> Tech companies like Facebook have mastered the art of distorting choice and consent.
I have seen this spill over into all sorts of everyday things. HR policy changes at work are communicated more like this now. You suddenly get an interstitial when logging in one day, demanding that you accept or acknowledge some change or new policy. There is often no other option, no avenues given to protest or question or even discuss it. These things used to be communicated by email, before that by memo, making it apparent who the author was and thus who to follow up to if you felt the need to do so. Now it's an annonymous "we" who have decided that this is the new order of things, and if I want to get on with doing my work I need to acquiesce.
A lot of places replaced a policy and procedure manual for stuff like HR and Procurement with video content.
I had to do something for an employee on workers compensation a few years ago and the training consisted of a 45 minute video consisting of recitation of a PowerPoint and some screenshots from PeopleSoft. Literally a monotone HR drone reading form the slide, except he also added critical, unwritten commentary.
Right but if you quit a job you're not quitting all jobs.
That's not true with social media outside of fringe options like Mastodon (Which is like quitting a FAANG job to work at Wendy's... and this is coming from someone that likes Mastodon)
To be honest, Mastodon does have some UX issues that prevent it from being as popular as it could potentially become. The lack of the ability to import your existing contact list is the big one. Mastodon tries very hard to focus on finding new people with common interests, but that's a very much secondary activity on any social media platform. It's important, yes, but it's secondary. And emphasizing that "instance is a community" doesn't help this much either because people often have more than one area of interest.
I'm trying to fix these issues with my own fediverse project.
The problem is deeper than that. I tried to persuade someone here that mastodon had the potential to grow as quickly as Twitter. Their response was “we don’t want it to,” more or less.
And probably with good reason. Not everything needs to be the largest thing it can be. It’s why bean sprouts are different from oak trees, as someone once put it.
I have one friend who set up his own Mastodon server. Had some fun with it and seemingly forgot about it. The server is still running tho.
Some people just don't have the need for social media, they have enough life without it. That's fine. For most, though, having some form of social media presence is beneficial. And the platform on which they have that presence better not be based on the scourge that is the attention economy.
In fairness, the person sending the email or the memo isn't usually the person that came up with the policy, right? Isn't that usually done by a large group?
What's the difference in just emailing HR to complain than replying to the email? In either case, can you really expect anything to happen in a large company?
I'm sure I'll get lots of eye rolls and skepticism for saying this but: i feel like crypto projects and DAOs are in the very early stages of solving some of these problems by giving communities abilities to vote on upgrades or fork off if they don't agree with an implemented change. It's still very early and governance systems are still being experimented with, but I'm optimistic.
How the heck will anarchism help you when you don't have any power to implement the changes? You have to have the leverage to deny decision makers things they need or want or else you are simply subject to their whims, vote or no vote.
This is the purpose of labor organizing. A strike, work stoppage, slow down, or other action will exert pressure on decision makers directly.
> This is the purpose of labor organizing. A strike, work stoppage, slow down, or other action will exert pressure on decision makers directly.
Lately I've been been wondering regarding labor organization: why not cut out the negotiation part and start companies directly run by unions? Or, as they're more commonly called, co-ops.
Intuitively, it seems to better align the decision-makers with the laborers because they become the same people.
Maybe it's the same Facebook-vs-Mastodon problem in that people want to work at the popular place with the large market share but they also want to have their human rights respected, and a co-op doesn't offer the former.
I agree, co-ops are far superior to private corporations. However, they still exist in a market and the market will force them to make many similar decisions to private corporations. This is why we need a consciously planned economy. We cannot be free without the ability to make meaningful decisions.
> the market will force them to make many similar decisions to private corporations
I'm curious which decisions you believe will be forced. The cases I can think of (particularly around "engagement" since I've been reading about that lately) are decisions that derive from deeper decisions (building your business around selling ads) that are at some point within a company's control.
