Comment by rolandog
1 month ago
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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Your own source [2] says:
> But to be clear, there is no evidence DARPA or the U.S. intelligence services had any role in the creation of Facebook.
Do you require everything you read to spell out everything for you point blank? Are you unable to connect dots?
The DARPA lifelog project ended the day Facebook was announced by a college dropout no one had ever heard of before. Facebook just happened to have the exact same goals / features as the lifelog project. Must just be a giant coincidence huh?
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No way, we've known for 15 years that it was the CIA, not DARPA, after The Onion broke the story:
https://youtu.be/ZJ380SHZvYU
Distracting from actual stories like DARPA's lifelog program ending the same day Mark Zuckerberg announces Facebook to the world, with dumb videos from the onion, is really doing the world a great service.
> 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.
I disagree. I feel like earlier social networks hadn't yet huffed the "lean startup" gas and weren't obsessed with engagement and thus were not yet trying to hook their users into an engagement cycle like where we are today.
I feel like the Myspace/Friendster and early Facebook were nowhere near as harmful (albeit for addiction, those sites were still vulnerable to grooming) as where we are today.
OG Facebook was perfectly fine. In your analogy it’d be more like someone replacing your Diet Coke with actual cocaine. Like, yeah Diet Coke isn’t great for you, but it’s not cocaine.