The Black Liszt

Category: Facebook

Summary: Software in Government, Big Business and Big Tech

This is a summary with links to my posts on the many ways that large organizations including government, big business, big tech and the rest diligently apply modern software procedures as taught in academia and required by professional management; they consistently produce disastrous results in software quality, cost, security and everything else that matters.

There are of course issues that are common to all these large organizations, for example in cybersecurity.

https://blackliszt.com/2015/06/systemic-issues-behind-the-cyber-security-disasters-at-opm-citi-anthem-etc.html

Government

Government software disasters are government-as-usual, so much so that disasters that wreck lives barely make the news. For example, over 10 million people world-wide enter a government-run lottery for immigration slots that can lead to US citizenship. How hard can picking a bunch of random numbers be? Apparently too hard for the government software people, with the result of horrible consequences for the declared lottery winners whose immigration slots were invalidated.

https://blackliszt.com/2011/07/software-quality-horror-tales-electronic-diversity-visas.html

Consider the sets "Excellence" and "Government IT." There is a great deal of evidence that these are non-overlapping sets. I learned there are organizations promoting and celebrating digital government. They hold awards ceremonies. I tried to find out what the winner had done to deserve winning. Surprise, surprise, the link at the organization’s website explaining it all was broken. Pathetic.

https://blackliszt.com/2015/05/excellence-in-government-it.html

Even simple things like making Social Security statements available on-line appears to be beyond them — including of course lying about it.

https://blackliszt.com/2024/03/excellenece-in-government-it-the-social-security-administration-.html

The NSA (National Security Agency) has a budget of over $50 Billion and is touted as being the world’s best at cybersecurity. It turns out the only reason we know their super-top-secret budget is because their security was blatantly breached with massive internal data made public.

https://blackliszt.com/2014/05/bureaucracy-regulation-and-computer-security.html

Given that this army of highly-paid cyber geniuses can’t protect itself, it’s not surprising that its analysis of a high-visibility security breach may have sounded good to the public, but was in fact entirely fraudulent.

https://blackliszt.com/2017/01/russia-hacks-dnc-podesta-email-fake-news.html

What do you do with such a huge budget when you’re unable to do what you’re supposed to do even with your own secrets? You set up a massive program to teach students your excellent methods and hope to train over a million certified experts. I tracked the program from a local community college to the NSA’s own description of its program – which was both broken and insecure!

https://blackliszt.com/2017/06/government-cyber-security-tops-the-oxymoron-list.html

Unfortunately, this isn’t just about keeping information safe. Government ineptitude kills people. Instead of taking a quick, simple approach to preventing train crashes:

https://blackliszt.com/2015/05/an-app-to-prevent-train-crashes-like-amtrak-philadelphia.html

The government presses on with its super-expensive solution using obsolete technology, which leads to yet more preventable crashes and deaths.

https://blackliszt.com/2016/10/scandal-hoboken-train-crash.html

It’s not just big governments. The little government of several islands in the Caribbean managed to create a multi-front disaster using best practices to foist a digital currency system on its innocent citizens.

https://blackliszt.com/2022/03/dcash-government-cryptocurrency-shows-why-fedcoin-would-be-a-disaster.html

https://blackliszt.com/2022/03/what-is-behind-the-dcash-central-bank-digital-currency-disaster.html

The US government continues to pursue a national digital currency of the kind that has already proved to be a disaster in the Caribbean. They do so ignoring the fact that the US Dollar is already largely digital, with extensive software support structures that are in place and working well..

https://blackliszt.com/2020/12/we-dont-need-fedcoin-we-already-have-a-national-digital-currency.html

Important things like voting systems are some combination of broken and insecure. I took the trouble to define a simple combination of tech and non-tech to build a modern, secure voting system that was auditable, with operations visible to every voter while keeping what they voted for secret. Will any government institution pay attention, much less implement it? We all know the answer.

https://blackliszt.com/2025/03/voter-id-and-paper-ballots-dont-prevent-cheating.html

Big Business

Executives in big business want to succeed and advance, but this can only happen by avoiding risk. The best way to avoid risk is to do what “everyone else” is doing, what the experts say is best. That’s where industry advisory groups come in.

https://blackliszt.com/2017/05/the-value-of-computer-industry-advisory-groups.html

Giant advisory firms counsel their customers on how to make the best decisions. Getting your customers to like you is high on the list. Carefully crafted words are of supreme importance to such large organizations. Actions that match? Not so much.

https://blackliszt.com/2016/07/gartner-group-big-company-customer-service.html

A giant health insurance company “lost” the personal information of "tens of millions" of its members sometime in 2014; they're not sure how many, whose records were "lost," or when it happened. The details are an astounding illustration of big-corporate IT incompetence.

https://blackliszt.com/2015/02/the-anthem-of-cyber-insecurity.html

I soon found out that my information had indeed been stolen. The company’s response to the theft was right in line with their letting it happen.

https://blackliszt.com/2015/02/my-anthem-account-was-hacked.html

What company doesn't want to be part of the digital revolution and have an app? If you're a major health insurance company, why wouldn't you replace old-fashioned insurance cards with something always up-to-date that comes on an app? Here’s what ensued when one of the industry giants tried.

https://blackliszt.com/2021/02/why-cant-big-companies-build-or-even-buy-sofware-that-works.html

I've covered many big organization face-plants. The awfulness encompasses a broad range of consumer-dissing inconvenience, Here’s a case of some software that "works" but puts customer inconvenience front and center.

https://blackliszt.com/2021/03/why-cant-big-companies-build-software-that-works.html

