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Comment by rdxm | Hacker News Reader

Totally unsurprising. I mean, people don't actually think FB is a positive force in the world do they?

The science is clear on human's capacity for meaningful/real realtionships (it's a pretty small number), the anecdotal evidence is also fairly clear on FB's real contributions to society (it's not positive).

FB really is the poster child for just how willing we are as a species to roll around in our own feces. It's most definetly a sad commentary on where we are at in general as a society and the contribution it made to the last electoral shitshow is just icing on the cake.

Hell, it's also sigularly unsurprising that Zuck is headed to politics, in fact that morass of crap is just about a perfect fit for him.

View on HN

Just because I can only have a few meaningful relationships doesn't mean that I don't like to keep track of what's going on in the lives of my friends and family that I've met over the years. That's a great service.

Yes Facebook does bad things from time to time, researching what days of the week teenagers are most likely to post given content does not, in my mind, qualify as an especially nefarious action.

Give me a break, we supposed to protect the weak teenagers not sell them to advertisers for exploitation. They are vulnerable they need support at this time not the lucid loop of facebook. This is sad news.

Also about your "keep track of what's going on in the lives of ..", just call your friends to find out what is going on in their life. People normally don't post everything on facebook. I think its a great service if you want to know what's going on in Kim Kardashian life.

>Also about your "keep track of what's going on in the lives of ..", just call your friends to find out what is going on in their life.

I don't understand the need many people have to know what their friends are doing at all times. I check my friends' Snapchat stories sometimes, but usually I just don't care and they can tell me next time I have a conversation with them.

'Why do people like something I do not enjoy?'

That's not the question, and I do enjoy knowing what people are doing. What I don't understand is the addiction many people have to social media.

>Also about your "keep track of what's going on in the lives of ..", just call your friends to find out what is going on in their life. People normally don't post everything on facebook.

Not all of my Facebook friends are close enough that I'd call them to keep in touch, but it's still nice to know how they're getting on.

One of my friends from high school just finished her education to become a Doctor. Good for her. I didn't need to know that, but it's still nice, and I would never have known without something like Facebook.

>One of my friends from high school just finished her education to become a Doctor. [] I didn't need to know that, but it's still nice.

I reminded of the scene in Fight club where the narrator discovers that "Chloe died of cancer". He'd forgotten all about her, but discovering her death made him react as though sad. When challenged as to whether he cares, he says something like "I don't know, I haven't thought about her in a while".

(unnecessary reference, but I guess it frames the other side).

After I'd left uni for a couple of years Facebook became a long list of people I used to know sharing lots of minutae and a few big events in their life. Processing that has a cost, emotionally and intellectually. Is that cost worth paying? My deciding "no" doesn't mean that it's true for everyone!

The toxic thing about social media is that people are only sharing their best moments or are even trying to portrait their lives to be a lot better, then they actually are.

So if you're a depressed person on social media seeing all those awesome things people are doing, just sends you down a downward spiral, even though a lot of people are probably not much better off.

And you just said it yourself. You didn't need to know your "friend" got her doctors and your life probably had zero impact from knowing, which really is the best case szenario with social media.

I am not saying, social media serves no porpuse though. For event organizing and crowd funding and probably a lot of other things, it comes in handy.

You seem to be mixing up social networking in general and FB in particular.

Slightly tangential experiment: I'm commenting here because this thread is quite close to the top of the page, and the top-level comment I left with the following info is not likely to become un-buried at this point.

Just wanted to say that the paywalled article in The Australian can be viewed via cache: just fine:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dRqAloI...

Here's a more permanent copy: http://archive.is/paAKu

Whoops, this is now at -2.

My apologies, and thanks for the feedback; I won't try this again.

"In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could." - Rudi Dornbusch, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudi_Dornbusch

Change is closer than we think.

I don't personally use Facebook much but this is overly pessimistic. Sure, people can get addicted to Facebook (I've seen it happen) but people get addicted to many other bad and harmful things.

I tend to prefer Facebook Messenger (messenger.com is great btw - literally a blow up version of an iPad/tablet app). It 100% encourages 1-1 communication and staying in touch with friends since there's nothing else to do there - you can't get sucked into mindless browsing. It doesn't even have any ads as far as I can tell.

(edit - typo)

Sure, people can get addicted to Facebook (I've seen it happen) but people get addicted to many other bad and harmful things.

I'm here neither to attack or defend Facebook, but this is a really crappy way of looking at the world. "People suck anyway, so...."