And it may be that the company will need to make decisions employees don't like even if they're the ones who have to make the decisions, but at least then they're involved in the decision-making process rather than having it dictated to them.
> This is why we need a consciously planned economy. We cannot be free without the ability to make meaningful decisions.
At face value this sounds like an oxymoron to me. A planned economy is planned by someone. Then those living with that economy are beholden to the one(s) doing the planning, who will naturally be motivated to plan in their own favor to the detriment of others. Some mechanism would need to be applied to counteract the natural self-interest of the planner(s).
> I'm curious which decisions you believe will be forced.
Decisions around how hard to work, how much to extract from customers, business model, suppliers, environmentalism, etc. Anything that is dictated by needing to be profitable. It is possible to run essential services at a loss or neutrally because they provide public benefits that are not easily capturable as private profit.
> And it may be that the company will need to make decisions employees don't like even if they're the ones who have to make the decisions, but at least then they're involved in the decision-making process rather than having it dictated to them.
Ideally they would be able to make decisions that serve them and their customers well. Not always possible, but market logic severely restricts the possibilities.
> At face value this sounds like an oxymoron to me. A planned economy is planned by someone.
There is a huge literature on how this might be accomplished. Local planning can be accomplished democratically at the ground level and information passed up and down a chain to larger bodies that gather more inputs. Smaller bodies at different levels of the chain can have various veto powers.
Right now Facebook is the only company that can make a client.. In a crypto native ecosystem you could have multiple competing clients. Instead of organizing labor and playing directly into the hands of the corps, users simply vote with their attention by choosing or building a more desirable client. Progress is made through innovation, technology, and community building. Organizing labor just isn't enough!!! You have to go further.
Admitting means understanding how exactly it would help. For issues described in TFA and this subthread the platform trust issue (which “crypto” part is supposed to solve) doesn’t exist. You may discuss both on twitter with the same effect.
I can't see how - if they wanted a consensus, there are myriad ways they could have a vote without blockchain.
The typical organisation that does stuff like this is quite large, has heavy bureaucracy baked-in, and has an HR department whose aim is to "protect" the company and squeeze every drop of productivity from employees at the lowest price possible. They do not care half a shit about people, and hell would freeze over before they allowed their people to vote on policy changes.
What’s wrong with “25 best survey sites in 2021” (or change.org for more serious questions)?
Will your HR find survey site CEO and buy them several times over?
Is there a hope to fork your company?
What you described looks like a solution looking for a problem. And it wouldn’t solve it either. If a change is worth enough money, “they” will add as many real-person fake opinions as needed until it’s not done.
This article doesn't even mention how horrible the implementation is, too. It didn't merge your conversations with a person into a single thread across Facebook Messenger and Instagram. Instead it created 4 permutations of threads with a person.
* Your Messenger + Friend's Messenger
* Your Instagram + Friend's Instagram
* Your Messenger + Friend's Instagram
* Your Instagram + Friend's Messenger
Each of these conversations will result in a new, separate thread, even if your Facebook and Instagram accounts are linked. It's such a mess.
Imagine being a new manager/vp/whatever there... do you want to go to a shareholders meeting and say "this was a great year, we mainatained all the same stuff, because it's working great already!"... or do you want to say "we've unvailed a totally new, totally better chat platform, with millions of new users, and gajillions of new chat threads!"?
Sadly, the same is happening at other tech firms, where only something "new" gets praised, and we end up with all the icons looking the same, and good products killed (just count the number of chat/communication services from google).
This is so on point. People do things to make themselves look good without care for the product, user, or even company success sometimes.
I still find it puzzling that a bunch of people without actual product nor technical knowledge and experience dictate how products get build and evolve. Ego driven development.
Well I mean, if you think about, everything they do is just making up work. They've basically succeeded in the whole "mega corporation too big to fail, huge amounts of regular automated revenue" thing. They could probably kick their feet up and just coast for a while and not worry but instead they have thousands of employees and hundreds of managers all making up things to do to try and position themselves to make more money in the future. They're already just making up stuff to do
>This is not an update, but a new messaging system from which you can’t switch back.
