Comment by GCA10 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GCA10 | Hacker News Reader

In my 20s, I got paid $50 to be part of a focus group on young men's attitudes toward Foster's Australian lager. Of the six of us in the room, five of us drank maybe 3-4 beers a week. One guy (call him Tony) admitted to drinking a whole case -- 24 beers per week.

Our hosts jokingly said: "Maybe we should send the rest of you home right now, and spend the rest of our session figuring out how to get Tony's business."

Facebook's gravest problem (which OP doesn't yet confront) is that its business systems are built to get maximum engagement out of every Tony on the planet. And that can have catastrophic implications. Truther cults of all sorts flock to FB private groups. Young teens with body issues obsess on Instagram. Trolls, bots and the agitators behind them soon embrace Facebook as the garden they never leave.

When OP talks about Facebook's Competence as a political problem, he's using the most opaque language possible to talk about what's really a moral problem. The people inside Facebook aren't immoral, but some (many?) are profoundly amoral. Being really good at connecting people raises grave issues when some of those people are uniquely vulnerable to being drawn into an ever-tighter net of connections that could mess up many lives.

Parallels -- and pushes for regulation -- abound. In the finance industry, wisps of regulation try to prevent account-churners from trading Tony's accounts to zero. The same issues come up with the gambling industry, and its seduction of compulsive gamblers. Team Zuckerberg hasn't really found its conscience yet. And so, the list of Tony fueled troubles keeps growing.

Here's hoping that OP's second version of this essay digs a little deeper into the problem of competence. Will Team Zuckerberg find a conscience? Will regulators install one instead? Lots of unresolved questions to get settled in the next 5-10 years.

That was almost certainly not a joke. The alcohol industry is quietly aware of their dependence on addicts. A study in the UK found that 44% of alcohol sales were attributable to those who drank 14 or more drinks per week. They’re acutely aware of the fact that they depend on Tony more than you and the other men in that group.

If this is the same study,

https://www.recoveryanswers.org/research-post/alcohol-sales-...

then, I think it's even worse than that. I believe the stat you are referencing meant that the amount of alcohol sold to people in excess of the health guidelines (14/wk) amounts to 44% of total alcohol sales (that is, if everyone merely stuck to the guidelines, alcohol sales would drop 44%).

In the same para, they say if you segment the population by drinker level, those who consume over the guidelines represent 68% of total sales. 23% from those men who drink > 50 (> 35 for women) drinks a week (!!) and 45% of sales are from hazardous drinkers who go over the 15/wk guideline.

3-4 drinks/wk people like OP only represent 32% of sales revenue, but they are more than twice the population of the hazardous or harmful drinkers combined. So if the >15/wk set simply turned into 3-4 drinks/wk people, alcohol sales would crater >44% (but presumably <68%).

Very well said. Facebook preys on people, and some people (or most people?) aren't equipped to deal with it, especially children.

Facebook isn't exactly evil; as you say, it doesn't care about good or evil, which probably makes it worse.

These kind of comments always seem to dismiss the positive value that facebook brings to society.

You forgot the /s

no I did not.

Because you've made the oblique claim: what is the positive value that Facebook brings?

I for one have sold many things on Facebook marketplace. That provides value for both me and the buyer as they're getting items at a discount and I get cash.

Another positive is my drone hobby has lots of groups on Facebook where members share information and help each other across the globe.

Another positive is that my local buy nothing group helps neighbors out by giving things away for free to neighbors in need.

Almost none of the negatives of Facebook brought up in recent discussions apply to me because I don't go looking for it and if I see them I tell Facebook not to show me things like that and then it doesn't. People act like you can't curate your experience.

It might not be obvious if you don't use the application, but I've met countless people throughout facebook, including my now-wife, and have kept in touch with my friends throughout the world thanks to that app. I've lost touch with a few people, who sadly have deleted their facebook accounts, but whenever I travel I get to meet old friends thanks to fb. I also reconnected with childhood friends who I managed to find through the app.

I know my wife basically keeps in touch with all of her family through Facebook. I try to avoid that because I've always posted more liberally there, but I connect with all my family (including my 90 year-old grand mother) through whatsapp.

There's a real benefit from having a public registry that everyone signs up to.

> There's a real benefit from having a public registry that everyone signs up to.

Is there? or is there a benefit from having a communications platform that is easy to use.

if there was a public utility that allowed you to contact anyone on the planet and all you needed to know was their userID would that not meet 80% of the functionality without these scathing problems? Maybe you could use some kind of federated system that allowed operators local to each cohort of people to moderate abuse properly.

(I'm joking of course, this is somewhat how the phone system works).

Are you seriously implying that the phone system is a reliable registry? I change phone number every year, most of my friends have changed phone number several times since I know them. There's a reason I've lost touch with old friends who deleted their facebook accounts.

That’s very strange. Why would you change phone numbers? It seems like you’re being deliberately hard to reach?

It seems similar to deleting your Facebook account every year.

How is this similar? I only use a phone number for services and never for friends. I change often because I travel a lot.