You could put just about anything after beginning a sentence like that.

I agree. I am very curious about ways to prevent people from getting addicted to harmful things or things that they consciously decide to avoid.

I am not here to attack or defend Facebook either, but I think accusing them of being bad just because people get addicted to it is not a good measure. People get addicted to smartphones also but I rarely see people critical of the smartphone as a device.

>FB is a positive force in the world do they?

Thats how I keep up with my extended family 1000 miles away. I do think it's a positive force in the world.

I am not trying to demean your comment in any way but I will give you an alternate viewpoint..

Back in 2011 I also used Facebook to "keep up" with my distant friends and family. I read their posts, looked at their photos, liked their comments, left notes here and there.. Chatted with them..

Then one day I realized that these were all (for me) extremely shallow interactions, and I decided I would make a better effort to stay in touch.

I closed my Facebook account, and made a commitment to reach out directly to the people I cared about. Perhaps less often, but in more meaningful ways.

I started sending monthly emails, and scheduling Skype or (eventually) FaceTime calls, and so on..

Fast-forward 6 years of that and I feel much more connected to the distant people I care about in my life than I ever did via Facebook, and almost all of them have reciprocated my efforts at maintaining a better connection..

Again, this is just my story, but you really don't need Facebook to stay in touch with the people you care about, no matter where they are in the world.

But you can only do that with so many people. Facebook is more convenient. And it has the random factor. Sometimes there's a friend d who you weren't super close with but always thought well of. With Facebook you can see when they're visiting your city (if they make a post about it). It gives you the opportunity to know that that friend is around and reach out to them.

I think there are a lot of positives to Facebook, but a lot of potential negatives for certain kinds of personalities (people who are negative or addictive). With the right attitude though, it's certainly helpful

This kind of sounds like hoarding.

I look back on my Facebook usage as a cost / benefit tradeoff and in the end the benefits just weren't paying off.

I know exactly what you mean in theory however, no matter how much one views "status updates" inevitably you're drifting apart from those people and caring less about what they're doing, that's natural. I had less time for my closer friends. It felt artificial to have to stay connected, exhausting, though I didn't realise till I left.

One could check updates less, often, but then what's the point ?

If someone really wants to hangout they just contact me via other channels.

That's not random, that's the algorithm. It might not show you anything if it decides you won't find that friend interesting.

Not that this is "what you decide is interesting". Which makes it much less useful, prone to social signalling and what is worse, actually less meaningful than more direct contact. Remember, it is mostly text, not even time of voice is carried in it. Even a picture is static.

Contrast with realtime voice and video. (Facebook has those features but they're nowhere near as utilized. And they definitely do boot show up in feeds.)

What is the point of reaching out to a "friend" only when it's convenient to you? The only motivations I can think of are quite selfish.

Is it so horrible to have people you're willing to walk to your local pub for, but not willing to travel to their city for?

Just because you're not willing to make time for someone doesn't mean you can't enjoy an evening of chatting and catching up when your lives happen to intersect.

> But you can only do that with so many people.

That's a feature, not a bug.

> I read their posts, looked at their photos, liked their comments, left notes here and there.. Chatted with them..

Wow. Back then it had already degenerated into two things: chainmail and the trap of portraying a life that you don't lead. I left when I realised that absolutely none of that "keeping in touch" was happening. If anything, Facebook estranged people.

To the point of the article, imagine all the good that could be done with this data: an alert system for vulnerable teenagers.

I think part of this trap was due to how FB encouraged people to "friend" as many people as they could..

At the height of my Facebook usage, I had less than 100 connections, because even back then I only stayed connected with people I was trying to maintain meaningful connections with.

No co-workers I didn't see socially, no one I went to high school or university with but didn't still keep in touch otherwise, etc..

So I rarely saw "junk" on my feed that was totally irrelevant to me, but it still happened sometimes..

In addition to meaningful communications between you and family/friends, the communication is only between you and you friends. On facebook, the communication is through you --> third party corporation --> family/friends.

There's something to be said about not directly involving corporations with your communications.

Why use the internet at all then? After all I can 'prove' that real world interactions have far more informational content than virtualized ones, so all non-utilitarian electronic communication is inherently inferior if you begin with that premise.

The internet? Well for example there are many internet services that I do use, for example p2p sharing, decentralized and open source services. There's nothing inherent that says a major social networking site needs to be a multi-billion dollar corporation, in fact that goes against the foundation of decentralization that the internet was built upon.

