Comment by baritone

Who hasn’t ruined a life or two for excessive monetary gain? Surely every person on earth right?

Thanks Zuck for ruining lives, selling out the public to advertising and performing psychological experiments on your users, so this guy could send text across the wire. Something not possible before Facebook apparently.

> We all fuck shit up and ruin lives

Part A sure, but I can say with some certainty that most people do not ruin lives. It's just hard to have that much influence over other people. If you want to be particularly pessimistic, you might be able to argue that many people ruin their children's lives -- But even that's a stretch.

This is a disappointing take on the state of affairs. The book is trying to say the execs couldn't care less about the harm their platform was causing. This is not about "screwing up" inadvertently. This is about prioritising money over everything else.

Yes, individuals have the power to change the world. Some of them in positive ways and some in horrific ways. By all accounts, Zuck and the top execs at FB firmly belong in the latter category.

Very few people actively try to be supreme jerks and ruin things, that's very abnormal behaviour for a human being.

It's much more common that your inner narrative keeps finding justifications for why what you are doing is important, and the damage you are causing is either justified or not perceived as so damaging.

The issue is the system we live under doesn't really incentivise moral and ethical behaviour, the rewards to be reaped are much larger if you act immorally, people like Zuck are able to tell themselves what they are doing is ok for "making the world a better place". But there's no reward for making the world a better place, the reward is for you showing revenue growth, user growth, and Zuck chased that even though there was an inflection point where the "good" was outweighed by the "bad".

> Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.

All of that could still have existed without all the appendages included to extract more money from the machine. Without creating feeds of content measured by "engagement" to the point it became detrimental to the users themselves, all the good Meta has done could have existed if morals and ethics trumped profit-seeking. And for that I do not thank Zuckerberg, at all, even though I do understand he is also a product of the system, in the end he (and Meta) abused one of the most powerful feelings of humans (connection among each other) to extract as much money as they could without regards to the dangerous side-effects that many pointed out were happening when Facebook was growing, there was no care about anyone, you and I were swindled.

It's unfortunate, I hope you can see that, for all the good provided over years on fostering connections, it was just spoiled in the end by his greed, and carelessness.

We can do better than that, no need to thank Zuckerberg for fucking us over.

The great man theory [1] has been thoroughly debunked at this point. I you feel grateful for old Facebook, do thank the thousand nameless engineers that actually built it, not the single man that took all the credit (and money).

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

You talk as if you'd have had no other means of communication had Facebook not existed. Your delusion would have been funny had you not also implied you intend to subject your children to the same poison too.

Please, for God's sake, don't.

What a disgustingly ass-kissing take. To pull the Godwin: Hitler built the autobahn, should I thank him for allowing me the thrill of going 200km/h (I need a better car...), sure 17++ million of lives(1) were ruined, but whatever!

And yes your beloved communication medium helped the Burmese commit genocide...

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victims_of_Nazi_Germany