I understand the distain for Facebook as a business, but still this is pretty low effort.
A ton of small city governments in the US do announcements and such on Facebook these days. One columnist is advocating giving the a seats at the United Nations, and does not get immediately laughed out of the room by the editor [1].
It's really hard to practically escape their reach, all the "How I left Facebook and it was really great" posts notwithstanding. Being digital Henry David Thoreaus is not a scalable strategy.
So I tend to take the low effort comments as a visceral articulation of the relief felt at knowing that the platform and the conspiracy theories and such spreading on it are...gone, albeit only temporarily.
I must confess that I myself felt this kind of relief. I secretly hoped that it would stay down; and that we'd get to rebuild a kinder, more honest, and open social media platform or platforms.
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[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-03/give-a...
Here I thought that this snake had wrapped itself entirely around all of us, but it really didn’t. All we have to do is ‘flick’, turn it off. Body image issues on Insta? Not today kids.
How simple some of our biggest problems are to solve. It does make one hopeful.
That's funny, because most of what I read while Facebook was down was conspiracy theories about Facebook being down.
I don't see how? OP is saying that the low-effort comments are more frequent on this post than on other HN posts ("...an unusual amount of reddit style small comments on this outage"). I'm agreeing with that assertion, and positing a possible explanation for it ("people felt a fundamental sort of relief, and expressed it through offhand comments").
Your assertion, on the other hand, seems to be that these low-effort comments are present on all posts – which seems to me to be, if anything, more of a diversion from OP's point of view.
Don't put words in my mouth and this is not what I said. I just see this as an ad hominem attack, ironically diverting the criticism of HN (a factual observation in my view) towards my persons and my ulterior motives.
I wasn't thrilled by the delay, but also thought the assumption of vaccine hesitancy from others in the meantime and hard to navigate process could put some off entirely.
But for everyone else, what a sign-up incentive!
The whistle-blower only brought to light what we have known previously, Facebook is a net loss for humanity.
Letting people contect with family and long lost friends is good.
Purposefully pitting people against each other, human experimentation https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook... , creating hateful echo chambers, claiming to be the source of all facts, manipulating users for engagement and ad revenue is bad.
The low effort posts could signify a loss of cultural cohesion or new accounts, but Facebook and its children fading from the public would be a gift to many addicts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
Gaslighting is a specific form of manipulation that uses intentionally false narratives.
Maybe it's overall good, maybe it's over the top and not super. Even if it is good, the existence of Facebook presents a block for better and healthier ways developing for them to connect.
There are/were a couple of other at least briefly front page submissions around it of e.g. twitter/reddit potentially-leaked minor bits of info, and krebsonsecurity post; I'm sure the few informed more interesting comments would've found their way to those without a 'it is down, here is a link that will soon be up again' mega-thread.
Which leads me to a meta-point on this submission: I've flagged it, because AIUI it's customary that the initial 'down' submission gets renamed 'was down', rather than having the two 'down'/'up' threads.
99% they just get used as 'is it just me' checks, and there are dedicated sites for that.