[dcow]

It seem you don’t understand the economics of this situation.

Facebook makes money from ad partners not users. Users are not paying Facebook for the software. People who want to run ads are. There is no market for newsfeed software here. Only a market for user attention.

Because FB made a creepy tool 15 years ago they won some users and have an established base they can market to. People using it these days do so because of the network effect not because it’s the best tool to keep in touch with people. Facebook has to maximize time spent with users eyeballs glued to the newsfeed because that’s where ads appear. The friend network portions of the software only exist vestigially at this point to keep people locked in to a newsfeed platform.

Facebook is dependent on their customers but their customers aren't the people glued to the newsfeed, those are the product literally for customers paying for an advertising platform. If it was legal, Facebook would literally chain you to your computer and force you to interact with the world through their platform because that maximizes their profits.

[sershe]

The gp does say users-slash-customers, usually meaning "or".

There were social media platforms before them that lost despite the network effects, and there are platforms that have appeared after them that gained a ton of users despite the lock-in (some of which they have bought, which is in my view the only thing about them that should be amenable to regulation). EDIT: based on TFA and only tangentially relevant to this thread/the moral crusade, making sure online tools can be modified/scraped/etc. in any normal way is something else I would regulate. EDIT2: based on the rabbit hole of anti-FB articles, what is needed is more of a DE-regulation, removing or significantly narrowing the scope the of the laws FB uses to threaten developers. It's not that modifying a webpage is not protected, it's that it can explicitly be construed as illegal, in part because of the previous moral crusades.

The users derive some value from Facebook. I'd rather we didn't have holier-than-thou people regulate every pastime they don't like... reminds me of moral panics over everything from video games to weed.

[dcow]

It is illegal in most of the rest of the world to advertise/market prescription drugs specifically because it causes undesirable outcomes where patients are telling their doctors what to prescribe, which is backwards. And drugs still exist in those countries. I don’t think anybody is saying “make Facebook illegal”. The ask is to deeply explore our understanding of ad-based social media and consider whether such machines have any place in a healthy society. Facebook or some equivalent would still exist if you curtailed ad-profits, I don’t really understand the scare/worry that all our good internet things would just vanish if we clamped down on the harmful business model… Every law is a moral value judgement on the type of society we want to participate in (unless you’re an absolutist). I think your moral panic examples are generally unfounded concerns. I would have agreed with you 10 years ago that Facebook panic is also FUD. However I think we have clear a history of examples of harm to go off of now with FB. We clamped down on the Tobacco industry and it wasn't just holier than thou zealots having a field day as fun ruiners. Real harm lead to real legislation. We just need to realize things as they are and stop pretending that FB newsfeed style social machines are benign especially in the face of hard evidence to the contrary. I totally agree with your “I would rather” in the general sense. I simply think there’s a specific case here that warrants scrutiny.

[sershe]

I think I understand what you are trying to say, however...

> I don’t think anybody is saying “make Facebook illegal” ... consider whether such machines have any place in a healthy society.

That sounds exactly like a moral crusade. You don't want to make it illegal, but would like to consider if it has "any place", and also someone will have to define "healthy society". If you asked people in many places and times (if not most), they'd tell you homosexuality is an abomination that has no place in a "healthy society". Even at present, some people literally treat it as a disease in need of a cure.

And yes, I think prescription drugs should not be a thing (well, prescriptions are fine but if I want to buy metformin because I think I'm smarter than everyone else I should be able to do it and prove myself right (or wrong).

Tobacco is a perfect example for me personally, because I dislike it, so I feel good about forcing everyone to not smoke. On the other hand, it hurts almost entirely the user, so the only justifiable restrictions would be the ones where the user is imposing costs on others, e.g. charging them more for healthcare... I like the advertising bans, but I would have also liked e.g. never having children around, via e.g. banning them from all restaurants and gyms. Doesn't make it justified.

[epgui]

> We clamped down on the Tobacco industry and it wasn't just holier than thou zealots having a field day as fun ruiners.

Well-said! There's a big difference between enacting laws that protect vulnerable groups (eg.: smokers / the public) from powerful influences (eg.: Tobacco companies / propaganda), and enacting laws meant to impose standards of "moral purity". A very big difference.

[sershe]

Where do you draw a boundary? What you're saying is "you are doing a thing that is bad for you, /I/ know better what /you/ should be doing". You can talk about externalities, but unless it's something that is very narrow and direct, e.g. "you ruin your health via smoking so you get charged extra for certain healthcare services", it becomes a slippery slope. "Healthy society" type stuff is especially suspect, stuff like "undermining society/government/cohesion" has been used by authoritarians for the vaguest of reasons.