Facebook Morale Takes a Tumble Along with Stock Price
My favorite paragraph [0] I've read about Facebook is:“Zuck himself so clearly doesn’t even understand Facebook” strikes me as a completely fair and not even controversial position. Mark Zuckerberg built an online facebook for Harvard students. It became popular, and he turned it into a company with a vision “to make the world more open and connected,” and now it is enabling mob violence in India and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and election interference in the U.S. and corporate emotional manipulation and the transformation of the news media and also probably just making people sad a lot. That list is sort of random, which is the point; no one at Facebook sat down to build an election interference function. They sat down to build a system for purposes that they thought were good, and are happy to brag to you about: sharing baby pictures, connecting the world, making piles of money by showing you ads, that sort of thing. All — most, anyway — of the bad effects of Facebook are emergent features of the system that they built for the good effects; that system itself, and its messy interactions with billions of people out in the real world, creates the bad effects.Conventional wisdom for a long time was that ad-funded social media was a pretty cool and not-that-bad thing. Those emergent properties might make it a sometimes cool, mostly bad thing.When the stock price is climbing, I'm sure it's pretty easy for employees to ignore that line of thinking. When it stops—if you agree with the shifting conventional wisdom—then why wouldn't you leave?[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-09-13/the-cr...