Hacker News Reader

Comment by Molaxx | Hacker News Reader

Blaming Facebook in this is really weird. You didn't know about it because you weren't really friends. You were acquainted, yes, but you didn't actually keep in touch. If it weren't for Facebook you'd never consider him a friend, just some guy you knew. I'm sorry this seems insesnsitive, but Facebook isn't reality, and it's a company trying to make money. It should be accountable for the damage it does for society, but it can't be accountable for the way we manage our friendships. That part is our responsibility as humans.

View on HN

> If it weren't for Facebook you'd never consider him a friend, just some guy you knew.

If you re-read the post, this is inaccurate. The friendship began elsewhere.

>Facebook isn't reality, and it's a company trying to make money

It is a company whose value proposition (to non advertisers) is its being reflective of or enhancing reality. This as opposed to, say, warcraft.

>it can't be accountable for the way we manage our friendships

Managing friendships is exactly facebook's purpose. If it claims to be the best way to manage a friendship, and bad things happen as a result of presumptions the company makes in the course of managing said friendship, it's sane to associate facebook's tooling around friendship management with the actual management of friendships.

If I sign up for facebook under the pretense of "see what happens to my friends", and then sort by recency, if recent things that happen to my friends do not appear, that is, IMO, a legitimate grievance.

Facebook might not owe this user anything, but that doesn't mean they can't wish for better service. A person missed the death of their friend because they were second guessed by an algorithm that has gradually torn control from the hands of users and downgraded reality and chronology to foster "engagement". That sucks.

There is this principle that I always bring up when it comes to our interaction with the government, but it fits perfectly here too.

You might be able to give up control over something, but never the responsibility that comes with it. So in this particular case, we are free to let the algorithm decide for us, but we should all be aware who will suffer when the algorithm goes haywire. It's that simple.

> If you re-read the post, this is inaccurate. The friendship began elsewhere.

Yes, but it didn't begin in the real world(irl) either. Quoting the tweet: "Our friendship started on an old gaming forum,". I used to play WoW: do I keep up with any of my online friends now ? No. Why ? Because I moved on and found friends irl.

> It is a company whose value proposition (to non advertisers) is its being reflective of or enhancing reality. This as opposed to, say, warcraft.

You pay NOTHING for Facebook. Any value they claim to bring you is subject to their discretion. If you expect anything else, go to a different network. Oh wait - you can't, since social networks are only valuable if everyone is on them. And please do not bring open source software as a counter example: open source software exists because it is more rational for companies to use it by cooperating to share the cost of projects that would otherwise be too big for each of them to handle (and also independent open source project are done by people out of curiosity, and to allow them to stand out when searching for a job). So the FREE in FREE SOFTWARE is not the same as the FREE in FACEBOOK. Also, as you correctly noted, the value proposition of Facebook is to advertisers (and also shareholoders), so to use the annoying cliche, you are the PRODUCT, does the product get to have a say on how it's handled?

> Managing friendships is exactly facebook's purpose. If it claims to be the best way to manage a friendship, and bad things happen as a result of presumptions the company makes in the course of managing said friendship, it's sane to associate facebook's tooling around friendship management with the actual management of friendships.

Does it? I didn't manage to find that product description on their website. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, so can you please share it? What I did find though was in the terms and conditions (https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms): point 15.3: >WE TRY TO KEEP FACEBOOK UP, BUG-FREE, AND SAFE, BUT YOU USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK. WE ARE PROVIDING FACEBOOK AS IS WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS >OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON->INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT GUARANTEE THAT FACEBOOK WILL ALWAYS BE SAFE, SECURE OR ERROR-FREE OR THAT FACEBOOK WILL ALWAYS FUNCTION >WITHOUT DISRUPTIONS, DELAYS OR IMPERFECTIONS. FACEBOOK IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACTIONS, CONTENT, INFORMATION, OR DATA OF THIRD >PARTIES, AND YOU RELEASE US, OUR DIRECTORS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, AND AGENTS FROM ANY CLAIMS AND DAMAGES, KNOWN AND UNKNOWN, ARISING >OUT OF OR IN ANY WAY CONNECTED WITH ANY CLAIM YOU HAVE AGAINST ANY SUCH THIRD PARTIES.

