Former Facebook, WhatsApp employees lead new push to fix social media
wsj.com
wsj.com
First, getting people to pay any money is such a massive barrier to entry that it limits your audience by orders of magnitude. WhatsApp (pre-FB) is a rare outlier. Likely the only reason this worked is there simply weren't any other messaging apps for many of their platforms at the time and SMS prices were still outrageously high. none of that is true anymore.
Second, just the name ("HalloApp"). I mean the fact that it's "Hallo" not "Hello" tells you a lot. This is developed on a budget. It's also too close to "WhatsApp" so (combined with the subscription) it just smacks of former WA engineers trying to create WA 2.0. 2.0s almost never succeed (MariaDB being a rare exception).
Third, it's not really clear to me what the messaging model here is from just reading this. How is this going to be different from the user's perspective compared to WA, Messenger or whatever?
Fourth, any new platform that is similar to another is simply going to be a haven for those that are banned on the original platform or who otherwise feel they proselytize whatever whacko positions they hold. This is not the basis for a healthy platform.
Lastly, people. The dirty secret of social media is that the core problem is people. On anonymous online spaces people are hateful and vindictive. They believe crazy shit and want everyone to know about it.
This is simply not true.
"According to the researchers, results from a major social media platform over a period of three years “show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals."
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/why-ending-anonymity-wou...
All you have to do is look at twitter. The toxicity of blue-check mark people and the hideous cancel culture and attacks by non-anonymous individuals against non-anonymous individuals. When your identity is open to everyone, you have more stake in an argument/belief/cause/etc and it incentivizes you to be more extreme and toxic because your identity/social standing/group/etc is at stake.
Wait, what? Could you elaborate? How do you go from "Hallo" to low budget?
wait, you think people get banned for wrongthink on whatsapp? lmao
Video games? DotA?
Often you'll have a relatively niche game like PUBG that validates a concept (battle royales) which is then done in a more polished way by a second-mover (Fortnite, WOW, TF2, CSGO, StarCraft 1, Unreal Tournament, etc) with commensurately greater success.
There are lots of great ideas about how to tame problematic online behaviour.
But in the end I've only see one working well and at scale - here at HN, @dang's courteous yet determined interventions. As luck would have it, I noticed a new one this morning, classic dang:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31265977
Perhaps there is literally no tech. that can do as good a job as a motivated savvy human.
Social media however has grown far beyond what I think the original inventors intended at the time of creation. couple that with a multitude of legal jurisdictions and levels of sensitivity I fee we can no longer keep the environment clean to so many different standards and must instead switch to a model which is more akin to defaulting to being exposed to nothing and choosing over time to be exposed to some categories of potentially offensive things.
I did have a stab at this and fee it needs refining for sure. Wether this is a valid attempt or not, I think the worry that the current moderation model isn’t adequate is grounded in reality.
https://gist.github.com/TheMightyLlama/bb77a05d3dde4da251142...
Typing from phone. Sorry.
That they don't see the army of Reddit moderators as an indicator that things can scale is a sign.
I suspect it's about an under valued skill in people.
Personally I'm in favour of the semi-anonymous freenode channel ops who are encouraged to be hidden at least until required and image board "janitors". Basically moderators shouldn't be idolized or be given unique powers or made to stand out as a special power user but it should be seen as a kind of service. Humble moderation.
I do not envy what dang does. It's a hard job. But at the end of the day these positions end up effectively enforcing the middle ground logical fallacy.
dang's job sucks, but him pushing for moderation (as in moderate behavior regardless of opinion being expressed) is exactly what makes HN enjoyable even in threads where I don't necessarily agree with the consensus.
You didn't explain how it's a fallacy rather than just state it is. The middle ground might be right in some stuff, it might also be extremely damaging in others.
I'm sure you can think of examples for that.
