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Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

> Is it possible to curate all of Facebook’s content?

Here's perhaps a better question:

If it's not feasible for a social space to be maintained in some semblance of good order because of its size, should that space even exist?

Do extremely horizontal social networks provide value to society proportional to the harms they seem to cause, and that the people who build them seem either unwilling or unable to stop?

I'd also pose this question about narrowly targeted advertising, which of course goes hand in hand with enabling these platforms to exist.

Things don't necessarily have to exist just because they can.

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There are plenty of large groups that people derive social value from, maybe even most.

Unfortunately, Facebook mirrors human society and gives bad/profit-driven actors an easier avenue than traditional recruiting and distribution.

Most things are good/neutral, but scale means some things will go south

> There are plenty of large groups that people derive social value from, maybe even most.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you mean groups on facebook or that there are other groups on the scale of facebook people (ie. a user count in the billions) derive value from?

For the first, in the absence of facebook these groups would no doubt still exist. There were forums before facebook and some of them grew quite large. There were even regional social networks on smaller scales (I worked for one once).

If you mean the latter, well, I don't think that's really true. In so far as it is, there are only really a couple that aren't just owned by facebook to begin with.

> in the absence of facebook these groups would no doubt still exist.

I don’t think they would.

Creation, discovery, participation, following. None of these is particularly easy if you revert to forums and Google. I won’t join Cute Puppies Forum but I wouldn’t mind following an homonymous group on Facebook for a little while, maybe I’ll answer some questions too.

The average Joe won’t care enough to join their little city group, but Facebook makes it so easy that you find all kinds of non-tech people on it, ready to answer your questions (and sometimes insult you, but I block those on sight).

I don't think we really know what kind of social spaces would have evolved in a world where something like facebook didn't or couldn't grow. I think there were some hints of it evolving in the early 2000s, but when facebook blew up it just sucked ALL the air out of the room and forums and blogs all got stuck in 2009.

Maybe I'm wrong, but again I have to ask the question: Are those conveniences actually worth the harm we see from aggressive narrow ad targeting/tracking, as well as the issues mentioned here around parasitic viral memes, that make things like facebook even viable as businesses?

This is an evaluation we are allowed to make, and it's not a foregone conclusion that just because people can build these things they have a place in our society.

I’d rather keep my Facebook groups and have Facebook manually quarantine misinformation groups and pages instead, in a way similar to how Reddit does it.

I don’t think we should reduce public liberties because some people take advantage of them. I’d rather punish/limit them instead.

Ok, so who's going to accurately quarantine misinformation among the trillions of posts being made by billions of people? How many moderators does it take to do that effectively? Likely a few orders of magnitude more than facebook employs.

Anyways, no "public liberties" are unlimited. All are constrained where leaving them open creates significant harm or burdens other people's liberties. Even free speech and freedom of association.

People understood that once. "All my freedoms are absolute and who cares if society falls down with them" is a modern construct and it seems pretty plain to me that it's resulted in a lot of problems.

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