[zeptonaut22]

Mark Zuckerburg's superpower is being like Jack Sparrow at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: he steps off one boat just as it's sinking onto another, and he has the humility to not really give a damn which ship he's on. (I say "humility" even as someone frustrated by his net impact on society.)

I think on the How I Built This Instagram episode the Instagram founder said that Zuck was basically reading the data from Facebook's interactions and saw that the demographics and sharing tendencies of Facebook users meant that it was in a death spiral: people were moving interactions to private channels, reducing the available "friend" content. IMO, the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing and the result was FB pivoting away from "social network" (OG Facebook) to "social media" (2010-2015 FB) and eventually just "media" (Instagram, Reels).

Looking back at what I posted on FB in 2008-2012 is like observing an alien from another planet: it was a completely different platform.

[BeFlatXIII]

> people were moving interactions to private channels, reducing the available "friend" content. IMO, the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing and the result was FB pivoting away from "social network" (OG Facebook) to "social media" (2010-2015 FB) and eventually just "media" (Instagram, Reels).

Adding to that, the people who kept posting as if nothing changed typically were extremely low-value posters. Political ranters, zero-commentary meme reposts, etc…

[hinkley]

Like a large room full of people talking until an event starts, and that moment when half the crowd has realized that someone has gone on stage while the other half has gotten sucked into an argument/discussion and forgotten why we were all here in the first place.

[DyslexicAtheist]

>> people who kept posting as if nothing changed typically were extremely low-value posters

absolutely not, ... these were (and are) always there. instead it was Facebook management decisions choosing to amplify exactly this. Let's not blame a minority of (misguided) content creators for the shortcomings of Zuck and his sycophant senior managers.

[lenerdenator]

> Mark Zuckerburg's superpower is being like Jack Sparrow at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: he steps off one boat just as it's sinking onto another, and he has the humility to not really give a damn which ship he's on. (I say "humility" even as someone frustrated by his net impact on society.)

That's like saying a tapeworm is humble because it doesn't care which colon it's sitting in.

The tapeworm lacks the faculties to care about the colon. It just needs nourishment. Same with Zuck. You can't blame the worm, because it's got no concept of reality beyond the things needed to serve its survival. Zuck, as a human, can only do that by very likely having a serious personality disorder.

[tibbar]

A reference to Larry Ellison as a lawnmower, perhaps? [0]

> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728

[bitpush]

> That's like saying a tapeworm is humble because it doesn't care which colon it's sitting in.

A more VC speak of this is

"Strong ideas loosely held"

[noisy_boy]

> The tapeworm lacks the faculties to care about the colon. It just needs nourishment. Same with Zuck. You can't blame the worm, because it's got no concept of reality beyond the things needed to serve its survival. Zuck, as a human, can only do that by very likely having a serious personality disorder.

Isn't that behavior massively rewarded in the current system of VC-driven capitalism as a general rule? Such founders/companies leach off the society, leave it worse and are given huge valuations and riches. Infact the incentives mean we will see more of such people rise to the top in a ever-worsening feedback cycle until the society puts some checks on them. Which is a extra difficult in this deliberately fragmented environment. Same old loop we can't break out of.

[pipes]

It was just never clear who I was sharing with. At least on a private chat there's a list of users and that's it.

[RajT88]

That was intentional. I recall testing this out every time there was a new "oops, we're sorry, we reset your privacy settings to default -- AGAIN".

The privacy settings were carefully designed to have vague wording that how they worked on the surface wasn't how they really worked. Each and every one of them which had a different functionality than what the wording suggested on its surface resulted in you sharing to a much wider audience than you thought you were.

I recall carefully testing it out with a burner account which my main was not friends with, and it consistently taking 2-3 tries to get the privacy settings back to where I wanted them to be.

I would take those days over what Facebook is today - which is to say, useless. The only thing I use it for is groups, which have the good sense to only be about the thing you want to learn about when you look at the group. Still though - it is sad that FB Groups killed off small web forums.

[zeptonaut22]

Definitely true, but back in the day that was sort of the fun of it -- similar to putting up an AOL Instant Messenger away message, it was just... a blast of a funny thought to the people that you knew.

Over time, that network got stale and it included "people you sort of used to know", and then it included your grandma and uncle and rest of the world. There are few things that are at the intersection of the Venn diagram of "things I want to share with all of those people", especially as I get older.

[MarceliusK]

Looking at old FB posts feels like reading an internet time capsule from a version of myself that barely exists

[araes]

Fading spectre of person you once were.

Archived images barely remembered.

Time stands long frozen.

Dust of memories.

A museum of former self.

[Ntrails]

> the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing

  Instead of chatting shit in a "public" area (rip wall to wall) limited to just my uni friends, there were suddenly home friends, relatives etc reading.  And obviously it only got worse with algorithms pushing dross and hiding the zeitgeist from you.

Growth and monetisation drove that shift imo

[grandempire]

Zuckerbeg’s super power is actually operating a giant tech company successfully, executing on multi-year visions, and just barely turning 40.

[calimariae]

You might manage the same if you’re rich enough to hire top-tier advisors. Let’s not kid ourselves—OG Facebook wasn’t a tech marvel or even particularly original. It just landed in the right place at the right time and snowballed from there.

[Apocryphon]

In recent years, operating it successfully despite burning through billions for their metaverse boondoggle, sure

[Aeolun]

Maybe he’s just good at not rocking the boat too much? I’m fairly certain these things mostly keep moving without any input.

[addicted]

Superpower is one way to phrase it.

Another is illegally using Facebook’s monopoly and data to crush or buy potential competitors. I think the olds used to call that anti-trust.

[jncfhnb]

The word you’re looking for is sociopathy

[billy99k]

Now it's 99% AI generated click bate.

[qingcharles]

I always see comments like this, but I rarely have this problem myself, though I see it on others' accounts. Even my Facebook feed shows me lots of legitimately useful posts. Sure, updates from friends and family are a much lower fraction than they were, but I'm actually OK with what I see.