> These are simply features presented to artificially devalue one of the systems, distract from the real changes, and manipulate users into changing to a different system.
> this change will eventually link to your real name.
So the sticking point on the first point is that it is a one-way decision? By that framing, every product update is a cost. Upgrading from iOS 13 to iOS 14 was a cost. For the second point, then every time a company decides not to build a new feature that is also a cost? I guess I could buy that, but it feels pretty weak.
When you use a free but not open product, you are not the customer. This is an old and tired idea, but also true.
If you want features not disappearing or changing when you don't want them to, you need to be in control. I know only two ways to be in control: you either pay (and the agreement contains a provision about the product properties you care about), or manage it yourself.
Using a free-as-in-beer service always puts someone else in control, not you. Bear it in mind every time you register with such a service, and shape your expectations.
Yes, proprietary software is negative in the freedom dimension.
You have to realize that what your saying here is a category error: The libre alternatives don't have billions of dollars of marketing, engineering, market cap and users.
EFF here is trying to point out exactly what you are espousing. These kind of dark patterns are used at all levels to drive engagement, including sign up and retention. ("But ... How will I be able to talk to my friends if I delete Facebook??")
I can't recommend a solution, but "Well, its free, what do you expect?" is even worse.
Would you prefer to hold private parties somehow liable to follow your convenience or best interest, and not their best interest? Anyone who would suggest that should prepare for this approach to be applied to themselves — that is, being coerced to do what some other people want. Whatever it is, it's not freedom.
(Yes, indeed, the law works by coercion in the common interests. But I don't see any law having been broken here.)
So yes, it's free to play — what did you expect? Too much? Memorize this, and remember next time. Tell your friends and relatives what to not expect. Name and shame the entities which did something unsavory: this helps make users less gullible, and through that, nudges companies to be more careful.
Consider avoiding the use of stuff you don't control for important things. Be conscious when consuming free candy from a for-profit entity, even if you think your interests are currently aligned. But don't force anybody's hand.
>Consider avoiding the use of stuff you don't control for important things. Be conscious when consuming free candy from a for-profit entity, even if you think your interests are currently aligned. But don't force anybody's hand.
This is excellent advice, but it doesn't help all the people who are not even in the same league as this idea, who are just making their way through the landscape using whatever they come across to not get herded further into the vortex of asshole walled gardens.
The value proposition of this to mom or some kid is gonna sound like: "What?"
I'm sure they can relate, but the good alternative is probably going to involve thinking about something. Just consider how many people can't stop clicking phishing emails.
Our society has really turned the screws up wrt attention, it's pretty taxing just living life sometimes. I hate to get all "hoi polloi", but I mean people are out there that are sure Sars-CoV-2 vaccines render them magnetic.
Facebook definitely has a "real name" policy, but it isn't clear to me why a unified messaging experience means that your real name will now be shown to other users. That seems like a product decision, rather than an inevitability.
As an aside, I don't like this feature and have not opted into it because I actually dislike interoperability. If there was a hypothetical way to get Twitter DM / IG Direct / Messenger / iMessages all in one unified inbox, I would never use it because I actually prefer to keep things in context. My persona and networks on the various platforms are different on purpose, and I like to keep it that way.
>it isn't clear to me why a unified messaging experience means that your real name will now be shown to other users. That seems like a product decision, rather than an inevitability.
They've probably noticed that Instagram has more marketshare with younger audiences and better engagement, where Facebook is full of your grandma and "old people".
If they can slowly boil the frog and make them the same, they have a much stronger grip. Its better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.
Same. As a Facebook skeptic and EFF donor, I think this article is unhelpful because it tries to portray user choice as something bad just because Facebook is involved. It totally misses that most software platforms do not allow users to opt-out of massive UI/UX changes and the world could be better if they did.
