Ditto. Issues like Facebook's role in society are nowhere near as simple as reddit and twitter make them out to be. Posts this naive and simplistic being upvoted is kinda ominous for the future of HN.
Moreover it's gross that Jack Dorsey is put on a moral pedestal and Zuckerberg/FB employees are villainized. I'm not saying there's an exact equivalence between Twitter and FB (due to lack of transparency around news feed, Instagram's impact on young teen girls, FB's history of lying) but the disparity in rhetoric and treatment is concerning given that Twitter has undeniably played a role in some of the same societally destabilizing things that FB is involved in, such as extreme echo chambers, abundance and virality of fake news, abundance of bots and scams.
I haven't figured out the reason for the out-of-whack disparity yet. Is it because Zuckerberg lacks charisma, because he has Aspergers and people hate the awkwardness, or because FB is the tallest poppy, or because journalists have found a credentialed home on Twitter (blue check mark)?
> journalists have found a credentialed home on Twitter
This.
Twitter made a deliberate decision to recruit opinion-formers early on.
The face of Faceache is Zuck, with his blank expression and absurd haircut (surely after 20 years, he could find a decent stylist). The face of Twaddle (in the UK) seems to be Stephen Fry - a comic that I used to admire. Now, not so much.
I think Twaddle did a better PR job than Faceache from the beginning. I think they're still doing a better job.
Highly agree in the means, not the ends. I'm also rabidly anti-FB, to the point it's had a detrimental impact on my social life. It's a cost I knowingly walked into and one I'm happy to bear. Take a look at my public posts: I categoricaly think FB and their employees to be immoral.
I think it's the implication that anyone that works for facebook is inherently immoral and exchanging their own ethics for cash, which is not true imo.
There are lots of great people doing great things at FB, and if we apply this standard to FB we should also be applying it elsewhere. I'm not entirely sure many major companies have been completely controversy-free... Work for Apple? well you are complicit in sweatshops. Work for Uber? Complicit in sexism and workers being taken advantage of. Work for Spotify? Complicit in artists not getting paid what they should get. I would be interested in hearing where I am allowed to work if we follow this to it's conclusion.
(NB: I don't work for facebook or any of these companies...)
I’m just saying it’s a standard we don’t apply consistently, even across the tech world, never mind to other industries.
Besides, different people have different moral perspectives, and I assume most people at Facebook probably think the company has had a net benefit on society (even if you don’t).
