Facebook's Little Red Book

https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook

by heshiebee • 2 years ago

544 270 2 years ago

projektfu• 2 years ago

Good job with the scan. I started reading the book and began to feel rage so I stopped after about 20 pages. Is it the most self-unaware book or just people trying their hand at PR?

qsort• 2 years ago

A little red book full of quotations from the chairman... Where else did I see this?

woodruffw3• 2 years ago

I think that's a very explicit, intentional reference.

thanks_dang• 2 years ago

Is it too early to start a first print of paulgraham.com? I want mine signed.

I hope the cover is orange.

com2kid5• 2 years ago

This was 2012. There was still hope and optimism in the tech space. The Internet had helped overturn powerful regimes and given voice to the disenfranchised. There was the idea that person to person public discourse could resolve many societal problems. Smartphones had exploded just 6 years prior and they were already making inroads into traditionally underserved and neglected communities around the world, helping farmers improve yields and young women become self sufficient so they could escape forced marriages.

The idea that we could join together and share ideas and make the world a better place isn't a wrong idea, it is just one that got subverted once it was realized that inciting anger in users lead to more usage and thus more ad impressions.

dgfitz5• 2 years ago

There was the idea that person to person public discourse could resolve many societal problems.

Nobody thought this.

ryandrake• 2 years ago

I can kind of understand having that kind of optimism back in the Internet of, say, 1998, before we saw how vampiric venture-backed winner-take-most tech companies would be. But by 2012, it would be incredibly naive of tech employees (of any company) to seriously believe they were some kind of force for good.

evanelias3• 2 years ago

Some additional context: morale at Facebook was relatively poor around this time period, partially due to the disappointing stock performance right after the IPO, as well as a one-time company-wide reduction in bonuses a bit after that. So parts of this book may have been intended to help inspire a workforce that was becoming slightly disgruntled over compensation.

fwiw they were still giving the red book to all new hires in ~mid 2013. Personally at the time I found parts of it to be interesting from a "company telling its own history" perspective, and other parts to be extremely cringe-inducing. That said, I'm sometimes a grumpy cynic, and I'm also familiar with some random rare aspects of FB history due to previously working for Harvard IT. (I started working there a year after Zuckerberg dropped out, so didn't have any overlap, but some of my colleagues there were directly involved in the disciplinary hearings regarding Facemash.)

conductr• 2 years ago

Fb did actually accomplish a huge feat. They connected in a defacto social network pretty much everyone in the world that wanted to be connected via a social network. They had just hit a billion users in 2012, took them 8 years, and the internet existed with a lot of hype and similar pretty much failed attempts of this before they succeeded. I think a lot of people probably forget or are too young now to know what even the early successful internet was like. It had a ton of hype, promise, etc. but just doing something simple like talking to other people was kind of clunky. It was cool because it had all the BBS and forums and niche community stuff. But, I'd venture to say for most people it was a solo experience. You got online, did some reading or research or gamed a bit, but didn't really start talking to other humans online until the late 2000s or later. You definitely didn't have a way be connected with people you actually knew, to your social network as we know it today. Sure, you had email, but we all know that has a very specific purpose and is not exactly social or hitting the same spot. This was actually a world changing product, there was a lot to be optimistic about.

All that said, I am not much of a social media user and never really used Fb much myself. I see the appeal and I see the bad sides of it. I think we'd be much better off without it. I don't necessarily like the way in which it changed the world, but there was a lot to be excited about at this point in time. Not liking the product/company/industry/etc doesn't negated what they achieved.

woodruffw3• 2 years ago

I think in 2012, SV startups (and especially social media startups) were still getting high on their own supply: there was a seemingly genuine groundswell belief that unilaterally connecting the world would be a force for good, rather than a mere reconfiguration of powers.

(I don't think Zuckerberg himself is a true believer, but I do think that the people who wrote and read this book in 2012 probably believed it. This was the same year as the Arab Spring, after all.)

junon• 2 years ago

Yes, this. I was at Uber in SF around 2016 or so when they did their "pixels and bits" rebrand which felt very similar. It felt very... "we are messiahs"? Most people felt it, only the people with the highest paychecks (or managers) played into it.

After hearing the core values of the company thrown around in regular speech so often most people got kind of numb to anything corporate (e.g. "I really like that you're always hustling so hard but I would love to see you do a bit more toe stepping").

I left SF a year or so after that so I wonder if that whole approach has changed in the bigger offices or not. Being in Europe now most people here (most ..) wouldn't play into it I don't think. Retrospectively feels very American.

---

EDIT: Actually it's kind of hard to find info on the rebrand now. There's the announcement[0] but that only seems to allude to the weird philosophical aspect of it in the description, which leads me to believe they never published it publicly.

The new Uber brand system is made up of primary and secondary components that tell the story of technology moving the physical world. Today, we're rolling out a new look and feel that celebrates the cities we're in and the technology that brings people what they want, when they want it.

It was more than just "primary and secondary components", they had somehow likened people and pixels together and were trying to create some weird (but similar) narrative of "connecting everything through transport" or whatever. I think the idea was that they wanted to start breaking into more verticals, a la UberEATS and whatnot, but I distinctly remember hearing a lot of "what ifs" about freight, air, etc. that I think were mostly fluff chatter to hype up the rebrand.

Most people, even internally, hated it it, and shortly after that started monthly, then weekly, then at times daily new public scandals about the company or TK, so many people left shortly thereafter.

[0] https://youtu.be/axjXNEordH8?feature=shared

tokioyoyo• 2 years ago

For better or worse, social media (I’d even go as far as saying Facebook) has changed the world. As cringey as that book sounds, people loved hopium of early 2010s. Maybe I was young and naive as well, but I also believed that such connections will unite the world somehow.

