zlacker

>>zdw+(OP)
> The refrain of how a startup CEO is going to save humanity is so common that it’s actually uncommon for a CEO to not use saviour language when describing their startup. Cult leaders do the same thing: they create a unique philosophy, imbued with some sort of special message that they alone can see or hear, convince people that only they have the answers for what ails humanity, and use that influence to control the people around them.

I agree. I've been working in Silicon Valley for a few years now, and it honestly feels like a page out of Animal Farm. The Orwellian mismatch between rhetoric and action feels like cult-like propaganda to me.

I don't know how veterans of the Valley can keep this up.

>>Karrot+e1
Can you describe in what ways SV feels like Animal Farm?

> The Orwellian mismatch between rhetoric and action feels like cult-like propaganda to me.

Can you list out a few of these actions?

>>acchow+ka
Maybe I should tell the (abridged) tale of XMPP. Once upon a time, XMPP was an open standard that allowed FB, Google, and independent clients federate at once. The reason Google and FB were able to become such popular messengers is because they allowed all sorts of clients to federate with them. This was the world of Pidgin, Trillian, GTalk, Adium, and others. Then Google and FB both closed off their XMPP support, citing overhead in maintaining a federated service.

Facebook thought it was a better use of its resources to build a Snapchat clone named Slingshot. Google decided it was a better use of its resources to build a social network named Google+.

Animal Farm: "Four legs good, two legs bad" Google: "Don't be evil"

Animal Farm: "Four legs good, two legs better" Google: "You can make money without doing evil" [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil#cite_note-Goog...

In the old days, this was called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

>>Karrot+Vc
Small point that I think FB's snapchat clone was called "Poke".

Also XMPP sucked when it came to mobile devices - maybe the right answer was to have a RFC for an improvement to the standard rather than create environments outside of it, but I can see a reasonable argument for biasing towards development speed.

Google kept XMPP support the longest - I think they closed it when everyone else was closed and the others were using Google's remaining XMPP support to farm over Google users while not allowing Google access to do the same. It's a problem with incentives - there was a time when cross service compatibility was important.