Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is powerful and insular. Taking it down requires extraordinary organisation. Outrage is helpful in that respect.

Agreement is better than disagreement. Would I prefer we had agreement earlier? Yes. Is agreement today better than agreement tomorrow? Absolutely.

Now that we have a constituency, the important thing is to mobilise. The past is in the past. Our job, in the present, is to protect the future.

View on HN

Call for a facebook user strike on May 1st.

#May1FBstrike

https://medium.com/@oddbert2000/call-for-a-facebook-users-st...

Excellent - they'll be able to offer advertised another demographic category "People who are vocally privacy conscious, but who aren't prepared to do anything about preserving it if it means they don't get to play Farmville."

Antivirus vendors and shitty vpn services will be all over that.

what is the point?

Why not just every day? Only use it as much as absolutely necessary (to communicate with people you wouldn't be able to reach otherwise) and use competitors instead. Even using FB owned companies (e.g. Whatsapp) would help. While FB still gets some data, they don't get contents (unlike FB messenger all chats are end-to-end encrypted) and most importantly no ad revenues. And lower revenues is what would truly change Facebook's policies.

You think people could organize better than against Trump ? seems unlikely

> better than against Trump?

It is more effective to organise for a cause than against a politician. Presidents are intentionally difficult to remove. The bar for promoting action against Facebook is lower than for prompting action against the President.

Trump has many supporters(not me). I don't think any facebook users particularly like facebook, it's just where "everyone" is.

Exactly this.

Who even supports FB?

The media? No, they hate them because they took all their ad revenue.

Republicans? No, they hate them for the censorship controversy that happened a year or so ago, and because it is full of ultra left wing silicon Valley types.

Democrats? No, they hate them for the whole Cambridge analytica, Russian data thing.

Facebook has made a lot of enemies, and there really isn't any sort of constituency that SUPPORTS them.

Still, absent an adequate replacement people will continue to stay there.

Bunch of companies get a lot of their customers through Facebok. Those will probably support (finanically and otherwise) FB as long as there are no obviously better ways to get customers. Not for any sentimental reason, just because their business relies on it.

Not necessarily. Businesses are usually fine with making things worse for themselves if it also impacts all of their competitors, preferably even more. That is, as long as a business comes out a bit more ahead of their competitors, a business is usually just fine with making something worse for everybody.

So, even if a business currently gets a lot of revenue from Facebook, as long as a business thinks that other businesses in their field are more dependent on Facebook than they themselves are, they should be fine with Facebook declining.

They have two major things.

1. Money

2. The fact that they are the only source of information that a good percentage of the world uses.

Money can be used to buy power, and they already have a not-insignificant level of control over the flow of information (which is power itself).

Facebook's ability to prop itself up and exist as it does, despite all the animus against it, reminds me of the essay Meditations on Moloch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com