That cute girl you hooked up with in Thailand that said she'd message you when she's visiting SF: gone. The cousin you really get along with that you never see anymore since her father passed away: no more casual reminders she exists. No more university friends.
There's such arrogance on HN about Facebook but it makes a bigger difference to ordinary people's lives than any other website.
There are challenges, but what do you expect Zuckerberg to do? Let fake news and bullshit, unchecked viral opinions go wild? The smart people are leaving the small towns for the cities and it's destroying the ability for smaller communities to make sense of the world. We need a way of protecting fake news and propaganda from spreading through our social networks.
The Facebook isn't run by some scheming cabal of evildoers.
I don't doubt that facebook provides some value, but I don't think that value is a sane relation to what we sacrifice as humans.
On the other hand, I do have lots of nice memories of actual physical meetings with people.
My conclusion based on my biased data set is that the value Facebook brings is ephemeral at best when laid against the skein of real world experiences.
My life is not a stream of posts on third party servers.
??? Do you not have phone numbers for your friends?
I am not a huge Facebook fan, but Zuck is right about that much. That potential could be squandered or worse. Right now Facebook is still largely a toy but that potential is there.
But Facebook is exactly that - thousand disparate bubbles. People are connected only to items they are analyzed to care about beforehand. If something irks them, rather than coolly analyze it, people get offended and react - often en masse - which triggers the social media rages.