4 ms·

FB is so detrimental to society, people that never use it need to be concerned much like with gambling and alcoholism. HN is hardly alone on this, plenty of ot

FB is so detrimental to society, people that never use it need to be concerned much like with gambling and alcoholism. HN is hardly alone on this, plenty of other sites including redit and a few others that I know of hate on facebook regularly.

sbmthakur 7y ago
> FB is so detrimental to society, people that never use it need to be concerned much like with gambling and alcoholism. I don't get how Facebook is detrimental to society. Probably I am missing something. The majority of people do have an option to delete their account or simply not to log in. Apart from Facebook's involvement in scandals like Cambridge Analytica, I don't see what's wrong with the site or company. It's true that it can be used for causing harm, but that's true for almost every other tech out there.
- CaptArmchair 7y ago
  That's the equivalent of the "guns don't kill people. People kill people." argument. It's a sort of "shifting the goalposts" fallacy. Tools, organization, policies,... are always an expression of a specific or a common intent. How Facebook moderates the platform, makes design choices, how it decides on what to show on your newsfeed,... all of that is intentional. Facebook isn't a public commons, it's not a space where people freely control the flow of the content they publish or control what they see or when they get to see it. Facebook is designed with the express goal of getting to know as much as possible about its tenants - "insights" in marketing speak - so it can then sell that information. The problem with Facebook is how 2nd and 3rd order network effects that disrupt the fabric of society, emerge through its sheer scale. What's wrong with the platform is that it is entirely unwilling to acknowledge those effects and happily shift responsibility towards society and individuals. If people aren't willing to delete their account, then that's because Facebook has captured how people communicate and understands that it plays into basic psychological behaviors such as FOMO, or that nobody likes to be an outsider. If literally everyone you know goes to the top place in town every thursday and saturday night, if all the gossip happens at that spot, well, it's extremely hard to stay clear of that without feeling left out.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    I don't see anything to actually blame them for specifically. Lots of insinutations and FUD but no actual claims of harm or what they should have done instead. You have described shady monetization but not the harm inflicted. If I measure everyone in town's height when they walk by a lamppost and sell it to clothing manufacturers I have gotten money due to them but I haven't stolen anything by any sensible framework. I mean I consider Facebook a pile of trash but that I recognize that the problem has always been the people who make up society being vapid, foolish, and vain caring more about it. Banning Facebook won't fix those problems - their ancestors have been witchhunting, engaging in stupid "reformations and moral crusades" that only make things worse without any redeeming values and lashing back at inconvenient facts long before Facebook.
    - CaptArmchair 7y ago
      Are you implying now that it's impossible to hold politicians accountable because you can't prove any direct harmful causality between their actions and the effects on individual citizens?
      - Nasrudith 7y ago
        No - but Facebook is not politicians nor voters. It should be trivial to prove harm from a politicians policies. There should be direct and clear chains of causation and knowledge applying actual standards. The reason you can't hold politicians accountable is because their whole aparatus of government is deathlty afraid of setting any precedent which might hold them personally accountable for direct misdeeds. See the furious rationalizations known as Qualified Immunity and refusal to prosecute literal war criminals. See the furious reaction to whistleblowers above literal traitors who sell secrets to foreign governments. It is abundantly clear that they fear transparency and accountability above all else and replacing the clusterfuck with something not even worse is politically very difficult. Blaming Facebook for "influence" is questionably third to fourth order as well, especially when far more direct culprits go unpunished without reason. It is classic cycle of abuse displacement of blame from a more responsible to a more accessible and vulnerable target. Sure grandma may voted for a guy whose campaign platform was literally "Mein Campf" subsisted for the local language and country but maybe the uncomfortable truth is that she was always quietly a genocidal racist who felt that mass murder was preferrable to being on an equal footing to "lessers" but was fine before because they "knew their place". Utterly horrifying but easy to see why most would prefer to blame Facebook over their family members for being responsible for being horrible people. It reeks of "follow the money" ambulance chasing of suing the laundromat for not having bulletproof windows instead of the gangbangers who hit the victims during a drive by shooting. Only in this case it is "follow the politicial power to try to dragoon it to something they think will be in their favor".

sbmthakur 7y ago

> FB is so detrimental to society, people that never use it need to be concerned much like with gambling and alcoholism. I don't get how Facebook is detrimental to society. Probably I am missing something. The majority of people do have an option to delete their account or simply not to log in. Apart from Facebook's involvement in scandals like Cambridge Analytica, I don't see what's wrong with the site or company. It's true that it can be used for causing harm, but that's true for almost every other tech out there.