In my opinion that sort of ever more absurd "if you're not with us you're against us" type thinking is what has turned social media into such a cesspool, and by enforcing a sort of moderate state, that sort of person gets pushed away, making the space more tolerable for healthier minds.
Eg. with abortion it's almost impossible to have a civil, nuanced debate on social media because the extremes of both sides have cemented themselves into (fairly hypocritical) positions that paint everyone who isn't fully with them as an enemy, even though there's a lot of room for reasonable compromise and healthy debate on the effects and tradeoffs of specifics of related policy.
Most Americans would argue (and there's data to back this up) that abortion shouldn't even be something that we need to have a nuanced discussion about. The idea of nuanced discussion for everything is how stuff get pushed into harmful and extremist views.
The idea of "nuanced discussion" doesn't really work when the outcome of one side of the nuanced discussion is the subjugation of a whole class of people.
America went through "nuanced discussion" about the "Japanese problem". It went through "nuanced discussion" about civil rights. Most of this ended up either literally fucking over a group of innocent people, or delaying action that should've been taken decades prior.
The idea that a "nuanced discussion" is the way to go is exactly what that fallacy is talking about. Basically you can't have people's rights and lives talked about as if one side of the discussion has the right to take that away from them.
Think about how long it took us to legalize gay marriage. The only thing that got the ball really rolling was stonewall.
Or think about the Vietnam War. Extremists helped end it.
How about climate change? Do we have a nuanced discussion between the older population who is going to be dead by the time this becomes a problem, or do we listen to the climate extemists who are generally younger and the ones who are going to get fucked by this?
Anyway, middle ground politics is a dead area and not something that always works. The people who like it are generally the people who are fine with the status quo. So of course you're going to see angry view points (who most of the time have all the right to be angry) as a cesspool.
Dang has personally dinged me a few times -- maybe I'd disagree with a few, but the guy seems alright. Sometimes I troll and don't get caught, sometimes I'm being honest but dang dings me.
I dunno', but this is by far the best forum on the modern web. Of all fallacies, the "middle ground fallacy" seems to me to be the best.
Human moderation against clearly set community expectations for behaviour is the only effective way. And if things are going to get too spicy, do the same as always and ban religious/political discussion altogether.
The reason we have such massive issues with Twitter/FB/etc is becuase they essentially said they were gigantic open public spaces with no moderation guidelines at all, then started enforcing arbitrary 'moderation' based on political or cultural biases, including banning content instead of bad behaviour (which it seems a lot of people out there - including the WSJ staffer writing the article - have a really hard time understanding the difference between).
HalloApp will avoid the problem by having the 50 user group limit, but how long until they get the 'feature request' to allow bigger and bigger groups? It also sounds almost exactly like Facebook groups, so what's new there aside paying for it?
I would be cautious with this platform being created from ex-Twitter employees, they will continue to implement 'misinformation' policies that police content rather than behaviour, but time will tell.
It's interesting to see it all come round again to basically the forums of old: Specific interest groups, smaller scale, moderation to suit. Who knew that worked...
Isn't that what all the censoring europeans, chinese, russians, saudis, israelis, etc all say? All censors are trying to target "problematic" behavior.
Your comment is no different than what every tyrannical or oppressive regime espouses. The biggest problem with social media and internet is that it is transnational. Countries and people that value censorship really shouldn't have a say in american social media. I believe they should develop their own social media.
I no longer ascribe to the idea that everyone should have free speech. I believe we should have free speech in america and you should have whatever you want in your own country and own social media. The problem with american social media is that it is trying to appease everyone and as a result, it becomes a race to the lowest common denominator.
If American social media chooses to be global (it does!), then putting up with the rules of the countries it chooses to operate in is part of the game.
Fool me once...
It reads as very self-serving for these folks to create a business model that is clearly economically unsustainable and fueled only by venture capital, then sell their company to Facebook for billions of dollars -- and then to pretend like they're shocked that Facebook wants to make their money back.
