
Ask HN: What do you believe is Facebook's ultimate place in world history? - rblion
It&#x27;s a pretty impressive accomplishment on paper. Yet there is an ever increasing list of reasons to delete your account. There is always a lot of outrage it seems but few people ever actually delete. They may deactivate, take a break, but most everyone I know, ends up using it again.<p>Is this solely because there is no alternative (there have been many, some still exist)? Or because the network effect (one of the strongest of all-time)? Or that most people simply don&#x27;t care as much as a very vocal minority (it seems) who is writing so many of these articles and doing these investigations? I wonder...<p>I created my Facebook in 2005, I was in 10th grade. I want to DELETE mine but it&#x27;s like a time capsule, it&#x27;s a piece of history now if you think about it.<p>Anyways, share whatever comes to mind. Let&#x27;s talk this out, all angles and caveats. This is one of the most important questions of our time if you ask me.
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ggm
Herman Hesse's novel "the glass bead game" discusses a movement he calls _The
age of the Feuilleton_ When a sports writer is asked for his opinion on
nuclear physics, and a chef might expound on the relative merits of gay love
and modern dance. At the time I first read this (the 1970s) it felt like a
very odd artifice, an unlikely situation: who the hell would care about this?

But in the context of Facebook, insta-famous, I think Hesse might have been on
the money: we've descended into a rats-nest of opinion-that-matters coming
from D list celebrities, and we ignore real ideas, because they're just too
hard to cope with.

I think FB owns some of this: the idea we glom onto people and give giant
thumbs-up signals to the ones who say things we can _relate_ to even if we are
doing a thumbs-up to a picture of a starving Kid: we reduced the mental effort
to participate to a single button click, and rank people by influence which is
judged by engagement which is judged by _likes_

So I'd reduce the impact of Facebook down to _likes_ -This idea may have been
birthed elsewhere, but Facebook is where it exploded to worldwide relevance.

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Bucephalus355
Not good.

Something negative is eventually going to be written about big tech, and
Facebook stands out as the easiest to be negative about / even scapegoat.

Not only that, but the story is incredibly easy to write. Mark Zuckerberg is a
single individual with near total control of the country. It’s almost
Shakespearean. Writing about any other company would be a muddled narrative
with many different sides, hard to trace blame, etc.

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yusee
Mark Zuckerberg is the Apex Predator of planet Earth.

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rblion
Jeff Bezos could probably take him in a street fight.

