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Comment by jacknews | Hacker News Reader

"To be fair, there is one notable exception: Imec, an R&D hub for nano- and digital technologies. This organization has succesfully spun-off multiple startups in its specialist field. However those are often based on specialization in a very narrow field of research. I’m more into the Silicon Valley-type of startups."

Isn't this exactly what countries should be doing, funding emerging niche technologies?

I assume by 'silicon valley-type' you mean facebook, twitter, uber, and the like?

IMHO, many of these don't seem to add any real value to society, certainly not in proportion to how much money they attract.

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> don't seem to add any real value

These comments make me angry. Thanks to Facebook, I keep in contact with a lot of friends who would otherwise have completely lost touch with. Thanks to Uber, I get comfortable rides from point A to point B, even in places where the taxi systems completely fail (and there are a lot of these, I have plenty of stories, even recent ones).

I get enormous value from these services. You don't, fine. Stop projecting on others.

So we're still getting the fb excuse/apologism. Anyone could have used - and many of us used - plain old email, then irc, various messengers et al before zuck came. Back then, at that time, there were other ways to keep in touch and still is, just much more. All of them are better in terms of privacy.

Please tell me of one service that existed before Zuck came along that you could use to set up multi-directional live video streaming for a group event connecting the US and multiple locations across Eastern Europe and South Asia with mediocre internet connectivity, for several hours, for free, and that would be so simple to use that your elderly grandparents could join in.

Please tell me of one service that existed before Zuck came along that automatically performed genuinely good machine translation of chat messages between two non-English languages.

Please tell me of one service that existed before Zuck came along where you could, after moving to a new town or neighborhood where you know nobody, be certain that you would be able find active local groups for your non-nerdy social niche.

Because these are all things I have recently used Facebook for. And while there are alternatives for some/all of them in the era after Facebook, in the era before Facebook, I don't think I would have been able to do them easily, or at all.

just, LOL.

What's so special about Facebook? Before Facebook there was MySpace and before that there were others. During Facebook there were many competitors, some big, some small, but Facebook managed to hold out the longest.

Years before Facebook introduced DMs people were chatting on MSN and video calling over Skype. MSN and Skype were everywhere before Facebook took over, and if they weren't, alternatives like AIM were.

There's nothing technologically or ideologically superior to Facebook. Most new and interesting features have been a result of acquisition rather than internal drive for advancement. Facebook rolled out calling in 2013, three years after Skype did. Skype translator came out in 2014, Facebook added their version in 2018. Google Chat introduced a translation bot all the way back in 2012.

Their current quest for innovation centers around the Metaverse, something nobody but Facebook seems to want to be a thing. Even that is just the unholy amalgamation of Second Life and VRChat. The big difference there is that people actually use Second Life and VRChat.

Facebook made the best business model out of scraping the stuff people somehow fed freely into their system. It's one of the few remaining social media companies, that's it. None of the inventions you quoted were done by Facebook, they just copied features others thought out and merged them into a single place to become the bloated tech giant it is today.

I used Skype. I distinctly remember that my grandparents were not able to set up Skype on their own: I had to visit them and install the thing and set up their account and add everyone they wanted to into their contact list. I also distinctly remember the video/audio quality often being close to white noise when chatting across multiple international boundaries.

I used MySpace for a bit. As far as I remember, it was a network targeting teenagers. Not a place where, say, one could search for an electrician or a dentist, discuss the relative merits of the vegetable selection at nearby groceries, or look for baby formula in a time of shortage.

I used ICQ and IRC and MSN and AIM and plain old SMS. None of them invested much design effort in internationalization. IRC in particular was brutally hostile to non-English alphabets. None ever considered the possibility of auto-translationg a conversation between people speaking different languages; perhaps there were third party addons that tried to do so, but I never encountered them.

You are correct that Facebook did not invent its portfolio of technologies. What Facebook did is integrate them, implement them extremely well, and made them ridiculously easy to use for non-technical people, which is extraordinarily useful given that much of one's social circle is non-technical.

Except it's not free, you're the product.

https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/

"Loveable Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called his first few thousand users "dumb fucks" for trusting him with their data, published IM transcripts show.

Facebook hasn't disputed the authenticity of the transcript. Zuckerberg was chatting with an unnamed friend, apparently in early 2004."

lots of people got enormous value from the labor of enslaved people

start considering the lives of people beyond yourself

Please quote the actual thing I said, 'value to society'. That is what countries are (should be) concerned with.

And so it seems to me perhaps Belgium has a fairly sensible approach, to fund actual technology development, rather than monopoly schemes based on extant technology.

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