Comment by vineyardmike

Comment by vineyardmike 4 days ago

7 replies

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The boat is constantly rocking though, and it's actually incredible how he's kept the boat afloat and increasingly profitable. You can despise their impact on society, but he's an incredible example of a very successful CEO.

Political investigations, anti-trust, terrible media and brand image. GDPR. DMA. Etc. A literal genocide associated with their product.

The shift from desktop to mobile, and the continued evolution of the distribution channel - eg. the "Anti-tracking" requirement on apple devices.

The shift from text posts to images, to stories, to short-form video. From broadcast to DMs and groups.

The shift from "social" media to celebrity and influencer followings, to a feed entirely algorithmic.

The shift in advertisement formats, the shift across what gets advertised (eg. apps didn't exist at all when Facebook started, now they track ad-click-to-install rates through ML models).

Aeolun 4 days ago

I suppose I just don’t find any of those things very admirable? The fact that their product is associated with so much bad shit and still alive is a terrible thing for society. I just cannot reasonably call someone that led all that a ‘good CEO’, because they represent nothing that I’d like a CEO to be, regardless of what Wall Street things.

I’d also argue that it just means that Facebook was very successful at following all the trends and purchasing what they couldn’t replicate.

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  • lazide 4 days ago

    The CEO is captain of their ship.

    Saying ‘I hate their ship, and that it hasn’t sunk’ doesn’t mean they are a bad CEO.

    If anything, it means they might be an even better CEO because it’s still doing well, running around rampaging, despite all the hate.

    After all - who is the better pirate? The one who is hated and infamous (and still alive pirating), or the one no one has ever heard of?

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    • olyjohn 2 days ago

      Your definition of "good" is weird, man. He's good at making money, that doesn't make him a good CEO. A good CEO should be able to make money and have some goddamn principles.

      It's like staying that Putin is a good leader, because he's managed to stay in power for so long. Like what the fuck?

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  • grandempire 3 days ago

    > associated with so much bad shit

    Reputation vs harm ethics.

    > I’d also argue that it just means that Facebook was very successful at following all the trends

    Yeah foreseeing and executing on those trends is the hard part.

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    • Apocryphon 3 days ago

      Each one of these platform empires from IBM to Microsoft to Google to Amazon to Uber has been very successful at foreseeing and executing on trends, until they're not. Meta was so for a long time, but not necessarily in recent years. That will, inevitably, be the fate of TikTok and whatever future empires arise from the current environment.

      I am not saying Zuckerberg hasn't achieved much in the past. It's just funny to crow about his "super power" when Facebook reached critical mass over a decade and a half ago and has been able to coast along as a money printer based on network effects. And also as a Xerox copy printer- I always like to bring up the time they cloned HQ Trivia.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31691294

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27933874

      It's good for a platform empire to spent some of its lavish riches on R&D, even if it's just to diversify its moat and further entrench itself. But less so when that ends up as a quixotic boondoggle no one asked for (Metaverse) or as a blatant unoriginal copy (Reels, Confetti). At some point it's not really brilliance to be "foreseeing and executing on those trends" when you have the resources to chase after every trend. Then you've just turned your megacorporation into a VC fund, throwing anything and everything at the wall until something sticks. As we can see, there are a ton of initiatives, projects, departments that don't stick, and some quite spectacularly (Metaverse, again).

      Eventually you just end up with the unoriginal silliness of LinkedIn Stories or every single platform including FB having its own Clubhouse, even when Clubhouse itself was a fad that faded as quickly as it appeared during the height of the pandemic.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27580241

      What I'm saying is, what has Zuckerberg done lately?

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someusername321 4 days ago

I get your point about what he has accomplished. But at the same time, right after saying he's an incredible example of a very successful CEO, you acknowledge "a literal genocide associated with their product." I really wish we could shift how we define success for these CEOs.

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