The article reads like a bad hit job it tries to paint facebooks position as bleak while ignore all its products have continued to experience amazing growth.
It paints a picture of what the author want the world to be like rather than reality. One of the biggest examples is how they view regulation as a risk to Facebook while Facebooks views it as a guarantee of market dominance.
I can't speak to every point raised in the article, but at least the jealousy aspect doesn't seem so off-base if one looks at the recent re-branding of Whatsapp.
Whatsapp now has a giant "whatsapp by facebook" advert right on the loading page of the application. There was a quite funny article a while back how it led to school children deleting whatsapp because they thought facebook was "uncool" but didn't even know it was a product of the company.
I'd also caution about "arguments from growth", given that it's totally possible that given better decisions it might have grown even faster. Sort of like the medieval physician who argued that blood-letting worked because the patient recovered. It'd be better to address the substance of the article.
More likely a decision made to strengthen Facebook's case to antitrust regulators. The "by facebook" branding suggests a deeper integration between different apps and therefore makes it seemingly harder to break up Facebook's app family.
> I'd also caution about "arguments from growth", given that it's totally possible that given better decisions it might have grown even faster.
Anything is possible and that's conjecture. Not news. Argument from proven growth/data/etc is far better than "argument from hypotheticals/what ifs/etc".
> There was a quite funny article a while back how it led to school children deleting whatsapp because they thought facebook was "uncool" but didn't even know it was a product of the company.
Seems like another of these manufactured nonsense from the industry. How many children? How old were they? Care to share the link so we can all have a good laugh?
> It'd be better to address the substance of the article.
So why don't you? You didn't mention anything substantive from the article in your comment. Is it because there is no substance. What objective, factual, relevant information did you take away from an article which is mostly subjective, gossipy and pointless.
Well, have you noticed it uses 'cool' futuristic lettering instead of Facebook's actual logo? They know how uncool they are, they know the Facebook brand doesn't work with WhatsApp.
> The article reads like a bad hit job it tries to paint facebooks position as bleak while ignore all its products have continued to experience amazing growth.
Did you really expect anything better from bloomberg? Instagram is one of the largest social media platforms in the world. If zuckerburg "held it back", then he should "hold back" everything and become a trillionaire.
4 out of the top 6 social media platforms are owned by zuckerburg. Hate the guy for his greed and insatiable appetite for your data, but the idea that his "jealousy" held back instagram is laughable. The article reads like a silly gossipy teen manufacturing drama for attention. But that's the media for you.
One thing I'm surprised not to hear mentioned in this article is regulation. I'm sure there's a level of trying to assert Facebook's dominance over the more successful acquired product. But one thing that wasn't mentioned is that there is a strong political movemeent saying we should break up big tech. Elizabeth Warren was called out specifically by Zuckerberg as the most effective and transformative politician of our time.
I think one thing we need to consider about facebook is the classic middle manager wrangling. If you think that a priority you like is under the chopping block, you tie it inextridcably to something else and then go "Oh, well! Can't can this project because you'll be destroying our most important project". It is essential for Facebook to get to the point where it is so difficult to distinguish between Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp that you can make a coherent argument that you can't split that company into 3 separate parts. That's a great reason for a lot of what was going on at facebook, but the article doesn't seem to consider it.
As John Gruber writes after every single link to Bloomberg:
* Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” in October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we do not just forget about it. Bloomberg’s institutional credibility is severely damaged, and everything they publish should be treated with skepticism until they retract the story or provide evidence that it was true.
Gruber can write what he wants, but is there any evidence that Bloomberg's institutional credibility was impacted in anyway.
I see tons of articles from Bloomberg being posted on HN, where people care about that issue. Outside of this, no one cared and there are people on both camps as far as that story is concerned.
No one cared because not enough people looked past the initial headline. Gruber is doing a service to everyone, including honest journalists and their publications, by reminding us.
That particular story wasn't quite as fraudulent as Newsweek's exposé of a random retired Japanese-American guy as "Satoshi Nakamoto" a few years back, but it's close.
Additional friendly reminder that Bloomberg sees Facebook as the biggest threat to its existence and is extremely motivated to report negatively about them
Because Facebook's news feed cuts out news outlets as middlemen. Though now Reddit, Instagram, LinkedIn and a number of other sites do too so it was pretty inevitable, but Facebook started the trend and before that the only way to get news was pretty much just through major media outlets that you paid for like newspapers or tv news.
Right, but Bloomberg doesn't make (meaningful) money from showing news to a wide audience. Bloomberg is somewhat unique among news providers in that _news is the advert_ for the company.
They sell a software terminal at about $20k/yr subscription, and there are > 325,000 paying subscribers. It's nearly an essential tool in finance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal.
It's pretty neat, there's some really interesting tech and history involved but it's all hidden away in a very insulated industry.
Go Bayesian. With every passing month/year, multiply your expectation that the story is true by a fixed decay factor between 0 and 1; this simulates the exponential distribution. But also be sure to update how surprised you will be, if the story does ever corroborate!
I'm not sure if the integrity of this article - an excerpt from an upcoming book by another editorial team - was affected by Bloomberg's previous editorial actions.
A news source has literally nothing to sell except credibility.
Although as qnt points out, this particular one sells terminal access. So I guess they can go ahead and throw the credibility thing overboard, and still do OK.
Yes. Bloomberg uses their publication to manipulate the stock market to the advantage of insiders. This is completely obvious based on the huge number of absolute bullshit fabricated stories where they and their anonymous sources are the only starting point.
I forget what country it was... somewhere in northern Europe.
(looks like it might be Bangladesh (see below for link))
They passed legislation that allows a RIVER to have rights and lawyers can sue on its behalf.
We need similar legislation for reality. We have about 50% of the country that literally doesn't give a shit about lying.
The truth should have rights to sue.
Now I KNOW there is a fuzzy ground but there are also things that are clearly, provably false.
If a politician says he was in the United States, yet there are records, showing he was in Germany, and you can prove damages, you should be able to sue.
We already have limits to the 1st amendment. You can't libel or slander someone for example. The truth needs to be protected. Otherwise we're doomed.
And if you don't want to disable JS, every time you reach the article limit, in Chrome you can go to the Application tab in DevTools and "Clear site data".
It paints a picture of what the author want the world to be like rather than reality. One of the biggest examples is how they view regulation as a risk to Facebook while Facebooks views it as a guarantee of market dominance.