Here’s a case of a giant company software issue that is low on the “it matters” scale, and high on the “a smart high school student could have done it better” scale. It’s the kind of issue that leads one to wonder whether we’d all be better off if they refused to hire any more people with college degrees for any job, and in particular, management.

https://blackliszt.com/2021/05/anthem-needs-my-feedback-reveals-deep-problems.html

Big Tech

Whether the software is a cool social app, an academic website or a real business, there is a common theme: the software is poorly designed and, even worse, it just breaks. You might think the cool internet apps like Facebook and Twitter are an exception, but they’re not.

https://blackliszt.com/2012/01/internet-software-quality-horror-shows.html

How can you innovate? Did the leaders of the current big tech companies benefit from training in innovation? Once they became large, have the big guys like Google demonstrated excellence in innovation? Uhh, sorry, the facts indicate otherwise.

https://blackliszt.com/2016/05/organizing-for-successful-innovation-recent-history.html

The widely-accepted logic is: Facebook is wildly successful; FB is built on software; therefore, FB software must be excellent. I should hire people from FB to help me build excellent software! The history and facts support neither the logic nor the conclusion.

https://blackliszt.com/2014/12/fb.html

I looked at FB’s mobile app when it had over 700 million people using it. Over 20 million people had written reviews, more than 6 million of which were 3 stars or less. A random sample of those reviews yielded juicy results.

https://blackliszt.com/2014/11/facebooks-software-quality.html

The difference between image and reality at FB is astounding. Here is an interview and a recent book that should lead any ambitious young company to avoid hiring people from there.

https://blackliszt.com/2017/03/software-giants-image-and-reality-facebook.html

Large organizations have trouble building software. This has been true since the dawn of software history, and shows no signs of changing. The decades-long, rolling disaster of Microsoft Windows is a great example of this.

https://blackliszt.com/2015/08/large-organization-software-fails-the-case-of-microsoft-windows.html

Microsoft illustrated multiple issues relating to digital ownership in a case I dug into. Among other things they attempted to require use of their own pathetic browser.

https://blackliszt.com/2014/05/giant-software-bureaucracies.html

There are big problems with software quality. The social apps in particular have decided it's embarrassing. But instead of actually, you know, fixing the problems, they seem to have decided to mask the problems! Twitter is a great example of this disease.

https://blackliszt.com/2013/05/twitter-software-quality-stinks.html

I did detailed studies on Twitter and found that they do indeed produce provably bad search results.

https://blackliszt.com/2013/05/twitter-software-quality-an-oxymoron.html

People write and talk about what's "trending on Twitter" as though the trend meant something. It doesn't. It's based on deeply flawed Twitter search software that gives random, widely varying results.

https://blackliszt.com/2013/05/the-bogus-basis-of-trending-on-twitter.html

Twitter fired boatloads of software engineers in 2022 leading some to predict that software disaster will ensue. But then, most people don’t know much about software and don’t realize what a disaster Twitter software has been for years.

https://blackliszt.com/2022/11/twitter-can-improve-software-quality-by-losing-most-of-its-engineers.html

Then there is Apple, the high-prestige computer company making expensive devices. In 2016, terrorists killed a bunch of people in California. Law enforcement and the FBI worked hard to find out what happened and who else might have been involved. This required looking in the government-issued iPhones used by the killers. What happened? Apple did its best to protect the criminals. Here are the highlights.

https://blackliszt.com/2016/03/the-apple-fbi-fiasco.html

And here are the details:

https://blackliszt.com/2016/03/apple-can-help-fight-crime-while-maintaining-privacy.html

https://blackliszt.com/2016/02/apples-cancer-prevention-strategy.html

https://blackliszt.com/2016/02/apples-approach-to-privacy-terrorists-and-criminals.html

I reviewed a book about government security on Amazon. The author was impressive and had loads of experience. Many of the reviews were positive, with a few pointing to obvious bias. I wrote a review that pointed to the positive aspects, but also mentioned some of the bias. The review disappeared. I interacted with Amazon, and was told that suppressing the review was a mistake. It appeared again. Then it disappeared. I tried to write a review and was told I've been banned!

https://blackliszt.com/2023/03/early-evidence-of-criticism-suppression-by-intelligence-agencies-.html

Yelp isn’t as big as the industry giants, but it’s pretty big. A random plunge into their system demonstrates the same kind of slick surface with rotten underpinnings as their larger brethren.

https://blackliszt.com/2021/05/yelp-big-tech-incompetent-corrupt.html

Conclusion

There is a better way! The winning methods aren’t even new – they’re proven in practice by small groups that need to win. See:

https://blackliszt.com/2023/07/summary-software-innovation.html

https://blackliszt.com/2023/07/summary-wartime-software-to-win-the-war.html

November 17, 2023
Facebook’s Libra is not a Cryptocurrency
“Everyone” says that Facebook’s Libra is a cryptocurrency. Long before Libra had been imagined, Bitcoin pioneered and established the brand new world of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin created the category, and has always been its leading exemplar. The white paper by the still-unknown Bitcoin creator and inventor spelled out his design goals and the main aspects of Bitcoin that supported those goals. Once you read and understand what cryptocurrency is, it becomes very clear that, whatever Libra may be, it is NOT a cryptocurrency. To claim that it’s a cryptocurrency is like claiming that a locked desk drawer is a bank vault – yes they both have keys and are supposed to keep things safe, but other than that…

Satoshi, the brilliant creator of Bitcoin, designed a currency that involves cryptography. If you want to be extremely loose, you could say that Libra is the same thing, because it’s also a currency that somehow involves cryptography. But that’s like saying that the thing you use to “buy” properties and hotels in the board game Monopoly is “money.” Try depositing some of it at an ATM and see how far you get. Let’s explore the basics of what makes a cryptocurrency the way Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency.

