6 ms·

I think a very inconvenient and ugly truth is slowly dawning on Facebook and society in general: connecting people at mass is bad. Facebook may go down in histo

by volgo 8y ago

I think a very inconvenient and ugly truth is slowly dawning on Facebook and society in general: connecting people at mass is bad. Facebook may go down in history as the next Big Tobacco or Big Fast Food that touted new innovation as a mass utopian relief, only to be later debunked as charlatan science Zuckerberg has always touted Facebook's core mission as "connecting people throughout the world." The mission is so fervent you get socially deranged executives like Boz who boast about "connecting people at all cost... even if someone gets killed or bullied" [paraphrased here] Technologies change throughout the ages, but human societies in general don't. Like it or not, part of what makes a society work is that the people you interact with have some similarity with you culturally and that interactions have costs - in the form of reputation. If you lie everyday, you'll be known as the liar. If you are prone to anger attacks, people don't want to be near you. If you set a fire in your village, you get condemned or thrown in jail. The threat of social stigmatization helps regulate bad behaviors. Facebook completely strips away all of that. It forces human beings to interact in an unnatural and inhumane way, which is that almost anyone in the world is allowed to attack your conscience and upset you. Your immediate circle is suppose to be small and protective, whereas Facebook opens you up to attack on all sides, putting you at the whim of whatever the public is feeling. You're assaulted with ideas and emotions you cannot possibly process fast enough as a human being. It's situations like these where a fair amount of liberal arts training can help engineers like Zuckerberg understand that human beings are not statistical models. Your data set may suggest that the more "connections" people make, the more satisfied they feel. Just like mice who find out that pressing the lever and getting an injection of chemical feels very very good. It completely ignores what it means fundamentally to form a coherent society.

