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Comment by lucasmullens | Hacker News Reader

Why is this being downvoted? It's okay to like Facebook, folks.

Probably because Facebook is full of dark patterns and slowly tries to force this kind of content back onto you all the time so you're constantly fighting a riptide of ads, political garbage, and memes when all you want to see if updates about the lives of friends and family.

I know that I have trouble fighting that riptide. My family doesn't stand a chance. Too many friends and family members who are too old to fight that effect have been slowly polarized politically because they're helpless against Facebook's engagement metrics.

I mean you're just describing social media. Facebook the company makes plenty of user-hostile decisions but "the majority of content that people on Facebook share are memes and political garbage" isn't really something Facebook did except by being a platform where people who post that stuff can find an audience.

I mean I guess Facebook could mod memes and political content out of existence but the backlash against such an action would probably be worse.

Social media doesn’t have to be awful. The current platforms are awful because they work for advertisers, not for users.

When there are people using your data to exploit the less intelligent more easily terrified portion of your countries citizens using targeted groups run by nation states that can only be described as adversarial to your country, it's a bit beyond "this is just what social media is". Facebook knows exactly what is being done using their platform and their CEO has given it tacit approval. There is a reason why I and a not insignificant portion of engineers wont consider working there.

Do you remember the early days of Facebook, 2007-2010 or so? There was a time when Facebook was just direct posts written by friends, photos they posted, and ... no links, no articles, no newsfeed algorithm, nothing else. Hell, at one point there wasn't even a newsfeed, you actually had to visit everyone's page (though iirc you could subscribe to a notification when certain friends posted?).

I'd pay $5/month for that 2009 Facebook back. And honestly I'd pay $20/month to get that for my parents and a couple of other family members who've experienced serious brainrot as a result of years of feed addiction. They wouldn't know where to find garbage 24/h news articles without FB.

Because this post is like someone coming to an AA meeting claiming it's okay to go into a bar because he loves eating peanuts, drinking carbonated water while reading a book in a corner booth.

There's always someone in these threads who is like "hey, I have a healthy use of facebook, why don't you ?". This conversation has been done to death.

Many people feel Facebook is, collectively, a strongly net negative on society as a whole.

If it were simply a place to keep in touch with family and friends, and to find local business, etc, I think it’d be a fantastic resource and a net positive.

Unfortunately it has instead contributed to the devolution of a common understanding of truth, a common set of values, in favor of the outrage machine, mostly pushed by Facebook’s algorithms.

So not only is it destructive, Facebook has actively encouraged that destruction.

So, many people feel it’s not actually okay to like Facebook, any more than it’s ok to like the proliferation of drug dealers on street corners.

ELI5 how do you know it’s being downvoted?

Posts turn grey if downvoted enough. It seems to have rebounded now, though.

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