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Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

doctorow.medium.com

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Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#21

Post by rst »

Barrin92 wrote: post #6
Qi_ wrote: post #4

The author seems to be filled with a sense of “knight-in-shining-armor-ism.” If Facebook’s actions really are a problem to most people, then most people would stop using it. He calls Zuckerberg a "pope-emperor" of Facebook's users, but that's because the users choose to give him power. If the users stop choosing to give him power, he loses it.

>If Facebook’s actions really are a problem to most people, then most people would stop using it what do you call this argument, best of all worlds-ism? So a priori any institution that persists is beneficial to its constituents merely because it continues to exist? Do concepts like power and dependence exist in the kind of worldview that produces these arguments?

There's an actual name for it -- Panglossianism -- named for Dr. Pangloss, the tutor in Voltaire's Candide who keeps insisting, despite catastrophically mounting evidence, that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds." (This was a deliberate parody of moral philosphy written by some of Voltaire's 18th-century contemporaries, most notably Leibniz.)

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#22

Post by mavhc »

cute_boi wrote: post #18
joshgel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like cigarettes? I have no sense of whether FB is physically addictive like smoking. But, if a company directly contributes to decline in civil discourse and harms democracy, and thereby harms the users, then isn't it a government role to step in? And isn't this the governments role even if users can't see the harm at the micro-level of their daily interactions with the company? I guess that is the argument at least.…

Facebook is addictive tbh. I heard they hired some prominent psychologist to make it more addictive. My mother is surely addicted to facebook. She knows all data implications but she enjoys getting likes/shares etc. And fake news etc which is intentionally specious make the platform even more enjoyable. I can't tell her to stop facebook and I am sure it is harming her right? Yes this is government role but as with ev…

Humans enjoy being liked, what specific harm does your mother experience from using facebook?

Better to be addicted to typing words than drugs, it's free and you don't die.

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#23

Post by epgui »

Qi_ wrote: post #11
Barrin92 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If Facebook’s actions really are a problem to most people, then most people would stop using it what do you call this argument, best of all worlds-ism? So a priori any institution that persists is beneficial to its constituents merely because it continues to exist? Do concepts like power and dependence exist in the kind of worldview that produces these arguments?

My argument is based on free-market economics. The users/customers seem to not care enough to put their time and money elsewhere.

No it’s not, and a cursory glance at studies of human behaviour (what economics is really about, in a way) would dispel this notion.

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#24

Post by Qi_ »

epgui wrote: post #23
Qi_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument is based on free-market economics. The users/customers seem to not care enough to put their time and money elsewhere.

No it’s not, and a cursory glance at studies of human behaviour (what economics is really about, in a way) would dispel this notion.

Could you please elaborate on what you mean? Facebook is a company and therefore its success and failure is dependent on its customers/users, right?

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#25

Post by sokoloff »

joshgel wrote: post #9
Qi_ wrote: post #4

The author seems to be filled with a sense of “knight-in-shining-armor-ism.” If Facebook’s actions really are a problem to most people, then most people would stop using it. He calls Zuckerberg a "pope-emperor" of Facebook's users, but that's because the users choose to give him power. If the users stop choosing to give him power, he loses it.

Like cigarettes? I have no sense of whether FB is physically addictive like smoking. But, if a company directly contributes to decline in civil discourse and harms democracy, and thereby harms the users, then isn't it a government role to step in? And isn't this the governments role even if users can't see the harm at the micro-level of their daily interactions with the company? I guess that is the argument at least.…

> if a company directly contributes to decline in civil discourse and harms democracy, and thereby harms the users, then isn't it a government role to step in?

The chief problem here is “who decides?” If a government in power is being undermined, they have incredibly strong incentives to determine that those undermining actions are “harmful to democracy” (rather than merely harmful to their party). (I think we could point to many examples in US politics in the last 5 years where “this is bad for my party” is cast as “this is bad for democracy!”)

Which is why I think that, of all the speech that must be protected, political speech is of the highest criticality to protect. (And that claims by the government or strongly politically aligned citizens that ‘X is bad for democracy’ should also be viewed with a healthy amount of skepticism.)

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#26

Post by dasil003 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

> Regulating tech is a great idea (assuming the regulations are thoughtful and productive, of course), I’m not nearly as enthusiastic for these calls to bring heavy regulation on to the tech industry. Articles like this have a hypothetical ideal mental image of regulations that will punish only the bad guys while protecting themselves and the content they like. There’s also an implicit assumption that regulation will…

Totally agreed on the utopian fallacy angle, it's really hard to come up with effective regulation ideas that won't create unintended distortions at best, and new innovation-killing moats at worst.

