Tag: meta

On the death of Perks Culture and other thoughts on Work in 2025

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If you are interested in perk culture and reading about work generally, I thought these pieces were all worth reading:

First up, this piece: For Younger Workers, Job Hopping Has Lost Its Stigma. Should It? I think criticizing job hopping is a classic case of employers not liking an advantage workers have. Relatedly, What Is (or Was) ‘Perks Culture’? touches on the clawback of worker privileges that tech firms no longer figure they need to provide them. That said, Meta is going on a hiring spree, so maybe things will swing back. For companies that are on a hiring frenzy, they would do well to study this piece on how Aaron Schwartz hired programmers.

Another perk more employees used to have was sabbaticals. I know some jobs still have them, but at one time even tech firms like Apple offered them. Based on this piece, it looks like young people are trying to reinvent them in a way: To Escape the Grind, Young People Turn to ‘Mini-Retirements’.

Work culture is different outside North America. For example, over in Asia we have this: Declaring ‘Crisis,’ South Korean Firms Tell Managers to Work 6 Days a Week. China too has the 996 system: 6 days of working 9 am to 9 pm. Not sure that will be sustainable.

Forming Storming Norming Performing: those four words you may have seen or experienced at work. The idea comes from here:Tuckman’s_stages_of_group_development. Some teams never go from Forming to Performing, but many do.

Roxane Gay is a great writer who also writes well about work. Here’s her last piece: Goodbye, Work Friends. You’d do well to read the rest.

(P.S. Photo of many of my work neckties and bowties I finally threw out. Many trends come and go and return when it comes to work, but wearing ties is over, I think.)

 

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care about you and your friends

Mark Zuckerberg was roasted recently for saying the following:

“There’s the stat that I always think is crazy, the average American, I think, has fewer than three friends,” Zuckerberg told Patel. “And the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends or something, right?”

“The average person wants more connectivity, connection, than they have,” he concluded, hinting at the possibility that the discrepancy could be filled with virtual friends.

Some thoughts on that:

    • He’s wrong. The majority of Americans say they have four or more close friends, according to this Pew Study. And 2/3rds of Americans have three or more close friends. That just close friends. Obviously the list of total friends is much higher than 3 for most Americans.
    • Zuck just wants to find justification to start forcing AI into the social technologies that Meta owns so he can sell more ads. But he and Meta don’t seem to want to come out and say that. So he offers up these “virtual” friends as justification.
    • Meta’s products don’t foster real friendship and social connections.  Meta exploits people with technology that makes it easy and desirable to connect with others. Once you establish social connections there, they short circuit that by inserting ads into your communications. They also enable others (e.g., influencers) to insert their communications into your feed. In the end the technology you used to communicate with your friends becomes a firehose of others trying to get you to buy things.

You might push back and say: what do you expect? That’s the deal you made to use their “free” social media technology. There’s some truth to that. But there are degrees of exploitation, and Meta is the most extreme form of it and have been since Facebook first took off in the early 2010s. They aren’t just a parasite living off their host: they take over the host and eat it alive.

It’s instructive to compare Zuck’s proposition with what is being offered by the porn actress Sophie Dee, as outlined in this Washington Post piece. She too is offering up social connections, albeit of a different nature. In the end though, the game is the same: foster enough social interaction to push and promote the services she is selling.

There are ways to foster real friendship and enable communication with technology. That’s not what Mark Z or Sophie Dee are offering though. They are offering an illusion via AI to sell more things to you. Let’s be honest about all this. Let’s ignore this talk from Zuck about his virtual friends, for they are no friends at all.

All social media companies are bad, but some are successful. (Social media roundup, April 2023)

All social media companies are bad, but some are successful. The older ones like Meta and Twitter have fallen on difficult times for many reasons. They are bad companies doing badly. And the new kid on the block, TikTok, has gotten all the wrong attention recently. It’s a bad company doing well, at least in some aspects. Let’s talk a look.

Meta/Facebook: Meta continues to do poorly, and I for one am glad about this. Remember, no matter how stupid Twitter is or how creepy tiktok is, Meta/Facebook is all that and worse. For how they are creepy, read this on the slow death of surveillance capitalism in WiReD. Or this bit of outrageousness on how GoodRx leaked user Health data to Facebook and Google (Google is also bad.) And it is not just GoodRx: Cerebral did it too. Sure health web sites like GoodRx and Cerebral are horrible, but the social media companies facilitated it.

As for stupid, just think of the metaverse. Or don’t. Disney is giving up. More will too. And that will lead to more Facebook/Meta  layoffs.

Tiktok: Tiktok continues to be under fire politically. And Mark Z would love to see it get shut down and replace it with Instagram Reels.

