From my perspective, problems with facebook: 1) Anti-privacy, megalomaniacal nature of network. 2) Social cost of having removed the normal ways we moderate e

From my perspective, problems with facebook: 1) Anti-privacy, megalomaniacal nature of network. 2) Social cost of having removed the normal ways we moderate each other's behavior. E.g. when someone is a narcissistic bore, you talk to them less and less at the barbecues and eventually events start happening they're not invited to. Facebook takes the people most willing to ignore social boundaries and customs and puts them center stage. 3) Opportunity costs of not having mechanisms to form more naturally-moderated social groups, but with a wider pool of potential people than are in your physical social graph. This has always been the dream of the social internet. 4) "Fake news", specifically the moral hazard of providing an environment that plays to the "worst" tendencies of media consumption. This is obviously dependent on our values, and how patronizing we're willing to be. But the hazard is a real issue especially when your network attracts people under one pretense--hang out with your friends/kids/grandkids--and then has this non-advertised effect of sticking you in a media echo chamber. This unlike when people choose to go out and fight their echo chamber in a way that's fairly important. 5) Like 3) but now for "good" media consumption, or a Healthy Democratic Civil Discourse, or whatever. I'm glib because this is on the razor's edge of smuggling in whatever values we daydream about imposing on the world. A lot of us can come up with the David-and-Goliath dream of a distributed network, but I think it's interesting that this is probably neutral-at-best for 4), which is the issue du jour. One could easily see things getting worse and articles being published with the thesis that people need to be de-balkanized for the sake of civic discourse. Also, the REAL contrarian take here is that things are close to optimal. People are succeeding at 3) and by extension 2), just in niche special interest groups that aren't salient to us in the steady state. The "problem" is that many of us lack the conviction or self-direction to quit media behaviors we don't like. Meanwhile 4) and 5) are really about the bankruptcy of modern ideologies, etc. etc.