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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Zuck is just bullshitting here, like most of what he says.

There is zero chance he wants to pay even a single person to sit and take calls from users.

He would eliminate every employee at Facebook it it were technically possible to automate what they do.

So would everyone that ever created a business. Nobody grows headcount if they don't have to. Why be responsible for other people's livelihoods if you can make it work with less people? Just more worries and responsibilities.

This doesn't seem true to me at all. Humans are not rational drones that analyze the business and coldly determines the required number of people. I would be surprised if CEOs didn't keep people around because it felt good to be a boss.

Facebook might be able to operate with half the headcount, but them Zuckerberg wouldn't be the boss of as many people, and I think he likes being the boss.

> I would be surprised if CEOs didn't keep people around because it felt good to be a boss.

If you had hired people (and been responsible for their salaries and benefits and HR issues), you would definitely not say that.

Money unspent is worthless.

> Nobody grows headcount if they don't have to.

From my experience in corporations this is a false statement. The goal of each manager is to grow their headcount. More people under you - more weight you have and higher position you got.

I think that once you have profit & loss responsibility that chanes.

I think that once you have profit & loss responsibility that changes.

There is a difference between business owners (who don't want to spend money unless they have to) ans managers (who want career growth and are not necessarily worried about the company 's bottom line wrt headcount)

> Why be responsible for other people's livelihoods if you can make it work with less people?

Because he is the fourth richest man on the planet and that demands some responsibility, which he refuses to take.

He owns 162,000,000,000 dollars. Metas net income 2024 was 50,000,000,000 dollars.

A manager’s net worth is not tied to the valuation of the company. They get their salary regardless.

I don’t know about you, but for me, one of the greatest joys in life is being able to hire people and give them good jobs.

Most major corporations have increased head count in recent years when they didn’t have to via the creation of DEI roles. These positions might look good in the current cultural moment but add nothing to a company’s bottom line and so are an unnecessary drain on resources.

Ahh getting downvoted but no one has offered a counter-argument.

He can definitely fire most people at Facebook. He just doesn't because it would be like not providing a simple defense against a pawn move on a Chess board. No point in not matching the opposition's move if you can afford it. They hire, we hire, they fire, we fire.

Sounds like his own job could be automated…

The company is his property, ofc he won't fire himself

FB would be run into the ground on day one, if he fired most people (>50%) at FB.

Why?

Other than on-call roles like Production Engineers, whose absence there would make the company fail within a day?

Because things would happen on the platform, that would be bad PR. Availability might even go down. Who knows what kind of automatized things need to be kept in check daily.

> things would happen on the platform, that would be bad PR

They literally had (allegedly) significantly contributed to inciting a genocide [0]. PR doesn't get much worse than that, but it seems that we as a society, just don't care about these things that much any more. I really can't recall any case of any individual or organization going down because of PR issues, except for people in the entertainment industry; for some reason, we only expect good morals from our actors and comedians.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_co...

Twitter example shows it might not be true.

Twitter is dead now, right-wing echo hall. It basically ceased to exist in the way it did.

I will admit though, that it may be possible to continue existing in other ways, if he fired >50% of the people at FB.

Most major companies and politicians still use twitter for communication. It sounds like you are the one in the "echo hall"?

And exactly why would I care, what uninformed people at companies and what uninformed politicians do? And what does that have to do with me being in an "echo hall" (I think you mean echo chamber, btw..)? In what way is whatever platform politicians use indicative of that platform not being an echo chamber?

It doesn't matter whether you care or not. Your personal opinion is of no importance when it comes to mass-market social media and other horizontal platforms. The point is that a lot of politicians and business leaders will continue using X regardless of what you think of it.

Do you even realize that you are the one who used the phrase "echo hall"?

Might be time to step back and take a breath.

You still didn't answer the question though. I asked you why it matters, whether politicians make uninformed use of a bad platform, when it comes to me being in an echo chamber or not. I think there is no relation between what silly things politicians do, and whether I am in an echo chamber or not.

I am not sure why I wrote "echo hall". I must have been mentally absent or something. To my own ears it sounds weird and not like something I would usually write. It might have been weird auto correction on phone. I am not sure. Anyway, that is besides the point. I would like to know, why you think, that what politicians do has any relation to me being in an echo chamber or not. I mean, do you define the outside of echo chambers to be the place, where politicians go? Like ... Are they such a massive number of people or somehow indicative of that outside? I just don't get your idea.

If you are only getting your perspective from tertiary sources rather than primary sources, then you are more likely subject to a bias layer from intermediaries.

I really dont think I am saying anything controversial.

This has more to do with Musk's policy, though. It's still up and running, so clearly the tech side wasn't as affected as people thought it would be.

You are showing your own biases here. Twitter did cease to exist the way it did. In its place is a platform mostly free of censorship and with new features added.

I’d rather see humanity in all of its good, bad, and ugly than have a feed sanitized for me by random Twitter employees who in many cases had their own agenda.

I would rather not see hate speech and incitement of violence online. If you think that Twitter in the form it has now doesn't have a hidden agenda ... That is a very naive believe to be held. Censorship is not the only negative thing that can happen to information. We should all have learned that lesson by now.

I want to see those things. Or rather, I want people to show me who they are.

I want to see all the dumb stuff politicians say. I want to see celebrities’ terrible opinions on things.

I’d rather know how messed up people are than have a feed sanitized for me to keep me ignorant.

I don't see any hate speech or incitement of violence on my X feed. If you do then you must be following the wrong accounts.

Censorship is the worst negative thing that can happen to information. We should have all learned that lesson by now.

> Censorship is the worst negative thing that can happen to information. We should have all learned that lesson by now.

On the contrary, some "information" doesn't deserve the light of day, and we should have learned that lesson in the 1930s and 1940s. The question is where to draw the line.

It’s not mostly free of censorship, you can find many examples of mild left opinions being censored. Harsh epithets against the out group are allowed, up to and including death threats, but mild epithets against the right are removed and often result in bans.

Free speech on Twitter is a joke, and you either are arguing in bad faith or you have no idea what you’re talking about.

> Twitter did cease to exist the way it did. In its place is a platform mostly free of censorship and with new features added.

Try blocking or criticising Musk, or saying "cis" and come back to us on "mostly free of censorship".

> right-wing echo hall

But it is the result of new agenda of new owner, not the result of mass layoffs. I'm sure the result would be the same without layoffs.

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