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Comment by rozap | Hacker News Reader

I've been reflecting over the past year or so about this. And I'm also stuck with the same thoughts. Was I just dumb 15 years ago, or did the industry actually shift? Or a little of both?

imo society also had a different view of these sorts of snake oil salesmen, so it was easier to fall into the collective hallucination. Remember when the movie "the social network" came out, the movie portrayed zucc as kind of an asshole, but also a hero - there was a sort of righteousness, and people loved him. The "very special boy" who cheekily breaks a few rules in order to build something that is wildly popular and disruptive...and this was something to live up to? But now I think, in general, we've seen that most of these very special boys are actually quite shit.

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> The "very special boy" who cheekily breaks a few rules in order to build something that is wildly popular and disruptive...and this was something to live up to?

I think examples like this (also see Bill Gates) were more inspiring because there was an idea that you could get at least some smaller scale of that kind of success with a modicum of talent, hard work, and luck. You would look around your high school class and there would be one or two "whiz kids" who everybody knew would go on to do great things. The role of computers was not widespread yet and there seemed countless possibilities for computers to make life better. Instead of writing numbers by hand into a ledger and adding on a mechanical calculator, you would use a spreadsheet type of thing.

I think what changed is the efficiency of the successes. Success means extraction at largest possible scale, such that there is no more room for one or two whiz kids from every single high school class. There is room for 1 whiz kid per generation; and chances are that guy will need to be a greedy asshole to make it to the top. And then the very nature of this extraction means, now that the productivity gains have plateaued, that resources are taken from the poor and given to the rich.

Sorry to be a downer, I'll see myself back to my bottle. :-D

Yes. The problem is scale and pervasiveness.

Ethics didn't matter on an Apple ][. Well, not much. You could screw around, break stuff, "should" didn't come into it, you couldn't really touch the parts of the world that matter. Even people hacking phone lines and banks were small-time for the most part.

Zuckerberg wasn't particularly original in his thought process, there'd been many like him before, but I think Facebook was the pivotal moment. One, because it was for everyone (even more so than AOL), two, because it was personal in a way that previous social platforms (ICQ, Usenet, Compuserve) hadn't been, and three because by rigidly enforcing real-life identities as the norm, it collapsed the context between online and offline.

Ten years earlier, lonely-bored-horny-smart dudes would have joked about building an app to be vaguely creepy around hot girls they were too shy to talk to. Heck, that's basically the plot of Weird Science - by 1985, Hollywood knew that's what geeks were like, so we can guess the first time that conversation happened was about 1972.

Smart little boys breaking the rules on an Apple ][ are interesting and funny. When they end up running the world but haven't grown psychologically, it's downright terrifying.

Same goes for 25-year-old stoner douchebags making edgy shitposts on 4chan, and those same people when they're 55 and worth $400Bn. With power, responsibility. Grow the fuck up.

> Grow the fuck up.

Or else what.

Or else you're a

Sigh, never mind.

I guess the blurring and eventual erasure of the online/offline erasure is where Zuck succeeded and Friendster, MySpace, et al., failed.

I'm not sure the others aspired to, to quite the same extent.

Partly a function of timing of course. Stable, universal broadband connections arrived a couple of years before Facebook, and the iPhone a couple of years after.

Even as late as 2002, people _went_ online. I think the last time I used a modem must have been summer 2003 or so. By 2007, people _were_ online.

I can no longer edit my comment. Strike that second instance of 'erasure' and substitute 'red line'.

You nailed it: success is a winner-take-all (or maybe most?) proposition. At least in a narrow domain, the dominant solution crowds out all other contenders.

15 years ago we didn't have so many algorithms. I think Facebook still sorted by recent back then.

The pervasiveness of algorithms is a symptom of the change that has happened. It shows how companies started to compete more and more for our attention and engagement.

At one point, a company makes changes to just get users, and that makes it have to do things people want. Eventually the growth opportunity by utility gets very small, so all the efforts come from increasing profitability per user. That will rarely make the company's products better for their users. Every top company moved to increasing margins and minimal growth years ago.

And this is precisely Doctorow's definition of 'enshittification'.

I think "algorithms" disguises something bigger: a broad ethos to extract value from users, instead of delivering value to them. Modern consumer tech sees end-users as resources to exploit. Between privacy violations, vendor lock-in, worsening functionality and interoperability, and unilaterally changing terms and designs, these services demonstrate so much contempt for the people who've come to rely on them.

Instead of making things better, tech companies use their engineering prowess to impose control over people and reduce end-users' agency.

