when I signed up in 2005 it was only open to people at colleges, and your info could only be seem by people at the same college... (hence the name, facebook, which no longer makes sense).

ELI5 why facebook is exceptionally evil. (Of course I'm inviting downvotes, but please give me a comment too; ideally a reason that isn't also applicable to 'internet as a whole').

They're not much more evil than any other publicly traded, advertising supported content repackager (so the bulk of "social" media these days), but they're far worse than a lot of other places on the internet because of their power as the "default location" for a lot of people to go when bored.

Facebook, long ago, stopped being about connecting people (except that claiming this gets more people to join), and more about "keeping people on Facebook as long as they possibly could" - because that means more ad impressions, which means more money for Facebook.

They rely on every quirk in human psychology to keep people addicted ("engaged") and scrolling as long as possible. Intermittent reward, randomized ordering (the refresh throbber followed by "new" content), and driving people into toxic emotions and rabbit holes. Anger, outrage, and conspiracy rabbitholes are /great/ for keeping people on the site. They're terrible for the people involved (one could offer the handwaving parallel of a grocery store offering free heroin if you buy stuff there to keep people shopping), but profitable for Facebook.

They believe the entire internet is theirs to scrape user activity from (the "like" buttons were turned into data collection elements long ago, against the original promises made about them), so they can offer better-targeted advertisements to anyone who has a valid credit card. Foreign actor, scammer, seller-of-medical-nonsense, it's all fine - as long as they pay up properly.

And in a wide variety of cases of Facebook being fingered as directly responsible for enabling reprehensible behavior like genocides, their responses are consistently, "We are so, so sorry that you caught us doing that, and we promise to try harder not to get caught in the future." Genocide is extremely engaging, and as long as they can sell ads to people othering their neighbors and calling for violence against them, well, what's wrong?

The guiding principle of Facebook has been clearly demonstrated to be, "What's Good for Zuck is Good for Zuck!" Anything else is secondary (and mostly a concern in that if you don't do anything, people might get around to cancelling their accounts or no longer using Facebook).

I can, and do, apply these criticisms to a number of other properties on the internet, but the social media companies (companies who take user-generated content, repackage it, and algorithmically deliver it in optimally engaging order to other people, interleaved with ads) are the parts of the internet that are demonstrably ruining just about everything that people care about.

Thanks for the thorough response.

> They're not much more evil than any other publicly traded

Ok, that's basically my point, but people seem adamant that they are somehow exceptionally evil.

> content repackager

> companies who take user-generated content, repackage it

What do you mean by taking user-generated content and repackaging it? I understand that users often do this themselves, but what exactly is Facebook repackaging?

> "default location" for a lot of people to go when bored

For me this is HN

> keep people addicted

This does seem evil, if the product is causing the user harm.

> They believe the entire internet is theirs to scrape user activity

I could see how this bothers people, though it doesn't bother me that much personally. Follow-up question: do you view Fullstory as evil?

> Facebook being fingered as directly responsible for enabling reprehensible behavior

To me, this is a sad misuse of a tool. But yes, efforts should be made to limit the tool's possibility for evil usage.

> ...but people seem adamant that they are somehow exceptionally evil.

They are more directly responsible for keeping people in a mentally toxic {outraged, angry, upset} state than most other companies. Their reach far exceeds Twitter (2.5B active users vs about 180M for Twitter), so I'll consider them "more evil" in that they have a far greater reach. While I may have plenty of bones to pick with Google, Amazon, etc, they don't directly influence mental state for their own profit like Facebook does.

> What do you mean by taking user-generated content and repackaging it?

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, etc, do not (meaningfully) generate their own content (yes, you'll see an occasional Facebook blog post usually saying "We're sorry for getting caught this time..." but that's not their primary purpose). They take content that their end users generate (photos, posts, links, etc), and repackage it, reorder it, inject ads, and deliver it to other people.

