Facebook chooses profits over people • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#181

Post by dTal » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:12 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #96

jamesandthewolf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> if I hoard billions of dollars If you literally "hoard," as in store it up and hide it away [1], yes, that would be crazy. But nobody does that. Those billions are invested and working. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hoard

Investing and working, in order to... make more money?

After a certain point - when you can afford literally everything it's possible to want to consume - it's no longer about improving your own quality of life. It's either about increasing your "score", or about increasing your power over others.

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#182

Post by GlennS » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:13 PM UTC

christophilus wrote: post #60

aceazzameen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You made me think, is it even possible to create a social media network geared towards education (sharing skills and ideas) for the masses? I suppose YouTube is somewhat there. But it's blended with so much crap.

Anything “for the masses” has to compete to win over the average and below average intellects. From what I can tell, that means that you have to get more and more sensationalistic to keep market share. You’re competing with a lot of addictive content out there, and educational content generally doesn’t fare well in that regard. Remember all of those educational video games in the past? Math blasters? They sucked. The…

> You’re competing with a lot of addictive content out there, and educational content generally doesn’t fare well in that regard. Remember all of those educational video games in the past? Math blasters? They sucked. There’s no way they could compete with Mario and Zelda. This is the same phenomenon.

I think you took the wrong lesson here (seems appropriate given the subject).

Edutainment (Word Rescue and so on) wasn't unpopular because people are stupid. It was unpopular because it wasn't very good. They chased two rabbits and lost them both (education, entertainment).

Mario was more fun, better art, and probably better for your mind.

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#183

Post by amelius » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #179

amelius wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the problem is lack of strong consumer protection. Trusting profit-seeking private companies to do "the right thing" is naive at best.

I trust that my "profit-seeking" dentist does the right thing, just like I trust that the "profit-seeking" engineer that built the home I live in and the "profit-seeking" restaurant owner from the place I had lunch today. Please stop demonizing "profit-seeking". The problem is the lack of ethics of Facebook and Big Tech in general. Putting it on "private, profit-seeking" companies is a tired, sophomoric take.

There are plenty of ways in which profit-seeking can hurt consumers. Just look up "dark patterns" for starters.

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#184

Post by nerdkid93 » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:19 PM UTC

qedlab wrote: post #170

ACS_Solver wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

He is accountable to people. Those people just happen to be shareholders. And if the stock price continues to increase then what's the incentive for shareholders to ask for more accountability. All the bad news and publicity without the de-investing means that it is ultimately good news (from a shareholder perspective), thus no financial action.

Zuckerberg is a minority shareholder in Facebook with majority control due to dual-class Founder's shares he possesses. The only person he's accountable to is himself.

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#185

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #49

felipellrocha wrote: post #3

In other news, the sky appears to be blue.

People in this thread say variations of your comment, that it's obvious, that everyone knows it. But then at the same time people still make excuses for companies like Facebook. They urge others not to assume any bad (or purely profit oriented) intent, to believe that the people working at Facebook are honest about what their PR campaigns and Zuckerberg claim and the list goes on... Also it is absolutely common that…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#186

Post by pixelgeek » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #179

amelius wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the problem is lack of strong consumer protection. Trusting profit-seeking private companies to do "the right thing" is naive at best.

I trust that my "profit-seeking" dentist does the right thing, just like I trust that the "profit-seeking" engineer that built the home I live in and the "profit-seeking" restaurant owner from the place I had lunch today. Please stop demonizing "profit-seeking". The problem is the lack of ethics of Facebook and Big Tech in general. Putting it on "private, profit-seeking" companies is a tired, sophomoric take.

Is your dentist a corporation that is lead by a board of directors and has a series of shareholders that help define how it operates?

If not then the comparison is not really valid.

> The problem is the lack of ethics of Facebook and Big Tech in general.

And big oil. And big pharma. And big anything.

Large corporations are built to maximize profit. And it is this focus on profit that is the problem.

So 'profit seeking'...

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#187

Post by tester34 » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #146

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #44

These 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…

> And it really appears to be a Facebook problem. Instagram for Kids wasn’t the fever dream of a deranged Instagrammer Two things to unpack here. its not a facebook problem. its a problem that exists in many large companies. Apple for example doesn't give a shit about individuals. (you can see that if you slip off any of the predefined support pathways) _everyone_ to google is just a thing to evaluated and advertised…

>(how do you think they manage the "x is busy now, try later"?)

what is this?

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#188

Post by rglullis » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #183

rglullis wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I trust that my "profit-seeking" dentist does the right thing, just like I trust that the "profit-seeking" engineer that built the home I live in and the "profit-seeking" restaurant owner from the place I had lunch today. Please stop demonizing "profit-seeking". The problem is the lack of ethics of Facebook and Big Tech in general. Putting it on "private, profit-seeking" companies is a tired, sophomoric take.

There are plenty of ways in which profit-seeking can hurt consumers. Just look up "dark patterns" for starters.

Again, this has nothing to do with "profit-seeking" and a lot to do with business ethics. Two completely separate issues.

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#189

Post by dTal » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #114

jamesandthewolf wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand people need money to make money, I get it, but surly we could place a cap on it. The super rich are no different from the kings and queens of old, they just are called by different names like CEO or some other three letter thing.

> we could place a cap on it Why? What benefit does society gain from telling Elon Musk, years ago, no more money, go buy cars and nice dinners, you're not allowed to start SpaceX or get involved with Tesla? Also, it's trivially sidestepped. Japan is a culture with notoriously uncompetitive executive pay. As a result, one, its ambitious tend to not do their work there. And two, many firms have the entire family on th…

Ideally, the value that Elon Musk has captured would instead go to an institution that we collectively control, like NASA, and we would accomplish the same things but in a more accountable way. Is it really right and fair that society is ploughing money into Mars colonization, without any of us having been consulted, just because some nerd got "disruptive" with banking regulations?

In any case, Elon Musk is a pretty bad example because most billionaires do not orient their investment activities around some forward-thinking idealistic goal like Elon has. For every Elon, there's a hundred very boring billionaires who are perfectly content with swinging their wealth around in ways that just make society worse, like lobbying politicians and buying up chunks of economically valuable real estate in cities.

Money is power, and power begets more power. People shouldn't be able to circumvent democracy no matter how cleverly they've played the economy game.

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#190

Post by michaelt » Fri, Oct 22, 2021, 1:30 PM UTC

joconde wrote: post #159

ACS_Solver wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 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. Let's add a header to Facebook's homepage insulting some country's leader, and see how fast they get beaten into removing it by a…

> the president of any country has more authority than MZ, except maybe over Facebook

Well, it depends how you measure.

Joe Biden has the power to start wars, to pardon people for US crimes, to have anyone disappeared and tortured indefinitely - but he doesn't have the power to create a database listing all American citizens, let alone the citizens of foreign countries.