[cj]

> line between good and evil

Talking about good and evil in tech is a slippery slope.

What's worse, working at Meta building products causing addiction in kids, or building an adult content site?

I think there's an argument that Meta is morally worse, yet there's no stigma associated with having Meta on your resume. I find that interesting.

[gosub100]

Let me challenge your POV for a moment..

What about proportionally of abuse?

How many married people met on fb? Estranged family members reunited, long lost friends who found each other again? Etc.

It's impossible to know the number for those, but I vividly remember how difficult it was to find people before fb. And they made it trivial because of critical mass.

I'll acknowledge that this has also led to a lot of unwanted "finding" too. Again, we cannot calculate. But it's worth bringing up proportionality. Because you could make the same argument about a mass retailer like Walmart. They sell tires that were used in drunk driving crashes, they sold food eaten by obese people, they sold cigarettes (at least thru the 90s) to lung cancer victims, etc. You can skew the data however you like because they sold items to so many customers. But they also fed a lot of families and reduced the cost of living (sometimes by nefarious means) for a lot of poor people.

[LorenPechtel]

Facebook, as a community is fine.

The evil lies in the feed. All the standard addiction techniques are present. All the engineering to promote "engagement" is actually basically addiction. And the attempts to show you want you want have a strong tendency to show you more extreme versions of anything you previously watched. It's very, very easy for it to lead you down a rabbit hole into extremist territory. It's inherent in any such prediction algorithm unless somehow the selector understands to bias away from extremism.

[juliushuijnk]

> yet there's no stigma associated with having Meta on your resume.

You think so?

[ohyoutravel]

Meta isn’t as blatant about it, but they’re arguably much worse than anything else listed here. I think because it has legitimate uses up front, like keeping up with your friends or selling something on the marketplace, and the true evil is just below that veneer. Gambling and payday lending is right out front.