Of all the big tech companies Facebook is the only one where it can completely disappear overnight and my life would be completely unaffected (or possibly improved by not having to explain to people I don't use facebook, please email or text me your invitations rather than use messenger). If Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple disappeared the story would be completely different.
Facebook is an unparalleled titan in the realm of advertising and WhatsApp is basically a utility-level communication system for a big chunk of the globe. Instagram is a key cultural driver of the Western world. You many not feel any direct firsthand consequences, but the overall impact would transform the world around you.
I find this kind of comment fascinating because it's illustrative of how humans can form intentional blindspots as to the utility of a person or institution when when all they care about are the negative aspects of that person's or institution's existence.
op: "I don't care about thing X disappearing"
re: "While you may not care about it because of Y, X also provides benefit Z to other people"
op: "But would there be any drawbacks?"
yeah, there would be drawbacks, other people would lose Z, which may matter a lot of them even if it doesn't matter to you. Someone just told you about Z, and you just responded as if you weren't just told about Z"
These days I find it incredibly frustrating to deal with people who have conclusively decided they don't like something and that renders them incapable of acknowledging other benefits that said thing provides even if those benefits aren't relevant to them or are less relevant than the things they vocalize caring about.
I can agree with the "intentional blindspots" argument but turn it right around.
I'd like to explicitly note that the parent post did not say "X also provides benefit Z to other people" - it asserted "Facebook is an unparalleled titan in the realm of advertising" which is a substantially different thing; it's not something that some people simply don't care about and a benefit to some other people and considering those statements as equivalent is a (very large) intentional blindspot. The current way of how advertising is done (driven, in part, by FB) is also a harm to many people and society at large, so publicly making an implicit assumption that "advertising" is at most neutral is not okay, it's something that should be called out.
This very "unparalleled titan in the realm of advertising" aspect is a major cost on society, a net harm that perhaps should be tolerated if it's outweighed by some other benefits FB provides (such as the "utility-level communication system for a big chunk of the globe"), but as itself it's definitely not something that should be treated as benign just because some people get paid for it.
If FB advertising disappeared with no other drawbacks, that would be a great thing. Of course, there are some actual drawbacks, but even so it's quite reasonable to motivate people to ask about the actual drawbacks of FB being down, because "oh but ads" (with which the grandparent post started) is not one.
Thank you, I agree with everything you said here. But I'd also like to address the other things I was answering with the drawbacks quip...
> WhatsApp is basically a utility-level communication system for a big chunk of the globe.
Unfortunately, it's not an actual utility though, which is precisely my point. It's pure folly to build your business around a pseudo utility owned by a private company.
> Instagram is a key cultural driver of the Western world.
I honestly have no idea how this is being presented as a good thing. A "key cultural driver of the western world" is an app whose entire purpose is to harvest your data and sell it to dodgy partners who will use it to usurp democracy.
There are several people earning their living through Facebook/Instagram and there is a whole marketplace that would impact lots of people. Don't get me wrong, I don't use or like FB in any way but FB disappearing overnight would definitely have drawbacks for lots of people.
Replace Facebook in your post with human trafficking :)
Obvious I'm not serious, and it's popular sentiment here that "Fuck Facebook... Oh but I use Instragram and WhatsApp of course!", but the point was "some people making a living on x" isn't really a great argument for "x is harmful and we might be better without it".
My time on Facebook made it abundantly clear how racist, misogynist and otherwise vile a large portion of the people I grew up with are. I was much happier having a superficial contact with them once every ten years at a high school reunion. I'm no longer on Facebook (or Twitter).
Occasionally, I'll see/hear/do something and think that it would have made a good status update/tweet, but then I remember that these things have happened to me for decade before social media was a thing and life was fine. Some I'll share with my wife or a friend, most just disappear and that's fine too.
I did. Facebook also spent a lot of time dumping stuff in my newsfeed from people I wasn't friends with (Twitter also liked to do this). It was a lot easier to just not have all that crap in my life.
