Cats and politicians: why Zuckerberg decided to return Facebook to the people . Truth and fiction about Mark Zuckerberg: why the creator of Facebook criticized the film The Social Network

On May 14, the most famous American programmer celebrates his 33rd birthday. founder and developer of the social network Facebook Mark Zuckerberg. At the age of 26, he was recognized as the youngest billionaire in history and a legendary man known throughout the world. In 2010, David Fincher's film " Social network", which is based on the biography of the creator of Facebook. Despite the fact that the biopic was recognized as the picture of the year and received two Oscars and four Golden Globes, Zuckerberg was very dissatisfied with this interpretation of the events of his life and issued a refutation of some of the facts.

The young man initially did not like the idea of making a biopic about him. “I didn’t want anyone to film Mark Zuckerberg while I was alive,” he said. Although he had no desire to see what happened as a result, he did watch the film “The Social Network” and was very upset by the inaccuracies that its creators made.

Mark stated that the film is not based on the real events of his biography and is guilty of exaggeration. So, for example, according to the plot, Zuckerberg decided to create a social network after he broke up with his girlfriend and, wanting to take revenge on her, wanted to earn the recognition of hundreds of other girls. “There were some things that caught my eye. But they were entirely invented by the authors of the film and made it difficult to take the film seriously. They just made up a ton of stuff, which I think is really offensive. They came up with this whole storyline that I somehow decided to create Facebook to attract girls. If all this had been started for the sake of the opposite sex, then Priscilla Chan and I would not have gotten married in the end,” Zuckerberg said.

Mark is portrayed in the film as a cold and calculating young man with a difficult character, capable of betraying friends for his own benefit. He allegedly exchanged real friends for virtual world and loneliness. In the story, he left his friend and investor Eduardo Saverin with virtually nothing when their views diverged. In fact, Zuckerberg left him a 5% stake in the company, valued today at $1.5 billion, although he was not the main investor.

In addition, Mark can hardly be called a pragmatist: one day he did not come to negotiations with Yahoo simply because it was a day off and he was expecting his girlfriend to visit. Material gain is far from the only goal for him. “They just can't accept that someone can create something just because they enjoy creating... The real story is a lot of hard work. If they actually made a movie [about the creation Zuckerberg Facebook]... it would be a film about me for two hours without a break writing codes", he said.

The founder of the social network also admitted that before watching the film he had never heard of the alcoholic cocktail appletini (martini with apple flavor), but after the premiere this drink really became incredibly popular in the Facebook office.

However, the filmmakers still managed to maintain authenticity in some details of his biography. Thus, Mark recognized the protagonist’s gray T-shirt and slippers as his favorite outfit. He explains his love for simple clothes this way: “I really want to clear my life so that I make as few decisions as possible and focus entirely on Facebook. I'll never get my job done if I waste my energy on something stupid or frivolous."

However, the creators of “The Social Network” did not pursue the goal of absolute authenticity. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin said: “I don’t want to retell so much as I want to tell a story, which is two big differences. "Social network" - true story, written in a cinematic spirit with thriller elements." Therefore, one should not blame him for adding drama to a film based on real events.

I have never been a philanthropist or populist. What forced him (at least in words) to declare war on sponsors and declare that the social network will be returned to ordinary people?

But no agency will report the news that “our cat gave birth to kittens yesterday,” while for a particular user this may be much more interesting than reports about the war in Zanzibar. Moreover, the lion's share of such “news” turned out to be fake when checked. As a result, the inexperienced user stopped believing any news at all, even the most truthful ones.

Riot on the ship

FB management was thinking about returning to user-friendly policies a couple of years ago, when Facebook announced that the social network would begin to pay more attention to the posts of users’ friends, rather than reprints from the New York Times or Bernie Sanders’ political campaigns.

The last straw, as Wired writes in its gigantic (more than 40 pages!) investigation, was not only the irritation of users at the fact that they were fed news according to the menu approved by the Facebook trending team (a team in manual mode deciding which messages are worthy of publication and which are not).

“ dissident", current or former employees FB).

"Since 2016 Facebook company is experiencing a real civil war. Anyone who doesn’t share Zuckerberg’s anti-Trump views could be shown the door and woken up in the middle of the night,” Wired sources say.

It was the voluntary ranking of posts that caused a loud scandal in December last year. Then one of the users was unable to come to the aid of a dying friend offline, because the Facebook trending team considered his posts too gloomy and did not publish them on the feed. (Why the caring friend did not contact the dying man through any other channel, history is silent, but the logic of Facebook is quite clear: gloomy content scares off the reader, and he hurries to go look at cats on another resource).

During the existence of Facebook, a whole generation of users was born and united into communities, for whom from the very beginning it is not a social network, where the bulk of posts is user-generated content (content created by the users themselves), but an aggregator of other people’s content, the expert points out.