When there are countless legitimate criticisms to make regarding Facebook, an institution as influential as EFF coming out with something this weak actually hurts the cause.
It seems like Facebook is trying to prevent anti-trust regulatory action by making it harder to split up / distinguish its core products. Although I’m unsure of how effective that would be.
Zuck already merged Facebook's and Instagram's database so good luck splitting them.
I hope free market economy prevails or in another words lawsuits fail. They should've learnt their lesson with Microsoft(antitrust is waste of taxpayers' money).
The Microsoft antitrust thing was about bundling Internet Explorer in Windows, and also Microsoft's Java VM. The argument from Microsoft was that these two components constituted essential parts of Windows (to that end internet explorer became a web view control in Windows) and so couldn't be removed. In practice this hurt competition from other browser vendors and from Sun.
20 years on, Internet Explorer is dead and Microsoft Edge uses Blink (the same engine as Chrome). Firefox is the only other browser with a distinct rendering engine.
Microsoft's Java VM also died. It was removed in XP SP2 and Microsoft no longer distribute, even via MSDN, versions of Windows that shipped with it. You could argue these events lead directly to the creation of .net since Microsoft's original plan was to jump on the Java train.
So it worked, or at least certainly shaped those various markets.
That thing in your pocket you use to browse the web and make phone calls is a computer too, so Windows isn't the dominating operating system.
And IE isn't the number one browser anymore, so this worked out.
I was alluding to PC operating system industry but whatever. Yea it worked out really well Microsoft is only worth $2 trillion.
And try to work from home or remote work on your smartphone and not on your PC or laptop and tell me how productive you are. Or try to get any serious task done on smartphone except taking photos, browsing the web and writing notes.
It did, actually. Microsoft was not able to engage in as many unfair anti-competitive practices in the browser space, and partially because of that, there was a increase in browser competition.
Preventing microsoft from locking the world in to its browser, with illegal and anti-competitive practices, caused lots of better browsers to be developed.
What happened to Microsoft? Microsoft still controls 70-90% market share of computer operating system industry. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple achieved dominant market position through legal and fair market competition.
> Microsoft still controls 70-90% market share of computer operating system industry.
Definitely not, unless you are defining computer in a way that only includes computer form factors that existed in the 90s and also excludes server computers.
That isn't how antitrust works. In the US, having a monopoly is not a crime; abusing a monopoly is. The consent decree had very specific goals and requirements, you can go read about it at Wikipedia. But none of them were about shrinking their market share.
The European EC decision was different, but also was not targeting market share.
People stopped caring about Windows being dominant years ago. Mac and Linux became competitive for those who wanted it, mobile ate the world, and Windows only dominates in Office and gaming, neither of which are apparently worth fighting over.
I think that's less an indictment of anti-trust lawsuits being effective and more of an indictment of either a lack of knowledge or willful ignorance around how connected the economy was becoming via computers.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook are all companies that are beyond a reasonable scale - there are far too many eggs in those baskets for long term economic health. Those companies are making GD, Raytheon and Lockheed look like kids playing in a sandbox.
>Those companies are making GD, Raytheon and Lockheed look like kids playing in a sandbox.
Maybe because >Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook are extremely useful consumer technology companies. I don't know about you but I won't be buying fighter aircraft anytime soon.
Boeing gets about 28.6 Billion from the US government each year[1] given the US population of around 400 million you're giving them (if we spread the cost evenly) about seventy five dollars every year. Once upon a time this was a large sum of money - now-a-days it's probably less than most folks spend on spotify and definitely less folks spend on coffee in a non-pandemic year.
A monopoly of any kind subverts both the free market and democracy, and there is literally no such thing as "wasting taxpayers' money" at the federal level in the US, because the US issues its own currency
I was a fan of social media at it's birth. Like many, I saw an ability to stay in touch with old acquaintances with less effort and intrusion. We didn't have to interrupt each other with a phone call, or worry about replying to a text in a reasonable amount of time. People would post updates, interact with the updates, and thus in a sense interact with each other's personalities manifested in these posts/comments/likes. It was convenient, and I feel, beneficial.
