Hacker News Reader

Comment by Liron | Hacker News Reader

It’s nice to see a post that acknowledges the obvious truth that Meta is a great company with great people that does great things. Sure they do bad things too, but calling them bad and evil is usually all I ever see on HN and Twitter.

View on HN

What obvious truth is acknowledged here?

- They pay extremely well and offer great benefits to their engineers.

- They (not coincidentally) are able to hire great talent.

- That their platforms offer as much reach as any other company

None of this is new information and neither "great company" nor "does great things" follow from what's provided here.

Yes, those are obvious important truths, but weird to cite without related truths that shed more light on why Meta has the money, power and influence it does. Like that people there are smart, believe in the vision, care to do a good job. And that users love the products. If you’re summarizing positive bullet points from the article, you’ve only listed 3 of about 10.

I'm pretty much listing off the subheaders, none of which I dispute nor seem to be disputed by the general consensus. What is still unclear, however, is how to draw an arrow from "I love working here" to "the product is great." I think everybody here has experiences in companies/roles that are large and/or opaque enough to muddy that cause-and-effect.

It is very likely my dad will die from COVID, cancer, or heart failure thanks to Facebooks relentless stream of promoting lies across the platform.

facebook is great? Facebook is guilty of facilitating charlatans and grifters to hurt many more people.

Your dad will need to take more responsibility about who he listens to or suffer the consequences. If you don’t think your dad is capable of doing that, you can help explain these subjects to him, or delete his Facebook account, or whatever you need to do. Blaming Meta seems to me like basically learned helplessness on your part.

people like you need to read a little more about the difference between positive and negative freedoms

Reply on news.ycombinator.com