HN's Facebook obsession is so unproductive. Let it go already. Focus on building your own thing.
Yes, people use Facebook. No, you don't have to.
Edit: yes, please downvote this comment. Let the HN naval gazing continue.
Yes, people use Facebook. No, you don't have to.
Edit: yes, please downvote this comment. Let the HN naval gazing continue.
I know several people who essentially need to maintain facebook and other social media presence to be employed because they work in social media adjacent fields or journalism, where social networks are nowadays the main source to do basic things like get into contact with sources and so on.
So no many people are actually dragged into these networks rather involuntarily. The same is also true when it comes to people's dating lives if one looks at the behaviour of particularly young people.
Regardless, they presumably maintain a Facebook presence because that’s where people are, but that’s not where you have to be. Shocking, I know.
I have to ask to be emailed about these events and often I get a screenshot of their facebook post!
You should not have to be on a platform to participate and luckily everyone that I explained this problem to understands it and do send me the email with events. But it creates enormous pressure to be on the platform.
HN just has an unhealthy obsession with Facebook.
Get over it already.
HN is hardly alone on this, plenty of other sites including redit and a few others that I know of hate on facebook regularly.
I don't get how Facebook is detrimental to society. Probably I am missing something.
The majority of people do have an option to delete their account or simply not to log in. Apart from Facebook's involvement in scandals like Cambridge Analytica, I don't see what's wrong with the site or company. It's true that it can be used for causing harm, but that's true for almost every other tech out there.
Tools, organization, policies,... are always an expression of a specific or a common intent. How Facebook moderates the platform, makes design choices, how it decides on what to show on your newsfeed,... all of that is intentional.
Facebook isn't a public commons, it's not a space where people freely control the flow of the content they publish or control what they see or when they get to see it. Facebook is designed with the express goal of getting to know as much as possible about its tenants - "insights" in marketing speak - so it can then sell that information.
The problem with Facebook is how 2nd and 3rd order network effects that disrupt the fabric of society, emerge through its sheer scale. What's wrong with the platform is that it is entirely unwilling to acknowledge those effects and happily shift responsibility towards society and individuals.
If people aren't willing to delete their account, then that's because Facebook has captured how people communicate and understands that it plays into basic psychological behaviors such as FOMO, or that nobody likes to be an outsider.
If literally everyone you know goes to the top place in town every thursday and saturday night, if all the gossip happens at that spot, well, it's extremely hard to stay clear of that without feeling left out.
I mean I consider Facebook a pile of trash but that I recognize that the problem has always been the people who make up society being vapid, foolish, and vain caring more about it. Banning Facebook won't fix those problems - their ancestors have been witchhunting, engaging in stupid "reformations and moral crusades" that only make things worse without any redeeming values and lashing back at inconvenient facts long before Facebook.
The reason you can't hold politicians accountable is because their whole aparatus of government is deathlty afraid of setting any precedent which might hold them personally accountable for direct misdeeds.
See the furious rationalizations known as Qualified Immunity and refusal to prosecute literal war criminals. See the furious reaction to whistleblowers above literal traitors who sell secrets to foreign governments. It is abundantly clear that they fear transparency and accountability above all else and replacing the clusterfuck with something not even worse is politically very difficult.
Blaming Facebook for "influence" is questionably third to fourth order as well, especially when far more direct culprits go unpunished without reason. It is classic cycle of abuse displacement of blame from a more responsible to a more accessible and vulnerable target.
Sure grandma may voted for a guy whose campaign platform was literally "Mein Campf" subsisted for the local language and country but maybe the uncomfortable truth is that she was always quietly a genocidal racist who felt that mass murder was preferrable to being on an equal footing to "lessers" but was fine before because they "knew their place". Utterly horrifying but easy to see why most would prefer to blame Facebook over their family members for being responsible for being horrible people.
It reeks of "follow the money" ambulance chasing of suing the laundromat for not having bulletproof windows instead of the gangbangers who hit the victims during a drive by shooting. Only in this case it is "follow the politicial power to try to dragoon it to something they think will be in their favor".
I bet many of the people here grind their teeths when they see mark Zuckerberg earning billions doing what they didn't and now can't because of Facebook Monopoly on social media apps. They patched up every way to connect inside their walled garden and grab the existing users.
As a side note, make a Facebook account and never log in beside the first time with zillions of anti tracking plugins. People who will otherwise ask for your Facebook can just search your name (they do this first before asking) and send a friend request, and I doubt anyone would ask why you didn't accept their friend request because
A. You might not like them or so will they think. They will be afraid to open up that they are bothered by you not accepting the friend request. After some time, if you remain friendly irl or on other platform they will think maybe you forgot or something. They will make up a reason for you that satisfies them of the image they have of you for not accepting the friend request.
B. They simply send too many friend request to remember whether someone accepted or not.
Have an upvote!
May I recomend you a book? https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...
Or, if books are not your thing, maybe watch Black Mirror - Nosedive (S03E01).
You need to understand that some people are older than facebook and have seen the tranformation of human society since the Facebook came.