Well, that in itself seems unusual. I don’t believe I ever met anyone who didn’t talk to friends and relatives on the phone.

Really? I don’t know anyone who use their phones to talk to friends or relatives. Everybody use whatsapp or messenger.

i guess whatsapp runs on your phone?

Ah, then we agree. I thought you meant using phone numbers to call someone directly.

we agree to the point that a "phone" is usually involved.

still i frequently call and get called by people _directly_ (business and personal) and i don't see that changing until neccessitated by latency or bandwidth constraints (eg. interplanetary communication)

changing a phone number does about the same damage to your reachability than deleting you (fb-)account and creating one with a new name.

facebook is less of a public registry than the phone system thou.

I disagree, eventhough I've changed phone number 10 times in the last 10 years, I've only lost contact with a few people (who were the ones who deleted their fb account). Perhaps we're not from the same generation, but people around me keep in touch not with phone numbers. Actually, I still remember a time in a distant past where people who ask for each other's phone numbers after meeting, but that's long gone.

i respect your disagreement and, baring the possibility that we are indeed of a different generation, would like to bring to your attention the fact that it makes litte difference wether you change your phone number or make a new facebook account - the links associated with the old handle are gone unless migrated somehow.

ppl are still exchanging identifiers after meetings

Counterpoint: I've had the same phone number for 7 years (Sweden), and another number for 15 years (British), but I've deleted my Facebook account multiple times in that timespan, and removed "friends" even more commonly when they started posting excessively political stuff and I didn't have a strong connection to them.

Are you aware that you can take phone numbers with you when you change providers? As for the other point: they're addressable on the entire planet, you can be sure everyone has one and it's not tied to a singular company.

So, while I'm joking about the equivalency, you said that a "registry that everyone on the planet was on" was the value add- I'm suggesting, somewhat tongue-in-cheekly, that we have such a system.

I travel a lot, and so do my friends as I end up meeting a lot of exchange students and expats. Moving with your phone number is not a thing everywhere.

more to the point: moving with your $account_id is not a thing everywhere.

phone number is a username in a worldwide public registry

I'm with you and I don't have any connection with, or financial interest in, Facebook. I use it. A lot of my friends and family do too.

It makes it easy to stay connected with and re-engage with people in your social group.

It managed the spam problem reasonably well (those Ray Ban scams are a relatively infrequent problem).

It makes to easy to start, run, find, and join niche interest groups. I'm in a dance community that would find it much harder to find each other's events without Facebook Events. My wife is in a vintage community that carries out low-friction international vintage clothing exchanges through Facebook Groups.

There are communities using Facebok to run small businesses and serve their communities.

Oh and I change my phone number when I change phone company because it's easier than not.

Now, I also think there are things wrong with Facebook and with how the network effect impacts on its competition. I think it could use oversight and regulation. But your naysayers are unimaginative children. Of course Facebook provides societal benefits. Get real.

If it's good enough for WhatsApp...

To that I might add what the OP also mentions, that is how FB leveled the playing field when it comes to advertising. You can launch a new business competing with big corps with as little as a 100$ ad budget. It wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago. Without Facebook, many SME owners would be in serious trouble (see what happened with iOS 14).

I find it really hard to argue that any of that is worth the enormous loss of privacy, the rising anxiety and effects of Instagram on the youth and the terrible effects Facebook is having across the globe when it comes to politics.

You’re quoting stories focused on the negative side.

charities truly benevolent, such as animal shelters, benefit greatly

Facebook can have some positive values, while still when taken as a whole be an overwhelming societal net negative.

Facebook can have some negative values, while still when taken as a whole be an overwhelming societal net positive.

Such as? What are the good things that Facebook does that make them net positives?

I think you’re suffering confirmation bias or bubble mentality if you cannot see any positive

Treating "net negative" as equivalent to "cannot see any positive" is disingenuous.

Agree, so is the reverse

But I never said the reverse, you're putting words in my mouth by way of the parent comment. Sure letting extended family members stay in touch is a good thing. Keeping childhood/high school relationships going past when they might previously have ended is probably good thing (I'm skeptical but I'd like to be wrong.)

But when those goals have to come at the expense of subversion of democratic institutions (elections of which no fraud can be found) and at the expense of scientific data that is deluding people to think that vaccinations are suspect I'll draw the line. FB does (and enriches itself from) far more damage to society than which it provides.

Oh please regale me with tales of how Donald Trump won the election in 2020 and Bill Gates is implanting us all with tracking chips through vaccines just so I can see pics of the grand kids, they do the darndest things.

Trump won the election in 2016 because half the country voted for him, and because there is no popular vote in the US, and because there is a lack of education in the US.

Please say you mean he won the 2016 election for those reasons. He clearly lost the 2020 election.

Yep! Typo

:-) it happens to the best of us.

Half (50%) of the country did not in fact vote for Trump. Biden won 51.3% of the popular vote and Trump won 46.8% of the popular vote [1].

