I've seen no evidence that Mark Zuckerberg is anything other than a normal ivy league type guy. I'm sure that he hears dozens of positive things about facebook every single day - it helped someone meet their spouse, connect with old friends, solve a problem. It's likely that in his view he's doing something to make the world a better place. Some may focus more on the negative aspects of facebook, and that's fair. But there doesn't seem to be any reason to question his character.
That's precisely what's in dispute here.
Different social media applications yield different results. Some of us believe that facebook is designed to cause envy, woe, and want in order to sell.
The thing about Usenet is that it trained you how to discuss things in public. It is a rhetoric laboratory. It's very useful learning to harden yourself to envy, woe and want. Eventually, such things become a mirror and if you don't like what you see, change it.
Guns don't kill people. People kill People. etc. etc...
You can take out Zuckerberg and it would change things only at the margins.
People are constantly trying to figure out how to be attractive, and they constantly look out for who is attractive around them. The embers to produce social media websites like Facebook are already there, Zuckerberg was only the match.
Zuckerberg not creating Facebook doesn't change the fact that we're in an era where singers and socialites are celebrities, as opposed to the previous era, where society was more enamoured with intellectuals like Einstein and Haber, or the era before that where people looked up to generals like Ulysses Grant for unifying the nation.
Facebook is a product of today's decadence, rather than the other way around.
Would Facebook fit in a society with attitudes from (my take):
1. 1700's England? Nope, people are too serious back then.
2. 1000's Baghdad? Yes, in a world singers and celebrities and everyone wants to be attractive.
3. 800's Baghdad? Nope. You'd lose your head.
4. 300's Rome? Why yes, breads and circuses everywhere, why not another distraction?
5. 200BC Rome? Hardy people don't use Facebook much.
Here's a nice short book talking about these cycles.
http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2014/092814_files/...
I found the perspective in your post interesting, but I have to suggest that you research 'coffee shops' in London in the earlier 1700s. They declined towards the end of that century for reasons that could be quite interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...
Any references for Baghdad in 1000s? Sounds interesting.
hacker news is a form of social media so that makes it just as bad as guns, cigs and heroin. Ycombinator and the people who run it are just as evil as kim jong un.
> Researchers have proposed a new phenomenon called “Facebook depression,” defined as depression that develops when preteens and teens spend a great deal of time on social media sites, such as Facebook, and then begin to exhibit classic symptoms of depression. Acceptance by and contact with peers is an important element of adolescent life. The intensity of the online world is thought to be a factor that may trigger depression in some adolescents. As with offline depression, preadolescents and adolescents who suffer from Facebook depression are at risk for social isolation and sometimes turn to risky Internet sites and blogs for “help” that may promote substance abuse, unsafe sexual practices, or aggressive or self-destructive behaviors.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/127/4/800.full
How is that remotely the same as actual depression? It's an insult to people who suffer from this medical condition.
Looking for the study itself (which I can't seem to find), but the article says something along the lines of "showing symptoms of depression". Symptoms of depression are often caused by depression.
No, it's not an insult at all. The biggest insult to depression sufferers is not recognizing it as a condition or implying that they are something other than depressed.
Edit: I'm sorry; perhaps you are simply not understanding the article. Is English your primary language?
The only difference is that (heavy?) Facebook users are more likely to suffer from it.
If you want to argue against it, I recommend you say that the actual mechanism/cause is on shaky ground.
It should be really easy to highlight those parts then.
I can only comment on my own phyche after being on the two sites. I don't feel good after being on FB. I've gotten into the habit of deativating my account Monday-Friday. I keep it open on the weekends--just in case? So far nothing, but I've never been a popular person.
On the other hand, I don't feel bad after being on HN. Yes--like any site, I can only take it in small doses. And yes--if it changed up too much from its current format, I would delete my account.
I use the Internet for information, and enjoyment. FB just brings up too many bad memories, or just puts me in a weird mood. I don't think I've evolved enough to like FB? Were we, as monkeys, ever designed to see so many other monkeys?
I'm not saying Facebook couldn't be changed to not serve that purpose, but the whole nature of Fb leads to people envying idealized illusions of people's lives.
It also does not allow people to move forward because you are always reminded of and connected to the past. I don't think that is a topic that has received anywhere near enough attention. The people that are bad for you are and will forever haunt you through facebook. It really needs more study and I would not be surprised on bit if it were shown to facilitate things like substance abuse relapse and poor choices.
That's not hyperbole at all.
Further, I think this is bunk:
> If it wasn't facebook, it would be some other website.
This can be used to justify pretty much anything. "Somebody'd be selling this heroin. Might as well be me." Or, less obviously: cigarettes, fossil fuels, and junk food.
If good people to refuse to do something harmful, it will be done less well, hopefully causing less harm. Whether or not Mark Zuckerberg is better or worse than the average ivy leaguer doesn't seem relevant. What matters is that he's the one with the power to change what Facebook is doing, and he's the one who profits most from it.
I guess that depends on how you view facebook itself. Advertising is one thing, but I find the model of encouraging people to share their personal information for one purpose, then surreptitiously monetizing it by selling it to others to be downright slimy.
Facebook is in many ways an organically occurring reaction of people.. people doing things the internet enables. Facebook is as led as they are led by their users which is everyone.
