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Comment by 3gg | Hacker News Reader

Simple truths. If we just took for-profit corporations for what they are, things would be easier to comprehend.

As far as I understand it, Facebook is a private, not public, space, and they can technically delete anything they want on their own platform. The big mistake is for us to pretend that they are a public space and that they owe us some kind of fairness and equal treatment. Why do we expect this? The sole reason for their existence is profit, they owe us nothing. Rather than taking the platform for granted as the new norm of social and political life, I think we would all be better off destroying it and creating a true, public cyberspace in its place.

Facebook does not need to be fixed, it just needs to be destroyed.

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The problem of Facebook has nothing to do with it being for-profit. This is an issue specific to companies whose paying customers are not the users of its supposed product—a situation that distorts how the market is supposed to work (behold a whole new level of information asymmetry, famously not good for markets except now it’s the entire premise of a huge business).

The belief that free social is the norm is part of it. The promise of the free leaves users at the mercy of the provider serving advertisers. We can’t vote with our money (free!); all our friends are here (free); a competitor who makes its users its paying customers can’t survive against a free offer.

The issues with the "free" paradigm you point out are interesting indeed, and I think I have read some of your points elsewhere. I have also thought that the "free" model -- advertising -- is a creator of bad products, and like you said, it distorts many of the assumptions that make the market work.

I had also exaggerated my point on "all for-profits" and "simple" truths. Like I commented below, I do not believe that all for-profits or capitalism are necessarily evil; it's just that the American version of it often makes it look that way.

Monopoly

Nope, however bad monopolies are this is not that either really.

Facebook exists to make money.

They took your money while you were willing to spend it and showed your ads, and blasted you when you ran out? Sounds like a way to make money.

And if you are not paying to use facebook you are the product. Do people not understand this?

Facebook IS NOT your friend. Engagement drives clicks, "engagement" comes from trash content / click bait / outrage cycles. Does this sound healthy? No

If you are trying to make the world a better place in almost any way - facebook is probably not the healthy partner in this!

I see the same engagement issues everywhere on the internet, including this site where discussions constantly veer off into the same old fights. I realize it's tempting to focus more blame and hate on facebook (I don't like it either, and Zuckerberg especially seems like a first-rate snake). But this idea that they "infect people with mind-viruses", or whatever, is just too reductionist and misses how they actually operate, which is simply "fill a need people have so those people will use the product and you can sell ads". It just happens to be a baser need we'd rather people not go fill. I have read that in the past everyone just drank alcohol constantly to escape, so maybe it's progress.

As for this person's specific complaint of hypocrisy or whatever, I don't actually think the imposition of "silicon valley values" or whatever into their operation is at all beneficial to IT companies' finances. I'd place it under the category of hackers, who are abusing/corrupting the automated moderation systems and forcing the company to waste money trying to actually be fair and not alienate half their potential customers, not earn more money by it.

> "fill a need people have so those people will use the product and you can sell ads"

What need does Facebook fulfill?

instinctive needs to connect and interact with other people, to gain new experiences/information and be entertained, that kind of things. People will just seek it out elsewhere if not on Facebook.

By this logic, we should be fine with shutting down Facebook. We'll simply go somewhere else. Fine with me, maybe it'll also serve as a lesson in greed.

Well I mean it's no more of a defense of Facebook than of a liquor store or whatever. But I don't follow your logic. If you shut down the restaurant on the corner here I will go somewhere else too. Doesn't mean I'm necessarily fine with people granting themselves the right to shut places down.

The users are not the customers.

The subject of this story is both a user and a customer. But apart from cases (like this one) where the advertising is for political campaigns, the goal of advertisers is to sell products to facebook's users. So instead of being customers of Facebook, they are customers of Facebook's customers. The money trail simply has an extra step in the middle. There are surely be some nuanced differences in that more-complex relationship, but overall the motivation for facebook is the same as if they were trying to sell their own products directly to users, which presumably they do sometimes also. Though they probably have to deal with a higher risk of antitrust accusations when they operate that way.

It’s not that simple, behind the company are people. While earning money might be probably the biggest goal there are a lot of other goals by the people working there. Workers act on their beliefs up to a certain point (because they have a lot of discretion about things that don’t hurt the bottom line), managers often want to feel in power, Mark Zuckerberg wants to be like a roman emperor.

> It’s not that simple, behind the company are people.

I get your sentiment, really. But where is the tipping point? When does it become the responsibility of an employee to quit? Which atrocity has to be committed after which i cannot claim personal innocence as an employee? (in a general sense, not only facebook)

The sliding scale goes from minor concerns about freedom of speech to the gas chambers. I don’t say this to exaggerate — I really think that’s how things spun out of control in Germany.

There’s a somewhat terrifying book on said topic: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

A book review reads: “[this is] a shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews”.

