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@bjoern “when Mark Zuckerberg was making Facebook in his dorm room bedroom, he probably wasn’t trying to make this dopamine-inducing tool”
Yes he was. He called his users “dumb fucks”. Can we please stop perpetuating this myth and giving the people who knowingly created this mess a pass with this “oops, they just wanted to make things better but ended up making things worse and accidentally becoming billionaires” narrative.
VC/startups/the Silicon Valley model is unethical.
@bob @bjoern He literally called the people who trust him “dumb fucks”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-facebook
@aral
Facebook's arc was so predictable from the off. It was all there to see. That is why I tire of the decade-too-late centrist takes on the dangers of Facebook from embedded journals that have been riding the FB convoy for years and still now feel compelled to warn their readers against the extremism of looking for alternatives or smear FOSS types & decentralists, often barely making a living, as Mr Robot style weirdos.
@bob @bjoern
@krozruch @aral @bob @bjoern That othering means that free software proponents have to cut themselves off from reaching people to use safe platforms, which only feeds the loop.
There's also a lack of concern from users. I can tell all the horror stories I want, but they still think it's just how things are. Especially because the platforms are free. No one pays for "unnecessary" services.
@kcnightfang @krozruch @aral @bob @bjoern
Don't know whether any of you would/could gain anything from the following, regardless I present the article:
"List of problems endemic to social media"
https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/List_of_problems_endemic_to_social_media
The last bullet-item currently on the list:
"• Apathy: The meta-problem. 90% of users don't care enough about the above problems to switch to better systems."
The problem is not so much apathy as network effect. Real People (TM) have said things to me in the past like:
"Why would I move to a social network where none of my friends are?"
It's not that they don't care about privacy. If you ask them to give you their credit card number or to remove their curtains they'll say "no". It's more a case that if you want to be with your friends then you have to accept what the social networks are.
@bob @kcnightfang @aral @FerdiZ @bjoern Depends where you are and what demographics you mix with, I think. Penetration of these issues is higher in some places than others. In Prague, despite a very high proportion of IT types, there are the people you describe, but also a lot of people who either don't understand at all, who understand to some degree but are apathetic, and those I meet most often, people who are outright hostile when you bring up alternatives or problems with Facebook etc.
>Ethical software
>on platform from the espionage world
>that is get spawn money from the said secret services
Good luck with that. The latest big thing are smart cities that are supposed to pave the way for the Technocracy that was planned decades before the first electronic computer was modelled on paper.
@aral @bjoern We should never forget that Facebook's core business at launch had multiple competitors, and was replicable easily and quickly by multiple groups. Facebook didn't win because it was the best, it won because it was the tricksiest. Facebook was a cool "exclusive" invite only club, right up until network effects and FOMO were strong enough it didn't need to be cool or exclusive any more. That was never scale hacking (see: Competitors scaled faster), that was calculated people hacking.