Underpass9041• 2 years ago

The amount of retcon in even the first few pages is comical, it comes across as the most tone deaf thing ever.

tejohnso• 2 years ago

What's so enraging? A company puts out some propaganda about how wonderfully world changing it is. Not all that unusual or unexpected.

paulddraper• 2 years ago

Huh?

Smiling people drinking Pepsi, oil companies showing sun filtered through cornstalks....what's the difference?

toast02• 2 years ago

I could never figure out how much of the employee directed propaganda was from people who were doing it ironically and how much was from people who were drinking the Flavor Aid.

I don't think I saw any posters about carpooling, but if there were any, reprints of the classic [1] would have fit right in with the rest of the posters.

I'm pretty sure I saw this book, but I don't think I saved a copy I don't think they were still printing it when my employer was acquired.

Unfortunately, the propaganda doesn't work Page 110 talks about building trust, but what has FB done to earn your trust lately?

[1] https://fdr.artifacts.archives.gov/objects/17472/when-you-ri...

yuliyp2• 2 years ago

I think the way to read it is as a few things: - An artifact intended to try to help solidify a sense of unity of mission and values - Internal cheerleading - A stake in the sand about things which did not fit in with the values.

I read this at the time it showed up on everyone's desks (I wish I'd kept it, but I have no idea where it is). Employees naturally rolled their eyes at some of the excessive optimism in some places, but generally it got the ethos right. That some of the boldest statements have fallen by the wayside ("We don't build better services to make money; We make money to build better services", "Build Products around people, not data") is obviously disappointing, but I'd view what it was trying to do in the light of a piece of art that fell short of its goal rather than merely self-unaware.

It was never intended as PR. It delivered its message via anecdotes and the experiences of working there, not in any way that would have anywhere close to the same meaning to the broader world.

whalesalad2• 2 years ago

page 17. android operating system on an iphone 4. i'm crying right now, particularly the way this is juxtaposed with so many critical moments in history.

Mogzol• 2 years ago

I think it is meant to be a generic phone, the edges and front camera are wrong for an iphone, but then the home button is very distinctly an iphone. It is weird.

whalesalad2• 2 years ago

it's either an iphone 4 or iphone 5 in a case. the home button is an iconic giveaway.

croisillon• 2 years ago

i don't think it's an iphone

firecall2• 2 years ago

Correct - it's not an iPhone.

It's the Facebook Phone!

(probably)

duck• 2 years ago

Could it be an iPod Touch?

pests• 2 years ago

I think that's a BlackBerry. The later Motion from 2017 had a singular button down there too. Could be an older version but can't find anything.

firecall2• 2 years ago

It is in fact the Facebook Phone!

Or at least a mockup of one.

It has the front-facing camera in the top right corner, which is a hint!

Googling suggests the Facebook phone was an HTC device?

grahamj• 2 years ago

[flagged]

JKCalhoun• 2 years ago

Ha ha, so it's more of a cautionary tale. I love those!

yapyap• 2 years ago

haha, for real though. they poisoned the culture. of course not only them blah blah blah but they definitely played a BIG part.

t-3• 2 years ago

No, they didn't. Facebook was just a less trashy, more exclusive version of myspace when it came out. Geocities, livejournal, blogger etc. were earlier iterations on the same concept - personal websites for non-techies. The only thing new about Facebook was their relative success in signing up a broader userbase, which was probably just a right-place, right-time thing of being around when computers and high-speed internet were becoming cheap and ubiquitous rather than anything different about what they were doing.

dartharva4• 2 years ago

It's hilarious to see people desperately put the blame on the connectivity platform when deep down they themselves know, it's the users. Just as always, the platform itself is indifferent; it is the people spewing poison.

woodruffw3• 2 years ago

Facebook is definitely a "great company" by Person of the Year rules[1]. There are some real whoppers on that list.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year

bee_rider• 2 years ago

It is great in the sense that it is very large.

Towaway69• 2 years ago

page 27

Zuckerbergs's Law: The amount each person shares doubles each year.

I initially thought wealth, ideas and love was meant but no ... it's just data.

dullcrisp4• 2 years ago

[flagged]

pc86• 2 years ago

I looked up "psychohistory" and while the definition makes sense, I don't really understand what you mean by this comment.

ninth_ant5• 2 years ago

I’m quite confident this would have been based on metadata collected by Facebook from its user activity. The company has been extremely analytical about its own growth, and id be surprised if this wasn’t a conclusion from an in-house data scientist that just got Zuckerberg’s name stamped on it.

vineyardmike2• 2 years ago

While I’m sure Facebook had data to roughly justify this, just like Moores Law, I’m sure this is equal parts back-projection as prophetic declaration of intent.

For Facebook, they needed the cultural expectation to be ever-increasing data sharing. They (along with other companies) facilitated the creation of tools to share ever-increasing amounts of data.

mparnisari3• 2 years ago

Why would you think it was anything BUT data?

tdeck3• 2 years ago

Before we started using "share" to mean "post" or "upload", and long before it meant "rent", it meant other things. Now it's so normal that we don't even think of how that word is a particular framing of those activities.

almog• 2 years ago

For a moment I read that "the amount of each person's shares doubles each year"

yoavm• 2 years ago

What I find interesting about this "law" is that for a while it seemed true, but things seem to have reached some kind of peak for some of us, and nowadays, I rather share very little online.

plasticchris• 2 years ago

People like to look at the start of the sigmoid and extrapolate.

paxys2• 2 years ago

I think people here are too young to remember the tech industry in 2012. None of the images and ideas conveyed in this book (printing press, cave art, fall of the Berlin wall, Arab Spring, particle accelerators) were outlandish for the time and space it was printed in. Tech was all about optimism and idealism. Everyone in silicon valley knew they were changing the world for the better, and tech was the missing piece all along. Silly people would finally all stop fighting and get along now that they had Facebook and Twitter and iPhones.

nitwit0052• 2 years ago

You mean, the marketing was all about that.

