Hacker News Reader

Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

This argument gives the platforms more credit than they're worth. It's been obvious for half a decade that social media is bad for mental health. I've cut it out of my life. I tell others to cut it out of their life. No one's under the impression that these platforms are good for anything. They're popular now, but they are not important.

View on HN

Cigarettes are obviously bad for people's individual health, but we don't rely on individual responsibility to ensure children don't purchase themselves cigarettes.

I cut facebook out of my life almost 5 years ago before it was "cool" to do so. Its like junk food or cigarettes or anything else that is net bad for a person. I would say let people decide for themselves if they want to use it and you hope they make the smart choice of just saying no to facebook and all its toxicity that comes with it.

> they are not important

They are important because they contain a significant portion of many people's address books. When Facebook was offline a few days ago, I had no way of reaching about two thirds of my contacts. And I'm someone who's made a significant effort to move off of Facebook. There were people I wanted to contact that day that the only way to reach them would have been to ask mutual friends for other contact details. And there were a few people that I either don't have mutual friends with or who our mutual friends were also only reachable via Facebook. If legislation aims for some form of "interoperability" the main condition should be that, if Facebook were to disappear again, I would still have the ability to reach all of my Facebook contacts via another network.

I loathe Facebook and am hesitant to take its side on any issue. But if you cannot be bothered to ask your "contacts" for a phone number, email address, Telegram, whatever, I don't see why it is Facebook's responsibility to ensure you have access to these people 24/7.

That's a social issue, not a Facebook one. Interoperability is an insane ask that has absolutely no precedent, and I say that as one of the biggest FOSS enthusiasts this side of the Mississippi. There's simply no way that the United States government could force a private company's hand like that, and even if they did the fallout from that would be insane. Where do we stop with interoperability? Do all browsers need to share the same history storage format? Do all cloud storage providers need to use the same app? Do all of us need to use the same operating system, communication protocols and news outlets?

No, because we're different people. Some people are drawn to Facebook's firehose feed, and there's not really anything you can do to stop them in a free world. It's a disgusting, albeit perfectly legal exchange of goods and services. Microsoft and Apple fought long and hard to make sure consumer protection laws like that never saw the light of day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com