Nor did Trump win the Electoral College vote, 306 to 232 for Biden[2]

there is a lack of education in the US

On this we agree, but I'm sure in very different regards.

[1] https://www.cfr.org/blog/2020-election-numbers [2] https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/2020

Edit: (no change) gp changed their comment to shift their point to a different election cycle, big difference.

Sry, I was quoting the other comment I think they had the same typo :o)

> because there is a lack of education in the US.

What does this actually mean? There are plenty of Trump supporters out there with master's degrees. One of the capitol rioters was a GMU grad with a security clearance: https://www.newsweek.com/who-federico-g-klein-state-departme...

You could say the same thing about lead, asbestos, etc.

Lead is only bad in fuels and chew toys. Removing lead from solders, piezoelectric components etc is truly catastrophic.

> Lead is only bad in fuels and chew toys.

Water pipes?

> Removing lead from solders, piezoelectric components etc is truly catastrophic.

Sounds like you're happy turning Facebook into something that consumers don't touch on a daily basis, like piezoelectric components. No complaint here, so you've got a deal!

Removing lead from solder is, well, not really catastrophic. I’ll admit lead free is a pain in the ass sometimes, but catastrophic, not really.

Removing lead from solder has positive benefits for home hobbyists who might not have proper vent hoods. Or who might be teenagers.

I switched to lead-free solder for all of my projects and haven't had any problems, let alone a catastropy.

lead paint was also a bad idea (unless you count it as a chew toy)

> dismiss the positive value that facebook brings to society

Very few people call for banning Facebook. What is sought is regulating it, perhaps breaking it up. That seems to quite clearly accept that it has positive value. Just that it is creating tremendous negative value in its current configuration with it present people.

are we reading the same comments?

> The people inside Facebook aren't immoral

I'm going to go ahead and push back on that.

A company whose founder started by using his fellow students' photos without their permission for a hot-or-not copycat website, then went on to assist genocide in Myanmar, do psychological experiments on its users, and facilitate the spread of misinformation in a pandemic that has caused more deaths than any foreign conflict in US history is an immoral company full of immoral people.

Signal and Telegram facilitate the commission of crimes and the spread of child pornography. Are their authors immoral?

Does signal present you with an algorithmically generated feed tuned for engagement no matter the consequence?

Even if this is true (source?) I don't believe it's comparable.

Signal (I know less about Telegram) has no news feed, and doesn't make money from advertisers. It has neither the inherent conflicts of interest nor the history of acting in bad faith that Facebook does.

Facebook makes a lot of decisions about what information to show people, which influences them. At their scale, that's a lot of power, which means they have a lot of responsibility.

WhatsApp doesn't have a news feed or advertising either, and people don't exactly seem happy with it. While there are some issues from FB (the TOS scandal), the biggest issues are inherent to the platform (fake news in IIRC brazil, the genocide in myanmar).

WhatsApp uses the same growth hacks that Facebook (and Instagram) used to grow at all costs.

What are those? It is a chat app that got popular by providing free texting in a world where SMS costs were high and working across a wide set of phones.

How can Signal with absolutely no user data tracking and no algorithms be compared with a product that shows algorithmic feeds?

Facebook shapes our perception of the world by choosing the information we see. Even those who don’t use Facebook are impacted by the majority who do. A company with such frightening influence over so many people — over their deepest thoughts, feelings and behaviors — needs real oversight.

-- Frances Haugen, Opening Statement to Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, October 5, 2021.

https://www.franceshaugen.com/blog/b9xlswihkike7639nn4ie23od...

Which is newspeak for censorship.

Facebook wants you to believe that the problems we’re talking about are unsolvable. They want you to believe in false choices. They want you to believe that you must choose between a Facebook full of divisive and extreme content or losing one of the most important values this country was founded upon: free speech. That you must choose between public oversight of Facebook’s choices and your personal privacy. That to be able to share fun photos of your kids with old friends, you must also be inundated with anger-driven virality. They want you to believe that this is just part of the deal.

I am here today to tell you that’s not true. These problems are solvable.

https://www.franceshaugen.com/blog/b9xlswihkike7639nn4ie23od...

Far-left Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen, who has advised lawmakers to pass legislation that would empower the establishment media at the expense of independent creators, worked for a unit at Facebook tasked with preventing “misinformation” around the 2020 election — the same group that would have been involved in censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Are you saying that companies should never do AB testing to determine if their products can have psychological effects on their users? Doesn’t that make it harder to avoid any negative effects?

I suggest reading about the principles of ethics in psychological experimentation[1]. Informed consent is an important one.

[1] https://www.simplypsychology.org/Ethics.html

Given that Facebook was originally conceived as a way to compare female students in a "Hot or Not" list, there is no conscience to be found, just a black hole.

A database company for example could be run by ruthless salespeople (such as Oracle) or have clients with questionable ethics, but at the end of the day the product itself is morally neutral. Facebook however rests on a bedrock of amorality.

Didn’t Zuckerberg’s hot or not type website include both men and women? I thought Aaron Sorkin made up the part about it being only women for his movie.

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