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Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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