In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $16 billion, making its co-founders — Jan Koum and Brian Acton — very wealthy men. Koum continues to lead the company, but Acton quit earlier this year to start his own foundation. And he isn’t done merely with WhatsApp — in a post on Twitter today, Acton told his followers to delete Facebook.
“It is time,” Acton wrote, adding the hashtag #deletefacebook.
Damn.
It’s nice to think all your friends see your photos. But the algorithm ensures all of them never do. Some do.
I agree on a pretty basic level, but I opt to not make that trade: I’m creeped out at the amount of information being accumulated. I try to use less tracked things like group texts and shared iPhoto streams. But you’re right: that depends on everyone I’m sharing with using the correct technology, so irs a trade off. Not everyone in my social circle gets my messages. I wouldn’t roll my eyes at someone choosing to make that trade, for the very reasons you cite here.
Easy for him to say after he got their money.
It’s easy to tell people to delete FB but it does serve a purpose – it’s much easier to keep in touch with farflung friends and family on FB than, say, via email and the like.
I see people post kid pictures, video of accomplishments, and the like. Not to mention notices of events from protest marches to art openings. All of that is a one to many ‘cast – I post a pic and all my friends and family can see it. I don’t have to email everyone, deal with replies, etc etc.
For reasonable people who don’t opt into sharing everything under the sun and take every quiz …. what’s the alternative? What will they say to get people to move over with them (because if I move but much of my social circle doesn’t, that’s a fail)?
And… is any of this really news to people? Facebook sells your data! No sh#t.
Oh I know. But it’s still an easy way to post and if people see, they see. Anyway, you’re nitpicking and you know it. The overall point is… what’s the alternative if people want to do that kind of stuff?
After all, the reason FB has power is that they have 2b people using them. People use them because,their friends and family are also there and they feel, correctly or not, that it’s where to share information with those people.
To unseat FB, an alternative has to be attractive enough to move most of someone’s core contacts over OR people need to decide that they don’t want to bother with any social network at all.
Failing a material decrease in users, though, FB’s power will remain. At that point, you’re down to government regulation about data sharing to address the issue.
Delete Facebook. You kept in touch with your family just fine 10myears ago without the anal probe of Zuckerberg.
It’s the kind of addiction that these neo-fascist “social media” companies want.
This argument is totally bullshit. go back to group emails.
Get a better way to communicate with your family. Your argument is specious and meant by Facebook to keep you addicted to their constant robbery of your personal info.
We are fortunate in that everyone in my family uses iPhones. We use the Photos Sharing feature and love it. You can post pictures and videos and comment and even like them. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202786
It’s still hypocritical as hell, though. As Gruber points out, the policy that led to all of this was in place long before FB bought WhatsApp.
Funny how so many of those founders rediscover their consciences after their stock options have vested, no?
That element exists for sure. But tech has a real problem. Labeling the messengers as hypocrites and opportunists sweeps the real and present issues under the rug…IMVHO.
“the anal probe of Zuckerberg”
Brilliant.
I was on Facebook for a year in the early days and dumped it (as I did Twitter). I can honestly say that I dumped it because I thought it was badly designed, less because I had insight about data scraping but of course, the way they make their money is advertising being driven by data scraping…
For me, the bigger question is, could I ever get off of gmail? Google does some of the same stuff and I retain my gmail account, stubbornly or stupidly or both.
Without having meant to dismiss the genuine problem you’re describing, I nevertheless believe these issues are connected. It reminds me a bit of the difficulty in discussing federal politics with longtime Beltway reporters who’ve been submerged too long within the culture of their adversaries. Few people leave the arena without having had their objectivity compromised.
It’s nice that someone like Acton is saying these things, but I’d take him a bit more seriously if he hadn’t cashed in so enormously from the malfeasance he’s now describing.
Then again, if he hadn’t done that, who’d bother to listen to anything he’d have to say?
After investing $50 million in Signal, WhatsApp’s competitor, he does this?
“Can you say conflict of interest boys and girls? I thought you could.”
Get stuffed.
John Gruber made that point as well. But I disagree. Selling something to someone is a transaction, not an endorsement. I don’t see any real hypocrisy here.
Yeah, if that’s the case it’s a decent instagram replacement. Not a total replacement for a full on social network, but for more instagram focused stuff, quite decent.
There’s a growing number of founders, and others with big exits, going public with their own version of insider techlash. Remember when it was mostly academics who warned the public of tech’s downsides?
I sort of get it. There’s a genie-out-of-the-bottle quality to the industry now that didn’t exist early on. Things have gone from idealistic, even altruistic, to demonstratively destructive examples in nearly every aspect of real life touched by tech.
Looking forward to this pendulum swinging back the other way.
I do. They decided to benefit from the very thing that they now decry. Facebook was able to buy them for so much money because FB was making money from… selling user data. It’s not like is $6.5b came from a lemonade stand.
It will be interesting to see how that changes with time. Anecdotally, “young people” don’t do Facebook any more. Or as much. Or whatever. Does that mean that as the years go forward, Facebook use declines? Perhaps…but even if it does, that doesn’t make the platform less valuable to you, perhaps. Your peers are on Facebook…possibly the next generation after you aren’t your peers, are less likely to be people you want to friend. So overall Facebook growth may approach zero, or maybe go in the negative, but its utility to you is unlikely to change despite it.
Hans Gruber?
The message is more interesting and more important than the messenger, IMVHO.
Yeah the generational change is absolutely a long term threat to them. Of course, if the next gen simply moves to instagram…
The press is a nice example, and a problem that also needs much more transparency.
Yes, being a founder provides a platform and a target, both. Something the average user has no shot at.
Yeah, everyone makes different choices and value judgements. I could setup some kind of free WordPress blog and share stuff there, inviting family and friends so they can too… but that lacks the discoverability of a network and is one more place they all have to go… and if they want to add different friends, it doesn’t work for that… etc.
It’s easy to say “Leave Facebook” but that ignores the value of such a network. Of course the network doesn’t have to be FB… but any new network will face the same issues. People want it to be free but that leaves targeted ads as the only way to support the network and if the network can’t make money it can’t grow to support increasing use. Increasing use is what makes it valuable to people (If everyone you want to connect with is on the network it enhances utility, if 25% are, it’s much less useful).