[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.

[Fins]

Actually, I think that "social media" as a platonic ideal is more useless than evil. Now, the social media that we actually have -- FB, Twitter and alike -- that appears to be quite obviously evil as it promotes wrong incentives (number of "friends", likes, reposts, and a culture of outrage because "engagement". And then, of course, we have FB that has been caught, multiple times, doing clearly evil things while saying 'we're very-very sorry" for the previous thing they were caught doing.

Now we could have an entirely separate conversation on whether this is because they are actively evil (which does not seem outside the realm of possibilities for FB) or because they are just giving the public what it wants.

For people who work there, though, I might blame older ones (including at least one relative) who should know better, but young kids who had just graduated and are offered salaries better than most people will ever see in their lives... nah, they just don't think about it. It's not like elite colleges that feed FAANGs were doing a great job (or any job, really) teaching ethics, so why should kids in that nice, well-paid and well-fed bubble care?

[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.