What I'm trying to say is, the internet is great, with it we can move beyond the old hegemony and monopolies.

The postman, local mail company, phone line company, Microsoft (Skype).

Unless you talk to them face to face, most, if not all, forms of communication rely on third parties.

The postman doesn't read your mail. (Normally, of course. I'm sure it's happened).

Sure it happened somewhat. That's how they caught Solzhenitsyn and that's the protagonist's side job in Catch 22.

But we're talking orders of magnitude of difference.

In general "they" don't read your mail because they can't even if they wanted to. Slow mail is extremely expensive to do a through survailence on.

That's kind of the point though. Even if they would read your mail if they could, they cannot because of the technological limitations on the medium.

The intention doesn't matter, the fact is that slow mail is private for all intents and purposes.

If I may attempt to bridge two viewpoints?

You're absolutely right. Facebook can be an immensely negative experience for a person, a damaging force in their life. Facebook also can be a positive force, connecting a person to their friends, loved ones, and community.

But might that also have been the case even if Facebook never existed?

Eg maybe getting older was a factor in that.

I lived most of my life without Facebook (born in the late 70s) and it's at least not obvious to me that people had more deeper connections prior to it.

I agree that most relationships weren't more meaningful, but I had less meaningless relationships too.

That's the sick part of FB. That I really don't care for my cousin saving the world in Africa, so why should I care what she's doing?

I don't. And the truth is most of us don't care either. We're unable to admit it to ourselves so we pretend to care

That's just you. My sister has a similar approach (sending out periodic emails) and I find them utterly tedious to read, too polished and edited to approach any kind of spontaneity or intimacy, and mildly annoying as a reminder that she can't be bothered to keep up with any of my online social activity while expecting me to stay up to date with what she considers important to report.

Yes, quite a lot of social networking interactions are shallow, as are most real-world social interactions. but I've also made quite a lot of good friendships from what started out as shallow interactions. You're doing social networking right here on HN, you just treat it differently because it's (I presume) somehow connected to your professional activities.

Maybe your sister is just a bad writer? Or you already don't like her and are predisposed to find her emails tedious? I don't still write to people who didn't write me back, by the way.. I got the message that they were not interested. It's not an exercise in narcissism..

And yes I was indeed sharing a story about what works for me. I never implied it would work for everyone else, or that anyone using FB was doing anything wrong, or that "social networking" is wrong.

You're also right that I am networking on HN as we speak! And these are also very shallow interactions, but that's perfectly ok because this is just HN and I'm just talking with strangers about topics that interest me.

But that wasn't the case with Facebook. Context matters. I was having shallow interactions with people I have deep existing relationships with (good friends who have moved away, family, etc), and I decided that for me personally that didn't work, and I wanted to do things differently.

The concept of social media is a positive force, not Facebook the entity.

I'd like to think this (too), but I don't believe there's any evidence to support this claim.

In many countries they don't have free speech among other things and it's harder for them to organize. Twitter and Facebook have been used to help oppressed people across the world organize to help enact change. It's also helped catch criminals and citizens and first responders react quicker to crisis.

I rarely use Facebook because it's a time suck and I closed Twitter, but there are a lot of positives from social media, especially if you consider it globally.

"In many countries they don't have free speech among other things and it's harder for them to organize. Twitter and Facebook have been used to help oppressed people across the world organize to help enact change."

I see this claim often, but I've never seen any hard evidence backing this claim.

Au contraire: Social media is a fantastic snooping tool for oppressive (or even non-oppressive) regimes.

"Our evidence suggests that social media carried a cascade of messages about freedom and democracy across North Africa and the Middle East, and helped raise expectations for the success of political uprising," said Philip Howard, the project lead and an associate professor in communication at the University of Washington. "People who shared interest in democracy built extensive social networks and organized political action. Social media became a critical part of the toolkit for greater freedom." [1]

"Social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring. A spike in online revolutionary conversations often preceded major events on the ground. Social media helped spread democratic ideas across international borders." [2]

"Global Use of Social Media to Fight Corruption Inspires Youth in Brazil" [3]

"In the Bagega community in Nigeria, lead poisoning had resulted in thousands of children suffering serious health problems. The government announced it would release around $5.3 million for remediation but months later the funds had still not reached the affected community." Two passionate guys formed an organization called Follow the Money and amplified the voices of this forgotten community. Within 48 hours of a Twitter campaign targeting government officials and other influential leaders -- and following a campaign by groups including Human Rights Watch -- the funds were released and affected children are now receiving the urgent medical care that they deserve. [4]

[1] https://phys.org/news/2011-09-quantifies-social-media-arab.h...

