tejaswiy
Joined 16 years ago
Joined 16 years ago
So before all the privacy activists are up in arms, this is pretty incredible and it looks like they're getting pretty close to eliminating all violent crime. I think that's an incredible achievement if they can pull it off. In an even broader historical context, individualism and capitalism have had their run for 100+ years, maybe this is the rise of a new ideological movement.
[1] https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.as...
I assume they think that the network effect is going to lock users into WhatsApp but the moment it becomes too painful to run on a 100$ Android phone with 1GB of RAM, it will inevitably die. Sure it's not going to be instantaneous but I'm a 100% sure that all the PMs that run Facebook Messenger are itching to get their hands on WhatsApp.
I understand these changes are only on the server side, but I imagine the client side is not too far away. Some client changes are inevitable because I'm pretty sure they'll build a "unified" API for all these apps and it's is going to contain a whole bunch of messenger service code (because look at all those messenger features that noone cares about, surely we can't just drop what a whole org has been working on for two years)
I really like this idea but I feel this is the key in getting it right. Several video games achieve this feeling of seamlessness when translating raw input from a controller to in-game actions. However this does occasionally go wrong and can be a frustrating experience in video games (especially if you're playing online competitively) but in the real world it can have much more drastic consequences.
Also, given the complexity of the real world, it's somewhat scary to think of a scenario where you're actually trying to take a drastic action on the road but are prevented by the system from doing-so because it feels that the action is unsafe.
- There was a violet attack in Mexico against a journalist by some drug cartel and a random body part (leg or an arm or a head or whatever) was chopped off and posted on social media by the cartel. The people protesting cartel violence picked this image up and were using this image as a part of their protest. Facebook's censors allowed it until the image popped up on some school kid's feed in America / England and all sorts of outcry later, it was removed from the site as a violet image.
- The boston marathon bombing happened and gruesome images of people lying on the floor with limbs strewn about started getting shared on the site. Facebook's policy at this point specifically said no violent images on the site so they got blocked by the censors. Media picked this up and raised an outcry on how facebook was censoring these images and basically someone high up said 'leave it up or else' and the images were allowed on the site.
This is clearly hipocrisy and there's no right answer here. Traumatizing school children with violent imagery they didn't even want to see is not great while the Boston marathon bombing was a significant political event in America and those images didn't deserve to get silenced.
This ends up being a question of free-speech and what sorts of content Americans were okay with. There are no right answers and I believe the govt. definitely should step in and provide guidelines here.
The disingenuous thing is using this as an example of how Facebook is okay with govt regulation while resisting any regulation around things that can hurt them like any number of their privacy mishaps, shady 3p data markets and ad tech in general.