[mattmaroon]

"Perhaps the lesson here is that competing with and using your 'friends' in serial fashion until you totally and completely ravage each relationship is key to achieving financial success—but then it's certainly no way to define friendship."

That's certainly not the lesson. In fact what's always made me believe these sort of attacks against Zuckerberg's character is the fact that you don't see this happen with really any of the other startups that got big. Nobody is accusing Larry and Sergey of these sorts of shenanigans.

I'd say if anything, being a moral person is more blessing than curse when it comes to amassing wealth. It's obviously not a requirement though.

[unabridged]

>That's certainly not the lesson. In fact what's always made me believe these sort of attacks against Zuckerberg's character is the fact that you don't see this happen with really any of the other startups that got big. Nobody is accusing Larry and Sergey of these sorts of shenanigans.

I think a lot of it is about the product you are making. Google was started by people who would find Google useful. Larry and Sergey were not laughing at people for wanting to search the web. Facebook is just another in a long line of marketing triumphs, similar to movie and record producers who create movies and bands they themselves would never watch or listen to. Facebook is not a tech company, they are the worst part of the entertainment industry, the nonartists.

[nancyhua]

Larry and Sergey are different from other star founders who've been accused of evil (Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg) in that they were older so maybe more mature and also relatively less entrepreneurial- their goal was academia, unlike all the young dropouts. Maybe many extremely entrepreneurial people don't respect the law. In Zuckerberg's case it does seem like he doesn't care about patents at all whereas Aaron is still mad about the IP and hates that Zuckerberg ignored the rules (re: patents, Facemash, dropping out, and everything else) and got rewarded for it.

Reading the logs I don't get the sense Zuckerberg is being dishonest or that he even considers Aaron to be a friend. The main conflict seems to be the accusation that Zuckerberg stole ideas, which is a big question for software in general: ideas want to spread so the concept of IP is arguably against the nature of ideas. At the same time, we want people to be able to get rich off a great idea even if they don't implement it successfully. This question re: IP and copyrights is something we're still resolving as a society. Until it gets resolved, if ever, lots of people are going to have lots of unfair things happen to them and it's understandable to be mad about that.

But that's what life is: unfair. Just like we can't go through life feeling guilty about how lucky we are to have survived infancy unlike some absurd percentage of humans in poor countries, we can't constantly hate on other people who are even luckier than we are re: how they don't deserve their success. No one deserves anything. Life is unfair.

[corporalagumbo]

1) I don't think Greenspan is mad, he seems more disappointed.

2) It is absolutely possible to treat your fellow human beings well and find richly-deserved success - Mark Zuckerberg however does not seem capable of this.

3) Even though our society might tolerate and even reward (in the short-term at least) this sort of behaviour, should we be happy that a master-exploiter of this unfairness is the guardian of social relationships on the internet?

[nancyhua]

I don't know Zuckerberg but want to play devil's advocate to give him the benefit of the doubt until he actually gets convicted of something.

> 2) It is absolutely possible to treat your fellow human beings well and find richly-deserved success - Mark Zuckerberg however does not seem capable of this.

From Aaron's account, it looks like Mark does not believe that these software ideas were original or IP. If you buy that perspective, he wasn't wrong to execute far better on the same ideas that have appeared repeatedly in the history of social networks- he was simply a sucky friend, which is unlikeable but not illegal.

He's made a bunch of people very rich with Facebook. Do you think D'Angelo, the Winklevosses, and Saverin would rather have never met Zuckerberg or would rather he never created Facebook?

>3) Even though our society might tolerate and even reward (in the short-term at least) this sort of behaviour, should we be happy that a master-exploiter of this unfairness is the guardian of social relationships on the internet?

The sin Mark's accused of is stealing people's ideas, assuming ideas are steal-able, and thereby breaching the trust of people who considered themselves his friends or coworkers. If he's guilty, I guess the question is whether someone who is immoral/amoral in one respect is able to be ethical in other areas.

Since the movie makes a good case that Zuckerberg betrayed some of his close friends, I don't trust him (or any random person) not to betray me, a random stranger / Facebook user. But I do trust Zuckerberg to want to do whatever is good for Facebook. Are people scared he's going to somehow blackmail them into staying on Facebook by threatening to release their private data to everyone? I'll be scared of that scenario if that ever seems like the best plan for Facebook.

Who else could run Facebook? Most people are less intelligent or less competent or less interested in Facebook's future. Almost anyone in Mark's situation would cash out and grow indifferent but Zuckerberg persuades me he's not doing it for the money. So I guess I'm happy he's running it because regardless of his moral judgment or human loyalty at least I feel like he cares about Facebook.

I think many problems with corporations arise from leaders' interests not being aligned with those of the company. Facebook is one of the few examples where I don't believe that's the case. It might seem psychopathic to care more about Facebook than your best friend and/or cofounder, but is that really a big problem? Maybe from the corporation's perspective (or from the user and shareholder perspective), it's actually a virtue.

[corporalagumbo]

I appreciate that building Facebook to the point it is at now, and maintaining focus on the future company despite buy-out offers, is not trivial. Mark is clearly a talented individual.

However what is good for Facebook =/= what is good for Facebook users. And one point that emerges from Greenspan's description of Mark is that the man may be a genius for cutting out friends and building an empire, but when it comes to human warmth, he's lacking. And the problem with that is that it may very well limit Mark's ability to imagine how something like Facebook could evolve and work, and thus limit his ability to better equate what is good for Facebook with what is good for users.

A subsidiary point is that, due to network effects, Facebook's vulnerability to a poor core philosophy is reduced, at least in the short term. Once a social network grows into our lives, it isn't easy to replace. So if Facebook is indeed "rotten at the core" (I'm not arguing it is necessarily... just saying) then it may be able to buy itself a lot of time, even if it acts in its "own" interests, not its users'. But as technology continues to develop and its environment destabilises it won't remain invulnerable forever. Unless you are interested in slavery and extortion, eventually, under our moderated democratic capitalist model, what is good for a company is being good for its users.

[nancyhua]

I think I agree with your points assuming Mark is evil.

I am not convinced Zuckerberg's lacking "human warmth." It didn't strike me that Mark thought he was actually friends with Aaron or thought he was betraying anything- that's Aaron's perspective, which was understandable but we can't be really nice to everyone who considers themselves our friends or disagrees with us on who owns an idea.

Facebook so far hasn't done anything I really disagree with. But my feelings on privacy etc aren't that strong yet, maybe a failure of my imagination because nothing bad has really happened to me yet (knocking on wood).

[Apocryphon]

They've accused Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of it.

[wpietri]

E.g., Jobs cheated Wozniak out of cash money:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Early_career

[brooktree]

The first person who comes along and hits the web industry jackpot at an unprecedented level who is also not a stereotype antisocial nerd douchebag* is going to thoroughly debunk all theories that correlate this sort of character to financial success without any evidence of causation.

* The degree to which sheer luck and network effects are factors in this particular sector makes this plausible.

[blhack]

Um Jack Dorsey?

[VBprogrammer]

Jack who?

[theorique]

Co-founder of Twitter and Square