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Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

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Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#121

Post by Dumblydorr »

gargron wrote: post #92
macspoofing wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Like maybe, a social network that doesn’t manipulate us, or scan our faces without permission, or build dark profiles of everyone, or read our personal messages, or Heh. Fat chance. The next generation of social networks will be coming from China because China is the perfect incubator for this category of software. You'll yet wish for Facebook.

The next generation of social networks is already here. It's decentralized and open-source. Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, loads more, all part of the same network, the fediverse.

I'm a regular HN user, deleted FB three years ago, I've never even heard of any of those sites.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#122

Post by Dumblydorr »

matharmin wrote: post #104

Reading through the actual proposed regulations, most of them are regulations I'd like to have enforced on any social media tech company above some small threshold in size, and are not onerous to implement. Many of these proposed regulations cover exactly the type of issues that are often complained about on HN. Why does it matter so much that it's Facebook proposing it, and that they have already implemented it?

Because they are using it to prevent competitors from being able to take their market share. They're the market leader, they have resources and codebase already...

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#123

Post by claudeganon »

mgraczyk wrote: post #47
blunderkid wrote: post #16

There should be only one regulation for fb, display following warning on all pages/screens: Statutory Warning: This product is specifically designed to cause behavioral addiction so you are guided down a slippery slope of over consumption & that is how this company makes money. Overuse of this product is known to cause - anxiety, depression, low self esteem, constant craving for attention, short attention spans, inab…

I always disliked Facebook and still don't care much for it, but having worked on ranking there for a few months, comments like this just sound incredibly naive. Facebook is not "specifically designed to cause addiction". It's designed by a complicated process with many people trying to maximize many competing metrics, some of which might go up when people are "addicted". In fact the complete opposite is one of the m…

This is more an obfuscation than any kind of defense of Facebook. Here’s a better starting point for evaluating the company:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#124

Post by Izkata »

kmlx wrote: post #56
nullc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially no one I know now smokes. Something was effective.

wasn't it taxes?

In addition to sibling comments: Also e-cigs.

There's plenty stories online about people who have, multiple times, tried to quit smoking and didn't manage it. But they had no issues switching to e-cigs, and then a few months down the line were able to stop using e-cigs - without any urges to return to any kind of smoking.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#125

Post by ch4s3 »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #118
ekianjo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It pains me to come to the conclusion that in Facebook, we have created something that should not exist: an addicative worldwide mob where peddlers can sell emotionally manipulative ideas to the people least able to handle them, Or maybe, alternate world view, it does not even matter as much as you think it does.

It does matter, look at who is in power after democratic elections where FB aided and abetted foreign nations to lie and deceive voters.

As much as I dislike FB I think this gives their ad platform far too much credit.

How do you go about connecting ads viewed to votes, or even poling data? Of those views how many users engaged with the content?

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#127

Post by _red »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #118
ekianjo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It pains me to come to the conclusion that in Facebook, we have created something that should not exist: an addicative worldwide mob where peddlers can sell emotionally manipulative ideas to the people least able to handle them, Or maybe, alternate world view, it does not even matter as much as you think it does.

It does matter, look at who is in power after democratic elections where FB aided and abetted foreign nations to lie and deceive voters.

Yes. those crafty russians who forced the american elite hollow-out the middle class, undermined Bernies primary, and installed unelectable professional grifters on the Dem ticket.

You should also consider that you are not viewing reality correctly.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#128

Post by AsyncAwait »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #118
ekianjo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It pains me to come to the conclusion that in Facebook, we have created something that should not exist: an addicative worldwide mob where peddlers can sell emotionally manipulative ideas to the people least able to handle them, Or maybe, alternate world view, it does not even matter as much as you think it does.

It does matter, look at who is in power after democratic elections where FB aided and abetted foreign nations to lie and deceive voters.

Alternative view, the U.S may have got a small taste of what it regularly does to others and continues doing so, having apparently no sense of hypocrysy whatsoever.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#129

Post by heinrichhartman »

mgraczyk wrote: post #47
blunderkid wrote: post #16

There should be only one regulation for fb, display following warning on all pages/screens: Statutory Warning: This product is specifically designed to cause behavioral addiction so you are guided down a slippery slope of over consumption & that is how this company makes money. Overuse of this product is known to cause - anxiety, depression, low self esteem, constant craving for attention, short attention spans, inab…

I always disliked Facebook and still don't care much for it, but having worked on ranking there for a few months, comments like this just sound incredibly naive. Facebook is not "specifically designed to cause addiction". It's designed by a complicated process with many people trying to maximize many competing metrics, some of which might go up when people are "addicted". In fact the complete opposite is one of the m…

I don't care if "addictiveness" is by design or emergent. Cigarettes were also not designed for cancer.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#130

Post by dsfyu404ed »

dbspin wrote: post #110
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of fallacies here. I'll take just one. If you'll allow, I'll use a political example from 15+ years ago. When young Bush was running for president, you'd see commentators on TV talking about which candidate had some demographic. Such-and-such had the 50+ white male vote, so-and-so had the hispanic vote, and so on. These people did not know what they were talking about, but it made for good TV. The peo…

While it's true that social problems are complex and multivariate, what gets missed in the American context is the importance of virtuous and viscous circles. So for example the net cost of normalising college debt, and the regulatory exceptions to bankruptcy etc around this form of debt, is not simply a generation entering the workforce in debt. It's massive concrete measurable inequality between those who can affor…

>We can disagree about the causes of social issues in America, and their solutions; but its inarguable that there has been no effort to systematically test and deploy policy interventions at a national level in any kind of evidence based way.

Why do we need to do these things at the national level?

The federal government is intentionally not set up to be able do these kinds of things. Doing these things at the federal level is an exercise in Constitution avoiding mental gymnastics and you wind up with hacks like withholding federal money or insane interpretations of the commerce clause in order to get things done or your policy winds up hanging by a threat that SCOTUS can cut at any minute (e.g. Obamacare).

Using policy to mitigate social problems does seem to work well at the state level (for any given problem there seems to always be a state that's doing a good job tackling the problem) because the states don't have to implement back handed legislative solutions or compromise things as many ways and generally run at smaller scale. (For example, there are at least a couple states that have decent universal healthcare programs.)

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