But we have to try.

As imperfect as government is, it is the only power that we have over giant corporations. Existing regulation and agency structure is completely unsuitable for the world we live in today. So far tech has relied on creative destruction as compute power grew and form factors shrunk rapidly, leading to ever increasing waves of adoption, and "software eating the world". However at this point most people have a smartphone in their pocket and the attention economy is maxed out. A lot of future innovation will be capital (and data) intensive, and with adoption already saturated, the natural power of Google, Facebook, and Amazon will not be naturally disrupted the way PCs disrupted mainframes or the web disrupted Windows hegemony.

Of course there's nothing worse than bad regulation, and historically tech regulation has been a minefield due to the general cluelessness of congress. The good news is that this will improve with turnover and younger staffers helping build a broader understanding of the issues. Hopefully we can start to pivot away from distractions like section 230 and asking corporations to be arbiters of truth, and instead focus on anti-trust and data privacy angles, with specific focus on size and power.

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#27

Post by dcow »

Qi_ wrote: post #4

The author seems to be filled with a sense of “knight-in-shining-armor-ism.” If Facebook’s actions really are a problem to most people, then most people would stop using it. He calls Zuckerberg a "pope-emperor" of Facebook's users, but that's because the users choose to give him power. If the users stop choosing to give him power, he loses it.

Since when is “most people don’t speak up so it’s obviously okay” a healthy way to determine whether anything should be legal or not?

Where is the knite-in-shining-armor-ism? What even is that? Doctorow is asking for for us to build a society where we don't take a company on their word that they will do right by users because he cites multiple examples where a company leader charged as the steward of software integral to peoples’ lives has said they will and then about faced to chase profits. There’s clearly something worth discussing here… Remember how nice and interoperable chat was before Google killed xmpp?

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#28

Post by eljimmy »

Qi_ wrote: post #24
epgui wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s not, and a cursory glance at studies of human behaviour (what economics is really about, in a way) would dispel this notion.

Could you please elaborate on what you mean? Facebook is a company and therefore its success and failure is dependent on its customers/users, right?

The users aren't the customers, they are the product.

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#29

Post by dcow »

Qi_ wrote: post #24
epgui wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s not, and a cursory glance at studies of human behaviour (what economics is really about, in a way) would dispel this notion.

Could you please elaborate on what you mean? Facebook is a company and therefore its success and failure is dependent on its customers/users, right?

It seem you don’t understand the economics of this situation.

Facebook makes money from ad partners not users. Users are not paying Facebook for the software. People who want to run ads are. There is no market for newsfeed software here. Only a market for user attention.

Because FB made a creepy tool 15 years ago they won some users and have an established base they can market to. People using it these days do so because of the network effect not because it’s the best tool to keep in touch with people. Facebook has to maximize time spent with users eyeballs glued to the newsfeed because that’s where ads appear. The friend network portions of the software only exist vestigially at this point to keep people locked in to a newsfeed platform.

Facebook is dependent on their customers but their customers aren't the people glued to the newsfeed, those are the product literally for customers paying for an advertising platform. If it was legal, Facebook would literally chain you to your computer and force you to interact with the world through their platform because that maximizes their profits.

Re: Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook

#30

Post by dcow »

dasil003 wrote: post #26
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

> Regulating tech is a great idea (assuming the regulations are thoughtful and productive, of course), I’m not nearly as enthusiastic for these calls to bring heavy regulation on to the tech industry. Articles like this have a hypothetical ideal mental image of regulations that will punish only the bad guys while protecting themselves and the content they like. There’s also an implicit assumption that regulation will…

Totally agreed on the utopian fallacy angle, it's really hard to come up with effective regulation ideas that won't create unintended distortions at best, and new innovation-killing moats at worst. But we have to try. As imperfect as government is, it is the only power that we have over giant corporations. Existing regulation and agency structure is completely unsuitable for the world we live in today. So far tech ha…

Why do we have to regulate? It seems an alternate yet much more difficult path would be that we could grow a societal backbone and make certain destructive practices illegal instead of trying to figure out a central list of allowed practices and licenses and policies and permits and bureaucracy etc. For example, it’s pretty clear that internet scale data markets and user attention platforms harm the individual. Why is step one always to reach for a regulatory solution instead of a slightly more radical “outlaw such machines and then figure things out from there” approach? A naive example might be a law stating: “It is illegal to profit from the sale of advertisements to your own users.” In the same vein, why cant we outlaw DRM because it’s bad for users and tell movie studios we care more about users health and well being than we do about your “piracy” problem?
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