Facebook's feed algorithms don't care about whether your friends die, they care about maximizing profits. If you care about your friends, you won't let that be managed by a stupid, free of charge piece of software, but you will call them regularly, or go meet them in person, so let's all be brutally honest not rationalise lack of empathy as failure due to external factors.

That's an extremely limited and dare I say outdated view of what constitutes a friend. One of my best friends I only see irregularly once a year at best, sometimes not for years, yet we always get on great when we see each other. That to me is a great friendship, that you know you'll always get along. I don't think it's your place to decide who someone views as a friend and how their relationship should look like.

OP clearly states he met the person online and they communicate online and that might involve irregular but deep, friendly exchanges and meeting up once in a while. I.e. exactly a kind of communication Facebook is supposed to facilitate, yet it completely failed him here which is absolutely valid to criticize and call out.

This is very rude. You're telling someone that her (deceased) friend is not really a friend because of the medium they used to communicate.

She knows better than us whether they were friends or not.

If they used any medium to communicate then they would have noticed that the other side doesn't respond any more. Or do we count likes as communication?

Facebook is a medium by any definition. OP said they kept in touch via comments, a more modern form of SMS or even letters.

This whole X is realer than computers is silly to me.

Messenger and other IM apps are the more modern form of SMS or letters. Facebook and Twitter are broadcasting mediums.

This is wrong, on so, so, so many levels. Yes, I get that the best way to maintain relationships is in meatspace, but this isn't really possible anymore. People move, meet online, etc... This doesn't mean they stop being friends. Their relationships might weaken, but you don't get degraded to "just an acquaintance" because of this. At the age of 18, I had already lived in 4 countries (France, Canada, US, UK) for a minimum period of 2 years. I still keep up with old friends, but this only happens online because meatspace is kind of getting in the way with us actually talking.

Furthermore, Facebook is totally to blame here. For most users, the whole point of their service is to keep in touch with others. That Facebook failed to tell the user of something as important as the hospitalization and death of a dear friend is a clear red flag: Facebook's algorithms are failing. Sure, you can also blame the user for using the "wrong medium", leaving communication to a for-profit company. But then what's the lesson here ? That you should only talk to people in meatspace ? Well, I guess we're not living in the same reality here.

The lesson is to use Whatsapp or Email.

Sure, Whatsapp is owned by Facebook but you can send messages to each other and see their response pushed to your phone. It doesn't have an algorithm choosing not to show their messages sometimes.

I think it is not as binary as this. I too have friends that I do not see often, but what makes them friends to me is that no matter for how long we do not meet, as soon as we meet our relationship is the same as the last time we met.

Friends are not always those who you meet every day, but those that give you the feeling of happiness when you have them around, at least for me.

Please just re-read your comment replacing Facebook with either your phone service or email service or USPS. What you said applies to all these three. People are complaining because Facebook gives the perception of connecting people but fails without notifying.

I'll answer here but it's relevant to most comments I got. True, we can have friendships which are not in meatspace as someone said here. And it's also true that even people you don't meet much could be meaningful friends. It's also true that Facebook presents it's self as a social network for connecting with our friends and this.might be seen as a failure in that respect. All that said, Facebook is a product, as a user you have the responsibility to use it wisely considering it's obvious limititations (i.e. nothing is perfect). If we consider we (the users) and Facebook to be in a customer-provider relationship , then they failed. But not morally, just professionaly, meaning, they provided a not perfect product. I just dont think we as users are Facebook's customers, we are the product. Even if we were, I still think the overall responsibility for our relationship with our friends is ours. I think what irked me the most was the use of this Facebook-algorithms-hurts-society template when it really isn't appropriate. No algorithms wouldn't change the outcome of this event. Without Facebook OP would still don't know about her friend's condition in real time,ormaybe at all. Usually this template is used to show effects of Facebook's algorithms on society that would never have happened if not for it's algorithms tuned for profit. If anything, this mindset that finds blame in Facebook s algorithms for an unfortunate but non novel event, is a much more interesting social effect. Meaning, the total natural delgation of responsibility to a company that uses you as product is pretty mind-blowing.

They were counting on Facebook to bring to them updates from someone that was important to them. Yes, it's their fault for giving away that responsibility in the first place, but it doesn't seem right to say that they weren't friends.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com