Please don't take HN threads further into tedious flamewars. Those have nothing to do with intellectual curiosity, and are therefore off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Be critical all you want, just don't try to gaslight by saying they're on the verge of collapse and everyone hates them. They're extremely popular and billions log in every day because they apparently get some kind of value out of the product

There’s a difference between hating Meta for its ethics and hating Meta as a money making machine. People are doing the latter and that’s pretty silly. Meta is, however unethically, a good entity at the goal of making money.

I mean, if you don't have a stock position, why parrot the same tired narrative? It's not adding any insight and it's not like their stock never had downswing before.

At one point the crowd here was like oh fb ipo so embarrassing, to oh fb eng so hot much react, to oh fb so evil now, crash and burn pls. Such fickleness. Surely we can do better than that.

I agree with you on almost everything but we can't blame meta for weak democracy, underpaid teachers, private schools, lack of social programs, absent social services et al are weakening democracy

Sure, but try being critical about something that they can actually be faulted for rather than their incredible earnings. The OP was just pointing out that a lot of the criticism here made no sense.

Why post emotive comments on a financial post?

It doesn't weaken democracy any more than other social media. And if facebook goes down it's just going to be replaced with tiktok or something worse.

What, does public opinion shield you from the burden of proof? These are outrageous claims. I pray for legislation to put this all to rest.

If democracy can't survive Facebook then it probably was doomed already. Similarly with trying to live in civil society when there are already fellow citizens full of violence and hatred; FB might give voice to what is already there and already broken but isn't really the cause.