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Comment by tenaciousDaniel | Hacker News Reader

I still have a FB account because my family is on there, and even then I check it maybe once a month, if that. It's just not in my life anymore. When I do go on there, I have a hard time imagining how anyone could get sucked into it.

Sometimes I feel like FB is a kind of scapegoat for social critique. Maybe because it's the largest, but not sure.

Personally, it seems like Twitter is a much more malevolent cultural force. The amount of toxicity that arises out of that platform is overwhelming, and the addiction factor is much more affective. I'm not saying FB doesn't deserve criticism, but I wonder why these other platforms don't get the same attention.

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> Personally, it seems like Twitter is a much more malevolent cultural force

Completely agreed, it's quite impressive that they've managed to remain unscathed in all of this. Every single criticism that one can level against Facebook applies to Twitter ten times over. At least with Facebook's properties, the core use case is still keeping in touch with friends and family. Twitter's only real use-case is providing a soap box to the most outrage-inducing opinions, accuracy or nuance be damned. It's just democratized punditry.

My guess is that vested interests likes Twitter because they can use it as a tool to direct the mob. Not so much with FB since FB has their own agenda.

I think its simpler than that - journalists get a lot of positive reinforcement and attention from twitter, so they just like it more.

I think 10x is a touch hyperbolic, but I agree otherwise. Much like FB, you can avoid the outrage porn by mercilessly unfollowing political accounts. Unlike FB, Twitter has an option to order things chronologically instead of by how outrageous they are.

> Every single criticism that one can level against Facebook applies to Twitter ten times over

Eh, I disagree. Sure, Facebook and Twitter can both be used to spread disinformation, to foment divisiveness, to addict their users to low-quality scrolling. Facebook, however, allows secret distribution of misinformation at scale, does a much better job of censoring at scale (i.e. they censor leftist views for users on the right and vice-versa), seems much more interested in the elimination of privacy as a concept, and seems much more interested in connecting me with people I don't want to connect with.

On twitter I can curate my feed so it's high signal-to-noise ratio. On Facebook I have to put up with the nonsensical political opinions of people I'm related to, used to go to school with, and used to work with. I left my hometown for good reasons.

> I still have a FB account [...] I have a hard time imagining how anyone could get sucked into it.

I drink a glass of beer several times a week, and can't imagine how anyone could become addicted to alcohol.

Very sadly, the world does not feel at all constrained by my imagination.

Fair enough, the second half of my comment didn’t really follow from the first. But I think my point stands about the relative attention paid to FB compared to other platforms. I don’t get it.

> Maybe because it's the largest [...]

This. Same way that Apple gets the headlines when it's learned that workers at some electronics factory are being horribly mistreated.

(Well...maybe that's stretching it. I've heard several times that, for quite a few people, FB basically is the web.)

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