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Comment by kmlx | Hacker News Reader

> I imagine you're well aware of all the harm they've been causing to society.

what harm to society? from where i’m standing they’re a huge net positive, they’ve enabled huge advances in society, they’ve enabled great collaboration across the whole planet and enabled us all to benefit from the one of the greatest inventions of humankind: the internet.

could they do better? sure. are they past their peak? maybe. but their past contributions are immense.

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Can you prove that without Google we wouldn't have seen more advances in society? Perhaps people just jumped on the wrong bandwagon because they didn't know any better? Perhaps Google got big for the wrong reasons?

So much of the Meta hate in tech circles comes from same cope psychology of engineers thinking “if you build it they’ll come” and failing at acquisition.

Ads help SMBs and larger ones so much. Sure there’s issues here and there but meta has probably pushed GDP forward pretty hard and enabled awesome amounts of product discovery, and this is just on the ads side. Think of everything people have learned on FB/IG. I’ve met so many valuable people.

Lol, Google essentially makes SMBs buy ads for themselves for people searching directly for them already.

yes but on the margin?

You make it sounds like google and meta invented the internet or made it so much better by itself. Sure they open sourced a few technologies and steered some evolutions but I don't see anything immensely relevant.

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