61
" Facebook built its foundation on a second lie, repeated thousands of times in early meetings between Facebook’s army of sales reps and the world’s largest consumer brands: “Build big communities and you will own them.” Hundreds of brands invested hundreds of millions on Facebook to aggregate enormous branded communities hosted by Facebook. And by urging consumers to “like” their brands, they gave Facebook an inordinate amount of free advertising. After brands built this expensive house, and were ready to move in, Facebook barked, “Just kidding, those fans aren’t really yours; you need to rent them.” The organic reach of a brand’s content—percentage of posts from a brand received in a fan’s feed—fell from 100 percent to single digits. Now, if a brand wants to reach its community, it must advertise on—that is, pay—Facebook. This is similar to building a house and having the county inspector show up as you’re putting on the finishing touches. As she changes the locks she informs you, “You have to rent this from us. "
― Scott Galloway , The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
64
" and it gets its content, similar to Google, from its users. In other words, more than a billion customers labor for Facebook without compensation. By comparison, the big entertainment companies must spend billions to create original content. Netflix is shelling out more than $100 million for each season of The Crown and will spend $6 billion on content in 2017 (50 percent more than either NBC or CBS).26 Yet Facebook competes for our attention, and wins it, with pictures of fourteen-month-old Max curled up with his new Vizsla puppy. This is fascinating to a small audience, maybe two hundred or three hundred friends, but that’s enough. It’s easy for the machine to aggregate, segment, and target. "
― Scott Galloway , The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
69
" How people interact with one another determines the projects they work on, who will work with them, and who wants to hire them. Young people who have a strong sense of their own identity, remain poised under stress, and learn and apply what they’ve learned, do better than peers who are more easily flustered, get hung up on petty issues, and let their emotions drive their responses to stimuli. People who are comfortable taking direction and giving it, and who understand their role in a group, do better than their peers when lines of authority get murky and organizational structures are fluid. "
― Scott Galloway , The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
72
" Curiosity is crucial to success. What worked yesterday is out-of-date today and forgotten tomorrow—replaced by a new tool or technique we haven’t yet heard of. Consider that the telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million users, whereas television was in 50 million households within 13 years, the internet in 4, . . . and Angry Birds in 35 days. In the tech era, the pace is accelerating further: it took Microsoft Office 22 years to reach a billion users, but Gmail only 12, and Facebook 9. Trying to resist this tide of change will drown you. Successful people in the digital age are those who go to work every day, not dreading the next change, but asking, “What if we did it this way?” Adherence to process, or how we’ve always done it, is the Achilles’ heel of big firms and sepsis for careers. Be the gal who comes up with practical and bat-shit crazy ideas worth discussing and trying. Play offense: for every four things you’re asked to do, offer one deliverable or idea that was not asked for. "
― Scott Galloway , The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
75
" Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist and expert in how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities, compares social media notifications to slot machines.51 They both deliver variable rewards: you’re curious, will I have two Likes or two hundred? You click the app icon and wait for the wheels to turn—a second, two, three, piquing your anticipation only makes the reward sweeter: you have nineteen Likes. Will it be more in an hour? You’ll have to check to find out. And while you’re there, here are these fake news stories that bots have been littering the information space with. Feel free to share them with your friends, even if you haven’t read them—you know you’ll get your tribe’s approval by sharing more of what they already believe. "
― Scott Galloway , The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
77
" Facebook attempts to skirt criticism of its content by claiming it’s not a media outlet, but a platform. This sounds reasonable until you consider that the term platform was never meant to absolve companies from taking responsibility for the damage they do. What if McDonald’s, after discovering that 80 percent of their beef was fake and making us sick, proclaimed they couldn’t be held responsible, as they aren’t a fast-food restaurant but a fast-food platform? Would we tolerate that? A Facebook spokesperson, in the face of the controversy, said, “We cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves.”47 Well, you sure as hell can try. If Facebook is by far the largest social networking site, reaching 67 percent of U.S. adults,48 and if more us, each day, are getting our news from it, then Facebook has become, de facto, the largest news media firm in the world. The question is, does news media have a greater responsibility to pursue, and police, the truth? Isn’t that the point of news media? "
― Scott Galloway , The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
79
" It’s difficult to remember now, but when Apple made that move back then, most people figured the company was wrong; that Apple was a company lurching toward irrelevance; and that by opening fancy stores it was positioning itself for luxury with the equivalent of a walker. How dumb was that, they thought. Couldn’t Apple see that the tech market now revolved around commodity boxes powered by Microsoft and Intel? That the boom was in e-commerce? Gap Inc., Form 10-K for the Period Ending January 31, 1998 (filed March 13, 1998), from Gap, Inc. website. "
― Scott Galloway , The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google