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Comment by submeta | Hacker News Reader

In the case of Facebook, whole societies and the psychology of the masses have been negatively effected. So them being in a strong position harms society and individuals alike. - In the case of Apple we are talking about a company that dominates a market and harms its competitors and has the power to be the gatekeeper. Yes, that‘s power that should be limited, but it‘s a company that produces goods that their customers love. I don‘t see any harm in their products and services at all. Au contraire.

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A golden cage is still a cage. No matter how comfortable they make your life, we can not look only at the services they provide, we need to also look at the restrictions they impose.

The iPhone is like a service. I don’t see a restaurant as a cage because I didn’t control exactly how my food is made. I don’t want to deal with that, I want to build trust with a business and get the service I want. When I stop getting satisfactory service, I pick a different business.

In your scenario, Apple is not a restaurant. Apple is the tomato farmer that makes perfectly genetically engineered red tomatoes, with extra vitamins and whose yield is unmatched by any other.

It seems great, until you realize that all restaurants end up buying from them and after some years they put all other farmers out of business and you have no other choice in the market. Now they can charge whatever they want, and if you are a cook who would like to use some different variety of tomato, you are kindly told to get lost.

Also, we all have to spend the rest of your lives praying that there is no new disease that can come up and affect the tomatoes sold by them.

I think we often times confuse the harms of "people being able to talk to each other en masse" with "things uniquely caused by Facebook."

I am not sure why this is, but I think a large part of it is that it sounds much better to rail against Facebook than to say "I don't like the outcomes when large groups of people are allowed to talk to each other online without intermediaries." But really, the second thing is what you are typically actually saying.

Sometimes they say the quiet part loud. I've seen people on here say things like, "You can't just let people say whatever they want!"

Maybe a principled defense can be made for the quiet part - who knows. but it annoys me that it is implicit and not stated because I never understand what people are criticizing FB for.

> In the case of Facebook, whole societies and the psychology of the masses have been negatively effected.

In my opinion facebook is very beneficial to society, so I find it strange that such a strong negative claim, stated as a fact, yet only a matter of personal opinion is left unchallenged.

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