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Comment by unclebucknasty | Hacker News Reader

Really can't wrap my mind around how everyone just goes along with FB. There's a lot of hand-wringing and exclaiming but, at end of day, it's business as usual. Consumers and investors never punish the company in a meaningfully lasting way.

With existing products built on network effects, I can at least see the rationale: where else can you go where everyone else is at scale? But, for new product categories like this, why would anyone follow them? I understand they have advantages there, based on their existing properties, but it's still an opportunity to say "hell no" to FB.

In particular, with this product: the idea that we are to spend increasingly more time in a simulated universe is dystopic enough. But, one controlled by a man who has proven himself time and again to be immoral at best and sociopathically evil at worst? I mean we're really just gonna' slow walk ourselves into this sci-fi movie?

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Personally, I'm much more interested in technological advancement than paying mind to the plodding conservative narrative from media demagogues.

You see all of the complaints about Facebook, including those launched by whistleblowers, as simply part of an illegitimate "conservative media narrative"?

> Really can't wrap my mind around how everyone just goes along with FB.

It's the same way people have gone along with 100s of acquisitions from Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27036073

Facebook doing Second Life over again was predicted when they started VR, it just doesn't seem like that big of a change to me.

But I've already made up my mind on it, and I can assure you not everyone goes along with Facebook.

Antimeta is gonna be a thing. I think that things like SL, Sandbox and Decentraland have a better chance of succeeding in continuing building an open metaverse.

Maybe we need something like an http/html standard for the metaverse?

Heck, even commercial offerings built on top of Ethereum sounds much better then built on top of Facebook.

To me it's like Microsoft in the 90s trying to claim they can build a better proprietary Internet... In that sense its actually pretty scary, so let's hope Zuckerberg and his unethical leadership isn't the one to succeed since given past track record its not gonna be pretty.

I'm sure Zuckerberg sees becoming AOL of the next big thing as the best direction to take his company, but it just all seems so overly complex. No communication standards can lower garden walls, because the walls and complexity are the point, when you sell ads for communication platforms

But then, restaurants and other businesses relying on Facebook exclusively to have an online presence (often inaccessible to those with no account) seems like a bad idea to me, but it happens.

> But, one controlled by a man who has proven himself time and again to be immoral at best and sociopathically evil at worst?

I don't understand this sentiment. Why do we need to care how moral the man at the helm is? A leader is temporary: today's leader can be immoral, while tomorrow's leader can be moral. Or vice versa. Or a leader can be moral in such a way that you would wish he wasn't. If end users can exercise their moral choices themselves, if they can refrain from lying, or bullying, or bragging, or trolling, then so much the better. If they can't, well, then we are screwed either way.

>Why do we need to care how moral the man at the helm is? A leader is temporary

It's interesting that you raise that question in the FB context, because Zuckerberg has very specifically structured his company such that this isn't the case. He can't be removed.

More broadly, we should care because such leaders accrue outsized power and can thus have outsized influence/impact on large numbers of people.

>If end users can exercise their moral choices themselves,

End users don't always have the info they need to choose not to participate in immoral schemes or to know that they are victims of the same.

>a leader can be moral in such a way that you would wish he wasn't

That argument vaguely evokes nihilism. Societies organize themselves around generally accepted moral principles, many of which are codified. Largely, we can quantify morality.

Yep, to most people, comfort trumps principles.

Who goes along with Facebook? Most tech-enthusiasts I know make a point about not using anything Facebook (Whatsapp notwithstanding). It's just that most people don't care that much about tech-related ideologies, the same way most people don't care about animal rights, or the environment. TL;DR: We have to pick our fights.

Sure, but many of these issues have very little to do with tech itself (though they happen to be tech-powered). Breach of trust, privacy violations, disinformation propagation for financial gain, radicalization, instigation of anxiety and depression (in teens especially), etc.

Are you saying that the "masses" lump all of these social effects into esoteric "tech issues" since they are enabled by tech?

That's more or less what I'm saying, yes.

Have you seen the Tyler the Creator cyberbulling tweet? That's how most people actually feel deep down.

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