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Comment by cehrlich | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg is fundamentally right [1], and I think it's a good observation that many people fail to make.

But I think it's companies other than Facebook/Meta that are creating the new value.

[1] https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...

I agree with you however truly innovative things that are not making anyone poorer are way rarer than author of this post suggests. Even Steve jobs devices, given here as an example, was taking part of the cake from someone else. First thing that came to my mind is original VCS made in 1972 by Bell Labs. This was an invention that genuinely created profit from place where no one else was making any money.

profit is not the same as wealth

Inexplicably linked though. If you have a lot of one, the other is inevitable with even a modicum of effort.

He's not saying that new stuff will always not be zero sum, just that the space of potential non zero sum new things is bigger than the space of things that already exist.

I think Facebook/Meta are creating fantastic and mind-boggling value.

Just not for the end users, but for the advertisement and data broker industries.

he is right in a way that makes it hard to see what facebook is turning into profit: the users attention.

sure they are creating a space without taking away volume for other people to build there, but nobody will care about the other things because a proper map of the internet is not concerned with what is there, but what a given user spends their attention on.

I think the argument which is charitable to Facebook is that they make money by more efficiently matching advertisements to slots: advertisers are less willing to pay for generic slots in a newspaper than targeted slots because, in theory, a slot seen by someone more desirable. Facebook do advanced targeting to allow slots to be sold at closer to their fair value by making buyers better informed and they take a fee for improving the efficiency.

But it’s still reasonable to argue that the targeting is not as effective as claimed, the fee is too large, or that there are political reasons to dislike targeting and we should disallow it even if it makes the ad market more efficient.

i mean, of course i want the best THINGS for my bucks, so advertising good wares is kind of desirable...

but perhaps that is not enough. perhaps the scope needs to include production of wares: i dont just want inferior wares to not be advertised, but rather not even made. time, effort and resources wasted on trash products are a shame we are going to feel painfuly in the coming decades if humanity ever wakes up from the capitalist dream

>but what a given user spends their attention on

I want to point out, since I have not seen it elsewhere in this thread, that user's do not need to be on the internet at all. Does no one remember what it was like to be bored? With respect to living everyday lives, social media addiction is becoming an issue. Instagram specifically is a huge item.

So it would be contradictory to say Meta is responsible for manipulating its users and successfully furthering people's addiction to social media in general, while also claiming that people are using meta products with time and attention that would have been spent on the internet anyway (0-sum).

Are they or are they not incentivizing people to spend more time on social media than they otherwise would have?

I might not need to be on social media but I do need to be on the internet.

- Vehicle and Public Transit Navigation

- Apartment shopping

- Amazon.com

- Determining visa rules for extended travel

- Obtaining medical records

All of these are possible without the internet but all of them are a massive waste of time without the internet. I’m okay with being bored but some things would be an enormous waste of my life.

Facebook created value out of nothing; peoples boredom in-between doing all of the above. I am just saying people are treating facebook like it is stealing attention from everything else on the internet and I dont buy it.

I think it is a stretch to say any of the things you listed are competing with social media for your attention. The "attention" social media is taking from its users was previously spent on being bored, not taking care of other pre-existing needs. Social media becoming mainstream has created new "needs" for people to stay in touch with their online network. These new needs spawned economic incentives. Facebook is arguably the reason social media is mainstream at all. They have certainly earned the right to claim they are not stealing economic activity from those other pre-existing needs. You previously could not create an economic model out of people who were checking in with friends because they were bored. They created that

While I may not agree with your primary conjecture, your link is so good that I will simply slowly nod. Nice share!

Very strongly agree. If you work in tech in general you should probably be thinking about most decisions with this kind of positive sum mindset where one person’s gain is not another’s loss. For one thing, I think it feels better, but it is also very typically true.

I think you think that because you want to.

But it's simply not true. Internet classifieds destroyed newspaper ads. Apple destroyed Nokia. It is a zero sum game to a certain degree.

I'm not saying you should feel sorry because you improved things, but sometimes your success is someone else's downfall.

I think what I meant to write is that ‘one’s gain is not balanced out by an equal loss to another person’. And there are plenty of places where a zero-sum mindset might make sense, e.g. if you work for a small non-growing company the only real opportunity for career advancement may be replacing your boss, but most people who can work in tech can find somewhere to work where they can create value rather than just move it from somewhere else.

I don't think we should have a bunch guilt for destroying old technology, it's a major benefit of tech to not need as many physical objects, as much manual labor, or as much time fussing with DIP switches.

Facebook is different because it doesn't destroy anything, it purely adds to life and consumes time, with fairly minimal happiness involved. It acts more like an an obligation than a leisure activity even though it's purely voluntary.

The things that wind up getting displaced aren't technologies or jobs, which can often be replaced with a good riddance, they're things like "Having a conversation" or "learning a language" or "taking a walk" or anything else one might do in their spare time.

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