Hacker News Reader

Comment by rauchp | Hacker News Reader

"his claim that the post-Facebook world 'is better,' as he put it in his note in November, is arguable, at best"

A horrible statement in an otherwise decent article. There's a lot of work to be done in keeping these platforms safe, I agree. The article does a really good job of highlighting the uncontrollable growth these communities experienced and the founders' inability to control it.

But to state that an interconnected world is "at best" arguably better? The author comes off as a luddite who disregards the largest human network in history, just because of their anger towards Zuckerberg or Facebook as a corporation. Things need to change, but let's not downplay what we're dealing with here. There has been so much commercial, personal, and community growth thanks to Facebook's network effects. This isn't about the wealth of a single individual anymore.

View on HN

Yes, I think it’s ok to put the idea out that maybe Facebook hasn’t had a net beneficial effect on humanity.

Maybe it has, maybe it hasn’t. Certainly the interconnectedness in general is moving us forward.

But Facebook in particular is amazing at capturing your attention and manipulating your emotions to get you to spend more time in Facebook. It is a responsive actor that learns what you respond to, and it’s interests are not aligned with yours.

Without Facebook, would we have settled on something less malicious?

That’s impossible to say.

"Certainly the interconnectedness in general is moving us forward."

It is undeniably moving us. I can't imagine the argument that it's not moving us. But I'd submit unless you mean "forward" in the trivial temporal sense, I am unconvinced it's "forward" in the general sense.

I blame as the root cause the mismatch of incentives between Facebook making money via advertising vs. the user's desires and goals. Advertising gives Facebook billions of dollars worth of incentives to invade privacy, hook people to ways of giving up their personal info, manipulating them in ways to ever up "engagement" with the ads specifically (not just the service in general). That's a big negative in my book, possibly as large as "break the political system" large.

On the positive side, we can't credit Facebook with everything thats happens on their service. At best they get the difference of the good social interactions that happen today minus the ones that were already happening without them (and can still happen without them), e.g., school and family reunions and parties happened before Facebook.

Until we do something to remove these incentives created as a second-order effect of trying to build services on top of advertising alone, anything is going to be toxic, whether or not it's called "Facebook".

The Internet is now primarily a tool for serving eyeballs to advertisers at any and all costs, rather than a tool for serving people. How can any other outcome occur until that is fixed?

It's an impressive human accomplishment, but that doesn't mean it made the world better.

I think the world may have been better for a little while, during the era of the chronological timeline (maybe not), but facebook has devolved into a surveillance machine feeding us echo chambers.

I think "more connected" is a hard sell and "better" is false.

I agree, Newsfeed is divisive and toxic. I feel like Facebook was too slow in de-emphasizing it from the core product. But Facebook has become a lot more than that for so many people. I've seen a lot of people that have been able to make a better living thanks to Facebook's network effects.

This isn't thanks to the efforts of Facebook, but a byproduct of their huge social graph. I don't like Facebook as a company but I recognize the value in this, especially for people in less developed countries.

Your description comes somewhat close to the initial grand vision of Facebook as a global community uniting strangers of different cultures in a shared, positive effort of cooperation.

While everyone probably has a few examples of friends they otherwise wouldn't have kept in touch with, that is so far from those optimistic hopes that we stopped debating the possibility about five years ago and don't even make fun of it even more these days.

The world would definitely be better off without facebook. It's worse than useless.

Seriously, how would your life change dramatically without Facebook?

My life? Not at all. I don't really use the product except for managing event invites. But I don't run a business that generates most of their leads through Facebook. Nor do I organize any volunteering or community events that would benefit from reaching a large amount of people.

This is a strange hill to die on, because I really don't agree with most of the company's actions. Yet every time I'm outside of the U.S, I see how important Facebook is to a lot of communities. I could be wrong, but I've just seen large social graphs like Facebook's create value. Hence my surprise to the author insinuating it's made the world a worse place.

Ironically enough the people that benefit the most from the product aren't the primary source of income, as I'm sure first world users are valued higher per ad dollar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com