Even non-technology companies stole a bunch of marketing buzzwords from this era that are still in use today.

mattmanser• 2 years ago

This site is from that era, a bunch of posters on this thread are registered from then or before.

There was plenty of cynicism in tech back then too, plenty of posters who always complained about 'micro$oft'. How Oracle had been corrupted, etc.

What seems to be different now is that the optimism hype fades quicker. Back then Google kept it going for years. Recently things like Tesla and OpenAI the optimism gave way to the harsh reality of greed a lot quicker.

ern• 2 years ago

There was plenty of cynicism in tech back then too, plenty of posters who always complained about 'micro$oft'.

I think the anti-Microsoft sentiment (outside of some internet forums, and justified IE6 hate) had been dialled back by the early 2010s.

.NET was a thing, they were post-Gates, post-antitrust, making significant efforts at developer outreach. Windows 7 was a hit.

Despite working in the Microsoft ecosystem, I didn't feel trapped, and the walled garden was coming down, with awareness of non-Microsoft technologies being widespread.

pyrale2• 2 years ago

There was always a next wave, a new movement to embody ideals. I’m not sure what the fresh utopia is these days.

tdeck3• 2 years ago

I think the movie The Social Network was responsible for bringing this into the public consciousness, and constructing it to some extent. It kind of framed the discussion about the software industry for at least a decade.

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

Feels like we watched different movies.

nativeit• 2 years ago

I think that’s maybe reversed. The Social Network was telling a narrative through a contemporary lens, and part of the reason it became a phenomenon was because it hit on something people were already feeling. It may have helped a lot of people better articulate their own unease. I know I had already identified the anxieties in myself, and started discussing the potential negative impacts to social cohesion and political polarization, as these things were already fairly stark to anyone who was interested in exploring them. Although, I am not a CS grad, but rather Media Studies, so I had been primed to look for unrest and fraying of social fabric as a result of the communications revolution of the internet, just generally. So maybe mine isn’t the best benchmark perspective on this after all?

sfblah• 2 years ago

You're likely too young to remember anything much before 2012. Honestly, this stuff has been around for 50 years. Go watch a video about Steve Jobs at NeXT from the 1980s.

mettamage3• 2 years ago

True, but for me, the techno-optimism started with Google. I was a young kid back then, but the idea to catalog all of the world's information under a search engine (that worked) sounded wild to me at the time.

mathgenius• 2 years ago

People thought the invention of the telegraph was going to bring about world peace.

jhbadger• 2 years ago

But except for the Arab Spring of 2011 none of these events had anything whatsoever to do with social media. It is just absurd to see Facebook try to associate themselves with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It reminds me of the 1990s ad campaign Apple used to have about "thinking different" featuring people like Einstein, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi, none of whom obviously used Apple's products.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

"But except for the Arab Spring of 2011 none of these events had anything whatsoever to do with social media"

There is an argument I saw made in a documentary that the Arab Spring also had nothing to do with social media.

MichaelZuo• 2 years ago

Why does it matter to you?

Unless you received assurances otherwise, trying different things every week seems like the default expectation for a big company.

melagonster• 2 years ago

Do not social media cause the Rohingya genocide?

jimmydddd• 2 years ago

LOL. Bill Burr on Conan discussing Steve Jobs self promoting: "Jesus, Ghandi, me."

ajkjk2• 2 years ago

Most of us felt exactly the same way about it then that we do now. The only difference is that fewer people take that cringy utopianism seriously now.

fragmede2• 2 years ago

Is that based on any sort of actual data or are you just going off the scientifically supported totally unbiased data collection method known as ~:/vibes/:~ ?

I imagine the future looked pretty bleak during world war I, and then again during II, and maybe something else during the civil rights movement, or there was also the cold war. Cynics and optimists have existed since there was something to have feelings about. what's different about today to say that the cynics outweigh the optimists, in a way they never could in the past before?

m463• 2 years ago

I agree if by "cringey utipianism" you mean the carefully formulated messages CEOs pass on to their employees (especially businesses where the user is the product)

stiltzkin• 2 years ago

HN before 2012 was way different back then too.

doright• 2 years ago

I think this is the reason why I feel so much nostalgia for the sort of 2012-era vectorflourish sort of aesthetic. Look at the first Google image result for "Zune" for an example[1]. Gradient-type stenciling with references to the organic world and a sort of optimism implied overall (the same sort that proponents of Frutiger Aero talk about but this is not quite the same thing, I think it's somewhat flatter but not ultra-flat like everything is now).

This aesthetic represents to me the dead tech-optimist future we were promised but never got. It's a "ghost future." Mark Fisher had a lot of interesting writing about this phenomenon as applied to music, termed hauntology[2]. It's about how some genres/labels of music (like Ghost Box) were characterized as a misremembered past that was perceived as more rosy than in reality.

I suspect but cannot be certain that "vectorflourish" aesthetics like those and/or simple but not condescendingly dumbed-down ones like Bootstrap 1.0 will experience a resurgence in the coming decade, the same as the "Windows XP" aesthetic of ten years prior had a while ago, in the name of reclaiming such a lost future. With today's CSS I imagine it would be much easier to recreate such an aesthetic than in the past when mostly you had to use Photoshop to create all the raster assets.

