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Comment by ruddct | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is:

* One of the most addictive products the world has ever seen (Opioids, another such product, were used to overthrow countries)

* The single most important media company in the world

* Controlled by one person

Threat to free society? Jury's out. But at this point, it certainly seems worth regulating.

(Edit: The above points are not meant to paint FB/Zuck in a bad light. To their credit, they've built an incredible ecosystem and a mind-bogglingly good product. We all strive to create sticky/addictive products.

My point is: When your product is incredibly addictive to a large chunk of humanity, regulation should be considered)

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> When your product is incredibly addictive to a large chunk of humanity, regulation should be considered

Yes. Let me compare FB to a phone company. When telephony was first invented, it quickly turned out to be addictive to a large chunk of humanity. Did we leave it unregulated? No, we didn't. In fact, there was regulation stating that telephone conversations may not be eavesdropped by telephone companies. Other regulations allowed other companies to be active on the same network so people could call eachother, regardless of their operator.

But somehow, we think that these types of regulation should not apply in this day and age. Strange.

This is actually a great comparison. FB has > 1 billion users, and it would be great if through gov't regulation those users could chat between whatsapp, snapchat, apple messenger, etc.

In the past this would be deemed "anti-competitive", now it's perfectly reasonable from an "innovation" standpoint.

What is stopping any of the 1 billion Facebook users from using whatsapp, snapchat, or any other messaging service?

It's the inconvenience of having multiple accounts and logins with multiple services. Sure it's not as inconvenient as having multiple phone line accounts so AT&T customers can talk to Bell Atlantic customers but at the end of the day, your data is providing revenue to these companies and the companies continue to silo themselves.

Wouldn't that be easily solved if all the other services offered a "log in with Facebook" feature and routed messages to other people who also logged in with Facebook?

I assume there's a gaping flaw in this idea that I can't quite see at the moment ;-)

Part of the gaping flaw is that Facebook will very quickly disable your API account so you can't offer login with Facebook, if you're competing with them. :)

Don't forget that Whatsapp is also owned by Facebook

That's a great comparison. Facebook has taken on that kind of quality for me. It's become one more communication channel. Fantastic for keeping up with my friends who use it, but not intrusive. I'd say telephones are still addictive (along with email and other forms of communication as a whole), but more in the category of food being addictive than drugs. Yes, some people used to ring up $2000 phone bills, but the more common case was legitimate communication.

One theoretical framework that justifies regulating telecoms, but not necessarily Facebook is that telecoms usually have special privileges granted to them by governments, up to and including monopoly status.

Building the hardware layer for a telecom network requires access to public land, and often private land where the landowners may not be cooperative. In exchange for the government enabling the telecom to build its network, the government gets to impose rules, sometimes even mandating competitor access to said network.

Facebook is different. The internet is already there, and is not owned by any single entity. Facebook does not need to compel cooperation from anyone to operate. It does not invite regulation in the same way a telecom does.

Now, there are plenty of people who believe that anything is fair game for the government to regulate if it's in the public interest, but I think that position is less universally accepted than that of trading special privileges for regulation.

> Yes, some people used to ring up $2000 phone bills, but the more common case was legitimate communication.

Telephone tariffs in some parts of the world made long distance relationships very hard. Monopolists (often government controlled) took consumers to the cleaners every chance they got.

Only in the last two decades have prices finally been coming down.

So even those $2000 phone bills could easily be legitimate communication.

Today I'm still very conscious of the time I spend 'on the phone', especially when abroad. On mobile phones I've been hit more than once with a surprise bill because of living close to the border that was in that neighborhood (but the phone company was good about dropping those charges because even if I was on Dutch soil my phone kept switching to a German base station that was very strong where I lived).

>But somehow, we think that these types of regulation should not apply in this day and age. Strange.

Who is the "we"? I certainly think it should apply. I'd argue that the main difference in this day and age is that the "we" now includes corporate entities as persons who, thanks to Citizens United, now hold the lions share of political influence to affect whether regulations like this come to be.

I don't think FB itself is the structural threat to free society - treating corporate persons equally with flesh and blood people under the law is the structural threat. FB is just one of the more frightening corporate mega personages at the moment. Any of them would be equally so if they were as adept at people farming.

It's safe to assume data miners won't be interested in designing a neutral ecosystem.

