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How do you like Zuck?


  • Total voters
    38

BenTrovato

macrumors 68040
Jun 29, 2012
3,049
2,223
Canada
I don't care about Zuck but he does "appear" to be a slimy person. Never met him though, so I could be wrong.
 

Scepticalscribe

macrumors Haswell
Jul 29, 2008
65,212
47,604
In a coffee shop.
Alternatively, it could be that you didn't provide a compelling enough argument to change anybody's mind; no point raised against you was rebutted, and the basis of your argument seems to be that we're "techy" people and unable to empathize with "regular" people.

When I the iPhone was released, I was 10–11 and living in rural New England. We had dialup. Well, we would have dialup. After seeing ads for the iPhone on TV, I wanted that thing.

Anecdotal, sure, but think of what the iPhone was. Apple's best selling product, the iPod, with a ****ing phone! Average people were interested in this.

There were already massively successful smartphones: Blackberries. Although coveted in enterprise, these things seemed daunting (to me, anyway) with their jam-packed keyboard and d-pad navigation. The iPhone was a Blackberry for regular people… with a built in iPod. Its success was not down to one social media site.

You can either continue to ignore the responses you've gotten, assuming we all just hate Facebook, or you can take what we've said at face value. In any case, I gotta go respond to notification from Facebook Messenger. ;)

Excellent post.

And what does one make of an OP who hasn't returned to a thread he started to make an additional post, or reply, or comment? At least, in addition to the sole post he made since joining the forum which he made when starting the thread.
 
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LizKat

macrumors 604
Aug 5, 2004
6,770
36,283
Catskill Mountains
Excellent post.

And what does one make of an OP who hasn't returned to a thread he started to make an additional post, or reply, or comment? At least, in addition to the sole post he made since joining the forum which he made when starting the thread.

Here's something for the OP to chew on when he ever gets back. Fascinating reading.

Did Facebook’s faulty data push news publishers to make terrible decisions on video?

It's a piece from Nieman Labs about Facebook having pushed the idea, based on analysis of their own site's massive usage data, that news reporting online would "become all video" within five years... and then, when such a trend appeared not to be the case from the consumer demand POV -- as analyzed and then reported on by the WSJ-- Facebook apologized for the "pivot to video" assertion and said they had overestimated viewership of news video on its pages by 60-80% and were promptly reporting their erroneous usage calculations.

But, per the cited piece, a California lawsuit said Facebook had known about its error for two years before publicizing it, and that the range of video viewership overstatement was more like 600-900%, and that meanwhile news organizations were massively disrupting their own businesses to accommodate the alleged trend. The disruption of course involved reallocation of resources from web-text to video news preparation.

In translation: text-oriented journos lost jobs and news websites struggled to make sense of the disparity between what Facebook was claiming about news video consumption in their pages versus what the news sites themselves were experiencing in viewership (and in complaints from subscribers about why all the focus on video when reading text was quicker).

So part of of "why we hate Zuck" could be down to who the "we" are. Journalists oriented to production of online news in text format are probably not big fans.

Quote from Zuckerberg in 2016:

“We’re entering this new golden age of video,” Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News in April 2016. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.”
Of course that triggered plenty of video ad buys, so it does make sense Facebook might try to fix its calculation but slow-walk the outing of the error and the apology for as long as possible, although they claim that was not the case. The lawsuit is partly over that, although more about false representations for so long that had led news outlets to reallocate resources.
What's really funny (unless you used to write for print/web-text for a news outlet) is that people like myself, and even the Nieman Lab guys, had often enough wondered about the "pivot to video" trend. since we preferred reading news in text rather than watching it on video. The lab employees and I all chalked ourselves up to being outliers as individual data points.

Turns out most of us text-preferring "outliers" were not, in fact, outliers at all. Pew Research did a study that showed even younger readers also increasingly prefer text news to video because it takes less time to absorb the information.

But in that meantime before Facebook revised its calculations, online news outlets had naturally enough figured if Facebook with all its hundreds of millions of users found people watching more news video than reading news in text format, video was the way to go.. and so they had kept shifting resources accordingly, even in the face of wondering how come their own viewership analyses weren't jibing with those that Facebook was asserting.

What a mess. It could lead to disliking Zuckerberg in some quarters... ya think?

What I really wonder about now is if and when online news outlets will shift resources back to writers and photographers... I do get tired of mistakenly clicking on titles that I think are articles but are videos, since they're not always differentiated well in some news outlets' web sites, particularly when it comes to "More on this topic" or similar sidebar type references tacked onto a piece one has just read.
 

