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In my 20s, I got paid $50 to be part of a focus group on young men's attitudes toward Foster's Australian lager. Of the six of us in the room, five of us drank
by GCA10 5y ago
In my 20s, I got paid $50 to be part of a focus group on young men's attitudes toward Foster's Australian lager. Of the six of us in the room, five of us drank maybe 3-4 beers a week. One guy (call him Tony) admitted to drinking a whole case -- 24 beers per week.
Our hosts jokingly said: "Maybe we should send the rest of you home right now, and spend the rest of our session figuring out how to get Tony's business."
Facebook's gravest problem (which OP doesn't yet confront) is that its business systems are built to get maximum engagement out of every Tony on the planet. And that can have catastrophic implications. Truther cults of all sorts flock to FB private groups. Young teens with body issues obsess on Instagram. Trolls, bots and the agitators behind them soon embrace Facebook as the garden they never leave.
When OP talks about Facebook's Competence as a political problem, he's using the most opaque language possible to talk about what's really a moral problem. The people inside Facebook aren't immoral, but some (many?) are profoundly amoral. Being really good at connecting people raises grave issues when some of those people are uniquely vulnerable to being drawn into an ever-tighter net of connections that could mess up many lives.
Parallels -- and pushes for regulation -- abound. In the finance industry, wisps of regulation try to prevent account-churners from trading Tony's accounts to zero. The same issues come up with the gambling industry, and its seduction of compulsive gamblers. Team Zuckerberg hasn't really found its conscience yet. And so, the list of Tony fueled troubles keeps growing.
Here's hoping that OP's second version of this essay digs a little deeper into the problem of competence. Will Team Zuckerberg find a conscience? Will regulators install one instead? Lots of unresolved questions to get settled in the next 5-10 years.
- baby 5y agoThese kind of comments always seem to dismiss the positive value that facebook brings to society.
- hedgehog 5y agoIt seems like you have an agenda here, did you end up with a material amount of Facebook stock?
- baby 5y agoI worked there for two years, and I joined facebook in part because I believed (and still do) that they're a net positive for the world. And I get frustrated when I read one-sided comments on HN, so I push back. Not everyone believes FB is evil or a negative to society.
- femiagbabiaka 5y agoCurious, from your POV, what is the other side?
- baby 5y agoWhat do you mean exactly?
- hedgehog 5y agoThanks, it sounds like you both believe in the mission and reading between the lines still have a financial interest via your stock. That's useful for calibration given your strongly pro-FB comments.
- baby 5y agoNo worries. Everyone is biased and it’s good to be aware of your own biases or to be transparent about them. That is to say if you use my transparency to cancel my opinion, it says a lot about your open mindness.
- sdoering 5y agoI would love for comments like yours to provide examples for these net positives. Sure FB made it way more easy for me to follow my favorite band and see when they announce special concerts that are in small locations so that I had a chance to grab tickets. I stopped using FB in January and deleted all content I ever put there. I kept the account as it was an experiment planned for one month. But I just didn't return. So as said for a balanced discussion I would like to see the net positives you see. I can't currently see things, that are genuinely there because of Facebook.
- warning26 5y agoYou forgot the /s
- baby 5y agono I did not.
- woodruffw 5y agoBecause you've made the oblique claim: what is the positive value that Facebook brings?
- kevinsundar 5y agoI for one have sold many things on Facebook marketplace. That provides value for both me and the buyer as they're getting items at a discount and I get cash. Another positive is my drone hobby has lots of groups on Facebook where members share information and help each other across the globe. Another positive is that my local buy nothing group helps neighbors out by giving things away for free to neighbors in need. Almost none of the negatives of Facebook brought up in recent discussions apply to me because I don't go looking for it and if I see them I tell Facebook not to show me things like that and then it doesn't. People act like you can't curate your experience.
- baby 5y agoIt might not be obvious if you don't use the application, but I've met countless people throughout facebook, including my now-wife, and have kept in touch with my friends throughout the world thanks to that app. I've lost touch with a few people, who sadly have deleted their facebook accounts, but whenever I travel I get to meet old friends thanks to fb. I also reconnected with childhood friends who I managed to find through the app. I know my wife basically keeps in touch with all of her family through Facebook. I try to avoid that because I've always posted more liberally there, but I connect with all my family (including my 90 year-old grand mother) through whatsapp. There's a real benefit from having a public registry that everyone signs up to.
- dijit 5y ago> There's a real benefit from having a public registry that everyone signs up to. Is there? or is there a benefit from having a communications platform that is easy to use. if there was a public utility that allowed you to contact anyone on the planet and all you needed to know was their userID would that not meet 80% of the functionality without these scathing problems? Maybe you could use some kind of federated system that allowed operators local to each cohort of people to moderate abuse properly. (I'm joking of course, this is somewhat how the phone system works).
- jbigelow76 5y agoFacebook can have some positive values, while still when taken as a whole be an overwhelming societal net negative.
- baby 5y agoFacebook can have some negative values, while still when taken as a whole be an overwhelming societal net positive.
- nixass 5y agoSuch as? What are the good things that Facebook does that make them net positives?
