Do it and I'll donate $1000 that I promise I was not going to donate anyways to Partners In Health.
There's an idea common to forums that I don't frequent that I recently learned of called an "ideological Turing test". The idea is to take a group of people divided along a controversy, and to get each side to anonymously write a coherent argument that capture's the other side's perspective. Then everyone tries to tell, "which is the real argument, and which is the cunning fake?".
In that spirit: if you think you understand what 'grellas is trying to say so well, go ahead and take a whack at saying it better, and demonstrate that you actually grok his perspective.
People should stop trying to make entrepreneurs feel guilty for not living up to their personal ethical standards. One of the advantages of our free society is that people can choose to work on weighty issues or fluffy diversions. As long as you abide by the law, you should not be criticised for the style of business you decide to pursue. If a lot of people can make money from social networking then that is definitionally a good thing (i.e. a good thing is a thing which makes some people money.)
"What I choose to call 'Founder's Guilt Complex' is a false sense of guilt imposed on founders who are told that the only worthwhile venture is one aimed at shaking up the world - I say, relax and use your talents to build the business you want. Keep it legal and do aspire to more in life than that. But forget about the censors. Like the Puritans of old, they would put you in a straightjacket for no good reason. And for this reason too, though there may be bad actors, there is not a thing wrong with social networking as a worthwhile business endeavor."
Does this short version achieve the same goals as the original? Yes and no. Context matters a lot in writing (see, e.g., my thoughts on legal writing: http://grellas.com/articles.html). The original here is flawed in that it is in the nature of a first draft (which is the case with all my posts at HN) and could be streamlined. But when one seeks to advance an idea that is bound to meet resistance among readers who are not used to hearing it, it is important to develop it and not simply state a summary of it. If this is misplaced for the forum (my posts do seem to generate a lot of meta-discussion about "walls of text"), then that is one thing. But there is no doubt that a merely summary version of such an argument will not have the same impact as one that is illustrated and developed.
By the way, I am not thin-skinned. I have appreciated your comments in this thread as well as those of others who have taken me to task on this or that point. We can disagree and still appreciate each other.
One suggestion I do have to help with readability (and with someone deciding whether they want to read the entire comment) is to place a summary (longer than a sentence) at the beginning of what you are writing if it is long and detailed.
I've found that this practice is helpful not only when writing to customers, but when writing to "important people" who most likely aren't going to want to take the time to read an entire detailed CYA type email with my opinion on something they have asked me about. That way if they want, they can dig further. And if anything happens it's on them if they did not read the fine print and only followed the summary to make a decision.
And for fairness sake I'll try to summarize your argument, Gumbo:
Endeavors that either add relatively nothing or have negative consequences, such as negative productivity, simply for pure financial gain, are not noble endeavors.
To paraphrase Gérard de Nerval, our industry is a hovel and a place of ill-repute. I'm ashamed that God should see me here.
How many great engineers are working on sites that allow people to share pictures of their cats? How many of our most talented minds don't even know who Ivan Sutherland is? How many are trying to tackle hard problems, and how many are trying to get rich putting what we know in a new dress? It's a rhetorical question but answer it to yourself anyway, because it's so sad.
PIH is a great charity. A great, great charity. Do you want to try again? I think if you ask around, you'll find at least a few people on HN who will tell you that I am not completely full of shit about this. But you have to actually do the thing I challenged you to do.
You said:
"Write it better.
Do it and I'll donate $1000"
Perhaps you could state the specifics of who is the judge, or the definition of "better".
Quickest way of course would be to have PG be the judge but I'm guessing that's not your idea.
A lot of people make money selling drugs too.
Demand, doesn't automatically make the item in demand good.
And a lot of people enjoy taking drugs, but face the same problem of other people pushing their personal morals and ethics on them.
If I want to smoke pot and design shitty Facebook games, leave me to it.
Example: Readers might believe some rambling gibberish about there being no need for any startup founder to have a conscience, and they might attribute it to the poster's own beliefs (it's ok not to have a conscience), when truthfully the poster might believe otherwise (he does not really believe in screwing people over, to the point of having no friends or a lifelong reputation as a con artist) and might just be advancing an idea that would benefit his business: the more social networking startups and the more money flowing into them, the better for those who take a cut.
The other implication is that you have to first understand a position in order to argue it effectively. The claim here is that one commenter does not actually comprehend the other commenter's position. And an easy way to show this is to ask each commenter to argue for the other's position, instead of against it.
The point is photo sharing, status sharing, killing pigs with birds turned out to be made such a valuable thing that people felt it worth investing billions into it. That's fair too, because you are diverting investments towards where the demand is. But the core of the problem was that the 'actual innovations' got the short end of the stick.
When I look at Elon Musk, I see a person with a mission. As much as it may sound unpractical at times, the person worked on things that have solved genuine problems. Problems like making payments online easy, building electric cars, building cheap vehicles for luggage delivery into space. When I see Bill Gates, I see somebody who radically changed the desktop industry. Who is now investing time and energy fighting diseases, hunger an poverty around the world. All these great men, built business that genuinely changed things around us. Though I use Facebook, I feel no such respect for Zuckerberg. I am jealous of his money. But if I have to be that rich someday, I want to be doing work for a better cause.
I understand that games and stuff like that have their own value. But when they are glorified so much to make genuine work utter useless, unrewarding activity. Things begin to look bad.
If it doesn't improve humanity like a cure for cancer, but ends up creating happiness in the lives of its users, is that wrong?
I tried to get the spirit of the words. How did I do?
Quibbles: I thought several issues were conflated in the original post by grellas, so honestly I don't think I could possibly do justice to all the unstated assumptions.
"It is morally acceptable for some of the brighter minds of a generation to invest their time, effort and energy into developing social products - including but not limited to Facebook. These are fully legitimate free market business ventures, and we need to stop collectively pontificating about what may or may not constitute a socially worthy business goal."
This is, I believe, a more concise summary of the parent's perspective. It meets a different need, and I don't view it as being "better" per se.
