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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

It's hilarious to me that the author pretends we should have higher standards of facebook. Hey do you know how much facebook paid for the content they publish? You know what you get for $0 ? Nothing or less than nothing. And it s not just facebook, all of them are selling attention, not content. As long as users are not compensated for their content, the audience will be fed with trash

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I mean, plenty of people write blogs for no compensation whatsoever (usually paying some token fees for hosting and domains, making it a net expense). Just because content is free doesn't mean it has to be bad.

Exactly. I've seen plenty of YouTube videos that are excellent despite being made by tiny channels of just a few 100 or 1000 subscribers. Same goes for a lot of the posts on Hackernews. And TikTok has a massive userbase that's still growing because even if it's not healthy for you, at least the content on the platform is good. Facebook is both unhealthy and bad content. Every time I scroll through, it feels like I'm torturing myself a little.

I think their point was that facebook doesn't care if it's good or bad so long as it's free to them and engaging.

You can have an ocean of free blogposts but if it's not engaging then it's not easy to monetize.

It's their blogs, they don't do unpaid work for facebook

> As long as users are not compensated for their content, the audience will be fed with trash

Not really. On the opposite. If there is no money to be made there is no ad harvesting bullshit to be made.

not really. on the opposite, youtube, which does compensate for popular content, has vastly better content. Since people know there is a way to make money by making content that is likeable, the likelihood of making good content is higher. In facebook people make $0 always, hence they have no incentive to put any effort

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