[tptacek]

Only in places like Hacker News is there a consensus opinion that Facebook is "a new addictive and time wasting form of entertainment who's contribution society is null or negative". Facebook has increased the number of interactions I have with my extended family by roughly a factor of infinity --- and I'm one of those nerds who's run a mailing list for his family since the mid '90s.

A more concise way to say what 'grellas said is that these complaints about Facebook have nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with fashion. They are just a new way of proclaiming to the world that "I don't even own a television".

Concern for masses frittering away hours on meaningless entertainments is at least as old as the mechanical player piano. Despite the countervailing evidence of the Salk Vaccine, the ARPA IMP, Google, stem cell transplants, McGee's _On Food And Cooking_, and everything else society has managed to accomplished while beset by the horrors of entertainment, you are welcome to hold the view that you are better not only than the people who avail themselves of that entertainment, but also the people who manage to produce and maintain it using computer systems running at a scale unimaginable just a decade or two before.

Just do it with better writing, because the bar for articulating this particular concern is set very high; you might start with _Infinite Jest_.

[qq66]

It's not just Facebook that has an unusually bad reputation among the technology crowd -- companies like Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. are widely respected outside of the industry bubble. I remember hearing two ordinary guys talking about Wall Street bankers in Logan Airport, and contrasting their ill-gotten gains with Bill Gates and how he fairly earned his money by "building a better mousetrap."

(Also, your point about entertainment and its production is an interesting one -- the people who built and maintain Facebook can be, in this way, rightly compared to the Beatles, the Baroque composers, and Valmiki).

[autophil]

Only in places like Hacker News is there a consensus opinion that Facebook is "a new addictive and time wasting form of entertainment who's contribution society is null or negative"

You either know that statement is untrue but lie anyway, or you haven't been outside and seen a tree in real life for over a year. Many people of all walks of life think Facebook is an "addictive and time wasting form of entertainment who's contribution society is negative."

If you honestly believe otherwise, you need to push away from the computer desk and interact with normal human beings in the flesh STAT.

[cuergas]

Writing style is important when trying to persuade. But for the discerning reader looking for facts, content is what counts.

The top post shifts the focus from a blogger's (Greenspan's) account of his dealings with Mark Zuckerberg to "founders guilt".

And this comment is now addressed to the relative merits of Facebook.

The discussion moved from discussing Greenspan's account to discussing founder's guilt and the merits of social networking. How does this happen?

Those topics are not the point of Greenspan's post.

It's a simple tale of how one founder treated someone else, from whom he took advice and ideas.

It's a tale that's familiar (perhaps painfully familiar to some), because we've heard others tell it before as it also happened to them.

Keep changing the subject. Or trying to justify how Zuckerberg treated people by looking at the end result (which no one denies was due in part to great luck).

By all means do what Zuckerberg did and build something big. But don't screw other people over the way he did, call users "dumb fucks" and disregard their privacy as a trivial matter because you think that's a prerequisite to success. It isn't.

[tptacek]

"That can't be true because it just can't be", then?

[dumb_dumb]

I think what he's saying is if you go outside and look at a tree, then the truth will be revealed to you. No need to do this if you've seen a tree in the last year though. But perhaps I read his comment wrong.

[autophil]

A tree won't BS you like some people, and it won't change it's story a year from now.

So yeah, you pretty much got it.

[dumb_dumb]

:)

[corporalagumbo]

Just to be clear, I do not share this opinion of Facebook.