Mark hates leakers, so it is kind of intensely funny that the NYT seems to have a direct line to probably dozens of ICs. Ultimately, it's hard to keep secrets shared with 70,000 employees.
Years ago when following what Zuckerberg did occupied more space in my brain, it struck me that he can "hate leakers" but not look inward and change his behavior in a way that doesn't upset people and make them want to leak. He is a very reactionary guy, and not a "how can I be the change" or "what did I do to cause this" kind of guy.
I thought of this during his various scandals at the end of the 2010s. Everything was a PR reaction for him, rather than looking inward. The best PR is not being an asshole. I wonder if he's thought about it.
> The best PR is not being an asshole. I wonder if he's thought about it.
There are a lot of people in the world who lack basic human empathy to such an extent that it is nearly impossible for them to just not be an asshole.
I don't know for sure if this applies to Mark Zuckerberg but based on all the second-hand anecdotal information I've heard about him "empathy" as he understands it is a product branding feature rather than a human emotion.
hard to do anything about when it’s in your genetics. it’s a form of neurodivergence just like
any other. and to deny it is just furthering the stigma against people with high cognitive empathy and low affective empathy
Do you want to prevent leaks, or achieve some other goal? If you want to prevent leaks, this isn't an effective approach. If you want to achieve a different goal, that's fine, too, but orthogonal to the stated goal. For leaks, it's probably better to just restrict communications to the necessary distribution and understand that anything widely distributed is more or less public.
Leaking of good things is just good "PR" - people even pay good money for that to "accidentally" happen. Wonder why nobody thinks about actually doing the good thing and not bother with the rest.
I get why people have this idea, but it doesn't work. A culture of "don't have anything bad to leak" quickly and inevitably leads to "keep your mouth shut so there's nothing bad to leak".
It's impossible for someone to be so good that nothing they say would ever look bad when leaked out of context. Sometimes you have to make hard tradeoffs, or hypothetically evaluate something to understand whether it's bad or not.
He'd please a lot more people if the feed hadn't been filled with crap - out of order, at that - that nobody ever subscribed to in the first place, causing them to miss actual posts from friends (whatever you think of 'social media', his website is fucking broken) for YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS
If that one change requires every user to click on their friends profiles to see updates x 2.1 billion daily users and say 4 family friends checked and it takes 1 second to click that is 291,000 8 hour workdays lost per day to humanity. Around 100,000,000 work days per year humanity looses out on putting to productive use. And I am REALLY underestimating the time lost to this. Facebook is stealing low end 100 million days of productivity a year from humanity on this one thing.
Or another way, 850,000,000 hours. It took 5-15 billion human hours of work to go to the moon. They steal 1 moon program worth of human time from humanity every 6 or so years. At the scales they operate we need to judge them on that scale. Mark get's paid/rewarded at that scale. He needs to be judged on the same scale. Not on 'the impact per individual'.
Meta has stolen multiple moon programs from humanity (again I am way under measuring) for that one change in order to increase their billions of dollars.
How can you steal time from humanity when they freely chose to use your product? You don’t owe people a perfect product that doesn’t “waste” their time when compared to some arbitrary standard of how it should be.
Your argument is effectively saying "how can lowering the quality of my product affect customers when they freely use it?".
If you use Facebook regularly, you are locked into it because unless you manage to convince your entire friend network to move to some other social media with you, you will have to "leave them behind".
It's worse than that, people have reported that even going to someone's page, FB determines the order posted. Also, psychological experiments FB has done; also, it's kind of the definition of addiction, because FB, in the beginning, when you first friend someone, shows posts. These then subsequently drop off. You can post something, assuming it's been read. It might show up for nobody.
It's been said before that it's interesting Zuckerberg for making a social site is pretty introverted. It's because he stole it and he's always been stealing things. He did it to Whatsapp. He copied Snapchat multiple times. He thinks people are "dumb fucks" rather than "look, people shouldn't give info away, but now that I have it I'll do everything I can to keep it secure" (I DON'T like Google but my understanding is they have far fewer data problems). That's the mark of a certain kind of person which I'll, I suppose, not name. It's insulting to the web, what he does
I'm actually not kidding when I say that Zuckerberg likes that particular fallacy a lot and I've seen him use it. You're right that it's not at all exclusive to him.
He's wealthy enough that he doesn't have to care. Sadly, he's one of many, most, who demonstrate what happens what you have unbelievable wealth: you do whatever you want to whoever you want without feeling remorse.
And why not? What does he have to fear? He controls the stock. He's not going to lose his company. He's not going to lose his wealth.
He's all but invulnerable as long as he doesn't do wrong (enough) by whatever government he lives under and sucks up enough that he can get away with the rest.
This is not an excuse. This is disgust. He, and most billionaires, are rotten bastards. It's not whether they're awful, it's how awful.
He probably has the same thing as Elon Musk, aspbergers to be honest. Eh I just looked it up, and apparently he does. Come to think of it, maybe Steve Jobs as well, he was insanely eccentric.
Employees seeing wave after wave of their coworkers laid off. You won’t win much loyalty that way.
This latest one releasing the NUMBER and DATE of the layoffs a month in advance without naming WHO is a whole new level of stupid. Let’s deliberately maximize the level of anxiety in our employees and reduce their trust in us to zero.
Given Facebook's current size, and how many people are relatively disgruntled, but work there because of the pay being quite good, the chances of leaks for wide coms approach 100%. The level of internal, upward trust you need to have few leaks left facebook at least 10 years ago.
No amount of hate will fix it, and no amount of tracking will hide all but the most hidden secrets, so he better get over it. In his situation, hating leakers is like Garfield hating Mondays.