All efforts when creating such services, and Facebook is the first of them, are aimed only at taking the maximum possible amount of time from a person and keeping his attention for as long as possible - Sean Parker, ex-president of Facebook

As Zuckerberg’s former comrade Sean Parker warned, their brainchild works on the principle of a drug dealer: once a user gets hooked on a needle, he won’t go anywhere until his death.

“With the two billion audience that Zuckerberg claims, this ship has tremendous stability. Mass departure of the audience is possible only in one case: if the same massive negative hype arises around Facebook. There is more than enough of this kind of hype now, but it is mainly content producers who are making the noise - that is, media professionals, and this is of no interest to any cat lovers. And it is these latter who make up the critical mass of content consumers,” points out Reedus’ interlocutor.

The Titanics also sink

That even social networks with tens of millions of users are not immune from troubles was shown by the sad story of the once popular My Space, as well as Live Journal, which is better known to the Russian audience. True, the number of LJ/LJ users never even at its peak rose above 40 million, of which over 2.6 million were in the Russian-language segment (data from 2012, on the eve of which a disaster began with this resource).

Moreover, in the case of LiveJournal, its Russian-language version outlived the original American one, not least through the selfless efforts of the now deceased Anton Nosik. But even the genius of the head of the blogging service (until 2012) of the SUP company could not bring the project out of, to use an aviation term, “stall”, which at some point “missed” a cardinal change in trend among social network users around the world: a move away from long philosophical written discussions about existence to “clip” consciousness - on which the phenomenon of success of microblogs like Twitter (as well as Instagram) was based. This was a generational change that LiveJournal managers either missed or ignored.

However, the head of FB plans to do exactly what killed Live Journal - return to the concept of the time when many of the current users of his social network were not yet alive. True, this may be a deliberate risk - after all, the FB audience itself is visibly maturing, and the younger audience prefers “updates” on Snapchat and Telegram. However, FB developers in this case keeping their nose to the wind, trying to lure the “renegades” back with the help Instagram service, where almost nothing is required to write at all (an effort that is almost too much for the vast majority of members of Generation Z).

The fascinating success story of Mark Zuckerberg - founder of facebook! About how a simple programmer managed to make a billion-dollar fortune for himself!

Today I want to talk to you about the founder of a huge social network - Facebook.

Who created it? How did this brilliant idea come to the creator?

How did he make it come true?

So, let's go find out...

The youngest billionaire, the father of Facebook, computer genius, a cynical bastard, a traitor, a man who walks over corpses to his goal, an insane eccentric - in just 30 years of his life Mark Zuckerberg deserves all these characteristics.

Son, you are a genius

The future cult personality was born in the state of New York into a fairly wealthy, decent Jewish family.

Already at the age of 10, it became clear that the boy connected his future with programming.

The fact is that it was at this age that he received his first computer as a gift.

Mark, like his peers, from new toy did not leave, but his interest was not limited to finding information for tests and visiting interesting sites.

He became seriously interested in programming, began reading specialized literature, and at the age of 12 became the author of a program that made it possible to exchange messages.

The first user of the program was his father.

It is clear that such a talented young man should have found a place at the best university in the country.

Harvard believed in the uniqueness of the future billionaire and gladly accepted him into its ranks. But Mark Zuckerberg never had the opportunity to show off his graduation cap and gown.

Fellow students Moskowitz, Severin, McCline, Hughes, with whom Mark Zuckerberg started this project, they gradually removed themselves, although some were forcibly removed.

On new level Facebook was able to make the transition when the founder of the then-nascent empire met the legendary programmer Sean Parker, who, having become Facebook's president, attracted its first major investments and showed that it was possible to make big money from advertising.

Sean also soon had to say goodbye, as he was charged with drug possession.

A Facebook themes Over time, it continued to develop rapidly, already bringing billions to its creator.

Billionaire? Well, okay

Today, a person who is a member leads a fairly modest lifestyle, receiving a salary of $1.

His wife was a close friend of many years, not particularly beautiful.

He drives a small Volkswagen and even rides a bicycle.

In everyday life, he wears cheap jeans and T-shirts, and you will never see him in fashionable clubs, at elite resorts or at social events.

The dollar billionaire does not have his own huge house with a swimming pool and other material benefits due to his status.

But he donates millions to charity and is part of a group whose members pledge to leave at least 50% of their wealth to charitable foundations.

He remains the same infantile and eccentric genius who introduced the fashion for social networks.

It seems that he was just lucky to become rich and famous, but this is far from the case.

And a few more facts

from the success story of Mark Zuckerberg and the creation of his “brainchild”

watch in the video:

Your goal Mark Zuckerberg achieved through colossal labor and enormous talent, although the methods he chose confuse many.

