[jbm]

I try not to comment on stuff like this but I'm going to make a one-time exception.

Ask Gen-Xers, specifically those who are not over-consuming news media and the harmful generalist social media (Reddit's default subs, Twitter's political echo chambers). My life is way, way better now than it was prior to the internet, Google and half a dozen other services.

Even HN's favourite boogieman Facebook provided me with insane value. For example:

- While I lived abroad, it provided an easy, passive way for me to keep in touch with my family. Compare that to my parents' desperate 10 dollars per minute phone calls in the 1980s

- I met friends through Facebook advertising for a boardgaming group (that I also ran on Facebook.) I met people from way, way more backgrounds than otherwise possible

- I can passively keep in touch with friends and easily get in touch if I'm in the same area.

People "struggle" to find "long term value" because that's ironically the meta for upvotes on the contrarian SV Internet right now and we internalize those values far too easily. Rest assured, value exists for most, if not all.

[dleslie]

One that seems incredibly important to many:

Small towns are no longer truly isolating. If you're an outsider, for whatever reason, in a small town it's no longer a sentence for loneliness, harassment and abuse. You will likely still experience harassment and abuse, but there is bound to be a community online that you can connect to in order to overcome loneliness.

[mcpackieh]

The flipside is that people who were better suited for life in a small town have lost what the others have gained. Life moves fast everywhere now, your friends and family may step into your life at any moment of the day without notice, even though you live thousands of miles away. All of the big city hustle and bustle reaches out and touches people through their phones and stopping it requires people to deliberately and overtly snub people they'd prefer not to overtly snub.

[Capricorn2481]

I've been alive way before facebook and I can think of a number of ways they have made my life worse, not better. It's up to personal preference whether the trade-off is worth it, but to argue that facebook is a boogieman of ignorant people is really lame.

[fzeroracer]

That long term value you mentioned has little to do with Facebook itself though. In my teens I met friends through IRC and AOL, people across the world and passively kept in touch with them through the eras of IRC, Skype and now Discord.

But what you don't see (or perhaps didn't pay attention to) is the way that Facebook monopolizes that value. They gained that control through ruthless manipulation, advertisement, buying of competitors and more. Then once you have buy-in, you're stuck with the enshittification they force on you because all of the alternatives have died.

For Bandcamp, they existed in the bought competitors space. And we're seeing the cycle I mentioned above occur faster and faster. The goal of companies like Facebook, Epic, Uber etc isn't to actually make a good thing. It's to dominate a market. The value is incidental, occasionally coming with the aquisitions.

[JALTU]

Aside from the corrosive individual/personal effects of social media and the cumulative effort by parents/communities to mitigate, I would agree, net net. (Gen-Xer, as well.)

[mcpackieh]

> Ask Gen-Xers, specifically those who are not over-consuming news media and the harmful generalist social media

That's a pretty bad selection bias. You shouldn't exclude the perspectives of those who've been harmed by social media. That would be like asking people if alcohol has been a positive influence in their life, but excluding alcoholics.

[cma]

Without commercial spam (which I don't think can be blamed on VCs) it is possible all this would be readily doable through things like email, newsgroups, IRC, XMPP. Inauthentic users/coordinated interests beyond commercial spam would also have been an eventual problem to overcome.

[fsdalkj]

This is like the infamous dropbox comment [1], only instead of you making it as a prediction, you made it over a decade after the company became wildly successful.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

[cma]

You think without Facebook the choice would be $10/min long distance calls and that email wouldn't be an option? I can agree the big use case of Facebook probably accelerated internet access but I don't think it would be that severe.