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During the time Facebook (and related properties) have been unavailable, I can't help but feel a little better about the world. There is so much hate, arguments

During the time Facebook (and related properties) have been unavailable, I can't help but feel a little better about the world. There is so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angry, and harmful messaging on FB platforms. It's nice to know all of that crap is just....gone. At least for a little while.

bamboozled 5y ago
It does feel nice, like the oppressor has died, at least for a bit. Also fun to watch the scramble to get it back online, would be nice if it never came back :)
- FormerBandmate 5y ago
  >the oppressor It’s a website that shows you what your friends are doing. That’s it. People said the same things about television
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    It's so much more and if you spend a significant amount of time on HN then you know it.
    - aierou 5y ago
      The implication that HN is a primary source of knowledge is disturbing.
      - barbazoo 5y ago
        It's a link aggregator, it being a source of information shouldn't come as a surprise.
  - md2020 5y ago
    That’s simplifying it a lot.
    - FormerBandmate 5y ago
      There has been tons of use for it for hate, but people have found a way to use every method of communication for hate (e.g. TV, Mail, phones) and efforts to crack down on hate on Facebook haven’t seemed to have an effect on hate in the real world (see the people banned from Facebook who went on to use other platforms to coordinate 1/6). I don’t like their privacy intrusions but people seem to have a tendency to blame all of society’s ills on Facebook, phones, and the internet and that in and of itself is a massive oversimplification that doesn’t reflect the real issues with our society
      - bamboozled 5y ago
        It's also global targeted advertisement delivery network who tracks user around the internet without consent?
      - cybernautique 5y ago
        I replied to your toplevel, which I make note of simply because I don't want to seem as if I'm targeting you. You dislike their privacy intrusions, and I hate them for it. My life is actively made worse for their stalking, their insistence that they be at the forefront of all things social. I agree that they're not to blame for the hatred in society, nor are they responsible for all of society's problems. But their utter contempt to just let people be is reason enough that I should make myself heard as often as I can, and especially whenever I see an attempt to relieve any amount of pressure that hopefully weighs on their conscience: fuck Facebook and their employees.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    >That’s it. It really, really isn't all they're doing. Not by the longest of shots. Here is one example: https://indica.medium.com/facebook-is-evil-and-i-quit-2151055bd4bb https://indica.medium.com/facebook-is-evil-and-i-quit-215105... There are thousands of others. Every week on here there's a new story about some new uncovered act of heinous evil from the Zuck and his buds. It's a wonder you haven't seen them.
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    Yes people said the same thing about television and by and large most people think Television had some pretty bad side effects. A dumber society, all kinds of depression began manifesting in people who were sold an image of ‘reality’ via ads/unrealistic shows, the gutting of ‘journalism’ into 24-hour news, none of that stuff was wrong.
  - cirgue 5y ago
    And they were right, no?
  - cybernautique 5y ago
    It's a multibillion dollar corporation that wants to track me wherever I go, whatever I do, whenever I want to connect. Facebook is a maniacal stalker. Their website is merely an innocuous facade that hides a nest of ugly, venomous, snakes.
- cmpxchg8b 5y ago
  How did it oppress you? Can you point to the place on the doll where it hurt you?
  - thatsamonad 5y ago
    > Can you point to the place on the doll where it hurt you? Using a reference to how survivors of abuse are often required to re-enact their abuse to make a snarky comment is neither funny nor clever and it doesn’t add anything substantive to this conversation.
    - cmpxchg8b 5y ago
      I apologise for that. You’re right, it didn’t add anything substantive and was disrespectful.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
lifthrasiir 5y ago
Unfortunately Twitter was still alive and QAnon conspiracy accounts were making fun of Facebook. Maybe next time.
- Covzire 5y ago
  Someone was wrong on the internets? BRING IN THE FEDS!
- boplicity 5y ago
  One step at a time. ;)
antocv 5y ago
All the hate and comments but you forgot what keeps it on. The ads. All the ads.
- Wistar 5y ago
  My God, it's full of ads.
bawolff 5y ago
Talk about shooting the messanger. All the bad people still exist. Its not like fb the platform solely created them or that they will just go away if that particular platform disappeared.
- blibble 5y ago
  it's not shooting the messenger because it's a curated experience to maximise ad revenue and should be regulated as such
  - bawolff 5y ago
    So? Do you think its the only curated experience to maximize ad revenue on the internet (not to mention the non digital world). If you want to argue underregulated capitalism is bad, by all means, but lets not pretend that there aren't hundreds of websites waiting to take facebook's place if fb's downtime went on for more than a few days.
stickfigure 5y ago
Your experience must be very different from mine. My Facebook feed is full of interesting pictures from my friends. It's only when I visit HN that I find lots of hatred and bile... for Facebook.
- practice9 5y ago
  HN is one of the most sceptical places on the internet, which I find interesting as it's just a news aggregator for people in software.
Bud 5y ago
It's like that scene in approximately 500,000 movies where, for just a moment, it is revealed that the immortal arch-villain actually has a weakness, and can be killed.
