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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

You can be the nicest person and still leave behind an awful world.

Really hard to argue that Zuck and his companies have had a net positive impact on the world.

It's all about perspective. I think, unpopularly but based on objectivity and rationality, that oil companies are great and have done a world a lot of good – literally everything we do today from modern medicine to farming depends on fossil fuels, it has sustained 8 billion people on this planet and saved countless lives. Without it, we would see horror of death like you've never witnessed, millions of people would die. This whole thing is a matter of perspective, like a russian doll illusion. Stare hard enough and it will rotate the other way.

You can similarly see social media in two ways. Zuckerberg also gets disproportionate amount of hate compared to other media. Who's the CEO of Tiktok?

There is no net positive impact from social networking services, or indeed any other medium powered by advertising where the operators thereof have realized that hatred can be monetized. People have always disagreed with one another and clashed over political views... but only in the last 15 years have people been so polarized, and I think we can directly attribute it to conditioning as a direct result of participation on networks that incentivize people to consume hatred for clicks.

Families around the world and across continents have been able to keep in touch due to social networks.

For all the deserved hate, some good has come.

Sharing memes wasn't quite as satisfying as a long distance phone call.

You don’t need a social network for that, just a messaging app. The idea that families would not be able to keep in touch without social media is absurd and obviously wrong.

You don't need them, but friction matters. You can stay in touch via the postal service. That does not mean that newer mediums with lower friction and more capabilities do not deliver real value to people.

Whether or not social media is a net positive, no serious person can argue that they do not deliver value to large numbers of people.

What total nonsense!

Facebook added a Like Count next every comment my family made and thanks to that totally fucked social dynamics for good.

Families mostly like to share photos. Facebook works far better than any messaging app for that use case.

Does it? I just opened Facebook, scrolled for a while, and didn’t see any family photos. I saw a bunch of lizard brain short videos of people fighting in road rage incidents, attractive women dancing and such, airsoft gun games (no idea why Facebook thinks I’d like this), and other similar types of things not related to my family. I actually liked Facebook when it mostly showed me photos of friends and family, but I’m guessing that isn’t profitable enough.

The feed really depends on what you have reacted to in the past. I routinely "hide all from" most pages and friends-of-friends so I mostly only see original content from friends and family.

I never told it to show me short form video of random things not related to my family and friends. I also never reacted to it. The idea that FB is about staying in touch with family, and that it's the best way to do that, is absurd when you look at what FB is today.

Believe it or not, but my family made a point of keeping in touch with distant relatives waaaay before social networks like Facebook. Heck, they did this back in the day when mail was the only mechanism (arguably mail & telephones are themselves social networks just in a different modality).

Now it has made that easier and maybe cheaper (although only if you ignore messaging apps). I'm not sure there's data one way or the other to suggest that it has enabled new familial connections that wouldn't otherwise have happened. Even in the digital erra, we've had

Families kept in touch prior to that with little things called Email and Phone Calls and Snail Mail. Ad-driven networks were never necessary.

They haven’t. But a eulogy is premature.

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