The real lesson of the book is that each and any of us could be these ordinary men.

So I’m not sure there really is a tipping point. Maybe we can invent one in retrospect, but as the slow-motion train wreck happens, it’s hard to find any one point where things really go awry. It’s an integrated process.

It’s possible to pass the the buck back forever. The root cause of WW1 is that a group of primitive apes became intelligent and migrated through and out of Africa.

The only thing we can hope to do is fix things as they stand now. We’re probably far past the tipping point already, what with all the damage social media has caused our society.

> I think we would all be better off destroying it and creating a true, public cyberspace in its place.

It lives on money and attention. How do you propose cutting off one or both until it can no longer survive?

> Simple truths. If we just took for-profit corporations for what they are, things would be easier to comprehend.

Context: I strongly dislike Facebook; I left years ago. I'm fairly interested in novel socialist, anarchist and resource-focused models for organisation as necessary improvements over current mixed mode we use in many countries currently (I just don't know any that will "work" at the required scale).

I don't think it's _that_ simple. Under capitalism, most systems are for-profit. Even governments and charities operate to raise capital to fund projects, so at the interface with people and most other organisations they have to operate similarly to capitalists (protectionism, hoarding, cost-cutting).

Because of this, you can't point to money-making as the only cause of the malpractice, without also implicating the person you're trying to convince.

There are things I don't like about capitalism, can we try this crappier economic model that has the exact same issues of concentrated authority only exaggerated 10 fold. I swear its an improvement, just give me control and I'll show you.

> Under capitalism, most systems are for-profit. Even governments and charities operate to raise capital to fund projects.

I think we're mixing things up here. A non-profit raises funds to run its operations; it does not seek to make profit, it does not have any private ownership of the means of production (the literal meaning of capitalism), and it does not seek to grow its profits YoY, rule out competition to sooth investors, and the usual day-to-day business of for-profits. That it needs money to run does not equate it to actual for-profit corporations in a capitalist society.

I agree with your last point though. For-profit corporations are not necessarily evil if they can put ethics before profit; it's just that American Big Tech chooses not to do so.

I also applaud your move.

In America we have a concept known as “the rule of law”. An independent judiciary prevents mob justice from simply seizing wealth from people and private entities. We even prevent the government from doing so (at least theoretically).

To see a counter-example, look at China. Their system is completely opaque and politicians can easily stymie even the strongest business entities. The judiciary is not independent but subject to the latest dictator’s whims.

If you are reading this and live in a Western country, feel appreciative that simple solutions are not applied quickly to complex problems.

> In America we have a concept known as “the rule of law”.

We do. And in America, that set of laws includes things like "Thou Shalt Not Buy Up All Thine Competitors Into One Giant Monopoly."

Unfortunately, the groups in charge of enforcing those laws have been asleep at the wheel for the last 20 years or so. Were they working, Facebook wouldn't have reasonably been allowed to buy up nearly as many successful competitors as they've been allowed to, and wouldn't have nearly the stranglehold on "social" that they do.

Same goes for Google and Amazon as well - I don't pick on Facebook alone here, except for the fact that they're the topic of discussion in this thread.

> “The FTC’s Complaint says almost nothing concrete on the key question of how much power Facebook actually had, and still has, in a properly defined antitrust product market,” the filing reads. “It is almost as if the agency expects the Court to simply nod to the conventional wisdom that Facebook is a monopolist.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/28/judge-dismisses-ftc-antitrus...

You claim that FB is a monopoly, but the courts made a dispassionate, reasoned analysis and disagreed strongly. This is what an independent judiciary looks like.

I agree with the courts, speaking as someone that hasn't used FB in almost a decade (never used IG, might use whatsapp every couple of months) and same with twitter.

It's just nonsense to me because people have convinced themselves they can't live without them… addicted to their centralized social media skinner boxes to the degree they are no longer capable of rational thoughts on such subjects.

The fact that people can choose not to use a product has nothing to do with whether it is a monopoly or not.

Agreed, and there are plenty of alternatives that people can and do use to send garbage to one another that arent fb and its centralized brethren.

The criteria is not monopoly or not.

Bork argued regulators should only consider benefit to the customer. Who is Facebook's customer? Did they benefit?

Before, and now after, Bork the criteria included anticompetitive behavior. In that regard, Facebook's actions would make Microsoft blush.

> In America we have a concept known as “the rule of law”.

Paid for by corporations who spend lots of money lobbying the government.

I guess I get part of your point, but let me also joke a little:

> To see a counter-example, look at China. Their system is completely opaque and politicians can easily stymie even the strongest business entities. The judiciary is not independent but subject to the latest dictator’s whims.

To see a counter-example, look at America. Their system is completely opaque and corporations can easily stymie even the strongest of political entities. The legislative is not independent but subject to the latest corporation's whims.

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