First and foremost, there’s the concept that in Bitcoin, no one is in charge. How can you possibly make a computer system that works, does lots of computing, keeping lots of financial transactions and makes sure everyone’s account balance is correct … without anyone being in charge?? These things are hard to do when someone IS in charge! There’s quite a bit involved in making this happen, as I illustrate here, but here are some of the key points:
- Anyone who wants to can sign up to be a “miner,” who are the folks that make Bitcoin work.
- A miner has to put money into buying fast computers, running the mining software, and connecting with all the other miners to share work.
- Miners get new transactions that Bitcoin users want to perform and “make them happen.”
- This means that miners race each other to solve complex problems involving cryptography, the net result of which is a new page (block) of transactions that have been vetted, and “locked” by crypto-key.
- Every piece of work a miner does is paid for by newly-minted Bitcoin – the miners are paid with Bitcoin!
- Miners are highly incented to do the work and do it right, because they want to get lots of Bitcoin, and they want Bitcoin to continue to be viable.
- Miners come and go as they see fit – no one “approves” them, literally no one’s in charge.
- Miners can be anywhere, in any country.
Big corporations and regulators don’t like the unsupervised free-for-all of Bitcoin. They like to control things. And that’s exactly why Bitcoin was invented – to escape the control of a central authority but still have a system that works. It’s a brilliant concept, and Bitcoin’s success shows that it works.

Along comes Facebook and Libra. Facebook is ambitious. They keep trying to invent new things. They mostly fail when they build things themselves, so they buy companies instead. Facebook would LOVE to buy Bitcoin – but it’s not for sale, because no one owns it – darn! They’re forced to try to build it. But being a big corporation, they just can’t stop themselves from building their version of Bitcoin in a style that makes them comfortable – violating every single core principle of Bitcoin – the original cryptocurrency – along the way!

Here’s what Facebook is doing with Libra:
- In Bitcoin, literally no one is in charge. With Libra, Facebook is designing and building it. Facebook is in charge and owns it.
- Facebook has gone to considerable lengths to create the illusion that it’s not in charge with this fake Swiss-based consortium of prestigious companies that supposedly control things. Either way, some combination of big name-brand companies are in charge, which is pretty far from Bitcoin’s really-truly NO ONE is in charge.
- Just like Facebook owns and controls all the computers that run Facebook, Libra will own and control all the computers that run Libra in a private data center. To all the corporate computer types, this is a good thing, but it totally and completely violates a core principle of Bitcoin, leaving it open to the same kind of insider corruption that all such places are rife with. It’s also a silly idea, as explained here. Microsoft and Intel explain the issues here.
- One of the less pleasant side effects of Bitcoin’s miners and what they do with cryptography is the fact that “proof of work” takes time. It’s a cornerstone of getting all these strangers to play nice and do good things, but it takes a number of minutes to complete a transaction. To Facebook, this is unacceptable. So they’ve blithely discarded the key cryptographic cornerstone of Bitcoin, and replaced it with some light-weight encryption, so they can still say they’re a “cryptocurrency,” even though they’re not.
There’s more to be said, but that should be sufficient to make the basic point that Libra is a cryptocurrency the same way my cousin, who is sometimes allowed to sing in bars, is an opera singer. My cousin likes to think she is, and I’m nice to her. But she’s never so much as attended a performance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, much less appeared on stage in front of an audience. Similarly, Facebook’s Libra likes to think it’s a cryptocurrency even better than the original, Bitcoin, but it swore off the core principles of Bitcoin from the start, and doesn’t deserve to be called by the same terminology.

Note: This was originally posted at Forbes.
November 11, 2019
Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency and the P2P Apps Venmo and CashApp
Facebook is working hard on building a brand-new cryptocurrency system called Libra, sort of like Bitcoin and Ethereum, except it will be much better, at least according to Facebook.

With all the talk about Libra, cryptocurrency, regulation and the rest, no one seems to wonder about what existing solutions normal people will be using to solve the problems for which Libra is suited. This isn’t strange at all actually – in all you’ve read about Facebook’s Libra, how much have you read about the pressing problems it will solve, the unmet needs it will address – right? Mostly what you read about is how Libra will solve all sorts of problems that today’s crypto-currency systems have, how many partners they have and how wonderful it will be.

Libra will be an infrastructure “out there” somewhere, with lots of important people and organizations making sure it’s wonderful. But in practical terms, most people will use it via an e-wallet, an app that they install on their smart phones. That’s where a name that hasn’t appeared a great deal pops up: Calibra. Calibra is a newly-formed Facebook subsidiary that will be the e-wallet for Libra. It will “integrate with” Facebook’s WhatApp and Messenger, giving it incredible consumer reach.

You can read all about what it will do, but it’s basically an e-wallet for holding e-cash and providing basic functions like sending and receiving e-cash to and from another e-wallet. Except for the little “detail” that instead of sending real money, you’re sending the Libra cryptocurrency, and will have to go to an additional step to move dollars in a bank account to and from your Calibra wallet, converting to or from dollars along the way.

Putting aside the fancy new terms of cryptocurrency and the rest, does using a phone to make person-to-person payments remind you of anything? How about Venmo, the P2P e-wallet used by over 51 million people, which is now part of PayPal? How about Cash App, the rapidly growing P2P e-wallet installed in about 60 million phones?

These are proven consumer applications which have already gone through numerous upgrades and feature additions, used at least weekly by tens of millions of people.

