Comment by Jasper_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jasper_ | Hacker News Reader

"Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire human race is hard! And requires a lot of people"

Yeah, no shit! You say that like Facebook didn't completely strong-arm their way into wanting to become the sole communication provider for the entire world. They struck deals and started entire projects making sure telcos in emerging markets would only get priority to Facebook, and Wikipedia, and basically no other competitors. They tried to convince the Indian government to make access to Facebook 100% free of charge until backlashed pushed them out.

If they didn't want to become the mediator of all human communication, that's fine, they can stop at any time. But they themselves chose to put themselves here as the messenger, growth-at-all-costs style, and that means they get to deal with the consequences. It's not like they stumbled into this problem by accident.

I can't feel pity for a company that wanted world domination, achieved it, and is now stuck with the issues. Turns out when you're the communication provider for 3 billion users, you get the problems of your 3 billion users! You can't say they didn't know that going in...

Please don't fulminate on HN or take threads on generic-indignant tangents. Those are much less interesting and usually turn nasty. Substantive critique is welcome, but if you reply to a comment you should really be replying to something specific in that comment, and you definitely shouldn't be blasting the other user.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512954.

Not to mention, imagine the hubris necessary to want this as a company, and consider oneself the sole (or few of) moderator of human communication to police and curate absolutely everything that gets shared, according to a single prescribed narrative by their political partners, and their team of fact checkers complete with their implicit biases, who are funded by extreme partisan players who won the Elite Olympics™ with their nearly infinite wealth and sway.

It's honestly pretty easy to imagine. Given any company with a clarified goal, the default answer to "How much of the market do we want?" is "All of it." Rare is the company that sets as a goal "10% of the potential customers."

I can't blame them though. Networks of any kind have the particular effect of working the better, the more people are on it. What use is a messenger (cough Signal, Threema) if none of your contacts use them and can be persuaded to install yet-another-network app?

The obvious solution would have been for governments to mandate federation with open standards (e.g. XMPP) early on, but unfortunately most politics decision-makers are dinosaurs who won't understand "federation", much less "API"...

That’s because they don’t have to pay for externalities. If Facebook was to be held liable, criminally or financially, for the negative impacts of their service, they wouldn’t be viable as a business (and nor would anything else trying to operate at that scale). It’s only because they can dump the waste products of their enterprise into our collective psychological water supply without consequence that it appears like a profitable business.

How do you quantify externalities of media? Do NYT and other progressive outlets share responsibility for looting during summer 2020 because they largely shared the views of demonstrators? If climate change anxiety is shown to be a large factor in psychological issues, do outlets covering climate change get held responsible for that psychological consequence?

I actually don't think it is that rare. Especially for smaller companies. I don't want 100% of the market. I want 10%, but I want the best 20% that can easily afford my product and doesn't complain, cancel, chargeback, or need unnecessary handholding to use my software. Beyond that it's mostly diminishing returns.

Of course, I actually have a product that people want to pay for, I'm not giving it away for free and selling ads to fund it. If I was, I might be more interested in 80% of the market and still try to discourage that worst 20% from using it.

I enjoy working for a company that realizes we'll never have the entire market and is fine with the fact that there is plenty of space for multiple competitors to do well.

I've been at companies where "we want to be number 1, win all the awards, and defeat the competition" and I get where that comes from... a certain amount of that is healthy, but it can also get very twisted. I'd rather not.

That's not true at all. Plenty of people run lifestyle businesses whose goal is to support themselves and their families, friends, and employees. One example is Aquarium Co-Op [1] who is into promoting the aquarium hobby in all its facets. Cory, the owner, is very frank about the costs of running his business and how he often sells products at or below cost because he believes they're important to the community. A far cry from big tech companies seemingly bent on world domination.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Aquariumcoop

I think that's excellent and I wish Cory the best. Cragislist is another example I can think of where a company just set out to be small and charge what it needed to make its small employee-base comfortable, not dominate the world.

... but then I'm out of names, is my point. Most companies don't go this road. Perhaps that's because going the other road gathers enough resources to be big enough to make all the headlines, so we don't hear about the others.

I think you're generally going to run out if you try to think of household names. Instead, think local. I don't know about you but there are a lot of local family-run restaurants, bakeries, chocolatiers, furniture/carpentry stores, flower shops, consulting businesses, accounting/tax prep firms, game/hobby stores, boardgame cafes, independent movie theatres, etc. On and on the list goes, though unless you live here (Waterloo) you've probably never heard of any of them. And of course where I live is not special; you can find a similar variety in any city and even many towns or villages.

VC-funded corporations are more inclined towards world domination than co-ops.

> "Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire human race is hard! And requires a lot of people"

Who are you quoting? Not me, I didn't say that. You've constructed a strawman and then replied to that.

> I can't feel pity

No one asked for pity. I merely pointed out a couple of ways in which the system can fail. It's failed in the past and will fail in the future, hopefully less.

I feel like you really wanted to get all of this off your chest and then replied to me because the comment was high up.

>> "Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire human race is hard! And requires a lot of people"

> Who are you quoting? Not me, I didn't say that. You've constructed a strawman and then replied to that.

Yeah that confused me too. I'm guessing this is what they were referring to, which conveys a similar sentiment:

>> "With time I learned that any system that’s meant to work for millions of users will have some edge cases that need to be papered over."

I read your comment a bit like a defense of Facebook, saying "you know, when you scale to millions of people, it's really hard and expensive! Cut them a bit of slack"

I don't disagree that these problems are hard when you scale to millions of users. Just pointing out that Facebook were the ones who chose to scale to millions of users before their moderation systems were ready.

For what it's worth, thank you for doing your part in helping to fix the system.

And the size of this problem, managing the entire human race, is part of why they make so much money. They are in front of a lot of people and extracting value from them.

So it seems that they want to keep the profits while not paying the costs to be in this business. While Facebook does bring some benefits to people, it also does a lot of harm, to the point that I'm not sure it's a net positive to the world (or even if it's possible to have a net positive company in this space).

Privatize gains, socialize losses: not just for the finance industry!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com