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Comment by jpeterson | Hacker News Reader

These apps "change the world" only if your "world" is the silicon valley echo chamber. The real world is only moderately impacted, and only for a limited time, even by an anomaly like Facebook.

Seriously, to all the silicon valley startups and investors: get over yourself. You are not changing the world.

*EDIT: There are a lot of interesting and cool things going on in silicon valley, perhaps more than in any other place in the world. To that, I agree. The whole "changing the world" thing is a bit much, though, and I believe anyone who claims this is either overestimating their startup or underestimating the world (or both).

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A third of divorce filings in the United States contain the word Facebook. People are writing whole books (or incite revolutions) on iPhones while they're on the bus. I'm not saying that Facebook is as important as genetically modified rice on a worldwide scale, but it's up there.

I suspect that any marriage that was destroyed by Facebook was probably not long for this world to begin with.

Marriages, cars, houses, computer programs and businesses all take work, are subject to rot, and can be rebuilt. If every bump in marriage doomed it, nearly no marriage would survive. The viability is a combination of all the negative and positive pressures.

> iPhones while they're on the bus

Writing books on iphones? Seriously, that's neither beneficial nor effective -- smartphones might be changing the world but certainly not because it's helping people write books.

> A third of divorce filings in the United States contain the word Facebook.

Do you have a link for this statistic? Do 90% of divorce filings also contain the word `cheated`? And would they have contained `journal` or `letter` 70 years ago in as much as they cite email or cellphones? The medium of expression is changing but that's not the same as `world-changing` not to say they aren't linked, but surely divorce is a terrible example.

> Writing books on iphones?

Yes. Over 75% of the writing on Wattpad happens on a mobile device. I know. I find it crazy too.

> Do you have a link for this statistic?

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/facebook-relationship-statu...

How is divorce a terrible example? What is more impactful to someone's life than ending their closest lifelong relationship?

> Yes. Over 75% of the writing on Wattpad happens on a mobile device. I know. I find it crazy too.

Ok let's be clear, I don't know what wattpad is -- but how many books worth a damn are written on smartphones, I wager << 1%.

> How is divorce a terrible example? What is more impactful to someone's life than ending their closest lifelong relationship?

Because facebook has nothing to do with that based on the information you've cited. Yes people get divorced, there are usually deep-seated reasons for that,if the cat, the dog, the kids, their friends, their letters, or their facebook are mentioned amongst thousands of words of the filings does not in anyway say something about the particular significance of those factors. I think you'd be completely stupid to insist facebook is a cause rather than a medium amongst these.

Genetically modified rice (golden rice) is a propaganda tool that can't change anything (you can't cure malnutrition due to poverty with genetically modified anything), so bad example.

What offends me about the claims is the difference between what could be done and what is done. In 1999 we learned via Napster of a fundamentally new type of entity, the digital good. This was an item with zero marginal cost - it literally costs nothing to reproduce on margin.

This fact should be fundamentally changing the world. A new type of economy is possible now, one that goes beyond capitalism, one where wealth can be shared instantly across the planet and multiplied infinitely the moment it is created.

This revolution was shot in the face by the DMCA and various other efforts, and that brilliant energy channeled instead into making a panopticon to allow better ad targeting.

Facebook did not change anything; Facebook is squatting on the corpse of real change.

> Genetically modified rice (golden rice) is a propaganda tool that can't change anything...

Vitamin A deficiency is responsible for 1–2 million deaths and hundreds of thosands of cases of blindness per year. Even just basic Vitamin A fortified rice could literally change millions of peoples lives per year.

See this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2682994/

And if I'm wrong and this has been refuted, please share your research.

> A new type of economy is possible now, one that goes beyond capitalism... Facebook did not change anything; Facebook is squatting on the corpse of real change.

Facebook made the internet usable by normal people for things normal people wanted to do. It is changing their lives right now. DMCA is shitty, but most people find a way to watch shows just fine.

Yes, Vitamin A deficiency is a problem, and Golden Rice can treat it. You know what else can? Pretty much any other food with Vitamin A. Why do we need to create an entirely new kind of fortified rice? Why not just, say, give these people carrots?

These people are vitamin deficient in their diets because they are poor. Making golden rice is solving the wrong problem. What we need to do is end poverty.

You are using a logical fallacy in your argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Should we work towards ending world wide poverty? Yes.

In the meantime, just like Canada added iodine to salt to prevent a whole host of diseases at the turn of the 20th century, so to can we add things like vitamins to very basic foodstuffs for the third world.

> Why not just give these people carrots?

Because that is extremely costly, difficult, and destroys local agriculture and has a host of other negative externalities. Furthermore many people are too proud to take a handout, but selling their farmers better grains is achievable.

It isn't costly at all. We can feed everyone on earth for a few paltry billion; food is not expensive. We choose not to. Golden rice has its own technical hurdles and is only solving a single nutritional problem.

We already have enough food to feed the world[1]: the problem is distribution. Poor people can't afford to get a balanced diet that's already there, would the GM rice be miraculously free?

1. http://www.wfp.org/hunger/faqs

I agree that distribution is a large part of the problem, but there are other problems as well, like perverse incentives (destroying local farm economies by flooding in free food).

Rice is an extremely durable foodstuff and even if it wouldn't be free, it would be much cheaper than the alternatives and it would easily integrate into already existing markets and logistics chains.

I'm not sure you can call a billion people connected in a single massive network a "moderate" impact or "only for a limited time." Almost every aspect of many people's social lives now goes through Facebook, from keeping up with old friends, to sharing opinions, to organizing events.

Let's set aside for a moment that the exact means by which people keep up with friends is not necessarily "world changing", and also that this has been mostly enabled by the internet itself, not any particular app-du-jour that rides on top of the internet. Besides that, it's not obvious to me that people in the world are actually more materially "connected" by Facebook than they were before Facebook.

Exactly. I feel like Facebook is somehow being credited as inventing human communication itself. Why else would people fawn over "a billion users?" To me, a billion users means there are a billion rows in a database table somewhere; that doesn't inherently mean there is significant value.

Ask yourself this: If Facebook were to disappear tomorrow, would the world continue relatively unchanged? I argue that it would.

> not any particular app-du-jour that rides on top of the internet.

I remember the internet pre-Facebook and it definitely didn't have the same social implications. People were split across different networks, and there definitely wasn't the concept of group events.

> it's not obvious to me that people in the world are actually more materially "connected" by Facebook than they were before Facebook.

It is too me. Facebook is literally the only way I keep in touch with friends from back home and the USA.

I'm currently studying in the Middle East. It's very interesting but also could be very isolating. Without tools like Facebook and Skype, I never would have done this.

> Seriously, to all the silicon valley startups and investors: get over yourself. You are not changing the world.

Pretty much this but I find it admirable. Such is the spirit that ultimately changes the world if it means tolerating some pretty darn awful ones.

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