I have no problem with folks doing this but it feels like hollow, performative grandstanding that allows tech folk to feel like they’re helping without doing anything that will make them truly uncomfortable. How many companies will do this but continue to let talent pipeline issues languish, or neglect unconscious biases create an uneven playing field for employees?
A lot of people are rightly concerned here that Facebook will run this arm in a cutthroat way so as to stifle innovation and competition. Though they might, I have no reason to believe that’s because they want to usurp and control every technology they invest in. I think Facebook knows that their core products and business lines are under threat of attrition, and the margins on ad revenue will get tighter. A venture arm, coupled with one of the world’s beefiest analytics muscle, will probably return more than their core businesses, and insulate them from a potential turn away from social media as a profitable vertical.
That’s what I thought they were doing with Oculus originally. Same with WhatsApp, then they started to commingle the branding.
One aspect of systemic debt that tracks well with technical debt (and most forms of "debt") is that paying down that debt requires you to confront the risk-averse and fearful tendencies of your organization/nation.
The more fearful and risk-averse approach will lock things into a local optimization with tremendous support costs and will accrue debt very fast. The bold approach will break out of the local maximum, but probably upset the apple cart.
I have to be internally consistent and agree that it's at Zoom's discretion as a private-sector company whether to host specific content or provide services to specific people and viewpoints, just as it is for Facebook/Twitter etc.
Two things are additional considerations that may change how this sort of action ends up for Zoom:
1. Zoom will be judged in the court of public opinion for their decision to align their moderation of access to their service with the CCP. This is likely a different degree of backlash than you'd see with, say, shutting down the accounts of US-based hate groups.
2. Zoom may come under scrutiny—without concrete evidence—for introspecting the content of communications through its platform that would otherwise be presumed to be private. This is different from Facebook/Twitter etc., for which much of the content that drives moderation decisions is public.
Zoom is not abridging anyone's constitutional right to free speech, nor would they be able to. How they are judged for their specific actions, though, is entirely at the discretion of their user base and public opinion.
I’ve worked at a global-scale platform for user-generated content doing anti-abuse and anti-spam tooling. In my experience those researchers do exist in-house and there was an imperative to remove abusive and spammy accounts.
The difference in my perception is that the presence of the bots and bad actors on Twitter that come to the attention of reporting like this increases engagement and views, and thus top line revenue.
This isn’t saying “bots count as views, so we get more ad dollars”. It’s that bots and bad actors promote topics and conversations that bring more real users to the platform, and increase the session duration for new and existing users.
I would imagine that Twitter sees spam bots and purveyors of illegal content as unwelcome and probably has an engineering team that dispatches those accounts quickly. But whether deliberately or unconsciously, they probably don’t apply the same rigor to accounts that break the TOS but manage to drive the top line up.
I’d love to hear from an engineer from Twitter who works in this space.
VC money being geographically concentrated in SV seems like the kind of ingrained inefficiency that VCs themselves clamor on about disrupting excessively. Dealflow is a solvable problem for distributed futures.
The implication from this litter of thinkpieces on HN is that proximity to a tech hub (SV/NY) is your only competitive advantage as a knowledge worker—your butt is close to their chair. This runs counter to the other prevailing wisdom about SV/NY, which is that those areas are hubs—and essential to the tech industry—because the world's top talent is drawn to it.
Thank you. The naive, incorrect view is that private entities restrict your constitutional rights by refusing to host UGC or by editorializing/annotating it.
An evolved, but still incorrect view is that a private entity is legally or constitutionally obligated to apply their policy about hosting speech consistently across all users.
Disagree that what you wrote constitutes "career suicide".
- Being targeted for layoffs says more about the company you work for and less about your own career.
- Passed over for promotions is again saying a lot about the company, and many folks who work in offices still have to change jobs to get career advancement.
I, for one, believe that cultivating remote work competencies that hedge against either of those things is a valuable career skill. It means you can't schmooze your way in person through career growth, you have to do it by demonstrating real value to companies that will value you fairly.
> Our app designs have become soft, sweet, inoffensive. Bank interfaces use pastels, rounded corners and soft drop shadows to make mundane or unpleasant tasks more "fun.” Animojis have taken over our chats, and our productivity tools are starting to look like Animal Crossing.
This is the part of this that galls me the most. Weaponizing UI design as a substitute for UX simplicity, and using that weaponized design to bluster past the UX shortcomings of your service in your service's marketing.
It would be fun to compare the timeline of stock transactions by legislators with the timeline of public statements by those legislators and their colleagues pertaining to the companies’ stocks they’re selling, or those companies’ industries in general. Not that I expect such nakedly corrupt pumping and dumping or hyping... but I’ve been more surprised in the past.
I think a smart approach will be to deploy these “emergency brakes” as TFA mentions, but preferably far before it seems necessary, because of the cryptic transmission and long incubation period.
And a lot of comments here talk about restrictions deployed simply to avoid an overwhelm of the healthcare system. While that’s important, the longer we can prevent the disease running through the population, the lower we can make the case severity and fatality rate due to advancements in treatment.
A lot of commentary on COVID-19 recently presumed that we can’t control outcomes, only the rate of spread. That may be true at a point in time, but the longer we hold out, the better the outcomes will be on the tail end with advancements in treatment research.
That sounds relatively fantastic. I interviewed with a few larger companies many years ago that had a similar thing. Each "pod" (or scrum team, or what have you) had an office with a door that closed, semi-private cubes within, their own collaboration space, and autonomy over much of their environment.
Interestingly, all of these companies ran outmoded spec and dev waterfall processes. And every truly agile place I've worked at or experienced has been everyone in an open room on each other's nerves. Weird correlation!
One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and constructive discourse show up as the same thing on the P&L of a social network, that dynamic of Twitter is tolerated, tacitly enabled, or even deliberately built upon.
Somewhat related, most academia is not focused on source code quality or its suitability for posterity. If you absolutely need to mime or plunder academia to succeed in your startup, pair that with a software industry veteran who can scale and secure your technology operation.
Population density is a factor to be sure, but the government response was a bigger factor in failing to contain it in my opinion.
The CCP’s culture of fear and retribution pushed municipal officials to suppress reports of a novel outbreak, and pushed authorities to retaliate against medical professionals sounding the alarm.
A culture of transparency and non-retribution may have enabled China to contain this, and could have provided earlier warnings to the world to prepare for an epidemic or pandemic that might not have even happened.
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