Facebook has incredible reach, and billions of cash in the bank gotten by selling your private information to advertisers. They will certainly make a lot of noise. How does Facebook's proposed system compare to Venmo and Cash App?
- Venmo and Cash App just use dollars. Simple. Facebook will use the newly invented Libra, which needs to “work,” something Facebook isn’t good at doing.
- If you split a bill and need to send $7.30 to your friend, you just do it with Venmo and Cash App. With Facebook, you’ll have to convert it to Libra, send that, and have it be converted back. Hopefully the exchange rate won’t move too much.
- Venmo and Cash App support free P2P payments. The Calibra website claims it will be “low cost,” but they have yet to say what the cost will be; after all, there is a HUGE cryptocurrency infrastructure to support, none of which is needed by the existing cash apps.
- It’s easy to imagine Facebook will find a way to sell the information about your transactions to the highest bidder, or somehow find a way to "monetize" what you do with your money. It’s what they do!
- Libra and Calibra will work for international payments! With exchanges from local to Libra to foreign currency, two exchanges instead of one. That’s certainly something Cash App and Venmo don’t do today, and will appeal to some fraction of a hundredths of a percent of the market. Except for the proven massive cryptocurrency uses for money laundering and international crime, who will have yet another channel to support their illicit activities.
Facebook's Libra is getting all the attention any giant corporation could want, including some attention I suspect they'd rather not have, from regulators. But in the end, will they be able to make this massive software effort work? Will it do anything consumers want better than existing apps like Venmo and Cash App that are in widespread use? There is good reason to be skeptical.

This was originally posted at Forbes.
September 6, 2019
Facebook’s Libra Crypto-currency Introduces a Brand-new Smart Contract Language

Facebook’s Libra faces the daunting task of pulling off the flawless world-wide launch sometime next year of a new cryptocurrency based on new code. In taking on this task, they are hoping to pull off a first in software history: a major body of new code that works out of the gate. I assess the odds of this working here. At the same time, they have upped the stakes by also introducing a brand-new smart contract framework based on a brand-new language. Good luck!

Smart contracts are a way of extending and customizing a blockchain. Outsiders might imagine that the Bitcoin competitor Ethereum emerged from the pack because its name is somehow cooler than Bitcoin, but insiders know that an important factor was its pioneering incorporation of the first widely known implementation of smart contracts. Here is my explanation of smart contracts.

There’s just one little problem: however cool Ethereum’s smart contracts may be, in practice a majority of smart contracts have bugs and security holes, as a study of tens of thousands of them has shown. Even worse, smart contracts are part of the “immutable ledger” that is supposed to make things secure. Except when there are bugs and security holes, it doesn’t.

Facebook has quietly recognized that smart contracts are needed to make the primitive blockchain database even marginally practical, but that most smart contracts aren’t even modestly intelligent. How are they going to fix this problem?

One of the wonderful things about the steady stream of blockchain and cryptocurrency initiatives by internet and corporate giants is that they tend to tell us, in plain and simple language, the fatal flaws of the whole block-whoey business. Of course, they don’t put it that way. They know that they’ve created a dramatically improved system of blockchain (or whatever) – and as soon as you fully appreciate how bad the standard-issue stuff is, you’ll insist on buying their new, dramatically improved version. Microsoft and Intel have done us all this favor in explaining the wonders of their proprietary version of blockchain, as I described here.

Facebook has followed in this clear pattern. They actually spell out, in no uncertain terms, that existing smart contract implementations are dangerous things, riddled with bugs and filled with security holes. But it’s nearly impossible to build a marginally usable cryptocurrency system of the kind Facebook wants without them.

Facebook is proud of its solution: a new software language called Move. Yes, a language called “Move.”

I’ve spent a little time checking out the new language. The developers are generally right about the deficiencies they are addressing, effectively endorsing the view that existing smart contracts are hopelessly flawed. They are smart and have put forward credible solutions to the problems. It’s just possible that, after a few years and after the software has gone open-source, the new system will turn out to be an improvement on the old one. But before deciding that, let’s do something programmers avoid doing: take a quick look at history.

Software history is chock full of programming languages, each of which was invented to improve on or fix problems with earlier languages. Most new languages are supposed to make programming faster and more flexible, with fewer errors of any kind. After more than half a century of effort with thousands of new languages, how has that worked out? See this for details. Sorry, humans are creative types, and are capable of making mistakes in any medium at all. While Germans may be deeply certain that the German language is more clear and precise and superior for expressing truths than French, citizens of France are remarkably articulate about how this is not the case – while at the same time demonstrating that the French language is no better.

The team at Facebook has done us all the great service of making widely known the otherwise ignored deep flaws in Smart Contracts, while almost certainly increasing the chances of things going horribly wrong with Libra while introducing a well-intentioned but, well, new language, claiming against decades of experience with thousands of languages that this one will really bring human programmers to the land of perfection.

I’ve got a bridge. It’s cheap – wanna buy it?

This was originally posted at Forbes.

July 23, 2019
Facebook’s Libra Crypto-currency is unlikely to Work – Here’s Why
There is a great deal of buzz about Facebook’s new cryptocurrency Libra. There is even a trickle of technical information about it surfacing. No one seems to be talking about the deep-seated technical reasons the new system will crash and burn. Sadly for Libra, there isn’t just one such fatal flaw! Here I’ll describe one of them.

The core reasons that FB’s Libra will fail are:

it’s a large body of new code

new code is always riddled with bugs, no matter how hard the developers try

Unlike the code big companies like FB are used to, bugs are really hard to hide in this application

It’s a large body of new code

The hype machine for crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum, ICO’s, Blockchain and the rest has been running at full speed for a few years now. Leaders in every industry are infected with intense FOMO (fear of missing out), and are committing to projects left and right. With all the blockchain projects going on for years now, it’s understandable that most people would think that this code must be solid and tested by now. There’s just one little problem: there are thousands of bodies of code, with new ones emerging all the time as groups get excited about fixing the glaring problems in older implementation of the concepts; little groups like Microsoft and Intel. These aren’t just tweaks – we’re talking major new bodies of code here.

