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0 pointsgibolt5y ago0 comments

There are plenty of large groups that people derive social value from, maybe even most.

Unfortunately, Facebook mirrors human society and gives bad/profit-driven actors an easier avenue than traditional recruiting and distribution.

Most things are good/neutral, but scale means some things will go south

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stormbrew5y ago· 2 in thread

> There are plenty of large groups that people derive social value from, maybe even most.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you mean groups on facebook or that there are other groups on the scale of facebook people (ie. a user count in the billions) derive value from?

For the first, in the absence of facebook these groups would no doubt still exist. There were forums before facebook and some of them grew quite large. There were even regional social networks on smaller scales (I worked for one once).

If you mean the latter, well, I don't think that's really true. In so far as it is, there are only really a couple that aren't just owned by facebook to begin with.

asiando5y ago

> in the absence of facebook these groups would no doubt still exist.

I don’t think they would.

Creation, discovery, participation, following. None of these is particularly easy if you revert to forums and Google. I won’t join Cute Puppies Forum but I wouldn’t mind following an homonymous group on Facebook for a little while, maybe I’ll answer some questions too.

The average Joe won’t care enough to join their little city group, but Facebook makes it so easy that you find all kinds of non-tech people on it, ready to answer your questions (and sometimes insult you, but I block those on sight).

stormbrew5y ago

I don't think we really know what kind of social spaces would have evolved in a world where something like facebook didn't or couldn't grow. I think there were some hints of it evolving in the early 2000s, but when facebook blew up it just sucked ALL the air out of the room and forums and blogs all got stuck in 2009.

Maybe I'm wrong, but again I have to ask the question: Are those conveniences actually worth the harm we see from aggressive narrow ad targeting/tracking, as well as the issues mentioned here around parasitic viral memes, that make things like facebook even viable as businesses?

This is an evaluation we are allowed to make, and it's not a foregone conclusion that just because people can build these things they have a place in our society.

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