[coldtea]

>because they radically changed the world for the better

Did Facebook "radically changed the world for the better"?

Did Twitter?

Did Google, for that matter? Is the control it has amassed, and its imperial impact of business and ideas (and the web itself) a net positive to a good search engine and a OK email service (both of which have gotten worse over time)?

[Yizahi]

I dislike all those companies and net negative impact by all of them is undeniable. They do sell our "private" data, they do foster bad behaviors in humans. They monopolized whole industries and cemented bad ideas everywhere.

But if we would assess them overall - they indeed has changed the world for the better (in my opinion). The communication benefits provided by them to humanity is immense. Nokia's slogan - "connecting people" is the important thing, which force accelerated a lot of things on the planet. Yeah, maybe in some other timeline different companies may have done it better, but we are not debating hypothetical, we just observe what has already happened.

[pm90]

Facebook is the only social media company in “FAANG”. Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google have, I would argue, materially changed our lives for the better. They created the smartphones that are now ubiquitous and that opened up a whole marketplace of app based tech. They literally created cloud computing which has allowed more companies to focus on product ideas and get off the ground quickly. E-commerce (disrupting retail), streaming (disrupting Hollywood). Not to mention all the OSS and platform improvements that have originated at Faangs.

They have grown powerful and entities with power will often abuse it, and I would argue that regulations would be a good step in this direction. But arguing they haven’t had a positive impact on society is absurd.

[coldtea]

Notice though how none of the above looks into second order effects.

Nor is "disrupting retail" or "disrupting Hollywood" automatically good in themselves... (e.g. a question would be "disrupting towards the better?").

[SpicyLemonZest]

Second order effects are important to consider, but the idea that the world would be better off if nobody had ever built something like Netflix or Amazon is... hard to take seriously.

[danlugo92]

I'd rather not have streaming and ecommerce if it meant to not have PR1S M