As Facebook Struggles, Rivals’ Leaders Stay Mostly Mum

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/technology/facebook-tech-industry-leaders.html

by domevent • 8 years ago

114 68 8 years ago

rco8786• 8 years ago

Because they’re all doing the same stuff?

maxxxxx3• 8 years ago

Exactly! Google, Twitter, Snap and others are exactly the same. It's exactly the same business models as Facebook's. The whole focus on Facebook is pretty misguided. Maybe it will hurt Facebook but there will be a ton of companies ready to jump in and do exactly the same or worse. In the end we need privacy regulation and make the business of selling customer data difficult to the point it doesn't make sense for most companies.

creato• 8 years ago

They are not the same. Yes, they all collect a lot of information, but only Facebook allowed much of that information to come into possession of third parties.

ror6ax2• 8 years ago

Yep. What this situation shows is that open data is faaaar faaaar worse represented than open source. There is not even a faint whisper of possibility, you know, not using proprietary platform and use the internet the way it was meant to be used.

kelukelugames• 8 years ago

lol, what did you expect?

I worked at Microsoft when the Playstation got hacked. They were like, "let's not say anything and attract attention from the hackers."

aswanson• 8 years ago

Thats kind of sinister.

ocdtrekkie2• 8 years ago

Is it "sinister" to not want to also get hacked? Hackers love a challenge, the worst thing you could do in response to a competitor getting hacked is suggest you aren't as vulnerable. It's basically an invitation.

maxxxxx3• 8 years ago

That's exactly the same logic my director applied to pentesting. If you don't test no vulnerabilities will be discovered.

fancyfacebook• 8 years ago

I've been wondering for a few years now what it would look like if one of these tech behemoths collapsed, mainly in the context of how intertwined and globalized they all are now.

We're also not allowed to talk about how important and integrated these companies are with the defense industry, but they are. Lots of people working on lots of projects that they can't put on their resume. Some of these companies are practically governmental entities, particularly the telecoms.

Maybe too big to fail isn't the correct term, more like too integrated to fail. Market caps can move around but the apparatus must be maintained.

ocdtrekkie2• 8 years ago

AOL and Yahoo are now both properties of Verizon.

The idea that one of these companies could fall in a "literally just gone from the Internet" standpoint isn't realistic. They're worth too much, and someone will buy them for some amount, and keep the basics of their company online.

dom96• 8 years ago

They stay "Mum"? Boy that sounds odd to a British resident.

petepete• 8 years ago

Not to this one, mum means to stay silent (mum as in 'mmm', not your mother). Even Shakespeare used it in Henry VI

Seal up your lips and give no words but mum

jacobolus• 8 years ago

'mum' meaning silent dates from the 15th century. 'mum' meaning 'mother' (in England) dates from the 17th century.

Various English posters and signs in WWII warned readers to 'be like dad – keep mum'.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/INF3-243...

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/be-like-dad-ke...

marricks• 8 years ago

Speak out against FB, people call you a hypocrite. Speak out in defense... we’ll who would be stupid enough to do that.

I bet their real play is lobbying legislators aggressively to weaken any potential legislation against them.

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/29/the-u-s-government-is-fi...

primitur9• 8 years ago

The elephant in the room is not Facebook.

Its the generations of people who have, over the last 10 years, grown up to assume that their personal lives are of interest to others, and wish therefore to capitalize/profit on exposing their life to strangers.

This is going to be a much more difficult precipice to step back from than, say, the rampant piracy of things like Napster, and so on. We'll definitely have to push technology harder and further to establish better ways for these addicts to come down from their highs and return to a more normal level of social interaction - but then again, maybe its too late.

(Upvote me if you agree.)

Seriously though, I believe we have to appeal to one demographic that gets ignored through all of this, thick and thin: parents. Its truly the only way to adjust this cultural liability for future generations - we simply must insist on parental controls over social media from now on.

And, in addition, we have to establish that parents should regulate their kids' use of online/social media tools in such a way that we reduce the devolutionary effect on human interaction that is occurring now.

Perhaps its truly time for a revolutionary new service: FamilyBook. You can only gain access with a birth certificate .. mmm ...

Eric_WVGG3• 8 years ago

The notion that parents are always or even usually wise and responsible, that seems like a very shaky foundation upon which to repair a culture. Homer Simpson “beat” Dr. Huxtable, after all, quite handily...

primitur9• 8 years ago

They don't have to be wise or responsible. They do have to have a desire to raise their kids with future-proof values. These are not necessarily the same thing.

And .. Homer Simpson? Fiction, yo.

pjc502• 8 years ago

assume that their personal lives are of interest to others

Celebrities and self-promoters have existed forever. As have gossips. Generally people are interested in others' personal lives.

parental control

This is going to be an endless battle, and will come with ludicrous comparisons to the various ages of personal responsibility. You can as easily end underage internet chatting as you can end underage drinking.

primitur9• 8 years ago

I'm not calling for its end. I'm calling for its control. And there is no better entity in all society than the family unit when it comes to social control. You can't effect change without control...

harryf• 8 years ago

And, in addition, we have to establish that parents should regulate their kids' use of online/social media tools in such a way that we reduce the devolutionary effect on human interaction that is occurring now.