Think about transportation machines as diverse as propeller planes and powered skateboards. Yes, they both get you from point A to point B, but they’re quite a bit different from each other. The code that Libra plans to use is brand new in every way – even the central concepts of how blocks are built and chained are radically different than the proven-in-production methods used by Bitcoin. That’s like saying “we’re using proven engine technology to build our new car – except that its engine won’t use gas, diesel or electricity for power – it will be better!”

New code is riddled with bugs

People who write code make mistakes. Lots of them. All the time. There are a host of methods in varying degrees of use to prevent or catch such mistakes, things ranging from test-driven-development to extensive code reviews. None of them work. No, they don't work for Facebook either.

Yes, there are some bodies of code that are remarkably reliable. Linux is a great example – it powers over half of all the web servers in the world! Linux performs a function that was thoroughly understood when it was written, and is an open-source project written in a solid language – C – and led by a true coding genius. Its quality was achieved over years of top-notch leadership with thousands of talented contributing programmers and millions of installations. Libra is at the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s brand new, and it’s supposed to work flawlessly keeping track of financial assets from day one. The chances it will perform without flaws from the beginning are essentially nil.

What’s worse, the internet giants have an unbroken track record of releasing code that’s riddled with errors. Yes, Facebook is partnering with lots of corporate giants – and those giants are equally accomplished at releasing an unbroken stream of software horror shows.

Facebook ignores the issue of its inability to produce software that works and satisfies users, much less have a solution for it that it will apply to Libra.

The tech giants usually hide their bugs

The much-lauded software geniuses at Facebook, Twitter, Google and the rest are convinced that they are as good as programmers get. But their efforts have a track record of failure. More important than the actual failures is the fact that their applications are ones in which hiding errors is built into the applications! When you enter a search query, how do you know whether the results are accurate, so long as you get a list of vaguely relevant results? When you pull up Facebook and see the newsfeed, are the entries always the right ones? Are all the entries that should be there in fact there? How would you know when they’re not?

Contrast this with your credit card. You get a statement. You can be sure the bank has included every transaction you’ve made, so they can make you pay for it. Most people at least scan the transactions to see if there’s one you didn’t make, so you can call the card company and get it removed, so you don’t have to pay for whatever the criminal bought using your card! The typical internet method of hiding errors just isn’t going to work here – and Facebook doesn’t even acknowledge the issue, much less have a way to solve it.

Conclusion

Facebook, like the other internet giants, is incapable of building code that works, even after extensive testing and use by millions of users. Corporate giants and the government are no better. Facebook’s usual method of tricking users into not seeing its errors won’t work here. Facebook and its partners are rushing to somehow leverage Bitcoin’s “success” at funding the international illegal drug and human trafficking trade, flouting anti-money-laundering regulations and providing a platform for what amounts to massive illegal gambling. Of course, they talk about being charitable to the "unbanked" and other noble goals, while continuing to enrich themselves in a way the so-called "robber barons" could only envy. They are likely to fail at this mission because of their inability to write software that works.

Final note: the standard pronunciation “Libra” is Lee-brah, like the astrological sign. Because of its deeply flawed design, which Facebook and its partners try to cover up, I prefer to pronounce Libra as “lie-brah” – because it’s based on lies.
This is cross-posted from the original on Forbes.
July 19, 2019
Social Media Has a Long History

It seems like the whole world is in an uproar about social media, with frequent revelations of awfulness and malfeasance. The uproar is about social media such as Facebook, Twitter and the rest. The trouble is these issues have existed in one form or another in social media going back … hundreds of years. What we are seeing is ignorance of the present combined with ignorance of the past. In other words, business as usual.

The Core Drivers of Social Media

Most people care about their place in society — their status. They care about how they're perceived, who knows who they are and how others relate to them. While this drive seems to come to a kind of perverse peak in middle and high school, it persists for most peoples' lives.

Intimately related to caring what others think is the drive to express what you think and what you've done. While this is related to influencing others' thoughts, it seems to be a kind of innate drive as well.

In short, you want to tell people what you've done, what you think, and you want to hear about other people, particularly those you somehow are involved with or even just similar to in some way.

Closely related to this are the core concepts of status and fashion. It's a basic urge to want to see your status reflected publicly if it's high, and many people have strong interest in what high-status people do and how they do it. Particularly as fashions of various kinds wax and wane, from clothing to activity to speech, people who want to increase their status have an intense interest in learning what the new things are.

Key Characteristics of Social Media

What makes something Social media vs. some random other kind of media? It's pretty simple: social media mostly consists of media (words and pictures) that is about and either written/created by the person or sourced from that person. It's about what a person says, thinks or does.

Now let's get to the other key characteristic: money. Who pays for social media? After all, it costs quite a bit to produce it, and that money has to come from somewhere. Historically, the people who consume the media pay a little, while … get ready … advertisers pay a lot. Today, the incremental cost of delivering social media to the person who consumes it is so little that no one bothers to charge for it — the whole cost is borne by advertisers.

Social media is an amazing phenomenon, deeply rooted in human drives and emotions. People produce the content for it for free — they are glad to have things about themselves distributed at little effort of their own to those they may like to know about it. And they read about themselves and people to whom they are socially connected with, paying to do so if necessary. They can't help but knowing that the ads that are intermixed with the "content" are going a long way (in the electronic world, all the way) to paying for their reading pleasure, but it rarely bothers them. They also know that ads are targeted to particular groups of readers. It makes common sense, after all. No big deal — if I were an advertiser, of course I'd want to show my ads to people who are likely to buy what I'm selling!