neemsio 5y ago
I saw some teenagers sitting on a field and talking instead of on their phones this afternoon. Was a pleasant surprise
- xwdv 5y ago
  Nature was healing.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Facebook is very far from perfect, but it brings a lot of good to the world as well. I met my partner of almost five years thanks to Facebook's friend recommendation algorithms. I had never met them outside of Facebook and we didn't have any friends in common outside Facebook either. In fact, when we met, we lived on opposite coasts. I will always be grateful to Zuck & Co. for that, and for the hundreds of other friends I've made on Facebook - people of all ages, backgrounds, professions, and nationalities - people I never have, and almost certainly never WOULD have, met in "real" life. In my experience & opinion as an 8+ year high volume shitposter, Facebook is the best site in the world for dating and for expanding your social horizons/circle And I say that as a former frontend lead at Ghostery, lol
- jimsimmons 5y ago
  Proof by anecdote
  - jamiequint 5y ago
    Did you get confused and think "There is so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angy, and harmful messaging on FB platforms." was data?
    - jimsimmons 5y ago
      If you keep up with current affairs the past few weeks have shown that FB’s alleged problems are supported by data which is disregarded by it’s leadership
      - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        For example: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02711/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0271... https://bmcresnotes.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13104-016-2186-0 https://bmcresnotes.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1310... https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-the-more-you-use-facebook-the-worse-you-feel https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-t... Facebook's own research: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/22701445/facebook-instagram-mental-health-research-pdfs-documents https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/22701445/facebook-instagr... It's nice - and of course timely - that there are some heartwarming feel good stories in this thread. But the plural of anecdote is not science. And the science is pretty damning.
smoldesu 5y ago
If you feel that Facebook is really that detrimental to your online existence, there are easier (and more persistent) ways for you to block them out of your life.
spike021 5y ago
I think people could really work on self-curating/self-filtering content to make sure it's mostly what they want to see on social media. I've made nearly a dozen friends in Japan who I've now met there on two separate trips purely through a shared interest by connecting on Instagram. I rarely see content that I don't expect or care to see.
- asciimov 5y ago
  The problem for me, and many others, is we are friends with people on the complete opposite political spectrum. I don't have the granularity to block their political posts while still being able to see their regular posts.
  - filoleg 5y ago
    This sounds more like an issue when it comes to interacting with those people in general, regardless of the medium. I bet those friends would still bring up their political views in irrelevant conversations irl, on twitter, or literally everywhere else they socialize. This isn't a fault on the part of FB. You indicated you are friends with those people and want to follow their content. If you want to be friends with them on FB, but not see their content pop up on your timeline, that option is a click away. If you want more granular filtering, so that you can still see non-political posts from those people, you need to indicate to the algorithm that you want less of that by clicking "show me less posts like this", and it will eventually learn. I see those options as a reasonable approach, as I struggle to come up with a better way to filter the content of people you follow with such granularity. The only option I can see in my mind that would work better is literally having someone work as your personal "filter", so that they can only show you the posts you want from those people. But that, obviously, is not a viable approach. It's just like in real life. If you have a friend who you want to continue socializing with, but in public settings they say extremely off-putting things half the time that you don't want to hear, your options are to either stop socializing with them completely (aka unfollowing), to ask them to stop doing it, and that's pretty much it. All of those options are available on facebook as well, except facebook offers even more options that are all pretty good. And I am saying this as someone who opens facebook at most once-twice a week for a little bit of time, just to check up on what my friends post and to read thru a few interesting discussions in the hobby groups I am in. If I occasionally see a wild political shitpost, I just click "show me less content like this". And the algorithm, surprisingly enough, tends to adjust to this pretty well.
fleddr 5y ago
It's interesting how Facebook experiences differ. To me it's a peaceful place showing mundane updates from friends and family, with zero politics. Plus, a bunch of niche hobby groups I subscribed, full of very kind and constructive people. The actual war zone to me is Twitter, not Facebook. I should add that I'm not from the US.
- TrevorJ 5y ago
  >I should add that I'm not from the US. That's probably a big part of it.
- rconti 5y ago
  100% agreed. And there is nothing funnier than seeing people on "team Twitter" excitedly tweeting about how "nothing of value was lost" without any sense of irony whatsoever. To me, it's the difference between default private and default public. On both platforms you can curate your content, and arguably the worst content festers on Facebook because it is so hidden from the public eye, but it also means it doesn't have to find its way to you. Facebook as a company has had much more problematic behavior, I'd agree with that one for sure. But if there's anything we've learned from the past decade, it's the old axiom "sunlight is the best disinfectant" is completely and utterly wrong.
