It's impossible to argue preventing suicides is a bad thing. But it is inseparable from the fact facebook is now actively pursuing their ability to use the plat

It's impossible to argue preventing suicides is a bad thing. But it is inseparable from the fact facebook is now actively pursuing their ability to use the platform for social control. I'm willing to grant them the benefit of the doubt that they just sort of bumbled into an interaction loop with downsides that might make facebook use a net-negative for the mental state of some users. They were trying to provide communication tools and it evolved into something that (at least correlates with) a decline in well being [0][1]. As more and more companies doing "social" cultivate userbases larger than they can moderate start feeling justified in shaping their users' behavior en mass, I worry that we're slowly stumbling towards human-scale skinner boxes that no-one fully understands or controls. [0] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0069841#s3 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... [1] jimmies' comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13772729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13772729 is a fairly typical example of someone figuring out facebook use is harming their psyche.