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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

One thing HN has taught me many times is I’m too trustful of people and things. I was defending Theranos way past their sell-by date, and I’ve been refusing to take “Facebook / Zuck is evil” seriously for a long time too. This isn’t a good look for them at all tho

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My high school had the foresight to have a media literacy class 20 years ago. I never looked at an advertisement the same after that.

This just isn't being talked about enough. Educating people is one way to help the individual combat deceptive media practices, dark patterns in games and UIs, and much more. Luckily, my parents taught me to loathe commercials, and later political ideals led me to read a lot on the topic of the interaction between media and advertising and ideas, and how propaganda actually works (hint: effective propaganda isn't about lies, it's about showing some truths and not talking about others).

And this was all before the Internet boom and the terrible ad-tech hell we find ourselves in.

Anyway, kudos to your high school.

Do you recall what the required reading was?

This is truly a fantastic place to start (there is a book of the same name):

https://youtu.be/AnrBQEAM3rE

Outstanding. A 1992 documentary that describes fb and all modern media down to a T.

Just be mindful that HN (or any outlet these days) will never teach you the positive value of FB for the common person. FB is indeed evil in this case, but be careful not to blindly make over-generalizations with unnecessary correlations. FB, like most, can be good and evil. You don't have to accept the deluge of low quality, substanceless FB op eds the same way you do articles with more objective content. We have the ability to have more nuanced opinions about companies than all good or all evil.

My point is more that I've found HN's negativity to be more realistic than my natural optimism, over and over again.

Sure, just saying don't let the local sentiment change you. I personally have found the opposite once outside the echo chamber, granted like HN, I am naturally pessimistic/skeptical. I've found common-person use of tech and common tech business to be nowhere near as negative.

I've also found the common-person use and valuation of tech to be nowhere near as informed as HN's.

A bliss users enjoy, as we might in areas we're less knowledgeable in. They see a forest, we see trees; doesn't discount their happiness.

How is that relevant? Yes, uninformed people aren't worried by the problems they don't know about. That doesn't make the problems any less problematic.

More like uninformed people don't consider them problems, or at least not problems outweighing the benefits. There are several things that make "problems" more or less problematic, one of which being hyper-focus on negatives, which is why it's relevant.

> More like uninformed people don't consider them problems, or at least not problems outweighing the benefits.

Which still doesn't change anything about them being (serious) problems. It just means that people who don't have a clue don't have a clue.

> There are several things that make "problems" more or less problematic, one of which being hyper-focus on negatives, which is why it's relevant.

No, whether anyone is paying attention to a problem has zero influence on how big a problem it is.

Facebook has about a decade of privacy fuck-ups, manipulation and dark patterns behind it.

Sure, they're not 100% evil, heck Hitler was a pretty swell guy with his close friends too, but at this point they should be guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around.

The deluge of anti-fb comments is the public finally having enough of their crap, so you should get used to it.

> The deluge of anti-fb comments is the public finally having enough of their crap

This is the trap I'm talking about. Instead of "public" what you mean are "commenters" and "writers". Assuming that is an accurate representation of the public is folly. As has become clear so many times recently, and is especially visible in election results, the loud public and the general public are often not of the same mind.

The silent public is irrelevant, because they won't vote on whether facebook gets crushing fines, broken up, etc.

They'll just use whatever is easiest and tickles their fancy.

For curiosity's sake... we know now that Theranos was never anything more than hot air and marketing. What caused you to defend them at the time?

Probably the same thing that caused it to be worth $9 billion. Holmes was incredibly convincing and had real contracts with huge companies.

Whether Facebook is evil or not is not really the question. I frame it like this: We have a couple of big companies that make money from one thing: knowing as much as they can about you. Currently they sell ads. We have given these companies an important part of society. So much, in fact, that the choice is not "should I use X" but "should I chose not to use X and face not-so-small consequences for doing so?".

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