  - toss1 5y ago
    >>"sunlight is the best disinfectant" is completely and utterly wrong. Certainly for some types of infectant such as weapons-grade dezinformatsiya... Or at least, to achieve disinfection, that sunlight needs to be applied at intensities found on the surface of the sun vs at the surface of the earth.
- Permit 5y ago
  I suspect the original poster was not complaining about these topics showing up on their timeline; they don't want them showing up on anyone's timeline.
  - bryan_w 5y ago
systemvoltage 5y ago
I feel like we're singling out FB here. Can we bundle Twitter and Tiktok with it? May be Youtube comments? The danger of course is that we have all piled up on a scape goat and the rest of the social media companies will continue to enjoy great PR. Tiktok continues to be HN's darling. Edit: Downvotes really? What for?
- dragontamer 5y ago
  Television is a new medium where opinions are neither rare nor well done. (~~Anonymous from the 1930s, with many varieties) It helps to remember that most new mediums follow the same trend: when its easier to share opinions, everyone is flabbergasted at the huge volume of "low quality" opinions.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    I'd argue that the problem is much deeper than social media. It's the internet and we're acting surprised that giving a microphone to every human was not going to lead to angry mobs and echo-chambers of the scale the world has never seen. Then, we decided to clamp down on it, lose civil liberties and the ability to dissent. Comedians are apologizing for making people laugh - think about it. So we're overall worse off in terms of social civility than we were 30 years ago. I still believe that the internet has done more good than bad, but it's foolish to not acknowledge the shortcomings.
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      Are you familiar with the 1st Amendment, and the immediate backlash (aka: the Sedition act) passed almost immediately afterwards? The printing press had the exact same issues as today's media, albeit at a slower pace but it was still there. A balance must be found. A few decades ago, the balance people liked was that newspapers were free to say anything, but if something was untruthful, then people could sue newspapers (providing a strong incentive for newspapers to remain truthful). I don't think it was a perfect system, but it was better than what we have today for sure. The issue is that we haven't figured out what the new system should be. (If someone posts misinformation on Facebook or more commonly: false-information on Google Reviews / Amazon Reviews / Yelp reviews: who do you sue?). Heck, people seem to have entirely forgotten the first 150+ years of American history with the 1st Amendment and how we settled upon the libel / slander laws. People don't really care about the national-level discussion. National level is abstract and doesn't really affect our day-to-day lives. But ask people about how misleading Yelp reviews or Amazon reviews have hurt (or helped) them, and you can tell that people are incredibly jaded about this "Free information" online. -------- I don't know what the new system should be. But the 1st step is to acknowledge that at all points of our history, we've had freedoms AND we've had problems associated with those freedoms. We want the "good stuff" associated with free communication, but we must work our best to clamp down on the "evil stuff". I don't think anyone disagrees upon "evil stuff" of free speech: doxing, swatting, "fake news" / "misinformation", etc. etc. Both sides pretty much agree upon the realities of today's media (the right calls it "Fake News", the left calls it "misinformation". Come on, its not like we're that far apart on the matter). ------ In any case: take solace in history. The 1st Amendment vs Sedition Acts were the big debate in the late 1700s. Its not like the discussion was ever resolved: we just had different political powers swing free-speech one way, and then swing enforcement the other way (ex: Office of Censorship during WW2).
aierou 5y ago
I don't know about everyone else, but I get most of my hate, arguments, misinformation, angry, and harmful messaging from HN and Reddit. RE: downvotes I understand my comment is low effort, but so is the parent comment. I would be more than happy to see both removed.
starik36 5y ago
> so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angy, and harmful messaging on FB platforms And yet, you are still on them.
didip 5y ago
With the exception of WhatsApp. WA is legitimately useful for everyone around the world to communicate with their families. WhatsApp should have IPO'd instead of selling out.
- tarsinge 5y ago
  It’s relatively low friction to migrate to Signal or Telegram compared to a social network. I could said to family and friends stop using WA use that replacement with some success, but there is no migration for FB, Insta, YouTube…
emmelaich 5y ago
"Hackers Warn That If Demands Aren’t Met They Will Reactivate Facebook" https://babylonbee.com/news/hackers-warn-that-if-demands-arent-met-they-will-reactivate-facebook https://babylonbee.com/news/hackers-warn-that-if-demands-are...
ffhhj 5y ago
And somehow this feels like another of Zuck's social experiments of "how much you all miss _______"
wwweston 5y ago
It wasn't ever gone. It just wasn't hosted on FB. The thing to remember about tech -- both when it's lionized as a revolution for the better or vilified as the source of evils making things worse -- is that most of the time what tech does is magnify existing human dynamics. FB could do more to attenuate problems and better boost virtues, but it's not the source of the problems. Its absence won't solve them or prevent something equally bad (or worse) from filling any gap it might leave behind.