Gutwrench

Suspended
Jan 2, 2011
4,603
10,550
:rolleyes: - I read about this several days ago in my new All Digital WSJ subscription for $4.99/mo.

Here's something for the OP to chew on when he ever gets back. Fascinating reading.

Did Facebook’s faulty data push news publishers to make terrible decisions on video?

It's a piece from Nieman Labs about Facebook having pushed the idea, based on analysis of their own site's massive usage data, that news reporting online would "become all video" within five years... and then, when such a trend appeared not to be the case from the consumer demand POV -- as analyzed and then reported on by the WSJ-- Facebook apologized for the "pivot to video" assertion and said they had overestimated viewership of news video on its pages by 60-80% and were promptly reporting their erroneous usage calculations.

But, per the cited piece, a California lawsuit said Facebook had known about its error for two years before publicizing it, and that the range of video viewership overstatement was more like 600-900%, and that meanwhile news organizations were massively disrupting their own businesses to accommodate the alleged trend. The disruption of course involved reallocation of resources from web-text to video news preparation.

In translation: text-oriented journos lost jobs and news websites struggled to make sense of the disparity between what Facebook was claiming about news video consumption in their pages versus what the news sites themselves were experiencing in viewership (and in complaints from subscribers about why all the focus on video when reading text was quicker).

So part of of "why we hate Zuck" could be down to who the "we" are. Journalists oriented to production of online news in text format are probably not big fans.

Quote from Zuckerberg in 2016:

“We’re entering this new golden age of video,” Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News in April 2016. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.”
Of course that triggered plenty of video ad buys, so it does make sense Facebook might try to fix its calculation but slow-walk the outing of the error and the apology for as long as possible, although they claim that was not the case. The lawsuit is partly over that, although more about false representations for so long that had led news outlets to reallocate resources.
What's really funny (unless you used to write for print/web-text for a news outlet) is that people like myself, and even the Nieman Lab guys, had often enough wondered about the "pivot to video" trend. since we preferred reading news in text rather than watching it on video. The lab employees and I all chalked ourselves up to being outliers as individual data points.

Turns out most of us text-preferring "outliers" were not, in fact, outliers at all. Pew Research did a study that showed even younger readers also increasingly prefer text news to video because it takes less time to absorb the information.

But in that meantime before Facebook revised its calculations, online news outlets had naturally enough figured if Facebook with all its hundreds of millions of users found people watching more news video than reading news in text format, video was the way to go.. and so they had kept shifting resources accordingly, even in the face of wondering how come their own viewership analyses weren't jibing with those that Facebook was asserting.

What a mess. It could lead to disliking Zuckerberg in some quarters... ya think?

What I really wonder about now is if and when online news outlets will shift resources back to writers and photographers... I do get tired of mistakenly clicking on titles that I think are articles but are videos, since they're not always differentiated well in some news outlets' web sites, particularly when it comes to "More on this topic" or similar sidebar type references tacked onto a piece one has just read.
 
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Scepticalscribe

macrumors Haswell
Jul 29, 2008
65,212
47,604
In a coffee shop.
Here's something for the OP to chew on when he ever gets back. Fascinating reading.

Did Facebook’s faulty data push news publishers to make terrible decisions on video?

It's a piece from Nieman Labs about Facebook having pushed the idea, based on analysis of their own site's massive usage data, that news reporting online would "become all video" within five years... and then, when such a trend appeared not to be the case from the consumer demand POV -- as analyzed and then reported on by the WSJ-- Facebook apologized for the "pivot to video" assertion and said they had overestimated viewership of news video on its pages by 60-80% and were promptly reporting their erroneous usage calculations.

But, per the cited piece, a California lawsuit said Facebook had known about its error for two years before publicizing it, and that the range of video viewership overstatement was more like 600-900%, and that meanwhile news organizations were massively disrupting their own businesses to accommodate the alleged trend. The disruption of course involved reallocation of resources from web-text to video news preparation.

In translation: text-oriented journos lost jobs and news websites struggled to make sense of the disparity between what Facebook was claiming about news video consumption in their pages versus what the news sites themselves were experiencing in viewership (and in complaints from subscribers about why all the focus on video when reading text was quicker).

So part of of "why we hate Zuck" could be down to who the "we" are. Journalists oriented to production of online news in text format are probably not big fans.

