Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

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I find this kind of comment fascinating because it's illustrative of how humans can form intentional blindspots as to the utility of a person or institution when when all they care about are the negative aspects of that person's or institution's existence.

    op: "I don't care about thing X disappearing"
    re: "While you may not care about it because of Y, X also provides benefit Z to other people"
    op: "But would there be any drawbacks?"

yeah, there would be drawbacks, other people would lose Z, which may matter a lot of them even if it doesn't matter to you. Someone just told you about Z, and you just responded as if you weren't just told about Z"

These days I find it incredibly frustrating to deal with people who have conclusively decided they don't like something and that renders them incapable of acknowledging other benefits that said thing provides even if those benefits aren't relevant to them or are less relevant than the things they vocalize caring about.

I can agree with the "intentional blindspots" argument but turn it right around.

I'd like to explicitly note that the parent post did not say "X also provides benefit Z to other people" - it asserted "Facebook is an unparalleled titan in the realm of advertising" which is a substantially different thing; it's not something that some people simply don't care about and a benefit to some other people and considering those statements as equivalent is a (very large) intentional blindspot. The current way of how advertising is done (driven, in part, by FB) is also a harm to many people and society at large, so publicly making an implicit assumption that "advertising" is at most neutral is not okay, it's something that should be called out.

This very "unparalleled titan in the realm of advertising" aspect is a major cost on society, a net harm that perhaps should be tolerated if it's outweighed by some other benefits FB provides (such as the "utility-level communication system for a big chunk of the globe"), but as itself it's definitely not something that should be treated as benign just because some people get paid for it.

If FB advertising disappeared with no other drawbacks, that would be a great thing. Of course, there are some actual drawbacks, but even so it's quite reasonable to motivate people to ask about the actual drawbacks of FB being down, because "oh but ads" (with which the grandparent post started) is not one.

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