The Easy Reason Facebook Can't Be

The Simple Reason Facebook Can Not Be Fixed

The tech elite live in another world than most of us, plus they will not fix what they do not see

Nope. The organization's stock is up 40% so far this year as"new hell" continues to be stunningly profitable. Moreover, if you work in technology, at least one person you know who has a solid moral compass has excitedly started a new job at Facebook without a shred of cognitive dissonance.

The main cause is quite straightforward. We're asking people who don't experience the effects of Facebook's existential defects to fix them. This basic dilemma explains why many Facebookers still have unbridled zeal for the company's mission and put ominously over any attempts to reimagine what Facebook could be, preserving a status quo that works good for tech's elite but quite poorly for everyone else.


Toexplain this happening, let me take you straight back to my own days as a 22-year-old fresh recruit at LinkedIn, fueled by Silicon Valley idealism and exquisite fruit-infused water. As a LinkedIn employee, I obviously spent a fantastic deal of time around the platform, where my feed was mostly populated with articles from other LinkedIn employees and their networks. The result was that LinkedIn appeared to be a really wonderful stage, a potpourri of the best articles from the technology media and relevant job posts -- and I realize that to anybody reading this who hasn't worked for LinkedIn, this is almost impossible to believe.

After a few months, I went right into a role in customer achievement, easily my favorite of the fake job titles made by the software as a service (SaaS) industry. In order to replicate bugs and troubleshoot customer concerns, I sometimes had to (with explicit user consent ) log in as the member and click around -- meaning I undergone LinkedIn like an individual did.

When I did so, my filter bubble was busted, and I entered a markedly different digital globe. On a professional community, I saw blatantly xenophobic content which was thinly veiled as thought leadership on jobs. While this was rather uncommon, many user feeds were a bizarre amalgamation of math puzzles, inspirational memes, and ridiculous self-promotional tales such as one growth hacker's accounts of becoming pen pals with a dictator. Job postings, important professional news, and many of the other items LinkedIn was apparently supposed to provide were frequently absent altogether.

Like the rich live in various worlds, the tech wealthy live in various digital worlds.

Yet regardless of the company using a group of nearly 100 human editors to curate users and content posting under their real, professional identities, the LinkedIn experience for the average user frequently devolves into an electronic used car lot. I am convinced Jeff Weiner wouldn't even comprehend the platform how many members encounter it.

In a similar vein, Facebook is typically a fantastic platform -- for Facebook workers and people with a similar demographic profile. At worst for them, it's a harmless vice with minimal fake news. There is rarely a plausible path down the rabbit hole of extremism which holds real-life effects for people and their loved ones.

While much was made from the filter bubbles that create a red vs. blue Facebook newsfeed split , a far more significant chasm exists among social networking consumers. Digitally savvy users like well manicured feeds; while advertisements are found, they are imprecisely personalized and easy to glaze over. Meanwhile, the audiences that advertisers can caricature are the classes that become the item and are revealed advertisements to exploit their more closely held anxieties. The vast majority of Americans fall into the latter camp.

While the 3% of Americans who really read the Mueller report may obtain their news from straight after notable politicians or journalists on Twitter, the system is more like a funhouse mirror compared to the real-world . Much more Americans are seeing political material on social media in the kind of wildly unregulated advertisements that are added in their feed for fractions of pennies.

Throughout the 2018 midterm elections, the Trump campaign put just shy of 10,000 advertisements on Facebook that averaged 7 million impressions each. For probably the grand amount of around $110,000, text scanning"build the wall" in shining lights obtained 70 billion views. That isn't a bug; it is Facebook's pièce d'résistance feature. The business may operate a platform that works beautifully for the tech elite, offload the externality on more gullible users, and then sell their gullibility for billions of dollars.

Even though Tesla's engineers are less or more driving the same car as their consumers, Facebooks's engineers are constructing a product that, as it hits the market, basically bears no resemblance to the one they have shipped. If it breaks, it is like being asked to resolve a car that, anytime you choose it out for a spin, glides smoothly round the open road. But whenever you hand the keys into a client, it pulls slowly to the right before it crashes into a dumpster fire filled with Nazis.

Like the wealthy live in different worlds, the technology wealthy live in different worlds that are digital. Facebook's leadership is about as well-equipped to fix the monster it constructed as Andrew Cuomo is to correct the nyc subway. For all intents and purposes, neither have used this product.

To its credit, Facebook has tried to deal with this issue, once famously slowing internet rates to 2G levels to mimic the experience for its users in the developing world. The company now wants to go further and force its own leadership and rank-and-file product supervisors to dive deep into the belly of Chupacabra. Anybody who touches the core product ought to be onboarded by spending a month shadowing content teams. Spend some time together with users in the Philippines, where the belief that vaccines are essential has plummeted from 93 percent to 32 percent in just 3 decades.

Although these would be strong steps, however much you force empathy, Facebook workers' main point of reference for the product would always be their particular Facebook accounts. Along with the stage will be all the worse for it.


Using its core business model ushering in a post-truth era, where does Facebook move from here? Facebook would like to become WeChat, free to capture the spoils that come with having an individual's social and financial life. To hide the authoritarian undertones behind that vision, it is being packaged in a sudden epiphany around the significance of consumer privacy.

Ultimately, a company must decide whether or not a really good platform for advertisers or a really good platform for retailers.

