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Comment by themitigating | Hacker News Reader

Why does the size of the company matter?

Because of the impact their actions have on people's lives.

If my local barber tells me "don't come back here ever again", I'll find another barber within 15min walk from my place.

If Facebook bans me, I might lose a way to communicate with hundreds of people, I might lose access to managing my business and talk to my clients. And often there might be very few viable alternatives.

As Facebook and other large companies become dominant in certain areas, their responsibility should grow, too. And banning users based on some algorithmic detection, without the ability to contact human customer support to understand and fix the situation, should not be acceptable.

I just don't want more government regulation, we have enough

Were you equally against the FAA regulating the use of drones around airports?

No, because that's for safety.

What’s a viable alternative?

Don't use whatsapp

What should people use instead that is free and easy to use, has the same features WhatsApp does, and is ubiquitous? Realistic answers only, please.

Signal

Unfortunately Signal does not meet the "ubiquity" criterion, as far fewer people have it installed than WhatsApp. Signal can also terminate your number if they so choose.

Your criteria is arbitrary. Ubiquity is not a necessity, neither is feature parity with WhatsApp. There are dozens of messaging apps and people typically use many different messaging apps, if the communication is worthwhile your friend will install an app to communicate with you.

If that is true, why do some messaging apps gain critical mass, while others are relegated to niche use? I don’t think the data is consistent with your claims.

"Critical mass" is a subjective description, there must always be a most popular platform by definition, but there isn't actually a practical distinction you can point to that contradicts the fact that there are dozens of messaging options.

What do you suggest then? Without regulation we'll allow companies to ban people via algorithms without an option to appeal the decision and talk to actual human being.

We can keep saying "uninstall WhatsApp/Messenger/WeChat!" but for a lot of people this it not viable, because it means cutting social connections or losing clients. There are countries like Spain where WhatsApp is the way to communicate on-line and few people use other IMs.

There are a few things that can change it - either a technology shift (e.g. mobile revolution ended Windows dominance), black swan event (like pandemic that moved everyone to hybrid/remote work), or government regulation. If we don't want the government to intervene, we need to accept that we might be randomly banned by an algorithm and there's nothing we can do about it.

> And often there might be very few viable alternatives.

There are alternatives. If we don't want Facebook in general to monopolize every aspect of our lives, we need to actively refuse being assimilated by the Borg and prioritize these alternatives.

I like that Hacker News idealism.

Ok, your small online store is banned from advertising on Facebook and Instagram. What will you do?

My idealistic answer would be "go back to the drawing board to create a business is not built on someone else's land."

Do you mean advertising or keeping an internet presence? If you mean "internet presence", I'd would use one of the numerous site builders and I would create a pixelfed and mastodon instances to publish content.

If you mean advertising: I'd write a post here about how my account was banned without justification...

None of these options let you change the status quo. It's like arguing about tipping. Whether you like it or not it exists and the social norm doesn't change because of your individual decisions.

You don't need to change the status quo.

You just need to stop contributing to it if you believe that it is harmful to you and you are okay with the consequences of your choices.

I am not walking around with a soapbox telling everyone they should leave FB and Instagram. Instead, I am simply not participating in it and hoping that this can serve as an example for others.

Resources available (fiat and people) for meeting regulatory requirements and the relative burden imposed by regulation. There are regulatory risk and compliance teams (finance specially, but also in other spaces) larger than most startups, with mid to high 8 figure budgets.

Meta can afford meeting regulatory requirements imposed by nation states.

If the value of a social graph with N users is ~N^2. The damage done by restricting access is similarly non-linear.

Aside from burden on the company, the cost to the user from being arbitrarily locked out of a facebook property is much greater than some random start up.

Because the larger the company, the more they should be able to afford it.

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