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Comment by rishabhaiover

18 hours ago

I have a genuine dislike for all Meta products now. With time, their intentions have become much more clear and it was never to bring people closer or whatever.

> With time, their intentions have become much more clear

Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties, probably with the aim of bringing them ‘closer’? They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.

  • My theory is that Zuck has profound imposter syndrome due to the public knowledge that his joke of a side project in college went uber-viral and he has had to play CEO dress-up ever since. He has been desperate to prove that he actually has deep technological insight with his big bets on wearables and the metaverse and AI, but the truth is that his entire dynasty is built on people's need to snoop on pictures of their crushes and their exes. I think the company has actually done some impressive things with staying alive via acquisition as facebook has rotted, but he wants to be known as a tech genius, not an M&A suit.

    • One can only hope that he just fully turns to philanthropy a la Bill Gates sooner rather than later, and gives up trying to "connect" people (which somehow always turns into privacy nightmares).

  • > Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties, probably with the aim of bringing them ‘closer’?

    Sort of.

    Wikipedia @ 2:

    > Mark Zuckerberg built a website called "Facemash" in 2003 while attending Harvard University. The site was comparable to Hot or Not and used photos from online face books, asking users to choose the 'hotter' person".

    Britannica:

    > Despite its brief tenure, 450 people (who voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004.

    > They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.

    Wikipedia @ 3:

    > A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities.

    Wikipedia @ 2:

    > Zuckerberg coded a new site known as "TheFacebook", stating, "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available ... the benefits are many."

    [1] https://www.britannica.com/money/Facebook

    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

    [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book

    • While we're doing historical quotes:

      "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." -Mark Zuckerberg

  • I think the “face book” was used prior to the name of the company for what you would call a college student directory. Like a yearbook.

  • > Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties

    Maybe so, but have you seen Zuck's wife? I'm pretty sure he could find someone hotter to date if he cared to. There must be armies of gold-diggers after him. And yet he seems happy with his imo rather plain looking wife. Well done them both!

Meta products are pretty good specifically if you're a business owner who wants to advertise his product.

Its pretty safe bet to completely ignore any PR, be it meta, apple, google or whatever, and just look at past actions of company and owners/ceo. Shallow talk is very cheap, morality often isn't. Then no surprises happen, practically ever.

  • This really should be a basic concept every human needs to understand. Public communication in 99% of cases is fabricated to please the masses, but usually hides a lot of the actual intentions of the communicating party. Whether it be advertisers, politicians, CEOs, certain news channels and whatnot. You can not trust public speeches without digging for some info yourself.

Going back to the G+ era, I remember even by that time the FB dev advocates (these existed) came off as seriously slimy, to the point that it was clear we couldn't have the Google and FB reps in the same room at the same time. (And the Google ones were much more good humored about this).

Admittedly that was just a couple of guys, but it takes something to be so obviously toxic yet still chosen to represent the values of your company at a third party.

Arguably the Google ones were guilty of naivete, but that's not a crime you'd want to punish too hard, and I was myself guilty of far worse.

  • What did you think of G+? I never understood it, but what would you have done now differently than Google with G+ (using your hindsight and battle scars)?

> their intentions have become much more clear

The hunter Biden laptop story was censored - including in private messages - and Charlie Kirk was shown being shot in the neck to death to children.

There's nothing else to say.