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Comment by mlazos | Hacker News Reader

I always enjoy reading the opinions of people who aren’t in tech. It always reminds me how little the world really understands the devices and programs they run every single day and how much of a bubble I live in. At the point where he said there should be a law that recommendations need to be made by humans it’s like dude, there’re 2 billion people using this site, that ship has sailed, we’re at tragedy of the commons-level shit right now. I do agree with him for the most part though, I just can’t see a solution other than users not using Facebook anymore or somehow banding together and forcing the recommendation engine to show us higher quality content by only clicking on higher quality content which is a sadly far-fetched idea at this point. I can only hope that people start to limit themselves.

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Facebook just persists on the inertia of the network effect its leveraging. The only thing that will ever stop them is actual updates to anti-trust laws to stay in step with the current state of the industry.

It’s bullshit that a single company should get to pick winners and losers in the economy. We get squeamish about allowing our (barely) democratically elected government do that so I don’t understand why proponents of free-markets think it’s fine to let an unaccountable corporate entity exert the same kind of influence.

>> We get squeamish about allowing our (barely) democratically elected government do that so I don’t understand why proponents of free-markets think it’s fine to let an unaccountable corporate entity exert the same kind of influence.

Only a handful of people get to call themselves President, Senator, or Congressperson. Fewer will ever be billionaires, but more can dream because there's no constitutional limit to quantity or term length. They aspire to create the next unaccountable corporate entity.

> It’s bullshit that a single company should get to pick winners and losers in the economy. We get squeamish about allowing our (barely) democratically elected government do that so I don’t understand why proponents of free-markets think it’s fine to let an unaccountable corporate entity exert the same kind of influence.

Speaking as an economic conservative, our principles were not designed to handle companies like Facebook with such unholy amounts of influence over media and society.

I'm not saying that excuses the lack of action in terms of regulating them, I'm just attempting to explain why it's difficult to get there from here, so to speak.

> The only thing that will ever stop them is actual updates to anti-trust laws to stay in step with the current state of the industry.

It's silly to think that only government intervention could change the status quo. Who do you know under 40 who likes using Facebook? They are susceptible to competition from the market, like everyone else. Ask IBM and GE how quickly ubiquity can evaporate.

They’re big enough to buy out any actually threatening competitors. A duopoly or a small oligopoly aren’t much better.

As for IBM or GE, buddy it took almost an entire generation for their stranglehold to break down, and in fields with much lower barriers to entry than this.

You might think you’ve made a very novel point that no free markets supporter has considered or answered before, but you’d be very wrong. Anyone with even cursory knowledge of political philosophy knows this.

First of all, the issue with government wielding power in a way that violates NAP is not that it’s a single entity but that it’s wielding power to violate NAP, e.g. violating negative rights, redistributing wealth etc.

Since a private entity like Facebook doesn’t do that, it’s not even comparable. And the reason it has so much power (but again it can’t violate your negative liberty like govts do despite that) is that people voluntarily choose to use it so much (even if not willingly). As long as they choose to do so, Facebook gets power and that’s how it should work.

I personally think that Facebook isn’t great and we should use less of it and be less reliant on it (which I follow), but I’m not going to support using government’s power to override other people’s choices. A social network with a monthly fee (if people are ok with supporting it voluntarily over a privacy nightmare like Facebook) should be worth a try.

> It always reminds me how little the world really understands the devices and programs they run every single day and how much of a bubble I live in.

I have a similar experience with tech people, too. I use a weird little 40% keyboard (Vortex Core) at work and when people try to use it while I'm not around, I get questions about the location of various keys.

Specifically, people tend to ask where the symbols are. I tell them the truth, "On the number keys where they always are." Turns out it's not as common as I thought for people who type a lot to actually know where certain keys are, independent of their physical location. I thought that the majority of heavy typists would know which symbol is on which number, certainly symbols they use a lot, but that turned out not to be the case.

Just as many are simply tripped up by the weirdness of it, of course. That's understandable. This keyboard is picky about the order in which you press some keys (for good reason, but a rambling explanation would be orthogonal to this comment), so that can certainly confuse people who have only ever used 60% and larger.

No judgement here, I'll be the first to admit that I'm a weirdo using a weirdo keyboard. I just found it surprising is all. And, admittedly, somewhat entertaining.

Just looked that up. What a beautiful little keyboard!

Why would that surprise you?

I'd never heard of your keyboard so I googled it. It's a regular keyboard with no number keys on it. Why would it be surprising that people would ask you where the numbers and their corresponding symbols were?

Looking at the photo I certainly can't see how you'd go about typing an exclamation point, for example, even though I know it's over the one.

> I use a weird little 40% keyboard (Vortex Core)

Total aside: I really wish someone would make a normal-size keyboard with all those extra modifier keys. I don't really care for hyper-compactness, I just want to be able to easily type more characters in a backward-compatible way.

> Turns out it's not as common as I thought for people who type a lot to actually know where certain keys are, independent of their physical location. I thought that the majority of heavy typists would know which symbol is on which number, certainly symbols they use a lot, but that turned out not to be the case.

Why? Typing is all muscle memory and there's practically zero utility to know the (arbitrary) mapping.

I really wish someone would make a normal-size keyboard with all those extra modifier keys.

Yes!

The closest I've been able to find is the Razer Anansi, though I'm still not completely satisfied with the layout and I don't like the way its keys feel (YMMV). There are some other gaming keyboards with thumb keys but the Anansi is the only one I remember having found with more than three.

It's so frustrating, they figured out that you get extra bandwidth by giving the thumbs more keys, but then they throw that extra bandwidth away by making the keyboard smaller.

Oh, right, there's also keyboardio. I've never tried it and it's expensive but it doesn't just have thumb keys, it also has palm keys. And there's ergodox though I didn't like it when I tried it. There are also some generic Japanese keyboards with a narrower space bar and extra bucky bits - I assume you'd have to fiddle with remapping keys for optimal use in English.

> At the point where he said there should be a law that recommendations need to be made by humans it’s like dude...

You’re taking him way too literally. “There oughta be a law” is a figure of speech.

Heh normally said by people who naively believe that all this regulation and unions are not required only to find that when they have problems there isn't a law against it.

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