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Comment by vecter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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.

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