Quote from Zuckerberg in 2016:

“We’re entering this new golden age of video,” Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News in April 2016. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.”
Of course that triggered plenty of video ad buys, so it does make sense Facebook might try to fix its calculation but slow-walk the outing of the error and the apology for as long as possible, although they claim that was not the case. The lawsuit is partly over that, although more about false representations for so long that had led news outlets to reallocate resources.
What's really funny (unless you used to write for print/web-text for a news outlet) is that people like myself, and even the Nieman Lab guys, had often enough wondered about the "pivot to video" trend. since we preferred reading news in text rather than watching it on video. The lab employees and I all chalked ourselves up to being outliers as individual data points.

Turns out most of us text-preferring "outliers" were not, in fact, outliers at all. Pew Research did a study that showed even younger readers also increasingly prefer text news to video because it takes less time to absorb the information.

But in that meantime before Facebook revised its calculations, online news outlets had naturally enough figured if Facebook with all its hundreds of millions of users found people watching more news video than reading news in text format, video was the way to go.. and so they had kept shifting resources accordingly, even in the face of wondering how come their own viewership analyses weren't jibing with those that Facebook was asserting.

What a mess. It could lead to disliking Zuckerberg in some quarters... ya think?

What I really wonder about now is if and when online news outlets will shift resources back to writers and photographers... I do get tired of mistakenly clicking on titles that I think are articles but are videos, since they're not always differentiated well in some news outlets' web sites, particularly when it comes to "More on this topic" or similar sidebar type references tacked onto a piece one has just read.

Excellent - and very interesting - post, and I agree with you completely.

I had wondered about this "shift to video", and I'm another of the "so-called outliers" you have described, as I do not just prefer reading text, but I love reading text, and detest watching videos.

As someone who wears glasses, and, as someone who has worked in several countries with poor internet facilities (where trying to watch video was torture), I far prefer text. Text allows for nuance, and introducing complex and complicated ideas, facts, and sources, as well as ideas and theories, rather than the screaming headline approach you tend to find with much video news.

Not only does it take less time to absorb the information, (with text), but text also allows for that information to be covered in greater detail and with more subtlety.
 
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Scepticalscribe

macrumors Haswell
Jul 29, 2008
65,212
47,604
In a coffee shop.
@Scepticalscribe - our good friend Liz becomes defensive when I find a better deal (I might have fibbed on the price but that’s our secret.). She’s giving me the silent treatment right now.

I imagine that she will respond to you in due course, but I refuse to be drawn on a battle (difference of opinion?) concerning the respective merits (price, access, or quality) of WSJ or NYT.
 

mmomega

macrumors demi-god
Dec 30, 2009
3,888
2,101
DFW, TX
But in Zuck's case, why people are actually irritated by his presence - his whole personality, demeanor nags us! Why so?

220px-Mark_Zuckerberg_F8_2018_Keynote_%28cropped%29.jpg
because he makes an epic amount of money by creating a product that the haters spend all of their time sitting on for 30 hours a day and then while sitting on facebook and using facebook to complain about the zuck while using facebook to do the complaining and hating. and again, facebook facebook.

Just stop using the fb and caring about someone that has zero to do with your life....wait.
There is a solution to just being irrationally pissed about a person or a product that actually has no actual effect on my day to day life, nope because then i would have to make a decision to make a change and I'm not going to make a decision. I will however make a decision to ask everyone else's opinion on what decision I should make and hopefully all of the people around me or people on the internet that I have never met or anyone that lives my life will make a decision for me so that I don't have to and then again I can be mad about the outcome of the decision I didn't want to make for myself.


:D:D:D

Whoa, what just happened here?
 

Akrapovic

macrumors 65816
Aug 29, 2018
1,211
2,615
Scotland
Well the original version of Facebook was Facemash, where Zuck and his mates would upload photos of the girls from the university he was at and the site allowed you to rate them based on hotness. Unlike sites like Hot or Not, they did this without the girls knowing. So personally, I think he's a wee prick, as we'd say around these parts.

When in front of Congress this came through a few times. Congress embarrassed themselves with the questions, but every time there was a legit one, he weaselled out of it like a snake and said: "I'll get my people to check". Aye very good. It's quite clear that he doesn't have the ability to run Facebook like a proper responsible company, but he's such a control freak (as confirmed by the WhatsApp and Instagram former employees) that he refuses to let go. So he digs these massive holes as Facebook does some very suspect, and sometimes illegal things, which he then only gets away with because Congress and the authorities are too tech-illiterate to deal with.

You only need to look at how they collect data about you from other peoples devices, and how they collect data about non-Facebook users and build them shadow profiles to realise that it's all gone way too far.