Of course they do. You knew that. We all knew that. And you still sold your business anyway. That's fine -- good job -- we're happy for you -- but don't act holier-than-though now that you're rich and bored. And don't start a new company backed by venture pretending you're not hoping to do it all over again.
Also nice that they are building out product catalogs. In the developing world sometimes it is difficult to get a list of products with prices.
https://blog.whatsapp.com/introducing-catalogs-for-small-bus...
Haha. So true. As if all these people in the heart of the money spinning and raking machine that is SV were so naive and cheery eyed, that they just didn't see what all the "deals" were.
They didn't know that FB has a fiduciary duty to explain its spending? They didn't know that Zuck wants to increase the share price and market cap of FB?
Did they really think that paying 1$ for downloading WA was a good enough revenue stream?
Did they really think that Zuck was such a fool to actually allow that "No Ads..." bullshit paper really run?
He waited for a couple of years, mining user data, then when people mostly forgot about it, went in for the kill.
I'd say go wipe your tears with a wad of Benjamins, but I'm not convinced there are any tears being shed to begin with.
Whatsapp was making money, but was that enough for the VCs? Even if it was not burning currently, it might have burned it in the past, so if the VCs trigger the clauses to ask their money back, you might not be able to give the money to them, ending up bankrupt. Plus, VCs might have a majority on the board. They see nothing but money, so they will push for the option that results in the highest payout for them, even if it is immoral, and even if that means using their powers to kick out the founders.
VCs look for businesses that 10x their investment in a very short time frame, and use that money to finance their many more failed ones. What might be a solid business in the wild is something they cull.
WhatsApp was (is?) famously lean. They essentially never needed to spend a cent of VC money, even though they took on two rounds.
I think the story goes that when they took on a Series B, one of the cofounders sent a screenshot to Sequoia (repeat, sole investor) of the untouched bank account containing their Series A. Or maybe it was a screenshot of the Series B heading into the acquisition, I forget which.
If I pay you 1000 shares that I think are worth $1, I count it as a $1 expense, even though I’ve lost zero “dollars”. If that equity grows to be worth $10mm, at the end of the year I need to report a $10mm expense in stock compensation. This doesn’t mean I’m $10mm poorer, it means I’m 1000 shares poorer and the valuation has changed. You’ve already “paid” for the loss with the shares.
The reason you report it in dollars is because one can theoretically sell those shares to obtain money to feed the business, so it’s important for investors to know if you’re burning through a lucrative pool of equity.
It has no direct impact on cash liquidity, operating margin, or cash flow. I think many commenters in this thread missed that distinction. There’s a huge difference between reporting a loss and running out of money.
My number still stands. Or if looking at net cash, it was never enough to cover all expenses.
The gist of the misunderstanding is that there are many more things that register as "expenses" when calculating net loss without burning your cash pile. Stock compensation just happens to be the biggest one.
They had $10.21mm in revenue in 2013 and $3.82mm in 2012. [page 4]
$9.94mm net cash used in 2013. $3.5mm in 2012. [page 6]
[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20141031201145/http://investor.fb...
It helps with hiring as a signal effect; if sequoia thinks the company you’re thinking joining is a worthwhile investment of they’re capital, they’re more likely a worthwhile investment of your career.
The spare capital is good insurance against risks that might make fundraising in the future difficult. For example, needing to invest in PR/marketing, because an entrenched company with more resources released a competing product. Or legal fees, if you get sued for one thing or another.
It’s also genuinely useful to have experienced investors on your board or in your intimate network, to ask for fiduciary-bound advice when waging your own battles. You typically “pay” for this service by raising money. I think this one is generally underrated by people who view the VC relationship as strictly transactional. Running a high visibility young company is incredibly stressful and it’s valuable to have people at the table who have seen it before.
I imagine this last reason is probably the main one for WhatsApp’s choice.
