The early iterations of Facebook, just like the early iterations of most internet community and social platforms legitimately brought and kept people together and helped them forge and maintain more solid group connections… I still communicate with a wider range of people from my past, high school, university, etc because of it and enjoy easy access to excellent information about certain vehicles and natural areas (hot springs) because of it. That core value still exists behind all the evil.

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esalman an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Thanks to Facebook I am finding out that those people I grew up with and had connections have become assholes and would behave like one in public forums, even at the matured age of 40+. No thank you.

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LastTrain an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The focus wasn’t making the world a better place, or even to provide any value at all to its /users/, who are not its customers. The focus it was and is making money and to take this essay at face value, nothing else. Nothing wrong with making money - honestly.

	▲	jimbokun an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I’m sure a lot of early employees convinced themselves Facebook had positive social value in addition to making them rich. That was the default mindset in the early days of the web.
	▲	thin_carapace 7 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		nothing wrong with the concept of making money, sure. let's look at the specific method that meta uses to make money. meta onsells private information about their platform users, to more accurately program those same platform users, according to commands of those supplying money. this can effectively be seen as slavery coercion (because slaves have no privacy, slaves obey their masters command, and nobody truly wants to be a slave). personally I don't agree with slavery and I don't agree with coercion, so I see plenty wrong with the way that meta makes money by middlemanning slavery. therefore I see your generalization as insidious because it downplays other viewpoints without adding anything.

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coolThingsFirst an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Fcb for me it's ads, ads ads and even more ads. The newsfeed is complete slop from news outlets. It's just extremely noisy. The only thing that I use there is the Messenger because my older friends aren't too savvy with Whatsapp.

And even the Messenger app is a sloppy behemoth of an app with barely working Search. This is coming from a company with thousands of engineers and the core features of the business barely work.

98% of newsfeed is recommendation slop.