Then came "the algorithms", capitalist refinement of the experience to increase user attention and interaction. Or more accurately, addiction. This is where I had to quit, a couple years ago. The updated algorithms (instead of linear time representation of posts) did cause me to care too much. There was too frequently new content to see, from things I didn't even care about. Cool videos from GoPro, RedBull, etc. Weeks old updates from forgotten friends sprinkled in to make it personal. Much of the time I used to spend in my head, in a good way, such as in line at a grocery store, or waiting for a project to compile, I was now refreshing feeds. My mind operated more in the realm of social media than in it's own existence.
Now we get to the consolidation. All of your social media, even your "private" chats on WhatsApp, tied to one profile. One centralized database of your life, quickly queryable, cleaned, sorted, and available to advertisers and governments alike. One part of me actually likes this change from Facebook. At least they're being honest about their data being merged. But it's another optimization designed to generate revenue, do not believe otherwise. It's one more step towards the apex of profitability. I don't know what the results of this step will be, but I'll probably be bitter about it, and make another rambling comment in a couple of years.
This is a perfectly legitimate comment, but I would go one step further: throw Mark Zuckerberg in jail. While it may seem to be an industry wide practice I believe that he is above and beyond the most predatory and cynical of the practitioners of these things. Remember how Facebook lied to advertisers about video metrics for 2 years? Other companies will look at fb's success and say 'hey, I have to do that too'. Not realizing the only way they're successful is because they have a wanton disregard for any decency whatsoever
I wonder what the long term plan is with this. Instagram and Facebook become one app? Surely they see that's not a good idea. Personally, I think Facebook as a product is struggling heavily and instead of letting it die, they're going to take down their other apps with them. I won't complain if they want to destroy themselves though.
Imagine a parallel universe where social network’s interests and the interests of its users were actually aligned—all because paid social was seen as the norm from get go. Fully featured APIs? Multi-platform third-party messaging clients? Ethical privacy policies? Once the end user is able to vote with their money, so many possibilities suddenly open.
The status quo is much more preferable to social networks and their shareholders, of course. Charging advertisers arbitrary amounts based on eyeball count no one can actually verify, while not having to worry about losing paying customers due to ignoring requests of locked-in users, is a nice position to be in.
To the point about market regulation, IMO there may be a place for a limited, surgically precise yet not targeting any specific companies intervention (for example, “you are obligated to provide an API covering the entirety of your GUI features if you serve more than N users”) that would, a few causal links down the line, break such shockingly dysfunctional customer-provider relationships, normalize paid social and let the market do its thing.
If you peel back the layers and sequence of causation, I think you'll always find that there is some government intervention that has a hand in these "market" failures. Unfortunately, I don't think capitalism can function properly in an environment that has government fiddling, which is what we're seeing. And I say that as a full free-market advocate.
Either way, government is too blame. Both for not regulating these bad things away, and also for having some hand in causing them N-levels back (you just can't see or prove this one easily). It's a nice sweet spot for governments and their officials and advocates, because they can always absolve themselves by blaming the free-market in one way or another. They do too much or do the wrong regulation, causing something "bad" in the market, and boom they blame "the market". Likewise, they put some half-assed regulations that don't do much and yet again they blame "not enough regulation". The entire thing is ridiculously circular and self-reinforcing. Almost as if it's been designed for argumentative deadlock.
It would be nice to set up these Silos in Matrix identity servers so that you can find your friends. This currently works with email and phone but adding facebook, instagram, snapshat, twitter... would be a nice step forward.
I said no to a smartphone entirely and it's been working out pretty well for me except that dumbphones are becoming such a specialty device that the quality has been dropping while prices have been steadily increasing.
