement of disbelief in how little people think about their privacy"

>even though the comment shows no malice

...He's literally offering up their personal information on demand. "No malice"? That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

Contrary to what you seem to believe, people can have a good moral grounding in their late teens/early twenties. What evidence do you have which shows he's changed at all?

I see nothing malicious, and no 'bad morals', in that quote snippet. He created a service, people willingly signed up, people willingly gave their info, people probably clicked right past a user agreement if one existed at the time without even looking at it like they do NOW, and then they actively uploaded their content to a social virtual 'yearbook' networking site.

At that size of the site/database that's no different than going "here's my rolodex, who's info do you want".

Again, please look up definitions for the words 'malicious' and 'morality'.

If he had 4,000 users, he was probably thinking about monetization at that point. And whatever the excuse, most companies that call their customers dumbfucks before their inception probably won't enact much positive change in the world.

For what it's worth, Mark wrote those comments in 2004, shortly after "The Facebook" was created. They didn't start monetizing until late 2007 [0].

[0]: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2007/11/facebook-unveils-facebo...

What you have linked to is the consolidated Facebook Ads platform, but they started running ads known as Facebook Flyers around April of 2004. Revenue was $382,000 in 2004.

While I agree that currying favor with upperclassmen with performance art that pranks all but ingratiator and the ingratiated is a common strategy of whelps, I do find that this example of providing social security numbers has gone too far: it is one thing to rig the water fountain to dispense beer, and quite another to invite identity theft of the entire student body. Only we may do that and only for the purpose of parking violation fine recovery, for which outstanding unpaid balances exceeding $1mm USD exist on certain accounts.

Surely there is a difference between a 19 year old and a 40 or 50 year old saying something.

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