But, Facebook's rally to solitude looks doomed from the outset. For starters, it's comically late. Zuckerberg is George Clooney trying to turn the boat around in the eye of this storm. However, above all, Facebook still wishes to keep all its fish. At precisely the exact same keynote it announced that the"future is personal," Facebook proudly declared that it would love to know which of your buddies you secretly wish to bang.

It requires a great deal for a big, publicly traded firm to maintain the wherewithal and forward-thinking mindset of investing in something at zero or negative revenue. A company that began its apology excursion Morgan-Stanley-style isn't going to dedicate to overhauling its entire business model. As its position as a propaganda system became more clear, Facebook felt compelled to plead to Wall Street for lackluster advertising earnings compared to Main Street for subverting its democracy.

As a first step toward realizing its brave new world, Facebook is frantically trying to proceed on trade, beginning with the long-awaited launch of Instagram Payments and P2P trades in Facebook Marketplace. I have long thought that trade would be Facebook's endgame for a basic reason: total addressable market. In the next ten years, more than $1 billion of goods will be purchased online in the USA alone. Even the most bullish projections of digital advertising place the market at a fraction of that number.

As a pure commerce play, pretty much everything about Facebook's current product is working against it. Ultimately, a company must decide whether or not a excellent platform for a excellent platform for retailers. When platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram market advertisements, they ensure users won't find a competitive advertisement. From a shopper's standpoint, this is completely absurd.

If Facebook is pivoting to earnings flows which don't rely on personally identifiable information, the company must lose the fallacy that there is some set of win-win decisions that can address existential issues. To genuinely commit to trade is to ditch the ad-based company model.

Yet on Facebook's Q1 earnings call, one sentence later championing a vigor for commerce, Zuckerberg announced the launch of a product called collaborative ads:

I think what we're going, this is, we are likely to build more resources for people to buy things straight through the platform. ... It'll be valuable to them and therefore that will translate into higher bids for your advertising and that will be how we view it.

Translation: While we may truly commit to commerce sooner or later, our primary goal for now is to encourage individuals to buy things to show advertisers how precious we are.

All this suggests a remarkable callousness toward the actual people whose lives are affected. ... The platforms are perfect -- it's us pesky people which don't get it.

The only company who has walked this tightrope is Amazon, and at a heavy cost to consumer experience. Now if you run a search on Amazon for jeans, your first two results are for sponsored blue jeans and khakis. This competitive form of marketing makes Earth's most customer-centric company nearly unusable sometimes. But it took Amazon 15 decades of refining e-commerce logistics and buying client goodwill (and monopoly power) until it earned the right to sell advertisements. Goodwill is not something that Facebook has in book.


AsI write this column, measles -- a disorder that humanity completely eradicated in 2000 -- has established its U.S. reunion tour. The tide of anti-vaccination propaganda on his own stage that made much of the possible must hit close to home.

What if he has realized he's built something that he does not have any hope of controlling? In the course of one year, Facebook took more than 2.8 billion bogus accounts, and also to the general public, it feels as though it barely made a dent. Imagine if circumstances for the world's largest social experiment have become shaky because the hypothesis Facebook is constructed on is basically flawed?

As Pinterest went public, it didn't need to answer questions about why consumers searching for crochet kits have become pioneers in chemtrails. People come to Pinterest to find inspiration for tonight's dinner or tomorrow's DIY project. Connecting the whole world on a single, centralized platform is not. What honorable entity would ever want the type of responsibility that comes with policing the whole zeitgeist?

This was the main question running through my mind as I watched Jack Dorsey, yet another beleaguered platform leader, discuss his vision to the future of Twitter at TED. Dorsey, apparently with no time to alter after his collection playing rhythm guitar for Paramore, talked as if Twitter had turned into his Ultron, a beast borne of great intentions that he could no more control. As I watched, I could not decide whether to feel sympathy or disgust. The irony of Dorsey and Zuckerberg -- two of the most effective men in the world -- residing in purgatory at the mercy of the own algorithms makes to the perfect 21st century Shakespearian tragedy. But the actual tragedy is that they're not even trying to battle back.

To make Twitter operational again, Dorsey might have to spend the platform to the studs. Yet somehow, he still has to be the CEO of another public company, take 10-day retreats, and rebrand eating disorders. Zuckerbergin an attempt to win the"hold my beer" entire tournament, read more took the point at F8 and made a joke about solitude. Rather than giving in to privacy advocates, Facebook is building a group of PR and legal Avengers headed by a new chief attorney who helped write the Patriot Act.

All of this indicates a remarkable callousness toward the real humans whose lives are influenced by the Leviathan. The platforms are ideal -- it's us pesky people that don't get it. If the cretins could only get better at using technology, everything would work. It is this smug attitude more than any technological difficulty that all but guarantees Facebook will not be fixed.

Amid all of the turmoil, Facebook is still hiring like mad, with 2,900 open rolesaround the world in the time of this writing. In posts about how to construct a winning team, thought leaders, expansion hackers, and other Silicon Valley apologists still estimate Sheryl Sandberg and Zuckerberg without a hint of irony. One of the favorite quips is Zuckerberg stating,"I will only hire a person to work directly for me if I'd do the job for that individual."

Congratulations, Mr. Putin, and welcome to Facebook!

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