Thread by @borrowed_ideas

1/ Thread: Facebook's follies

I am an $FB shareholder, and intend to remain so despite the constant negative press coverage.

I'm not oblivious to FB's follies, but disagree with the motivated inferences of the detractors. I do, however, have sympathy for some concerns.

2/ I admit any social media has incentive structure that makes it difficult for the company not to optimize for engagement.

If everyone logs into FB for just a minute/day to get the relevant stuff they want and logs off promptly, an ad-based model cannot work in such a case.

3/ A subscription based model could work for such a "social media".

Of course, any subscription product comes at the expense of lack of access which was non-starter for Zuck from Day 1.

It's instructive to read the very first sentence Zuck wrote in his letter on FB's S-1:

4/ "Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected."

FB's role was intended to be simply to connect people with the pollyannish assumption that connecting itself is inherently good.

5/ Attention is a coveted commodity in the digital world, and the competition for that attention is SO intense that I believe it is disingenuous to demand FB change its algorithm to make it less "addictive".

6/ Attention and engagement are the very business Facebook is in, so is almost every digital company out there, especially the ones dependent on ad dollars.

In fact, even subscription based businesses also seem to crave attention/engagement even though they aren't as dependent.

6/ Reed Hastings, for example, cited "Sleep" as the real competitor of Netflix in 2017.

So this inherent incentive to keep users engaged is a feature, not a bug unless you want to pull a "CCP" and give a timer to everyone on how long you can use/access a particular app/site.

7/ Therefore, although I admit the twisted incentives FB may have, it is very much a macro problem, not a micro problem.

The micro/FB specific problem I'm more concerned about is its role in international markets.

8/ First of all, true to its mission, FB is perhaps the only company which truly deeply cares about connecting even the "internet illiterates".

For perhaps hundreds of millions of people in emerging and frontier markets, Facebook IS the internet.

9/ The access and connection did enormous good for most people in those countries.

Of course, the ill-effects that we hear about everyday here in North America are very much prevalent in those markets as well.

10/ With fledgling democracy and thin skinned ideology of freedom of expression in many of these countries, along with FB's own lack of preparedness in responding to the demands of these countries, when things go wrong, it goes really wrong.

11/ Here too incentive comes to the equation.

FB doesn't make much money on many of these international markets and investing heavily on security and infra to make it as good as the US may not make a lot of financial sense. Plus the media attention is also very thin there.

12/ It is perhaps fundamentally impossible to understand the urgency, nuance, and significance of how FB is being negatively utilized in some of those countries when you are sitting in Silicon Valley.

The debacle in Myanmar reflects such parochialism and I hope FB learns from it

13/ While it concerns and bothers me, I continue to believe FB is in the right side of history in attempting to connect the world.

I don't have unreasonable expectation that FB will erase all social ills, but do hope it will learn more to amplify the good and suppress the bad.

End/ Given FB eats almost everyone's lunch on the attention economy, I don't expect to see many friends.

I don't mind the critics; they aren't inherently wrong and it's possible they are good for FB in the long term as they may keep FB focused on overall health of the platform.