Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 356 posts

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#251

Post by aaron695 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #109
aaron695 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shhhhh on HN you can't have independent thought, your hive mind has to hate Facebook for every incident even if it makes no technical or logical sense. The Tweet is a good reminder how Facebook is a utility and more than a 'fun' app. It's nonsense to then go it needs regulation due to this outage. It's obviously unintentional, and as you point out, outages are rare and it would be unlikely any government would have l…

This is a clever troll. It's so full of ignorance I thought of reporting as a troll, but that would only serve to validate one of your false claims that one can't have independent thought. The point ideologically is that society should not be so dependent on one private company. Government is regulated by the people and serves the public interest. Facebook serves only itself and profit. Government intervention, so th…

[dead]

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#252

Post by TeMPOraL »

Koaks wrote: post #115
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #75

Was talking about this with a friend today, and I think this incident highlights why I sometimes get really depressed about my career and technology. I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the domina…

Well as you get older, you are just more likely to be surrounded by the moan and drone crowd. Its just life. Upto you to get out of that space now and then. Go watch the communities where kids are developing games, unity, webgl, godot, twitch streamers, VR/AR etc etc. That same energy and excitement of the blog and website era still exists.

> Go watch the communities where kids are developing games, unity, webgl, godot, twitch streamers, VR/AR etc etc.

You mean centralized proprietary platforms where they get monetized doing this.

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#253

Post by shmel »

I really don't get the point about WA outage being a catastrophe. WA pretty much forces you to put all phone numbers in your contacts to communicate to anyone at all (ok, except group chats to an extent). Why can't you just send an SMS? Why can't you call? Even if it is across the border, just send an SMS: "hey buddy, WA is down, install telegram so we can talk tonight as we agreed to".

I could understand the same argument about FB Messenger, I do occasionally talk to people I have no contacts except Messenger. But we also talk once a month or so, a few hours of outage isn't a huge deal, is it?

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#254

Post by vadfa »

madeofpalk wrote: post #230
leokennis wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one thing, many governments will have laws about availability of key infrastructure (roads, snail mail, 4G and 5G, wired internet, financial services etc.) which result in resilience decisions: * Have at least 2 or 3 mobile networks; if 1 fails, people can still dial 112 (911) over the remaining one(s) * If banks break down, you can still withdraw up to €xyz from an ATM during the emergency * Even if all mail isn…

I'm confused - SMS and other telephone services already go down. Regulating something doesn't make it more reliable. Arguably the regulation of "classic" telephony services is what lead to the innovations of Whatsapp and everything else.

>Regulating something doesn't make it more reliable.

In my experience, it makes it less reliable, since that service will no longer have to compete with anybody else.

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#255

Post by freetinker »

snek_case wrote: post #80
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #75

Was talking about this with a friend today, and I think this incident highlights why I sometimes get really depressed about my career and technology. I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the domina…

It's easy to feel blasé about the internet, but it's also played a huge role in making information easily accessible. I learned about electronics from online tutorials. Taught myself programming. Also learned a lot about home repairs and renovations. Made a lot of contacts, landed jobs, etc. I met my partner through a dating app. I would say the internet has brought a lot of positive things in my life so far. The ope…

I’m going to count HN as a social network. It’s one of my favorite places on the internet. It surfaces great content, and the comments are a gold mine of top-notch information and advice (by and large).

What general principles can we learn from HN that can be applied elsewhere? Does HN self-select its audience? No profit motive? Great moderation? (Thanks Dang!)

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#256

Post by GoblinSlayer »

blippage wrote: post #197
sandworm101 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the US story. It has less to do with facebook and more to do with the US political system. There are plenty of countries who have very different systems that have not followed the same path in recent years. Tech companies are part of the problem but should not be made scapegoat to avoid the deeper issues within the American political system, issues that existed long before the internet was a thing.

UK Brit here. Countries like the UK and the US certainly have their flaws, but I'd take them before nearly everything else that's on offer. China's system seems terrible. The whole of Africa seems like a corrupt system. The EU seems mostly woke, and I'm not sure I particularly want that. Canada seems to have bought a first class ticket on the Progressivist crazy train from what I've been hearing. What's left? Not muc…

Brazil.

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#257

Post by emerged »

dongping wrote: post #191
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #75

Was talking about this with a friend today, and I think this incident highlights why I sometimes get really depressed about my career and technology. I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the domina…

The discussion environment is worse because there're more people online. Being online alone was a great filter for fruitful discussions. At least we have Library Genesis and Sci-Hub, which fit the vision of "tech utopia". It would have been great if there's more stuff like that (I left out the vibrant open source landscape, because it also sort of existed in the 90s, in a (way) smaller scale though.)

There really is a gigantic portion of the population who seem to completely ruin everything they touch. It happens to everything that gains popularity. That root of the problem isn’t getting better.

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#258

Post by GoblinSlayer »

corinroyal wrote: post #90
sandworm101 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let the sheep have their facebook apps. Modern tech has also brought us strong open source tools. We have stronger encryption in any linux distro than any army had in the 90s. We have communication pathways (Tor) that defeat censorship. I can send an email today, encrypted then sent via Tor, that no government can censor, read or even detect that I have sent. I have a dongle that plugs into my phone that can decode a…

Tempting. Sadly, if we let the sheep have their FB, the likely result will be that we lose whatever semblance of democracy we have left. Already we're down to one party that belives in free and fair elections. Our system depends on informed citizens, not massive authoritarian psyop experiments. The longer we go where the majority can't get overwhelmingly popular policies accomplished, the closer we get to turning to…

Will it be better if we destroy FB and the sheep is back at TVs?

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#259

Post by lorenzobr »

leokennis wrote: post #232
madeofpalk wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused - SMS and other telephone services already go down. Regulating something doesn't make it more reliable. Arguably the regulation of "classic" telephony services is what lead to the innovations of Whatsapp and everything else.

When had all sms or phone service in your country gone down? Sure a carrier might have issues - but there are other carriers who can pick up the load and there are likely government contingency plans for just that situation. Same doesn’t apply to WA.

The sms and phone service infrastructure is more centralised than you might think and carriers probably have less redundancy than big tech when it comes to it.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/21/20974692/valentines-day-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/06/o2-customer...

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#260

Post by GoblinSlayer »

inglor_cz wrote: post #139
spockz wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m by no means an expert in US political history but all books and papers I’ve read indicate that this polarisation between the parties did not always exist. Members were allowed to vote according to their own principals instead of just the party line which is basically always opposing the other party. Senators and other politicians would have bbq on Saturday at each other’s place. It appears that this no longer hap…

Too much transparency. If thousands of eyes of gatekeepers are at you at all times, and immediately start screaming that you are a DINO or a RINO if you do not hold the party line at all times, you have all the incentives to be strictly partisan. We generally consider transparency in politics a good thing, especially because it may reduce corruption. But it comes with significant downsides. Only very resilient person…

>Only very resilient personalities are able to ignore the psychopathic monkey cesspool that is the political Twitter.

Then don't visit twitter and post on an obscure nntp newsgroup instead.

Post reply on HN