Hacker News Reader

Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

It must be thoughtlessness. You can't honestly look at Facebook's contribution to the Arab Spring (and similar social justice causes) or the millions of people it has reconnected (long-lost family/friends) and think that SpaceX has any chance of creating comparable positive impact at any point in the near future.

I like SpaceX too. It's every geek's childhood fantasy. It's a great thing. Elon is the real Tony Stark. But the reality is that far more humans benefit from relatively mundane advances in things like cell phones and social networking than rockets.

Facebook is connecting humanity together in a way that's never been possible before. Improving the lives of billions of people in a meaningful way is an undeniably Big Fucking Deal.

View on HN

I think it's a bit of a leap to attribute the Arab Spring to Facebook's contribution. It was long overdue and it would have happened with or without facebook.

Would we blame it on facebook if the spring failed to lead into summer? If not then it stands to reason that we can't credit facebook with the success either.

The Arab Spring and all the good that may come out of it belongs to the Arabs, to those that laid their life on the line and to those that stood up to oppression.

Connecting humanity is an important thing but we have a very large number of ways to do that, facebook is but one of those.

I'm with you that connecting peoples lives in such a way is beneficial, but I'm not quite sure yet if Facebooks net value is positive or not if you factor in the massive privacy violations that have already happened coupled with those that are surely to come.

No social network has the potential for good as much as facebook does at the moment. But at the same time that potential needs to be realized and that needs to be balanced with a healthy respect for the privacy of the users of that network.

For a good read on the Arab Spring and the online movements:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/so-was...

The telephone, the internet in general, twitter, online news media and yes, Facebook all played a minor role. But in the end it was the people that made the change and they would have found a way to communicate. Possibly not as effective but there have been revolutions all over the world that pre-date the invention of the telephone so a new piece of technology is likely not an enabler but simply one more line of possible communication.

>Would we blame it on facebook if the spring failed to lead into summer? If not then it stands to reason that we can't credit facebook with the success either.

There is a logic fallacy in this statement: Facebook was the tool to call and organize millions of people for the Arab Spring; organization is the obligatory step 1 for a revolution; if they fail at step 2 or 3 it haves nothing to do with Facebook; it would be like pretending that telephones do not help in emergency situations because when the fireman doesn't arrive fast enough we don't blame the telephone company.

Here is 2 leaders of the Arab Spring laughing at the suggestion of Facebook contributing to the Arab Spring: http://youtu.be/HdVoBlABSpc?t=13m44s

Also, in Syria, the authorities tortured people for their Facebook profile information. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/8...

Please distinguish my reporting of facts from taking a position on this issue.

Facebook was not made with intent to spur political unrest, thats a side effect, a collateral.

And anyhow, the effect on arab spring of social media such as facebook is highly overstated, as one rebel said in an interview "We turned to facebook and twitter only after we had destroyed 90% of the police stations in our town."

I got to disagree. Not in the part that Facebook was important to Arab Spring and reconnect people long seen. I desagree in the part that rockets doesn't give benefits.

Rockets and all 'complicated' science, push the human race forward. Your cellphone is only able to connect to the internet because of the rockets that were send to the atmosphere, long time ago. Better than me, I have to people to talk about this.

Read Science and Culture, by Thomas Huxley : How often have we not been told that the study of physical science is incompetent to confer culture; that it touches none of the higher problems of life; and, what is worse, that the continual devotion to scientific studies tends to generate a narrow and bigoted belief in the applicability of scientific methods to the search after truth of all kinds. How frequently one has reason to observe that no reply to a troublesome argument tells so well as calling its author a "mere scientific specialist." And, as I am afraid it is not permissible to speak of this form of opposition to scientific education in the past tense; may we not expect to be told that this, not only omission, but prohibition, of "mere literary instruction and education" is a patent example of scientific narrow-mindedness? source: http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Best/HuxleyScienceC...

And the great Neil deGrasse Tyson , in the pretty "We stopped Dreaming": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIZU8cQWXc

You can't possibly think I was saying scientific progress isn't good, right? We're comparing the positive impact of Facebook and SpaceX to date.

I think he's saying SpaceX is a "Bigger Fucking Deal" than Facebook.

No..he didn't even mention SpaceX. He's just talking about scientific progress in general.

> You can't honestly look at Facebook's contribution to the Arab Spring (and similar social justice causes) or the millions of people it has reconnected (long-lost family/friends) and think that SpaceX has any chance of creating comparable positive impact at any point in the near future.

You absolutely can. The telephone did those things, too. So does Twitter. If it weren't Facebook, something else would've been used instead.

This is like celebrating the "success" of a new hammer design. There will be another tool in five years' time that will replace Facebook, too.

>>You absolutely can. The telephone did those things, too. So does Twitter. If it weren't Facebook, something else would've been used instead.

Why wasn't something else you say was actually present when it was needed?

Why didn't somebody else execute it and build it.

The fact is that <somebody> who can build awesome <anything> is difficult to find is the crux of this whole debate.

I imagine it was useful simply because it was the biggest social site online. If facebook had not existed I'm sure they would have found other ways to accomplish similar goals.

It's not as if they set facebook up with the intent on making it easy to organise revolutions.

If they could have got similar eyeballs by posting a video on xtube.com would that have made xtube a great innovation?

That's the point. Facebook brought social network to the masses. In my environment, Twitter is still a tool for geeks. Facebook has brought to hundreds of millions the broadcasting and sharing features. You can't deny that. It could have been something else than Facebook, but it hadn't. Someone else than Neil Armstrong could have landed on the moon, but he was the guy. And he deserves the credit rightly. Past and events are what they are.

I will agree on the timing of benefits to mankind; however, I'm willing to bet far more humans benefit from advances in rocketry over the long run.

Consider what we have done already with rockets. There are many satellites orbiting the earth that make huge communication networks possible. Rockets sent them up there. SpaceX may not have immediate applications, but someone needs to be pushing the frontiers of science and technology. If there wasn't a space program going back decades, I seriously doubt we would have the ability to communicate the way do today.

a. Facebook != social media

b. Doesn't matter how many social networking sites are built if we run out of room.

c. Mapping, telecoms, climate, nuclear proliferation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com