- baby 5y agoI think you’re suffering confirmation bias or bubble mentality if you cannot see any positive
- jbigelow76 5y agoTreating "net negative" as equivalent to "cannot see any positive" is disingenuous.
- baby 5y agoAgree, so is the reverse
- jbigelow76 5y agoBut I never said the reverse, you're putting words in my mouth by way of the parent comment. Sure letting extended family members stay in touch is a good thing. Keeping childhood/high school relationships going past when they might previously have ended is probably good thing (I'm skeptical but I'd like to be wrong.) But when those goals have to come at the expense of subversion of democratic institutions (elections of which no fraud can be found) and at the expense of scientific data that is deluding people to think that vaccinations are suspect I'll draw the line. FB does (and enriches itself from) far more damage to society than which it provides.
- dataflow 5y agoYou could say the same thing about lead, asbestos, etc.
- hoseja 5y agoLead is only bad in fuels and chew toys. Removing lead from solders, piezoelectric components etc is truly catastrophic.
- dataflow 5y ago> Lead is only bad in fuels and chew toys. Water pipes? > Removing lead from solders, piezoelectric components etc is truly catastrophic. Sounds like you're happy turning Facebook into something that consumers don't touch on a daily basis, like piezoelectric components. No complaint here, so you've got a deal!
- jchw 5y agoRemoving lead from solder is, well, not really catastrophic. I’ll admit lead free is a pain in the ass sometimes, but catastrophic, not really.
- mellavora 5y agoRemoving lead from solder has positive benefits for home hobbyists who might not have proper vent hoods. Or who might be teenagers. I switched to lead-free solder for all of my projects and haven't had any problems, let alone a catastropy.
- mellavora 5y agolead paint was also a bad idea (unless you count it as a chew toy)
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> dismiss the positive value that facebook brings to society Very few people call for banning Facebook. What is sought is regulating it, perhaps breaking it up. That seems to quite clearly accept that it has positive value. Just that it is creating tremendous negative value in its current configuration with it present people.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- baby 5y agoare we reading the same comments?
- cowpig 5y ago> The people inside Facebook aren't immoral I'm going to go ahead and push back on that. A company whose founder started by using his fellow students' photos without their permission for a hot-or-not copycat website, then went on to assist genocide in Myanmar, do psychological experiments on its users, and facilitate the spread of misinformation in a pandemic that has caused more deaths than any foreign conflict in US history is an immoral company full of immoral people.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y agoAre you saying that companies should never do AB testing to determine if their products can have psychological effects on their users? Doesn’t that make it harder to avoid any negative effects?
- cowpig 5y agoI suggest reading about the principles of ethics in psychological experimentation[1]. Informed consent is an important one. [1] https://www.simplypsychology.org/Ethics.html https://www.simplypsychology.org/Ethics.html
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- avalys 5y agoSignal and Telegram facilitate the commission of crimes and the spread of child pornography. Are their authors immoral?
- gordon_freeman 5y agoHow can Signal with absolutely no user data tracking and no algorithms be compared with a product that shows algorithmic feeds?
- stocknoob 5y agoDoes signal present you with an algorithmically generated feed tuned for engagement no matter the consequence?
- danjac 5y agoGiven that Facebook was originally conceived as a way to compare female students in a "Hot or Not" list, there is no conscience to be found, just a black hole. A database company for example could be run by ruthless salespeople (such as Oracle) or have clients with questionable ethics, but at the end of the day the product itself is morally neutral. Facebook however rests on a bedrock of amorality.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y agoDidn’t Zuckerberg’s hot or not type website include both men and women? I thought Aaron Sorkin made up the part about it being only women for his movie.
- bambax 5y agoVery well said. Facebook preys on people, and some people (or most people?) aren't equipped to deal with it, especially children. Facebook isn't exactly evil; as you say, it doesn't care about good or evil, which probably makes it worse.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ashtonkem 5y agoThat was almost certainly not a joke. The alcohol industry is quietly aware of their dependence on addicts. A study in the UK found that 44% of alcohol sales were attributable to those who drank 14 or more drinks per week. They’re acutely aware of the fact that they depend on Tony more than you and the other men in that group.
- throw_away 5y agoIf this is the same study, https://www.recoveryanswers.org/research-post/alcohol-sales-excessive-drinking/ https://www.recoveryanswers.org/research-post/alcohol-sales-... then, I think it's even worse than that. I believe the stat you are referencing meant that the amount of alcohol sold to people in excess of the health guidelines (14/wk) amounts to 44% of total alcohol sales (that is, if everyone merely stuck to the guidelines, alcohol sales would drop 44%). In the same para, they say if you segment the population by drinker level, those who consume over the guidelines represent 68% of total sales. 23% from those men who drink > 50 (> 35 for women) drinks a week (!!) and 45% of sales are from hazardous drinkers who go over the 15/wk guideline. 3-4 drinks/wk people like OP only represent 32% of sales revenue, but they are more than twice the population of the hazardous or harmful drinkers combined. So if the >15/wk set simply turned into 3-4 drinks/wk people, alcohol sales would crater >44% (but presumably <68%).