2k20, what's the worst enormous tech company?

oh hai lex luthor

https://i.redd.it/67thj75i00941.jpg

Mediaite reports:

During his talk with Rush Limbaugh today, President Donald Trump talked about a recent dinner he had with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. As the president today talked about the size of his online followings, Trump brought up how “I had dinner with Mark Zuckerberg the other day” and claimed, “He said I’d like to congratulate you, you’re number one on Facebook. You know, it’s incredible.”

Slate says "Amazon" but the lower levels of this have some I was previously unfamiliar with:

https://slate.com/technology/2020/01/evil-list-tech-companies-dangerous-amazon-facebook-google-palantir.html

Our respondents say: “I am most troubled by the growth of cyberstalking apps (pitched as legitimate help for parents and employers and deployed by domestic abusers).” —Danielle Citron, Boston University School of Law

legitimate help for employers huh

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/technology/google-search-results.html

In the two decades since Google introduced text ads above search results, the company has steadily made ads less conspicuous. But its latest look may have pushed things too far. Users complained that Google was trying to trick people into clicking on more paid results, while marketing executives said it was yet another step in blurring the line between ads and unpaid search results, forcing them to spend more money with the internet company.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pke9k9/facebook-wanted-nso-spyware-to-monitor-users

"The Facebook representatives stated that Facebook was concerned that its method for gathering user data through Onavo Protect was less effective on Apple devices than on Android devices," the court filing reads. "The Facebook representatives also stated that Facebook wanted to use purported capabilities of Pegasus to monitor users on Apple devices and were willing to pay for the ability to monitor Onavo Protect users."

Contact tracing can help slow the spread of COVID-19 and can be done without compromising user privacy. We’re working with @sundarpichai & @Google to help health officials harness Bluetooth technology in a way that also respects transparency & consent. https://t.co/94XlbmaGZV

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) April 10, 2020

a Facebook of medical data of large parts of the world’s population? no, that’s just fine

Is this bad

― calstars, Friday, April 10, 2020 2:17 PM (fifty-two minutes ago)

i guess it depends on how much you believe in the illusion of privacy your smartphone currently affords you and whether you'd sacrifice that data-collection for legitimate health reasons (ie, saving lives) rather than selling you bullshit ads.

New Candidate - Zoom

https://www.engadget.com/zoom-is-now-the-facebook-of-video-apps-190024369.html

The owner of @ChiPizzaBoss shared this nightmarish Grubhub invoice that will haunt me for days. https://t.co/VMDcIgAqxd pic.twitter.com/Zz6cPi0HnJ

— Susie Cagle (@susie_c) April 30, 2020

Ugh

A VP at Amazon quits over whistleblower firings

Warehouse workers reached out to AECJ for support. They responded by internally promoting a petition and organizing a video call for Thursday April 16 featuring warehouse workers from around the world, with guest activist Naomi Klein. An announcement sent to internal mailing lists on Friday April 10th was apparently the flashpoint. Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, two visible AECJ leaders, were fired on the spot that day. The justifications were laughable; it was clear to any reasonable observer that they were turfed for whistleblowing.

This is interesting:

https://themargins.substack.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage

That’s a good read. What a dumb world we live in.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/05/facebook-zuckerberg-trump/

During an internal presentation, Facebook debuted a feature for its workplace chat product allowing employers to remove & block specific topics that are trending in office chats. The topic chosen in the demonstration was “unionize,” the Intercept reports https://t.co/Q1Tpa5dXEt

— Hamza Shaban (@hshaban) June 12, 2020

Sudden outsider challenge from eBay: https://boston.cbslocal.com/2020/06/15/ebay-employees-arrested-u-s-attorney-andrew-lelling-cyberstalking/

what in the fresh hell

The Wirecard story is amazing.

https://www.ft.com/content/284fb1ad-ddc0-45df-a075-0709b36868db

holy shit

Wirecard acknowledges for the first time the potential scale of a multiyear accounting fraud, warning that the €1.9bn of cash probably does “not exist”.

