??? You absolutely have the right and ability to host your own content on your own page. Facebook is incredibly popular, but it's not the "centralized" communication medium. If you want to make a political statement or whatever, you absolutely can-- presuming you can get people to actually come see what you have to say.
People use Facebook or other social media because it's significantly more convenient to do so. And distributing content on Facebook/Twitter/etc. is much more effective than trying to get people to go to your own personal website.
No doubt, but the fact file sharing networks were and still are largely self-hosted proves that people will have no issue doing the same to get a copy of some movie or music album. So self-hosting your FB-like wall or Twitter-like timeline shouldn't be much harder. If anything, I think it would be easier since the remaining data that would be stored would be relatively small (thinking of Vine-like videos, photos like you have on Instagram, etc) with the rest just being hyperlinks. Hell, I think you could make them all hyperlinks and put storage in some other distributed protocol if you have to. In any case, it's not a technical problem in my opinion, it's just a problem of making such a platform as easy as installing it on your phone without a second thought beyond are you JamesBond007SexyTimes123 or whatever you silly handle would be.
I'm having a tough time understanding what you're saying. You're saying that the decisions of a company are made due to cultural norms, and not individual consciences? And that Zuckerberg doesn't actually have any power, because the shareholders would out-vote them? And the shareholders make their decisions based on cultural norms? Then where do those norms come from? What leads those cultural norms?
I legitimately don't understand what you're saying.
I'm saying that there's more at work which is beyond the individual choices of each person on the board at Facebook. They have legal obligations to their shareholders, nebulous legal obligations to users, and many other concerns I couldn't list here since I don't know them all. But just of the tension between the legal obligations to their shareholders and that of their users which results in the shareholders having the advantage here. There's little in the way of US law that prevents Facebook from doing what they do since Facebook isn't like a broadcast company or a utility (as per the legal definitions). So the default mode for Facebook's board is to side with investors and protect the value of their stocks, not to protect the privacy of users nor to protect their other civil liberties. You can't just throw away the law whenever you like. At some point, the law has to trump our feelings on an issue like this. And when it's inadequate to handle these edge cases we should take action to reform the law. But that takes time. You can't expect an individual CEO, President, or regulatory chief to make that choice alone if the law doesn't grant them that authority.
It might seem small, but I'd argue that the difference in phrases is pretty stark.
Saying we "have a better model of"-something leaves room for further exploration and interpretation. It's admission that there's room for different possibilities, and its not taking an /absolute/ position on something.
But saying something "has answered questions" comes off as absolute and final. Is 1+1=2? Yes. Answered. Case closed. If you're going to say that "The simulation solves a decades-old mystery", then you'd better be damn sure that your simulation is correct, your interpretations are correct, your simulation correctly reflects physical reality, etc.
Saying "it has been answered" is a strong definitive statement, though. It's rather arrogant to say "Yes, thanks to this model, we absolutely know <xyz>." Are we absolutely certain that this model is correct? Are we absolutely certain that what we can extrapolate from this model accurately applies to the physical world?
Granted, yes, questions were answered... I guess. But saying that "The simulation solves a decades-old mystery" is uncomfortably confident and counter to how scientific process works.
Some people like to say things like that, but it's more accurate to say "this proves our current model is consistent with data". I only skimmed the article (and haven't read the actual paper) but it focused on surrounding dwarf galaxies which have traditionally been a problem with these simulations. I'm sure there are still plenty of ways in which these sims do not match our actual universe.
People use Facebook or other social media because it's significantly more convenient to do so. And distributing content on Facebook/Twitter/etc. is much more effective than trying to get people to go to your own personal website.