They don't just have lots of users, they have more users than any country in the history of the world (that's 1.9 billion monthly users). Therefore there are potentially massive, world-changing consequences to everything they do, and even those who don't use it can't opt out of the effects.

Do you really feel like a non-democratic oligarchy (or more inflammatory language, a dictator) should have that much power?

edit: posted too much to make a proper reply, but China is only at 1.3 billion and is obviously a lot more localized

But Facebook isn't a country. It's a free (as in beer) on-line service. It's completely opt-in, and its only claim to you is the strength of its network effect - which, as history shows, is something very fragile both on the local and global scale.

What you're afraid of is evil CEOs doing mind control, not despotism.

I think Mark is the mostly benevolent dictator of 1.9 billion people who are using his service for various reasons.

If you were to show people exactly what Facebook knows about you and can figure out about you as well as the practices they engage in, many people would not use the service, but they don't know these things because Facebook keeps people ignorant. It's not in Facebook's best interests to have people know.

I can't blame Facebook for that, but when they are incompetent it impacts everyone else. I didn't opt in to racists getting jazzed up and going on killing sprees that they put on Facebook Live because of feeds that are mostly opaque and first and foremost designed to make money, and I didn't opt in to social media creating a generation of narcissists, but we all get to experience that.

I don't even believe Mark's evil, but when you have that much power, you have a ton of responsibility to use that properly and Facebook's response has mostly been to say sorry when they fuck up. There's nothing you can do to curtail that power because there are few entities that can actually sanction them.

That's scary and it's dangerous for society. It's the biggest social experiment ever conducted and there are no rules other than the ones that Zuckerberg makes.

If human existence is a long series of lucky rolls of the dice, is it really a good idea to roll the dice on a single individual who got lucky at 21, who now benevolently or not decides the algorithms that determine what almost 2 billion people see? That's nuts and it is something of our own making. Nobody did or would opt into that because people ultimately like to have agency over their own lives.

> It's completely opt-in

No, it absolutely is not. Facebook creates shadow profiles[1] even if you never use the service based on what your friends and family upload about you. Not to mention that not having a facebook profile is often treated as suspicious[2] by potential employers, landlords, significant others, and now US customs[3].

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/anger-mounts-after-facebooks-sh...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/08/06/beware-t...

[3] https://www.cnet.com/news/border-patrol-agents-checking-face...

China has more people than Facebook has users.

China has just shy of 1.4 billion people. That is not more people than Facebook has users according to this statistic》 https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

A lot of them are business accounts, bots and fake or throwaway. I have 3. How can anyone be sure that each account is a person. It says a lot about general IQ on HN that I got 4 downvotes for suggesting that Facebook has less users (real ones) than China has people (real ones, too!)

Have your upvote. Maybe if you had said this the first time you wouldn't have gotten downvoted.

It's possible, even likely that FB has 600 million fake accounts, but you didn't even bother explaining yourself.

So you're telling me that if I state a fact but don't back it up then I get down-voted? On so many occasions I've stated facts without explanation that got up-voted. So what I'm trying to say is: the idiocy of crowds.