bamboozled 5y ago

It does feel nice, like the oppressor has died, at least for a bit. Also fun to watch the scramble to get it back online, would be nice if it never came back :)

FormerBandmate 5y ago
>the oppressor It’s a website that shows you what your friends are doing. That’s it. People said the same things about television
- barbazoo 5y ago
  It's so much more and if you spend a significant amount of time on HN then you know it.
  - aierou 5y ago
    The implication that HN is a primary source of knowledge is disturbing.
    - barbazoo 5y ago
      It's a link aggregator, it being a source of information shouldn't come as a surprise.
- md2020 5y ago
  That’s simplifying it a lot.
  - FormerBandmate 5y ago
    There has been tons of use for it for hate, but people have found a way to use every method of communication for hate (e.g. TV, Mail, phones) and efforts to crack down on hate on Facebook haven’t seemed to have an effect on hate in the real world (see the people banned from Facebook who went on to use other platforms to coordinate 1/6). I don’t like their privacy intrusions but people seem to have a tendency to blame all of society’s ills on Facebook, phones, and the internet and that in and of itself is a massive oversimplification that doesn’t reflect the real issues with our society
    - bamboozled 5y ago
      It's also global targeted advertisement delivery network who tracks user around the internet without consent?
    - cybernautique 5y ago
      I replied to your toplevel, which I make note of simply because I don't want to seem as if I'm targeting you. You dislike their privacy intrusions, and I hate them for it. My life is actively made worse for their stalking, their insistence that they be at the forefront of all things social. I agree that they're not to blame for the hatred in society, nor are they responsible for all of society's problems. But their utter contempt to just let people be is reason enough that I should make myself heard as often as I can, and especially whenever I see an attempt to relieve any amount of pressure that hopefully weighs on their conscience: fuck Facebook and their employees.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  >That’s it. It really, really isn't all they're doing. Not by the longest of shots. Here is one example: https://indica.medium.com/facebook-is-evil-and-i-quit-2151055bd4bb https://indica.medium.com/facebook-is-evil-and-i-quit-215105... There are thousands of others. Every week on here there's a new story about some new uncovered act of heinous evil from the Zuck and his buds. It's a wonder you haven't seen them.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  Yes people said the same thing about television and by and large most people think Television had some pretty bad side effects. A dumber society, all kinds of depression began manifesting in people who were sold an image of ‘reality’ via ads/unrealistic shows, the gutting of ‘journalism’ into 24-hour news, none of that stuff was wrong.
- cirgue 5y ago
  And they were right, no?
- cybernautique 5y ago
  It's a multibillion dollar corporation that wants to track me wherever I go, whatever I do, whenever I want to connect. Facebook is a maniacal stalker. Their website is merely an innocuous facade that hides a nest of ugly, venomous, snakes.
cmpxchg8b 5y ago
How did it oppress you? Can you point to the place on the doll where it hurt you?
- thatsamonad 5y ago
  > Can you point to the place on the doll where it hurt you? Using a reference to how survivors of abuse are often required to re-enact their abuse to make a snarky comment is neither funny nor clever and it doesn’t add anything substantive to this conversation.
  - cmpxchg8b 5y ago
    I apologise for that. You’re right, it didn’t add anything substantive and was disrespectful.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

