Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News

pfft. only if you don't compare it to any other non-walled-garden online communities.

it's places like HN (and many similar tiny islands of interest), I come for the comp.science news, and because of that it does NOT actively select for other criteria (just inherent bias) and I meet people with wildly different views than my own, and I can even expect to have a decent dialogue.

i don't even need to "like" their political values, but i can still upvote their tech expertise.

[ edit: LOL, I hadn't read dang's announcement about HN's political detox week, which pretty much runs exactly counter to what I just said, haha :) though I welcome the experiment and appreciate the irony of circumstance :-) ]

check out the "general discussion" subforum on any random webforum community on a topic that interests you.

it's all already intersecting by default!

and it's Facebook (Google too) taking a very active role crystallising the bubbles into walls. Don't just try to step outside your personal Facebook-bubble, for it's actively working against you. Step outside the big bubble of Facebook itself.

Yes, Facebook is going to be managing/filtering/curating/policing the site to some extent and yes, they want to show ads, as that's how they make money, not only to make a profit, but to run the site where this activity is happening. And some of the site management is about maintaining some level of decency or decorum, which will likely be inviting to more users, which indirectly leads to more ad impressions. It's not all directly about ad funneling and manipulation. Facebook the company is made up of people, and assuming that everything they're doing is purely to maximize profit at the cost of all else. To make such an assumption would be similar to me assuming everything you're posting has some ulterior motive, something beyond having a civil constructive discussion. I don't think that's a fair assumption to make. Is it?

Perhaps you're arguing that Facebook shouldn't exist? If that's the case, just say so.

Right up until they're spending more time and money on policing that they're benefitting from increased revenue.

> And some of the site management is about maintaining some level of decency or decorum

Yes, in a world where they link everything to everyone's feed, that need that.

But if they didn't do that, instead only linking when specifically mentioned, they wouldn't need to censor anything because you'd just unfollow people who link annoying things.

> Facebook the company is made up of people, and assuming that everything they're doing is purely to maximize profit at the cost of all else.

Right, they have lunch hours, etc. But how do you suppose their work is evaluated if they don't have concrete goals such as 'increase readership', etc?

You think they're all paid just to fiddle with stuff for their own individual desires?

> To make such an assumption would be similar to me assuming everything you're posting has some ulterior motive, something beyond having a civil constructive discussion. I don't think that's a fair assumption to make. Is it?

I'm not a for-profit company. If I was I think it'd be a fair assumption.

> Perhaps you're arguing that Facebook shouldn't exist? If that's the case, just say so.

Nope. I'm arguing that they're making their own problems and could stop if they wanted to. I don't feel like making excuses for them.

Three reasons.

1) I pay officers, and they aren't doing what I pay them to do and they aren't improving the things I want improved.

2) We can discuss both. But it's pretty obvious when this presumed black violence is trotted out as an answer to police violence rather than a conversation that just happened to be going on.

3) "Black" isn't a voluntary or revokable status. You don't choose your skin-color, nor can it be revoked when you misbehave. You literally cannot control people of your color. You also can't control other gamers, other men, other women, etc. Whereas "Police" is both voluntary and revokable. They can choose not to be police officers if they're upset with the behavior of other officers, and can revoke the status of bad officers. Even if we agreed with your assertion, black people cannot fix other blacks, officers can fix other officers.

> why is police shootings of black men the topic at all?

The discussion about police violence was already ongoing, but the police mistreat blacks disproportionally so it's not a bad place to focus. Fix the big leaks before the smaller ones...

Are you having trouble getting attention for your police violence complaints that you think this discussion is blocking, because you aren't black?

> Also, the levels of black crime are directly relevant to the topic of police shootings of black people.

Actually no, blacks suffer even in non-violent areas. The black professor arrested while breaking into his own house...

Also, it's just tactically not how it works. When police apprehend anyone they're actually afraid of they stay well away, call backup, bark orders through a bullhorn, and approach only once the person is laying down on the ground with their hands visible. Anytime you see an ongoing situation with an officer less than three steps from the person that officer is not afraid. That's intimidation, not safety, they're going for.

In many videos of police thuggery and shootings we see police going out of their way to put themselves in a tactical distance where they will be "forced" to respond by any slight movement. If they were really at all scared they'd be on the other side of their car, radioing for backup.