Didn’t a lot of it seem like a good idea at the time? When you look at early Facebook, I think people got a lot out of it. Even Facebook today can be a way for older people (say those who weren’t students when it was new) to reconnect with old acquaintances or lost friends.
If you try to imagine early Twitter it seemed like something people liked. Surely microblogging was easier to get into than microblogging. And the centralisation made it easier for friends to follow each other. I don’t think it was particularly obvious how it might go wrong. For example there wasn’t much of an algorithm for a while (feeds were chronological) except for a ‘trending’ section. But HN has a trending-like section – the front page – and it seems to work out ok.
Basically, I claim that ‘we’ thought they were a good idea and that they fitted in with the optimistic world-connecting zeitgeist of the early internet. I don’t really know what else people were thinking (well obviously there was some level of ‘we think these numbers correspond to a good service for our users and investors so we want to make them go up’ and ‘we sell ads to make money’)
This isn’t to say that the results were good but I think the efforts were generally serious and well-intentioned. If you look at something which is ‘anti-Facebook’, the GDPR, I think a similar thing can be said: the law was carefully written with deliberate goals and it’s authors seemed to seriously believe it would achieve them. I think we’ll find it didn’t work as well as intended but I hope I won’t browse HN in 2032 and see someone saying ‘what were lawmakers thinking when they drafted these terrible data-protection laws?’
A lot of it seemed like a pretty bad idea at the time. Capitalists built it anyway. "We" had little say in the matter aside from the ability to quit in protest to likely be replaced.
I think this must be the root of our disagreement because I basically don’t believe this. I believe neither that it seemed like a bad idea at the time nor that employees could do little, though I sympathise with the many reasons employees do do little.
Reports like this were incredibly common back in 2009. Few heeded these warnings. Now, outlets like The Washington Post depend on the whims of billionaires in order to survive, some huge chunk of the U.S. population incorrectly believe the last election was stolen, and our data is legally harvested to further manipulate the population.
In any case, it certainly seemed like a bad idea to me personally - and the point is more that there were indeed many people yelling "stop!"
As for whether employees could have done anything - I just really don't think they have as much influence as you suggest. Most jobs you have a boss, they say what your tasks are and very little is actually up for negotiation. Obviously there are exceptions, and I assume some rather lofty idealistic founders in the valley may offer individual start-up employees more influence. In general though, that isn't what happens at the average job.
edit:
also - Hacker News probably isn't the best place to sample from if you're trying to get a read on the pulse of society. Comments tend towards reactionary, dismissive, and shallow. Further, you're basically just sampling from (mostly) wealthy male programmers and aspiring founders. This spectrum ranges from "I just do my job and go home" to "how could our platform be causing issues? it connects so many people!" Zuckerberg-esque naivety.
If you try to imagine early Twitter it seemed like something people liked. Surely microblogging was easier to get into than microblogging. And the centralisation made it easier for friends to follow each other. I don’t think it was particularly obvious how it might go wrong. For example there wasn’t much of an algorithm for a while (feeds were chronological) except for a ‘trending’ section. But HN has a trending-like section – the front page – and it seems to work out ok.
Basically, I claim that ‘we’ thought they were a good idea and that they fitted in with the optimistic world-connecting zeitgeist of the early internet. I don’t really know what else people were thinking (well obviously there was some level of ‘we think these numbers correspond to a good service for our users and investors so we want to make them go up’ and ‘we sell ads to make money’)
This isn’t to say that the results were good but I think the efforts were generally serious and well-intentioned. If you look at something which is ‘anti-Facebook’, the GDPR, I think a similar thing can be said: the law was carefully written with deliberate goals and it’s authors seemed to seriously believe it would achieve them. I think we’ll find it didn’t work as well as intended but I hope I won’t browse HN in 2032 and see someone saying ‘what were lawmakers thinking when they drafted these terrible data-protection laws?’