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Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, he deserves kudos for this, but he also deserves much of the shit that people talk about him.

Facebook is a company that is loathed roughly in proportion to the degree that people understand what they actually do to make their money: adorn your baby or wedding photos with fart app ads, put your own face on various ads that you know nothing about, make you play whack-a-mole with their settings UI to preserve what little control of your information they allowed you to have last week, sell your instagram sexts, etc etc.

And he's the guy who calls the shots.

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I haven't seen evidence that the average facebook user cares that much about the things that you've mentioned.

I fully accept that some of their users (or ex-users) do. I have seen plenty of blog posts and outraged media stories. Yet I haven't noticed any great attrition among my friends on facebook, which is what I would expect to see if people cared much about this stuff.

What on earth does "what most people feel" have to do with anything? Nobody in Germany seemed to care that much about what Hitler was doing until they lost the war.

Off-topic but:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law

I know very well about the frustrating action on the internet where if you use Hitler for an extreme example of anything to make the point clear, someone's going to link Godwin's law.

Well, if you prefer an on-topic response:

The guy gave 500 million dollars to improve something in this world... The way he runs his company (or as someone else in this thread said, the company "runs itself") has nothing to do with it.

Still on the Hitler topic, I don't think you could opt-out of being german, nor could you voice your opinion freely against whatever was happening without fear of the consequences.

What I think, and in this I think you agree with me, is that Facebook should be more transparent as to what is done to your data, so that people would make a conscious choice of using it or not.

Because in this scenario (facebook, not WW2) the individual facebook users are the ones who stand to lose something in most arguments against Facebook's model.

So if a minority objects to facebook, I would suggest they just not use facebook. In most cases that means facebook won't have a negative impact on them.

> And he's the guy who calls the shots.

When a child grows into a teenager it becomes harder to blame the father for their actions.

Right. That is indeed a more difficult and nuanced judgement than holding a corporation's CEO responsible for its major business decisions.

Facebook is also, as a piece of software, utter crap.

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