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Comment by ikeyany | Hacker News Reader

I keep hearing that analogy but it doesn't really hold water. Telephone companies don't coerce you into becoming an addict, manipulating their UIs so that you subconsciously associate their platforms with the words "friend" and "like", shove controversy and irrelevant comments from strangers into your feed so that you get annoyed and feel like you're missing out when you clearly stated that you want a chronological ordering of what your close friends and family posted, and then innocently call it "engagement" or "connecting people". So no, it's not like a telephone company.

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You’ve twisted my words.

I’m not saying they’re like a phone company, I’m saying this would be the equivalent of a phone company saying what I said.

There’s a very clear difference.

I’m also not saying Facebook is a social good here, but those wrongs, valid or not, are tangential to the memo.

The analogy is still broken because the Facebook memo, although cold and calculating, is still blatantly sugarcoating what they do and why they do it. It's not about connecting people at heart, and they do it through much more nefarious means than simply potentially letting their tools fall into the hands of bad actors.

>I feel you’ve intentionally twisted my words.

I don't. Make comparisons, own them.

>>I feel you’ve intentionally twisted my words.

I feel you don't understand what your own words mean. You made a comparison, and someone pointed out that it was grossly inaccurate.

If someone compares a tall person to a giraffe, they're not also claiming they're orange.

FB is like a phone company where everyone can call everyone else, all the time, in some type of huge broadcast style phonecall, where people who miss the calls can listen into the recording later. As a matter of fact, that's where the analogy between phones and the internet breaks down too.

The point of an analogy seems to be missed on you. There is no actual analogous company to facebook because no company does everything like facebook.

> Telephone companies don't coerce you into becoming an addict

If you were around at the turn of the 20th century, you might think very differently. Gossip lines, heck, when lines were shared you could ease drop on your neighbors conversations. The telephone company must have had some idea of what they were enabling in society at the time.

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