If Mort Divine ruled the world

[Dak]

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_woman_would.html#c040902

Oldie but goodie. Pretty sure I read this entire blog at some point.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

700 acres for 1 person wtf, that is so wasteful. Bet he doesn't even farm, hunt or ranch it.

Yes, but we're talking about Mark Zuckerberg, possibly the most influential person of the past 10-12 years. If I were him, I'd have a 700-acres-of-Hawaii sized ego too.

 

[CiG]

Mark Zuckerberg, possibly the most influential person of the past 10-12 years.

Really?

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Have you used Facebook? It's part of the daily life of over a billion people, it's radically transformed the way young people communicate, and it may have caused the Arab Spring. I'd say that's pretty influential.

 

[Dak]

I'd say hunger caused the Arab Spring.

 

[CiG]

He created a social networking site, not even the first one. What an achievement, so influential.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Most influential man to normies, but only the elite actually matter in the world, so who cares?

 

[Einherjar86]

Zuckerberg could definitely be in the top five most influential people of the past decade or so. He may not have created the first social networking site, but he created the most widely used social networking site; and social networks have dramatically shaped the way we communicate. Additionally, Facebook has made everyone's personal information more widely accessible in ways that its users often never realized except in retrospect.

 

[Dak]

I think the problem is in how people think of being "influenced", or how people "influence". If we think of the term broadly as "how much a person is able to change thoughts and/or behaviors", Zuckerberg is clearly somewhere high on the list. People generally think of it more limitedly in terms of someone's persuasive powers, political power, etc.

 

[CiG]

Not to mention there's a chance facebook could go the way of myspace, especially with all the fuckery Zuckerturd is allowing to go on.

 

[Einherjar86]

Sure... but if anything, that only contributes to its current influence.

 

[CiG]

It's likely decline is part of it's influence?

I suppose something can only decline in influence or popularity from a position of substantial influence or popularity.

 

[Einherjar86]

I was specifically referring to "the fuckery" he allows to go on - sorry, that was ambiguous.

Granted, I'm not entirely sure what fuckery you're referring to, but I'm thinking of things like how Facebook regulates the kinds of stories that show up on its newsfeed. That is fuckery indeed, but it is immensely influential.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

I was just reading about him joining a group of other tech titans to help find a way to bring the net to the world’s two-thirds unwired people. I think he might have some influence

 

[CiG]

The fuckery is the whole Merkel scandal if you can call it that and the hundreds of people complaining about their posts being deleted for their conservative or right-leaning nature. I've been watching it unfold over the last 12 months.

The liberal bias of facebook is in full swing.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

whoa, is there any evidence of posts being deleted?

 

[Einherjar86]

Facebook has no "liberal bias." It has a desire to please its users and increase its stock value.

Facebook knows its users, and its users tend to be liberal. Read David Foster Wallace's essay "Host" - it outlines the basis for this argument. Basically, a news site or social networking site may appear liberal, but these kinds of outlets are in the service of their customers, that's all. Facebook has no political leanings or commitments; it just wants to make money.

 

[CiG]

That ignores the politics of it's creator, who is most certainly a liberal. Actually recently the staff of facebook were made to complete a course teaching them how to spot and deal with their own biases in how they moderate facebook because there were so many complaints from conservative users claiming their content was removed.

 

[Dak]

It's pretty obvious that the popularity of FOXnews, conservative talk radio, and Trump, are not reflected by Facebook algorithms.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

The political views of a service's customer base should only be relevant to the service when there's an obvious market impetus to encourage satisfying their customers. No one is going to stop using Facebook just because certain right-wing stories get pushed high on a newsfeed, because the users would still have their own community to talk to away from it, and because there's no alternative social website good enough to merit a switch in favor of an agreeable political atmosphere. A hippie vegan restaurant or a gun range, however? Obvious reasons to incorporate bias and not offend your customers, even if it offends non-customers.

An even more glaring example (from what I saw the Facebook thing might have been blown out of proportion anyways (I mean, be honest fellas, Breitbart is not as valid a news source as CNN)) would be Google not giving any negative search terms for Hillary Clinton-related searches, when they would certainly show up on Bing and Yahoo, all the while having no issue giving negative results for Donald Trump. Someone made a YouTube video about it, Google quickly threw out a "Oh it's nothing, we try to hide negative results from anyone", and then immediately changed their algorithm to make it equal with Trump. It's difficult for me to imagine that Google execs were like "Hey, our users lean left, let's bias things towards Clinton to make them happy", all the while Microsoft execs either thought "Hey, our users are exactly split down the middle" or "Hey, let's risk offending our left-leaning userbase".