[2] http://collectiondevelopment.library.cornell.edu/mideast/Rol...

[3] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/09/Brazil-y...

[4] http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/18/opinion/want-to-expose-corrupt...

Thank you.

Of course there is, people choose to spend their time talking to other people on the internet because they get something out of it that they find superior to other kinds of interactions.

The phone and post office allowed this as well, doesn't mean we need to keep with them on a daily basis.

you don't have an email account, a telephone, skype, AIM client, or even USPS?

Yes, imagine if one of your loved ones had depression and hid it well- facebook could sell him moody movies and suicide literature, while totally raspacting the privacy of cluelessness to the very end. Thank you fb

Or if you are Donald Trump it might convince you from all those like buttons pressed next to your post, that you are the second coming of Christ and only you can save humanity, as long as you continue and keep up your insightful posting.

That's why there's an anger dislike now.

Does anyone think the modern world is a positive force? It didn't happen because it was better for humans.

Yes I certainly do, you are better off today in almost every measurable way than any other time period. Life was really hard, and usually really short.

Life expectancy is up 50 years from 1000 years ago, childhood mortality is at its lowest point in history, education rates are at their highest, global poverty is at its lowest.

None of these are positive forces to you? What time period would you prefer?

Just because this weird bit of ideology is a pet peeve of mine and it's very widespread, let's go over it one more time:

The short average life expectancy of primitive humans is entirely an artifact of high childhood mortality and how averages work. If you lived past childhood you were likely to live until your 60's or 70's.

Primitive human lives were not hard and not short, the workweek for hunter/gatherers was less than half of ours. They were strongly biased towards highly egalitarian cultures.

Doesn't mean I'd necessarily prefer that time period to now, but I'm a white guy in a rich nation with a professional career and it's still not an obvious call. For the rest of the world they wouldn't have to think about it, they would hop in that time machine and head for a pre-agricultural era in a heartbeat.

The idea that blindly sprinting in the random direction of the latest discovery and calling it "progress" has not had any downsides is stupidity, as is the willful ignorance necessary to accept a cartoon version of pre-history created in 1651 based on extrapolating from experience in London, without any evidence or knowledge.

> The short average life expectancy of primitive humans is entirely an artifact of high childhood mortality

I am aware of this, but not sure why you think this negates the fact that life expectancy has increased. I would much prefer a drastically higher chance of living passed childhood. And if I somehow managed to live long enough to have children, I'd prefer that my children don't all die at birth, along with their mother. These desires have only been made possible in the last century or two

It certainly doesn't negate it, but it was an extraordinarily costly thing to buy for humanity. Other statements made it clear you didn't understand the cost. And that cost is born largely by those who's childhood mortality rates have not improved (for many they have worsened considerably).

Of course you'd prefer to have the modern first world chances of surviving childhood and childbirth. If you had a choice between prehistorical lives for your surviving children or for them all to have the lives of a random child on earth today it's a harder choice. Making your base of comparison the middle ages is also the most skewed comparison possible.

That's not even counting the fact that we are supporting this technological infrastructure not only by reducing the quality of life from less powerful peoples but by massively borrowing quality of life from all future generations.

Adult mortality was still quite a lot higher than it is today.

There have been some attempts to study hunter gatherers that existed in recent times:

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/life_history/aging_evolu...

The group there isn't necessarily going to be representative, but mortality for young adults was ~2% per year. In the US it is something like 0.1%.

Talk about missing the point. Your age at death is not a score.

I think you might be reading more than is there.

better off today in almost every measurable way

Quants are not the only people entitled to have an opinion on this. While I mostly like the modern world it has lots of downsides too. Simplistic measures like life expectancy reduce the business of living to a handful of metrics and then pronounce things to be good or bad according to how those arbitrary criteria measure up.

That's great if you want to live in a world that's run like a factory where productivity is the highest social good. I don't. I would be fine with dying at 60 or even tomorrow, not because I don't want to live any more but because I've chosen to set my own goals about what sort of life and activity I find meaningful rather than simply maximizing some inherited utility criteria.

