25 karma · joined January 5, 2020
The platforms also don't generate a profit or operate at a loss YouTube generated $15 billion last year[1], but Google/Alphabet never disclosed profitability and has only broken even in previous years[2]. Twitter also took over a decade before it even reported a profit[3]. These kinds of ventures would be choked out by competition and by a lack of investors normally. But monetary profits aren't the goal. It's all about control.
Take Facebook for instance. Over half of the US population has a Facebook account[4]. Facebook is also known to engage in psychological manipulation of its audience to determine reactions and behavior[5], even shadowbanning users and content that it disagrees with[6]. This is a great recipe for broadcasting whatever message the controllers of these platforms want and for reinforcing those beliefs with positive messaging. I won't even get into the political ramifications like with the Cambridge Analytica scandal[7] or that Facebook advertises using your name to your friends[8].
I'm trying to underline the point that Perez makes in the article. It's incredibly dangerous to trust these platforms with anything. They disguise their motives in corporate speak and platitudes while shutting out any dissenting voices. The solution is to get off of these platforms that stifle speech and thought. Otherwise, we're doomed to live in Edward Bernays' wet dream.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-ad-revenue-15-billio... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-go... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/technology/twitter-earnin... [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-... (the US population is 328.2 million) [5] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-... [6] https://gizmodo.com/facebook-patents-shadowbanning-183641134... [7] https://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-a-guide-... [8] https://www.facebook.com/help/214816128640041
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"Information is like a bank. Some of us are rich. Some of us are poor with information. All of us can be rich. Our job--YOUR job is to rob the bank. To kill the guard. To go out there, to destroy everybody who keeps and hides the whole of information."
One of the benefits of a CDN is the "N" part. If you host on a single server and you start getting requests from across the globe, those users will have a slightly more fluid experience if they can download the assets from a server that's physically closer to them than if they have to wait for packets to hop across dozens of nodes.
However, there are also a few "architects" who are basically free agents with god-like status. They don't architect anything. Rather, they do a lot of counter-productive things such as attending meetings for specific teams without those teams knowing. Then they make large decisions about the direction of a given feature without documenting anything, let alone letting those teams in on what's going on. It's always a fun surprise and works wonders for our ability to deliver a solution on time /s
Beyond that, they'll go off and develop whatever they feel like and force it through the system. We have a code review process, but if you bring up that problems are present in their code, they will often say that it doesn't matter and that the code just has to go through to meet some unspecified deadlines. They'll get management to skip code reviews if you try to hold them accountable. And of course, this results in things exploding. But then they can clean up those exploded bits, knowing what they were, and come out heroically since they "put out so many fires".
I'll stop ranting. But it really is frustrating, especially when you get shut down by management for bringing up any issues with this chaotic group.