[1] https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61hOqru2AWS.jpg

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology?wprov=sfla1

mawise• 2 years ago

It's funny; as I've been working on Haven[1], one of my guiding lights is what Facebook _could have been_[2]. To that end the opening section is really inspiring. This is describing a world where digital tools enhance your friendships. I think that's still possible and still a worthwhile goal--I just don't think it can be done by an entity with a corporate incentive structure. Those incentives will always tend towards enshittification[3].

[1] https://havenweb.org

[2] https://havenweb.org/2022/11/02/facebook-lie.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#

nashashmi3• 2 years ago

what Facebook _could have been_

In 2010, facebook changed. Twitter was cooler. Myspace was more money. So facebook took a page out of their platforms.

In 2012, facebook went to Washington DC.

In 2016, Washington DC went to facebook.

When did facebook change? When zuck lost control of it after sandberg came on board. When did zuck get control? When zuck changed to be in alliance with the master plan… which was take control of the world… politically. Remember zuck running for election?

ninth_ant5• 2 years ago

Oh my god, no.

Zuck had — and I believe still has — complete control of the company. Demonizing Sandberg and lionizing Zuckerberg is a complete disservice to reality. It was the focus on growth and not money that ruined everything.

Many changes occurred in this period. I was there.

A big change is that ads became profitable. I think it’s fair to say this change was sudden. Facebook went from being scrappy and underfunded to being wealthy and powerful.

At the same time, the growth had eclipsed competitors and Google Plus came and went. The media tone and coverage changed from “oh this startup is doing neat stuff” to a point concern for data privacy and the implosion of journalism revenue. So they became a lot more influential culturally.

Being suddenly wealthy and influential but with a cultural mentality of being a scrappy and upstart— something this book accurately reflects — lead to hubris.

The focus on hypergrowth which had served them well from a small startup — under the umbrella of this hubris — led to events like the Cambridge Analytica disaster. Insufficient care was being placed on how data could be collected and misused by others, growth took priority.

This focus on Hypergrowth meant that changes that responded well in metrics got pushed. The longer-term damage of people not enjoying their experiences wasn’t a high enough ranked metric compared to engagement and user metrics.

None of this was Sandberg’s fault. She was an extremely competent manager and is brilliant. Absolutely she was instrumental in leading Facebook to profitability but this push wasn’t a big factor in their decline.

Instead, Facebook got too big way too fast and the employees and Zuck didn’t have the mindset shift needed to consider everything as it was happening. Yes, money ruined everything eventually — but that came later.

The most crucial damage had already happened — people gave up on trust that Facebook could handle their data responsibly, and trust that they’d have a good experience on the site.

I could go on but that’s enough.

bagels2• 2 years ago

You don't think Zuck has much control over the company? What evidence do you have?

nashashmi3• 2 years ago

Is there a version I can read without the pictures? Just the manifesto?

I’d like to know how big this “book” is actually?

dangoodmanUT• 2 years ago

You can probably parse this out really fast with OCR

latexr• 2 years ago

Did just that with some random online tool and it said it found just under 7000 words. Probably also counting words in the images, though.

mgiampapa2• 2 years ago

Physically it's 4 1/4 x 7 x 5/16. Word count isn't much.

lbrito• 2 years ago

Web 2.0-era peak hubris. A decade later, its hard to decide if this looks delusional or prophetic - they did change societies, but probably not in the ways they ostensibly wanted to be recognized for changing.

scrubs• 2 years ago

Bingo ... let's not confuse a techie for a messaging app selling ad data as a tech savant (almost) brilliantly predicting the future because it tries to bootstrap itself into the stratosphere with a flourish of art copy & paste by association with pictures of CERN, Egyptian hieroglyphics and so on.

The latter are cool ... and stand well in time. CERN requires something a tad more complicated that pushing around "lol :)" over tcp-ip done before them + "big data" analysis to sell it to morons on madison street.

Claude Shannon, von Neumann, creators of the transistor, capacitors, languages, algos etc are the cool+smart kids ... not Zuckerberg. Not Facebook.

"Move fast and break" things has some tactical truth in larthargic companies, but averaged over time is asymptomatically a zero. It's just SV frat boy talk. Enough.

zoklet-enjoyer• 2 years ago

This looks like an Instagram feed. Is it a coincidence that they purchased Instagram in April 2012?

worik2• 2 years ago

I find this terribly sad.

fargle3• 2 years ago

particularly the bit where they are painting over the old Sun Microsystems sign.

a solid engineering company that actually build good stuff, destroyed in collateral damage from the dot-com bust, sold off to oracle of all things. now further being humiliated by this narcissistic, exploitative, personality-disorder-masquerading-as-a-service company?

yuliyp2• 2 years ago

Huh? That's a weird take. What should they have done? Left the entrance to their headquarters with a Sun Microsystems logo rather than their own? The Sun Microsystems sign continues to be there at the end of Willow Road, just facing toward the campus vs toward the street.

This is doing more to honor Sun than any other realistic choice they could have made.

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

Anywhere to find an original copy of one of these?

evanelias3• 2 years ago

Two copies have sold on ebay over the past month, with each listed at $1000 despite being later prints and having slight damage. That price seems absolutely bonkers to me.

The copy in the scan has a 2014 date, suggesting they were still giving the book to new hires in 2014 or maybe 2015. (I was hired in mid 2013 and my copy has a 2012 date.)

So based on company headcount those years and accounting for turnover, I would guess the total print run was at least 10,000... there are definitely copies of it around.