EDIT: looks like it was $1 on IOS and free everywhere else: https://venturebeat.com/2012/12/03/facebook-whatsapp-talks/
Atropine is the standard antidote to several nerve gases and pesticides. It is itself quite toxic, as are the standard antidotes to atropine overdose.
Analogies often fall apart when examined literally, but I do think there's a role for software to play in mitigating the harms of social media. This is almost certainly not that software, but I like online one-to-many and many-to-many communication with people I actually know, and miss what Facebook provided when most of what it showed me was original content from my friends and family.
Whatever SM comes about, they are going to do the same.
Also, the one and only business model, of any SM, is keeping people on the app, and you don't do that by providing counter points / arguments against their world view. You do that by matching them with people who think like them.
Any social media will devolve into cesspools of group think that often ends up being bad for society.
Just look at Whatsapp. It has no ads feed, no subscription fees and yet, it has innumerable groups that do spreading of all sorts of conspiracy rumor mongering. WA is not even getting like minded people together. They are doing it themselves.
The next wave of SM will be similar. But, even more crass and materialistic. It will not bring people together. It will bring groups together that will fight ever more aggressively with other groups, drawing strength from numbers.
And human nature, with its fickle tendencies, will enable the dumbest and gullible to form the largest groups.
The unfortunate truth is that fights creates audience engagement which drives up user retention and thus stock prices. Financial analyst look at how much time a user spents on each platform to issue a price forecast.
I literally cannot think of a single thing, when it comes to WhatsApp specifically, that got worse.
The data gathered from WhatsApp is used to fuel backend algorithms and help Facebook sell your (and your networks) information and preferences to advertisers.
A bank used to keep your personal financial information as private. Now post-acquisition, the bank starts selling your personal financial information to insurance companies. To you, as an account holder, you don't know the difference because its all hidden away from you.
Maybe you don't care because the bank hasn't increased your fees, but other people you don't know can now buy your data and target you. Here's how data brokers work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA
What!? Can you tell me an example of how businessmen sold customer data in the Victorian times? Unless, your definition of the 'dawn of business' is limited to this century or your lifetime?
There is nothing inherently evil with data, it's what these today's businesses do with it and at this scale. There has never been a platform with over 1 billion users' data for sale. This has only happened in the last 20 years.
You don't seem to have a very good understanding of the topic you are commenting on. In both your original and this comment, you make incorrect and face-value assumptions of how things work.
I have no evidence of this but I have thought quite a bit about why social networks angering push content the way they do.
The WhatsApp algorithm can be described as: “show the chat with the most recent reply at the top, then show the most recent reply at the bottom if the user clicks on that chat”.
Suppose the Twitter algorithm was: “show the tweet with the highest count recent replies at the top of the feed, then show the most recent reply at the bottom if the user clicks on that tweet”
That is a pretty natural way to design a social media service that wants to host the global discourse. And that algorithm would inherently promote tweets that provoke a lot of responses. It would take a strong thumb on the scale to make it not be full of divisive content (the major social media companies publicly claim to be attempting this).
WhatsApp is a useful datapoint here because we know the feed is chronological, yet there are a ton of news stories about how the app is rife with divisive content and misinformation, just like Twitter and Facebook.
How much you chat with your friend tells me how close you are and how similar your politics and shopping habits are. Add that with your location data from your IP address (contrary to popular belief, you don't need to turn on location permission to know).
Whatsapp is the perfect power-up for platforms like Facebook. With your Whatsapp connections and Facebook profile combined, your data becomes even more valuable to advertisers. Why do you think Google and Facebook keeps on asking for your phone number?
You are making the argument that Whatsapp doesn't use algorithms to favor divisive content, therefore, it doesn't have malicious use. My argument is that Whatsapp still contributes to the data harvesting of Facebook because it is used maliciously to invade your privacy. It's just in a different form and just as bad. You are not looking at the whole picture and only a tiny slice.
The most recent is probably not what I would want to see. Close family, friends, social circles first than influencers after.