He has done well for himself, and he has made a product that many people like, and for that he gets credit. I think he does deserve his fortune in that regard. But in terms of being a nice person? Frankly, he comes across as an immature wee frat boy who never grew up and now puts on a suit because he doesn't want anyone else to play with his toys. The problem he's beginning to have is that unlike Apple, Google and Amazon, Facebook is a one-hit-wonder and they can't continue buying up other products in an attempt to stay relevant.
 

rafark

macrumors 68000
Sep 1, 2017
1,841
3,223
Alternatively, it could be that you didn't provide a compelling enough argument to change anybody's mind;

You can either continue to ignore the responses you've gotten, assuming we all just hate Facebook, or you can take what we've said at face value.

It seems to me you think you are the only one right, because I could say the same thing.
 

AngerDanger

Graphics
Staff member
Dec 9, 2008
5,452
29,006
It seems to me you think you are the only one right, because I could say the same thing.
Yes, you could, but you'd be wrong. I responded to both points you raised (about the iPhone being niche and about it only appealing to "techies") whereas you've—as I already pointed out—not refuted a single point any other poster has made.

You also haven't based what you've said on evidence. I've referred to the massive success that was the iPod, the previous popularity of Blackberries, and the fact that the iPhone's capacitive input was different from most 2007-era smartphones with packed keyboards.

I have nothing against Zuckerberg (though this thread is pretty damning), I have nothing against you, and I'm open to having my mind changed. However, if your next post is as vacuous as your previous, I wouldn't count on getting a response.
 

Akrapovic

macrumors 65816
Aug 29, 2018
1,211
2,615
Scotland
To add to my previous post- someone's opinion on Zuck, Facebook and money are not necessarily related. For example, I don't think Facebook is bad (outside of the privacy issues), and I don't think it's a bad product, and I don't mind that Zuck is rich. So based off of his product and his personal finances, Zuck is in the same box as Tim Cook and Bill Gates for me. So far, so good!

Where Zuck falls down is he doesn't seem like a nice person. His antics in college were a disgrace, and his business practices haven't improved since then. Whilst Gates is trying to rid Africa of Malaria and Cook supports LBGT charities, Zuck was building websites to upload pictures of women in secret and have his friends rate them and leave comments about them - something so disgraceful that it'd be illegal nowadays. In terms of leading tech companies, Zuck is similar to the previous leadership of Uber, where they just come over as very unlikeable people, despite the excellent products. If Uber was bigger, we'd have similar threads about them too.
 
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LizKat

macrumors 604
Aug 5, 2004
6,770
36,283
Catskill Mountains
@Scepticalscribe - our good friend Liz becomes defensive when I find a better deal (I might have fibbed on the price but that’s our secret.). She’s giving me the silent treatment right now.

Just wondering if the WSJ throws in an unwanted video of each piece for my version of their online paper. If I could get the sub for that price I'd put up with the darn video.

When in front of Congress this came through a few times. Congress embarrassed themselves with the questions, but every time there was a legit one, he weaselled out of it like a snake and said: "I'll get my people to check". Aye very good. It's quite clear that he doesn't have the ability to run Facebook like a proper responsible company, but he's such a control freak (as confirmed by the WhatsApp and Instagram former employees) that he refuses to let go. So he digs these massive holes as Facebook does some very suspect, and sometimes illegal things, which he then only gets away with because Congress and the authorities are too tech-illiterate to deal with.

Well exactly. The number of times they've been caught out doing stuff they shouldn't or lying about how something works is embarrassing (or would be embarrassing to the average publicly traded corporation). Yet somehow because FB has hundreds of millions of users and because their data represents a gold mine to hundreds of thousands of companies... and because of Congressional and even Congressional-aide tech illiteracy... they do tend to get a wink and a nod instead of going up on some serious charges, including fraud.
 
Last edited:

Gutwrench

Suspended
Jan 2, 2011
4,603
10,550
Just wondering if the WSJ throws in an unwanted video of each piece for my version of their online paper. If I could get the sub for that price I'd put up with the darn video.

I had the online version and just didn’t like it. I guess I’m too fond of the app. (Add $10, I think, and that’s what I’m paying.)
 

LizKat

macrumors 604
Aug 5, 2004
6,770
36,283
Catskill Mountains
Well, the unpleasant personality, the arrogance, the lack of empathy, the dismissal of privacy concerns, the disregard of legal norms, the belief that rule of law matters do not realty apply to him, would all be classed as negatives to my mind.

