Hacker News Reader

Comment by bandyaboot | Hacker News Reader

This. People using FB to share information outside their lives has been a net bane to society. Unfortunately, FB profits immensely from the damage it causes.

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Uh, sharing news articles is most of what people do here on this site. Why is it uniquely bad when people do it on Facebook instead?

Lack of moderation or filtering of the content (via voting)

I mean, I gave up on Facebook long ago to be honest, but this is a news aggregator website that is specifically about sharing links to articles of news or interest.

Facebook... I mean... it wasn't pitched to be that? It was supposed to connect you to each other, not be an algorithmic view into the universe. Sure, sharing news can be a big part of that, and talking about news too, but every site doesn't have to be everything.

Why would my personal social group (i.e. facebook friends) make sense to combine with the random strangers on here who discuss technical posts? Sure there's some overlap in audience but it just doesn't seem like a necessary compromise to make.

Facebook has a lot of topical groups where you likely don't know anyone anymore than you do here aside from they have expressed interest in a topic enough to join the same group as you.

Sure, but I don't think there's any particularly obvious reason why Facebook would be the place for a topical group to set up shop. I think it is a bad place for a topical group because you cannot read the posts without logging in.

If you're in the Facebook ecosystem maybe this is less visible. But if friends plan an event in a Facebook group they are excluding me and others who don't use Facebook for many valid but irrelevant reasons.

One such reason is that pseudo-anonymity is crucial for a lot of people for professional or personal reasons, and it's way easier to support that elsewhere.

Others include data privacy policies.

Maybe there's not a great choice that has the right blend of ease of access and ease of setup. But I think Facebook is demonstrably bad because of the requirements of logging in to read at all and to enforce that your profile has a real name.

Oh, we are of course a higher species and should not be bound to the rules of the plebes. /s

The key difference is that HN is essentially plain text.

The bulk of Facebook comment threads under news articles is just plain text, too.

This site is external content oriented, not 'intimately know the commenter and their life' oriented.

Facebook groups are similarly oriented, usually.

My guess why HN isn’t a problem the way FB is?

No ads.

Thus, no engagement metrics to optimize for because HN isn’t even monetized that I know of (and hopefully doesn’t need to become one?)

With no engagement needing to be goosed we don’t need an algorithm to make sure we see the most outraging things possible. We just see what’s interesting to the whole community.

Radicalization online is a serious problem and I think the reverse qualities of the above, which FB, Twitter, and YouTube are perfect examples of, is a big part of how it happened.

HN pushes us toward the average interests of hackers. FB amplifies whatever interests repeatably get your attention until they become obsessions.

(I stopped following anything or anyone political on FB and YouTube, so that they only makes me more engaged in my nerdy, wholesome interests. I think I’m in the minority though)

I should have phrased it better, my intention wasn't to focus responsibility on typical FB users. It's posting and consuming news on a platform that deliberately puts them in an information bubble that feeds into and reinforces their existing viewpoints. It's what keeps people there and drives FB profits, but it causes harm to society. The responsibility is on FB and those knowingly feeding toxic content into it.

According to the people doing it or outside observers? Seems like there are lots of things that are net negatives in the opinion of one group of people despite many others choosing it for themselves. Should we ban soda? Granulated sugar in general? Rap music? The liberal arts? This is the government acting as a parent. We need a society of adults, not children.

Yes, we created a world, where many people make objectively bad decisions, because we let companies become so big and so rich that they can pay the cleverest mind to influence us. I too want a free society of adults, that can choose their own fate. But we as single persons do not have the capacities to find a reasonable way through all the bullshit that rich organisations feed us every day.

Look at supermarkets: everything after the department for fruits an vegetables is basically bad for us. Science prooves that. But we have to pass all this convenience food that promises to be cheap and fast and healthy and it isn't. And most people somehow learned that in school but ever since they are being informed by the companies.

Science does not in fact prove only fruits and vegetables are good for you, and in recent years the healt benefits of meat and dairy have been coming to light.

> Science does not in fact prove only fruits and vegetables are good for you

I will agree with your objection to the “prove” claim about the science (if only because it’s an overstatement of what science does) but the negative associations between various adverse health outcomes and a plant-based diet are well-supported in the literature: lower risk of type 2 diabetes, lower systolic BP, lower risk of cardiovascular events, lower total cardiovascular mortality, lower rates of certain malignancies.

YouTube is the new FB newsfeed. On a personal note, I wholeheartedly hate their half-assed approach to parenting controls.

Why are people ok with letting YouTube do parenting for them, that's what I would like to know.

It's like you're giving your children heroin, and complaining that your dealer has half-assed parenting controls.

> People using FB [...] has been a net bane to society.

Agreed.

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