Why? It is not as efficient. I can buy everything from stores but I use amazon, same thing. I don't actually use facebook though because I don't care about anyone really but for people that care, it is a solid platform.
There is a gap between "I want to know what people I know are up to" and "I want to meet with those people one by one to see what they are up to". Some people just want to passively watch and that is ok.
"I felt a great disturbance in the DNS. As if millions of influencers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I feel something terrible has happened. But you better get on with your content curation."
Facebook is implicated in genocide in multiple countries, and Instagram is nothing but a psychotic lie factory designed to induce depression and self loathing in young women.
But your friend groups would probably be able to migrate to Signal/Discord/Hangouts/etc quite quickly if WhatsApp were to disappear, no? WhatsApp has the network effect on its side by way of existing, but that could change quickly if given a push.
Sure. But you might not get everyone back - you'd have to have an alternate method of talking to the folks to get them to switch and meet up in the same place. You'd have this if the service just slowly died (like landlines), but not if something breaks instantly - forever. I'm guessing we've all had this when games died (especially old text-based MMORPG's, for example. So many people gone).
After using Telegram, WhatsApp is a complete piece of garbage, if it disappeared from the face of the earth it would be sure for the best as people would move on to alternative messengers.
IIRC, e2e by default for audio/video; for text chats, can be enabled by marking chat as 'secret'. Is it true E2E? Probably not (i.e. Telegram has keys that can be turned over to any government, noone argues with that)
Does WhatsApp have a true E2E either? Ask hundreds of moderators employed by Facebook who review WhatsApp messages flagged as improper and the chat history around them...
However, accepting the fact that neither of the services is truly secure, Telegram experience as a service is much better for an average user.
> for text chats, can be enabled by marking chat as 'secret'. Is it true E2E? Probably not (i.e. Telegram has keys that can be turned over to any government, noone argues with that)
That was my problem, and your confirmation means it's still as good as nothing.
> Does WhatsApp have a true E2E either? Ask hundreds of moderators employed by Facebook who review WhatsApp messages flagged as improper and the chat history around them...
If one of the ends decides to share a message, it's still E2E. That is the big difference.
> If one of the ends decides to share a message, it's still E2E. That is the big difference.
True. But you can't prove that "one of the ends" must necessarily be a human and not the logic in the app code, or an intended backdoor? E.g., an automated logic scanning for 'malicious' messages on-device.
Maybe Google, because of the search engine. Android: somebody will fill the void.
Messaging: people have been switching on hordes to every new free messaging system in the 90s and early 2000s, we will adapt to something else.
Netflix and video in general: same thing without the 90s/early 2000s.
Amazon: very convenient store, we'll spend a little less and somebody will fill the void.
Apple: can't say, never bought anything from them.
By the way, when I couldn't message on WA today I thought day they finally cut me off because I still didn't accept their new privacy policy from months ago :-) I resolved to wait and see for a couple of days.
I dunno. If AWS went away suddenly, or if Google Search/the G-Suite suddenly stopped existing, the internet as we know it would need some time to recover.
> Messaging: people have been switching on hordes to every new free messaging system in the 90s and early 2000s, we will adapt to something else.
Back then the IM population was a lot smaller. Also with "Free Basics" and other things in some regions of the world Facebook plays a game which makes it impossible to switch. (Using Whatsapp is free, for others one ahs to buy mobile data credits)
Man, out of those only Netflix going down wouldn't cause a gigantic billions of dollars worth clusterfuck to people, businesses and companies. It's nice you don't use them but about everyone around does and mostly for at least some important things.
si es muy posible, de otro lado se daría la oportunidad a empresas mas cercanas con la gente y que les paguen por los usuarios por los datos. finalmente los usuarios son su activo para generar muy importantes ingresos, estaría muy bien que compartan sus beneficios!
It didn't help that telecoms used to use SMS as an extreme profit center. I don't think WhatsApp would have taken over the way it did if SMS was always included in all plans for free. This is similar to the way "local" long distance used to be such a racket.