lifthrasiir 5y ago

Unfortunately Twitter was still alive and QAnon conspiracy accounts were making fun of Facebook. Maybe next time.

Covzire 5y ago
Someone was wrong on the internets? BRING IN THE FEDS!
boplicity 5y ago
One step at a time. ;)

antocv 5y ago

All the hate and comments but you forgot what keeps it on. The ads. All the ads.

Wistar 5y ago
My God, it's full of ads.

bawolff 5y ago

Talk about shooting the messanger. All the bad people still exist. Its not like fb the platform solely created them or that they will just go away if that particular platform disappeared.

blibble 5y ago
it's not shooting the messenger because it's a curated experience to maximise ad revenue and should be regulated as such
- bawolff 5y ago
  So? Do you think its the only curated experience to maximize ad revenue on the internet (not to mention the non digital world). If you want to argue underregulated capitalism is bad, by all means, but lets not pretend that there aren't hundreds of websites waiting to take facebook's place if fb's downtime went on for more than a few days.

stickfigure 5y ago

Your experience must be very different from mine. My Facebook feed is full of interesting pictures from my friends. It's only when I visit HN that I find lots of hatred and bile... for Facebook.

practice9 5y ago
HN is one of the most sceptical places on the internet, which I find interesting as it's just a news aggregator for people in software.

Bud 5y ago

It's like that scene in approximately 500,000 movies where, for just a moment, it is revealed that the immortal arch-villain actually has a weakness, and can be killed.

neemsio 5y ago

I saw some teenagers sitting on a field and talking instead of on their phones this afternoon. Was a pleasant surprise

xwdv 5y ago
Nature was healing.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Facebook is very far from perfect, but it brings a lot of good to the world as well. I met my partner of almost five years thanks to Facebook's friend recommendation algorithms. I had never met them outside of Facebook and we didn't have any friends in common outside Facebook either. In fact, when we met, we lived on opposite coasts. I will always be grateful to Zuck & Co. for that, and for the hundreds of other friends I've made on Facebook - people of all ages, backgrounds, professions, and nationalities - people I never have, and almost certainly never WOULD have, met in "real" life. In my experience & opinion as an 8+ year high volume shitposter, Facebook is the best site in the world for dating and for expanding your social horizons/circle And I say that as a former frontend lead at Ghostery, lol

jimsimmons 5y ago
Proof by anecdote
- jamiequint 5y ago
  Did you get confused and think "There is so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angy, and harmful messaging on FB platforms." was data?
  - jimsimmons 5y ago
    If you keep up with current affairs the past few weeks have shown that FB’s alleged problems are supported by data which is disregarded by it’s leadership
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      For example: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02711/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0271... https://bmcresnotes.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13104-016-2186-0 https://bmcresnotes.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1310... https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-the-more-you-use-facebook-the-worse-you-feel https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-t... Facebook's own research: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/22701445/facebook-instagram-mental-health-research-pdfs-documents https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/22701445/facebook-instagr... It's nice - and of course timely - that there are some heartwarming feel good stories in this thread. But the plural of anecdote is not science. And the science is pretty damning.