Basically: yes! But with lots of caveats.

- Parents shouldn't be able to play Big Brother in their children's lives - it's important for all kinds of reasons, especially sexual development, that children and teenagers get to have a safe degree of privacy e.g. son who's gay vs father who's homophobic

- "I blame the parents" needs to be eliminated from the conversation. Parenting today is full of bad compromises e.g. give your kids access to social media and expose them to a random stream of cultural influences vs. isolate them and risk social exclusion. And most parents anyway have little extra time / energy for keeping tabs on whether your child's use of a VR headset or whatever latest consumer tech found its way into your household is harmful or not.

- we need to exercise collective wisdom on what social media does to children. Seeing my daughter using musical.ly for example really makes we wonder if we're training a generation of narcissists.

...and that's just three off the top of my head

primitur9• 8 years ago

we're training a generation of narcissists

This is an age-old conundrum, and I don't think we'll ever be rid of it. However, I do believe we need to refine the current situation such that it doesn't become the #1 dominating factor in social discourse.

It would be nice to see a social network arise that rewards altruism and empathy, for example, while demoting narcissism and solipsism... Perhaps that will come, somehow. In some ways I believe we already have these platforms in some forms (github comes to mind) ..

Zak2• 8 years ago

we need to exercise collective wisdom on what social media does to children

You seem to be suggesting some sort of regulation. Since you weren't concrete and specific, I can't respond to that directly, but I urge you to keep in mind:

* Many things that are valuable to adults may be dangerous to children. Consider a kitchen knife, power tools or cleaning chemicals.

* With all the privacy concerns that are in the public eye lately, age verification, which is probably difficult to separate from identity verification, seems fairly unappealing.

AndrewKemendo• 8 years ago

This is a great point. Social Media democratized the ability to be a celebrity.

Celebrity is something that everyone wants - except for those who have achieved it.

efdee• 8 years ago

No, the elephant is definitely Facebook and friends.

"Its the generations of people who have, over the last 10 years, grown up to assume that their personal lives are of interest to others, and wish therefore to capitalize/profit on exposing their life to strangers." - Say what? Most people aren't looking to capitalize/profit on anything, they just want to share bits of their life with others that they count as their friends.

Most people are definitely not aware of what happens behind the curtains. The fact that there's a big gorilla in the room watching everything they post and profiting of that is the problem.

And that gorilla is Facebook.

primitur9• 8 years ago

Facebook wouldn't be such a bully if it didn't have so many willing victims, throwing themselves at its maw. There is a market for industrialized narcissism/solipsism .. but what came first - Facebook, or the narcissist? I believe its the latter, but I'm willing to concede that Facebook - as well as others - have definitely fomented this market.

Right now, we have to deal with the Facebook dystopia. But, it won't go away if we just shut down Facebook. We need to work on the reasons for the cultural and social proclivity towards allowing the usurpation of our basic human rights. Do most of us even know what our human rights are?

daveid• 8 years ago

The elephant in the room is not Facebook.

Can you really say "elephant in the room" in a thread about social media and not mention Mastodon[1]? That's a facebook rival that's not staying mum...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPSbNdBmWKE

sattoshi• 8 years ago

Literally nobody mentioned it to me except on HN. Nobody I know uses it.

shanev• 8 years ago

There was a social network like this called Famspam, but it pivoted to something called Github.

kerkeslager2• 8 years ago

Putting the focus on parents is a distraction. Obviously it's the responsibility of parents to monitor and regulate their childrens' internet usage. But that doesn't take any of the responsibility off of the social media companies for their attacks on attention and privacy.

Social media companies can't just prey on people and then say, "It's not our fault--their parents should have protected them from us!"

mmjaa• 8 years ago

I don't think the OP is saying that - its more that the solution to the real problem starts in the home. The problem is described as self-absorption and addiction to social validation - a product of modern family life, perhaps?

Either way, as a parent I do believe I have a responsibility to raise my children to understand the need to balance the desire for social validation, with actual contribution to the social order. Facebook et al., don't appear to be too interested in promoting externalisation of these issues, and have demonstrated a strong willingness to do whatever they can to keep people - kids and adults alike - glued to their landing pages .. whereas if parents were raising kids to understand this trap, it wouldn't be so easy.

But, as it is, more often than not when met with the statement "I don't let my kids use Facebook", too many times other peers/parents respond with "well you're not letting your kids keep up with the times, you are damaging them by not letting them have free access to the things that 'everyone else has'" .. and here, I think, is the crux of the social dilemma. In this aspect, I agree with primitur that parenting is the solution.