Long life would be nice, in general, but it's a fact that one's life might be arbitrarily cut short by some random accident. In your world being out at one extreme or the other of the probability distribution is statistically interesting but nothing more. Your value system lacks any criteria for determining the worth of life other than the most primitive feedback loop of maximizing whatever quantitative factors you've set yourself to measure.

It's very easy to live an long, comfortable and unhappy life.

But I guess it is easier to be happy when you are richer and have a smaller probability to die tomorrow.

No it isn't. Wealthy people just have more options for staving of misery, which isn't the same thing as being happy.

I am friends with a few super-wealthy people, one who had access to great wealth through business and another who's a prominent aristocrat. When I say friends, I don't mean that we hang out to drink champagne, but that I'm privy to intimate details of their family/personal lives. Wealth does not inoculate you against crippling emotional problems.

I was referring to the hunter-gatherer era (the majority of human history). I don't believe we are better off in any way thanks to the modern world. Farmers were able to kill off hunter gatherers, that is all.

It's very easy to romanticize the past. What does it help?

I suggest The Crisis of the Modern World by René Guénon to you.

http://dinghal.com/bibliotheek/The_Crisis_of_the_Modern_Worl...

Your post would have some semblance of significance and taken even slightly seriously if it wasn't so hyperbolic. What happened to nuance on HN?

It is as nuanced as the subject matter deserves and perhaps HN is acknowledging it?

While the wisdom of the crowds favors the continued existence and growth of Facebook, the wisdom of a tech heavy audience takes a skeptical stance, and the skepticism is heightened when entities such as Facebook and Google are completely robbing us of our privacy one little "byte" at a time.

In the time it took you to read my comment, let us just suppose FB and Google just reduced the privacy of your life by about x%, however minuscule you might think x is. The trouble is, despite the vitriol directed at these entities, the rate not only doesn't seem to reduce, it is actually going up every day!

This guy has access to everyone's conversation and anyone he wants to talk to at his finger tips and he has gone off on a "listening tour". Says all there needs to be said, about his ability to have a real conversation on his own platform.

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

- http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...

Has he ever acknowledged saying this publicly - or ever spoke about how he fucked over the twin brothers? I want a leader who's transparent, open - honest.

I don't think he acknowledged saying that, but he was also 19 at the time.

>I don't think he acknowledged saying that, but he was also 19 at the time.

You don't get to play the whole "Genius Wunderkind" part, take all the success and notoriety that comes with that, and then say "Oh, young people will just say dumb stuff" regarding your emotional maturity at the time. This is who he is. The quote perfectly sums up Zuckerberg's actual intentions, as demonstrated repeatedly by his public actions. He's a sociopathic megalomaniac, and Facebook is a net drain on society. Fortunately, I think others are beginning to realize it too.

I've seen very little evidence to show that he's improved since then. The ‘free internet’ stunt he tried playing in India recently was disingenuous and machiavellian. Then there's this story. I rarely say this about any public figure apart from politicians but I loathe the guy (and his company).

How exactly was the free internet program disingenuous?

It was free access to a limited subset of services, it would be a great way to lock in facebook use as it'd be the only social network that would be available. Calling it free internet is disingenuous because it wasn't access to the internet, but rather access to a couple websites.

First world ISPs provide limited access to the internet too by not allowing servers, use of "uncommon" ports, or issuing static IPV6 addresses to residential users.

I'd argue that's not to funnel use into a product that maintains market share through the network effect. That's the thing that made the free basics program so pernicious. What you are describe is just providing a poor service, rather than a service that is specifically tailored to stamp out competition.

IMO there is a significant (i.e. orders of magnitude) difference between these two examples.

Apples and oranges comparison.

> https://www.wired.com/2015/05/backlash-facebooks-free-intern...

"I'll do good, trust me."

How is age an appropriate excuse to my concerns? My concern is that he can't be transparent and open - meaning his thinking and behaviour will be molded by this. People clearly want to hear the truth out of his mouth, he's a coward - he's afraid of the ramifications of sharing the truth. He hasn't shown he's grown up. If he wants to lead, becoming skillful at self-awareness/growth and relationship building is key.

>>> I want a leader who's transparent, open - honest.

You're not gonna find that in the Holywood drama movie of said leader.

True - not when they are ashamed of their actions and feel the need to hide their past.

Might wanna double space those chat logs :)

Oops, thanks for pointing that out :)

> Says all there needs to be said, about his ability to have a real conversation on his own platform.

I'm going with "people on Facebook think he needs to go out on a 'listening tour' so he did".

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