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Comment by ErikAugust | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s important to note that Facebook didn’t invent any of this. They just built the biggest mainstream distribution channel to do so. Nothing they ever did in terms of facilitating pointless arguments has been all that original either.

People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web much, much longer than Facebook has existed.

Now that said, they know what they have on their hands and how it makes them the money. They aren’t going to fix it. It is a big feature of their product.

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Psychopaths often excuse their behavior by saying that if they don't take advantage of others, someone else will do it instead.

To be fair, people will go to great lengths to argue over things they think are wrong. People make alt accounts on Reddit and Twitter to do it. Heck, people will even navigate 4chan's awful UI and content, fill in captchas, just to tell someone that they're wrong.

Facebook could make it harder to post content, but I doubt that would make much of a difference

think it’s important to note that Facebook didn’t invent any of this

I think that’s literally true. They told their algorithm “maximise the time people spend on Facebook” and it discovered for itself that sowing strife and discord did that.

Facebook’s crime is that when this became obvious they doubled down on it, because ads.

Facebook, and others, absolutely innovated with their recommendation engines. Enabled by implementing the most detailed user profiling to date coupled with machine learning.

Part of this is that Facebook makes the opinions of people you know but don't really care about highly visible, which I think leads to some of the animosity you see on the platform. When the person you're confronting is the uncle of someone you talked to once back in high school, there's little incentive to be kind.

> I think it’s important to note that Facebook didn’t invent any of this.

I don't agree with that. I very strongly think that Facebook did invent a lot of this.

> They just built the biggest mainstream distribution channel to do so

Scale does matter though. There is a lot in life that is legal or moral at small scale but illegal or immoral at large scale. Doing things at scale does change the nature of what you are doing. There's no 'just' to be had there.

> Nothing they ever did in terms of facilitating pointless arguments has been all that original either.

I don't agree with that either. They have even published scientific papers, peer-reviewed, to explain their new and novel methods of creating emotionally manipulative content and algorithms.

> People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web much, much longer than Facebook has existed.

I also don't agree with this. Facebook has spent 10+ years inventing new ways to rile people up. This stuff is new. Yes I know newspapers publish things that are twisted up etc, but that's different, clearly. The readers of the paper are not shouting at each other as they read it.

I think it's super dangerous to take this new kind of mass-surveillance and mass-scale manipulation and say, welp, nothing new here, who cares? I think that's extremely dangerous. It opens populations to apathy and lets corporations do illegal and immoral things to gain unfair and illegal power.

Facebook should not be legally allowed to do all the things they are doing. It's invasive, immoral, and novel, the way they deceive and manipulate society at large.

> Doing things at scale does change the nature of what you are doing.

"Quantity has a quality of its own"

> I think it's super dangerous to take this new kind of mass-surveillance and mass-scale manipulation and say, welp, nothing new here, who cares?

If that's the outcome you're concerned about I think it's legitimate. I don't think it's parent's intention to encourage apathy though.

However even if unintended, it's a good reminder that we should all watch out to not fall into that apathy trap.

Have you read a newspaper comment section recently? Lots and lots of shouting going on between readers.

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