Earlier versions of Social Media

People like to imagine that social media are strictly electronics-age things. Mark Zuckerberg invented it, didn't he? No, sorry! Social media have been around for a looooong time. I could go all the way to ancient Sumer and Egypt, but I think the point will be clear enough with more recent examples.

Here is a notice in the Pittston Pa Gazette from 1928 about a function attended by my grandmother, Agnes Black:

Here is an ad that helped pay for that information to be printed:

More recently, here is a notice in the same paper from 1955 about a visit made by my parents:

Here is one of the ads that helped pay for the notice.

The notice was actually fake news! My parents visited with their two children, David Bruce Black and Douglas John Black — not David and Bruce. The advertisers don't care a whit — they just want the eyeballs to persuade them to buy some hot new technology:

I could give examples from many other places and centuries. Things have evolved, but since the principles are rooted in human in human nature, not as much has changed in principle as you might think.

Conclusion

Everything is about people. A great deal about people is relationships and status. The experiences we had in middle school and high school didn't disappear into nothingness. They just evolved as each of us entered new groups of people, each with its own pecking order and rules for engagement. One of the most ironic things about modern social media is that certain groups of people are really upset about what gets published, and want to make sure that only the "truth" is published. They, of course, want to be in charge of defining what "truth" is. Sorry, guys, in the world of social relations and much else, "truth" is nothing but a pretty veneer on top of raw power. Yes, your grace, your honor. Why should it be different now that we're staring into little screens and swiping while we walk?

October 16, 2018
Software Giants: Image and Reality at Facebook

I am perpetually amazed at the flood of reverent articles about the wonderful big software companies that are inflicted on us. How great are their leaders! How wonderful it is to work there! Everyone should emulate their business practices! Their products are awesome!

The reason why the sycophantic flood continues is based in simple economics, but why most people appear to buy the b.s. is beyond me. You don't have to be a hardened cynic to see past the image.

This subject is worth a book or two. I've contributed just a couple blog posts. This post is another one on the wonderful Facebook, which (supposedly) does so much to demonstrate software excellence and contribute to our betterment.

Why Facebook is Wonderful

An article has just appeared about the wonderfulness of Facebook. The article is an interview by John Battelle with Lori Goler, who is "VP of People" at Facebook, leading the company's growth from 500 employees to 15,000. Here she is:

She sounds like a really nice person. I've worked with the interviewer, John Battelle, at one of his prior ventures, and he's a great guy.

The whole article is worth scanning. But the subhead gives you the idea: Facebook is "the world's most admired employer." Here are a couple quotes from Ms. Goler:

We are really looking for builders…What goes along with that is a learning mindset.

Being a strengths-based organization is a place where you are really looking to put people in roles where they are doing work they enjoy that plays to their strengths. … It’s where you get the best teamwork. It’s where the people are able to do the best work of their lives.

For us, the mission is, “To make the world more open and connected,” so it makes sense that our culture is open and connected. Then internally, we reflect that culture.

What we find is that what it really means is that people have all the context they need to be able to work with great autonomy in the organization, which of course leads to greater innovation and greater impact. It’s been a virtuous cycle for us.

According to the article, Facebook is a great place with a socially uplifting mission, populated by great people who are always learning and in roles where their strengths are tapped and their work has impact is fulfilling, in a completely open and supportive environment. Wow. Who wouldn't want to work there?

Another view of Facebook

For a contrasting view of Facebook, I recommend reading this book:

Warning: I had to force myself to get through the book; the author's self-described behavior was distasteful, to put it mildly. But it made the rest of his descriptions the more credible, and he said nothing that contradicted my inside knowledge.

The book has gotten lots of attention. It's been reviewed by major media, for example the New York Times:

And by tech journals, for example Tech Crunch, which declared it was the "year's best non-business book about business"

The book is #1 in several categories at Amazon. The top-rated review is telling:

….

Perhaps you can see that there is a contrast, shall we say, between the wonderfulness of Facebook as presented by its leaders and the reality. But this makes sense. What was the job of the VP People before getting that job? Marketing! In other words, telling stories to get you to buy stuff. She is continuing to do her job well, i.e., selling Facebook as a great place to work.

Facebook's Product

Well, maybe it isn't such a great place to work in spite of all the propaganda, but at least those 15,000 people turn out a great, high-quality product, right?

Here's a post about software quality issues with a section on Facebook, and here are details about the inability of those 15,000 engineers to turn out a product that has reasonable quality, even after many attempts — as judged by their own users.

It's not just Facebook. It's Google and the rest. Think about this: with such wonderful employees and huge cash reserves, why can't they make their own products work, much less innovate? If they're so innovative, why does so much of what they "innovate" come from acquisitions? See this for details.

You might ask, if their software quality is so awful, how did they become so big and valuable? Good question. Zuckerberg made some world-class smart business strategy moves to get it going. See here for details.

Why this matters

These observations about image and reality at the big famous software companies have huge practical implications for small companies, managers and programmers.

I have often observed that when board members want to hire a top executive, or when managers want to fill an important software position, they often value highly a candidate's having done a stint at one of these famous giants. They'll think something like "Facebook has a product that nearly everyone uses; I want to build a product that nearly everyone uses; therefore, I'll hire people from Facebook, and I'll get a product that everyone uses."