Consider the Open Mustard Seed project;

  Open Mustard Seed (OMS) is an open-source framework for 
  developing and deploying secure and trusted cloud-based 
  and mobile applications. OMS integrates a stack of 
  technologies including hardware-based trusted execution 
  environments, blockchain 2.0, machine learning, and secure 
  mobile and cloud based computing. This platform enables 
  the managed exchange of digital assets, cryptocurrency, 
  and personal information. Harnessing mobile and personal 
  data, OMS establishes a sovereign identity, pseudonyms, 
  and verified attributes and provides each user with a 
  3-factor biometrically-secured digital wallet. This gives 
  individuals control over their identities and their data   
  and supports the formation of decentralized, responsive, 
  and transparent digital ecosystems.

https://idcubed.org/open-platform/platform/

https://archive.org/details/FromBitcoinToBurningManBeyond

* Sadly, the developer site is down at the moment, but the design considers a standardized set of APIs to verify identities and allow personal ownership and hosting and licensing of your social media data.

Architecture of the OMS TCC: http://i.imgur.com/HV04itY.png

> Other regulations allowed other companies to be active on the same network

well, this sort of thing is due (at least in part) to the physicality of infrastructure.

adding more telephone lines (and gas, electrical, etc) is welcomed for the first person to come through, but subsequent businesses/developers have a LOT more pushback if not outright blockage from local authorities.

I disagree with those saying that this is a good comparison. Telephone companies were not regulated because they were addictive, but rather because they are a public utility. Facebook possesses none of the characteristics of a public utility:

-Supplies an essential good or service

-Prohibitively expensive to replicate/enormous initial investment

-Inelastic demand

-Region-specific

-Few or zero consumer alternatives

I was telling people last year (before the tide shifted against FB) that there will one day (decades away) be Big Tobacco style litigation by governments against Facebook for intentionally making their service addictive when they knew the harmful effects (e.g., depression). I did not expect the sentiment to change so dramatically but I guess people are looking to blame anyone for the election.

Man I agree with you 100%. I have been trying to get this message across whenever these topics come up in discussions with people. We are risking the minds of people. Take this example. So many mobile games which essentially leverage the thrill of gambling to make their games addictive. Of course, this only increases micropayment revenues. How many people get hooked and waste hundreds of hours? How many kids!?

To me this is the same as cigarettes. Why do we regulate it? Because the average person is unlikely to know its harmful effects. What about these applications? Which are profitable by tapping into our desires and impulsive tendencies.

Its time we discuss this.

okay, then let's regulate donuts, let's regulate hacker news because I just can't stop myself from checking it everyday. let's regulate cereals and candy, etc. Oh and coffee too. oh and toothpaste as well, i can't help but brush my teeth two or even 3 times a day!

my sister has an addicition to shopping for clothes, so that's going to need regulation, as well as my friend's action to watching tv, etc.

They used to make radium toothpaste, heroin coffee. Legislated away.

Of course, the laws and regulations that have cropped up sometimes are in response to the addictiveness of particular vices. That's why we don't regulate shopping for example. It is kind of disingenuous to put "shopping for clothes" and nicotine addiction on the same footing.

> It is kind of disingenuous to put "shopping for clothes" and nicotine addiction on the same footing.

But putting Facebook and shopping for clothes on the same footing isn't. And the "Facebook causes depression" arguments are utterly unconvincing.

I agree with much of what you said. I'm not sure where I'd place Facebook in this case. Honestly, I'm not sure I'd make ruddct's argument for regulation based on the addictiveness of facebook more than I'd make the old anti-trust, money in politics and unchecked influence arguments.

Two questions for you:

Do you believe there should be a minimum age to buy tobacco?

Do you believe tobacco companies should have to publish information stating that tobacco is addictive and dangerous on their products?

Cigarette addicts can lead useful, productive lives before cancer or emphysema takes them out. Gamers on the other hand twitch away the best years of their natural lives, in some self-chosen dark sweatshop. Cigarettes then arguably the more benign of the two.

I feel like your conflating 2 arguments here. And I agree with 1 but whole heartedly disagree with the other.

Many Mobile games do abuse psychological elements. Agree they shouldn't abuse and should be stopped.

Waste hundreds of hours? I thoroughly enjoy hundreds of hours of game play so I don't see anything wrong with that.

Tapping into our desires? What's wrong with tickling our fancy?

