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Comment by person_of_color | Hacker News Reader

Disappointing that the author joined FB.

Indeed. It's hard to imagine people who could work basically anywhere in the world chooses to work for the company that has demonstrated they only care about money, don't care about its users and actively do more harm than good.

I could understand people who started working for Facebook 10 years ago, before we knew the beast. But now, just a year ago start working for Facebook? I really wish we (engineers working in the software industry) could be more ethical inclined and stop caring about money so much.

> actively do more harm than good

I don’t believe this statement is axiomatic.

There are literally billions of people who are happy to use it and get happiness from it. Yes it is also, fundamentally, spyware.

I think the answer is more nuanced and I struggle to untease it.

Consider that everyone who owns an internal combustion vehicle is knowingly implicit in poisoning the atmosphere. Most of them only care about money and don’t care about the atmosphere. Are they actively doing more harm than good?

(FB is a large corp and doesn’t need defense from little old me. I’m pushing back though at the absolutism of your judgement)

You're begging the question.

Not everyone shares your "facebook is evil" perspective yet your post assumes that we all agree about that.

Not everybody knows that facebook is evil. It's not something to have an opinion about.

Categorizing something as evil or not evil is an opinion.

Thats the point, not everyone will agree that facebook is evil, or even have the same interpretation of evil.

Glad to hear you put morality on an objective footing and we no longer have to waste time debating thd difference between good and evil.

Yeah, sorry, I do assume people have a base level of ethics and moral code :) If you're not part of the group, I understand my comment seems foreign.

People do not agree on ethical and moral questions.

The assertion that everyone who disagrees with you is objectively wrong is childish and you should work on overcoming that :)

Do you eat meat? Do you were clothes created in sweatshop? Do you use any cobalt mined in Congo?

I believe all of those are far more evil than Facebook. Any TV you buy, any webpage you go to (not literally any, but more or less) sells your data as well.

I understand that you, or most, might disagree with me. I do believe that is a matter of opinion.

You're conflating consumer choices (where you have little ability to affect the outcome outside an organized boycott) with actually producing stuff (which makes the system go).

What would be reason to assume people have a the same ethics and moral code ?

Is your base moral code to do what is popular? Because lets be real, this thread would not appear for any of the other companies that do the exact same thing but aren't currently in vouge to hate on.

So instead of having a complex ethical and moral framework, you turn to dogma.

Very easy to write this if you’ve already made it. Plenty of people haven’t, however. And while Facebook might not be the nicest place doing the best stuff for the world, we should not be disparaging developers for trying to better their situation unless you’re gonna go ahead and disparage every developer who ever worked at Facebook too.

We don't know the circumstances. Maybe he didn't have that many options, and needed money badly? It's easy to criticize people for their choices, but I always wonder what the critics would actually do in exactly the same circumstances. I personally am not so sure I can always justify my life choices as 100% ethically pure.

Yeah, that's how I look at people who work for the gangs that killed 200 million people last century, and continue to do most of the killing even today. Most people call them governments and they find nothing wrong with working for them.

People have different worldviews, news at 11.

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