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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Facebook is a benefit. Among other things, it gave me React which much of the modern web is built on, and React Native, PyTorch, GraphQL, Cassandra, Presto, and RocksDB just to name a few.

The question is, what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's harmful? I don't know. My daycare sends me updates, my barbershop tells me when they're closing and I used it to sell my fridge.

This hole Facebook irrational hate is ridiculously overblown. It's an app, and compared to things like TikTok that is essentially a Chinese psy-op, it's really a great product.

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> what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's harmful? I don't know.

This is extremely naive and akin to asking "why do people drink if it’s bad for you then??" Popular != healthy

Tbh, it's not clear that if we all stopped drinking the world would be better.

Yeah, and maybe it would be better still if we all tried heroin!

Are you legitimately trying to compare alcohol to heroin?

I think they are legitimately mocking the notion that we wouldn't all be better off without alcohol.

I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but ethanol is actually a very reactive molecule — and in some ways, it acts similarly to opioids like heroin. It, among other things, stimulates endogenous opioid pathways, leading to the release of β-endorphins and activation of mu-opioid receptors. So, alcohol works indirectly, heroin directly – but both enhance opioid signalling. If you’re curious, this study explains it really well:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3728478/

Food can also indirectly enhance opioid signaling. What's your point?

Food activates it within normal biological limits, alcohol and heroin artificially push the same system far beyond normal range, forcing the brain to compensate by downregulating receptors or reducing endogenous opioid production, so it's totally legit to compare alcohol to heroin

Oh it definitely would

Hard disagree.

I think it's incredibly naive and arrogant to tell billions of people who use a product through their own free will "ackchyually its really bad and you should stop".

Almost everyone would give you a response similar to mine. They use it because its easy way to plan events since so many people are on it, or a small business can easily create a website, sell something or just kill some time on the can.

Give it a rest.

Would you say the same about cigarettes? Billions of people used to smoke it as well, it was (and still is) quite popular, is it arrogant and patronising to tell them: this is unhealthy for you, and affects society in harmful ways?

It’s hard to believe this is not a rage bait AI comment given the last paragraph.

Both are terrible for society but I use facebook tools so Chinese app bad, USA app good i guess? Is that what you’re trying to say?

>The question is, what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's harmful?

Why do everyone get sick and eventually die if it's harmful?

It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.

> The question is, what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's harmful?

Perhaps _you_ don’t know.

It’s quite notorious for being the place to organise the genocide over in Myanmar.

IMO, that should disqualify every executive or engineer who knew (and did nothing) from ever again being involved with widely-used infrastructure.

> My daycare sends me updates, my barbershop tells me when they're closing and I used it to sell my fridge.

To consider the other side of this, read "The age of surveillance capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff (really read it though, not chatgpt the summary :).

All the benefits you mentioned are real. But, at what cost and could we have reaped the same benefits without surrendering all agency to those who can't be held accountable?

What are the costs? Seems like a huge benefit to me considering the alternative would be... I don't know. No updates? Maybe some shitty custom app that would 100% for sure have worse data security and privacy rights than something like Facebook?

Everyone's talking vaguely about the costs but no one actually makes a concrete case, where I made a concrete case of the benefits.

>much of the modern web is built on,

Was modern web a benefit?

> Yes, Facebook is a benefit. Among other things, it gave me React

No, this is peak HN

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