Fundamentally, it is many times easier to be negative than to be positive. Any (general) social media platform will (eventually) skew heavily towards the negative. Facebook just had a head start is all because of Zuck.
Facebook chooses profits over people
131–140 of 253 posts
Re: Facebook chooses profits over people
#132People do this too to be fair. The most notable people in the world are people who hoard wealth. We put all our points into commercialism, of course people would sell their own grandma for a few quid. We wanted this apparently.
If I hoard a billion news papers clippings I'm a mad man but if I hoard billions of dollars I'm a hero this seams like a bit of a paradox in itself no?
No. Newspaper clippings don't give you impossible, unaccountable power. Money IS a proxy for power in a way that old newspaper clippings (even of your own great deeds) can never be.
If you hoard millions of dollars, it's not really the same: it's effectively saying 'I'm going to do whatever I gotta do, in order to seize unthinkable power over everybody I interact with, and rule them'. The money isn't useful in itself past a certain point, it's keeping score and it's a marker, showing what you can do if you want. It's a lot like if you are able to make nuclear weapons and you're hoarding uranium. It's not an inherent value in the uranium, it's what you're prepared to DO with it and how people must interact with you, knowing that.
Re: Facebook chooses profits over people
#133> When it debuted on the internet in 2004, Facebook seemed like a revolutionary innovation. A way for millions of people to engage with one another on a central virtual platform. That's quite a load of revisionist history right there. Facebook was neither the first, nor the first large platform or what we today call social network to enable that. It's differentiating factors were that it was web-based, easy to use, a…
It is very revisionist. But it was certainly not special in being web based or easy to use. MySpace, for instance, was far more web based than Facebook has ever been. The major differentiating feature was the marketing model that drove it's initial rollout. It was progressively released to a handful of elite US universities. This led to demand and excitement as it was further expanded. What's striking is that this specific plan was stolen. Without this marketing trick, I sincerely doubt that thefacebook.com would have survived and grown into it's current form.
Re: Facebook chooses profits over people
#134Everybody seems to be surprised on how capitalism works, forgetting that capitalism without some sort of proper market regulation and real proper heavy fines means jack shit.
PR is working wonders. People tend to forget anyways, and now they're supplied with an alternative narrative as well.
Re: Facebook chooses profits over people
#135These headlines naïvely miss the point. The problem isn’t Facebook, a private company, seeking profits. The problem is its deeply-entrenched psychopathy and pathological record of lying [1]. And it really appears to be a Facebook problem. Instagram for Kids wasn’t the fever dream of a deranged Instagrammer. It was pushed by a Facebook implant [2]. I don’t know if being in proximity to Facebook’s leadership corrupts p…
I would even say it's simpler, and the problem is Mark Zuckerberg specifically. He's deeply immoral, and continues to do what Facebook does for power and money. I understand, on some level, the excitement - he's a computer nerd who came to control an organization that is more powerful than the majority of the world's countries. Zuckerberg controls the platform that is the primary means of communication for hundreds of millions of people, and in terms of power he's almost on the level of G7 leaders, just not accountable to anyone.
Ethically, however, Zuckerberg seems to be on the level of murderous dictators, or human traffickers, or others that are among the very worst. I think he's willingly inflicted huge damage on modern Western society, and has certainly been the most harmful user of Internet technology.
Facebook as a whole is just a reflection of Zuckerberg's values and policies, which is not surprising for a company that's ruled by one person (as in CEO and sole majority voter). It's also not surprising that a company does unethical stuff to increase profits (and we have enough examples from Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Google, just about anyone), but I've firmly come to believe that Facebook is in a category of its own.
Re: Facebook chooses profits over people
#136Just in: [Company Name] doesn't care about you: [Company name] always chooses profits over people
Re: Facebook chooses profits over people
#137Juding only by the headline: where's the news?
Re: Facebook chooses profits over people
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Those people are just intrinsically evil and do bad things for the pure joy they get from being evil Nobody said that. The assertion is that Facebook's culture either attracts or breeds people unbound by conventional morality. They lie. They break laws. They do things nobody else would find conscionable that makes them a single-stop shop for pen testing the limits of the world's regulatory and legal systems. (The l…
Calling people psychopaths and pathological liars implies that there is no reasoning behind their actions. You’re saying they’re mentally ill. Pathological liars lie compulsively, about things for which there is no reason to lie. Is that what you’re claiming is happening with the entire executive staff of Facebook? They are all physiologically incapable of being honest? That they know and believe their actions are de…
> Pathological liars lie compulsively, about things for which there is no reason to lie. Is that what you’re claiming is happening with the entire executive staff of Facebook? They are all physiologically incapable of being honest? That they know and believe their actions are destructive and are committed to doing them anyway because they have a mental disorder that makes them unable to stop?
Nobody can make a diagnosis from a distance. I am saying their actions are substantially and increasingly indistinguishable from those of someone so afflicted.
Lying about X-Check to their Oversight Board is one such instance. It's stupid. It's so stupid. If those who lied--and there were several, at least five to my count--who thought through whether they should lie, or if there were other, better options, they would have come to the rational conclusion. But they didn't. There was instinct built over years of cultural conditioning, and they did what they do. They lied.
I have good friends at Instagram, WhatsApp, formerly Facebook (going back to the early days)--the whole shebang. It wasn't always like this. But within the last decade, senior leadership started acting like it was them against the world. That attitude created the situation they scorned.
Re: Facebook chooses profits over people
#139How many people bemoaning Facebook's evils on HN still have Facebook accounts?
Do what you know you ought to do. Stop feeding the beast. Set a better example. Close your account and don't look back. And, when people ask you why you left, tell them.
Re: Facebook chooses profits over people
#140* Amazon doesn’t care about you: Tech giant always chooses profits over people
* Apple doesn’t care about you: Tech giant always chooses profits over people
* Microsoft doesn’t care about you: Tech giant always chooses profits over people
* Google doesn’t care about you: Tech giant always chooses profits over people
They are all the same. It's how capitalism works and no amount of hysterical TYT shows can change that.