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You are seriously overemphasizing the import of very minor inconveniences. The world doesn't owe you a maximally convenient well integrated instant messaging ec

You are seriously overemphasizing the import of very minor inconveniences. The world doesn't owe you a maximally convenient well integrated instant messaging ecosystem! I think it's very lame that Facebook would censor links to a competing site (if that is indeed what they're doing, which I'm happy to stipulate), but Facebook is not in any way the only way for people to see links to that site. Contemporary society provides that site a ridiculously giant number of ways to get the word out. There are lots of other sites where people can share the links, they can buy ads in articles, they can optimize to appear in search results, they can encourage people to share by word of mouth in messaging, email, and real life, they can buy billboards or ads in subway cars or lots of other things. I am not exaggerating when I say that it has never been easier to get the word out about something. That doesn't mean it's easy, it's just that it's always been hard and it's much easier now. This is why advertising has always been big business. The Facebook of today didn't exist when Facebook was new. How did they ever get the word out and get engagement? They figured out other ways! Facebook is just not a necessary component of spreading the word about a new site. It's very useful, but also very possible to route around it.

dane-pgp 5y ago
> The world doesn't owe you a maximally convenient well integrated instant messaging ecosystem! The world also doesn't owe Facebook monopoly power over people's social graphs either, and yet Facebook is able to wield that to some extent. In case you think that this is something that Facebook achieved on its own merits, rather than being granted by society/government, it's worth considering the extent to which copyright and hacking laws are used to prevent interoperability.[0] More generally, though, I believe that profit-seeking corporations should only exist to serve society, and therefore corporations do owe us minimally inconvenient products, however we decide to define "inconvenient" (and taking into account society's other goals, such as employment). > it has never been easier to get the word out about something. I think that is a reasonable assumption, but I think it's also true that it's never been easier to travel anywhere in the world, and yet local monopolies of railroads are still bad for society and should be regulated against. [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

dane-pgp 5y ago

> The world doesn't owe you a maximally convenient well integrated instant messaging ecosystem! The world also doesn't owe Facebook monopoly power over people's social graphs either, and yet Facebook is able to wield that to some extent. In case you think that this is something that Facebook achieved on its own merits, rather than being granted by society/government, it's worth considering the extent to which copyright and hacking laws are used to prevent interoperability.[0] More generally, though, I believe that profit-seeking corporations should only exist to serve society, and therefore corporations do owe us minimally inconvenient products, however we decide to define "inconvenient" (and taking into account society's other goals, such as employment). > it has never been easier to get the word out about something. I think that is a reasonable assumption, but I think it's also true that it's never been easier to travel anywhere in the world, and yet local monopolies of railroads are still bad for society and should be regulated against. [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...