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Comment by nibs | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is the 90s/00s Oracle of social media software. Horrifically evil, impossible to get rid of and only hipsters use the alternatives. Open source eventually got enough strength to rival the functionality and everyone who could jumped ship. If you continue the analogy, the only way to beat Facebook is for an open protocol like email or something else to gain traction among Facebook detractors. Because mobile is a walled garden, we are going through the IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, all-in-one is better phase. I am optimistic that there is some as-yet unindentified format for open communication that will win in a way that allows everyone to access it exactly how they want to (like email). Sure, the most fearful, slow moving among us might stick to the tried and true. But at least my parents and high school friends will have an account with the open protocol, allowing me and everyone else not to have to choose between social inclusion and using Facebook.

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>> Horrifically evil...

If Facebook and Oracle are "horrifically evil", I'm at a loss for what you'd call atrocities of war.

I don't mean to pick you out personally, but considering that this is the top comment in the thread, the anti-BigCo sentiment on Hacker News is getting a little ridiculous.

> If Facebook and Oracle are "horrifically evil", I'm at a loss for what you'd call atrocities of war.

Horrifically evil along a different axis?

If I accept the premise that attempting to quantify "evil" is coherent, I'm willing to agree that there are different axes to do so. But I honestly can't see Facebook as an entity being very far along any of them.

I think this is half true. Really, we are not measuring evil, we are measuring character. And evil as a metric of character is different from evil as a metric of war crimes. Doing things because you can instead of because it is the right thing to do. Highly subjective all around.

I don't know about good and evil but war and megacorps both redraw the map; in that respect they're similar.

I think facebook gets a lot of hate because it's a community tool designed to organize communities around external influences. Alexis de tocqueville talked about americans dropping everything at work to go build a church or school (community goods). Facebook is people dropping work to look at bikini photos or 'engage with brands'.

The alternative is communities like kickstarter, where like-minded people get together to invent something new. It's niche and local; if you want to only support kickstarters in your city or neighborhood, you can. Many kickstarter projects have supporters who are involved in the project IRL.

If you could choose between the facebook economy and the kickstarter economy, which do you pick?

Are atrocities of war the only things that can be called evil? If so, then clearly nothing Facebook does is evil.

However, Facebook does alot of things that by any other definition are evil. They perform questionably ethical experiments on their users, prey on users' ignorance of the data Facebook can see and use, are at the forefront of manipulative advertising (using fabricated social proof of friends, for example), and show a continual disregard for ethics that suggests worse in the future.

This is a company that has essentially tricked people into handing over a treasure trove of data that is unprecedented in human history, and they're only starting to figure out how they can take advantage of that. How can any good come of it?

No one here is comparing this to actual war crimes, but the fact remains that they are in a position to take advantage of over a billion people. Even if in a small way, that adds up.

OP's point was that using the term "horrifically evil" is horrifically hyperbolic.

What do you mean by "tricking people" to hand over a treasure trove of data? Ignoring the many benefits that FB provides (reconnecting with old friends, easy group communication, meeting people, convenient logins for newer applications, discovering good content, etc....), what they are doing with advertising isn't "evil" in any sense.

Facebook is a /free/ service that delivers targeted ads. Would you rather ads be untargeted? Millions of people benefit from having advertisements displayed to them showing stuff that they actually want to buy. Also, millions of businesses benefit from being able to target niche markets due to FB's data collection.

People WANT to find products that are relevant to them, and so many businesses have become successful by being able to reach those customers through FB's platform.

Facebook doesn't actually sell the data to advertisers. They just allow customers to blindly target demographic groups through their platform. It doesn't violate people's privacy in the slightest.

Have they done some unethical psychological experiments? Yes. But come on, I wouldn't call that evil... especially when they do so much good. By that measure, any university that has been around for 50+ years must be evil too!

> are at the forefront of manipulative advertising (using fabricated social proof of friends, for example)

Source?

I'd invite you to read "IBM and the Holocaust"[0] if you'd like a good analysis of how a corporation can commit atrocities of war through the types of data gathering Facebook and Oracle do daily.

0. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48838.IBM_and_the_Holoca...

>an open protocol like email or

the reason twitter beat rss is because 1) it was a directory of things to follow 2) it offered a public comment layer

for something like rss to overtake twitter, you need a technorati/yahoo/dmoz to index it, and you need an annotation layer like reddit comments or hypothesis

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