[jseliger]

For all the flack that Zuck is getting in this thread

It's pretty safe to ignore most of the flack in this thread. Most people vote with their feet (or wallets, or eyeballs, or attention), and they've voted that they love Facebook, regardless of what a minority of people in this thread say or upvote.

Nerds have a cantankerous side and are as prone to virtue signalling as any other group. Those of us who read Slashdot ages ago may remember the Microsoft hate it hosted and the way every year was going to be the year of Linux on the desktop. Well, Microsoft is still here; Linux on the desktop is still a minority pursuit; and most people never cared that much about the OS they used.

The specific target nerd derision has changed some, but the form of the attack and disdain has not. Any company or country or person's haters is proportionate to its size. Look at what people do and how they behave rather than what they say.

[Karunamon]

There's a difference between loving Facebook, and begrudgingly using it because that's where my friends/family are.

Facebook sucks, not just because of confusing UI, or because of silent changes to privacy settings, or because it's one stop shopping for scary three-letter-agencies, but because the network effect is so damned strong, it will take a monumental misstep for it to become the next Myspace.

[gavinpc]

> There's a difference between loving Facebook, and begrudgingly using it because that's where my friends/family are.

Not to Facebook.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Even to Facebook.

Coercion - even subtle social coercion - only works up to a point. If you piss off people enough they'll reward you with zero loyalty, no matter how popular you think you are.

FB is vulnerable unless it keeps its users very happy. Currently it has a monopoly on a product that's actually quite mediocre and frustrating in many ways, and not seen as particularly cool.

If it has to face real competition, it's going to have issues.

There are specific times when you can unseat a behemoth, and those times are when new markets and new platforms arrive.

How is FB doing in China? How are the Chinese doing with AI, AR/VR, and mobile?

Anyone looking at China can see that it's becoming competitive with the US. So far the software markets are largely separate, but I think it's naive to believe that's still going to be true 10-20 years from now.

[swsieber]

I would think that it does - would not the usage habits be entirely different between the two groups?

Also, hating Facebook makes jumping ship so much easier - my wife uses Instagram primarily now instead of Facebook. Yes I know Facebook owns Instagram, but there are other social platforms people are jumping to.

[bambax]

What you're saying is all true, esp. virtue signalling. But, one can admire Zuck as an individual (Harvard educated, code wizard, able to learn Chinese and become almost fluent at it while running Facebook, etc.) and still think Facebook changed the world for the worst.

Google and Microsoft gave us tools that enabled us to work faster and do things we couldn't do before (esp. Google); Facebook is just addictive but doesn't enable anything.

I would rather "the future" didn't include more of Facebook.

[perseusprime11]

I don't think he is getting much flack. I think he is more like Bill Gates with some luck involved. Let us not try to put him in the same bucket as Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Facebook started as a way to hook up college students, remember poke? It did not start out as a vision to connect the world

[mpbm]

Since a solid five minutes of the interview are devoted to Mark explaining how he never expected to start a company, let alone do anything as big as "connect the world", I don't think this is much of a rebuttal of anything. What makes you think Steve Jobs belongs in a "better" bucket than Mark? Even at his grandest vision he just made phones. They were good phones, sure, but he never tried to do anything bigger.

[elmar]

Elon Musk is on a league of its own.

Imagine a textbook 500 years in the future (there won't be physical textbooks of course, but whatever students are using as a learning tool then)... Who do you think will be profiled in that textbook? Bill Gates? Warren Buffet? Larry Ellison? Steve Jobs? Mark Zuckerberg? Maybe any or all of those people, but then again, maybe not, I bet Elon Musk will be there.

[oskarth]

> Most people vote with their feet (or wallets, or eyeballs, or attention), and they've voted that they love Facebook, regardless of what a minority of people in this thread say or upvote.

Plenty of people in the HN demographic also vote with their feet by quitting FB.

[argonaut]

The HN demographic is minuscule.