This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask you not to post insinuations about astroturfing. Those are internet poison and nearly always imaginary. (I've written about this ad nasueum for anyone who wants more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...).

So please don't do that, and please don't post unsubstantive comments in general. We're hoping for thoughtful conversation here, not flames.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Are you joking? In every thread about FB besides this one, almost every single comment actively bashes FB.

This is something I've wondered... Do all Facebook/Google employees drink the Kool aid? Are there no privacy proponents?

You have to have loose morals & ethics, be a misanthrope, or be completely oblivious to the world to even work at Facebook or Google anymore.

I think you could make that case easily for Facebook but less easily for Google. The number of useful Google products (AOSP, for instance) is enormous. They contribute massively to open source†. Their co-founders clearly have less evil tendencies that Facebook's founder. Their free products are insanely useful. A lot of Google's products have a price tag attached to them especially for the enterprise sector where they don't trade your data. I would compare Google to Apple and Microsoft and Amazon. Facebook is a totally different entity – I'm of the opinion that Facebook should _never_ have been allowed to acquire WhatsApp and Instagram.

† Before anyone points out that FB contribute to open source… they've about, what, 50 projects, Google has over 2,000 and has been running that Google Summer of Code project for many years which supports 1,000s of projects outside Google.

This is objectively wrong. Take a look at how often Facebook is mentioned in the title of submissions in the last month, sorted by number of upvotes: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook&sort=byPopularity&pre...

The entire top 10 are entirely negative of Facebook.

Not an FB employee but like many HN members with assets in tech stocks, a sizable portion of my portfolio consists of FB stock from the days when it was around $50.

FB has made me good money, and I don’t get shaken by what I see on the news. At the end of the day, FB still does more good things than bad, and I am more likely to take them seriously when they set out on a new venture.

> At the end of the day, FB still does more good things than bad

I don't think this is a claim you can make these days without a good argument behind it. It certainly seems false to me.

> I am more likely to take them seriously when they set out on a new venture

This is real, though. Whatever FB are, they're not dumb and whatever they do should be taken seriously.

There's def a sizeable representation of FB folks on HN, know some personally.