> Facebook called it a step toward “interoperability, saying, “We want to give people a choice so they can reach their friends across these networks from whichever app they prefer.”
If they really mean that (and ofcourse they don’t), they should help drive a new, open protocol, not create a new closed, centralized platform.
I really like the new Instagram and Facebook messengers because of how rich they are: you can send text, audio, pictures and video, and links get nice previews. You can control how long your messages stay around, and you can react to messages with the full emoji set.
> Instagram owner Facebook said in an email that its servers download only a downscaled version of an image, not the original file, and that the company doesn't store that data. The email also said that its servers run the JavaScript to vet it for security. Mysk, however, said that the video demonstrates that Instagram downloaded a 2.6GB file (an Ubuntu ISO with the file renamed to ubuntu.png) in its entirety. He also noted that most other messengers strip out JavaScript rather than downloading it and running it on their servers.
This is something which comes up a lot: people simultaneously complaining about invasive ad-tracking and all the ads they see suck.
But it's the truth. e.g. I visit the website of some weird brand of coffee. Suddenly, I get spammed with ads about artisan coffee, even though I could care less. Both intrusive (you took data from somewhere way outside of your domain to guess something about me) and annoying (you guessed wrong).
Moreover, this tends to happen very often for gambling, porn, weight loss, pregnancy, etc. all things which are very private, because they also happen to be stuff people spend a lot of money on. So I want to avoid those sites, not just because the government or insurance could use it against me, but because my ads will get even more annoying.
Maybe their AI googled divorce rates and found these somewhat promising.
I bet that if the entire ad industry just binned all people into 16384 groups and hired 65536 specialists to curate these profiles, the industry would be much more succesful, because today it is a complete bullshit with all these pointless hi-tech and surveillance efforts. Modern ads is the stupidest thing ever created (apart from crypto).
I don't use Facebook very often, but anecdotally I've gotten a decent number of solid ads for things I've ended up buying (mainly keto-friendly foods/snacks).
I don't think I've ever bought something through a Google or reddit ad, or if I have it was a long time ago and/or with less frequency, and I use both of those much more actively than Facebook. reddit ads will sometimes capture my attention/engagement, though, whereas Google ads tend to be more like noise that I tune out.
I would argue that this is because Facebook has removed the distinction between actual content (from friends and pages you follow) and paid advertisements, it requires more mental effort to determine if content isn't an ad than for Google Ads, where there's usually a fairly clear distinction between organic content and advertising.
This is why "influencer marketing" has an even higher conversion rate than Facebook or Instagram ads, because the distinction between organic content and advertising is removed entirely.
Ok but y'all do a bad job of it. The ads are irrelevant or they're for something I already bought. They're invasive, obnoxious and useless.
My wife bought me an ooni pizza oven for Christmas. A box showed up at our door labelled ooni and I didn't know what it was because I had never heard of that brand. My wife took it and hid it. Then I started getting ads for ooni pizza ovens on Instagram. So thanks for ruining Christmas, Facebook. Assholes.
Not only possible, it's actually required by Facebook's business model. The set of things that people actually need to buy isn't large enough to support Facebook's scale.
Not really. Whether the ads are targeted or not, you almost certainly don't need the shit they're selling & from that point of view, ads are, by default, bad.
> I will provide you with all of my personal data for you to sell it
Reminder that Facebook and Google don't actually sell this information, you can't pay them for access to their ad database. You have to really loosen your definition of 'sell' if you want to include 'using data to target ads'.
It's not directly selling the data, but when you target an ad, and a user takes an action on the ad (sometimes that's a click, sometimes it's just loading a beacon in the ad, sometimes the user may need to transact after a click), the advertise can correlate the targetting with the user.
That's not exactly selling the data, but it's close.
Disclosure: former Facebook employee, not in ads except for an ill-fated project that afaik hasn't launched and all my ideas were considered and rejected.
You're getting downvoted rather than replied to which is a bummer, because I understand your POV but have recently changed my stance on this.
