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Comment by pradn | Hacker News Reader

The words "friend" (everyone knows how shallow a "Facebook friend" is), "share" ("ride-sharing" instead of calling a taxi), and "community" (is the entire customer base of Facebook really a community?) have been shorn of their sociable, human meanings. It's as if a corporation were mining the good will humans have accreted to those words over millenia.

Sometimes there are communities in these spaces - NUMTOTs or small Discord servers. Other times its just marketing foo foo.

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Seems like almost every community nowadays has to have their own Discord server or private Facebook group. Often a deal-breaker for the more privacy-conscious people, unfortunately

My initial reaction to your comment was that privacy-consciousness has always been a potential deal-breaker for social engagement - which I think is true, building connection is an inherently vulnerable activity - but it's interesting how the word "privacy" means something very different on- and off-line.

We haven't ever lived in a world where not being "privacy-conscious" in a social setting could mean any of the following if that privacy is compromised by a corporation:

- Someone constructed a whole fake online presence using my data

- Someone used generative AI to make fake photos and videos of me doing things

- Someone has access to my bank accounts and all of my personal communications

- ...

We used to think of privacy as something that exists between people. Now we think of it as something that is mediated by corporations.

> We used to think of privacy as something that exists between people. Now we think of it as something that is mediated by corporations.

I have never heard of the second interpretation. The second sentence should in my opinion rather be: "Now we think of it as something that is violated by corporations."

> Often a deal-breaker for the more privacy-conscious people, unfortunately

You can’t have conversation in your community without them being public either. Saying anything in discord is just as public as on the middle of a busy shopping street.

Typically in public you don't have an irrevocable transcript of every word spoken. The predominace of electric communication and its natural surveillance has eliminated the ephemeral nature of conversation.

To some extend. But some must be pretty dedicated to find something you said even several days ago in a public discord. Coupled with the low stakes communication generally going on there it seems unlikely to me anyone would ever bother.

I'm a contractor working on the GTM side of a well a respected company with a very active slack public community. And let's just say all the activity in slack is piped into their data lake.

You're confusing facebook's customers with their users. Facebook's customers are companies that want to advertise.

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