[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?