I used to be the standard kind of user of FB and Instagram who had friends and occasionally posted, etc. Then I realized it makes me feel like crap being on there and hated their business practices so stopped using it.
Lately though, I've had a few experiences that made me rethink how optional it really is. I recently sold a car and FB Marketplace has /so many more people/ along with a higher degree of trust than Craigslist. I got a bunch of offers from FB and none from Craigslist despite the same listing.
But even more significant is how businesses interact with the platforms. Because a bunch of people use FB/Insta, a lot of local businesses post new things or updates or specials there. Lately, new businesses are not even bothering with a website and just setting up an Insta. If I'm looking up what a store's hours were this past holiday weekend in the USA, then I know it's most likely going to be best to look it up on their Insta page. And just go ahead and see what the experience is to do that when you're not logged in!
Sure it'd be GREAT if those businesses didn't do that, but the alternatives aren't great and I'm not going to pressure them into reforming social media when they're just trying to make money off of selling an ice cream cone; they've got it hard enough!
It is hard for those businesses, but I think we need to realize why they post their info on Instagram. It's because that's where their customers are. If more people are on there, they will cater to them on that platform (for the business). If people were to start using other services, the businesses would cater to them that way. If you'd rather businesses not post their info on whatever app, then don't use that app. That's the reason they do it.
I've been without Facebook or Instagram for over 6 years, it's totally optional. I sell stuff on Nextdoor and the dozens of other buy/sell/trade apps. I connect with my family via text/calls/video or other apps. People don't want to be the first to get off of a platform and convince others, and then we get into this situation where we think it isn't optional.
Facebook marketplace is such a gold mine, it's so annoying.
I had 3 pieces of lightly used Ikea furniture I wanted to get rid of. 2 weeks of craigslist with no bites. 2 hours of facebook market place and I offloaded them easy.
Completely anecdotal here, from within a small city. But people trust FB market place much more than CL for what that's worth.
What's stopping you taking a purely transactional approach to using those sites? You can post on FB Marketplace or stay logged into Instagram without ever needing to scroll the feed, give out likes, or engage in pointless arguments. It's not like you get reputation points for engaging in all the toxic behaviors.
Nothing is, so that's exactly the approach I take with them! I recommend it! My response is to absolutist positions like "delete your account" and "well it's not a /necessity/ so they should be able to do whatever they want."
> These are completely non-essential services in every way.
This perspective is completely neglecting that a significant portion of the developing world communicates almost exclusively via Facebook/WhatsApp. For communicating with people in those parts of the world, these services become essential in every way that matters.
There are countries where mobile phone operators will give you free Facebook Messenger/Instagram (sometimes WhatsApp), but not Telegram or Signal...making the use of a Facebook product practically mandatory if you want to connect with certain people.
I feel like this comes up again and again. For some people Instagram or Facebook are sometimes the only way to communicate with new peers without introducing too much friction. In France, for example, most of my friends will exclusively use Instagram when connecting with new people.
Are there no other options? Do your friends use them exclusively because they are sticky? Is there actually a feature that makes them unable to use other apps?
I find a lot of times, people just don't want to change, regardless of whether they should. I was the first to delete my Facebook in my group of friends, and now they all have, and my family has mostly jumped ship as well.
I'm sure your friends can use something else, they just choose not to.
Right, they choose not to invest more time and thought into something else. That's why the pattern of the social media bait and switch is frustrating.
The company made a promise. People bought that promise.
Company changes the promise and puts a bow on it and dresses it up. Company only notes the promise in the fine print. But because it already has the power and because people don't want to be on alert 100% of the time (because that can actually kill you), the deception works.
So you bring up a fallacy. The actual option here is "pay attention to every company you use to communicate all the time" or don't pay attention and accidentally agree to something not well advertised.
Interesting fact, Facebook has an F rating on the BBB's website.
Of course, the very first complaint on there is an interesting one that completely misconstrues the first amendment right, but again, that's just interesting.