smoldesu 5y ago

If you feel that Facebook is really that detrimental to your online existence, there are easier (and more persistent) ways for you to block them out of your life.

spike021 5y ago

I think people could really work on self-curating/self-filtering content to make sure it's mostly what they want to see on social media. I've made nearly a dozen friends in Japan who I've now met there on two separate trips purely through a shared interest by connecting on Instagram. I rarely see content that I don't expect or care to see.

asciimov 5y ago
The problem for me, and many others, is we are friends with people on the complete opposite political spectrum. I don't have the granularity to block their political posts while still being able to see their regular posts.
- filoleg 5y ago
  This sounds more like an issue when it comes to interacting with those people in general, regardless of the medium. I bet those friends would still bring up their political views in irrelevant conversations irl, on twitter, or literally everywhere else they socialize. This isn't a fault on the part of FB. You indicated you are friends with those people and want to follow their content. If you want to be friends with them on FB, but not see their content pop up on your timeline, that option is a click away. If you want more granular filtering, so that you can still see non-political posts from those people, you need to indicate to the algorithm that you want less of that by clicking "show me less posts like this", and it will eventually learn. I see those options as a reasonable approach, as I struggle to come up with a better way to filter the content of people you follow with such granularity. The only option I can see in my mind that would work better is literally having someone work as your personal "filter", so that they can only show you the posts you want from those people. But that, obviously, is not a viable approach. It's just like in real life. If you have a friend who you want to continue socializing with, but in public settings they say extremely off-putting things half the time that you don't want to hear, your options are to either stop socializing with them completely (aka unfollowing), to ask them to stop doing it, and that's pretty much it. All of those options are available on facebook as well, except facebook offers even more options that are all pretty good. And I am saying this as someone who opens facebook at most once-twice a week for a little bit of time, just to check up on what my friends post and to read thru a few interesting discussions in the hobby groups I am in. If I occasionally see a wild political shitpost, I just click "show me less content like this". And the algorithm, surprisingly enough, tends to adjust to this pretty well.

fleddr 5y ago

It's interesting how Facebook experiences differ. To me it's a peaceful place showing mundane updates from friends and family, with zero politics. Plus, a bunch of niche hobby groups I subscribed, full of very kind and constructive people. The actual war zone to me is Twitter, not Facebook. I should add that I'm not from the US.

TrevorJ 5y ago
>I should add that I'm not from the US. That's probably a big part of it.
rconti 5y ago
100% agreed. And there is nothing funnier than seeing people on "team Twitter" excitedly tweeting about how "nothing of value was lost" without any sense of irony whatsoever. To me, it's the difference between default private and default public. On both platforms you can curate your content, and arguably the worst content festers on Facebook because it is so hidden from the public eye, but it also means it doesn't have to find its way to you. Facebook as a company has had much more problematic behavior, I'd agree with that one for sure. But if there's anything we've learned from the past decade, it's the old axiom "sunlight is the best disinfectant" is completely and utterly wrong.
- toss1 5y ago
  >>"sunlight is the best disinfectant" is completely and utterly wrong. Certainly for some types of infectant such as weapons-grade dezinformatsiya... Or at least, to achieve disinfection, that sunlight needs to be applied at intensities found on the surface of the sun vs at the surface of the earth.
Permit 5y ago
I suspect the original poster was not complaining about these topics showing up on their timeline; they don't want them showing up on anyone's timeline.
- bryan_w 5y ago

systemvoltage 5y ago

I feel like we're singling out FB here. Can we bundle Twitter and Tiktok with it? May be Youtube comments? The danger of course is that we have all piled up on a scape goat and the rest of the social media companies will continue to enjoy great PR. Tiktok continues to be HN's darling. Edit: Downvotes really? What for?

