321–330 of 512 posts
Is HN just reddit now? The comments on this are beyond stupid and add nothing of value or thought.
Something happened during the pandemic where too many normies got hired into tech and then started larping around here.
The quality of comments here is now just emotional mainstream nonsense, compared to the annoyingly autistic (but often intelligent) analysis that used to be commonplace.
Remember when they told us that social media would "spread democracy" ?
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I’m taking it as a given that any sufficiently large social network is a gigantic propaganda machine of interest to domestic and foreign nation-state actors. Entertaining the thought experiment where all the normies join the fediverse: now you’ve got a big juicy target maintained by hobbyists. When it’s Lazarus Group vs Randall, the over-worked sys admin who stood up a node in his spare time, who do you think wins? S…
You are worrying about domestic nation state actors, and you are calling social media to be banned by whom? Some mysterious administrative entity that is surely not a part of the domestic nation state doing the very propaganda you are railing against? Surely the people with the power to ban the lot of social media don't have their own propaganda to shove down your throat. Surely they will only ban the bad ones where…
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Yes, they have a choice. Profits are more important than values.
Right, but it should be acknowledged that this is likely an amoral decision on Facebook's part (or more charitably, a pragmatic decision) not an immoral one. The governments that forced these changes in the first place are of course acting immorally, that's not in dispute.
Hyperbolic example: If your boss tells you to kill the next customer or you won’t get paid, doing the killing isn’t amoral.
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Social is where the people are. If you’re using Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family, the only viable alternative is wherever your friends and family are. Chances are it’s going to be impossible to switch everyone (or even most people) over, so you’re stuck if you care about those connections. Or you can do what I did and simply say “fuck it”. Get rid of your account anyway and deal with the consequences…
The offline world is where the people are. Social is where the accounts are, many of which have a nonhuman substrate with the goal of coercing alignment out of you.
The title should read "Saudi Arabia". Cutting a country name in half (unless its an accepted way of abbreviating it) is not a good say of modifying a headline. What is next? Zealand ?
Some people I know from Saudi Arabia refer to it as Saudi, so maybe thats the better word? I've never heard anyone call it Arabia.
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Haha, they didn't say they were offended, they just rejected the (clearly judgmental and off-topic) advice. They specifically asked for a Facebook alternative, including for online-only social groups they find important, so the advice to "just do real human connection without social media" is pretty useless. And shit like "Is it so important to share a photo with strangers?" is clearly judgmental and dismissive. Love…
I hope you have a pleasant day. :)
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Meta is not a political or moral entity, it's a for profit tech company. I don't see why it would be expected to make judgement calls on government requirements. Are we expecting Meta to take a political stance for or against specific policies in every country in which it operates? How would its politics be determined? I think the sensible thing for the corporation to do is to operate as widely as possible and follow…
Being a for-profit company does not automatically give you a free pass to do anything in the name of profit and claim immunity if your actions harm certain people. Individuals can (and will) expose and condemn for-profits for policies they believe cause them harm in order to attach some semblance of accountability to a corporation that would otherwise completely ignore their interests. This is effectively a way of ex…
Okay but that's not what were talking about. We're talking about Meta following the rules specified by the government of a country in which they operate. They don't need immunity to follow the rules.