Of course they can use something else. The very vast majority just want to talk to each other, not spend energy moving as many people as they can to their preferred platform to do the same thing.
At a certain point, arguments like this become out of date. You don't need cars, electricity, phones, email, citizenship, or even a name to survive. The only essential things are being able to forage/hunt, find running water. But as a civilized society we strive to raise the bar. At this point social media is an essential service, people just haven't caught up to it yet.
Only tangentially related, but is social media a net positive for society? An argument could be made for any of those things you named alongside it which have now become modern essentials, but does social media belong in that list? Instead of democratizing access to social media maybe the answer is to cut off the tentacles these firms use to maintain their grip over our society?
You could argue the same for speech or literacy. Free speech lets people organize gangs and crimes; literacy lets people learn how to commit crimes or learn about legal loopholes. Ignorance is bliss, so why not revert to medieval times where the church and monarchy keep people safe and happy in little bubbles of ignorance?
Essential to whom? For example, I used to be a consumerist pig, but when I trimmed the fat by deleting YouTube, Reddit, FB Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram off my phone, I suddenly felt like I could breathe again. Now I spend my time during the day doing the things I love (hobbies).
P.S. I've kept HN because, you know... the last bastion of reasonable discourse.
Social media is far from an essential service. Name one aspect of it that you deem essential which cannot be taken care of elsewhere. I've managed along just fine without Facebook and the like, along with many other people. Essential does not mean convenient.
Your lack of experience with businesses or information that is only available through social media is not on me to correct. Especially in places like 3rd world countries or small businesses everywhere.
It's a little bit more complicated. Some companies only provide support through Facebook, WhatsApp etc.
Even some governments use them as their main information channel.
In the pandemic the only way to watch the live press conferences was on Facebook. Only ours later they were available on YouTube.
They're becoming more and more essential. The last time I applied for a passport, the only working way to check the status of my application was via Twitter.
>Facebook made promises to keep the two services operating separately, and Facebook broke those promises just two years later, with similarly unclear notice to users
When will we learn? These are businesses. A promise is worthless, the only thing that matters are contracts.
And if your politics do not agree with Hacker News, then expect pontification about how the first amendment only applies to governments and not large corporations with massive network effects.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
can you explain how this should apply to "large corporations with massive network effects." would the other sections of the first amendment apply to private corps such that they couldn't deny medical coverage based on the corporation’s religious views?
That really doesn't seem like a good test for determining whether we remove a company's first amendment right not to distribute speech it doesn't want to.
The New York Times has revenue greater than the tax revenue of a few dozen nations. Should the government force the New York Times to carry any editorial anyone submits?
I think these sister comments are missing the point that contracts in general lead to consequences - that's what OP means by 'the only thing that matters are contracts', as in you can't trust their promise unless they actually sign a contract that says they won't do <x>. This has nothing to do with the EULA.
Once again even that doesn't mean anything. Companies will absolutely weight the benefit of breaking a contract against not breaking it. If the company decides it is worth it, they will.
When every EULA in existence contains a "despite everything we just said, we can actually just do whatever we want if we decide we want to" clause, why would you expect a contract to be binding in any meaningful way? Companies this big simply won't enter contracts that could potentially cause real damage if broken.
And good look suing a company with billions of dollars. Even with a strong case and good lawyers, they will drag out the process and all the court costs will make it impossible to finish, unless you also have billions of dollars.
I have seen this spill over into all sorts of everyday things. HR policy changes at work are communicated more like this now. You suddenly get an interstitial when logging in one day, demanding that you accept or acknowledge some change or new policy. There is often no other option, no avenues given to protest or question or even discuss it. These things used to be communicated by email, before that by memo, making it apparent who the author was and thus who to follow up to if you felt the need to do so. Now it's an annonymous "we" who have decided that this is the new order of things, and if I want to get on with doing my work I need to acquiesce.