2.4 billion monthly active users is "doomed" now? Just because in the tech bubble Facebook is viewed negatively it doesn't mean they are not doing just fine.
You can call Facebook whatever but it is not a failure. A company that has grown revenue from 2B in 2010 to 70B in 2019 cannot be considered a failure .
All companies from Sears to Yahoo to Favebook have peaks, troughs and then eventually fade out. Even if Facebook fades outs on the next 5-50 years, it would have done better than millions of other companies. Look at it this way - what started as an experiment in a dorm room turning into this big is the dream of every startup. Every year thousands of companies apply to YC hoping to be 1/100 to 1/1000 as successful as FAANG’s
The negative outlook instead seems to be that since 2010, Facebook (the product, not the engineering team) has delivered little value to society.
And at this point, seems to have ossified into a form that lacks the agility and will to make major shifts.
Their current emphasis on purchasing other companies for their product pipelines, to drive business to their advertising, seems more akin to pharma majors or IBM than anything in the startup world.
Facebook delivers value every day to billions of daily active users -- the social updates. The value varies by person but presumably it's positive value for all DAU or they would cease to be DAU.
Perhaps Facebook hasn't increased value delivered for each user for each day that much. Or has even decreased it. But the baseline is definitely "value to society" IMO
Did you mean Facebook has delivered little marginal value?
> since 2010, Facebook (the product, not the engineering team) has delivered little value to society
That requires a different rebuttal than 'to a user.'
If we rewound to ~2010, froze Facebook at its then-current feature set, and had Instagram (2012), WhatsApp (2014), Oculus (2014), and the myriad of other aquhires still in existence as independent companies, society would be a better place.
That measure is so subjective I'd be surprised if it was ever clear cut. You could argue circles with coal, oil, FB, beer, various drugs, fancy rocks. All are double-edged swords (the handle is also a sword (and it's on fire))
Indeed not always, and there certainly can be an observer effect, but the answer re. Facebook is very clear cut.
In any case I've found it preferable to "does this corporate entity create shareholder value?", which I must confess I was suckered by some rather Austrian-school economists into accepting as a valid proxy for human advancement and/or happiness in my mid-thirties.
Out of curiosity, why does the condition "without egregious side effects" exist? Aren't egregious side effects already factored ibto the "net benefit" calculation?
My moral compass says, don't harm individuals for the greater good.
I should add, you're not wrong to question the necessity of including the second part. It is most certainly a factor. There's a natural justice strand in the formulation of Benthamite utilitarianism (which is, broadly speaking, where I'm coming from) that reinforces an enlightened approach to individual consequences, since in the long run the absence of individual justice poisons the greater good anyway.
However that's a bit of a mouthful, and it does need surfacing because there are other formulations of utilitarianism that lead to dystopian nightmare societies, and besides, I'm rather fond of the word egregious.
However I do regret forgetting to riff on the laws of robotics in the phrasing
2.4 billion monthly active users is "doomed" now? Just because in the tech bubble Facebook is viewed negatively it doesn't mean they are not doing just fine.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...