| Oh my god, no. Zuck had — and I believe still has — complete control of the company. Demonizing Sandberg and lionizing Zuckerberg is a complete disservice to reality. It was the focus on growth and not money that ruined everything. Many changes occurred in this period. I was there. A big change is that ads became profitable. I think it’s fair to say this change was sudden. Facebook went from being scrappy and underfunded to being wealthy and powerful. At the same time, the growth had eclipsed competitors and Google Plus came and went. The media tone and coverage changed from “oh this startup is doing neat stuff” to a point concern for data privacy and the implosion of journalism revenue. So they became a lot more influential culturally. Being suddenly wealthy and influential but with a cultural mentality of being a scrappy and upstart— something this book accurately reflects — lead to hubris. The focus on hypergrowth which had served them well from a small startup — under the umbrella of this hubris — led to events like the Cambridge Analytica disaster. Insufficient care was being placed on how data could be collected and misused by others, growth took priority. This focus on Hypergrowth meant that changes that responded well in metrics got pushed. The longer-term damage of people not enjoying their experiences wasn’t a high enough ranked metric compared to engagement and user metrics. None of this was Sandberg’s fault. She was an extremely competent manager and is brilliant. Absolutely she was instrumental in leading Facebook to profitability but this push wasn’t a big factor in their decline. Instead, Facebook got too big way too fast and the employees and Zuck didn’t have the mindset shift needed to consider everything as it was happening. Yes, money ruined everything eventually — but that came later. The most crucial damage had already happened — people gave up on trust that Facebook could handle their data responsibly, and trust that they’d have a good experience on the site. I could go on but that’s enough. |
I think it was also that people were beginning to see the consequences of “over sharing” with people you’d never normally share things with. The vision of connecting everybody sounds great but not everybody needs, wants or even should hear everything everybody else says. And once such a realization comes about, away goes the linear timeline and in comes a more algorithmic approach. Suddenly your own posts get algorithmiclly ranked, sorted and filtered by every person on your friends list. And to get your post to show up on their feed you have to please an algorithm first in order to get permission. Thus comes a whole host of negative social interaction and toxicity.
I dunno. Maybe the decline of things like Facebook are simply because society “figured out through lived experience” what the end game of a tool like facebook looks like.