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You (and your parent comment) said “make the world a better place”, not “change” it. Very few things change the world meaningfully.

And the point stands: what he did was more relevant than most (if not all) Facebook communities will ever accomplish.




Splitting hairs.

If you use a platform nobody uses to try and change the world you won't change it just like if you tried to plant trees without using seeds.


The point is precisely that you don’t need a social networking platform to do something meaningful.


I don't think the author was talking about isolated change like planting some seeds.

Real change requires humans to collaborate and work together.


> isolated

The whole thread is about limited and well-defined communities, not the world. What the OP wants is specifically “isolated”.

> like planting some seeds

Spending thirty years planting a 550 hectare forest and restoring wildlife to it is not “planting some seeds”. Please don’t be reductive.

> Real change

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Change is change. You don’t get to define someone’s life work, which was more meaningful and impactful than most of us will ever achieve, not “real” to fit your narrow definition.


50K people is a limited community to move to another platform???


Yes, yes it is. By definition. “Limited” means “restricted in size”, not “an arbitrary number a random person thinks is small”. From the moment OP defined “this is for this specific community of this size”, it is limited. It will be abundantly clear when they have moved no one, or every one, or a critical mass, or not enough. Because it’s limited, bounded, constrained.


Well in that case so is the total population of earth.


We’re not discussing the total population of the Earth. The thing about words is that their meaning may depend on context.

If we were discussing everyone who has lived and will ever live, the current population of the world would be a limited snapshot. Same if we were discussing every planet and civilisation in the fictional world of Start Trek.

But we’re not discussing that. Making up something we’re not talking about to attack what we are is called a straw man argument.


And for the purposes of the stated goal, for one person or even a company to get 50K people to switch from Facebook or to use another platform especially when all someone else has to do is start a group on Facebook, might as well be “the number of people on earth” difficult.


Yes, I agree, I’ve said that several hours ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42781581

What you’re arguing against is not the point I was making. My point in this thread is way up there: it replies to someone saying you cannot make the world better without communicating with other humans, by presenting someone who on their own improved the world more than most (if not all) Facebook groups ever will.

When I used the word “limited”, it was clearly in reference to it being an “isolated” specific community and not everyone.


Mincing words and splitting hairs again.


Words have meanings. Communication between humans, which you’re keenly defending, depends on a shared understanding of them. I haven’t commented on it until now, but in my view you’re splitting hairs by repeatedly creating your own definitions (e.g. defining what is “real” change or not; changing the definition of words you said; saying “improvement” is not “change”; misunderstanding “limited”). So your repeated accusations don’t really land.

I don’t think it’s worth either of our times to continue, though. We’ve strayed too much from the original point.

A good evening (or your equivalent time of day) to you.


Yeah, and mincing words to make a silly argument valid isn't communication, it's arguing for arguments sake.




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