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Comment by chalkandpaste | Hacker News Reader

This is a very short-sighted view. Yes it has some immediate benefit in terms of pay, but you have to consider the long-term societal tradeoff of not developing addictive mental candy for people or developing societally useful technologies (or vice-versa, as it now stands). We can focussed on getting paid a lot now, or improving the wealth of everyone and generative the value we can all enjoy later.

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> the long-term societal tradeoff of not developing addictive mental candy

Along with React, GraphQL and a bunch of other technologies with various degrees of popularity https://opensource.fb.com

Along with various startups building around the projects incubated at Facebook - Asana, Interana, Phacility, Qubole, etc.

React + GraphQL < B

Where B is the sum of the set consisting of:

-Breaking democracy in the US and the UK by being _the_ platform for disinformation.

-Disinformation assisting genocide in Myanmar.

-Use correlating strongly with poor mental health

-Manipulating behaviour to encourage poor attention spans for the sake of ad-clicking

-Constantly violating basic standards of privacy

-(I could go on..)

Oh wait, excuse my arithmetic. I forgot to add another JS framework like Relay to the LHS of the equation, that makes it a net positive from Facebook! :D

I don't think its fair to blame FB on the decay of democracy in the information age. Surely Twitter is also to blame them. I think the blame is on the users. Its not possible to be perfectly informed. It is possible to keep your mouth shut if you don't know something for sure. Perhaps its the fact that in real life, to say something you need to say it to someone's face and on social media you don't have that social weight to carry. This brings about people more likely to share misinformation. If this is the case, its not the fault of social media, rather the fault of internet culture. More personal responsibility is the solution. Not an improved ML system to detect fake news.

Yes, Twitter is also to blame.

It is a problem inherent in the structure of most social media companies. And Facebook is the most significant social media company, and thus contributor to the problem.

> Breaking democracy in the US and the UK by being _the_ platform for disinformation.

Blaming facebook for "breaking" democracy in the US and the UK is ridiculous. I can't understand how this can continue being a claim remotely considered valid. I agree (or may agree, at least in part) on some of the other points, but not on this.

Claiming that Trump won just because of the russians putting ads on facebook is at least naive - and ignores the fears/actual issues a very big* part of the US population experience daily. Isn't failing public schooling a problem there also? Does that give us citizen more or less prepared to actually participate in democracy?

Politicians (of all sides) in the UK have accused the EU of being the root of all evil since they "joined", again and again and again: you lost your job? Blame the EU! We can't cut taxes? Blame the EU! You really want to blame facebook and NOT the politicians themselves because people voted for brexit?

If the Russians tried to manipulate (and for sure they did, oh gosh, I'm pretty sure the US and the EU states never do - or did - anything to manipulate elections abroad! Evil Putin, why you do this to us? :cry:) we rolled out the red carpet for them!

Democracy was broken because actual journalists did not do their job. Stop doing what they (may) want you to do, using social media as a scapegoat for their own (willing, sometimes, for sure, at least if you read what Chomsky has to say) MASSIVE failure of being the "champions of truth" they claim (and blindly believe - I worked on somewhat close contact with them for years, I've seen that) to be.

I think the sadder part of this argument is that nobody outside of software engineers know or care what GraphQL is, yet it’s being touted as a “societal benefit”. How about the fact that my grandma with limited mobility can still attend church virtually through the Live feature? Regardless of how often the scions of the Valley disavow their own technology (I would /never/ let my children use our products!), there are a billion or so other people who actually use it to real benefit in their quaint little lives.

This argument I agree is far more compelling than "reductio ad JS library"

Ok so React, GraphQL, and good pay. Definitely not short-sighted.

You don't think those technologies could have been developed by people at ethical companies, or even by the same people at ethical companies?

So why haven't they been developed by the time Facebook came around?

The same reason Facebook didn’t develop them before they did.

Why would it be remarkable that a few popular technologies come out of a big, rich technology company? People who create such technologies work at places like that. But there’s nothing about React or GraphQL that makes them only possible at Facebook.

A big, rich technology company has the resources to put people on the project full time and a revenue stream to justify such broad architectural project.

There's also financial support for building a community around improving the tech, by encouraging outside contributions via meetups, conferences, social events, better technical documentation, etc.

At smaller scale startup an engineer is surely welcome to work on his skunkworks project, but justifying expensive large-scale architectural undertakings on company's dime is problematic. Especially if a quicker fix is available and buys the company a chance to kick the problem down the road.

With that said, it's not impossible to build a major popular piece of technology within a small company (Joyent and Node.js being a good example), it's just harder.

You’re repeating what I wrote - Big tech is likely to produce new tech, but new tech comes from other places too.

This discussion is mostly irrelevant to the fact that this particular company is completely reckless and unethical. The technology they accidentally produce while building a dystopia to make people click on ads[1] does not justify anything.

1: https://youtu.be/iFTWM7HV2UI

OData was developed before Graphql - pretty much does the same thing

I agree with your premise, that many Facebook employeees would give society a better return on its investment if they were employed elsewhere, but that’s hardly Facebook’s fault.

I didn't pin the blame on them. I place it as a cultural issue.

It's tempting to think that without Facebook they would get involved in cancer research or interplanetary travel, but given the Silicon Valley's funding cycles, they would be more likely to end up building yet another food delivery startup or revolutionizing something by putting it on blockchain.

Also, a bunch of recruiting venues exploited by Facebook are not that accessible to smaller startups.

E.g. one of the top previous employers for Facebook employees was Google (or some other outfit within Alphabet group, like YouTube). Most likely those people would've stayed at Google.

Another hiring source was university recruiting, which involves participating at job fairs at various universities, exhaustive days of back-to-back interviews, flying candidates for on-campus interviews, and eventually covering relocation costs (and potentially visas and immigration paperwork) for someone moving from Pittsburgh, Waterloo or Romania.

Would a smaller startup have the financial oomph to run a similar recruiting pipeline?

There's also its ostensible goal to connect people. I logged in for the first time in months just to see if I had been compromised. In about 15 minutes of goofing around, I got to enjoy countless happy baby pics posted by old college friends, and had a nice chat with someone I hadn't talked to in almost a decade, after I randomly commented on a status update. Then I logged off. I know that my kind of limited use is likely not the average scenario, and I can definitely understand people suffering when they get sucked in. But it's a site that does a damn good job of making it easy for me to find and interact with friends, and I don't believe the tech and design involved is trivial.

Still living in Europe, I must admit I always envied the people who work at Facebook, Google etc. This neutralizes my envy

What makes Facebook "addictive mental candy" other than you not personally liking it?

I know lots of people who feel they get and have got tremendous practical benefit from Facebook. It isn't "addictive" unless you use that term to mean anything some people make that other people enjoy.

Here's a study:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28093386

"Our results showed that overall, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with well-being."

Naturally, even if this study is accurate it isn't definitive; the causation could go in the other direction, that the unhappy use Facebook more often than the contented. But it's still quite suggestive.

I saw this study referenced from this article: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17144748/c...

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