> 'Vetinari, are we to believe that you knowingly put the most important bank in the city into the charge of a known bank robber?'
> [...] 'Should he have left it in the hands of unknown bank robbers?'
Split it up as with AT&T Bell or Standard Oil, or stop complaining.
Just not rewarding flexing, but creating and world improving?
I just took a look, and it appears to have changed now though. At least, from the logged out perspective.
We should reward quality of engagement, not just length of it.
All in all, it is actually one app that is beneficial or at least harmless.
Today on the shadow libraries, you have your pick of a number of self-teaching textbooks for free, allowing you to find an approach that fits your learning style. No need to rely on a dodgy corporate app.
What is the author's model of a company?
I very much doubt that they listen to countries in tier 1 and 2 also. If not for the fear of US's relatively stronger regulations, don't think Meta would even pay attention to any complaints in US either.
This would not change with the change in leadership in Meta simply because 18Bn is fairly affordable for Meta's scale, but they should be worried about setting the legal precedent (though they denied any wrong doing).
Other countries may not have the same ability to impose penalties owing to their weaker laws also.
The CEO is the throughline in a history
of billion-dollar blunders
For comparison:
He outperformed the Nasdaq 100 which made 18% (plus dividends) in the same time.
And he way outperformed Warren Buffet who made 14% in the same time.
>
> But if Meta is truly interested in prioritizing the safety of users [...]
Where did that "but" clause come from? Has that ever been a priority?
> How many Tesla's investors have managed to cash out and how many of Facebook's advertisers managed to turn a profit?
It me. That said, I didn't buy TSLA because I was expecting to cash out a few years later when he started acting like a threat to democracy and his own judicial system; when I bought it I thought they had a good business model and I thought they were undervalued.
Now they're overvalued, have lots of visible competitors eating their lunch.
Worse, even if they succeed, given Musk has yet to pay out dividends on that stock and also enough control over the board to give him as many shares as he wants, I think even success would render the stock monopoly money.
If you think Meta is bad now, just wait until Zuck is replaced by a soulless, profit-obsessed corporate CEO whose primary job is maximizing shareholder profit. Meta as a company can get far worse.
People should really be careful what they wish for.
Interestingly I did learn of a niche which is completely unserved except by Meta recently: child-locked messaging apps.
Messenger for Kids basically does everything you want it to - restricted functionality, restricted contact lists etc. I won't use it, but I only found out about it because I was hoping someone had built a Signal client which did exactly that.
I’d be happy to see Meta gone altogether, but unless I missed the memo, Meta isn’t particularly upset about what it’s been up to (beyond bland press releases).
Why would it be interested in that? It's interested in increasing shareholder profits.
> It's time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign from Meta
What, like in the leadership of a political party? Meta does not work for the public good; if anything, it's rather the opposite. And it's not like another one of their people would change course and work and make it a public benefit company.
I think does not reflect the reality of how competitive capitalism works.
He went out of the way to make his company structure prevent that (also Elon)
Stepping down as CEO would do nothing, so unless you plan on forcing him to sell his share IDK what the point of the article is.
Mark Zuckerberg (13.68% equity; 61.2% voting)[1]
Zuckerberg is never resigning from Meta. Investors don't want him to resign from Meta.
What it is time for, though, is to ask ourselves as a society if the ad-fueled privacy-infringing depression-triggering attention-grabbing social media feeds are worth it.
People used to smoke. Now they dont. Change is possible.
It is singularly idiotic that people think people, companies, boards, governments, or anyone else should be "good", and that society will progress by rooting out "evil" ones, as adjudicated by their own standards.
People and by extension companies of people and by extension corporations, NGOs, governments, and everything else in society behaves according to incentives. "Safety of users" or "approval of The Guardian employees" does not rank particularly highly in the incentive scale next to money for anybody, least of all Facebook shareholders, lol.
The factors that influence behaviors are pretty simple. Money, negative money, threat of judicial or ultrajudicial retribution, etc. The people as a whole have levers to pull in order to shape society as they would like. Wishing for good and praying for evil to be dispelled are not among them, that's just like any other superstition.
If you think the actions of Meta are wrong and should be prevented, you need to act on the regulatory level, not appeal to the very shareholders who profit off the behaviour.
Not everyone gets super voting shares, but everyone gets a life and has to live on the same planet.