There is just no big benefit to justify the amount of damage done to mental health and privacy.

If your only concern is data handling, though, then fair enough.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/lets-talk-tween/2017...

For sake of not letting a bogus argument go unanswered: Google and Microsoft offer generic tools that have very broad social benefit outside the monetization of user data.

That said, I would prefer it if the FTC would address data monetization practices at all tech companies--it is a fine business model, but it is troublesome as a necessary addition to my spreadsheet or the operating system for my desktop/laptop/phone-sized computer.

IMO "bad for Facebook" ~= "good for society" has always been true.

It's not a "sad place to be as community", they are a corp and their bait-and-switch was expected ever since they got created, at least from the people who don't idolize corporations that is. It was extremely obvious they'll position themselves as helpful, pull tons of people in, and will then start to make use of all that precious data.

It would boggle my mind if somebody was actually surprised by this.

At least for a subset, 2005-2006, back when they had network pages. You'd gain access based on your email's domain, it has a shared calendar and worked as a planning location for everyone at the same college/university.

It had a purpose, it solved it better than previous options, and (critically!) it had a ceiling on today addressable userbase.

Once it metastisized into "extract maximum revenue from maximum number of people," I think its soul was lost to greed.

But eventually they burnt so much goodwill trying to justify their stock valuation that at least were I am, all those informal groups have moved away from Facebook. Some managed to substitute the infrastructure quite well, some suffer quite noticeably. But none of them would consider going back. And openness to newcomers, discoverability, that has all suffered quite considerably.

A topic for another discussion is why society allows corporations to become parasitic and cancerous without any checks or balances.

Germany would probably be the best counter-example to look at? Re: how to create and maintain medium-sized businesses that are still efficient.

You mean, when it was a sort of amihotornot for Harvard students?

I'd say there is a case for it being neutral for society for a fair chunk of time in its early days. Things don't have to be good/bad binary.

I generally agree.

FWIW, I just listened to an interesting CoRecursive interview with Facebook's Jason Gauci (February 2021) [0]. He addresses that question head-on at this point [1] in the interview.

[0] https://corecursive.com/061-reinforcement-learning/

[1] https://corecursive.com/061-reinforcement-learning/#the-soci...

P.S. I don't listen to many podcasts, but CoRecursive is great. I highly recommend other software developers check it out.

^^ THIS !

I remember when Apple hardened iOS so that Facebook & co. could no longer mis-use the system do do evil things such as silently monitor pasteboard contents.

Facebook took out enormous billboard ads at the time in major cities on which they exercised their tiny woe-is-me violin, trying to pretend Apple was the evil one.

Who is arguing that facebook should be able to sideload their own app onto users iphones?

That's the antithesis of what user freedom advocates argue for. The argument is "it's my device, I should be able to run what I want on it." Not, "anybody should be able to do whatever they want on my device." The latter is more an argument for Apple's status quo where they have full control of the device (that they ostensibly no longer own) and the user does not.