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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   36799 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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What will become of Mark Zuckerburg's empire of shit?

I was recently thinking wistfully of the brief golden age of Facebook, and how it made me more connected to my social network. At one point, most of my friends and family posted updates about their lives. I knew all about my friends from high school and college. I even connected to members of my extended family. And I could easily ask questions to my network and receive answers. It was great.

That was a long time ago. Zuckerberg pissed it all away. At first, he tried to replace the news media. Later, when that failed, he went all in on maximizing ad revenue. Facebook is now a wasteland of ads, AI, and clueless boomers. Nearly 100% of its value proposition is gone. No one I care about posts there any more.

Zuckerburg did a few things right, all more than a decade ago:

  1. He figured out that people will give you all their personal info for free and that this is worth a lot to advertisers. In his words, "they trust me, dumb fucks".

  2. He made sure his voting shares didn't get diluted so he has, in theory, monarchal control of Facebook

  3. He bought Instagram for cheap in 2012

He has reaped the rewards of these decisions handsomely and currently is the world's 4th richest person with a net worth north of $200 billion.

But what has he done more recently?

  1. Bought WhatsApp for $19 billion and promised to never advertise on the platform. Even though he has broken the promise, it's unclear how they will ever recoup this

  2. Blown tens of billions on the "Metaverse", a project which no one wants and has negative traction

  3. Made "Stories", "Reels", and "Threads" – blatant knockoffs of existing products which failed to win in the marketplace

  4. Made an open source LLM called LLAMA which was initially a success but has been blown out of the water by a Chinese startup that trained a superior model for just $6 million

I recently read the book "Titan", about John D. Rockefeller. Despite being history's greatest philanthropist, Rockefeller viewed Standard Oil as his real contribution to humanity. People take the wrong lesson from his life, which is generally viewed as "he did a bunch of evil shit to get rich but he gave it all away, so it's okay."

Bill Gates folllowed that model. Maybe Zuckerberg thinks the same way. But it's unlikely that anything he can do with his billions can undo the damage his social networks have done, and continue to do to the social fabric. The irony is that if he had just focused on making Facebook the best version of itself, he would probably be even richer today, and beloved for making the iconic product of the age.

But instead we have Instagram, Reels, and a bunch of other shit that just makes people miserable. Will it stand the test of time? I doubt it.

Rockefeller viewed Standard Oil as his real contribution to humanity. [...]

Bill Gates folllowed that model.

As some of you might know, Gates made his fortune leading a company called "Microsoft" in the 80s and 90s.

It is somewhat of an understatement to say that the Microsoft of that era was not generally seen as a force for good. They were the most hated company on the net in that era. Their software (i.e. Windows 95, 98, ME) was garbage. Its security was atrocious. Their marketplace behavior was anti-competitive. Their 'innovations' were things like a fucking talking paperclip which would try to distract you in word.

Basically, I stopped hating them when I stopped using their crap for serious work. Recent iterations of windows are tolerable as an operating system for a gaming-only machine, though.

I think that Gates has reached net good with his philanthropy, but to claim that MS was his real contribution to humanity is absurd.

Edit: made misinterpreted quotation more accurate.

Isn't that kind of a "programmer" perspective on Microsoft? From a normie perspective, Microsoft brought computers to the masses and made them useful to normal people.

