Hacker News Reader

Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

Meta have some of the most double speak I’ve seen.

They’ll say one set of virtuous sounding goals while completely undermining it in the same breath.

This is just them running with their tails between their legs before the new admin takes over.

Meta are willing to be downright evil if it's profitable. Just ask the Rohingya. They might have hired enough DEI people that there was a cadre of pro-DEI thought within the company, but at a higher level that was only ever preemption against regulatory action, and evidently they weren't ever allowed to take root.

> This is just them running with their tails between their legs before the new admin takes over.

They're not running away from this, they're running towards the new admin, mouths wide open to receive. This admin promises to be amazing for dead-eyed big tech fuckery and they want in. And it's a win-win for them as they can also save the expensive DEI and fact-checking cost center departments while they're at it.

I think this is the norm for any topic that is politicized. You could have ChatGPT or some other LLM write the memo and it wouldn't be much better or worse.

Suppose you made a bad policy decision and want to roll it back. How do you do that? Anything you do is going to piss someone off. I think they're trying to do it in a plausibly reasonable way without shitting on everyone who worked on it for a couple years.

It's funny how they suddenly realized and reversed every "wrong" policy decision made over many years just days before a new administration takes over. And these new policies are exactly aligned with what the administration wants.

Maybe you have the causality backwards — that the response to these kinds of unpopular policies are why a new administration was elected.

It was, after all, the federal government that forced Meta to do any DEI anything /s

Well, if you've made a bad decision, which is better, to reverse it for a bad reason, or to keep it for a not as bad reason?

They didn't have to announce shit, much less announce it right as the new regime is taking over. If they wanted to sunset these programs they could've slowly ramped these programs down without saying anything and nobody would've noticed.

This sends a very clear message about what they're trying to do and whose side they are on.

I disagree that silently rolling it back would not be noticed or create at least as big a shit-storm. Being public about the change was the only real option.

Goes way, way back—I remember announcements nearly 20 years ago where they were basically removing/setting bad defaults on what primitive privacy controls they had at the time, but calling it making things "more social."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com