TikTok, on the other hand, doesn’t show you anything from your friends and just tries to show you what will keep you watching. It seems to work well for them.
On the other hand, we know how this story goes: they either fail outright, or they succeed and scale up, slowly adding more and more features people request in order to create more growth, until eventually they look like the platforms they started as a reaction against.
Because Facebook, et al. didn't randomly arrive at the combination of qualities that makes them destructive, they got there by giving people what they asked for. Until you change what people ask for, you're either going to keep creating Facebooks, or get driven out of business by Facebook. Replace Facebook with the social media platform of your choice.
lol nah thanks.
FB -> Insta -> Snap/jikjok or whatever
It would be nice if that company later sneaked like better privacy, open protocol / interoperability with activity-pub or whatever. i mean people won't use a social media cz it respects privacy etc.
But then you will always come back to the problems that come with centralization: special interests, surveillance, censorship, doxxing / cancel culture, and platform bias. I'm sure many more of these platforms will spring up but that certainly won't fix Twitter. Centralized social media is probably unfix-able, these issues are just part of the whole package.
And DAO ownership isn't going to fix anything. It's a silly concept, a solution in search of a problem.
How is that any better than hosting your own forum and federating with others of your choice?
If I'm running my own forum, I (obviously) have a stake in the success of my own forum.
If my goal is to profit from running a forum, that can also be done in a decentralized, federated fashion without DAOs too.
As someone else pointed out[0], DAOs don't really add any real value in this case.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268355
I
Yes, that is likely true. I think DAOs are interesting because they make partial ownership by the users of the forum easier. Personally, I don't care about decentralization or federation. I ran a Mastodon and DeSo node for a while and I am not sure if it actually adds anything to user experience or actually solves a real-world problem.
What interest me in the "organization" of the DAO is where it allows people that share a common interest build something together without incorporating a business and distributing shares.
Do I need a DAO or run a forum or website (VPS or otherwise) for any of this? Realistically, I could phone a number of friends to meet up regularly for beers and discuss football.
But I think the development path could be Friends doing a meetup locally -> International friends that want to meet -> International friends that want to build something together and earn by doing so.
I think the problem that a DAO solves is to get people together that share a common interest and provides an efficient way to ensure proper governance and compliance.
Will the world continue without DAOs. Yes for sure. Could DAOs develop in ways for communities (clubs, teams, political parties, etc) to govern themselves, maybe. Still I think its worthwhile to think into this direction. I am currently hoping to get funds from Cardano's Fund8. And the voting process is completely organized by the community of Cardano users through a supported wallet. And I think from a fund-raising perspective, this is really efficient since it crowd-validates your idea and provides a transparent way forward.
I don't know. I think DAOs are a poor replacement for adhering to Wheaton's Law[0] and not interacting with those that don't.
Especially since DAOs would exclude a great number of people who could positively contribute to a forum/interest group.
They just took a fat chunk of investment, what's their business model to show a return?
I mean, kudos to you I guess for "caring deeply" about communications tools and social networks, but none of that can change the incentives inherent in Facebook's business model.
You are correct, I should have used clearer language, but by "sell the information" I meant that they monetized the information to make money selling ads.
But let's stop with the idea that somehow Facebook's data Hoover is somehow a benefit. Facebook could very easily get rid of all the problems they have on their site which require minimal data collection, but it would also cost them many billions of dollars, so they won't do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Data_scand...
Personally I believe there in a big difference between a company giving your data to another company behind your back and doing so after you have approved it first.
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FB has never claimed (in court) that CA violated any agreements they had with them. The only comments they've made are PR speak to obscure the fact that CA acted within the rules (hence why FB needed to update the rules). The only court cases that arose are against FB* for sharing data with CA they shouldn't've.