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

Maybe someone can put up their copy on eBay if they read this

chucknthem• 2 years ago

I remember this. Wish I'd kept my little piece of history. Written at a time when people were still optimistic and hopeful about tech.

jonas21• 2 years ago

Lots of people are still optimistic about tech. They just generally don't have time to get into silly arguments about it on HN.

dowager_dan992• 2 years ago

You're right - but also very wrong. People can be optimistic while still having an existential crisis about what they see/feel is happening. That's what makes them believe they can influence and change the world, and why they even try.

What we're seeing in tech today feels like it started in the 80's, and before that point computers, etc. were viewed by some as the downfall of humankind and by others the saviour.

aprilthird20214• 2 years ago

Eh, people back then were optimistic about tech AND had time to get into silly arguments about it on HN. So something's changed

pie420• 2 years ago

i'm sure there's lots of tech optimists in absolute numbers, but my personal experience in the bay area has been that a vast majority of my friends in tech and tech adjacent have become highly pessimistic of the current tech landscape, AI, VR, etc.

udev40962• 2 years ago

And yet, you are still here making silly arguments for not getting into silly arguments

cflewis• 2 years ago

Yeah, the dreams of what computers could do around Windows 95, and what the Internet could do around Windows 98/Windows 2000... it felt amazing as a teenager who wanted to go into computer science. IMHO social media heralded the beginning of the end, although no-one knew that at the time.

A lot of the 90s nostalgia is just the same rose-tinted glasses as all generations experience, but I think in this one dimension it truly felt a lot better back then.

alex1138• 2 years ago

I have a serious problem with calling everything social media and (more importantly) how it spells doom for this that and the other

If you want to criticize specific companies - yeah. But I literally do not understand what people are talking about when employing the usual "Social media was a mistake" type stuff

gosub1004• 2 years ago

FB has done a lot of great things. There just aren't any articles written about them.

dowager_dan992• 2 years ago

I agree, but you don't get to weigh everything out on a scale and be measured by the balance - even if you could. How would you compare say, GraphQL, with providing a mechanism for 24/7 cyber bullying, or sharing photos with grand parents? Which side of the ledger does React even go on?

PaulHoule2• 2 years ago

From the viewpoint of developer culture I think Facebook is better night and day than Google.

Google's culture is hire 15 geniuses from the Ivy League with 130+ IQ and make them fight with a 40 minute C++ build and a balky Kubernetes culture because "we only hire the best"; YouTube and the advertising system are a money printing machine, the team works for 3.5 years at something that get canceled at the last minute.

Facebook is much more oriented towards greasing the skids with the goal that a fresher developer would be able to push a change to a shared development system the first day on the job.

Look at React vs Flutter.

Like Microsoft, Google is thrashing around looking for "the next big thing", sometimes like a mindless beast. I've met person after person who told me that they went there because they believed they could make an impact and came to the conclusion within a year that they couldn't make any impact at all.

Facebook on the other hand is still run by the founder and it is pushing hard to develop a technology that he believes in even if the rest of us don't. It's a riskier strategy than Microsoft or Google who are likely to stumble on another multibillion dollar business despite themselves.

throwawayq34233• 2 years ago

The Cuban government provides great health care, while keeping everyone desperately poor. It's not one or the other.

sprice• 2 years ago

A surprising number of people are optimistic and hopeful about technology while not experiencing an existential crisis about it.

FWIW I’ve noticed with some confusion that over the past years HN has become more cynical and pessimistic towards tech.

disgruntledphd25• 2 years ago

This has always been the case, particularly for Facebook. Even when they acquired Instagram, the vast majority of the comments were negative (the top comment called it well though).

I do think that HN has gone from indie entrepreneur/ real startups to Big Tech and then back again over the time I've been hanging out here.

disgruntledphd25• 2 years ago

I still have mine, which is apparently unusual.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Ben Barry's page on the book from his website archive: https://v1.benbarry.com/project/facebooks-book

Animats• 2 years ago

Just read the whole thing. Not one word about ads.

From the 2014 book:

Remember, people don't use Facebook because they like us.

They use it because they like their friends.

Where that went:

We have the power to cut them off from their friends.

So we can control everything they see.

Muahahaha!

mparnisari3• 2 years ago

Okay, so Facebook started as a way to interconnect people. But it's a business, so it has to make money to survive. So they added ads. And now my feed is 99% ads, 1% updates from my friends. Sooooo mission accomplished, right? Right?

exe342• 2 years ago

you get updates from your friends? the only reason I have Facebook is to see pictures of cats, but it insists on showing me hamas propaganda ai-slop.

mparnisari3• 2 years ago

Yes. I get updates from my local community

1970-01-01• 2 years ago

Facebook was started as a way for college boys to gleam full names, pictures, and other personal information of college girls. When it was just this, it was actually wonderful and mostly innocent kids having fun. But Zuck was greedy, and eventually it evolved into yet another of the online behemoths that can only thrive by selling as much of your private data as it can get away with. As such, it is no longer special, and therefore it is ripe for disruption.

jbl0ndie2• 2 years ago

I guess that's enshittification for you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

ribadeo• 2 years ago

There are STILL people drinking the techno-utopian kool-aid.

Plenty of folks think Musk will do something smart someday, for humanity's benefit, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I was here when the web showed up, and I can honestly state that we featured blatant techno-utopian rhetoric in nearly every aspect of the industry, as well as our underground nocturnal allegedly musical entertainment.

I now feel rather dumb, aka a product of my time, but the notion that inventing tools would lead to them automatically being used for good was prevalent, if specious.

vundercind• 2 years ago

Similar journey here.

I think I’ve become some variety of techno-determinist pessimist. We are what technology lets us be, including when it comes to ethics and government. And major inventions aren’t guaranteed to push the space of the possible in the right direction—but neither can we avoid these changes, as effectively sounding the alarm early enough to matter, while also correctly calling which are bad and how they’re bad, is too hard to practically happen.

