Facebook’s biggest problem has always been the people that use their products spreading hate and misinformation

Facebook’s algo drives this. It’s a choice that they’ve amplified this content.

The article you replied to (not behind a paywall for me for some reason?) talks about how they open sourced their LLM AI for research purposes.

Can’t comment much on this one, so I won’t.

WhatsApp is still fully end to end encrypted

still because wasn’t it like that when they bought it?

they’re pushing the same on messenger now

Now, as in, they didn’t design it that way to begin with because it wasn’t the profitable thing to do. They have to compete with iMessage, and further, they gain just by being able to tell every cop shop “sorry can’t do it bro.”

Their targeted advertising has rightfully gotten a lot of scrutiny, but there’s a lot of misinformation behind it, like “Facebook is listening to my calls” and “Facebook is reading my message data”, which they’ve denied and there’s no actual evidence of. I have family with small businesses that wouldn’t have made it through the pandemic without their advertising platform.

Glad your family made it. Unfortunately, though, this is the masses not understanding how technology these days really works. They don’t have to read your messages or listen to your calls because they’re doing that all over the web and through their own users. The truth is more nefarious because for most people “listening to my calls” is scrutable, while adding tracking cookies across the web or computing social graphs based on your contact info being shared without your consent by a few of your friends, or doing some ML on every photo shared is not.

I don’t think that they have any place in the fediverse, honestly I’d be surprised if they wanted in on it anyways

Agreed.

If I were to guess this meeting was probably a job offer if anything lol.

Disagree. Fediverse and it’s growth as it stands now is not good for Facebook, so they’re trying to head it off at the pass. I’d be willing to bet this meeting was a feeler for them and I hope Eugen and others are smart enough of to say basically nothing, and they’re continuing the grand tradition of embrace, extend, extinguish.

Is Meta evil? No. They’re probably not a standard deviation away from any other org in terms of how many are “evil” but their incentives today all align to a worse outcome for humanity. It’s kinda worse - it’s a collection of incredibly smart people compartmentalized enough from the “evil” the org does. Actually, don’t know that I would say “evil” so much as “sociopathic.”

Meta should get no passes, and be met with absolute scrutiny related to the fediverse.

I mean, he doesn’t have to light the match, the bridge is already aflame. He’s just pointing out he’s not holding the match.

This is pretty much what I was going to say. I don’t think that people understand quite how the pseudo libertarian tech bro mentality still permeates this space, and in particular with reddit. The site has always been this way, so if you’ve been around for a while, you’ve been around to this play out many times. Free speech is some absolutely inviolate principle that requires reddit to platform pedophiles (jailbait) and pics of dead kids, until it’s not because it gets bad press and starts to affect financials and some overlord steps in, and then, just like in the real world, when my libertarian ideal starts to negatively impact me, it goes out the window. Repeat ad nauseum.

These people also tend to think that every bit of success they have is only because of them, even though in the case of reddit, most of the success that it’s had has happened in spite of them. One of Reddit’s defining aspects used to be ama’s. Reddit fired the person responsible for making them great. Reddit completely missed mobile even more than Twitter did, and then when they finally got there they did it poorly and can still attribute most of the success to third party developers. Nothing really since the core product stabilized in like 2008 has been meaningful, it’s been about the community the entire time.

I would still be willing to bet that spez and reddit think that their rugged individualist genius is the reason that reddit is as big when that’s all largely happened in spite of them. None of them will admit the truth - they had a good basic idea at the right time, and they’ve succeeded since based on the backs of a bunch of people they’ll never give credit to, and as soon as they stop listening to those people they fade from relevance. And even though they have plenty examples to look to (the juxtaposition of this compared to twitter is really something) they don’t learn from it.

Could they have something to do with it? Yes, for sure. But the thing is that they didn’t have to do any of this the way they did. They could have made an API plan that allowed third party apps to still exist/thrive, and also charge big companies that just want to use reddit to train LLM’s. Change the pricing/terms based around this idea. They deliberately went after third party apps, and then double and tripled down on it in the face of massive backlash. If spez was competent, he would have been able to better pivot this conversation and make it about training LLM’s for megacorps, but he didn’t and even then it would have still been bullshit that is easily seen past.

I agree with this but I’ll add in one more - it would have to come with spez resigning/being fired. Killing the apps was always the goal, and there is no way I would trust literally anything that is coming from reddit with him at the head. I don’t think it’s even a little hyperbolic to say flatly that he is a liar. Even if they reversed course 100%, I don’t see how it fixes anything because I don’t see how Christian or any of the other makers of those third party apps decide to continue working with this company.

And even then I don’t think I’d trust reddit to do the right thing at all. Every change made to reddit basically since 2010 or later has either been bad, or their hands have been forced to do the obvious right thing by negative press. They’ve not proactively done basically anything positive for users in a decade, and this is more or less the story of what I’d call social media 1.0 (twitter, facebook, reddit, youtube, etc.) Especially with my experience moving from Twitter to Mastodon, I’m far more likely regardless of what reddit does to replace it with a federated option because the end goal of publicly traded social media companies just do not align with my values, and even more practically, do not align with an experience I want to have.