oops

softbank really are gonna singlehandedly destroy the world economy huh

fun read

STOP THE ZUCKIES

https://gothamist.com/news/facebook-will-lease-730000-square-feet-farley-post-office-building

bring your flamethrowers, NYC

this is "fun": https://simpletexting.com/tech-ceo-salary/

BREAKING: Facebook refused to apply hate-speech rules to BJP officials, despite evidence of their violent and Islamophobic rhetoric on the platform. A smoking gun from @WSJ:

Read now: https://t.co/jU7nxV2QR2

— Equality Labs (@EqualityLabs) August 14, 2020

Paywalled article but highlights that Facebook has been permitting hate speech from right-wing Indian politicians, having hired a BJP supporter to oversee public policy.

Not completely dissimilar to a case in Ukraine where an investigative news outlet had their page deleted after writing an article exposing far-right activists linked to the organisation that does Facebook’s local fact-checking.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/26/world/europe/ukraine-facebook-fake-news.html

The local head of public policy is another controversial nationalist.

it's a garbage company and people who use its platform are morons

It took Apple 42 years to reach $1 trillion in value. It took it just two more years to get to $2 trillion.

Even more stunning: All of Apple’s second $1 trillion came in the past 21 weeks, while the global economy shrank faster than ever before in the coronavirus pandemic.

On Wednesday Apple became the first U.S. company to hit a $2 trillion valuation when its shares climbed 1.2 percent to $467.78 in morning trading. It was another milestone for the maker of iPhones, Mac computers and Apple Watches, cementing its title as the world’s most valuable public company and punctuating how the pandemic has been a bonanza for the tech giants.

Apple is not a noble company by any stretch of the imagination but they shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath as FB, Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Uber imo

this is about right

Always find @ReadMargins fascinating https://t.co/tV5smIomXQ pic.twitter.com/QQcFtP7kfU

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) August 31, 2020

Facebook to ban political advertising

the week before the election

After reaping all those sweet political dollars, like sucking a marrow bone.

why do people still use it

They haven't banned political advertising in the week before the election they've banned new political adverts in the week before the election. Existing adverts can be retargeted, have their speed adjusted. Your bullshit will be slightly stale but it will still be served up by the shovel load.

Basically they have done the minimum amount possible without actually doing anything, so they can announce they are doing something.

Also, they "banned" political advertising in Washington State 21 months ago, after being repeatedly sued by the Attorney General for violating electoral law regarding disclosure.

They then continued to sell political adverts, but had lawyers argue that they did not have to follow the law and make disclosures about them, because they had a policy banning them, therefore they did not keep any information about their sale.

and people still use it

This is a disturbing development.

Last Friday, Facebook sent a cease-and-desist letter to two NYU researchers (@LauraEdelson2 and Damon McCoy), demanding that they shut down their research into political ads and disinformation on FB’s platform.https://t.co/ksBVmqV27K

— Alex Abdo (@AlexanderAbdo) October 23, 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/oct/23/facebook-moderators-forced-to-work-in-dublin-office-despite-high-tier-lockdown

It's always simultaneously sad and hilarious when the tech bros testify on capital hill. You get, like, Jack Dorsey, with his wizard beard and nose ring and obvious tech knowhow, and then on the other side these 75-year old white guys who can barely check their AOL.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?476686-1/facebook-google-twitter-execs-testify-social-media-regulations&live

One of several fantastic answers from various Amazon help desk workers in this thread. (At some point they stop signing their initials to 'em.)

Thank you for that information. We apologize but upon reviewing your location you're in Northern Ireland. Rugby Autumn Nations Cup coverage is exclusively available to Prime members based in the UK. We don't have the rights to other territories. ^RS

— Amazon Help (@AmazonHelp) November 14, 2020

You apologise for the TROUBLES??? https://t.co/LPwwSjA9Ci

— jericho cane stan account (@brynteresting) November 14, 2020

1. A small business began selling camera tripods on Amazon
2. It reached $3.5 million in sales, 0.001% of Amazon's revenue
3. Amazon copied the tripods exactly and sold them as AmazonBasics tripods
4. Amazon banned the tripod company from Amazonhttps://t.co/f930Dvjpdp

— Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) December 22, 2020

Time for a new thread?

