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Meta is probably the only large tech company where we would be better off if they had never existed. Or, at the very least, it nothing of value would be lost.

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Could have very well lived without twitter too. It's not like everyone was aching for it before it existed.

Or just social media in general. Even Mastodon is full of toxic people. There's probably something about social media style timelines that brings the worst out of people.

A faster horse, you say?

All the advantages of a single public serchable IRC channel that logs all history.

And all the obvious problems with a public serchable IRC channel that logs all history.

I think Twitter (and to a lesser degree its derivatives like bluesky, threads, etc) did far more harm than Facebook. It played a major part in ruining journalism and politics to a degree that far outshadows any other social media platform.

The comparison goes something like this:

Twitter "ruined journalism" by giving lazy media companies a way to "track big stories" (i.e. a few thousand people comment about N and that's News, apparently.)

Facebook "ruined journalism" by virtue of users not bothering to read the news at all.

Both are horrible.

But, facts, "Journalism" was ruined by corporate interests decades ago.

Absolutely not. Facebook did far more damage than Twitter ever did.

They have open sourced a lot of valuable code.

I've noticed that too. But it would have happened sooner or later by someone

And drug lords have built soccer fields for the poor and dictators made freeways and cheap cars and rockets

I'd say FBs semi open source (not fully unrestricted iirc) was less unique or inevitable that the good actions of other notable evil organizations

Oh, and Llama is pretty cool.

React would be lost, so ... yes, this take is correct.

FB Marketplace, but that's about it. Even that is a hot bed for people like bike thieves.

Messenger is nice to have a directory of everyone I've met without a translation layer into numbers or screen names.

FB marketplace is a terrible market. It does not allow exact searches. It forces scrolling hundreds of ads in the hope of finding what I need. Even Craigslist had (has?) far better searching. If you do something crazy like sort by distance half the ads disappear. It is full of scam ads (I have given up trying to buy used phones, for example). Sadly I am forced to use it because that is where all the local person-to-person selling happens.

It sounds like FB Marketplace is every bit the marketplace for scammers that people claim craigslist is.

Having never used it, how does FB Marketplace differ from eBay?

In my area, it's basically replaced newspaper classified ads. So you get people selling cars, furniture, appliances, and miscellaneous stuff that's too big or heavy to ship. Except it's more restrictive, not allowing the sale of animals for instance, which is annoying.

My main problem with it is that it doesn't obey its own filters very well. If I search for "Buick" and set a radius of 40 miles from my location, it might give me a few within that radius but then start giving me a bunch from hundreds of miles away. And it doesn't seem to work outward, but might give me some 500 miles away and then one 50 miles lower down. That makes it less useful than it could be.

It's kind of like Craigslist, targeting local sellers wanting to get rid of things quickly rather than sellers wanting to ship things whereever the highest bidder might be.

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