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Comment by arketyp | Hacker News Reader

>We don't need to keep living inside screens — especially ones controlled by Mark. We don't need to accept Facebook's domination of the digital world.

Right! No body is forcing you. Ironically, these kinds of anxious reactions are symptoms of the very same pathological gregariousness that is the problem with social media in the first place.

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We are absolutely being forced. Perhaps you didn't realise, but lots of kids were on Google Classroom, Zoom, etc last year during lockdown.

This metaverse BS aims to be an even more contained aggregation of all this. If you watch the presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9vWShsmE20), its meant to include all aspects of one's life.

Talk about lock in!

Not to mention all the people that were on Instagram and WhatsApp before the sale… If a competitor emerges, it will play out the same way.

I'm not oblivious to the threat of lock-ins. But as far as remote tools go, my experience during the lockdown was that of competitive capitalism working at its best.

There are lots of viable competitors in the field of remote meeting and groupware tools, but most people aren't in a position to choose which ones to use and which ones to avoid — they're generally required to use a particular one by work or school.

Sure, and there can be conflicting preferences within a person's society of mind as well. Workplaces and schools sounds like a decent scale of granularity for free market effects though. I'm not saying network effects don't exist of course.

They promised me that, while my class may not have political influence, at least I would have consumer power on the free market. Apparently that was wrong as well.

> Right! No body is forcing you

Kind of. Workplaces, schools, academic environments definitely force the usage of some tool over another, or spending more or less time on screens. I am thankful that my new university uses BigBlueButton and hybrid teaching, since I spent the past two years on Microsoft Teams.

I see. So you were forced but found an alternative. That's great to hear.

No, I just saw the change after moving to another university for another degree (of course not for these reasons).

He didn't find an alternative. The university did.

> Workplaces, schools, academic environments definitely force the usage of some tool over another, or spending more or less time on screens.

But who's to blame?

I have the feeling that people are blaming the wrong people. Corporations are amoral entities whose mission is to maximize profit. If this doesn't bring social value or has obvious negative externalities, we should blame the politicians who set the rules, and vote for someone else.

Are you saying that corporations are exempt from moral responsibility?

Ah the ol’ network effects are a real high value target for businesses but have no real impact on consumers argument.

Nice.

“Pathological gregariousness…” with the scale and degree of consumption of social media, don’t you think there’s a possibility that actually there’s a universal human desire to connect with one another and it’s the tools themselves that are exploiting it to a pathological degree?

That's a good point which hard to address adequately in a few sentences. I think, perhaps naively, that corporations would like to make more profit out of people actually feeling good using their services. You could say that being aligned with people's well-being is the long-term better profit, compatible even with the most cynical renditions of capitalism.

We have little evidence that people even optimize for their own long term well-being

That's true. But a different interpretation is that natural selection is an optimum in progress. It can all end abruptly, but there can be many branches too.

Up until the point where people start organizing things as facebook events and you are out of luck if you don't have an account.

I and many others over the years have just stopped going to Facebook, not because of Principles or whatever, but just because it's the same shit every day. I don't know anyone anymore that obsessively uses Facebook or Instagram (I know, anecdotal). "The youth" is on more entertainment-focused things like tiktok, and people that want to keep in the loop (and argue about it) go to twitter.

But I don't feel like people are beholden to anyone. But again, that's purely anecdotal. People who are unaware and/or indifferent are more at risk.

I don’t think many critics of FB draw a bright line between FB and TikTok/Twitter. These are questions of degrees and specific variations, but from what I’ve seen much of the criticism is at the fundamental mechanics which are more or less shared across the services.

This here. No more loud principles but what it actually does is more important. The last time I used Facebook it was full of ads, irrelevant posts and news. I rarely saw my friends or families updates anymore.

> Ironically, these kinds of anxious reactions are symptoms of the very same pathological gregariousness that is the problem with social media in the first place.

Ironically, these kinds of anxious reactions are symptoms of the very same pathological gregariousness that is the problem with hackernews in the first place.

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