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Comment by two2two | Hacker News Reader

Parts of Cook’s speech are somewhat generic, but the point I believe to be important is a CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world is pleading with our future producers to acknowledge the damage certain aspects of online culture, such as likes, have on one’s psyche. It’s a subtle, “hey, somethings wrong. We can fix it by acknowledging it.”

I, for one, am thrilled with Tim Cook and others, helping to bring these issues to light. It is a huge problem. I know someone in the other room right now that is fishing for likes and depending on her success, will determine her mood for the rest of the day, maybe week.

It's psychological slavery that many have slipped into somewhat innocently.

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Social media is the new smoking. Facebook et all. are hiring the most intelligent people in the world, software engineers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists to get you to click on things and stay on their site. The studies are already starting to come out suggesting that social media is bad for your mental health, and it's largely a huge waste of time as you think you're maintaining relationships with people when you're really not, or you're afraid that if you don't use Facebook you can't ever reconnect with somebody you haven't spoken to in awhile.

On top of everything else, Facebook in particular is a monopoly and needs to be broken up. There's no good reason that they should own like 4 of the top 5 social media platforms unless we're fine with monopolies. I'd like to see a federal anti-trust lawsuit, but the government doesn't understand how impossible it is to do the social media thing and not be crushed by Facebook.

you compete with facebook by doing things that facebook cannot do. gnu/social and mastodon are one step in that direction b/c they are ad free on purpose and provide a much more personal experience via gift economy. sure, some instances have a tip jar, but its easy enough to find a friend who has a private instance you can live on for free b/c they like you.

of course, to compete properly things have to go further. #p2p applications and decentralized authentication systems to compete with "Sign-up with Facebook" and creating an ecosystem for competitive applications that don't rely on centralized infrastructure. facebook can and will crush you if you need to spend your way to victory. they're huge and rich. this is p obvious imo. so, to compete you have to make cost to the rando dev ~$0 so they can face the behemoth forever.

that isn't to say you can't make money. totally possible to sell cloud services to boost performance or increase storage for users. the point is that it doesn't cost you anything to run in the first place and provides acceptable performance without the cloud speedups.

Facebook's killer app was being the phone directory.

Once upon a time, there were paper mail and landline phones, with a directory where you could look up pretty well anyone's address and phone number. That was really useful; it was lost in the email years between letters and Facebook messenger.

Since no one got a distributed internet directory to work back then, it's hard to imagine that there will be one in the future. And so we're doomed to Facebook.

\> doomed

this is the doomed timeline, i suppose. no need to be so, uh, defeatist about it tho. building a facebook alternative/competitor isn't impossible, just hard. took forever, but #ostatus is finally making some headway against twitter. could happen again, right?

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