211–220 of 229 posts
It is both amazing and deeply concerning that one corporation has influence over 1/4 of the world's population. It is even more concerning when you consider the outsized voting power of 1 person at that company.
And even more concerning when you consider its a single-country owned corporation.
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That is mind-blowing. 2 billion total users an immense volume in and of itself but 2 billion even semi active users is incredible
Google's profile counts -- Android, Gmail, Youtube, and G+, mostly, in about that order, topped 3 billion a while ago. http://archive.is/zi4Uw (Origin site appears down.)
As insane as this number is, and it really is an incredible achievement, I'm left feeling Facebook hasn't delivered much real net positive value to the world just yet. Politics are in disarray. More people are "connected" online but more people than ever feel isolated in some way and mental health issues are on the rise. Highlight reels of your friends living a seemingly amazing life leave people feeling like they've…
Honestly I consider Facebook as an entity to be a net drain on the species in spite of whatever good it may have done.
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When was Facebook about improving society? Oh sure they'll do that as long as it doesn't jeopardize profits, but after all we've learned about their social engineering, social experimentation, pattern recognition and various mechanisms to maintain engagement, is it really right to pretend they are any different than any other large corporation? The dollar is the endgame, and if improving society becomes a profitable…
> The dollar is the endgame... Is that not equally true for just about every tech company we discuss here?
Profit-seeking isn't inherently a bad thing.
Personally I measure their worth of these companies based on the damage they cause in the pursuit of that profit.
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When you buy a coke, is there an email from coke in your inbox the next day? When you interact with coke does it gently tailor what you see and what you do not see, month after month? If you cannot understand how people are influenced, maybe you'll never see the influencing happening. That doesn't make you immune, on the contrary...
How does an automated email from FB that gets filtered into my FB folder that I never read actually influence me?
As insane as this number is, and it really is an incredible achievement, I'm left feeling Facebook hasn't delivered much real net positive value to the world just yet. Politics are in disarray. More people are "connected" online but more people than ever feel isolated in some way and mental health issues are on the rise. Highlight reels of your friends living a seemingly amazing life leave people feeling like they've…
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> The dollar is the endgame... Is that not equally true for just about every tech company we discuss here?
Of course. Profit-seeking isn't inherently a bad thing. Personally I measure their worth of these companies based on the damage they cause in the pursuit of that profit.
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for OSX blocking at DNS level: Posted a year ago in hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11793855 for linux use: https://github.com/tbds/FreeContributor/tree/master/data https://www.perpetual-beta.org/weblog/blocking-facebook-on-o...
> for linux use: https://github.com/tbds/FreeContributor/tree/master/data This appears to be broken.
As insane as this number is, and it really is an incredible achievement, I'm left feeling Facebook hasn't delivered much real net positive value to the world just yet. Politics are in disarray. More people are "connected" online but more people than ever feel isolated in some way and mental health issues are on the rise. Highlight reels of your friends living a seemingly amazing life leave people feeling like they've…
I personally didn't have much use of Facebook until I started using it to connect with those who suffer the same illness as me. Then I realized I had a worldwide support group to tap into. That's pretty important to me and to the billions who use this platform.