Those problems are American problems. They are human problems. You see them everywhere not just here.

> The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion

This has always been the case for as long as society has been consuming the news. “Business tycoons” have bought up newspapers and media outlets since forever to push their narrative.

I think one component that has changed is the sheer volume and diversity of media makes competition for your attention (clicks) all the more fierce. Enter The Algorithm and optimizing for metrics above all else.

I dunno. That doesn’t invalidate anything about the original question about what present day would be like without Facebook. Would something else similar have replaced it? Is Facebook really “the problem” or is it algorithmic content because algorithmicly driven content was going to happen facebook or not.

It's because of the fragmentation of news sources that can now be customized to one's preference with any finely sliced political cant desired. Three television networks maintained a measure of neutrality in their reporting. Mainstream print media did too albeit to a lesser extent. Wackjobs had a hard time finding each other to form a tribe that would destabilize society.

> The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion.

We're seeing the opposite, though. As the traditional media companies declined and the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own views, polarization increased.

As someone who tries to avoid the news and politics, it's pretty easy to avoid the companies selling them. But I keep running into them because there are lots of users on Hacker News/Reddit/etc. who try to interject it into every discussion they can . Invariably, these people don't come at it from the point of view that they might be wrong and the other side might be right; they act like zealous crusaders on a mission to vanquish evil.

Yes because before the current media landscape, politicians didn’t win elections by using dog whistles (Willie Horton), making some out group the villain or “segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever”.

Why are people acting like this is ancient history when my still living parents grew up in the segregated south and as recently as 2014 there were cities that still had segregated proms?

This happened in 1985

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WErjPmFulQ0

This is no media exaggeration. Forsyth county was notorious for this until the early 2000s. I (a Black guy) had a house built here in 2016 and sold it just last year when I relocated. While my son was one of the five Black guys in his entire school, we never experienced any issues so I don’t want to cast any aspersions toward Forsyth as it exist today.

Poul Anderson [1] in its short stories Time Patrol has this theory that the past can be disturbed to some extend, some things have to happen independently of particular individuals or events.

As a let down as it is for readers interested in how the author handles and solves time paradoxes (it is better than the insipid and sloppy multiverse solution, though) - Time Patrol are mostly history-focused action stories - this theory makes sense to me. At some point the world gets "ready" to discover things because all the pieces of the puzzle are in its hands. In the case of Facebook, I believe it is not an accident or "because Zuckerberg"; a massive social network had to emerge, in particular due to network effects.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul_Anderson

> then I think someone will do so.

Yes, but, would they be any where near the level of what FB achieved? Take Truth Social as an example. It started because people wanted a place they get out of the larger group to dedicate to like minded. In this Philip K Dick style rewriting of history where FB was created by those behind Truth, would it have ever achieved critical mass?

Just because someone else attempts to fill in the vacuum of something else not being there does not mean that it will succeed in filling the void. Truth only survives on the cult of personality, not because people really want to be using it or because it's like a good product

easy, man. there was another site called myspace back then. they would have won the game and the end result would have been nearly the same or worse.

Haha what? It’s the literal opposite mate. We’ve had an explosion of independent and non-capital aligned media. No matter what your brand of crazy is, you can find the “thought leaders” and community for you.

> unregulated news

For all of unregulated news's flaws, government controlled news would be worse.

That’s my thought.

One analogy is local news media ecosystems across the US, which have generally looked pretty similar though not 100% identical over the past ~125 years or so, suggesting some determinism based on broader culture and technology.

If Facebook had stumbled, something else would have gotten the next microgeneration of college students and then their parents and grandparents.

It’s possible to me that an independent Instagram would have filled Facebook’s niche a few years later, and something like Snapchat would have taken the current Instagram niche. Maybe Twitter would have played a different role.

It’s also possible a web 2.0 answer to classmates.com would have grabbed the older crowd, and we’d have a slightly more profound age split.

But ultimately I think we’d end up where we are — a set of platforms algorithmically curating feeds of user-generated content — with a few cosmetic differences.

Before Facebook there was Myspace and Orkut (which was huge in Brazil) - things were definitely pointed that direction.

Yeah, all social media has been pretty toxic for society. But Twitter has been especially bad. Turns out that requiring everyone to use very short messages means that interactions devolve into short, hot takes almost immediately. And then people just get angrier and angrier at each other as they fight back and forth via those barbs. Twitter couldn't have done more to unravel the social fabric if they actively tried to.