“RAGA received significant funding from numerous corporations in 2020," including Koch Industries ($375k), Amazon ($100k), Chevron ($50k), the NRA ($50k), Monsanto ($50k), Facebook ($50k), Uber ($50k), Coca Cola ($50k), Exxon ($50k), and Google ($25k) https://t.co/v6EwRXXn2C

— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) January 9, 2021

(RAGA was the group that funded the 1/6 insurrection of the Capitol)

Google threaten to cut off search if the Australian government stop Facebook from bootlegging newspapers

Good, Google search is absolute dogballs. Let another competitor enjoy the traffic.

If only DDG converted easily to a verb.

The experience of searching on Google and shopping on Amazon both absolutely suck now so that should be all the evidence anyone needs to prosecute them for antitrust violations

to return to the thread caek linked, lmao

Google Glass actually had *two* fatal flaws:

- It didn't really do anything very useful.
- You looked stupid while wearing it.

The culture in the Google Glass team grew to completely ignore these flaws, too. 7/n

— Warren Craddock (@warren_craddock) October 10, 2022

strong "oh my god, he say it!" vibes here

it's a great thread! what a fascinating career!

mh otm about multitasking

i’m pretty sure horizons actually does have a thing where you can look at a virtual “tablet” that does remote desktop to your actual laptop so that you can rudely answer emails even during your VR meeting but come on, the pure faff of it

My outsider view is that the whole Meta rebranding is simply to make Facebook look like it is capable of innovation and VR can be sold to market analysts as the Next Big Thing, and proposed as evidence that FB can continue to expand its revenues into the future. Whatever comes of it, if anything useful, won't look much like what we are now being told it will look like, which is just silly and needlessly cumbersome.

C'mon, if Brainstorm is any indication, the headsets are gonna seem like Viewmasters in a couple years, when they start mainlining content directly into THE MIND:

https://prod-images.tcm.com/Master-Profile-Images/brainstorm1983.69568.jpg

wtf that Twitter thread. Yeah, build a culture where you can say to your boss, hey how about canceling this junk and firing us? Notice the protagonist never dared suggest this. Because who would?!

I'd never seen the Google Glass spread in Vogue. That really didn't help matters.

In the Future, we will all be Christopher Walken

Hey blu-ray is way better than dvd don’t mix that up with all this other useless stuff

I agree blu ray rules, but think it's a fair example of something people didn't want regardless. At the time I think the general reaction was "well fuck I already have all these movies on DVD, now you want me to rebuy them?". Turned out what ppl actually wanted was no physical media at all and, instead of that, streaming services that give you access to like five movies made before 1990 and The Big Bang Theory.

crazy remembering the HD-DVD vs BluRay beef

what was it, just 8 or 9 years ago? and i'm now getting UHD content streamed to me in 4K

https://kotaku.com/zuckerberg-facebook-meta-legs-feet-video-vr-staged-fake-1849656315

it's fun to imagine the heady early days of internet and the abstraction of social communication, away from in-person speaking and gesturing, away from penmanship or typed letters and sealed envelopes and mailboxes, and toward the near-instant transfer of data, a name or a class or a field standing in for the visual information. abstraction. and then, snap forward to the present and we are desperately trying to add some legs onto shitty cartoon avatars

oh shit, meant that for wherever we're making fun of virtual facebook

or is that here

truly onethreadin today, sheesh

the thing about the metaverse via headset is that kids these days are always multitasking. how do I get on Discord while also in the metaverse? do I walk up to a computer in the metaverse to check on the chat?