I agree that there are some negative consequences of online behavior. COnversing online can get nasty easily, with people feeling little slights and reacting until the whole thing collapses into far worse than normal human interaction. On the other hand it allows us to converse with a much wider group. Would we be talking in Person Mr. Stokes, about Facebook? Facebook didn't choose features for addictiveness, they chose and promoted features because people used them. We're attracted to a lot of things that aren't good for us. People read celebrity magazines, and feel bad. They wallow in jealousy and other negative emotions. They do this on Facebook because they're on facebook.
There's a sense which this reasoning excuses everything. Tobacco companies gave people what they wanted too. But this is way more mixed.
People follow the objects of their envy, a bastard sister of admiration. It's hard to lay that on Zuck.
I'm going to completely bastardize a Douglas Adams Quote I can't find because I don't remember what words he used:
It's more like fast food or candy. When consumed moderately or intermittently , they can be relatively fine but when consumed voraciously, they can be very destructive.
Anyway, change very well can come from attacking people. Publically criticizing actions which are harmful is part of the way that we, as a society, build up the standards and norms by which we judge individuals' actions--and, ultimately, form legislation and other institutions to diminish harm and exploitation. The idea of "Don't hate the player, hate the game" is an attack on morality as such.
The anti-tobacco movement is a prime example of this, just as were the people who brought you Prohibition.
The Vast majority of capitalists struggle with ethical concerns because there's downside risk in behaving badly. It's an iterated version of "all problems stem from Man's inability to sit quietly in a room."
It's funny - I haven't seen that. Usually it's he does something like give money to charity followed by pages of people saying how iffy that it is. If you google 'smug little shit' Zuck comes up. Who's worshiping?
Isn't a reaction to something merely expose your own feelings. Freedom from something is no freedom at all.
Yes, in that case it is. Facebook is forcing us to stare in a mirror of our own mistakes and failings. We should fix them and not avoid them. Unfortunately the mirror is crooked. It only shows the apparent best features of a person, and it doesn't tell who are we supposed to compare to. There are always people who are (or appear) more successful; Facebook makes them visible to anyone as if they were the average case and not the rarity, what they really are.
I find the general accreted ... stuff I've read on facebook simply confirms my bias about confirmation bias. I unfollow people who get too noisy.
I still think the original Usenet - even after the Eternal September* - to be in all ways superior to anything else online. Then came the binaries that killed it.
*I would think that because that's when I found out about it and you could get one a' them dialup Internet connections boy howdy.
It's true that social network bring bad side effects, everything does. They can only try to correct them.
Yes, here's a study on manipulating the feed of over 600,000 users, in order to elicit an emotional response. Without asking for permission of course, because apparently you agree to FB playing mind tricks on you when "agreeing" to their terms and conditions. Really, it can't get worse than this and they have no justification.
Here's the resulting paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full.pdf
It's different when you do 'research', i.e. purport to act like a scientist, not a scam artist.
Most scientist do not do harmful things to their subjects. Modern science requires consent. So your fallacious argument, even if it weren't, fails to argue correctly in the first place, because scientists aren't advertisers.
Facebook study was done without consent. It was harmful to their users (subjects) because it interfered with their emotions. It is immoral.
The outrage might seem ridiculous, from the perspective of an advertiser, because, as you said, they do worst things all the time, so this study is hardly appalling for them. But from the perspective of other people, it is.
I hope this gave you an insight into (our) reaction to the study.
Nor is the tobacco industry responsible for nicotine's addictive effects.
The question is, do the benefits outweigh the problems? As I've never used Facebook, I can't really judge.
Devil's advocate: this is not the main problem with tobacco industry. The main issue is that other components of tobacco smoke are carcinogenic.
Now they're concentrating their focus on the Third World, getting millions more addicted where they aren't pestered by pesky "laws."
No, they probably don't. People don't know that smoking is the leading cause of erectile dysfunction; or that smoking is linked to penile cancer; or what the actual risks of lung cancer are.
People just know that smoking is harmful, but they laugh that off with "I might get hit by a bus tomorrow".
> Or do you think we, citizens of third world countries are all illiterate know nothings who got tricked by tobacco companies?
It's not about citizens of developing world being illiterate know-nothings, it's about tobacco companies being abusive manipulative arseholes who lie and who have millions of dollars to fund those lies.
Yes, there is a picture of a man covering his genitalia with a thumbs down and a big IMPOTENCE written on the back of cigaret packages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_packaging_warning_mess...
but guess what - all sorts of biases step in, we like to lie to ourselves, nicotine addiction isn't neglible either. in 2015, this information is world-widely known for years and years (apart from north korea, maybe), but people like to ignore it. somebody gets cancer from smoking? well man up and blame his own stupidity/weakness.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinker...
That is not the way making a claim works. A claim is made, and evidence to support that claim must be brought forward before the claim is to be accepted. We have a claim, but no evidence for that claim in hand, and as such, intellectual honesty dictates that our doubt is 100%.
There is the old yet reliably sourced claim of Zuck calling his users dumb fucks. It is probably that his opinion has changed as he has matured, however the sourness of the original intent remains a part of his Facebook website.
The long con of Facebook itself -- fooling us all into giving up our privacy. We got here by FB misleading it in incredibly calculated ways. Google "Privacy Zuckering". It's a dark pattern that tricks users into giving up more privacy than they would want to, by making purposefully misleading UI. One trick after another like that is how we got here.
Real name policy