Parents need to raise the next generation of humans to be wise to the ways of the wicked mind-control cults. Facebook just happens to be the contemporary version.

verylittlemeat• 8 years ago

Its the generations of people who have, over the last 10 years, grown up to assume that their personal lives are of interest to others, and wish therefore to capitalize/profit on exposing their life to strangers.

What do you mean "assume?" Obviously many people are interested in people who are exposed on social media. As a result there is massive opportunity to capitalize and profit. I'm not even just talking about the Kardashians of the world...Jane has 10 followers on instagram and Joe who is attracted to her wants to see what she's up to.

Parental controls aren't going to remove the human instinct to figure out where one stands in the social hierarchy. That's why the genie isn't going back into the bottle.

dalbasal• 8 years ago

I disagree, sort of.

I can see your argument and I agree with most of it, but I don't think it's the main thing. Look at where this is becoming a functional call to action (arms?)... It's politics. Not addiction, narcissism, the TV-but-worse elements and their side effects, not data security, privacy.. politics.

FB & social media generally, have already yielded a handful of full blown revolutions. Certainly a few attempts, and most anything that works by way of public election.

Elon Musk quit FB, on twitter. You know who can't quit FB, politicians. It'd be ill-advised. This has by definition become a political question.

eksemplar• 8 years ago

When I was a child I snuck up in the middle of the night to watch aliens on mute with a blanket over the tv to hide the lights, even though my parents had forbidden it. When I was a teenager my parents had no control at all.

Controlling your children is probably a nice thought for scared parents, but not only doesn’t it work, there is a long scientific record of it being abusive and ruining children.

I think YouTube is a terrible rolemodel for our children too, but mostly for the zombies watching it, at least the kids that are selling out, are actually content producers who are doing something with their lives. Even if that something is retarded.

SllX• 8 years ago

There's too many parents that shouldn't be parents for that to really catch on and simultaneously net the results you would like to see, assuming a kid even has a parent or active adult figure in their life.

itakedrugs• 8 years ago

I think that parental controls can be abused by the people implementing them and avoided by the kids "using" them so it is probably better to teach the kids what is right and wrong.

dawhizkid• 8 years ago

Snapchat is definitely not staying mum this April Fool's https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/980341288753967109

dictum• 8 years ago

It's disappointing how this kind of commentary, disparaging a whole nation/language instead of a government/chief of state, is seeping into mass media. Another recent example is the mock-Cyrillic in the Silicon Valley intro.

It stops being about Putin, the Russian government, leading Russian politicians, Russian oligarchs or some identifiable group. It becomes "the Russians".

(It's not a new phenomenon—remember Dr. Seuss's cartoons about the Japanese?—but it's being done by people who arguably didn't skip the lessons about the problems with national exceptionalism and just recently were making sure everyone knew that.)

oblio• 8 years ago

That tends to happen when you’re supposed to be living in a democracy.

At least with the Soviets there was no pretending.

prolikewhoa• 8 years ago

It's turning into Russiophobia.

Criticism of Putin and the Government, fine, understandable. When you start bringing the language, culture, and innocent people just trying to get by into it and start picking fun at it, that's not OK.

The same people who are OK with this are appalled at the similar right wing/4chan generalizations about Israel and Jewish people.

sheeshkebab• 8 years ago

When is Verizon going to buy Facebook? Any rumors out there?

dominotw• 8 years ago

how do they facebook is struggling? Their numbers might have been unaffected by all the scandals, for all we know.

Remember all the articles about 'Toxic Struggling Uber' , turns out no one really cared and their numbers didn't change much.

machinehermit• 8 years ago

I think it is reflection of the total bubbles people live in.

I have facebook and not a single person has deleted their account. Honestly, I doubt any of my friends on facebook know or care about this "movement".

It is just some goofy form of entertainment for young people who waste too much time on twitter.

hx2a2• 8 years ago

Today the WSJ has an article with the opposite headline:

Silicon Valley Rivals Take Shots at Facebook https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-rivals-take-shot...

hx2a2• 8 years ago

Also note there is fake news or a lame April fool's joke going around saying that Zuckerberg quit.

paxys2• 8 years ago

Other SV companies (Apple, Salesforce etc.) and former Facebook executives, but no one that actually compete with them in social networking/advertising. The lone Google statement is a personal one from an engineer, not a company stance.

ror6ax2• 8 years ago

YOLO, people from IBM and Apple chiming in to preach about business decency. Now I've seen everything.

bookofjoe• 8 years ago

“Never try to kill a man who’s trying to commit suicide.”—anonymous

paxys2• 8 years ago

Part of the silence, people in the industry say, comes from a desire to avoid the business equivalent of bad karma — knowing that they, too, may one day face the buzz saw of public censure.

This is pretty much it. Rule 1 of PR is not to criticize competitors for problems you have as well.

As Facebook Struggles, Rivals’ Leaders Stay Mostly Mum

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