Tapping into our impulsive tendencies. I feel like this is abusing human psychology again.

I'm not a gambler but I have felt the excitement and joy of it. I also love video games. I see nothing wrong with either of these things. But there is a clear distinction between the rewards of playing and the manipulation a company takes to enrich their bottom line.

> To me this is the same as cigarettes. Why do we regulate it?

Taxes.

I'm willing to bet in my lifetime Facebook will not become the world's largest company.

Google may have a chance of beating Apple at #1 but Facebook has quite a margin.

Essentially both Facebook and Google are ads businesses. Facebook seems to be optimizing for short term growth at the expense of their brand.

I know many people who joined Facebook around 2008 and absolutely were big fans of it. After 10 years none of them even use it, the novelty wore off.

Facebook will remain an "ads" company for as long as it's profitable. Marketing dollars will always need go somewhere, so I'm not convinced the advertising market will just wither and die in the face of adblockers. As long as Facebook commands an army of eyeballs, its advertising business will be profitable.

Facebook has shown a willingness to diversify its social properties via synergetic integration. See: whatsapp, instagram.

Facebook will likely continue to diversify its business. For example, it could easily repurpose its excess hardware to enter the cloud computing market and compete with AWS/GoogleCloud. I would be surprised if this is not on the roadmap.

Yes. As we've seen, the only way to stop such things, is for the next disruptive company to come along and fuck their shit up.

Something will likely come along. My guess is that it will be spam-related, which will make the FB user-experience too difficult to use to get a quality experience. FB will try to appeal to government for protectionist legislation, but it won't happen fast enough.

> I'm willing to bet in my lifetime Facebook will not become the world's largest company.

PS - There's an easy way to bet on this, just buy some stock :)

EDIT - Well, technically, you want to short the stock.

Saying it will not become the largest company is not the same as saying the stock will go down.

It's inverse, so the way to bet is to not buy some stock. Done!

No, it is to short the stock.

The question is if you can hold out long enough and if the change you predict will happen fast enough.

That can get expensive quickly, so it's not quite the inverse of holding stock where the only downside is how far the stock can drop, not how far it can go up.

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Timing as ever is the key.

Timing the market is a fools game.

Or rather, to short their stock, if you want to make some money off it.

Does Facebook's valuation assume growth that will make them the largest company on the planet?

Except it's not physically addictive. It's at most psychologically addictive and the withdrawal is not terribly painful. Just stop using it. Distract yourself with a good novel for a couple of days and it's done.

"Oh, I finished my book! I should probably take a picture of the cover and post it on Facebook!..."

That was not my experience. I had a goal of reading 52 books last year, one for each week of the year. I reached 40 but never felt the need to post any cover photos on FB. Your relationship with it changes quite fast once you start finding other things to do rather than hang out on Facebook

For me, it always end up in binge-reading the rest of the books in the series, or picking up a similar one. I guess I have poor impulse control.

Facebook is a fad that will pass. Pretty soon people will be onto the next big digital media thing and forget all about their facebook accounts. But targeting and regulating a single enterprise just because it is too popular will set a dangerous precedent in law that will reverberate throughout the ages.

There have been other dominating monopolies before, (ma bell telecom monopoly comes to mind) which was much dangerous than a website.

Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.

Yes internet and social media addiction is bad and dangerous, but that is something that would exist with or without facebook and can be addressed in other ways besides regulating facbeook

> Facebook is a fad that will pass. Pretty soon people will be onto the next big digital media thing and forget all about their facebook accounts.

I used to think Facebook would become a passing fad as well, but we've been saying this for a while and nothing has changed other than Facebook growing larger in size.

> Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.

The Facebook brand is tenacious and it's pivoting into other things. Take for example the recent deal to stream live MLS games [1] or news outlets leveraging Facebook Live for supplementary content. Let's also not forget that, sadly, Facebook is a primary source of news and information for many people. I think the days of Facebook being only about status/friend updates are over.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/10/facebook-scores-a-deal-to-...

I've been thinking about this, and personally, I thought Twitter was done years ago. To me, it was just a media that was designed specifically to give a few well-privileged famous celebrities a way to spew their empty garbage to the masses. It's very much a one-way "popular kids" channel.

I thought that most people would find it boring and useless and abandon it. But I think it's done the opposite. It's fed into the tabloid-news impulse of the lowbrow class, and only become more popular.

