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Comment by coolThingsFirst | Hacker News Reader

What good has Meta even done?

They harm teen mental health with their products and farm user data. What an achievement of youth to waste it on that noble mission.

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The early iterations of Facebook, just like the early iterations of most internet community and social platforms legitimately brought and kept people together and helped them forge and maintain more solid group connections… I still communicate with a wider range of people from my past, high school, university, etc because of it and enjoy easy access to excellent information about certain vehicles and natural areas (hot springs) because of it. That core value still exists behind all the evil.

Fcb for me it's ads, ads ads and even more ads. The newsfeed is complete slop from news outlets. It's just extremely noisy. The only thing that I use there is the Messenger because my older friends aren't too savvy with Whatsapp.

And even the Messenger app is a sloppy behemoth of an app with barely working Search. This is coming from a company with thousands of engineers and the core features of the business barely work.

98% of newsfeed is recommendation slop.

The focus wasn’t making the world a better place, or even to provide any value at all to its /users/, who are not its customers. The focus it was and is making money and to take this essay at face value, nothing else. Nothing wrong with making money - honestly.

I’m sure a lot of early employees convinced themselves Facebook had positive social value in addition to making them rich.

That was the default mindset in the early days of the web.

nothing wrong with the concept of making money, sure. let's look at the specific method that meta uses to make money. meta onsells private information about their platform users, to more accurately program those same platform users, according to commands of those supplying money. this can effectively be seen as slavery coercion (because slaves have no privacy, slaves obey their masters command, and nobody truly wants to be a slave). personally I don't agree with slavery and I don't agree with coercion, so I see plenty wrong with the way that meta makes money by middlemanning slavery. therefore I see your generalization as insidious because it downplays other viewpoints without adding anything.

Thanks to Facebook I am finding out that those people I grew up with and had connections have become assholes and would behave like one in public forums, even at the matured age of 40+. No thank you.

Before Facebook, after people lost touch with their high school or college friends, they often didn't have a good way to get back in touch again.

This is harder to do accidentally now, for better or worse.

But I suppose there are lots of other alternatives nowadays.

Anecdote, I know plenty of people who use FB exclusively for private and secret groups. The ability to require approval before approving (tied to looking up the profiles of people applying) while still allowing members to ask questions anonymously within the group (like maybe for health advice), moderation, some basic administrative roles, event invites / rsvp, discoverability by location (new mom club around me).

Not like any of these features are particularly good, but the combination beats anything else out there, which is surprising because usage of groups seems to be huge.

Discord comes close, but the complaint I see from FB group users is they don't like the real-time chat stream.

I use Facebook mostly for groups.

Facebook groups have destroyed online forums and with that killed long discussions on the internet.

But sure,somehow Facebook doesanage to suck you in and wate time on bullshit. For that it's awesome.

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