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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

I believe the problem with Mark lies in the fact that to many of us he hasn’t build anything substantial. Sure, from a technical point of view Facebook is spectacular. Other than that it’s a boring place adding no value whatsoever to the Internet. There’s nothing innovative about it. He’s isn’t solving any kind of problem. Compared to other giants of our industry he seems dull and irrelevant. And so does his vision.

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Facebook adds "no value whatsoever"? One billion people every day would disagree with you.

Facebook is the primary method that billions of people across the world use to stay in touch with family and friends. It's one of the most important pieces of my life and something I come back to almost every single day.

And no, I've never worked there nor will I ever. I don't own a single share of FB stock. I'm just a user who appreciates the value of what he uses, or at the very least, can appreciate the value that other people get out of a product that I myself may never use.

1. you don't have the grounds to speak for 1 billion people. you are not the whole facebook userbase. not every facebook user shares your opinions or uses the product the same way you do.

2. you don't know what the primary method billions of people use is. you're presuming and projecting. your own life and habits is not the life and habits of others.

3. it doesn't matter if your have a financial or material interest or not. this is a non-argument.

Well good for you. I on the other hand never felt the need to use the place and its privacy policies annoy the heck out of me. I also don’t like the fact that it’s a walled-in garden contradicting the essence of the medium it was built upon.

Other than that, you don’t have to be working somewhere to have a positive stance about the place. We’re not cheerleaders, we’re just opinionated people. No one is accusing you for promoting Facebook’s agenda out of personal interest. So chill, all is good.

Your claim of "no value" is clearly wrong. A consumer internet company cannot be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, have billions of users, and add "no value".

define value. establish how FB provides value according to your definition. social habits and popularity alone are not sufficient to establish value.

remember, we're talking about value for FB users, not value for FB customers (i.e. advertisers).

If a person uses Facebook in a given day, they've received value from it. Otherwise they wouldn't have used it.

Yeah they are. Social habits and popularity are inherently valuable. Another way to say the same thing would be "what do people spend their attention on." If you capture and/or channel their attention, that's valuable.

>It's one of the most important pieces of my life

Reading this made me sad.

Why does that make you sad

Cause it's just a tool. A tool that promotes laziness in communication and personal contact. All for the low low cost of all your privacy so they can sell you to whoever. It's a convenient tool though

Most of my friends don't live near me. I stay updated on their lives via Facebook. What's so sad about that?

The point of tools is literally to enable laziness. Feel free to go back to the telegraph if you really want to work harder.

Facebook sure adds value. It connects people. Friendships, marriages, partnerships, businesses, and more exist because of facebook. I am not a user but the value it provides is real. Otherwise people would not use it (Google+).

so did myspace, so did AOL. it is just an re-implementation of existing ideas and products. Nothing it offers is new or anything we haven't had for decades. Sure, a lot of people use it NOW but that will change just like it did for myspace, AOL, and plenty of other platforms. And those marriages/partnerships/business/etc don't exist BECAUSE of facebook, they exist because people started them and now they USE facebook as a tool, if facebook died tomorrow and was replaced by a new web-based-communication-and-advertising tool all of those things would still exist and all the marriages/partnerships/businesses/etc would shift to that platform, they wouldn't cease to exist. It doesn't create any value in any sort of dynamic new way, it is just a re-implementation of the same tools people have been building since the start of the internet. Everybody survived the death of those other tools just fine, no "value" was lost.

I met my wife on ICQ in the year 1998. My marriage happened because ICQ allowed me to connect with her. I would not have met her otherwise. :)

I think the key part is "if facebook disappeared and was replaced by another tool." The important part is how many people are in the SAME tool. The value to the user of a network depends on how many other people are in that network. The same number of people, split up into different networks, wouldn't be a linear decrease in value, it would be an exponential decrease in value.

Maybe the fact that reality is clearly contradicting your intuition about value is important? 1 Billion-ish people find Facebook valuable. You disagreeing with them just makes you wrong, or maybe lacking in empathy. I didn't understand the value in ridesharing. I still think it shouldn't be nearly as popular as it is. But that's me not understanding reality; it isn't reality being wrong.

>Compared to other giants of our industry he seems dull and irrelevant

Well, that is if you only view facebook.com, the product. But the tech that it supports and develops can be pretty cool. Oculus, React, and all kinds of research stuff. A bit like you don't necessarily regard Bell at anything exciting but it still finances Bell Labs which is pretty cool.

But I realize that's not what we're talking about.

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