dragontamer 5y ago
Television is a new medium where opinions are neither rare nor well done. (~~Anonymous from the 1930s, with many varieties) It helps to remember that most new mediums follow the same trend: when its easier to share opinions, everyone is flabbergasted at the huge volume of "low quality" opinions.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I'd argue that the problem is much deeper than social media. It's the internet and we're acting surprised that giving a microphone to every human was not going to lead to angry mobs and echo-chambers of the scale the world has never seen. Then, we decided to clamp down on it, lose civil liberties and the ability to dissent. Comedians are apologizing for making people laugh - think about it. So we're overall worse off in terms of social civility than we were 30 years ago. I still believe that the internet has done more good than bad, but it's foolish to not acknowledge the shortcomings.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    Are you familiar with the 1st Amendment, and the immediate backlash (aka: the Sedition act) passed almost immediately afterwards? The printing press had the exact same issues as today's media, albeit at a slower pace but it was still there. A balance must be found. A few decades ago, the balance people liked was that newspapers were free to say anything, but if something was untruthful, then people could sue newspapers (providing a strong incentive for newspapers to remain truthful). I don't think it was a perfect system, but it was better than what we have today for sure. The issue is that we haven't figured out what the new system should be. (If someone posts misinformation on Facebook or more commonly: false-information on Google Reviews / Amazon Reviews / Yelp reviews: who do you sue?). Heck, people seem to have entirely forgotten the first 150+ years of American history with the 1st Amendment and how we settled upon the libel / slander laws. People don't really care about the national-level discussion. National level is abstract and doesn't really affect our day-to-day lives. But ask people about how misleading Yelp reviews or Amazon reviews have hurt (or helped) them, and you can tell that people are incredibly jaded about this "Free information" online. -------- I don't know what the new system should be. But the 1st step is to acknowledge that at all points of our history, we've had freedoms AND we've had problems associated with those freedoms. We want the "good stuff" associated with free communication, but we must work our best to clamp down on the "evil stuff". I don't think anyone disagrees upon "evil stuff" of free speech: doxing, swatting, "fake news" / "misinformation", etc. etc. Both sides pretty much agree upon the realities of today's media (the right calls it "Fake News", the left calls it "misinformation". Come on, its not like we're that far apart on the matter). ------ In any case: take solace in history. The 1st Amendment vs Sedition Acts were the big debate in the late 1700s. Its not like the discussion was ever resolved: we just had different political powers swing free-speech one way, and then swing enforcement the other way (ex: Office of Censorship during WW2).

aierou 5y ago

I don't know about everyone else, but I get most of my hate, arguments, misinformation, angry, and harmful messaging from HN and Reddit. RE: downvotes I understand my comment is low effort, but so is the parent comment. I would be more than happy to see both removed.

starik36 5y ago

> so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angy, and harmful messaging on FB platforms And yet, you are still on them.

didip 5y ago

With the exception of WhatsApp. WA is legitimately useful for everyone around the world to communicate with their families. WhatsApp should have IPO'd instead of selling out.

tarsinge 5y ago
It’s relatively low friction to migrate to Signal or Telegram compared to a social network. I could said to family and friends stop using WA use that replacement with some success, but there is no migration for FB, Insta, YouTube…

emmelaich 5y ago

"Hackers Warn That If Demands Aren’t Met They Will Reactivate Facebook" https://babylonbee.com/news/hackers-warn-that-if-demands-arent-met-they-will-reactivate-facebook https://babylonbee.com/news/hackers-warn-that-if-demands-are...

ffhhj 5y ago

And somehow this feels like another of Zuck's social experiments of "how much you all miss _______"

wwweston 5y ago

It wasn't ever gone. It just wasn't hosted on FB. The thing to remember about tech -- both when it's lionized as a revolution for the better or vilified as the source of evils making things worse -- is that most of the time what tech does is magnify existing human dynamics. FB could do more to attenuate problems and better boost virtues, but it's not the source of the problems. Its absence won't solve them or prevent something equally bad (or worse) from filling any gap it might leave behind.