Comment by tajano | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tajano | Hacker News Reader

If you're accused of working on stupid, trivial things, and Facebook and Twitter are your best counterexamples, it's a little pathetic. It's very easy to conflate making a lot of money with doing something that matters. At the end of the day, they're ad-serving time-sucks that delivers CandyCrush and advertisements and an endless stream of selfies from our most annoying, narcissistic acquaintances.

Almost every founder, engineer, Stanford grad, and VC has been chanting "We're changing the world!" for the last eight years. Stop it. It's trite and annoying and it pisses people off. It doesn't piss people off because your current batch of products are half-baked and stupid. It pisses people off because your very best products of the last decade are, at the end of the day, stupid and trivial and really haven't changed the world in a very positive way. It pisses people off because it doesn't hold water outside the myopic Silicon Valley bubble, where everyone tells each other "We're changing the world" often enough that they actually buy into it.

That's a rather blithe and shallow criticism of Facebook and Twitter. I could easily complain about email because of spam, but it would totally disregard its usefulness and impact. (As for Candy Crush invites and annoying selfies, Facebook actually provides tools to deal with those problems. RTFM?)

Facebook in particular has allowed me to keep in touch with a much larger social circle. It has made it easier to meet people, establish friendships, maintain distance relationships, and keep in touch with more of my extended family. It allows me to plan events quickly and on short notice, and get quick feed back on who will be attending. It helps me learn about new events or activities that I otherwise might have missed.

> Facebook in particular has allowed me to keep in touch with a much larger social circle

For me, Facebook offered a false sense of being social. The more I used it, the more I craved social interaction, leading me to use it even more. It's possible, maybe even likely, that I was "using it wrong." But after I used Facebook's tool for dealing with this problem (the Delete Account tool), I've become a more genuinely social person.

I do miss out on photos posted by my extended family. That is a genuine loss. I've probably also missed out on some events organized through Facebook. But then again, I'm making more of an effort to actively maintain relationships offline, and it's probably been a net positive.

Of course, that's just my experience. There are 1.5B active users who might disagree.

> At the end of the day, they're ad-serving time-sucks

I can understand how you could say this about FB, but Twitter seems much more useful as a protocol.

Maybe it's not the best example of a great VC business, but you can't deny that it's changed how people communicate & especially how we get news.

I'd also like to point out that FB has served a great purpose for me and pretty much all my social circle.

It lets me keep up with people I would _otherwise not bother to talk with_ by seeing what's happening in their lives. It lets me organize events and coordinate with ease. It lets me share things like photos and video (both privately and publicly) super easily

Sure, technically, it's "incremental improvements" on blogs + RSS + email, but only in the same sense that C is an incremental improvement on Brainfuck. It's made a lot of these concepts easy to use for non-nerds on a large scale.

Dismissing Facebook ignores the social impact it's had on a huge amount of people.

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