  • Instead of typing cryptic commands into a terminal, you could just click buttons with a GUI
  • Yes, I know, Apple also had that in the Lisa and Macintosh. But those cost $10,000 in 1980s money, so no normal person could afford them.
  • Yes, I know, Xerox had it even earlier. Again, no normal person could afford that or even knew that it existed.
  • Instead of trying to choose between 12 different competing brands of computer that all ran totally different software, Microsoft made it easy by dominating the market with one standard that could run almost any kind of software
  • Microsoft didn't just sell computers, they came prepackaged with a bunch of useful software so that it would "just work" right out of the box. Tech nerds might call that an exploitive monopoly, but normal people were pretty happy that they could easily write a document, run a spreadsheet, or get an email on this complicated gadget which they had spent a month's salary on, without having to do some complicated "software installation" process. Hell, even just Freecell and Minesweeper were mindblowing to people back then, when the alternative was ordering game installation floppy disks by a mail-order catalogue, or programming them yourself.
  • A lot of their security problems were just because they had so many users, and so many hackers targeted them. Nobody bothered to target Unix or Apple back then because it simply wasn't worth it. But I'm sure they also had security problems that could have been targeted if "rich old boomer boss" had started using them en masse. hell, Richard Stallmen in his early years was notorious for hacking into people's accounts at MIT and changing their password because he believed that noone really needed a private password.
  • In general, they just did what any corporation does... try to make money. IBM and Intel were exactly the same. Commodore under Jack Tramiel was even worse. The early hackers like Steve Woz were just too naive to understand how the world works. They thought they could just give away everything for free in live in a hippy paradise forever.

Instead of typing cryptic commands into a terminal, you could just click buttons with a GUI

LOL.

Yes, I know, Apple also had that in the Lisa and Macintosh. But those cost $10,000 in 1980s money, so no normal person could afford them.

The Mac cost $2500 in 1984 dollars, not $10,000.

Microsoft didn't just sell computers, they came prepackaged with a bunch of useful software so that it would "just work" right out of the box.

Again, LOL. The original Mac came with a word processor and a drawing program.

First, $2500 was still a heck of a lot of money for a home computer in the 1980s. Its main competition were around $1000. Second, the original Mac in its launch state was woefully underpowered (https://www.filfre.net/2014/02/macintosh/)

Those realities could be hellish. The single floppy drive combined with the inadequate memory could make the original Mac as excruciating to actually use as it was fun to wax poetic about, with the process of just copying a single disk requiring more than fifty disk swaps and twenty minutes. MacWrite, the Mac’s flagship version of that bedrock of business applications the word processor, was so starved for memory that you could only create a document of about eight pages. Determined Mac zealots swapped tips on how to chain files together to craft their Great American Novels, while the business world just shrugged and turned back to their ugly but functional WordStar screens. The Mac was a toy, at best an interesting curiosity; IBM was still the choice for real work.

Those problems were eventually solved, but they required even more expensive versions of the Mac plus expensive peripherals:

Apple’s empire would be a very exclusive place. By the time you’d bought a monitor, video card, hard drive, keyboard — yes, even the keyboard was a separate item — and other needful accessories, a Mac II system could rise uncomfortably close to the $10,000 mark.

First, $2500 was still a heck of a lot of money for a home computer in the 1980s.

You set the goal posts in the first place; leave them where they were. IBMs competition at the time was the PC-XT, introduced 10 months earlier. It cost twice as much.

you're just nitpicking. Apple computers were always more expensive than other brands, and the Macintosh was considered expensive even by Apple's standards. There were many, many types of IBM and IBM computers at that time, which mostly cost a lot less. Going from Google... (https://www.neowin.net/news/the-ibm-pc-xt-launched-40-years-ago-today-but-it-got-competition-from-the-compaq-portable/)

The original IBM PC had a starting price of $1,565 when it launched in 1981 according to PC Mag. By contrast, the price for the first model of the IBM PC-XT was a whopping $7,545

So the Pc_XT was also an expensive high end computer. On the other end, you could get a commodore 64 for just a few hundred dollars.

Anyway my original point was that Microsoft isn't some uniquely evil company. They just sold a lot of software to anyone who wanted to buy it, unlike Apple with their little walled garden of Apple-only software.

You built your claims that Microsoft actually did what Apple is justly famous for doing on a foundation of false facts, and I picked at those; they aren't nits.

The Mac cost $2500 in 1984 dollars, not $10,000.

I think his point is that $2500 in 1984 money is >$10,000 today after accounting for inflation.

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