CaptArmchair 7y ago
That's the equivalent of the "guns don't kill people. People kill people." argument. It's a sort of "shifting the goalposts" fallacy. Tools, organization, policies,... are always an expression of a specific or a common intent. How Facebook moderates the platform, makes design choices, how it decides on what to show on your newsfeed,... all of that is intentional. Facebook isn't a public commons, it's not a space where people freely control the flow of the content they publish or control what they see or when they get to see it. Facebook is designed with the express goal of getting to know as much as possible about its tenants - "insights" in marketing speak - so it can then sell that information. The problem with Facebook is how 2nd and 3rd order network effects that disrupt the fabric of society, emerge through its sheer scale. What's wrong with the platform is that it is entirely unwilling to acknowledge those effects and happily shift responsibility towards society and individuals. If people aren't willing to delete their account, then that's because Facebook has captured how people communicate and understands that it plays into basic psychological behaviors such as FOMO, or that nobody likes to be an outsider. If literally everyone you know goes to the top place in town every thursday and saturday night, if all the gossip happens at that spot, well, it's extremely hard to stay clear of that without feeling left out.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  I don't see anything to actually blame them for specifically. Lots of insinutations and FUD but no actual claims of harm or what they should have done instead. You have described shady monetization but not the harm inflicted. If I measure everyone in town's height when they walk by a lamppost and sell it to clothing manufacturers I have gotten money due to them but I haven't stolen anything by any sensible framework. I mean I consider Facebook a pile of trash but that I recognize that the problem has always been the people who make up society being vapid, foolish, and vain caring more about it. Banning Facebook won't fix those problems - their ancestors have been witchhunting, engaging in stupid "reformations and moral crusades" that only make things worse without any redeeming values and lashing back at inconvenient facts long before Facebook.
  - CaptArmchair 7y ago
    Are you implying now that it's impossible to hold politicians accountable because you can't prove any direct harmful causality between their actions and the effects on individual citizens?
    - Nasrudith 7y ago
      No - but Facebook is not politicians nor voters. It should be trivial to prove harm from a politicians policies. There should be direct and clear chains of causation and knowledge applying actual standards. The reason you can't hold politicians accountable is because their whole aparatus of government is deathlty afraid of setting any precedent which might hold them personally accountable for direct misdeeds. See the furious rationalizations known as Qualified Immunity and refusal to prosecute literal war criminals. See the furious reaction to whistleblowers above literal traitors who sell secrets to foreign governments. It is abundantly clear that they fear transparency and accountability above all else and replacing the clusterfuck with something not even worse is politically very difficult. Blaming Facebook for "influence" is questionably third to fourth order as well, especially when far more direct culprits go unpunished without reason. It is classic cycle of abuse displacement of blame from a more responsible to a more accessible and vulnerable target. Sure grandma may voted for a guy whose campaign platform was literally "Mein Campf" subsisted for the local language and country but maybe the uncomfortable truth is that she was always quietly a genocidal racist who felt that mass murder was preferrable to being on an equal footing to "lessers" but was fine before because they "knew their place". Utterly horrifying but easy to see why most would prefer to blame Facebook over their family members for being responsible for being horrible people. It reeks of "follow the money" ambulance chasing of suing the laundromat for not having bulletproof windows instead of the gangbangers who hit the victims during a drive by shooting. Only in this case it is "follow the politicial power to try to dragoon it to something they think will be in their favor".