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Comment by patch_dev | Hacker News Reader

Why aren't they deserving of sympathy? Crazy take and a massive lack of empathy.

Facebook is widely thought to cause significant societal damage; anyone who thinks so, would probably consider employees of Meta to be the ones lacking empathy.

So Facebook products are definitely not good for humans to use, sort of like cane sugar is not good for humans to use, but I wonder if you also think this about, I dunno, banks? They do vastly more predatory stuff with much bigger impacts. Nobody’s Facebook usage is affecting how much housing costs, for example. But for some reason there seems to be more outrage at social media companies. Odd!

If they do it, then we can do it too.

So lets bomb some sucker nation or assassinate folks we summarily don't like, without due process. F'k it, if they do it, then we can also do it.

How does that make anything better? It results in a degradation of societal values where morals and positive norms are assigned to the pages of history.

There was a time when positive examples, folks standing up and resisting was seen as a something good. Nowadays everyone just does it because the others are even worse. So who should start making the world a better place? The others.

I’m not sure what this style of rhetoric is called but Matt Bors popularized it in his comic “Mister Gotcha”.

And we can be against banks being predatory and Meta. Coincidentally on a thread about Meta the topic is more about them than banks.

I believe Meta and most social medias cause significant societal damage. I also think that humans as a baseline are deserving of sympathy. Lets take the straw man Meta employee who causes damage and lacks empathy. Personally I'd think it's sad that that employee doesn't experience the emotion of empathy. I wonder how that impacts their personal life, why don't they experience that empathy?

I don't think it's a good idea to use someone else's perceived lack of empathy as an excuse to not be sympathetic.

Because they know what they are signing up for? I’ve only interviewed at Meta for practice even though I could earn ~250k a year more working there.

The issue I have is you are strawmanning every Meta employee into an amorphous form that knowingly works at Meta only for the money that trades away their rights to a safe work environment without any humanity to it. Thats not true, every individual there is unique with their own situation. Trying to lump thousands of people like that is really reductive.

This is a silly argument. They’re smart / diligent enough to spend months studying to pass their interviews, but not smart enough to spend 5 minutes researching Glassdoor / Blind?

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