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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

There was a related thread on the front page: TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716665

Since that article is several months old and this one is new, we swapped it out. I assume it makes more sense to discuss the new one. Also, there were lots of criticisms of the other article for supposedly focusing only on TikTok, and those criticisms seem supplanted by this piece. (I'm not arguing whether it's right or wrong, nor have I read it.)

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You can essentially just wildcard the social network name and everything still applies. That's the status quo

Except FB, which mostly harms the middle aged.

It was harming kids on an industrial scale back when it was new, before Instagram et al cannabalized their audience

Was it? In Facebook’s early days you actually followed your friends and only saw their content. There wasn’t even an algorithm until a few years in when they stopped showing the feed chronologically. It wasn’t perfect but it was largely just an extension of your IRL social life.

Yes. Early FB was a completely different application and pretty similar to MySpace.

Getting into the limits of my memory here, but as far as I recall, early Facebook didn't have a feed at all, chronological or otherwise. It was just a directory of students at your own school, skeuomorphic to the physical "facebook" that universities would hand out each semester to students on campus, which gave you a headshot of everyone along with their room numbers. At some point, they added an updateable "status" field to the profiles, to tell your friends how you were feeling that day or what you were doing or whatever. When they started showing those on the home page instead of just on the profiles, then there was a feed, which eventually transformed into the monster we see today.

But early on, it was just a digital phonebook with headshots and exactly equivalent to physical items that schools already distributed.

Would generally disagree here. Especially when limited to edu emails, it was focused on human connections. Even after it opened to broader audience, it was centered on explicit connections you already had (or to some limited extent discovering new ones through network effects).

Now whether social networks in even these basic forms are harmful (discouraging physical connections, isolation in digital environments, etc), is maybe a different topic.

Exposure to echo chambers of harmful, hateful content driven by algorithms seems to be more the focus here. MySpace, early FB, or even AIM/ICQ, and others focused on facilitating connections and communication didn’t drive the same level of harm imo.

and countries, at a secret service scale

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

The same outlet did the TikTok story:

Following the format of our previous post about the “industrial scale harms” attributed to TikTok, this piece presents dozens of quotations from internal reports, studies, memos, conversations, and public statements in which Snap executives, employees, and consultants acknowledge and discuss the harms that Snapchat causes to many minors who use their platform.

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