Funny how people "hate" them yet they have 4 billion active users and generate $135 billion in annual revenue. A better explanation is that outside of the HN bubble Meta's product offerings are insanely popular.
When you buy diapers you are paying for the manufacturing cost and the profit margin. When you use Meta's products, what are you paying for? That's what makes them closer to cigarettes. Tobacco companies sold a lie to their customers.
Meta too sells the lie that its products are paid for by ads. Its products are paid for by surveilling users, building behavioral profiles from the data that is collected, and then giving other companies access to that behavioral data in order to manipulate users to specific ends. In this quest to build better behavioral profiles, the products are made to be as addictive as possible, eating away people's time which could have been utilized in objectively better ways.
Not sure why you're making it sound like a conspiracy theory. User behavior profiling is common strategy for all personalized IR products, including recommender systems, targeted ads, web search, e-commerce, and many more. A bunch of major tech companies rely on it. Do you think Google AdSense is also an evil empire? What about Apple and Amazon ramping up their own ads businesses? More people use YouTube than Meta products and even spend more minutes per day there. Do you also think YouTube is also equivalent to cigarettes? What about TikTok, Twitch, and other streaming platforms? Was Doordash also wrong for setting up personalized ads and recommendations?
User behavior profiling wouldn't be bad if and only if users owned the data and had complete control of what is done it. Currently the legal/political system isn't equipped to handle this new technological assault on digital property and it will remain that way as long as long people keep hand waving it away. Imagine the same callous attitude being applied to real estate or other physical property.
You're only minorly wrong in that they don't sell access to the behavioral data [1] , but you do realize that you sound absolutely unhinged about it, right? Is HN surveilling my post because I typed here and pressed the 'reply' button?
I've never convinced someone of flaws in ethics by framing the perpetrator as a big bad boogeyman to the nth degree. It's unproductive self-satisfaction.
[1] They sell visibility to people queried against proprietary behavioral data.
There is mounting evidence that social media harms mental health[1]. I'm pretty sure when links between smoking and cancer were being established, there were plenty of people calling that evidence "unhinged", particularly if the evidence hurt their paychecks. Not saying that such people were willfully malicious, but that there are strong cognitive biases in favor of ignoring anything that can hurt their livelihoods.
HN Hated Facebook since its inception. There used to be people on HN defending Facebook, as a stock, or as an ad platform. Post 2015 on HN all ads are evil. Barely anyone defending them or Online ads anymore.