Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

I think we need to account for "bullshit products" too. Facebook and Instagram for example are such bullshit products, no real value, detrimental to society and mental health, and proped up by the worst attributes of human nature (narcissism, jealoushy, exhibitionism, and so on).

View on HN

With that mentality, If you think hard, almost everything we do apart from food and shelter can be considered 'superflous'.

-- Watching movies? Waste of time

-- Playing Video Games - Rotting your brain

-- Watching sports for fun - wasting your money / promoting violence

-- Traveling for fun - you are destroying the environment

-- Any entertainment shows - promoting bad habits

etc.. etc..

You can extrapolate 'what I don't like, must be bad for humanity' to almost every product of leisure activity out there.

At some point, for some, unless you are living like an Amish or in some kind of 'Puritan' way, everything else you are doing is bad and you are a bad person, and that platform that enables it (Radio, TV, Online Apps, Arbnb, Uber) must be bad and needs to be abolished.

These activities are examples of self gratification, they don't give anything to others and are bad for this reason. Imagine a group of cells in your body engaging in this behavior: they grab energy from others, spend it on rattling their mitochondrias, and give nothing back. Imagine if most cells in your body were like that.

>With that mentality, If you think hard, almost everything we do apart from food and shelter can be considered 'superflous'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

In any case, a lot of those can indeed be considered bad. Like professional sports. Participatory sports on the other hand, foster community, improve health, and entertain, all in one.

Watching movies, or the general category, art, nourishes the soul, allows us to live vicariously other people's perspectives, and builds culture. Watching crap movies, made for profit, who turn their audience stupid (or pressupose their stupidity), on the other hand, can be considered bad. The same can be said of spending hours every day watching TV.

I agree with the criticism except that I believe that these products provide some core utility to us. One of our dogs was posted for adoption on FB for example. Although plain old websites + RSS are my preferred method.

how do you define "real value" for products? i guess it must not have anything to do with profit in your world?

No, it doesn't. It has to do with making the world better.

Meth also makes for great profits.

They ought to be viewed no different than tobacco companies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com