ItsMe000001 8y ago
> connecting people at mass is bad I would have thought that the problem is elites lying and being extraordinarily selfish and working for causes that don't like being exposed to the public and not infrequently only for the benefit of a small part of the population, so that people don't trust more official channels of information in the first place.
- tajen 8y ago
  I’m not sure your message was clear enough. You’re adressing the example of CNN twisting reality so much to serve Democrats that most of the population now distrusts the media and trusts peer-to-peer information networks, I believe. With the compound problem that the comment above yours blames it all on the people. Yes, people want a narration of reality that matches their direct observations. Like, how can group be mediatized as uniformly good if they repeatedly perform bombings, looting and if they say they want to perform more bombing. Facebook comes to the rescue because media doesn’t inform people about real things. Yep, cognitive dissonance.
  - tzs 8y ago
    > Like, how can group be mediatized as uniformly good if they repeatedly perform bombings, looting and if they say they want to perform more bombing What group?
chrischen 8y ago
You get black guy and a white guy who have to live with each other may realize they have more in common than different, but if you connect a bunch of people over the internet the like-minded coalesce create feedback loops that further isolate them from outside groups.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mehrdadn 8y ago
> I think a very inconvenient and ugly truth is slowly dawning on Facebook and society in general: connecting people at mass is bad. For those who aren't aware, this insight came from a Facebook VP: https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-face...
joe_the_user 8y ago
I think a very inconvenient and ugly truth is slowly dawning on Facebook and society in general: connecting people at mass is bad. Facebook may go down in history as the next Big Tobacco or Big Fast Food that touted new innovation as a mass utopian relief, only to be later debunked as charlatan science. Wow, it is amazing to see how many people have come to this incredibly pessimistic view (I say this from other hn posts as well as this one). It's been a long time since people lived in villages where each person's propensity for lying or not could be easily discerned. And it indeed took a while for people to reach the point that they could relate to strangers without either attacking them or allowing them to take advantage of them. This progression has been necessary for the civilization that we know (for all it's goods and ills). It's worth noting social media arose in the US at the point that a lot of immediate associations were decaying (see Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone). Social media has fullfilled a lot of the functions of things like the bowling leagues whose decline Putnam documents. Certainly social media has been problematic but it has essentially been where the socialize part of society is going (not to mention a lot the problems that the article and the parent imagines comes from social media in particular are actually problems of society in general). In anything, of the social medias, Facebook has done the most work in creating an interface to your friends in particular rather than the world at large (does the parent know he can keep non-friends from seeing or commenting on his feed? It might solve some of the problems he rails about.) The thing is I suspect that the today's Facebook haters don't share an urge to return to the 100-person band societies that the primitivists I once knew idolize. Instead, I think they imagine a society where socializing will simply generally stop and people will give up the idea of friends entirely or that some small bubble they're can be exception to this.
- krapp 8y ago
  >Wow, it is amazing to see how many people's has come to this incredibly pessimistic view. It's amazing to see how many people ostensibly a part of "hacker culture" come to this view. What's gone wrong here is not that "connecting people at mass is bad," but that those connections were supposed to subvert and tear down the systems of centralized authority and information control set up by governments and the media... but we've just replaced one set of suits with another, and now we pretend the internet only has a few channels the way television used to. I'm all for ending the quasi-monopoly that Facebook and other big sites have on the public's awareness, but please let's stop implying that the problem with the web is its power to connect people.
CM30 8y ago
I don't think the idea of connecting people at mass is bad, large communities can and have worked out fine. What I think is the issue is that how Facebook and similar sites do things is flawed. Why? Because unlike real life: 1. You only have one profile on said sites (in most cases), and that means people can easily connect your different interests together. 2. Groups who can't tolerate each other's existence are forced in a situation where they've got to interact on a regular basis, or where interactions are made fairly common. 3. And everything you do is public record forever. Those in turn are the issues that are causing all this social instability. Why? Well, think of it like this. For the former, people always present a different 'face' based on the group they're with and the situation they're in. Their family knows one side of them, their love interests know another site, their friends know another, their colleagues yet another and various authorities know different ones entirely. But social media services remove this. They give people one profile for everything, and expose groups who didn't want/need/have to know about some aspect of an individual to things they weren't really meant to know about. In the old days, an 'offensive' joke might reach 5 people who'd groan a bit and then forget about it. Now it reaches half the internet, leads to jobs being lost and causes flare ups between friends and families. They also force people together who can't be 'openly' tolerant of each other, and makes their existence hard to ignore for their enemies, Yes, lots of people in real life have 'abhorrent' views, but said views don't travel beyond people that agree with said views. Social media sites push said views in everyone's faces. What Facebook and co have caused isn't necessarily polarisation or what not. They haven't made views 'more' extreme. They've revealed the tensions underneath human society that were previously able to be ignored because people could get along and work together in ignorant bliss. They've made every 'bad' and 'offensive' viewpoint held by some group or another visible to those outside the groups they're intended for. Connecting people isn't the problem. Making visible things that shouldn't be visible to everyone and making every group and viewpoint too visible is.
- azernik 8y ago
  > They also force people together who can't be 'openly' tolerant of each other, and makes their existence hard to ignore for their enemies, Yes, lots of people in real life have 'abhorrent' views, but said views don't travel beyond people that agree with said views. Social media sites push said views in everyone's faces. Actually, if you read through this story, that is the exact opposite of the truth. Facebook connected only people who held the same abhorrent views - aka Sinhala-speaking people primed to believe conspiracy theories about the Tamil Muslim minority. They were telling stories about groups they couldn't tolerate, not actually interacting with them.

by volgo 8y ago

ItsMe000001 8y ago

> connecting people at mass is bad I would have thought that the problem is elites lying and being extraordinarily selfish and working for causes that don't like being exposed to the public and not infrequently only for the benefit of a small part of the population, so that people don't trust more official channels of information in the first place.

tajen 8y ago
I’m not sure your message was clear enough. You’re adressing the example of CNN twisting reality so much to serve Democrats that most of the population now distrusts the media and trusts peer-to-peer information networks, I believe. With the compound problem that the comment above yours blames it all on the people. Yes, people want a narration of reality that matches their direct observations. Like, how can group be mediatized as uniformly good if they repeatedly perform bombings, looting and if they say they want to perform more bombing. Facebook comes to the rescue because media doesn’t inform people about real things. Yep, cognitive dissonance.
- tzs 8y ago
  > Like, how can group be mediatized as uniformly good if they repeatedly perform bombings, looting and if they say they want to perform more bombing What group?

chrischen 8y ago

You get black guy and a white guy who have to live with each other may realize they have more in common than different, but if you connect a bunch of people over the internet the like-minded coalesce create feedback loops that further isolate them from outside groups.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mehrdadn 8y ago

> I think a very inconvenient and ugly truth is slowly dawning on Facebook and society in general: connecting people at mass is bad. For those who aren't aware, this insight came from a Facebook VP: https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-face...