And people have been warning about these issues back then already : this is what "protocols, not platforms" was about.

(Corporations seeking monopoly is not a new story.)

Algorithms aren't inherently bad. An algorithm that keeps spam out of my email is pretty great if it works. An algorithm that presents a feed of things I actually want to see is also pretty great. I want to see life updates from my friends and family, especially media of their pets, but not sports, babies, or politics except from a couple people who write interesting things.

That's not a tall order for a recommendation algorithm with a huge supply of training data. It wouldn't even need a 50% hit rate to make something really useful that I would definitely check once or twice a day and post or comment several times a week if even a third of my real life social circle used it.

An algorithm that presents me a feed of things I sometimes can't look away from even though I don't really want to see them is harmful, like an addictive drug.

> the movie portrayed zucc as kind of an asshole, but also a hero

The word/ genre is a protagonist as antihero. An antihero is nice in fiction, we sympathize with them to some degree over their flaws and challenges. The problem is that a billionaire very much has an outsized impact.

Put another way, an anti-hero is tantalising in a work of fiction, but not necessarily the type of bloke with whom you'd want to grab a beer IRL.

In fact Zuck _was_ a hero back then, as was Elon.

People with power tend to change. With being in power, their perspective on the world shifts, often for the worse.

Zuck originally wanted fully free speech, this is in fact what everyone wanted in that time. Then appeared the massive abuse in the unavoidable echo chambers. Zuck was hence forced to be the judge between good and bad speech/content, up to being in court. The filtering had to happen with advanced algorithms since fully manual was impossible to pull off. The funding happened by advertising, so the move to algorithms upping engagement was only logical.

Elon on the other hand went all the way from the nerd being bullied at the playground, via the acceleration of electrical transport, up to buying the world's biggest software playground and obtaining a large part of world's communication and transport hardware infrastructure. He's more convinced than ever of the power of capitalism, for the good and the bad.

> Elon on the other hand went all the way from the nerd being bullied at the playground

Elon wasn't bullied. He was pushed down a flight of stairs by one kid after Elon made fun of that kid's father's suicide.

We were not at the site when it happened. I only recall the various sources that I read and try to make a consistent/plausible model and narrative. I never met Elon nor Zuck in person.

I wasn't there, but the source is elon's father.

Elon's father is/was a certifiable monster. I'm not sure he's the reliable narrator that you're setting him up to be.

Well, it's what everyone wanted apart from all the people warning them about it.

(I'm not taking credit. I was militantly pro free speech at the time, the anti-free-speech position was mostly held by Christian Conservatives and other fun-free types. Free speech was borderline _sexy_).

What I don't think Zuck or any of his peers realised was what they were connecting. Sure, connect all the bright young things on college campuses, and maybe their nice extended families, good things will happen.

I don't think he'd have done it if he knew just how much of the population was deplorable, deplorable-adjacent or highly susceptible to being turned that way.

And I don't recall ever seeing that discussed at the time. "But if we connect all the people... you realise we're connecting all the angry, ugly, bitter, nasty, broken ones too. And have you considered just how many of those there are?"

Zuck, a hero?

The first time I saw a fellow student post something utterly irrelevant (to our local group's real lives) rage bait thing into the then-new FB feed I knew we were in trouble. Surely, FB and Zuck must have had an idea what was going on.

Then I deleted my account and successfully ignored all of the generic, commercial asocial media fads that happened afterwards (at least to the degree they're directly ignorable). Feels nice to have it all pass me by.

Mixing online and real life in this uncontrolled manner and scale was a huge mistake for our collective moral and mental health.

And for the record: I don't blame him for everything that happened, but he certainly helped open the doors to a much more unpleasant VC-powered internet and we're struggling to reboot the cultural forces that made the time before it so great.

Agreed on the mixing of worlds being detrimental to society. Boundaries exist for a reason.

I don't think Zuck's motives were ever pure or noble. We must remember that Facebook (original name: Mashbook) was originally created to rate the fuckability of the females residing in Harvard's co-ed dorms. Basically, it was Hot Or Not for a very targeted population.

The concept of a social graph was stolen lock, stock, and barrel from the Winklevoss twins.

Zuck's talent is unabashed brashness and chutzpah. He thinks the rules simply don't apply to him. He is not an original thinker, but rather very intellectually derivative. The fact that he grew up wealthy opened many doors for him, even despite the Winklevoss twins' sentiment that he comes from new money and is thus irremediably beneath them, and even worse in their WASPy blueblood minds, Jewish new money. ('How dare a Jew steal our idea!') Shady actors all around, with not an admirable figure amongst them.

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