― mh, Thursday, October 13, 2022 3:39 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is a really good point, I think this stuff fundamentally misunderstands the way the world has changed the last 10+ years

for me the event that really drove home how fast things were changing was when Michael Jackson died. it felt as though everyone on the planet knew about it like 15 minutes after his heart stopped. there was no period of "holy shit did you hear?", we all just knew, because we're checking social media constantly. if anything that pace would only accelerate today.

obviously there are still a ton of jobs where you can't just be on your phone all the time but the stuff Meta is trying to replace (enhance? what the fuck exactly are they trying to do?) is mostly conferencing/collaborations/hangouts or whatever, situations where now (thanks to Covid) people are used to being online while doing work. you know, I reboot my server, I go post on ILX or check Twitter, or maybe while some meeting is going on that doesn't concern me I'm doing something else. it's amusing to me that even on days where we can have in-person meetings people don't like to do them, because then you have to SIT and LISTEN, as opposed to just working through them like we all do now. and, as most companies are starting to realize, that if anything is making us more efficient. so who is going to want to use this?

tbf any meeting that you're just working through you shouldn't be at, that's a management failure and no amount of tech is going to be able to fix that

I dunno for me it usually means I'm easily distractible in meetings I should be paying attention to...

yeah though tbf you're seated at the greatest distraction machine ever built. maybe Meta meetings will be enforced. no multitasking during my important rant!

plus think of all the bs data analytics you can run with a device that covers your employees' entire heads

Phrenology comeback

the thing about the metaverse via headset is that kids these days are always multitasking. how do I get on Discord while also in the metaverse? do I walk up to a computer in the metaverse to check on the chat?

great point but solvable. in fact it should be better than real life, because in the metaverse you can pretend to be making eye contact with someone while actually looking at an invisible Discord window.

SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — Salesforce, the largest private employer in San Francisco, is laying off hundreds of employees and joining a string of major Bay Area tech companies cutting their workforces.

The Big Down-Turn is coming fast & hard - not sure if it's just a cyclical contraction or if this is like the whaling industry

The whaling industry at least gave us a pretty good novel.

I for one don't want to pay for anything, or see any ads

Haven't used an oil lamp in years.

definitely eager to hear what Japan's scientific whaling uncovers about these fierce leviathans of the deep

i'd prefer not to

Smart Move, Google

For as long as I can remember, maps.google.com was the defacto domain for Google Maps. Also for as long as I can remember, I allowed this domain to use the location services of my browser.

Yesterday I was asked to allow the usage of location services for Google Maps seemingly out of nowhere. Of course I accepted. After all, I just wanted to check a route to a local business and I was in a hurry. Back home I opened Google Maps again, and noticed that maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps. This implies that the permissions I give to Google Maps now apply to all of Googles services hosted under this domain. So far I only identified Google Flights to have made the same switch (google.com/flights), though I'm sure they're just beginning to transfer their services to the main google.com domain.

Congratulations, you now have permission to geo-track me across all of your services.

Smart move, Google.

congratulations to the tories!

As a parent, and based on recent experience, fucking Roblox

my nephew is absolutely addicted. so i've seen him play it a million times, and also read the stuff about manipulating kids into becoming employees. is there anything new to be horrified at with roblox or is it mainly that? the internet, arguably, is bad

The boy's basically learned how to code through Roblox.

I'm not saying that's a great thing, but it's better than what I got from Sega Genesis.

I don't know how common a problem it is or if they've made improvements with this, but I've definitely heard of predators on roblox

YouTube Will Stop Removing Videos Pushing Lies About the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election https://t.co/AUcJ5lfGvN

— Variety (@Variety) June 2, 2023

It's cool to see the entire world slowly shifting towards 'but what if we just stopped giving a fuck about anything?' as an overarching ethos. The structure of society will regulate itself independent of the behavior of its constituents, nbd.

I just wanna see Deep Purple videos from 1971, not this garbage

Google’s return-to-office crackdown reportedly includes a $99 hotel for workers

The tech giant is offering a $99-a-night “Summer Special” deal for an on-campus hotel to “make it easier for Googlers to transition to the hybrid workplace,” according to CNBC, which viewed promotional materials and internal forums. Employees must pay out of their own pockets for the special, which is open until Sept. 30, the outlet found.

The offer comes as the YouTube and Android owner cracks down on remote work by more strictly enforcing its three-day-a-week policy. The Wall Street Journal reported in June that Google told employees office attendance records would start to figure into performance reviews.