But Mark does not know how to live differently: he is used to sweeping away from life everything that bothers him: be it material wealth or unnecessary people.

Most likely, this is why he won, and, as we know, winners cannot be judged.

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In order to understand this, you need to leave Facebook for a while and pick up Ryan Holiday's book “Believe Me - I'm Lying! Revelations of a media manipulator” and watch, for the sake of experiment, one newscast on TV.

Read some quotes from the book:

When you watch a news broadcast, count how many messages were negative and how many were positive. The advantage is on the side of the former, isn't it?

Are we becoming an appendage to the button?

When publishers, news companies, and news "creators" came to Facebook, they brought all of these approaches with them, as did various bloggers, click-baiters (is there such a term?), and spammers. For whom you are just traffic or an appendage to a button. And the more traffic they have on their website/blog, including from FB, the more they charge for advertising.

So the network is filled with scandals, false sensations, deception, spam, negativity, click-bait, advertising Low quality etc. And they are usually posted on business pages. Not surprisingly, a study on the effects of Facebook found that passively scrolling through the feed reduces well-being.

Networking improves well-being

And, on the contrary, active communication and commenting increases it 🔥. So, when you write a comment on my post, your mood and well-being will improve.

Has Zuckerberg decided to challenge classic negative news reporting and take on news companies? Don't think. Rather, this is a pragmatic move to ensure that users do not leave the network.

Is Zuckerberg chasing profit?

Certainly. We live in a capitalist world, and Facebook is a commercial organization, not a charitable organization.

Just think about the fact that he was able to attract more than 2 billion users to the network and created ideal conditions for entrepreneurs to promote their business. Does he have the right to demand his piece of the pie, given that maintaining and developing the network costs big money? Of course it does. Are you ready? You decide. I decided for myself.

What do you think about this?

You will find it useful:

Do you want to learn how to sell on social networks?

Maxim Perminov, a graduate of the “SMM salesman from Lara and Pronin” course, says:

Original post https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10211872055891877&set=a.1377771919409.2048073.1085193631&type=3

The most popular social network in the world, Facebook, is trying to “return to its roots”: its founder Mark Zuckerberg has officially stated that his project has become “out of hand”, it has been taken over by mass media, SMM and advertising professionals, while regular users with their private problems and joys, they found themselves relegated to secondary roles.

In practical terms, it looks like the owner of a Facebook account, logging into his feed, first sees news from professional media and sponsorship advertising there, and only then - posts from his friends about cats, children's successes and romantic parties.

But no agency will report the news that “our cat gave birth to kittens yesterday,” while for a particular user this may be much more interesting than reports about the war in Zanzibar. Moreover, the lion's share of such “news” was checked. As a result, the inexperienced user stopped believing any news at all, even the most truthful ones.

Still from the film “The Social Network”

Riot on the ship

FB management was thinking about returning to user-friendly politics a couple of years ago, when it was announced that this social network would begin to pay more attention to the posts of users’ friends, rather than reprints from the New York Times or Bernie Sanders’ political campaigns.

The last straw, as Wired writes in its gigantic (more than 40 pages!) investigation, was not only the irritation of users at the fact that they were fed news according to a menu approved by the Facebook trending team (a team that manually decides which messages are worthy publications, which are not).

The decision of the founder of the social network to return to the orthodox concept precipitated a revolt within the company itself, whose employees by the dozens complained to each other that the project, positioning itself as a platform with unlimited freedom of speech, had turned into a totalitarian regime regarding its employees themselves (Wired spoke with 51 such “dissidents” - current or former FB employees).

“Since 2016, Facebook has been experiencing a real civil war. Anyone who doesn’t share Zuckerberg’s anti-Trump views could be shown the door and woken up in the middle of the night,” Wired sources say.

The consequences of this "civil war" for Facebook users will be dual, as happens in any war where there are winners and losers, predicts Andrey Mikhailyuk, research director of the Social Discovery Ventures group of companies.

“The bulk of people who have accounts on Facebook are precisely those users who post cats. For them, advertising and sponsored content are an irritating factor. Another complaint is the sorting of the feed, when the wrong posts that are interesting go to the top to this user, but those that are determined by some of their criteria by the FB machine algorithm. To date, Zuckerberg has not said anything about whether the ranking of posts will be somehow changed so that they appear according to chronology and not some other considerations,” Mikhailiuk told Reedus.

Karin Vainio reported her complaints against FB on Twitter

Seven with a spoon do not wait for one

It was the voluntary ranking of posts that caused a loud scandal in December last year. Then one of the users was unable to come to the aid of a dying friend offline, because the Facebook trending team considered his posts too gloomy and did not publish them on the feed. (Why the caring friend did not contact the dying man through any other channel, history is silent, but the logic of Facebook is quite clear: gloomy content scares off the reader and he rushes to go look at cats on another resource.)