I suppose I'm still essentially indifferent to Zuckerberg since I don't think he alone makes Facebook what it is today. He does apparently micromanage it at least some of the time and probably I'd not like a lot of his ideas about what to do next with the company and its lucrative, captive datasets.

What keeps me from admiring him are certainly the things you mention, but my loathing for those attitudes doesn't rise to the level of hatred for him, nor even really to "can't stand him". Most of what I know about him is either from attributed quotes or reported as hearsay and it's hard to sort out how envy has affected some of what has been said about him.

So to get back to the darn poll... if the OP ever comes back and wants my vote in there, he'd better tack in a mid-range option, because I neither admire nor loathe Mr. Z.
 
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LizKat

macrumors 604
Aug 5, 2004
6,770
36,283
Catskill Mountains
Russia has outsourced their trolls to India.

Hah. Well the food is as good or even better in India than in Russia (to my NYC-restaurant oriented tastebuds' memories) so maybe the posts from India will be more entertaining as well. Although some of the Russian bot posts in 2016 were hilarious since their English was definitely not up to Indian standards. So now are we talking an influx of Indian bots or actual human cut-and-paste artists planning to chit-chat through other forums for awhile before engaging in their assigned political mudslinging over in PRSI subforum?

I almost miss some of the sing-song bot-like creatures that were around during the 2016 elections. They mostly got weeded out (of the political subforum here, not from Zuckerberg's trolling paradise) for being too repetitive. Same old meme for the 23rd time eventually prompted someone to bother reporting a violated guideline. I gather from some of the stuff that friends mailed me from Facebook in 2016 that mere repetition of memes over there does not violate any guidelines... :rolleyes:
 

AngerDanger

Graphics
Staff member
Dec 9, 2008
5,452
29,006
…Weird how he put a poll and and tags into his very first post. Not your average newbie.

… And what does one make of an OP who hasn't returned to a thread he started to make an additional post, or reply, or comment? At least, in addition to the sole post he made since joining the forum which he made when starting the thread.

… don't respond to posters who just joined the forum, especially in election season.
And oddly enough, the OP isn't the only newbie whose sole message is in this thread. It must be interesting to frequent an Apple-based tech forum long enough to learn the layout, finally find one post/topic that impels you to create an account, and then to never (as of yet) post again.
 

kazmac

macrumors G4
Mar 24, 2010
10,104
8,659
Any place but here or there....
Wait yourself…

I bought my first smartphone in May 2009 because I wanted a smartphone. It wasn't an iPhone and I wasn't on Facebook at the time. I simply wanted to be able to email and browse the internet outside of my home.

Facebook didn't even come into the picture for me until November 2009 and that was driven solely by a friend pleading for me to join - not because I wanted Facebook on my phone. And when I did get it I dealt with it on my laptop. I didn't integrate it into my phone until 2011.

Maybe I am in the minority (again) but nope, FB was never the reason I wanted a smartphone.

You're not alone. I used Facebook for two weeks in 2007 and hated it. Never went back.

I never bought a smartphone for social media and I am not going to start now.

The blatant disregard for privacy and user data (which is thing everywhere sadly now) and fake friends etc. - no thanks.
 

Apple fanboy

macrumors Ivy Bridge
Feb 21, 2012
57,049
56,081
Behind the Lens, UK
You're not alone. I used Facebook for two weeks in 2007 and hated it. Never went back.

I never bought a smartphone for social media and I am not going to start now.

The blatant disregard for privacy and user data (which is thing everywhere sadly now) and fake friends etc. - no thanks.
We’re your real friends here on MR!

I’m so glad I never ined FB or Twitter. I like to keep (most) things private.
 

decafjava

macrumors 603
Feb 7, 2011
5,530
8,049
Geneva
Russia has outsourced their trolls to India.
180522104319-modi-putin-0521-01-exlarge-169.jpg


You may be right...

Anyway, I am not a huge fan of Zuck but I can't fault him for finding a niche and getting rich off of other suckers (like me - if I could hop in a Tardis and go back to 2007 I would have stopped myself from joining), as others have said he won't be remembered as long other tech giants - the real ones.
 

Scepticalscribe

macrumors Haswell
Jul 29, 2008
65,212
47,604
In a coffee shop.
And oddly enough, the OP isn't the only newbie whose sole message is in this thread. It must be interesting to frequent an Apple-based tech forum long enough to learn the layout, finally find one post/topic that impels you to create an account, and then to never (as of yet) post again.

I reported that post yesterday.

It struck me as an unusually subtle form of spam.
 
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