Comment by frankharv
2 days ago
I didn't see it that way. when Facebook started it was like an intimate club.
Classmates.com was charging money for reunion information and Facebook was free.
It was the IPO that really tipped the scales.
In that one day Zuck became a Billionaire with everybody else's information.
We were bamboozled. Subscription versus free but not really.
Facebook was started by a college kid who made a site for non-consensually rating the faces of his fellow female classmates. He called his initial users "dumb f*cks" for trusting him with their private information. Information, which he offered to share with his friend, also without consent. It was obvious from the start that Facebook was up to no good, but money and power [1] prevailed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Facebook
Perhaps you didn't see it that way.
However, I do remember the conversations from that time.
I still don't have any social media other than LinkedIn that connects to my identity, and warned family against it for as long as I could.
Saying people on HN were bamboozled is ludicrous. HN is an old bastions for people who argue for privacy and anonymity. I sincerely doubt (hope) that many people would say they were fooled. That would indicate a degree of intellectual immaturity and avoidance of concequence which makes any other position held suspect.
It was clear that there was no other way this was going to go. Saying the IPO tipped the scales is also being wildly generous to firms.
Perhaps its the other side of the coin of the HN zeitgeist? faith in firms matching the distrust in government.
[dead]