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Comment by roydivision | Hacker News Reader

Most of the time tech companies have their fans and detractors. In virtually any discussion about tech companies, you’ll find people for the company in question, and others against, Apple and Google are great examples.

I find it interesting that I don’t think I’ve ever come across any discussion about Facebook (and I read a lot of them) where anyone is defending them. Either people are strongly against the company, or at most they admit grudgingly that they do use Facebook services because everyone else they know uses it.

The only people I ever hear championing Facebook are Zuckerberg and other top management.

I don’t have a Facebook account, so possibly all the positive discussion is on Facebook itself and I’m not seeing it.

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>I don’t have a Facebook account, so possibly all the positive discussion is on Facebook itself and I’m not seeing it.

We don't like to admit it but the HN demographic is a self-reinforcing "filter bubble" on some topics such as Facebook, Uber, Apple. Outside of HN, almost all non-techies I interact with don't complain about them.

I remember seeing a lady's gardening channel on Youtube and wondered how she got so many lucrative sponsorships since her subscriber count and view counts seemed too low. I later learned it's because the majority of her gardening fans' interactions and video views actually come from Facebook and not Youtube. Same for demographic of sewers for quilts & clothes.

So the Venn Diagram with one circle being female gardeners/sewers and the other circle being HN commenters have virtually no overlap. Hence we're in a filter bubble. The gardeners/sewers aren't complaining about Facebook because it's a positive in their lives and HN commenters never see that. I also read somewhere that Pinterest and Instagram are also more heavily skewed towards females.

(Because I don't have a Facebook account and got a lot of my info about FB from HN, it made me ignorant of the various communities that use FB in positive ways. I often wonder what other ways HN distorts my views that I'm totally unaware of.)

Outside of our bubble I don't see complaints about the company itself, but complaints about the product and content.

It seems nobody is very happy with Facebook. I have family members who will always agree that Facebook is full of uninformed opinions and everyone always seems to be disagreeing/arguing and it's full of complaining and political posts. And yet people continue to use it.

> And yet people continue to use it.

In my experience the people complaining about the junk content on facebook have checked out from using facebook very much years ago. Among my millenial peers at least engagement across all social networks has dropped like a stone. FB just exists to dump wedding photos now.

At least in my opinion for this on HN, you get downvoted very quickly on HN to have such an opinion.

I work for FAANG. I generally dont comment on HN but recently I read every thread about FAANG to have a thread that read like you should be ashamed to work there. I replied, Even before i worked there, I used their products to keep in touch woth my family/friends, at a startup I worked at we used open source tech from these companies, I also have always benefited from owning the stock in my retirement account via index funds. So why is it that working for the company is not ok but being a consumer, investor etc ok. And also asked if there's an acceptable list of companies to work at without moral judgements. Pointed out that people have strong feelings about big tech, big pharma, big oil etc etc. As you'd imagine, I was downvoted pretty soon and you realize trying to convince a stranger on the internet is pointless and gains you nothing.

A lot of people on HN downvote for disagreement, which I think creates a chilling effect, reinforces groupthink and results in a warped view of reality. For what it's worth, I try to balance that out by upvoting gray'd out comments that are sincere or well argued regardless of whether I personally agree with the statement or not. One of the things I appreciate about HN is seeing positions that challenge my existing ideas.

FWIW, I own stock in a lot of companies that are net-negatives for society directly and through index funds. When these companies succeed in the market I get a consolation prize.

In our modern market, I don't believe that my owning FB stock is contributing to their success. If I were to work for them I would be.

The fact is that working for a company is investing a lot of your time and energy to make this company more powerful.

Your work count. Really.

So your work should be as much as possible aligned with your moral values. Lot of people blind themselves with the salary and weak justification. I find that complete hypocrisy.

Now, is the company you are working for aligned with your own moral values?

