bubble_talk

I for one welcome Libra, but only for exactly one purpose.

The next time governments bail out another bank, they should just hand them a zillions Libras and ask the banks to collect the actual money from Facebook when they need it. Don't know if that is technically possible, but I would certainly support such a bailout scheme. :-)

If Microsoft hadn't embraced open source around the time Satya Nadella took over, by now they would have probably imploded and become irrelevant (I mean in the sense of how Bing is more or less irrelevant to most website owners even though it apparently makes a lot of money).

Its not as if they decided to open source Windows XP.

We should create a "privacy hall of shame" (I was tempted to call it the "privacy offender registry") and list the names of all the employees who work on these features, along with an easy-to-read blurb which explains how the feature could be misused. Bonus points for linking to their social profile. If you cannot find the actual person, go up the org chart and list the person closest on the hierarchy.

Not that it is going to matter, any more than you can dissuade members of a cult by telling them they should forego their membership. It just seems to bring the cult closer together.

>>given the press and the way it's portrayed on HN

You forgot to add the most important reason which should be at the beginning of that sentence - track record.

And also, hiding important financial details e.g. the so called "friendly fraud" case is not a serious mistake, which implies that somehow it all "just happened" and could have "happened to anyone". It was deliberate, a lot of people were complicit, and it is exactly the kind of issue that crosses the fine line between what is merely a "serious mistake" and goes and sits squarely in the realm of "intentional, systematic and deliberate fraud" to pump up the company pre-IPO. And the fact that this came to light about 7-8 years after the actual incident suggests that we have only yet seen the tip of the iceberg on these kinds of issues.

But let us suppose you are actually right that it was just a "serious mistake".

My view is that right now there are a lot more shady things going on inside FB even as you come and write this.

"Well, how can you be so sure?" is what people generally ask. That's exactly what people who were defending FB were asking as early as 2016 on these forums. But over the last 2-3 years, the skeptics have been vindicated, and those folks who were previously defending FB are nowhere to be found on threads which discuss Facebook. As the saying goes - their silence is now deafening.

Ask them how they would invest their money if they suddenly became 100x richer, which for most people isn't something they can easily comprehend. If their answers veer towards things like buying property abroad (or similar stuff indicating they don't believe there actually is any rule of law in their own country), then you can ask them why they are not investing in their own country if they truly believe in their views about it.

When asked to put their money where their mouth is, the actions of people speak far, far louder than their words.

Since no one else has asked yet: You seem like a nice guy who could probably get a job elsewhere easily. Why are you still at FB?

>>Contrast that with e.g. home internet, where in many parts of the US there's literally just a single company providing internet connectivity, a single ISP, and it's illegal to start a competing ISP.

You know, you might have shed some light on the core issue here. Usually for tangible goods, it is about choice, at an affordable cost. In the case of tech however, it is not about choice, but it is actually about access, at an affordable cost.

In theory, you could also just set up your own wireless mesh network to reach the internet. Its actually really simple: figure out the basic hardware, and then the software which goes with it, and then get the cooperation of your immediate neighborhood, and then the community at large, and don't centralize anything so you don't become branded as an ISP. Of course, the problem is that it is prohibitively expensive, at least in terms of time. So you might say "Well, it makes no sense. I will rather pay the very high price that my ISP charges". So you have just perpetuated the ISP's monopoly, because there is now one less person who has a good reason to potentially contribute to the wireless mesh network.

You can use Telegram instead of WhatsApp, but now you don't have access (because most of your friends are not going to move to Telegram just because you are such an amazing friend).

But here is the important thing: the fact that all these tech giants use every single dark UX pattern imaginable (to increase access on their products), and don't allow unfettered data export (to decrease access for competitors), means they are well aware of this and try to make access prohibitively expensive (again, in terms of time) if you chose one of their competitors.

I don't have a solution, but I think that is why the monopoly label makes sense.

Given that Microsoft now owns GitHub, I would add them into this list too.

Also, perhaps some of the focus should also shift towards preventing such acquisitions (Google + YouTube, Facebook + WhatsApp), which the tech community at large can immediately identify as a potential monopoly threat. A simplistic way to do this would be to look at how much the company pays for the acquisition, but I am sure others here can come up with better metrics.

Also, Facebook should not be clubbed with the other companies in this list. What they are doing isn't some poorly defined "tech monopoly consolidation". They are just a completely fraudulent company headed by someone who should probably not be running any company. Tim Cook's point may have been self-serving, but he was absolutely right when he said that "if I were Facebook, I would not be in this situation".

That's an overly simplistic analysis.

>>If you owe them billions, it's their problem.

It is also entirely possible that if the US decides to actually make this (say) China's problem by overtly refusing to pay back the debt, everyone else who holds US Treasuries would start dumping them, driving demand lower and lower until both (US and China) the giant economies come crashing down.

That is, this may not a zero sum game. By which I mean, both countries could lose (and also end up taking the entire world economy down with them for at least a while).

Yes, you can have a scroll bar - but where do you set the minimum threshold for qualification? If I slap a search box in front of CommonCrawl, have I now created a search engine?

I can relate a funny story about this. A Microsoft employee I know very well used to work at Bing and then moved on to another organization within MSFT. He isn't a big fan of Google (surprise!). When similar news came out about Google recently (audio recordings got leaked I think), he said everyone should stop using Google if they care about their privacy. So I told him that if that is the case Microsoft should have at least distanced themselves from Facebook after all the Facebook scandals which came out recently (they actually still own some chunk of Facebook shares if I understand correctly). He got a little stunned, mumbled something about how no one person represents an entire company's views, and proceeded to change the topic. :-) I would also now be curious to know what he thinks about the current story.