The genius of FB is that when sub-groups of people piss each other off, they can just unfriend, block, and ban, and they're in a nice comfy bubble.

The next thing that comes along will probably be both of these. With better AI-generated/sourced content.

I just started using Twitter this past year. What you get out of Twitter really depends on who you follow, which is not obvious at all to get a hook into and find good accounts you'd value hearing from. I luckily found a few good ones, and you find more by being exposed to content they retweet. It has been a great boon to me because I found a few cogent tweeters of the kind of politics and analysis I like, who I would not have been exposed to otherwise. I feel like it has expanded my political awareness and given me a better informed commentary than I'd find elsewhere. Not just empty heads there. You also get some minor amount of conversational interaction with them and others, and real time commentary on unfolding current events, and some of the jokes that get retweeted are funny. It's easier to see the value of Twitter on the inside than from the outside and its gimmick of short messages.

A lot of content to shift through, so following too many is not so good, and no real way way to sort them into themed content or more favoured tweeters, is my issue.

> Facebook is a fad that will pass.

Facebook is about talking (and texting, and instagraming) to your friends (and family, and acquaintances, and people you can't quite remember). That's not a fad, that's a general human desire.

Facebook the company might fail in the market and be replaced by someone better, just as they did to their early competitors. The desire for this kind of communication is universal though (and Facebook surely did much less to invent the idea than Graham Bell!). It's not going away.

> Also facebook isn't really a media company

tell that to the millions of people who get most of their news via facebook. Zuckerburg also disagrees (https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/21/fbonc/)

I don't think facebook is a fad.

It's the default communication mechanism for many people.

Telephones stink and we still use them because they are a standard.

It's the ubiquity of physically robust infrastructure that allows for telephones to persist, not some "standard".

> I don't think myspace is a fad. > It's the default communication mechanism for many people.

This is just as relevant.

No, not at all.

Facebook is a de-facto standard of communication. They have your info, you friends info - and you need FB to find and share with others.

The technology medium is completely irrelevant.

It's like saying 'hospitals are not important for saving lies, what matters the most are 'roads' because that's how sick people get around'.

My Space was never a communication mechanism, it was almost purely social, moreover, it didn't have broad appeal. My mother and grandmother never used MySpace - but they use Facebook.

Facebook has cross generational and cross cultural appeal, and has a 'global critical mass' making it the default platform for a lot of human communication.

I don't like Facebook at all, but they are here to stay for a while, until something else replaces it.

> I don't like Facebook at all, but they are here to stay for a while, until something else replaces it.

Just like MySpace. At the time, MySpace was the defacto standard of communication for most young people of a minimum socioeconomit status. You're missing the point by ignoring the history/reality.

Telephones still exist because the infrastructure is difficult (expensive, time consuming, hard to maintain) to replicate in a robust fashion. Wireless has come a long way, but it's still using the hardline protocols because we still have hardlines. Usually where financial incentives to switch are different.

I don't think the opioid comparison is valid. My litmus test would be: would someone resort to prostitution to get on Facebook for a few minutes?

That's fair criticism. My intent was to give an example of a hugely addictive product that shaped the course of history. Facebook is, obviously, not physically addictive like an opioid.

But it is addictive. Dopamine-hit addictive (thanks, likes and little red notification dots!). In what appears to be a very universally appealing way.

It'll be an interesting day indeed when the people living in my alley are moaning for a little bit of Facebook.

On one hand, you compare Facebook to opioid drugs in terms of addictive potential.

On the other hand, you suggest "regulation" in response.

But, if history and the nature of the state are our guides we must conclude that state intervention is unlikely to produce healthy outcomes, since the state has been unable to craft any "regulation" in the face of a century-long opiate(-iod) epidemic other than a prohibition environment, which has been disastrous for public health and dynastically enriching for drug cartels.

We are agreed that the government's response to opioids has been both awful, from a humanitarian perspective, and ineffective, from an engineering perspective.

But regulation must not be viewed as a monolith. Especially in the realm of communication tools, where many good, pro-consumer pro-competition regulations exist. e.g. number portability for mobile providers, common carrier rules, etc)

(Disclaimer: Obviously not all comm. regulations are good, cough cough cable companies in America. But clearly some regulation of these entities is needed, so let's fix the regs rather than trashing them.)

It depends on how you view the effect of time.