I'd figure the answer is ALL OF THEM at this point.

Good, I want people to stop moving here while still making their coastal salaries.

Well this pretty fucted. Humans suck.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbot-training-human-toll-content-moderator-meta-openai

https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup

ignoring repeated credible warnings that your product is enabling genocide - pretty bad i would say.

they pay very well though.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/11/business/ebay-cyberstalking-settlement/index.html

Seems like a slap on the wrist, though the lawsuit from the targeted couple is still pending.

Should have been more, but:

the $3 million settlement, announced Thursday, is the statutory maximum fine for eBay’s charges

zuckerberg:

I think there’s been this trend over time where the feeds started off as primarily and exclusively content for people you followed, your friends. I guess it was friends early on, then it kind of broadened out to, “Okay, you followed a set of friends and creators.” And then it got to a point where the algorithm was good enough where we’re actually showing you a lot of stuff that you’re not following directly because, in some ways,
that’s a better way to show you more interesting stuff than only constraining it to things that you’ve chosen to follow.

they absolutely believe their own bullshit - that it's good for people, not that it absolutely sucks for people but generates wealth for them.

I think the next logical jump on that is like, “Okay, we’re showing you content from your friends and creators that you’re following and creators that you’re not following that are generating interesting things. And you just add on to that, a layer of, “Okay, and we’re also going to show you content that’s generated by an AI system that might be something that you’re interested in.”

aaargh

https://www.theverge.com/24253481/meta-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-ar-glasses-orion-ray-bans-ai-decoder-interview

“and from there, it’s a logical leap to start showing you turds left behind by the types of animals that people who fit your profile have shown an interest in”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/us/politics/trump-tech-inauguration-parties.html

Facebook, Spotify, X, etc etc

https://i.postimg.cc/KYBr6msQ/Gqjkzcx-Xc-AAR7p-X.jpg

That is some actually successful underpants gnoming! Make the product worse so we can sell more of it.

Same Cart, Different Price: Instacart’s Price Experiments Cost Families at Checkout
https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/instacart/

Two shoppers walk into the exact same grocery store, at the exact same time, and pick up the exact same box of Cheerios. Then, they head to the cash register to check out. This sounds like the opening to one of those “three guys walk into a bar” jokes — but there is nothing funny about this punchline.

The first shopper is charged $4.99. She pays and leaves the store with her box of cereal. The second customer steps up to the register and is charged $6.12. He’s ticked and tells the cashier that he, too, should pay $4.99, just like the woman in front of him. His response is understandable. Customers expect to pay the exact same price, for the exact same item, and his experience violates our shared understanding of how pricing for essential products like groceries is supposed to work.

But increasingly, this scenario is no longer hypothetical, it’s real. In fact, the proliferation of new pricing practices and technologies has upended pricing transparency. Fair pricing is no longer a guarantee in the cereal aisle or anywhere else. Our research suggests that companies like Instacart — the focus of this study — are developing, acquiring, and perfecting technology to experiment with pricing, at scale.

These new strategies are pervasive in the growing online grocery sector, with $10 billion in sales in a single month in 2025 and more than 60% of U.S. households reporting they have purchased groceries online.1 At a time when food price inflation outpaces overall inflation, and Americans report that the price of groceries is their number one cost concern, pricing experiments used by companies like Instacart are making the situation worse.

One has to wonder across all businesses how many of these schema are running that are small enough to not really be noticed but the results in money made are impressive in the aggregate. Like the plot of 'Office Space' turned the other way. I would think the current climate, it probably could easily and widely go unnoticed except on the company bottom line. People have complained for years or decades about all the weird ass charges that end up on phone bills or cable bills, got to think that is probably all over the place.

Credit card companies/banks have had the sweetest deal of all (outside maybe like a Megachurch) where they get a sliver cut on every sale being made with the plastic, both taking a cut from the seller and buyer. What a racket. I always pay my local people at the garage or that say do some work on my house in cash if I can.

Compounding interest of bullshit world.