Comment by Centigonal
3 days ago
This is some next level legal judo. Say what you want about the metaverse or muse, but it's clear that Meta is still innovating when it comes to its Terms of Service.
3 days ago
This is some next level legal judo. Say what you want about the metaverse or muse, but it's clear that Meta is still innovating when it comes to its Terms of Service.
In a just world, meta wouldn't exist like this. I fail to see any benefit in a company like this. I can't think of a single useful product or advancement they've made besides creating the page that makes grandma go insane and young people everywhere to hate themselves.
They're pointedly worse than most other social media. Even twitter doesn't really pretend they're anything but a place to say slurs now that "comedy is legal".
Meta feels so much more nefarious due to how 99% of their business is quiet deals with data brokers and ad buyers, and they just smile and nod as if they make anything positive at all. It feels like a company that makes most of it's money selling heroin, but they have a cute storefront so they get a pass.
> I can't think of a single useful product or advancement
> They're pointedly worse than most other social media.
I agree that there's a lot wrong, but both Marketplace and Groups are actually pretty valuable and useful. To say that Facebook is just a feed of memes and politics is reductive.
Marketplace is a far worse replacement for Craigslist in the North American market.
It hides what you're searching for, ignores your distance filters, and fills your results with items that are essentially ebay cross-listings. The pictures are extremely compressed so you're unable to validate the item from pictures before reaching out.
The only benefit is many people already have a facebook account, but now I'm unable to delete my facebook account because marketplace is the predominant classified sales channel in most areas. It was a EEE style effort to collect more data on people.
The past few years there have been persistent spam campaigns against Craigslist in various areas of the for-sale classifieds. It wouldn't surprise me if meta was behind it.
Groups are in a similar vein. They've put a log-in barrier on various communities, lowering the barrier to entry tech-wise, but forcing people into their ecosystem when forums have existed for years.
These are bad services. They gain traction due to facebook's other malicious actions.
> Marketplace and Groups are actually pretty valuable and usefu
Craigslist created a new way to sell things and built up to what it is (was?) on being usable, having enough trust, and not fucking it up. Literally anyone could replicate that and add a shiny UI to rival it if they had a giant social network to support it.
Hyperbolic analogy: it's like pinning a medal to the guy who invented the roadside billboard and completely passing over the dude who actually invented the car.
In the long run the only innovating Facebook is going to do over Craigslist is monetization, and that just sucks for users.
craigslist and meetup worked fine before facebook got everyone to leave them
That's the system we live under here.
You either have a government capable of controlling its corporations or you get corporations capable of controlling the government.
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This is some next-level newspeak euphemism. I foresee a stellar career in PR or the ministry of propaganda.
That was a joke. (I assume, at least?)
Does it need to be a joke?
"Innovating" is often used in situations we consider good and sometimes we begin to associate it with some positive moral/ethical weight, but that is an incorrect association. Innovating on something is only as good or as bad as that something is. Innovating on something bad is thus bad.
The grand parentonly called out being innovative on "Terms of Service" without assigning "Terms of Service" a good or bad moral weight. I think we can read some implication from the short post, but (IMHO) the best part is that it can just as easily be read as a criticism of the wider concept of "Terms of Service" as of Meta itself.
the scariest engineers are financial and legal engineers
That's because they don't need to follow the laws of physics, so anything that can be imagined is possible.
well arguably they are still trying to wrestle with theorising what they can get away with, so there are clear limitations.
1 reply →
Scary in what sense?
Those are certainly among the most interesting engineers. For example, what were the American Founding Fathers, if not "legal engineers" (and certainly many of them were also "financial engineers", given this was one of their most pressing needs).
I guess if you find yourself preferring the status quo all the time they might be scary but given I can't think of any time in history where the status quo was totally desirable I'm not sure what there is to be scared of exactly.
Could you be more specific?
My interpretation was that they’re referring to legal/financial engineers in the context of corporate butheshareholderism, where rather than trying to e.g. build a good nation, the goal is to maximize profits.
What is the word for this type of troll that feigns lack of understanding?
3 replies →
These are two types of engineers that, at some places, aim to find loopholes that immensely help themselves while immensely hurting others, maybe as collateral, maybe by design. The fact that you’re so gung-ho about this…is alarming.
found one
> Could you be more specific?
They're shifty fuckers enabling greedy scummy fuckers to make everything shittier forever for everyone in the world except themselves.
1 reply →
No, it's the pick-up artists. They're the ones that know how to find ways to get around saying "no" to touch what they wanna touch even if the rest of us didn't want them to.
That's a bit of a stretch of the term engineer
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Antisemitism is not welcome on this platform.
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