The Inside Story
by Steven Levy · first published 2020
55% recommend45% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Well-balanced, detailed history of Facebook's business and product decisions, drawing on unusually deep access to executives; suits readers interested in how the company's strategy and mistakes unfolded.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"In his sophomore year of college, Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website to serve as a campus social network. The site caught on like wildfire, and soon students nationwide were on Facebook. Today, Facebook is nearly unrecognizable from Zuckerberg's first, modest iteration. It has grown into a tech giant, the largest social media platform and one of the most gargantuan companies in the world, with a valuation of more than $576 billion and almost 3 billion users. There is no denying the power and omnipresence of Facebook in American daily life. And in light of recent controversies surroundin
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Giphy shows good results but the search is quite slow IMO, I hope this improves in the future. If you haven't read Facebook by Steven Levy I recommend it, the book explains quite well what happened after the acquisitions of Instagram, Whatsapp, and Oculus.
on “Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M” ↗…more palatable than Luckey's Trump support). He ended up being sort of fired later because nobody wanted him on their team anymore. The best information I've read about this is in Steven Levy's new book Facebook: The Inside Story [1]. [0]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/palmer-luckey-the-facebook-nea... [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Inside-Story-Steven-Levy/dp/...
on “YouTube actively deletes anti CCP comments” ↗…easy answers. FB is generally open about that and what they're trying to do in order to reduce risk. The problem is mostly upstream. I'm not an apologist and FB has made mistakes (Steven Levy's book Facebook: The Inside Story is a great look into a lot of the history and it's rare in that it's actually a fair account of things). Growth at all costs (Chamath's team) lead to a lot of problems in developing…
on “Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2021 Results” ↗…http://www.slate.com/articles/business/when_big_businesses_w... See in particular John Battelle's "The Search" (2005), Steven Levy's "In the Plex" (2011), and Doug Edwards' "I'm Feeling Lucky" (2011). As for Facebook, there's probably less public documentation but I have been following/covering it from very early on and personally know a few of its earliest employees. Ads have never been Zuck's focus. Again, as I…
on “Are you really Facebook’s product? The history of a dangerous idea” ↗…understand why he did it, at some point it becomes irresponsible not to take the money given the opportunity cost (and he did give $50M to signal). Steven Levy has a funny bit about it in his excellent book Facebook: The Inside Story. When someone offers you 19 billion to violate your principles, you have to wonder what you can do with that money and maybe you can do more good than you could with whatsapp. Plus…
on “We Don't Sell Ads (2012)” ↗"Facebook: The Inside Story" by Steven Levy. The access he got to FB executives is beyond anything else.
on “Zuckerberg’s Jealousy Held Back Instagram and Drove Off Founders” ↗There's an interesting story about this. In Steven Levy's new book (which I really liked), Facebook: The Inside Story, he talks about teenagers in Macedonia pushing fake political news stories to drive traffic to their ad-laden websites so they could make money. They didn't care about the political…
on “YouTube deleting Palmer Luckey’s comments about CCP’s Wumao division” ↗I recently read Steven Levy's _Facebook_, which I thought was a well-balanced history of the company. Some mistakes he highlights that resonated with me: Facebook Platform, Beacon, Cambridge Analytica, foreign expansion without native language…
on “Facebook reports second quarter results” ↗One of my favorite genres! Any book by Steven Levy is great, he is the master! He wrote multiple books about Apple, and also about Google, Facebook,… Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Nick Bilton Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and…
on “Ask HN: Books like Androids:The Team That Built the Android Operating System?” ↗For people that are genuinely interested in this - I'd highly recommend Steven Levy's book: Facebook The Inside Story. It's a fair account without a political bent (really hard to find on this topic) and he had a lot of access to FB leadership while writing it. It also gives a lot of historical context.…
on “Facebook's “see no evil” strategy” ↗…individual user engagement or allow this kind of targeting on political ads. Otherwise they're making editorial decisions as a publisher and should be held to that higher standard. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Inside-Story-Steven-Levy/dp/...
on “Facebook will block ads from state-controlled media outlets” ↗…on life and achieving dreams. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson - A comprehensive biography of Apple's co-founder. Chaos Monkeys by Antonio García Martínez - A look into the wild side of Silicon Valley. Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy - A deep dive into the social media giant's history and controversies. Skunk Works by Ben R. Rich - Stories of innovation from Lockheed Martin’s legendary division. Thinking…
on “Creating a social photo frame from scratch” ↗…is a stock promoter through and through. It's really sad to see people fall into this guys trap. He has an incredibly story (coming from nothing) but lets look at his career: He "leaves" (aka fired) Facebook for being a D*ck head. Nobody is willing to work with him because he is rude and a jerk. His direct reports would cry regularly. Steven Levy talked about this in his book on Facebook. He starts a VC…
on “Chamath Palihapitiya on Wallstreetbets [audio]” ↗> In many ways, the story is unique to Facebook. Not every company is built to put a someone like Bosworth in charge of ad products. As Steven Levy described it in his book "In the Plex", back when Google needed a money-making scheme, their engineer…
on “How Zuck's Old TA Helped Facebook Master Mobile Ads” ↗My take is that it's just too early in biotech. Back in 1973 it was certainly possible to envision Facebook and Twitter. For example, if you read Steven Levy's Hackers you'll learn about the Community Memory project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory But computers and their associated tech like…
on “All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad” ↗