Despite all that, it continues to thrive, and things that take off there really take off. For example, here’s a piece on how Sofia Coppola’s daughter went viral with her one cooking tiktok. TikTok gets our attention.

For some companies, it gets too much attention. So they panic when they see people are using tiktok to definfluence others, for example.

Other Tiktok pieces that got my attention: this piece on Olivia Dunne, college gymnast has 6.7 million TikTok followers. I don’t, but Some people like Cory Doctorow. If you are one of them, you will like his piece on Tiktok’s enshittification. Speaking of crappy, this is on borg drinking and tiktok. Young people being dumb is not news: the innovative ways they are dumb is.

Twitter: Let’s not forget good ole twitter: Elmo Musk continues to drive the company into the ground. Twitter ad sales plunged 46% while TikTok Pinterest gained. What a genius he is. He’s saving the company money by falling behind on rent. And  laying off staff.  Firing top engineers. And employing his  “extremely hardcore” approach. Then he follows up with more layoffs, including Esther Crawford, who made a big deal about being hardcore and sleeping on the office floor in a sleeping bag. That worked well.

All those layoffs were good for system stability. NOT. Some stuff on the twitter outages can be found here and here (on how a single engineer brought twitter down).

No wonder people headed for the exits. Initially  more than a million people switched to Mastodon. That lead to things like this: Movetodon: Find your Twitter Friends on Mastodon this. Even Medium got into the act and  opened mastodon subscription memberships.

Additionally here’s two pieces on their tech. One on their API and one on their rss feed. Enjoy while you can. David Crosby did. He  was great on using twitter.

Finally: here’s a piece on how a community came to a Toronto restaurant’s defence after one-star review. Good for them. Online reviews mostly suck.

And hey, let’s not leave off Substack. In January they said: Don’t start a year. Start a Substack. I guess.

On Mark Zuckerberg’s Legs and other stupid things we have to try and ignore

So in Mark Zuckerberg’s hot new remake of Second Life, avatars will soon have legs. Woo. It’s something I’d rather not think about.  Just like I don’t care about Elon Musk and whether or not he spoke with Putin. Or anything to do with Kanye’s opinion on pretty much anything. But that’s the problem with social media these days. Even if you don’t want to know about these things, other people want you to. People whose opinion you’d normally are interested in. I mean, even I am guilty of this right now. So why do this?

What I would hope for is to nudge folks a little so that they find other things to share on social media. Things like stories about themselves. Or good things that they’ve discovered, be it big or little. Maybe facts or ideas about people other than those manic attention seekers that are everywhere on the Internet. That would be great if that could happen.

Will it? Likely not. That’s why I expect to see new forms of social media taking off. Perhaps it will be Discord. Perhaps someplace else. But some place you can go and avoid those that are so hard to avoid currently.

Meanwhile, congrats to Mark Z on growing a pair…of legs. Happy for you.

P.S. Turns. out Mark Z’s legs were a lie. Amazing.

On Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg is leaving Facebook/Meta. I used to think at best she was weak tea. Like Eric Schmidt, she was brought in to provide a degree of professionalism and organizational skill missing from their respective companies and leadership. And like Schmidt, she left when that missing skill was no longer needed or wanted.

I think Sandberg benefitted from having someone like Zuckerberg as her boss. The worst aspects of Facebook were associated with him, while whatever nefarious actions she was taking were unrecognized. This is not to absolve him or say that she was the one to blame. It’s just to note that many of the terrible things that happened on her time at that company should also fall on her.

Right now I think her legacy will change and darken over time. It will certainly  be less bright than it was in her Lean In days. But who knows: she may pull a Bill Gates and go on to be someone who spends her time and efforts in being philanthropic and charming.

Whatever her future, here’s some things I’ve been reading now in mid 2022 about her leaving:

Is Facebook / Meta in trouble?

Is Facebook / Meta in trouble? Kinda. I mean, it has lost a lot of market cap. On the other hand, having done so brings it other benefits, such as less scrutiny:
Facebook market cap under $600 billion threshold for antitrust bills

And losing value is not the only problems it has, as this shows: 6 Reasons Meta Is in Trouble – The New York Times.

I think instead of thinking it is in trouble, think of it in transition. The rebranding is only part of transition. Transitions tend to be tough. Right now Facebook sees itself in a corner in many ways: from declining users to pressing regulators. It has to do the transition at some time and now is likely the best time. So yes, it is in trouble, but not fatal trouble. I suspect we will have Meta with us long into the future.

Something to consider if you are gaming this holiday season (never mind the metaverse)

If you are planning to do some gaming this holiday season, especially Halo, then read this: Cheaters are already ruining Halo Infinite multiplayer games – The Verge. And it’s not just Halo, but lots of big online games.

As an aside, when I read about Mark Z’s Metaverse, I imagine them not even considering things like this.

(Image from article).