I want to know this too! If I invent a time machine, I'll message you but till then here's my ungrounded take (Obviously everything here is my personal opinion and not evidenced)

The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion. Meta are a particularly bad example of this, but as long as there's money to be made by providing a platform for polarising politics and fake news, then I think someone will do so.

Who knows, maybe in that alternate universe you'd be posting "if Yahoo hadn't made such savy choices, I wonder if we would have the political climate we have today?"

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cruffle_duffle 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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Eisenstein 4 days ago | parent [-]

It wasn't that bad when we had the Fairness Doctrine, which was removed in 1987. From there you could see a steady slide in US politics as polarization increased, from the Clinton scandal, to Gingrich and then Bush 2000. By the time Facebook hit it was already too late.

	▲	rynohack 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The Fairness Doctrine had a very limited influence on the media in general. It's power has been vastly over stated as of the last 15 years. It was only applicable to broadcast media, and rarely enforced. Nearly all of the enforcement was on behalf of private individuals wanting free airtime to respond to negative new stories about them. In my opinion it's a very bad idea to want political appointees to decide when an issue hasn't been given fair news coverage. The very idea that there is only 2 sides to an issue reinforces the two party system that has made media so biased in the first place

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kevin_thibedeau 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	JustExAWS 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Before the rise of social media, the mainstream news ignored both things going on in minority communities like police violence and ignored rural America. The MAGA community and Trump himself bypassed the mainstream media because of social media. America has always been polarized - institutions just never gave them a voice.

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gonzobonzo 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

	▲	JustExAWS 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		So polarization wasn’t an issue when segregation was the law in much of the south with separate schools, water fountains, entrances?
	▲	benrutter 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I don't dissagree, but I think I'm using "news and opinion" more loosely. To my mind, facebook putting your sister's political rant into your feed above your uncle's fishing pictures, is a kind of wauly of profiting from devisive political opinion. Even if it is more subtle than the NYT publishing a think piece.
	▲	mejutoco 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own views, polarization increased. It is the bot farms voicing opinions IMO. For regular people one account equals one human, and it is a difficult feeling to uproot for many people.

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JustExAWS 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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astrobe_ 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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dylan604 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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

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kergonath 3 days ago | parent [-]

> 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.

Not at all. It started because Trump was banned from Twitter. That’s it. The whole point was to give Trump a platform. There is nothing organic or natural about Truth Social and if it is the symptom of anything, it’s that some people just have too much money.

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dylan604 3 days ago | parent [-]

I kind of disagree in that the giving him a platform is just the cover for the actual purpose which is a way for anyone to shovel him money through a "legitimate" means to avoid any sense of bribe or quid pro quo. Very similar into how certain countries that wanted to curry favor made long term rental agreements for property owned by Trump. It was only slightly less obvious than dropping of bags in the oval office with $ marked on them.

	▲	kergonath 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed. Good point.

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oc1 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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anomaly_ 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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benrutter 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

There's another comment along these lines too. I think my "news and opinion" phrase sounded like I exclusively meant mainstream news. But I was thinking more generally abouts "news and opinion content" like Breitbart, X comments, facebook rants, etc.

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edm0nd 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah the explosion of the internet has allowed some conspiracy schizo person in the US to connect with another schizo conspriacy person across the world in Moldova to quickly find each other online and then confirm each others schizo beliefs.

Believe in flat Earth? Are you a holocaust denier? Think the moon landing is fake? Is the government gang stalking you? Welp you are in luck, there's thousands of other people just like you and here is a forum.

Kinda wild when you think about it.

	▲	arwhatever 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Do you feel the urge to fuck your toaster? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667362

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dehrmann 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> unregulated news

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

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benrutter 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, probably. But there's a spectrum. The UK has quite strict rules on air time to differing views (you can't air a climate change story which presents climate denial as the only opinion as news). I think those rules lead to a better system, not a more government controlled one.

Ironically, we (the UK) have the BBC which is fairly literally, government funded (not controlled) news. It's much more even handed than a lot of commercial news.

	▲	roenxi 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Britain's political culture is a bit of a disaster though. Kier Starmer was the best they could find in the last election and as far as I can tell even the people who voted for him don't seem to support him in the main. This time last century they controlled 20% of the worlds population and sat in a vast network of trade and technological innovation all feeding back towards the British Isles. Then through basically an ongoing refusal to engage with political realities they've managed to transition to the number 5 and dropping economy in nominal terms and, realistically, probably don't have the industrial oomph to back up the paper numbers. There was political debate recently over whether the country should even be able to produce steel. Per capita the picture is a bit worse, and on a PPP basis they're actually a hair below the European average. They've also managed to become relatively politically isolated because no view seems to have gained ascendancy over what their foreign policy should look like. Now it'd be unfair to blame it all on the present crop given the huge amounts of damage done in WWII, but it is a bit difficult for me to accept the trendlines of the UK compared to the recovering USSR countries or China/Taiwan while believing that there is a healthy political discourse. The high performing countries have done amazing things even from a standing start in the 70s, 80s and 90s. From such a dominant starting position, with the momentum of the old empire and technically being on the winning side of pretty much every major conflict and ideological UK politics seem to have done rather badly. The country is wildly average for somewhere that was so ahead of the game relatively recently and with so many opportunities to succeed in the interim and such poor quality of candidates allowed to hold power.