Just read that 1946 New Yorker article on the first bombing that made HNs front page a week back. This passage is probably the one Zuckerberg would use:

> Over everything—up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks—was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna seed had been dropped along with the bomb.

Never mind that the rest of the article will probably elicit a few spontaneous sobs from an empathetic reader.

This is also disingenuous, since they could've gotten the tree cut down without the nuke and so the nuke has no "exclusive" positive value. Social networks have some positive value that is exclusive to them, like the ability for people to connect with friends as well as diverse groups of strangers - both things that would otherwise be much harder if not impossible for many.

Exclusive to social networks... And restaurants, bars, parks, meetup groups, local events, email lists, chat servers (eg Discord), and generally taking the time to meet your friends and family in person rather than on the web.

It's only "much harder if not impossible" for lack of trying. And while yes, there are some out there that simply don't have such options, we also have people that need to cut down a tree but can't afford the work, and so simply hope it won't fall on their house the next time it gets windy.

Because in reality, all friends and family totally live withing reasonable travel distance of each other and interesting people will always pop into your local bar at the exact time you're there and wear a shirt outlining why you should spend your time trying to meet them as opposed to literally anyone else in the bar.

Email lists and chat servers are just Facebook with extra steps. The only difference ends up being the fact that Facebook-like social networks suggest you people and content you might like from a giant pool, whereas the alternatives have rather limited pools and the signal to noise ratio is pathetic because you get literally everything that is posted and have to filter through it manually.

Don't get me wrong, I hate Facebook and only use it on maybe a handful of occasions per year, but you can't tell me that it didn't enable things that weren't possible for many before it was invented.

Usenet, IRC, Forums all connected friends and diverse groups over the internet before "social media", and IMO they did not have the same negative effects because they did not "gamify" the system with a reward feedback loop like the current social media systems do

None of them had nearly the same reach and discoverability as Facebook does. Good luck finding your childhood friend whose name you barely remember through thousands of web forums with primarily pseudonymous users. Meanwhile, Facebook's recommendation engine will just throw their name at you out of nowhere.

Not true. I was an army brat. It finds nobody in my childhood even though I've tried.

People would have a better chance of finding me via one of my various pseudonym's online than they would by my IRL name.

I do not have any accounts in my real name, and I had no problems finding others via our pseudonym's when I wanted to share them with people in the physical world.

You state that these qualities are exclusive to social networks in the same sentence where you say that other means could be used but are much harder. So… not exclusive?

"Travel to Australia is possible exclusively by plane or boat" is a sentence very few people would have a problem with, although you could also technically and with great effort get there by swimming, blimp or hanging from a million helium baloons and hoping the wind blows the right way.

In all discussions I've heard that mention "exclusive value" or a similar concept, the agreed-upon definition was always something like "where all others are orders of magnitude worse".