Of course rarely will someone come out and say something like that, but the Facebook (or Google or whatever) aura is so strong, people often act as though they believe it. On the other hand, if you really get the perspective about the inept software giants described here and confirmed widely, you will tend to avoid hiring people from Facebook (or wherever) because you know you're likely to drag down your company to its abysmal level!

Lots more detail on this and related subjects is in my book on Software People. Or for an illustration from a whole different direction, consider the incompetent doctor and nurse in the PBS civil war hospital drama Mercy Street.

Nurse Hastings frequently brings up the fact that she served with Florence Nightingale as proof that her opinions are the best.

Conclusion

Nothing is going to change. Major corporations of all kinds, even more so the big tech ones, will beat the drums of self-promotion, selling themselves to customers and potential employees. It's in the interest of groups that hunger for money and attention from the big companies to make nice, and trumpet the self-congratulations. The big companies will continue to be unable to innovate, and will instead buy innovative companies. Sometimes the contrast between the image that is widely promoted and the reality gets to me. At minimum, my hope is that you're working at a place that's far better than Facebook, and that you avoid error of attribution I have described here.

March 21, 2017
Facebook’s Software Quality: the Implications

I have pointed out Facebook's lack of desire or ability (who cares which?) to deliver software that actually works. I've pointed out that they're hardly alone in this respect. It's important to accept this observation as true, so that you can change behaviors that may have been unconsciously predicated on the supposition that Facebook delivers great software, effectively and efficiently. They don't. So don't hire their people and expect great things to happen, and don't mindlessly emulate their methods or use their tools!

The Unspoken Assumption

Facebook is a wildly successful company, worth over $200 billion. I'd like my company to be worth even 1% of Facebook. So I better find out what Facebook did, and learn from it. Facebook is a software company, so their engineers must be smart and effective. I better get some of them in so they can teach us the "Facebook way." And their tools — wow. If Facebook uses something, what an endorsement that is. My guys had better have a real good reason to use something else; I look at what FB's worth and what we're worth — don't we want to be like them? If a tool or method is good enough for FB, it should be plenty good enough for us.

The role played by software in FB's success

Here's the logic:

FB is wildly successful.

FB is built on software.

Therefore, FB software must be wildly excellent.

We already know by examining the quality of FB software that it's crappy. So we have reason to suspect that the virtues of FB software may NOT be a driver of FB's success. Consider this thought: What if FB is wildly successful IN SPITE OF its crappy software? If that's true, the LAST thing you'd want to do would be to infect your reasonably healthy engineers with disease vectors from FB.

Explaining FB's Success

There are lots of reasons software companies can become very successful other than having great software. In fact, by the time a company gets large, bureaucracy and mediocrity normally take over, and any great qualities in the software are normally eliminated. The most common reason a software company gets and stays successful is the network effect, the self-validating notion that "everyone" is using the software, therefore I should too.

The network effect becomes even more powerful when there's a marketplace. E-Bay is a great example. If you're a seller, you want to sell in the place that has the most buyers. If you're a buyer, you want the greatest choice of things to buy. Similarly, if FB is where all your friends are, you'd better sign up — which makes the network effect even stronger.

FB, by chance or plan, leveraged the network effect for growth brilliantly. Harvard already had a physical book with everyone's pictures in it, called the Facebook by students. The basic education and promotion problem was solved out of the gate: Harvard students knew what a "facebook" was; they all had a physical one, and used it, if only because their own information was there. For example, here's me in the 1968 edition:
However straight-laced those Harvard freshman looked, a fair number of them were hackers and troublemakers. Here's the very last page of the 1968 FB. Look at the last guy listed.

There's a similar entry, with a different photo, at the start of the book.

Zuckerberg was solidly in the long-standing Harvard hacker tradition. He had already illictly grabbed student photos for a prior application, which both got him in trouble and made him famous on campus. So when he launched "thefacebook," of course all the Harvard students would check it out. He did this in January. It was used by about half of all Harvard undergrads within a month.

His next smart move was to open it just to students at a couple more elite schools, and then Ivy League schools. Once established there, he expanded. He did NOT open the doors and let anyone join — he moved from one natural community to the next, letting the network effect do its magic before moving on. Finally, alumni were allowed to join, but only if they had a .edu address proving their affiliation. That's when I joined. Only after a whole generation of students had made it the standard did FB allow their parents to join.

The quality of the software had nothing to do with this. If people had to pay for it, FB would have flopped. Feature after feature came pouring out of the self-declared brilliant minds of the top people at FB, many of them flops, mixed in with scary experiments with privacy. But it was "good enough" most of the time, it's free, it's where your friends are, what can you do?

The conclusion is clear: FB grew to be a huge success IN SPITE OF having rotten software quality and development methods that are just horrible.

The FB environment and yours

Facebook software development methods and tools are NOT something a small, fast-moving, high-quality software shop should want to emulate. Their quality methods in particular are not only trashed by their users, but also by a fair number of ex-employees. The same thing goes for the computing and server environment.

If you find a talented ex-FB-er, by means hire him or her — but only after verifying that they're sick of how things are done at FB and want to work at a high-quality place.

Above all, don't emulate the actions of FB's leadership. It's the network-effect flywheel that continues to bring eyeballs to their applications, NOT their great software.

And think about this: if they're so brilliant and such great developers, why have they done about 50 acquisitions in their short life, a couple of which are important to their growth?

December 7, 2014
Facebook’s Software Quality: the Facts

Facebook is an incredibly successful company, one of the most valuable on the planet. It is natural to assume that a main reason for this is that they've got a boatload of great programmers who produce code that users love. This assumption is wrong. In fact, the widespread adoption of Facebook masks deep, long-term quality issues that are not getting better.

