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Comment by BraveSnoo1028 | Hacker News Reader

> I understand that bashing on facebook is a popular narrative here and they have made significant mistakes but it can hardly be argued the platform doesn't bring value to a significant share of people.

You don't think other sites can provide the same kind of value, while being far more respectful of your privacy and better reflecting the values of a country's culture? I sure as hell would prefer a German Facebook rather than the Facebook we have now that drowns out all other alternatives while allowing hate speech to spread unabated and trampling all over my right to privacy and to control my data. It's not even the fact that an alternative needs to be state-backed. It would be enough for a government to ban Facebook to allow local alternatives to grow a user base.

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I think most would agree that if there were a globally connected (meaning countries are not silos), open and privacy first alternative would exist they would want to switch however I think once these platforms grow they would hit similar problems:

* To operate in multiple countries so people can stay connected you have to abide by local laws even if they don't match the typical values.

* Social media is inherently winner-takes all due to the requirement of critical mass and connectedness. The winners have shifted over time (myspace) before but it seems harder to do than with other consumer services.

* Moderation of billions is a hard unsolved problem and is a game you can't win. You walk the tight rope of either allowing hate speech or being too overreaching in censoring. I'm not sure other startups will solve this any better.

* I'm personally not a huge fan of governments messing with competition, especially not for services where the people themselves choose to use it or not. Some share of people like using facebook and I don't feel banning them for the sake of their success is the right solution. While I'm from europe myself I feel over-regulating is one (among many) of the reasons why there are almost no dominant tech players here.

* Monetisation and use of user data. While there are other monetisation paths many people are actually ok with the trade of their data for features and should have this choice. The larger tech companies probably have some of the most well organised and privacy aware advertising platforms compared to smaller players where the likelihood of privacy incidents is arguably higher.

> I think most would agree that if there were a globally connected (meaning countries are not silos)

The best solution to this would be regional alternatives operating on a shared standard. This would avoid the problem of values not reflecting your culture's values, not having to moderate billions of people, etc.

> I'm personally not a huge fan of governments messing with competition

I'm not a fan of the US's bizarre mix of laissez-faire "fuck you" capitalism and systems of regulatory capture. If all you value is rewarding any one company with an entire market because "they're successful", then fine. But the point of markets isn't to enrich a single company to the detriment of everybody else. It's to benefit the population.

> While there are other monetisation paths many people are actually ok with the trade of their data for features and should have this choice

There is no choice being made here. People aren't aware of how much of their date is being collected by companies like Facebook.

> The larger tech companies probably have some of the most well organised and privacy aware advertising platforms

I can't take you seriously. You must be joking.

> The best solution to this would be regional alternatives operating on a shared standard. This would avoid the problem of values not reflecting your culture's values, not having to moderate billions of people, etc.

You are just shifting the problem here to the edges between the different systems.

> I'm not a fan of the US's bizarre mix of laissez-faire "fuck you" capitalism and systems of regulatory capture. If all you value is rewarding any one company with an entire market because "they're successful", then fine. But the point of markets isn't to enrich a single company to the detriment of everybody else. It's to benefit the population. > There is no choice being made here. People aren't aware of how much of their date is being collected by companies like Facebook.

I don't claim the US has the optimal system here but I think it's dangerous to claim to know what people want under the guise that they don't know what they are doing. People will have vote with their actions if they want things to change.

> I can't take you seriously. You must be joking.

I failed to add enough context but I was mainly talking about advertisement based companies that chose this monetisation path. Having worked at start-ups I'm highly confident that many of them don't have security and/or privacy (anonymity) as a first (or second or third) priority. FB has made grave errors here but I'm not sure I trust "random FB replacer" any more given FB is under a magnifying glass not with people watching their every move.

> People will have vote with their actions if they want things to change.

This is why populists or platforms like FB make sure that people either don’t know that things can change or that they already live in the best version of the reality and, well, everyone else has it worse.

Right because FB controls people’s access to information to the point where they keep people from knowing “The Truth”.

"People will have vote with their actions if they want things to change."

That isn't how monopolies work - while some people can individually make huge sacrificies and not use any Facebook product, in reality that isn't practical and few people will because they are a monopoly.

This isn't like buying a car where there are multiple providers who all use the same roads and petrol. Or the mobile phone system, where there are standards (GSM) and regulations so you have a choice of physical and virtual networks.

In my mind, breaking up Facebook would be a massively pro-market (increase choice and competition) and massively pro-capitalist (increase investment of capital, profit and innovation) move.

It’s now a “huge sacrifice” not to use Facebook?

Yes, It's a huge sacrifice not to use the primary (and in most cases only) messaging and event organising platform in your local network. And usually that platform is Messenger or WhatsApp. Sometimes it's IG.

And yes, feel free to argue that you can still be reached on SMS, Signal or Telegram or literally any other messaging platform. But good luck convincing even your closest friends and family to join.

So now we need the government to step in because you can’t convince your friends to use an alternate platform?

I’m part of a non profit that was using FB messenger until one person said they didn’t want to use FB. Everyone switched over to GroupMe.

I have a few ongoing group chats over SMS.

Good for you. Anecdotally I'd lose touch with casual acquaintances/friends and spontaneous meetups if someone had to send me an SMS to get in touch with me, and people under 30 will corroborate that.

I wasn't saying anything about government regulations, don't put words in my mouth.

So just like any other product, if you choose not to use it, you don’t get to take advantage of it.

If it was Facebook alone, I'd agree that people should have the choice.

But its not just Facebook. It's WhatsApp. It's Instagram (the 2nd largest network, no?)

It seems to be very anti-competitive to control 2/3 of the biggest social media platforms. They need broken up.

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