[bluegatty]

I don't know if the regulations are reasonable (often there is government overreach) but I don't mind if they were just banned outright.

I don't think Meta crates economic civic value.

The time spent away from Meta would be better used for almost any other purpose.

Feels 'authoritarian' but the same reason FB/IN is bad for teens is the same reason it's bad for regular people.

I mean, obviously we can't go around banning companies, but still ... it would be good.

[embedding-shape]

When you have a business and you're trying to reach people, social media works surprisingly well, as long as you don't get banned for arbitrary reasons.

[bluegatty]

It would be replaced by other avenues.

'Because Advertising' has to be the worst reason imaginable to keep a system in place.

[embedding-shape]

But how would these "other avenues" be legal if your hypothetical scenario makes the "previous avenues" illegal?

[bluegatty]

I'm no suggesting Ads are bad, I'm suggesting Meta is.

Without Meta - people would spend their time doing other things - and your ad-volume in those other areas of attention would increase.

Also - Meta is grabbing your profits.

They have more market power than you - they force you to compete for attention on their platform, they skim all the surplus.

Advertising is ruthlessly inefficient, and the way Google/Meta do it is much worse.

1) targeting / relevance is poor 2) ads are poorly designed with bad messaging 3) powerful value chain actors (Meta, Google, YouTube) disintermediate and consume all of the value of a given activity, which is probably not an efficient distribution of power.

I searched for 'Midjourney' and the first placement says 'Midjourney' right on the title of the link and then on the landing page it says 'Midjorney' - alas, that was not my 'Midjourney' account from 6 months ago

In a weakened state of mind, just trying to get some 'other thing done' I fell down the path of 'legal and supported deception'.

All of that is gigantic waste - it's a 'lose-lose' war over attention like nations fighting over scarce resources.

And because it generates money it 'looks like' economic productivity, in the way that 'massive healthcare expenditures' and even 'wartime economy' seem positive for the GDP but they might be signs of civic degradation.

[embedding-shape]

So I'm still not entirely clear what you want here, are you saying "Ban every company like Meta" or specifically "Ban Meta"? Or does what you say apply equally to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Bluesky and every other public social media network? Or some are worse than others?

> All of that is gigantic waste - it's a 'lose-lose' war over attention like nations fighting over scarce resources.

Maybe for others, for us it was quite literally "When we put photos of our food, others who didn't know about our restaurant will see it, and some of those come to our restaurant", not more or less than that, no "wars about attention" or what not, just "look at pretty photo, come eat if you want".

I understand and agree there is a larger conversation to be had about all of this too, I'm just failing to see how it's related to Meta banning our account and ultimately not letting us get access to the account again, as we couldn't talk with a human at Meta.

[jmye]

Why are you assuming GP is saying literally anything other than "Ban Meta"? It's maybe a dubious response, but there's no reason to conflate social media with advertising via websites other than to try to create false cover for Meta.

[embedding-shape]

I guess I was assuming GP was making a larger statement than literally just "Ban Meta" as that'd be oddly specific, they must be talking about "social media" at large, or the very least "social media like Facebook does it", at least that's my charitable take on what they wrote, I might have misassumed indeed.

[lxgr]

For better or worse, several economies would currently come to a screeching halt if WhatsApp were to be banned.

[surgical_fire]

They would not.

Plenty of options for chat apps where your account is essentially your phone number. People would quickly organize around one of the options.

[lxgr]

I didn't say it could never restart. Obviously people will find an alternative, but I believe the disruption would be substantial.

[bluegatty]

WhatsApp is totally fine. Also, if it were gone, it would immediately be displaced by something else.

The features of 'WhatsApp' should be a standard or de facto standard, that comes with every plan globally.

WhatsApp only exists because Carrier incumbents are unwieldy and stupid - I worked with them for years, they're incapable of an ounce of innovation, and tried to control the entire mobile web.

If you're old enough, you'll might recall 10 cent WAP pages.

They fought desperately to control every inch, the iPhone broke their control, it would have been slow moving without Jobs breaking their hold, now Apple has a similar control, ableit much more capable.

[lxgr]

> WhatsApp only exists because Carrier incumbents are unwieldy and stupid

Honestly, I'm glad. The less involved telcos are in my instant messaging, the better. Using my phone number as a universal identifier is bad enough.

I feel like we peaked with XMPP in the early 2000s (federated, end-to-end encrypted, not phone-number-based) and are now just regressing into various silos.

> If you're old enough, you'll might recall 10 cent WAP pages.

I'm alive enough to experience 10 cent calls and texts to neighboring countries right now.