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Comment by yuppie_scum | Hacker News Reader

If only he could.

Why? Nobody is forcing you to use FB, are they? I have to make a google account in order to work with certain clients, which is dreadful, but have not encountered the same with FB.

In the realm of lack of choice, WhatsApp (also a FB property!) is pretty hard to avoid in certain countries. So FB the company is hard to avoid, but FB the site doesn't seem so to me.

I don't have to be on Facebook to see that it's damaging our society, polarizing and radicalizing many of my fellow citizens.

I certainly see the polarization and radicalism but am unconvinced that FB was critical much less a “cause”

Access to information and easier communication will do that all by itself. When I started using Twitter I followed lots of people of differing political viewpoints to avoid an echo chamber. It was a hideous reminder that there are many, many people who genuinely hate me and what I believe in and that there are an incredible number of idiots with strongly held wrong opinions and no grasp of basic economics and politics. People hating each other because they have radically different views, priorities and goals is normal. The flattening of opinion that happened between the birth of radio and broadcast tv and that of cable was the result of a determined effort to control the narrative, not something natural.

Idk, I never got angry on Myspace.

Twitter and Facebook make money by selling engagement. Placidity of the user base, for companies that sell engagement, is a lost opportunity. They have an incentive to rile people up -- especially in an election year like 2020 when they were selling political advertisements to demagogue politicians.

Nobody’s forcing anyone to use any tech but one tech giant standing up to another on valid moral principles with little beyond mindshare to gain is welcome.

This is something Apple has always flirted with and I’d welcome it as part of their brand. So what they might not actually take down FB. But clearly establishing their values isn’t just an opportunity to buy a product, it’s part of the conversation about what role we want technology to have in our lives and our society.

Actually many are - my wife's college did a lot of scheduling and event planning on Facebook because "everyone has a FB account". That's why she had to create an account.

Well no, she didn't have to. It just was most convenient for her.

Right, no one ever has to do anything: there’s no such thing as absolute imperative; there’s always a consequence implied in the verb. So why do we even have this word? Maybe because eliding the consequence is useful?

uh, given they were arranging things that where attendance was graded on FB she didn't have a choice. There was no convenience factor, it was literally the way things were communicated to students.

Yep, similar situation in schools. They are using Facebook for a lot of stuff now. That, and I was doing at least three training/apprenticeship where we used Facebook so I had to have an account. It is quite unavoidable today, I dunno why people make it sound like it is.

Thanks: I don't see that in my life so was not aware of it.

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