Not sure where to start with this one.<p>Can anybody briefly explain what a “rot economist” is? Is it meant to be capitalised “ROT economist” which stands for something? Has my browser not rendered the characters correctly or something?<p>This story of course includes the now almost mandatory attack on e2e encryption, which according to this account when coupled with the people you know feature is “a dangerous tool” - with little explanation as to the nature and size of the danger.<p>This part is interesting: “Worse still, accounts that were less than 15-days-old now made up 20 percent of all outgoing friend requests, and more than half of friend requests were sent by somebody who was making more than 50 of them a day…”<p>The explanation leaves a lot to be desired though:<p>“…heavily suggesting that Facebook was growing its platform’s “connections” through spam.”<p>Doesn’t this make perfect sense where a new user joins Facebook with no friends to start with, then in the first few weeks of using it finds all of their friends and adds them?<p>The whole thing reads like a grab bag of grievances rather than a forensic takedown, shame.
Companies make profits because people spend their money on what those companies have to offer.<p>Facebook offers a dopamine hit. And so does X and TikTok. To some extent also HN.<p>The infinite scroll slot machine.<p>At the end of the day, we are an evolved version of dopamine driven apes.<p>Meta family of Apps (Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram) has total WAU of 3.05 billion. Almost half the planet.<p>---<p>Sam Altman, Sundar Picchai, Mark Zuckerberg saying that AI will somehow cure cancer and solve climate change seems pretty far fetched.<p>The closer reality is that as the AI models advance, they will figure out ever better ways of making their apps as addictive as cocaine.
There's a fair amount of insight in this article buried under layers of insults and ad hominem attacks. Perhaps it's a bit ironic that the author feels the need to frame things in this way to drive engagement because that's what the internet has become. It might feel cathartic to blame Zuckerberg for this, but honestly he was <i>just a fucking kid</i> when these wheels were set in motion, manipulated by forces larger than himself.<p>The incentives created by capitalism + internet + global web/smart phone adoption mean a lot of what happened was inevitable. If someone in Zuck's position had taken a moral stand along the way, you could just swap out their names with any of a million opportunists ready to swoop in. I say this not to absolve Mark, Sheryl or anyone else involved, but just to recognize that these are systemic failures that need systemic solutions. Pinning the blame on individuals doesn't get us any closer to solving the general problems that all social media platforms invite.
Notably absent from article: the surprisingly equanimous opinion of Boz —- Agrippa to Zuck’s Augustus. I have to reread his post on perverse incentives now<p><a href="https://boz.com/articles/incentives" rel="nofollow">https://boz.com/articles/incentives</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39277516">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39277516</a>
> [...] thanks to Meta’s outright abusive approach to social media where the customer is not only wrong, but should ideally have little control over what they see.<p>It's trite at this point, and yet worth reiterating: You are not the customer.
HN rules/ethos don’t agree but the lack of ‘politeness’ in these posts is refreshing. ‘Manners’ have long been a way to reinforce power imbalances and avoid scrutiny. Us plebs shouldn’t shy away from calling out corporate scumbaggery for what it is - what is more damaging, impolite prose or what this company is doing to our society?