Now I want a counter factual story about Yahoo acquiring Facebook, which then never flourishes into the influential network it became. What happens to society? Would we have the same political climate?
I feel like SOUTHLAND TALES, a movie written and shot before the iPhone was released, is quite helpful here. The movie emphasizes all of our post-9/11 failings in American culture at a time before Facebook or Twitter or any of the social media nonsense people blame the current awfulness on. The problems we face as Americans are far deeper than "cell phones" or "the Internet".
I want to know this too! If I invent a time machine, I'll message you but till then here's my ungrounded take (Obviously everything here is my personal opinion and not evidenced)
The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion. Meta are a particularly bad example of this, but as long as there's money to be made by providing a platform for polarising politics and fake news, then I think someone will do so.
Who knows, maybe in that alternate universe you'd be posting "if Yahoo hadn't made such savy choices, I wonder if we would have the political climate we have today?"
> The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion
This has always been the case for as long as society has been consuming the news. “Business tycoons” have bought up newspapers and media outlets since forever to push their narrative.
I think one component that has changed is the sheer volume and diversity of media makes competition for your attention (clicks) all the more fierce. Enter The Algorithm and optimizing for metrics above all else.
I dunno. That doesn’t invalidate anything about the original question about what present day would be like without Facebook. Would something else similar have replaced it? Is Facebook really “the problem” or is it algorithmic content because algorithmicly driven content was going to happen facebook or not.
It's because of the fragmentation of news sources that can now be customized to one's preference with any finely sliced political cant desired. Three television networks maintained a measure of neutrality in their reporting. Mainstream print media did too albeit to a lesser extent. Wackjobs had a hard time finding each other to form a tribe that would destabilize society.
> The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion.
We're seeing the opposite, though. As the traditional media companies declined and the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own views, polarization increased.
As someone who tries to avoid the news and politics, it's pretty easy to avoid the companies selling them. But I keep running into them because there are lots of users on Hacker News/Reddit/etc. who try to interject it into every discussion they can . Invariably, these people don't come at it from the point of view that they might be wrong and the other side might be right; they act like zealous crusaders on a mission to vanquish evil.
Yes because before the current media landscape, politicians didn’t win elections by using dog whistles (Willie Horton), making some out group the villain or “segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever”.
Why are people acting like this is ancient history when my still living parents grew up in the segregated south and as recently as 2014 there were cities that still had segregated proms?
This is no media exaggeration. Forsyth county was notorious for this until the early 2000s. I (a Black guy) had a house built here in 2016 and sold it just last year when I relocated. While my son was one of the five Black guys in his entire school, we never experienced any issues so I don’t want to cast any aspersions toward Forsyth as it exist today.
Poul Anderson [1] in its short stories Time Patrol has this theory that the past can be disturbed to some extend, some things have to happen independently of particular individuals or events.
As a let down as it is for readers interested in how the author handles and solves time paradoxes (it is better than the insipid and sloppy multiverse solution, though) - Time Patrol are mostly history-focused action stories - this theory makes sense to me. At some point the world gets "ready" to discover things because all the pieces of the puzzle are in its hands. In the case of Facebook, I believe it is not an accident or "because Zuckerberg"; a massive social network had to emerge, in particular due to network effects.
Yes, but, would they be any where near the level of what FB achieved? Take Truth Social as an example. It started because people wanted a place they get out of the larger group to dedicate to like minded. In this Philip K Dick style rewriting of history where FB was created by those behind Truth, would it have ever achieved critical mass?
Just because someone else attempts to fill in the vacuum of something else not being there does not mean that it will succeed in filling the void. Truth only survives on the cult of personality, not because people really want to be using it or because it's like a good product
Haha what? It’s the literal opposite mate. We’ve had an explosion of independent and non-capital aligned media. No matter what your brand of crazy is, you can find the “thought leaders” and community for you.
We would have had something else with same effect. The age was ripe with social media, orkut, Facebook, MySpace, and so many others I cannot even remember.
One analogy is local news media ecosystems across the US, which have generally looked pretty similar though not 100% identical over the past ~125 years or so, suggesting some determinism based on broader culture and technology.
If Facebook had stumbled, something else would have gotten the next microgeneration of college students and then their parents and grandparents.
It’s possible to me that an independent Instagram would have filled Facebook’s niche a few years later, and something like Snapchat would have taken the current Instagram niche. Maybe Twitter would have played a different role.
It’s also possible a web 2.0 answer to classmates.com would have grabbed the older crowd, and we’d have a slightly more profound age split.
But ultimately I think we’d end up where we are — a set of platforms algorithmically curating feeds of user-generated content — with a few cosmetic differences.
Facebook is pretty bad for society, but Twitter has also been quite bad. IMO Twitter has always been the real problem. Facebook replaced Email as the channel of choice for your weird relatives to spread conspiracy theories. And that is bad, but it is just an enhancement of a constant thing.
Twitter: all the journalists and elected officials signed up and decided the stuff that went on there Mattered and was News. The shitposts that showed up in their feed became social trends.
It is a widespread failure, but if we had to pick a thread that we should call the start of that part of the unraveling, I’d point at Twitter. I mean, that’s just the social media bit. Social media didn’t cause, like, Afghanistan or whatever.