Most UK plans included unlimited SMS for a long time, but whatsapp still took over.
The group chat functions don't really exist in SMS (maybe in MMS but they never work properly), photos (same), whatsapp desktop, you can text when you have WiFi but no 4G (or using a different sim card when travelling), etc.
The problem for me is Oculus. I really love their headset and I appreciate the investment Facebook has made in that.
I hate the stupid strategy tax that makes me have an FB account to use their headset, and has it go down when they have an outage. I hope they can learn from MSFT that "Facebook Everywhere" is ultimately a self defeating strategy.
Not OP. They _can_ but good luck trying to convince parents of that. They're not tech savvy enough to install apps themselves. They have simple questions about why Whatsapp cannot be installed in a basic Nokia phone for instance. It's not easy to convince them to use Signal or Telegram or anything else.
Because combined with the abysmal state of education in most places, and a general lack of government action, Facebook is an actual threat to our civilization.
People unfortunately love the upsides of misinformation, or perhaps it's the format that makes it easy to build community around shared (misinformed) values, to rally in battles that rage for hours or days for a cause you deeply believe in and can follow by digesting 30-second soundbites on social midea and 30-minute videos on YouTube.
People will do this wherever they can talk in a group online, not just Facebook properties. It's... pretty bad actually, I think the only tool that exists right now is censorship, because the bullshit gets created, spread, and wholeheartedly received way faster than debunking will.
And censorship is a power that can't be safely entrusted to nobody.
I don't necessarily disagree, but often I hear FB or other tech companies like Twitter singled out re: misinformation. News media contributes to misinformation and contributes to a warped, partisan, permanently-in-catastrophe-mode population just as much as FB, Twitter, and other mediums.
I doubt, if FB goes away, that any of the issues you're implying will go away or even get much better. In fact, the lack of a real look into the negative effects of consumer news product reinforces this idea that only the elite can know the truth, and the masses just have to get in line and shut up.
News media proliferated nonsense from fed sources to justify the Iraq war, they gave Trump 24/7 airtime for a while because it increased ratings. They constantly forgo any real accountability for their actions, and pretend that they aren't just another addictive consumer product that warps peoples' brains.
> It's a parent's job to educate your children. There are much worse things than Facebook out there.
I'm guessing that either you're not a parent, or your kids aren't teens.
But most parents of teens realize that kids, and especially teens, are often much more influenced by things like social media & peers (and peers via social media) vs. influence their parents have on them.
It actively uses its algorithm to radicalize racists and conspiracy theorists, and when it discovered that's what it was doing decided to keep doing it because it was good for the bottom line:
An alternate explanation is that the algorithm tries to promote engagement and user retention. Presumably, people susceptible to radicalization engage with the content discussed in the article. It would be unreasonable to expect Facebook to not act in its own self-interest.
> An alternate explanation is that the algorithm tries to promote engagement and user retention. Presumably, people susceptible to radicalization engage with the content discussed in the article. It would be unreasonable to expect Facebook to not act in its own self-interest.
That's the whole point. Oh they're just trying to make a buck like everyone else is exactly the problem.
They are a running a paperclip maximizer that turns passive consumers of misinformation into "engaged" radicals and the system that is Facebook has no incentive to correct this.
To recap, you seem to be concerned that all social media are allowing posts to become popular, and those posts sometimes promote hatred towards conservatives or liberals.
Two questions:
- What do you think should be done about the legacy media that is doing the same?
- Should social media promote boring posts, or actively censor political content in favour of a certain viewpoint, or anything else? Perhaps a real-life name registration for anyone with over 1000 followers, like in China?
> those posts sometimes promote hatred towards conservatives or liberals.
Incorrect assertion. Those posts promote hatred and/or violence toward humans for traits those humans did not choose. e.g. race, sexual orientation, etc.
Legacy media aren't actively amplifying the voices and recruiting efforts of white supremacists.
Facebook is. They acknowledge that they are. They chose to actively allow and encourage it for profit.
