Comment by forkerenok
1 month ago
Meta is like one giant cancer that grew a few small tumors of benign[1] nature, like some of their efforts in open source and open research (React, Llama, etc.).
[1]: I could be wrong thinking those are benign.
1 month ago
Meta is like one giant cancer that grew a few small tumors of benign[1] nature, like some of their efforts in open source and open research (React, Llama, etc.).
[1]: I could be wrong thinking those are benign.
>Meta is like one giant cancer
Cancer is a great metaphor because its a perversion of natural, healthy processes. So called social media is nearly that, but actually grotesquely unhealthy.
People are dramatically unwell when they are not social, but that unregulated process is also negative up to and including being lethal.
Exactly. It started out as something good: see what friends and family are up to. But now: scroll infinite algorithmically placed or sponsored rage bait trying to trigger you into behaving the way that advances certain corporate or foreign interests at the expense of whatever was left of our already tattered social fabric and our collective mental or literal health.
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> It started out as something good
No it didn’t. That was just like the first free sample from the drug dealer. Give a “good” free service to rope them in, always with the next steps in mind.
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Being on "social media" is a fundamentally unsocial activity: you do it alone, it makes you lonely, and it separates you from others. Some people manage to bootstrap a social layer on top of the base medium, but most are being driven apart for profit.
I call it _anti_social media.
Facebook was the Eternal September of the Web. Netiquette died when it was made generally available, as did the culture that spawned it.
I think you can tell approximately how old someone is by when they believe Eternal September started on the internet. Nobody believes it was when they started enjoying the internet. It was always when some other generation or service arrived after them.
The internet was not a calm and well behaved place before Facebook arrived. The original “Eternal September” was in the early 90s. Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long before Facebook came along.
Can confirm.
Source: I was a bad, bad, boi, on UseNet.
So many words and you missed the most important one: "netiquette"
That's the whole point: the word exists precisely as a testament to something that used to exist but now doesn't.
Anybody old enough to remember the word when it was common use should realize that it would have been impossible for the term to be coined in 2026.
If you missed that part of the Internet (maybe you were too young or maybe you were focused on other things, like the vast majority of people in the 90s), that's totally fine, but plenty of us did experience it and remember it pretty clearly.
> Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long before Facebook came along.
You can tell approximately how old someone is by whether they have reached the "everything sucks" part of life yet or not.
Eternal September started before I was on the internet, but there have been several similar shifts since then.
It gets continually worse. Agentic AI is another Eternal September. For example, we now have dimwits sending dozens of unsolicited and unreviewed slop PRs to open source projects. Every search result is an affiliate marketing listicle obviously written by a robot.
Hence... "of the web." IRC is and always was a cesspool but at least they had heard of netiquette, and it was something you could choose to partake in - or not, for the lulz. Nobody said anything about being "calm and well behaved" in particular.
As a Millennial, I'm sad to say that it wasn't even older generations' fault, but our own (+Gen X). The tipping point was letting in normies who traded in photos and money instead of text and art.
Elitism and selectivity were actually features of the early Internet. High barriers to entry (tech savvy, literacy) ensured that there was a high signal to noise ratio, and thus you had, let's say, upper quartile participants concentrated in one (forum of) fora.
LLMs are now heralding the Eternal September of even software engineering, and now I am wondering where to hang up my Techpriest robes in search of more elite pastures.
I wonder if this is how the clergy felt once the vulgar were allowed to study scripture not in the original spiritual programming languages of Hebrew or Latin, but English.
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Everything consumer facing from meta is like a toxic waste hazard. It makes me sad seeing people stuck on those platforms.
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I think Zstandard would be the most benign example.
Zstandard was created by one amazing person. Pretty sure he would have done it even if meta didn't exist.
A few weeks after they expanded access beyond .edu domains, I deleted my account. Haven't looked back since. Not an ounce of regret.
Exactly. Why should furrin students get a look in?
React benign? That’s the first time I’ve seen this suggestion on HN. Usually it’s held responsible for great crimes and wrongs.
Ha, I think the great crimes and wrongs title goes to Angular. I became a front-end guy specifically to avoid all the OOP verbosity. I'm just trying to call some APIs and render some data on a web page. I don't need layers of abstraction to do that.
Anyways, is there a "just use vue" effort like there is with postgres :)
I also found Angular to be a nightmare. I enjoy Astro, Svelte, even Preact can be fun. There are many to try. My comment above was just a joke, but I'm getting downvoted.