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Who Will Fix Facebook? (rollingstone.com)
44 points by howard941 on Nov 27, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 23 comments


Facebook is operating exactly as designed. To hear people talk you would think Facebook was some kind of public utility or perhaps a system where Mark Zuckerberg does you a favor by hosting your cat pictures out of the goodness of his heart.

This is not so, you do not have a Facebook page - Facebook has a page on you[0].

The real solution to the power Facebook is probably regulation, but nobody wants to tackle that big ball of hurt.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2013/10/the_seven_realities_of_social_ne... (I wrote this several years ago, today I would be harsher on some of Facebook's policies)


It will fix itself when enough users really start abandoning it. And by fix I mean disappear.


Or when shareholders and board members oust Zuckerberg and Sandberg. Employees get fired for making mistakes that cost companies millions - why aren't executives held to the same standard especially when it's cost them billions in their market cap with no real solution in sight? The smart people are leaving (Chief Business Officer of Whatsapp being the most recent one), and the bleeding is only going to continue if there's no trust in the top ranks at FB.


Zuckerberg owns ~20% of FB and ~30% of its class A shares. So that's all easier said than done.


maybe there is a lesson buried in there about letting a child with no previous experience having that much control over a global advertising corporation.


I thought that young people were just smarter? /s


Totes!


I imagine if there was a Jira created to fix Facebook, the status would look something like:

    [ Closed:  Works as designed ]


It's hard to conjure sympathy for anyone booted from Facebook. They built on someone else's platform and that platform pulled the rug out.

That's the price of admission to the Walled Garden.


They knew they were joining a private platform. How could they not? If the walled garden is the de facto way people get their news, then as a media company you're just a fool to ignore it.


Facebook is fenced yard. Instagram is the walled garden one.


>Who will fix Facebook?

Hopefully nobody. It's a relic of a bygone era, and while many people are hanging on for sentiment it's really a social wasteland of advertising and inactive accounts.

Unfortunately FB's other properties are following in the same path. My Instagram feed seems to be approaching a 1:3 ratio of ads to content and I find myself using other platforms (TikTok, recently) more and more.


Facebook doesn't care if you're the owner of a page or a group. That means when you assign someone else as an admin of your page, they can remove you from the page and you are no longer the owner of the page. Crap. Why not holding `owner_id` to original page , so that in case of being hacked, you're still the owner ? Facebook never tries to protect your (or their ?) things.


This is for a reason. When Company hires Agency to design a social media presence, Agency doesn't have to wait for Company to create pages, assign rolls, and probably spend hours on the phone wasting everyone's time. Agency can just create a page, set everything up, then with the knowledge they already have, assign admin rights to Company, and Company can remove Agency.


It's not related to the ownership here. Assigning admin rights doesn't relate to the owner concept. In your case, transferring ownership is the right way to do, being admin is not enough.


No diff between Reverb and Alex Jones in my book.

My rule is pretty simple about who I follow - anyone using "us VS them" style language and communication techniques gets autoblocked. Complex issues can never be solved by bullying the other side into submission.

I don't care if they are liberal or conservatives, these are panderers and should be called out as such.


anyone using "us VS them" style language and communication techniques

Isn't that exactly what your comment is doing?


Probably the same, but why do panderers need a broadcasting platform?


I did the same. By doing it, a few months ago I was left with about 10 contacts ("friends") only and a couple of groups of interest, so I closed the account for good and never went back.


Probably not Facebook. Just check out this interaction between a NYT journalist and them.

https://twitter.com/sheeraf/status/1065988154308538368


Legends speak of one called Tom: a great Entrepreneur of old, taken away to sleep in a secluded space of his own, who will one day wake and return to social media in our time of direst need.


Tom is my friend. Tom is all our friends.


I like Matt Taibbi's writing but this piece is unusually naive by his standards. The whole 'clamp down on fake news, Russian trolls and Nazis' schtick is just an excuse to limit free speech, which FB have every right to do in their walled garden.

It's v unclear to me what FB is actually for these days. It's clearly not a high school yearbook style 'facebook' any more. The closed groups are AOL redux and the whole 'newsfeed' thing is a mess.

My more paranoid side suspects it will be sunseted soon as a newer, more sophisticated surveillance system becomes ready. A Yahoo style security breach will flush everybody off FB and onto a shiny platform with exciting new bells and whistles...




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