Only you can answer that ;-)

Its funny, lot of the responses for this thread are investing my retirement money and profiting off it is fine, using products/services of such companies is fine, but working there, that's where I draw the line, that's just morally wrong. Its a lot of I'll draw the line where I want to and belittle others who do it differently.

It's not like people are going to their broker and saying "buy facebook" then going online and saying "ban facebook." Most people probably have no clue that their retirement indexes include like 1% facebook stock in the mix. With the way retirement funds are set up in this country you really don't have much choice in the investment mix unless you are savvy and with time on your hands to study and pick your own horses.

Using another example, I'm against war and violence too, but that doesn't make me a hypocrite for paying taxes that go on to buy bombs, and paying taxes that fund war is just not the same thing at all as me working for Blackwater directly.

Ok, let's agree that some of us have a moral position against x and are benefiting financially from x but are too busy or too ignorant to do anything about it.

And, lets also agree that being employed a company is bad, the argument still seems to breakdown soon enough. Generally, the engineers are to blame because they make enough money and could choose other options, but not others capacities of employment e.g. a driver, cleaning staff, cook at one of their food courts etc. at the same company. They could've found other options too if they really wanted. Should a person making minimum wage now look into a company and its moral decisions in the past/present before taking up a job. Generally seems to come down to, oh its wrong but beyond a $ amount (an arbitrary line I just drew for myself), which just seems a very inconsistent moral position to me. Well, if you still think its a reasonable position to say its wrong but when the benefit you reap is > $x, can one of you tell me above what $ amount do the moral values apply?

I mean, I wouldn't work minimum wage for a company like this either. There is no shortage of job opportunities these days at the bottom level what with most every business having staffing issues.

Well I think there’s quite the difference any. A regular user of Facebook is worth roughly tens of euros. But working there rewards you with a salary that’s easily upwards of 200k. Given that they’re not losing money if you, you could consider yourself as one of the few power users around by providing a value to evil corp north of your salary. So I think you can definitely differentiate between a regular user contributing 50euro of value, or contributing >200k of value. Making numbers up here but suffice to say you’re talking about an order of difference north of 100x. Definitely something to think about I reckon, and definitely something reasonable to draw the line at. Imagine hyping the evil corp and adding 100+ users would equate to a year of working there, roughly.

So it is morally wrong but only above a $ amount? :)

Anyway, the irony is interesting, some people on HN unable to control the urge to tell a stranger on the internet that he/she is morally inferior without considering how it makes them feel, while blaming another platform for similar effects and how it negatively impacts people.

No, you argued that people draw an arbitrary line regarding morals when working for evil corp vs consuming. I tried to indicate to you why that line isn’t so arbitrary as it indicates a factor of x100, or whatever exact number it is that is many times larger.

Also, really few people say "you should feel bad for doing it".

What they say is "I would feel bad for doing it".

Which is quite different.

How about working there and doing a bad job? Is that a moral postion?

I'll step into that role then. I am a member of some Facebook groups that have been hugely helpful on a personal level. The community page software may not be perfect, but it is accessible and can bring together a really heterogeneous user base with diverse perspectives, much more so than Reddit. The groups pages are entirely separate from the toxic feed. I would be absolutely bummed if they were to blink out of existence.

As a counter point to this. Facebook has (tried and mostly succeeded) to replace community forums that used to be either public or with open registration and without the negative effects of facebook.

Stuff that's running phpbb or other similar software.

I was bummed too when fb blinked my community ran forums out of existence

I would imagine that the proponents of Facebook are the huge huge amounts of people who are less technologically savvy, don't really give two shits about privacy surrounding data they perceive to given up willingly, and aren't really involved in any sort of discourse.

However, they absolutely love the fact that they've been able to keep in contact with family, old friends, and see the value of the human connection they are able to get through Facebook as far greater than the negatives.

I am unfortunately still on Facebook - I moved to another continent in the last few years and it's the only way to keep track of people.

At least from my friends, everyone hates it, left, center and right-wing alike.

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