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Comment by myf01d | Hacker News Reader

Personally I wish Facebook to be destroyed, it's kind of a psychological cancer. I also guess Amazon can't be destroyed unless with a series of defeats within a very long period, it may be transformed into another Microsoft or IBM at worst but it won't be destroyed.

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I wish someone could make Facebook get closer to becoming a strictly positive addition to people's lives. If it merely gets destroyed then something would just substitute it. It's already in a position to do anything it practically wants, and there's a lot of good that could come of it... all it needs is a clear mind and willpower.

What if the substitute was specifically created to be as positive an addition as possible, with built in tools designed to help boost users' willpower and help them grow?

I'm not sure how viable such a thing would be given that most of facebook's negative aspects are a direct result of them monetizing the platform as much as possible. But I think it's worth thinking about!

What’s wrong with Facebook? I personally don’t think of social networks as malevolent — in the end they’re just tools. The real issue in my opinion is the type of content that is peddled to me.

Facebook's engagement-maximizing algorithm determines what content gets shown to you, and the peculiarities of that algorithm indirectly inform content creators. many content creators experience the following: when they publish something thin/clickbaity they get a bunch of views, whereas when they publish something nuanced/complex they only get a few. this effect effectively establishes a race to the bottom.

I am just a random Facebook user, and I already noticed the same effect on my wall: stupid things get liked and shared, anything of value is mostly ignored.

It happened a few months ago when as a result of reading some online stories, I decided to delete everything I posted on my Facebook wall; but then I changed my decision to "everything, except for the few best (highest quality? best ratings? maybe a bit of both) things". So I spent a few hours deleting stuff from my wall, while paying attention to the quality and number of likes. And I noticed the pattern that I didn't actually notice before.

I was already aware that I sometimes post smart content and sometimes stupid content, and that sometimes I get a lot of reactions and sometimes barely any. But only now I noticed how strongly are these things anticorrelated. It is almost always the stupid stuff that gets most reactions, and the smart stuff that remains ignored. Dozens and dozens of my old posts, always the same pattern.

After seeing this, I am no longer motivated to spend any energy on my Facebook interaction. Once in a while I share an interesting article, but I don't bother posting a summary anymore; I already expect no one will care, if even someone will see it. And once in a while I share a family photo. And that's all.

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