Freedom’s a fleeting gift of circumstance, and the world is a machine none of us control and that’s often bad and sometimes destroys important things, I guess is where I’m at now. I’d definite press a button to permanent un-invent the Internet, if someone put it in front of me.

toast02• 2 years ago

Plenty of folks think Musk will do something smart someday, for humanity's benefit, despite all evidence to the contrary.

It's taking a little bit longer than I thought, but isn't the destruction of Twitter a positive for humanity? :P

Nasrudith• 2 years ago

Tools which are not invented cannot be used for good, there is some logic behind that. It is necessary but not sufficient for good. There is also fundamentally a tension between freedom and good. Since being free to use technology also includes being able to use it for evil. Not to mention the track record of trying to enforce "goodness" has been less than promising historically.

And that is before the inherent fundamentals of dual use. There is nothing we could do to keep fire from being fundamentally capable both of keeping someone alive by preventing freezing to death, and sterilization and is usable as a self-replicating weapon of destruction. Basically you can only control how well our surroundings handle being set on fire, not make arson an impossibility.

tim3332• 2 years ago

Musk did some stuff with EVs and satellites.

__MatrixMan__• 2 years ago

There's a lot of altruistic sounding stuff about connection in there, but it's hard to believe it's sincere when their product is a space where paid accounts don't have to bother with consent.

disgruntledphd25• 2 years ago

This was a very, very different time and written by a company that no longer exists.

jmyeet• 2 years ago

How far we've come in a little over a decade.

If you're working for Big Tech now, you're basically working for a defense contractor. Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Meta are really no different to Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.

Meta was culpable in the Rohingya genocide [1], builds AI for the military [2], silences content about Palestine (with deep ties to the Netanyahu government) [3] and Zuckerberg is cozying up to the incoming Trump administration [4].

We're so far away from Sergey Brin's principled stance against China [5]. You can find similar lists to the above for Google, Microsoft or Amazon.

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/meta-allo...

[3] https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c87x98q8y08o

[5] https://archive.is/tOWfY

KerrAvon• 2 years ago

re: 4 -- Facebook and reactionary politics have been hand in hand from the beginning of general public access to Facebook -- the world would be in a much better place without it.

NetOpWibby5• 2 years ago

I work at a fruit company in Cupertino and I felt disgusted when the CEO of said company was in the list of tech CEOs groveling to the incoming president. As idealistic as I am, I do understand that certain things need to be done for waves hand reasons, but...ugh. At least I'm not (directly) supporting war? I think?

The world is feeling rather Cyberpunk 2077-ish so it's only a matter of time before I have no choice to trade in my values for the ability to support my family. I feel for people currently in that position.

52-6F-622• 2 years ago

I think its a very good sign to see people deep within the industry having emergent intuitions about the direction of the entity that puts food on their table…

But please, please dedicate more time to reading outside your sphere and beyond video games. They can be a part of the path to enlightenment, but there is much more going on.

None of the current status quo is a surprise to anyone who has been studying media or history or polemics or even poetry. In fact it’s just been agonizing to watch the cycles.

Equip yourselves, because if you don’t people will use those unknown ideas against you and the wider world.

Frummy• 2 years ago

"complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency"

So funny!

smnrg• 2 years ago

Design and content references must have felt like a cute satirical reference at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T...

tsunamifury2• 2 years ago

"We were going to change the world."

And then they did...

it was no accident

riiii2• 2 years ago

We were going to change the world

Ah, the importance of being specific.

If you want to change your neighbourhood, you could start every morning by sweeping the pavement. Or you could leave a random dog turd. Both will accomplish your stated goal.

swyx• 2 years ago

are there any pdf printing shops that cna take this pdf and ship it to us as a book?

forth_throwaway• 2 years ago

Facebook has usurped the legacy media that they mention in the Red Book. But their relationship to capital and government is the exact same as the legacy media they replaced, so instead of being disruptive they fill the same role --except this time with even more ruthless efficiency and profitability.

"When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor."

tills13• 2 years ago

When it was produces, this was probably inspiring and effective.

Retrospectively, it's a bit creepy and ominous.

lelandfe2• 2 years ago

And naive. "When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to" – in a room full of voices, uncommonly is the best idea heard.

lupire2• 2 years ago

Tomato, tomahto; Naive, cynical; potato, potahto.

"Best" in a Darwinian memetic sense of "optimized for reproduction and dissemination", not "accurate" or "helpful".

dang• 2 years ago

All: if you're going to comment, please make sure you're following the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

That means posting out of curiosity, not indignation. Internet indignation is addictive, repetitive, and boring (and there's already too much of it here).

tsunamifury2• 2 years ago

I think this all can be boiled down to to a true axiom of modern power:

"Expand the network at all cost, and increase its engagement."

This went from a little flippant red book to a credo that has now changed elections and democracy as well as culture and view of the human self.

At the time it was radical idealism and today its something different, but its worth seeing and truly understanding.

rokob• 2 years ago

I still have my copy. I didn’t realize this was such a deep cut.

My favorite part was the “Facebook was not created to be a business” quote being juxtaposed against Kevin Systrom saying “instagram was created to be a business” right after the acquisition.

bagels2• 2 years ago

There's propaganda slogans/posters like this all over the Meta offices. One of them is "This is now your company". When the layoffs started happening, I started seeing these mocked, "This is no longer your company", etc.