Yeah, all social media has been pretty toxic for society. But Twitter has been especially bad. Turns out that requiring everyone to use very short messages means that interactions devolve into short, hot takes almost immediately. And then people just get angrier and angrier at each other as they fight back and forth via those barbs. Twitter couldn't have done more to unravel the social fabric if they actively tried to.
I think if bay area companies had behaved differently in early treatment of Facebook I don't think we would have ended up with such a paranoid/aggressive Facebook and things would have been much better, even if Facebook still became super successful. I think some of those early purchase attempts/behaviors are WHAT made Facebook the bad thing it became. Wonder if the juicy stories ever come out.
No it would just be a bunch of happy people messaging each other on Yahoo Messenger. We were never meant to see the inside of the brain of the average human put on public display.
iwanttocomment|7 months ago
zaphar|7 months ago
benrutter|7 months ago
The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion. Meta are a particularly bad example of this, but as long as there's money to be made by providing a platform for polarising politics and fake news, then I think someone will do so.
Who knows, maybe in that alternate universe you'd be posting "if Yahoo hadn't made such savy choices, I wonder if we would have the political climate we have today?"
cruffle_duffle|7 months ago
This has always been the case for as long as society has been consuming the news. “Business tycoons” have bought up newspapers and media outlets since forever to push their narrative.
I think one component that has changed is the sheer volume and diversity of media makes competition for your attention (clicks) all the more fierce. Enter The Algorithm and optimizing for metrics above all else.
I dunno. That doesn’t invalidate anything about the original question about what present day would be like without Facebook. Would something else similar have replaced it? Is Facebook really “the problem” or is it algorithmic content because algorithmicly driven content was going to happen facebook or not.
kevin_thibedeau|7 months ago
gonzobonzo|7 months ago
We're seeing the opposite, though. As the traditional media companies declined and the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own views, polarization increased.
As someone who tries to avoid the news and politics, it's pretty easy to avoid the companies selling them. But I keep running into them because there are lots of users on Hacker News/Reddit/etc. who try to interject it into every discussion they can . Invariably, these people don't come at it from the point of view that they might be wrong and the other side might be right; they act like zealous crusaders on a mission to vanquish evil.
JustExAWS|7 months ago
Why are people acting like this is ancient history when my still living parents grew up in the segregated south and as recently as 2014 there were cities that still had segregated proms?
This happened in 1985
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WErjPmFulQ0
This is no media exaggeration. Forsyth county was notorious for this until the early 2000s. I (a Black guy) had a house built here in 2016 and sold it just last year when I relocated. While my son was one of the five Black guys in his entire school, we never experienced any issues so I don’t want to cast any aspersions toward Forsyth as it exist today.
astrobe_|7 months ago
As a let down as it is for readers interested in how the author handles and solves time paradoxes (it is better than the insipid and sloppy multiverse solution, though) - Time Patrol are mostly history-focused action stories - this theory makes sense to me. At some point the world gets "ready" to discover things because all the pieces of the puzzle are in its hands. In the case of Facebook, I believe it is not an accident or "because Zuckerberg"; a massive social network had to emerge, in particular due to network effects.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul_Anderson
dylan604|7 months ago
Yes, but, would they be any where near the level of what FB achieved? Take Truth Social as an example. It started because people wanted a place they get out of the larger group to dedicate to like minded. In this Philip K Dick style rewriting of history where FB was created by those behind Truth, would it have ever achieved critical mass?
Just because someone else attempts to fill in the vacuum of something else not being there does not mean that it will succeed in filling the void. Truth only survives on the cult of personality, not because people really want to be using it or because it's like a good product
oc1|7 months ago
anomaly_|7 months ago
dehrmann|7 months ago
For all of unregulated news's flaws, government controlled news would be worse.
trueismywork|7 months ago
smelendez|7 months ago
One analogy is local news media ecosystems across the US, which have generally looked pretty similar though not 100% identical over the past ~125 years or so, suggesting some determinism based on broader culture and technology.
If Facebook had stumbled, something else would have gotten the next microgeneration of college students and then their parents and grandparents.
It’s possible to me that an independent Instagram would have filled Facebook’s niche a few years later, and something like Snapchat would have taken the current Instagram niche. Maybe Twitter would have played a different role.
It’s also possible a web 2.0 answer to classmates.com would have grabbed the older crowd, and we’d have a slightly more profound age split.
But ultimately I think we’d end up where we are — a set of platforms algorithmically curating feeds of user-generated content — with a few cosmetic differences.
nkrisc|7 months ago
elevaet|7 months ago
bee_rider|7 months ago
Twitter: all the journalists and elected officials signed up and decided the stuff that went on there Mattered and was News. The shitposts that showed up in their feed became social trends.
It is a widespread failure, but if we had to pick a thread that we should call the start of that part of the unraveling, I’d point at Twitter. I mean, that’s just the social media bit. Social media didn’t cause, like, Afghanistan or whatever.
bigstrat2003|7 months ago
_DeadFred_|7 months ago
eru|7 months ago
A different MySpace clone takes over the same niche.
Mistletoe|7 months ago
Spooky23|7 months ago
fnord77|7 months ago
that's exactly where my thoughts went
dyauspitr|7 months ago