This is distinct from other content producers (news sites, blogs, etc) in which the site owners/employees/etc are the primary generators of material. I write content for my blog, and while I host and deliver the occasional user comment, the primary purpose of my blog is for me to communicate my thoughts to other people. I also, after several years of experimentation, now do so in an ad-free manner, because the small returns weren't worth the hassle, and I'm increasingly opposed to an ad-supported internet, so I now self-host my content and pay my hosting fees out of pocket.

> For me this is HN

Yes, but HN doesn't matter. It is also neither ad supported or, to the best of my knowledge, a public company (at least the HN interface). It's exceedingly low bandwidth and I quite like it as a remnant of an old style of internet that no longer really exists.

> Follow-up question: do you view Fullstory as evil?

I don't know what Fullstory is, so have no opinion on it.

> But yes, efforts should be made to limit the tool's possibility for evil usage.

Or to respond meaningfully when it's demonstrated that the tool is being used for it. Facebook tends to the minimum required to look like they've done something, and when someone else points out that the people the filters are aimed at have trivially bypassed them by changing the spelling of a word, Facebook throws up their hands and says, "Well, moderation is hard, we can't afford humans, and AI sucks, so... sorry!"

If you're too big to have meaningful human moderation that can understand nuance, maybe you're just too big as a forum/site/community/etc.

Thanks again for the thorough and thoughtful responses.

I started to write a number of counterpoints, then I realized it might not get us anywhere together. Perhaps it comes down to the way that I view web services: it's just a platform. Since Facebook is such a large platform, the evil parts of human nature will certainly be evident there. I'm aware that the "it's just a platform" viewpoint isn't for everyone. With that said, it's hard for me to leave that camp without carrying a lot of cognitive dissonance with me.

Is Ethereum evil because Vitalik doesn't spawn a fork every time innocent people get scammed out of their money (why only do it once (DAO hack)?)? Is Bitcoin evil because it allows people to evade taxes, hurting society? Do you think government should moderate the internet once AI can handle that task? I hope these aren't seen as strawman scenarios.

I'm easy enough to find elsewhere if you want to continue the debate. However:

Bad behavior tends to scale with size. I've run small community forums (I run one now), and beyond spammers, there hasn't been a moderation problem - it's just too small for people to bother making a nuisance of themselves, and they wouldn't be invited to stick around long anyway.

I would rather see a return to smaller, fragmented communities on the internet than the single centralized platforms we've settled on. They just work better. This would, sadly, require anti-monopoly agencies to do something other than sit around with their "Yes, sure, go ahead and buy that company out, whatever..." stamp.

As for some of the other stuff you're asking about, I'm not familiar enough with the details of the events to be able to offer an informed opinion - sorry.

I would like to think that the internet can self moderate in such a way that the governments are not forced to moderate things, and cannot do so even if they wish to do it, but... that seems a less likely future as time goes on.

Ads began in 2007, over 13 years ago.

I purchased my first FB ad in late summer 2007. Not sure if that’s also when it opened up.

I don't think the first few years of ads really made a big difference - Facebook couldn't really figure out how to make advertising terribly profitable while not driving people off.

Like most things, it took a few years to really take off. They IPO'd in 2012, and then really had to prove they could turn a profit (and increase it over time). I've honestly not been a heavy enough Facebook user to be able to pin the transition to a particular point in time (and it was almost certainly a long period of time, pushing for more and more), but the transition of the "Like" widget on random pages from an image icon to a data collection tool was probably a good indication of the transition.

In any case, by... oh, 2014 or so at the latest, they'd definitely started showing their true colors. Engagement Uber Alles. Because ads.

I don’t see much of a difference. It’s obvious this was going to happen. Is there any instance of a big site that doesn’t go this way? It seems as if sometimes people will always act surprised when sites monetize heavily. As if the site was always going to remain as basic as it was in its early days while growing. This is almost never the case except in cases where it goes paid [only]. Even those have exceptions (newspaper sites vs Substack)