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 years ago

Maybe they should shop here: https://despair.com/collections/demotivators

tdeck3• 2 years ago

Wow I remember seeing these in the 2000s. What a blast from the past!

nitwit0052• 2 years ago

When I visited Facebook's HQ years ago, people had modified signs saying "Move fast and break things" by adding a prefix "Don't".

I'm sure they knew this was propaganda. The little red book is a very clear reference (just do a search for "little red book" if anyone doesn't recognize the reference).

aristus• 2 years ago

Mocking the signs at Facebook started literally the day after they appeared suddenly in the 1601 building. "Break fast and eat things", and so on. There was a very fancy print shop on site and we would work up spoofs on the same equipment.

A large percentage of programmers of a certain generation got their start in the graphic design world.

programmertote• 2 years ago

Amazon also likes to tout their way of doing things as Amazon's peculiar culture. Some practices like reading the design proposal doc before starting the discussion about it looks right in general sense, but it usually turns out that almost all people who are invited to these meetings don't actually read that doc (instead are busy working on their tasks) or don't really have the depth to understand what's written in the doc in 15-30 mins. So what ends up happening is a lot of these meetings end up being dominated by whoever is the top dog (usually the guy with higher level in the room) in that meeting and the rest of the attendees end up listening to his/her opinion without much challenge (because most are intent on just getting out of that meeting).

The whole 2+ years I was there (left because of 3-days RTO), I felt like it was a cult and some people seem to drink the kool-aid (or they are good at pretending to like the culture), but some like me, who are more skeptical, don't.

wnolens• 2 years ago

I actually think this is one of the few (only?) good Amazon practices.

Anyone who can't grok the doc in 30 mins is unlikely to ever open it, and if they do and spend a few hours on it, chances are they don't have much to add and it only served to educate themselves.

Instead, you give it your best shot, surrounded by others which helps to focus/eliminate distraction and then get to listen to someone with far more depth critique it - and you get to learn their framing and about a ton of nuance you would never have taken away otherwise.

emilfihlman• 2 years ago

It's refreshing to see it said out loud today as an ideal, even if they didn't really believe it then nor today, the idea on page 24:

"But what happens when everyone can put their message in front of a lot of people? When the playing field is level? When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to, Influence can no longer be owned, It must be earned."

I wish people believe(d) in this still today, but we are in a jaded censorship world, and it seems that those who believe in it are labeled extremists.

sneak2• 2 years ago

They should have known that if they built a giant centralized platform, the government would eventually come knocking.

dredmorbius2• 2 years ago

s/government/governments/

Also corporations, political parties, propagandists, hucksters, and others.

Pathogens co-evolve with their hosts.

lupire2• 2 years ago

Then they immediately turned around and started charging money to show your post to your friends. Lies piled up on lies.

dluan2• 2 years ago

Facebook somehow acquiring 小红书 would actually be a prescient move, but even that era seems forever ago.

ncpa-cpl• 2 years ago

I came looking for this,

Is the Chinese instagram’s name, Little Red Book (小红书), related to Facebook’s Little Red Book, or just a coincidence?

dluan2• 2 years ago

lol, 小红书 as an idea was established way before facebook.

facebook was just trying to use an adbuster's style approach, but actually during that time there were tons of subversive messages, e.g. mckenzie wark's "hacker manifesto" was commonly read and discussed. that whole hacker-chic is what facebook and PG modeled their entire personality off of. even though they might not have cared about edgy communism back then, the GNU manifesto written 20 years even earlier (and lots of FOSS warriors) certainly did.

even back when facebook had their little print poster shop on their campus, a lot of hackers outside felt really grody seeing this anti-capitalist spirit co-opted by this financial behemoth. it was like every 2 weeks someone would know someone else's small startup get snapped up for $10s of millions here and there. it was like watching the air slowly get sucked out of a party.

pyrale2• 2 years ago

There’s another little red book which has ties to China and quite a bit more fame.

tivert2• 2 years ago

Is the Chinese instagram’s name, Little Red Book (小红书), related to Facebook’s Little Red Book, or just a coincidence?

I'd bet they're both related to Mao's Little Red Book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T...

You know, "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," and stuff like that.

Shank• 2 years ago

I reconnected with a long-lost childhood friend that I barely remembered any detail other than her name via Facebook. It proved its worth to me that day, but the caveat is that I had to reach her mom, and that's because she actually stopped using it long prior. After we started talking (and eventually dating), she deleted her entire account / profile, which rendered her unfindable again. The main problem she had was that she wasn't benefiting from it, and they were sharing so much of her personal information that she didn't feel comfortable with it.

It's an interesting juxtaposition, because had she not had a profile, I wouldn't have found her. But by that same measure, she found it invasive enough to delete her account.

I think Facebook had a time and place for when connecting people was an innocent venture with largely altruistic goals. But like so many things, times have changed and the calculus for "maybe one day a special person will find me on Facebook" vs "creepily processing all personal information" has shifted. Most young people aren't on Facebook. The door has closed, and I'm not sure if it'll reopen any time soon.

oooyay2• 2 years ago

Since this election has unfolded I've been thinking a lot about narratives and what they mean. Progress is largely based on narratives. They're the stories we tell ourselves to stay focused, motivated, and aligned. The narrative doesn't have to be true, it just needs to be a convincing story grounded in some reality (as it would seem). That got me thinking about the function of narratives versus truths, how they're related, and how they're distinct.

Products like this book are just an internal narrative. It doesn't discount other narratives, such as villain narratives, where FB could have the best or worst of intentions and the outcomes are what we know them to be today regardless.

Truth, on the other hand, is reserved for when the dust has settled, the facts are seldomly disputed, and are corroborated. Truth doesn't even need to be precise, it just needs to be accurate. Narratives are powerful in the moment and for momentum, truth is powerful across time. That said, even to truths there is a narrative.

mettamage3• 2 years ago

Yea, I was just thinking that.