My sense is that, with time as the X-axis and need for the state as the Y-axis, we're experiencing a downward slope.

I find it plausible (in truth I find it inevitable) that the state will crumble and that society will be better for it, especially in terms of corporate domination of everyday needs, which I believe that state empowers rather than "regulates."

* Facebook is not "unregulated" - the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission both regulate it. The latter has taken multiple interventions, and will probably continue to do so in the future.

* Facebook is not physically addictive - there's a huge difference between addictions like gambling and drug addictions.

* Facebook is not the most important media company in the world - Facebook does not produce news, only disseminate it.

* Facebook is not controlled by one person - it is a publicly traded company.

* The SEC isn't going to regulate content, only financials. FTC fought facebook over privacy settings

* Experts are beginning to disagree with this http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

* Facebook workers recently admitted to filtering content they didn't agree with (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/09/fo...)

* Zuckerburg controls facebook: http://fortune.com/2016/04/27/zuckerberg-facebook-control/

Facebook will never be regulated. The regulators love Facebook because they can do anything they want with Zuckerberg. He is their best friend. Hell, they want him to run for president. http://www.salon.com/2017/03/12/we-picked-the-wrong-billiona...

Very interesting. Is it really controlled by one person? Or is facebook dependent on user's, well, using it?

If facebook went away tomorrow, would meatspace life materially change for any of its users?

A little peer pressure to affirm that Facebook is a giant waste of time, narcissistic and generally kind of silly is all it takes plant the seed to drop FB altogether. I have seen that work in meatspace.

The "what would happen if it went away tomorrow" question is not particularly useful to determine facebooks power, since it's not going to go away tomorrow.

I think the argument is about influence, not complete determination. Influence can be exercised independent from a services replacability.

All three of those points are hyperbolic to the extreme.

Unlike opioids facebook can not kill you if you stop using the service. And addiction rates are still being studied best I can tell. Certainly no leading papers claiming an epidemic [0]

Sources required and likely highly deterministic on how you develop a scale for such ranking

*FB is a publicly traded company with a board, it, by definition is not completely controlled by one person.

I personally am no fan of social media, don't really see the point in most contexts, but a call for government regulation into communication is the wrong step. IMO cults of ignorance, luddites, and anti-intellectualism are the threats to free society not social-networking.

[0]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=addictiveness+of+social...

And yet, you have something called: personal choice. People should be responsible for their own actions. Most of the concerns listed in the article, are things any other company or entity could do: "creating shadow profiles", 'crawling the web', etc.

If you don't want FB to have your pictures then don't go there. The parent article is over-reaching it's concern.

And it's not exactly accurate that it's controlled by 1 person. Ultimately FB can't do anything we don't want it to do. If FB does something we don't like, we're just one tab lick away from putting them out of business.

The last thing we need is more useless regulations that will stifle the already stiffled and slowing of innovation.

> If you don't want FB to have your pictures then don't go there.

There's a trivial error in your example: I can upload the photo of you to Facebook, and there's no mechanism you can use to take it down.

> If you don't want FB to have your pictures then don't go there.

Basically impossible if you have friends that use Facebook - which most people have unless you run only in very specific circles.

> If you don't want FB to have your pictures then don't go there.

That's all well and good until you get to US Customs and they demand to see your Facebook before they let you back in the country.

It's addictive if you want/need to be social. My wife does, not me. I'm not a very social guy honestly, I have a few friends in my inner circle who I text/gchat/fb messenger with but I don't use the facebook app or the web interface.

Since I deactivated my acct in Dec last year to focus on bschool apps, I've accomplished so much, and I say that not to brag, but to illustrate that it was a bit of a timesuck for me and I've been able to do a lot more since I quit.

What exactly would be regulated?

Great question. Stratechery, as always, has an interesting read with some possibilities

https://stratechery.com/2017/manifestos-and-monopolies/

Thanks. I'll check this out. :)

> Threat to free society? Jury's out.

Building a wall isn't going to fix climate change. Facebook is clearly a threat to a free society, but it may be the only chance we have.

I'd be tempted to agree, but I will not trust the current congress or president to do the regulating.

> Threat to free society? Jury's out. But at this point, it certainly seems worth regulating.

Regulation is the threat to free society.

Ideologues are the real threat to free society.

Nonsense pseudo-intellectual one-liners are fun!

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