[askafriend]

A lot of the issues are perceived to be overblown - and in more cases than HN would like to admit, they indeed are overblown.

Quite a few double standards are being applied to Facebook by the media-industrial complex and the uninformed. On the other hand, Facebook has stumbled a lot on their own and deserve a significant portion of the criticism they get. It's a nuanced topic and isn't as simple as "FB bad, pls delete".

Facebook also has an extremely talented employee base and they pay industry-high salaries while also doing cutting edge work.

Smart people want to work with other smart people on interesting large-scale problems.

[sgeneris]

Destroying a society, addicting people/kids, violating privacy, generating inequality consequences -- interesting large scale problems indeed -- FB is working on CAUSING them. REALLY smart people wouldn't do this.

But then, who cares if you make big money. For allowing this the US deserves everything it gets.

[askafriend]

This is the kind of rhetoric that people shut out. It doesn't work.

Facebook is many things, and has many effects on society. Not all of them are good and in some cases cause active harm but not all of them are bad and in some cases do active good. I think most people agree with this assessment if they're being intellectually honest.

And from there, we can try to identify what aspects are extremely problematic and potential solutions to curb the downside risks.

But the point of your rhetoric seems to be because you want to drive a specific agenda or viewpoint. Everything you said could equally apply to Television, Hollywood, or even Radio and those same arguments were made during the advent of those media too. It's just not interesting rhetoric to engage with.

[Fins]

...and to hell with minor, uninteresting and not cutting-edge issues like impact on society.

[askafriend]

Or, alternatively: moderation at global scale with billions of pieces of content per day is an incredibly difficult, challenging, interesting, and impactful problem to work on and requires a lot of new technology.

If you can reduce abusive patterns of misinformation on Facebook by a few percent, that's a huge win for both the company and for the billions of people affected by the service - by extension, society.

This is likely the other side of the argument.

[Fins]

Or, even more alternatively, these aren't problems that could, or should be solved with/by technology, as much as Facebook's techbros do not want to believe it.

And besides, this isn't about moderation. It's that it is far from obvious if "social networks" (FB), or "personalized search results" (Google), or whatever it is that Twitter peddles provide any benefit to humanity.

That these are "incredibly difficult, challenging, interesting, and impactful problem to work on and requires a lot of new technology" -- well, good for them. So was developing V-2 rockets. At least that got us into space.

[askafriend]

> That these are "incredibly difficult, challenging, interesting, and impactful problem to work on and requires a lot of new technology" -- well, good for them. So was developing V-2 rockets. At least that got us into space.

I think entertainment has immense value.

I love sharing dumb memes and pictures with my friends on Twitter. I like to laugh at cute puppy videos on Instagram. I like seeing vacation photos from my family on Facebook.

I also love watching SpaceX launches, reading about NASA's latest projects, and learning about the latest advances in AI.

I'm certainly in no position to boldly proclaim that rocket launches are absolutely more important than the movies that my friends and I enjoy watching. Fundamentally if the world was _only_ dedicated to building rockets and going to Mars, that'd be quite a boring society in my opinion. Luckily there's more than enough of us to go around to work on different problems that interest us.

We take something like email for granted, but I think that's at least as impactful/important of an invention as rockets - if not more.

[Fins]

I am pretty sure people somehow managed to share silly jokes with friends long before there were FB or Twitter, and will manage long after they are gone. Some of the best books or music in existence were written before there even were computers, let alone FB.

You also seem to have missed the actual point -- that working on "incredibly difficult, challenging..." problems is rather orthogonal to doing something obviously evil (or good, for that matter). And in case of Facebook, or Twitter we can already see verifiable adverse effects of that work. While I have yet to see anyone manage to point out any positive effects apart from slight convenience for a few people.

[askafriend]

> You also seem to have missed the actual point

I think we disagree on the premise of the conversation.

This is what I'm getting (feel free to correct me):

* You think that it's a foregone conclusion that social media is evil. To you, it's obviously evil and you believe people who are working in the space also think this but actively don't care because they're in it for the money.

* I think that social media is incredibly nuanced and is a vehicle for a lot of fun, good, convenience, and utility but also comes with a lot of unmitigated consequences a lot of which we're just now beginning to understand and reason about.

I can totally see why you'd think what you'd think, but it's the very premise that I'm trying to challenge here.