Truth is a narrative too. There's one difference though: over time, truth will play out.

Simple example: blood moon occurs, people think they'll die. And then the next morning comes around.

With social systems, the truth takes a lot of time to truly unfold, but unfold it does.

oooyay2• 2 years ago

Yeah, very much agree. My point moreso was that the truth also needs a good narrative. I think we missed that this last election cycle. Isolated facts are not enough to convince people of a story, even if it will clearly play out as true.

dartharva4• 2 years ago

Progress is largely based on narratives. They're the stories we tell ourselves to stay focused, motivated, and aligned. The narrative doesn't have to be true, it just needs to be a convincing story grounded in some reality (as it would seem).

The "some reality" phrase is not needed. This is exactly how all human faiths and religions developed.

cynicalsecurity• 2 years ago

That books looks very cheesy.

Seeing them claiming they had their focus on privacy is especially hilarious.

Thanks for sharing it, but I'll delete it right away.

FactKnower69• 2 years ago

Truly disgusting juxtaposition between the marketing douchebags copy pasting pictures of the Berlin Wall and other vacuous feel-good pablum into the design bible of their MySpace knockoff, and the reality that said knockoff would later be best known for facilitating genocide in Myanmar

gerroo• 2 years ago

Thanks for sharing this :)

aratno• 2 years ago

Looks like this is slightly modified by the uploader: p94 says “Weaponize the cloud” with the Antimetal logo

po2• 2 years ago

Historically, those who controlled the media controlled the message. If you're the only one with a printing press, you control what people read. Same with radio. Same with TV.

But what happens when everyone can put their message in front of a lot of people? When the playing field is level? When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to. Influence can no longer be owned. It must be earned

Man, Zuckerberg would be rolling over in his grave if he saw what happened in the following years and our current engagement/algorithmically-driven media ecosystem.

I find this book to be a bit sad. I do believe they were trying to do all of this stuff but it definitely went off the rails.

squigz• 2 years ago

I think Zuckerberg is still alive and well aware of the current landscape.

momoschili• 2 years ago

I think he was replaced by a robot at some point and is now in Cuba with JFK and Tupac

0x3444ac53• 2 years ago

Whether or not Zuckerberg himself is alive (he is), this version of him is long dead. One of the sad realities of life under capitalism is that even if you go into something idealistic, hopeful, kind even, is that once it hits a certain scale the only thing you can do is succumb to some kind of greed.

Even if you yourself try to resist, you'll be beat down by market forces until eventually you either give it all up and let someone else do the evil, or discard the idealism and say "That's just the way it is!" and look back on your idealism with shame and grief.

Makes me sad too

dartharva4• 2 years ago

I wouldn't be so hasty in giving out such judgements, especially when Zuck is the only one among all big tech magnates to push for Open Source AI and LLMs.

po2• 2 years ago

Whether or not Zuckerberg himself is alive (he is), this version of him is long dead.

Yes, that was the joke that apparently wasn't obvious enough. :-)

stogot• 2 years ago

Was this copyrighted? I don’t see it in there, but can we print copies under US law if no copyright is present?

tinco• 2 years ago

No, copyright is an intrinsic thing. Copyright marks are half bullshit half indication of who owns it and since when.

ricardobeat• 2 years ago

Changing how people communicate will always change the world
What happens when anyone can put their message in front of a lot of people?

I think we’ve answered this question by now, and it’s not good. I wonder what Zuckerberg thinks of it…

udev40962• 2 years ago

Zuckerberg is too good with manipulating the engineers into believing this bullshit. I guess you really need fake inspiration to gobble up a big fat salary which is usually derived from unethical standards

incog_nit0• 2 years ago

As a jaded 40+ year old developer this got me choked up.

I remember that optimistic view we all had of technology in our youth.

For me the optimism was a little earlier than 2012 so maybe it goes hand in hand with being young and less experienced (jaded?).

I agree with some of the other commenters that a corporate structure makes altruistic goals like these impossible.

Only Wikipedia and The Internet Archive for me carry that feeling of goodwill still. I think OpenAI going from non-profit to profit will similarly erode the product as market incentives push it further away from what benefits the user most.

Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit.

Ylpertnodi• 2 years ago

Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit.

....a...Government?

tim3332• 2 years ago

Or B corp? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification)

allthing• 2 years ago

A public benefit corporation is sort of something in between

Willish42• 2 years ago

Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit

Maybe a co-op (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative)? There are also "for-profit" like businesses that are oriented around a different goal than just profits, https://good.store/pages/good-store-about-us comes to mind.

sirspacey2• 2 years ago

What a snapshot of history

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is almost every company becomes the symbol of it’s anti-mission

Root cause almost always seems to be trying to design PM performance around metrics

Metrics are a poor framework for values

k310• 2 years ago

The flip side. (Turning the Sun Menlo Park sign around to say Facebook)

Sad for me. As an S.E. (later called TPM) at Sun, I always busted my ass to meet customer needs technically, cost-wise (our group was Higher Educational Sales) and with dedication. I went to Sun after serving many years in computer support for Cal Berkeley, so I wore the customer's moccasins, so to speak.

Our customers were indeed customers, not products. I loved it. Most of us, I think, were crazy for providing the best for customers, and I don't recall a book. We WERE the book.

timkofu• 2 years ago

Thanks for this.

muddi900• 2 years ago

This definitely published before Silicon Valley aired.

alberth• 2 years ago

The version linked below is of higher digital quality.

https://spaccapeli.com/i-remastered-facebooks-little-red-boo...

Facebook's Little Red Book

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