Facebook Success

Facebook recently passed $200 billion in market value. Amazing! It has billions of users world-wide and has no serious competition. No one can question FB's success in user count and market capitalization.

Facebook Mobile App

Mobile device use is going through the roof. We are in the middle of a massive, rapid migration from workstations and laptops to tablets and smart phones. This trend impacts FB just like everyone else. At the recent Money2020 conference, a top FB executive laid out the numbers, which are stunning; in short, FB mobile use nearly equals normal web use. If anything is important at FB, it's got to be getting the mobile app right.

Facebook Mobile App Quality

So how is FB doing, this premier, ultra-successful company with no lack of resources to do an excellent job? They've got to be doing way better than the rest of the industry, right?

Let's start by looking at user reviews:

Not too bad, 4 stars out of 5, right? But out of more than 22 million reviews, more than a quarter gave 1, 2 or 3 stars, more than 6,000,000 reviewers! Let's look at a few of those reviews. (I didn't scan for exceptionally bad reviews; I just picked off ones that were near the top of the Play store.)

Here are a couple reviews. Cindy gave 1 star because the app doesn't work at all, and Johnny gave 2 because he suddenly can't avoid being buried in notifications.

Here are a couple more reviews. The third reviewer gave 3 stars even though the app is basically disfunctional.

These are educational:

The 3 on the left describe things that worked on a prior release that no longer work, which is the cardinal sin of quality testing. Look at Bratty's review awarding 4 stars, even though he/she can't use the app at all. Makes you wonder if anything but 5 stars is good for FB. Jeremy's review sums it up: "you're still not listening to your users." If only 5 stars represents satisfied users, the ratings mean that about half of FB app users have a serious bone to pick. Which is quite a statement.

FB App Quality in Context

Compare the performance of the FB app to the performance of your car. Getting a new release of the app is similar to getting your car back from the repair shop, only with little trouble on your part and no expense. Most cars run pretty well — they start in the morning, run through the day, and rarely break down. When you get your car back from the repair shop, it's even better, even less likely to break down.

Not true for FB. Even though it's "in the repair shop" pretty frequently, the FB "mechanics" all too often find a way to break things that used to work, and fail to fix things that didn't work when it went into the "shop." FB programmers and managers think they're way smarter than auto mechanics, but if the car people performed even a little bit like the FB crew, they'd be out of business. The reality is that, with all their oh-so-highly-educated-and-smart mountains of cool (mostly) dudes, the FB crowd can't come close to delivering the quality that nearly every corner-garage mechanic delivers every day.

FB quality stinks, and it stinks for their fastest-growing, flagship product. In saying so, I'm simply summarizing the expressed experiences of literally millions of their users. There are ways to achieve high quality software. FB does not lack the resources. The fact that they don't deliver quality and aren't even embarassed about it tells us that they just don't care.

November 23, 2014
Internet Software Quality Horror Shows

Whether the software is a cool social app, an academic website or a real business, there is a common theme: the software is poorly designed and, even worse, it just breaks. As in falls flat on the floor, waves its arms in surrender, and just gives up. And not just once — it keeps breaking! As I've said before, we really need a revolution in software quality.

Cool Social Apps

Hey, social is where it's at — how can billions of Facebook users be wrong? Before long, there will be as many FB users as MacDonald's has sold hamburgers (billions and billions)!

Those guys must be great programmers, huh? I mean, just look at their office:

Here's one of them giving a talk at a conference:

See how cool he is? He's just wearing a t-shirt, not even "business casual."

The other social media are just as cool. Here's a "chill" Twitter office:

And Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO — quite the opposite of a buttoned-down financial guy, huh?

It's perfectly obvious that these guys must write just the coolest, most awesome code ever. There's no way people this cool could make elementary programming mistakes, particularly when their application is so very dead-simple, and hardly ever changes — they could spend practically all their time being cool and polish up some already-faultless code a couple times a day, and still be OK.

Except this little detail, which I scraped from my own screen, and which I personally have seen countless times:

Yes, the famous Twitter fail whale. I think Twitter got tired of all the publicity their "cute" failure message was getting them, so they reverted to something more discrete; here's an example:

FB is just as bad, of course, and they've always tried to minimize the message when they screw up:

Apparently, FB is incapable of keeping even the most recent day's worth of updates on-line — you should try going back in history and seeing how far you get. Oh, you thought the stuff you wrote was your data, did you?

Naturally, it makes sense to consider that you get what you pay for; all these cool social apps are, after all, free. You can hardly complain when something you didn't pay for is flakey — return it and demand a full refund!

So let's turn to a more promising field. Everybody's supposed to go to college and learn stuff, so…

Academia

Let's see if the universities do any better. I was just on a local college's website, and it was even worse than Twitter — Twitter's code knew it was screwing up and put up the fail whale. In this case, any number of links I hit encountered badly broken code:

Oh, alright. The colleges are perpetually underfunded, and putting up a website that works isn't a high priority compared to … all the other things they spend money on. I guess.

Probably a real business does it better, right?

Profit-making Big Company

Even more so, an essential public service, like the cable company! Those guys have the money, the funding, the experience and the mandate to do it right. Let's pick the case where their motivation is the highest: collecting money.

Oops.

Just a few days ago, I was on my local cable provider's site trying to access my account. Here's what I got:

Not just once, but repeatedly, for hours!

But maybe it's just TW that's got problems — surely all the other big companies do things great, with their huge staffs and policies and procedures and all, right?

Sadly, no. Here's just one personal example from Verizon:

Summary

There's no getting around it. Software is just bad. Everywhere. We can speculate about why this is the case, but let's agree on the facts: it's bad, and not getting better.

January 22, 2012