joe_the_user 8y ago

I think a very inconvenient and ugly truth is slowly dawning on Facebook and society in general: connecting people at mass is bad. Facebook may go down in history as the next Big Tobacco or Big Fast Food that touted new innovation as a mass utopian relief, only to be later debunked as charlatan science. Wow, it is amazing to see how many people have come to this incredibly pessimistic view (I say this from other hn posts as well as this one). It's been a long time since people lived in villages where each person's propensity for lying or not could be easily discerned. And it indeed took a while for people to reach the point that they could relate to strangers without either attacking them or allowing them to take advantage of them. This progression has been necessary for the civilization that we know (for all it's goods and ills). It's worth noting social media arose in the US at the point that a lot of immediate associations were decaying (see Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone). Social media has fullfilled a lot of the functions of things like the bowling leagues whose decline Putnam documents. Certainly social media has been problematic but it has essentially been where the socialize part of society is going (not to mention a lot the problems that the article and the parent imagines comes from social media in particular are actually problems of society in general). In anything, of the social medias, Facebook has done the most work in creating an interface to your friends in particular rather than the world at large (does the parent know he can keep non-friends from seeing or commenting on his feed? It might solve some of the problems he rails about.) The thing is I suspect that the today's Facebook haters don't share an urge to return to the 100-person band societies that the primitivists I once knew idolize. Instead, I think they imagine a society where socializing will simply generally stop and people will give up the idea of friends entirely or that some small bubble they're can be exception to this.

krapp 8y ago
>Wow, it is amazing to see how many people's has come to this incredibly pessimistic view. It's amazing to see how many people ostensibly a part of "hacker culture" come to this view. What's gone wrong here is not that "connecting people at mass is bad," but that those connections were supposed to subvert and tear down the systems of centralized authority and information control set up by governments and the media... but we've just replaced one set of suits with another, and now we pretend the internet only has a few channels the way television used to. I'm all for ending the quasi-monopoly that Facebook and other big sites have on the public's awareness, but please let's stop implying that the problem with the web is its power to connect people.

CM30 8y ago

I don't think the idea of connecting people at mass is bad, large communities can and have worked out fine. What I think is the issue is that how Facebook and similar sites do things is flawed. Why? Because unlike real life: 1. You only have one profile on said sites (in most cases), and that means people can easily connect your different interests together. 2. Groups who can't tolerate each other's existence are forced in a situation where they've got to interact on a regular basis, or where interactions are made fairly common. 3. And everything you do is public record forever. Those in turn are the issues that are causing all this social instability. Why? Well, think of it like this. For the former, people always present a different 'face' based on the group they're with and the situation they're in. Their family knows one side of them, their love interests know another site, their friends know another, their colleagues yet another and various authorities know different ones entirely. But social media services remove this. They give people one profile for everything, and expose groups who didn't want/need/have to know about some aspect of an individual to things they weren't really meant to know about. In the old days, an 'offensive' joke might reach 5 people who'd groan a bit and then forget about it. Now it reaches half the internet, leads to jobs being lost and causes flare ups between friends and families. They also force people together who can't be 'openly' tolerant of each other, and makes their existence hard to ignore for their enemies, Yes, lots of people in real life have 'abhorrent' views, but said views don't travel beyond people that agree with said views. Social media sites push said views in everyone's faces. What Facebook and co have caused isn't necessarily polarisation or what not. They haven't made views 'more' extreme. They've revealed the tensions underneath human society that were previously able to be ignored because people could get along and work together in ignorant bliss. They've made every 'bad' and 'offensive' viewpoint held by some group or another visible to those outside the groups they're intended for. Connecting people isn't the problem. Making visible things that shouldn't be visible to everyone and making every group and viewpoint too visible is.

azernik 8y ago
> They also force people together who can't be 'openly' tolerant of each other, and makes their existence hard to ignore for their enemies, Yes, lots of people in real life have 'abhorrent' views, but said views don't travel beyond people that agree with said views. Social media sites push said views in everyone's faces. Actually, if you read through this story, that is the exact opposite of the truth. Facebook connected only people who held the same abhorrent views - aka Sinhala-speaking people primed to believe conspiracy theories about the Tamil Muslim minority. They were telling stories about groups they couldn't tolerate, not actually interacting with them.