Do you remember the "TV rots your brain" rhetoric from the 90s? It came from a similar place where people thought that it was a foregone conclusion that "TV is evil". And in many ways it was! But in many ways it also wasn't and became a cultural cornerstone for generations. So if we extend your argument to actors, actresses, and other personalities that made TV possible - are they willful conspirators too?

Media is a tricky subject because it makes us stare at our human reflection and come to terms with it. Again, I don't mean to say this to absolve Facebook or Twitter or X_SOCIAL_MEDIA of their responsibility. They absolutely have their work cut out for them and it won't be an easy path forward. It shouldn't be.

But I'm an optimist at heart and I think progress is being made in the new media world. Maybe not fast enough, but it's being made. The conversations are clearly being had. Society is adapting and figuring out what roles these services play in our lives. No massive technology shift is without it's awkward teenage years.

[RandomInteger4]

What do you mean by "Facebook's techbros?" Can you elaborate? Are you under the assumption that only men work at Facebook?

[Fins]

You don't have to be male to be a techbro, in a way.

I am also reasonably sure that FB (as well Google and others) are engaged in some pretty public efforts to improve the gender balance in tech. Or at least pay lip service to doing so. Might they be doing so because there actually is a pretty well known gender disbalance in tech.

Of course if you were meaning to say that a lot of negative moves on FB's part come from quite female Sheryl Sandberg, well, yes, but I don't think she's involved with the tech side.

[RandomInteger4]

What I'm meaning to say is that despite your desire to move the goalpost of the argument in order not to seem wrong, the term 'techbro' pretty exclusively brings to mind a negative male stereotype for most people.

Your post would have been better phrased using the term "software engineer's", which would have gotten the same point across whilst being gender neutral, neither reinforcing said negative male stereotype nor erasing female engineers in the culpability of said belief that "technology can solve everything."

[raquo]

Yeah, it's very hard, all but impossible, when your primary constraint is maximizing profit while holding tons of market power in an unregulated environment. Poor facebook, they really try their best. It's just so hard.

[askafriend]

I think once you start thinking about the scope and scale of the problem, you'll start to realize how difficult it is even without the question of money involved at all (but yes, money does often complicate things).

You have to remember that this is a global service cutting across all cultures, countries, governments, and circumstances.

At some level, it becomes trying to design a system of governance that cuts across all those things in a scalable way. This is a problem where there is very little precedent.

The original sin in my opinion was Facebook charging ahead with a historic rate of growth without building the rails (moderation systems, governance, etc) to support that growth.

However, that ship has long sailed. Facebook is already massive now. It's easy to say with hindsight that the problems were obvious and to be expected. But the pressing question for society now is what do we do about it?

Not just for Facebook but for all similar services - of which Facebook isn't the first and it won't be the last. And what software solutions will the industry invent to combat some of this stuff? Who is building it? How much is shared? How much is driven by regulation versus this stuff becoming a competitive moat? etc etc.

It's a very interesting question and I look forward to progress in the area from all levels, including our legislators (whom I have little confidence in, but I'm an optimist at heart).

[raquo]

Too many words for nothing. There is a simple solution:

Deregulate and cut corporate taxes. If they have access to more private user data and keep more of their money from atrocious behaviour they'll be less atrocious.

Oops, I meant the opposite of that.

[askafriend]

> Too many words for nothing.

I'll spare you from my meaningless words from now on. Cheers.

[ariwilson]

Nice way to appear to be even handed while minimizing responsibility:

"Facebook has stumbled a lot on their own" - stumbled as if it has no organizational will that pushed in a certain direction e.g. the growth hacks & engagement efforts that have caused a lot of these problems.

[askafriend]

> Nice way to appear to be even handed while minimizing responsibility

You're free to nitpick my choice of words and assume bad faith/intentions on my part. Doesn't bother me. We don't know each other.

But to your point, sure let's replace the word "stumbled" with "fucked up" or whatever else you'd prefer. I don't think my larger point really changes all that much.

[sigi45]

Really? overblown? They just don't care.

People working for Facebook, taking the money Facebook has because of all of it it is doing but the AI Expert doesn't care?

Thats probably the same people who like the challenge for military drone guidance systems because they like the challenge.

Great.

[askafriend]

I think you've already made up your mind.

I don't have anything to contribute here that I think can be productive for us.

[sigi45]

Yes but i have made up my mind because of a lot of things which happened.

If you are a company which has such a huge user base and so much money, you have much more responsibility than what FB is doing.

All those data scandals? The impact FB has on elections?

And what is the answer? Cheap reactional actions.