While facebook is huge and everyone knows it, i still don't see facebook the same way i see companies like: Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, ...
Sure they have so much money that they do research, build open source tools etc. but how that company came by and what it is actually doing, is so different to all the others.
Do companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Google, etc prioritize their customers over their own interests? Other companies in tech or outside of tech?
I don't think Facebook is some well run charity doing philanthropy - I just don't think they are meaningfully worse than their peers. I do think there is a concerted media campaign to malign Facebook and I think this is where the differential in how people think of Facebook versus these other companies comes from.
Facebook has money because it's Facebook. That doesn't mean how the company is run is good, efficient or worthy of emulating. Everyone I know who's worked there says it's not well run. There are constant articles like this proving it is not, and has not been, well run.
Right. Facebook, a young and suddenly influential company is a very different thing then the very large privately held companies. Those are usually very old, owned by multiple family interests, or associated with a government.
The worst thing about Facebook I personally see is the peer (or even professional) pressure to have an account there and be active. And them doing what all (American?) megacorps do: buying small companies, stripping them of assets, absorbing them and forgetting them.
Then again, some people build start-ups for this very reason, don't they.
It doesn't seem fair to compare Facebook to the other companies you listed, with respect to negative public sentiment. People rightly criticize FB for the numerous scandals, data leaks, and lack of ethics, and as Zuckerberg runs the company, he deserves that criticism.
It's one thing to buy the stock and be bullish, and another to turn a blind eye to the horrors this company has created.
Youtube has it's problems, Google Search is going down the drain, and a ton of other websites run off ad revenue, yes. Those services are not responsible for organizing genocides, providing political analytics companies access to unauthorized data, or running unethical experiments on users to test their impact on the users' mental health.
The problem with facebook is it does not produce any value unlike Microsoft and Apple.
Both Apple and Microsoft's product help people create stuff, get things done, entertain themselves. Facebook does a tiny bit of entertaining and socializing, it is no where near MSFT or AAPL in terms of having a tangible impact on people's lives.
Facebook is hardly the only tech company that makes its money by compromising its users' privacy and selling their users to advertisers. And they're hardly the only tech company that violates laws and regulations when it's convenient for them. I'm not at all a fan of Facebook, but singling them out as if they were some kind of unique evil seems a bit unfair to me.
I agree with all of that and I still hate Facebook.
Facebook has amazingly good engineers doing amazingly good engineering. Huge contributions to open source. Fantastic pay. Amazing job of growing junior engineers into good senior engineers.
However, the products they build still seem like they generally makes the world a worse place, and that's probably more important.
I see Facebook as the least ethical, and least useful from a civilization standpoint of all the big tech firms.
Google is driven by the same ad-clicking incentives, but the one-tricky pony has been developing other extremely societally useful tech, like self-driving cars and other moonshot projects.
Apple and Microsoft sell products, they do not make users the product (on the whole). Together they pioneered computing revolutions, and I'm confident history will judge them for making a positive contribution (on the whole).
Amazon is a leviathan whose societal value I find more difficult to classify, but I genuinely derive lots of value from their service personally. It's good for my lifestyle.
Facebook on the other hand, is a waste of my time, mental energy and a drain on society. As an academic, how can you turn your mind to furthering its goals?
From a technical standpoint and from a political standpoint. Facebook feels like the small brother of all those big impressive companies who did things, invented things and formed technology like i know it. Google, Microsoft etc. Facebook on the other hand feels strange.
Political speaking: they are reacting and not acting.
I can think of a couple fairly lousy companies associated with at least two of these fine fellows. Their being involved does not say anything about Facebook's potential to make money.
And again, just because other companies do bad things doesn't mean it's ok.
Also, most of these other companies exist because they provide a real, needed service to people. Facebook creates the need (artificial) for the services they provide.
Facebook—the product is possibly better than the other social networks at doing the basics.
Facebook—the company, is morally bankrupt. Arguably the worst of the bunch. The overly invasive data-collection, sharing of data in questionable ways, repeated lying about.. just about everything... etc.
For me, the product is not appealing enough to compensate for the failings of the companies. If it weren't for the fact that so many friends/ businesses/ family rely on it for communications I would quit it entirely.
Facebook dont consider themselves as tech companies. But there aren't any other category that are clearly defined in which they fit in. Social Media isn't one.
Sure they have so much money that they do research, build open source tools etc. but how that company came by and what it is actually doing, is so different to all the others.
In a bad way.
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