Per-FB's policy there are only a few things worth talking about. > (7) If you use any partner services, make them sign a contract to protect any information you obtained from us, limit their use of that information, and keep it confidential. > (9) Don't sell, license, or purchase any data obtained from us or our services. > (10) Don't transfer any data that you receive from us (including anonymous, aggregate, or derived data) to any ad network, data broker or other advertising or monetization-related service.
7 - This is my understand as to what happened. CA didn't turn around and release this data.
9 - Doesn't apply as nobody claims Kogan sold the data to CA.
10 - Doesn't apply as CA isn't these things.
* Technically the FTC did also against CA but it was literally _just_ because CA also recorded the User's FB ID [2].
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180329131546/https://developer... [2]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/12/...
Everyone makes their own choices.
Maybe the thing you should be taking away from Facebook in their resume, is that they're no longer working there. There's nothing to be gained from crapping on ex-Facebook employees that doesn't seem to boil down to ego-stroking and making sure people know how high your moral horse is.
All in all, if you choose to work for a shitty company, or doing shitty things, you should assume people will use that as part of their opinion of you.
I do not get how that becomes any extremism of any kind - that's just standard outcome of reading someone's resume?
In real life, people use tiktok, people use facebook, people use snapchat, and the only thing that other people worth their salt will get from seeing that you used to work at FB is "hm, they must at least be a somewhat decent dev with solid understanding of the area they worked on".
The people who are the loudest in their condemnation of you, purely due to your former employment at fb, aren't the ones you are likely to ever cross paths with in any meaningful way in the first place. And that's a good thing.
Anyone with a critical view of these organizations has seen exactly the extent of the harm. The endless news releases should be an adequate trail to follow.
People, at large, have chosen to ignore all the unbelievable actions so they can continue to stalk others online -cough cough- I mean, keep in touch with grandma.
Gates knows about how to make the world a better place. Everyone should read his op-ed that he wrote for the Communist Party in the People’s Daily, Chinese state media. He talks about how China has liberated hundreds of millions of people and has "achieved miracles beyond the reach of any other country over the past several decades".
Of course if you expect Beijing or Shanghai to be as free, safe and clean as Zurich, Amsterdam or Copenhagen then you'll be disappointed...then again not even NYC, LA, London manage to reach such peaks in all the 3 aforementioned fundamentals
That's why , like everything there is a leaderboard in which you compete against others, as well as yourself from the past.
China is still behind when matched against the West, but nobody improved over their past self as much as them.
If we talk about degeneration, we can also talk about Westerners parroting a totalitarian regime's talking points. It was the party that starved the people and it was the party that "saved" them. Amazing job. Meanwhile no one starved in free China (RoC) and the GDP per capita is still multiple times higher there. But I never see any of you guys talk about the supposed Taiwan miracle. It obviously don't work for that sort of propaganda.
It was rich elites like Gates, Munger & co who enabled the CCP, made them rich and created the system as it exists today - a perfect dystopian nightmare. It now comes back to bite you in the ass, many simply have not realized it yet. Just like they had no problem doing business with Russia right up to the war.
Here's a bit of Gates mental diarrhea from 12 years ago:
>But today his reinvention suffered something of a setback when he played down China's attempts to stifle dissent on the internet as "very limited".
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/25/bill-gate...
Today Bing remains the only American search engine that isn't blocked in China, because they censor like no tomorrow. Even 'be evil' Google is less evil than Bill Gates, this guy has all the money but no morals whatsoever. He's the last person in a position to lecture anyone on misinformation, his company is part of the worst misinformation network on the planet - the CCP intranet aka inside the GFW, where over a billion people are trapped viewing what is increasingly aggressive totalitarian propaganda.
Not sure what he has to do with Bing. Something that only came into existence 13 years ago.
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People regularly talk about Taiwan’s success. Can you show any one objecting to that? It would be difficult for people to always bring up other Asian success stories: Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan vs China.
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I don’t even like Gates or any other billionaires. Your anger appears to be misdirected and too focused on specific things.