All efforts when creating such services, and Facebook is the first of them, are aimed only at taking the maximum possible amount of time from a person and keeping his attention for as long as possible, Sean Parker, ex-president of Facebook.

This in itself is not a phenomenon at all, since, whether online or offline, content creators everywhere do not exceed 10% of total number population - in full accordance with the saying “One with a fry, seven with a spoon.”

“But in the case of FB, these communities perceive it as huge store brands, and brands can, in turn, receive here feedback, which is impossible in the case of conventional advertising. Accordingly, these 10% will only welcome the return of Facebook to its original function as a communication tool between users, uncluttered by advertising. But the other part will feel uncomfortable at first - but I think it will quickly adjust everything to itself,” believes Mikhailyuk.

The restructuring at FB will have completely different consequences for professionals in the media and advertising spheres - the very same ones whom Zuckerberg somehow blames for “something went wrong” (as if he expected the wolves to fall into the sheepfold , will become vegetarians).

"On this moment Professional content creators have two tools for promoting it. The first of them is beyond the control of Facebook administrators - this is social media marketing (SMM, promotion through social media. - Note "Reedus"). But the second method is to directly purchase impressions using the boost button. And I have a strong feeling that Zuckerberg’s good intentions to give preference to non-commercialized content have precisely the opposite, unpublicized goal - to raise the price of using this button,” says the expert.

People eats

It is extremely unlikely that Zuckerberg announced the changes solely on an emotional outburst or nostalgia for the good old days. But it’s very likely that the company’s analytics team has calculated exactly how many views advertisers and media professionals will lose if they have to rely only on “honest” SMM, and what part of them will therefore be converted into paid impressions.

“It is clear that some of the sponsors will fall off and go to other sites. But it is obvious that Facebook has accumulated a sufficient database of professional users so that its analysts can be confident that the loss of this part will not be critical and will be more than compensated by an increase in direct fees for content promotion. I think Facebook knows exactly what balance they consider optimal,” Mikhailyuk believes.

Moreover, the Zuckerberg empire clearly does not expect that this part of the “offended” will go to competitors - primarily Twitter. Because in “Tweet” everything has also been monetized for a long time and, thus, it will be an exchange of money for soap. And no other channels simply compensate advertisers and “content providers” for the audience they will lose by leaving Facebook.

As Zuckerberg’s former comrade Sean Parker warned, their brainchild works on the principle of a drug dealer: once a user gets hooked on a needle, he won’t go anywhere until his death.

“With the two billion audience that Zuckerberg claims, this ship has tremendous stability. Mass departure of the audience is possible only in one case: if the same massive negative hype arises around Facebook. There is more than enough of this kind of hype now, but it is mainly content producers who are making the noise - that is, media professionals, and this is of no interest to any cat lovers. And it is these latter who make up the critical mass of content consumers,” points out Reedus’ interlocutor.

The Titanics also sink

That even social networks with tens of millions of users are not immune from troubles was shown by the sad story of the once popular MySpace, as well as LiveJournal, which is better known to the Russian audience. True, the number of LiveJournal users never, even at its peak, rose above 40 million, of which over 2.6 million were in the Russian-language segment (data from 2012, on the eve of which a disaster began with this resource).

Moreover, in the case of LiveJournal, its Russian-language version outlived the original American one, not least through the selfless efforts of the now deceased. But even the genius of the head of the blogging service (until 2012) of the SUP company could not bring the project out of, to use an aviation term, “stall”, which at some point “missed” a cardinal change in trend among social network users around the world: a move away from long philosophical written discussions about existence to “clip” consciousness - on which the phenomenon of success of microblogs like Twitter (as well as Instagram) was based. This was a generational change that LiveJournal managers either missed or ignored.

The younger generation chooses Snapchat

Nevertheless, the head of FB plans to do exactly what destroyed LiveJournal - return to the concept of the time when many of the current users of his social network were not yet alive. True, this may be a deliberate risk - after all, the FB audience itself is visibly maturing, and the younger audience prefers “updates” on Snapchat and Telegram. However, the FB developers in this case are keeping their nose to the wind, trying to lure the “renegades” back using the Instagram service, where almost nothing is required to write at all (an effort that is almost too much for the vast majority of representatives).

In any case, as far as the Russian-language segment of Facebook is concerned, no disturbances emanating from its head office should greatly alarm Russian advertisers and content creators, Mikhailyuk believes.

“In Russia, the main danger for Facebook users is not internal restructuring in this company, but the constant efforts of Roskomnadzor to block this network under one pretext or another. And I am very afraid that at some point this will happen. But almost every Russian media outlet or brand has initially diversified the promotion of their content: in addition to Facebook, they use the VKontakte and Odnoklassniki platforms. Therefore, the loss of Facebook will not be a disaster for them,” Mikhailyuk predicts.