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This is what you get out from centralizing your communications medium. Sure, we all can easily talk to each other but now you have to assume the host will find

This is what you get out from centralizing your communications medium. Sure, we all can easily talk to each other but now you have to assume the host will find something you do or say a liability thus remove it as quickly as you post it. To say that Facebook shouldn't do this comes into conflict in protecting share holder value (which means also avoiding illegal content per local laws). So, you can't have it both ways. Either you have a corporate defend it's share holder value or you have it all nationalized and get NPR. I just wish people would realize that corporations aren't our friends, they're here to make a profit. And profit isn't always what's ethical. I think the better solution to the problem as it stands is to force people to start hosting their own content (which is why I support net neutrality and anti-metering laws). That way, you're in charge of your content and responsible for getting people to view it. We shouldn't have to return to the days of AOL (which we have largely done) to get eye balls. People still go to websites, so why depend on Facebook to distribute your content?

lotyrin 10y ago
Yep, it's not a public utility, it's not governed by a neutral third party, it's not open, transparent or free. What did you expect? It's a surveillance and marketing platform that you subjected yourselves to out of convenience, operated for its own benefit and indirectly to the benefit of its customers, certainly not its users. I've never really understood social media in this form, nor understood its takeover as primary communication channel and I'm not going to go full RMS or expect anyone else to have the same values as myself, but if people do share those values, and do want better than facetwitsnapagramblr (without any judgement on if they should) then they should have participated in building and using something better instead of deluding themselves.
- aidenn0 10y ago
  > Yep, it's not a public utility, it's not governed by a neutral third party, it's not open, transparent or free. What did you expect? It's a surveillance and marketing platform that you subjected yourselves to out of convenience, operated for its own benefit and indirectly to the benefit of its customers, certainly not its users. With the possible exception of "surveillance" everything you just said is also true of newspapers.
  - throwaway199283 10y ago
    Facebook is also the town square where people are selling the newspapers, Facebook is the streets that newspaper delivery trucks drive down, and Facebook is the sidewalks on which employees at the newspaper walk to work. There is no public space on the internet, just a network of private residences. Facebook has positioned itself as the public square. The freedoms of the press, speech and protest are predicated on equal access to these public forums and they clearly do not exist in our current media landscape.
    - the8472 10y ago
      > There is no public space on the internet, just a network of private residences. Net neutrality/common carrier rules make the streets public space. But that means only open-source, authority-less p2p communication is free. Everything else is under someone's thumb.
  - lotyrin 10y ago
    Not really relevant, I didn't have to subscribe to NYT in order to stay in touch with my friends and family.
    - oldmanjay 10y ago
      If you're going to start splitting hairs then you don't "have to" use any one particular method of staying in touch with people. Supreme convenience is not force.
      - amenod 10y ago
        > Supreme convenience is not force. In theory, it is not. In practice, it is. Not only that, in case when there is a fight between almost anything (such as privacy, security,...) and convenience, the latter will always win (on large scale).
clumsysmurf 10y ago
> I think the better solution to the problem as it stands is to force people to start hosting their own content I'm encouraged that Tim Berners-Lee is working on this exact problem with Solid (Socially linked data) "a way for you to own your own data while making it available to the applications that you want to be able to use it." http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-web/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-we...
- DesiLurker 10y ago
  you kinda already have an instance of IPFS from the creator of bittorrent, its called btsync. totally p2p. Tho somebody needs to make a 'Solid' layer on top of it. as far as social net is concerned I'd settle for a middle ground social network like ello with irrevocable privacy and non-censorship protections built in from the founding doc itself.
  - meira 10y ago
    Btsync isn't open, is it?
forgetsusername 10y ago
>I just wish people would realize that corporations aren't our friends, they're here to make a profit. I wish people would stop saying that corporations are some disparate entity, rather than a collection of people with a defined purpose, like our friends and family members. People just like you in other words. Corporations don't have a mind of their own, nor do they pursue profit regardless of ethics.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > I wish people would stop saying that corporations as some disparate entity, rather than a collection of people The whole point of a corporation is to be a separate entity from the collection of people that have interests in it.
  - forgetsusername 10y ago
    >The whole point of a corporation is to be a separate entity from the collection of people that have interests in it. It doesn't have a mind of its own, any direction comes from real live people making decisions every day. Or can you point to a single instance where this isn't the case?
- whyenot 10y ago
  > Corporations don't have a mind of their own Of course not, as you mentioned they are composed of human beings who make the decisions about how a company operates. I am sure you will agree that a significant number of humans will disregard ethics when it comes to personal enrichment. Let me provide one example who comes immediately to mind: Pablo Escobar (thanks, Netflix). US prisons do contain a large number of white collar criminals. > nor do they [companies] pursue profit regardless of ethics. This does not follow. Companies are composed of people, and people do disregard ethics.
- leereeves 10y ago
  The law says corporations are some disparate entity, except when they want protections given only to people, in which case the law can be convinced corporations are made of people.
drusepth 10y ago
>I think the better solution to the problem as it stands is to force people to start hosting their own content Does this mean people need to start moderating their own content, also? I don't want to have to decide on rules of what to keep/delete, and I don't want to just let anything go, either. If I wanted to manage my own site, I'd build one -- I almost always just want to use a service that someone else maintains for me, including determining what content to show/hide. If I wanted to manage all that stuff myself, I'd just build my own Facebook.
- norea-armozel 10y ago
  The way I look at is this, self-hosting should be the norm and not the exception today. We have plenty of hardware solutions for this but the consumer end of the problem is largely due to ISPs not wanting to be what they are: utilities. If we could politically fix that problem (regulate Comcast and company properly) then I think the rest should be obvious for people. The rest comes down to making hardware solutions as simple as pressing a button and go from home.
acagle 10y ago
The optimist in me would like to believe that we are still in a "Napster" world in terms of content, and we will eventually get back to a more bit torrent centric environment - what we lack is a killer UI that me, my kids, and mother-in-law will all use.
alanaut 10y ago
I would love to have a conversation on how big does FB have to become to be considered a monopoly?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
a_throwaway3838 10y ago
??? 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.
- norea-armozel 10y ago
  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.

lotyrin 10y ago

Yep, it's not a public utility, it's not governed by a neutral third party, it's not open, transparent or free. What did you expect? It's a surveillance and marketing platform that you subjected yourselves to out of convenience, operated for its own benefit and indirectly to the benefit of its customers, certainly not its users. I've never really understood social media in this form, nor understood its takeover as primary communication channel and I'm not going to go full RMS or expect anyone else to have the same values as myself, but if people do share those values, and do want better than facetwitsnapagramblr (without any judgement on if they should) then they should have participated in building and using something better instead of deluding themselves.

aidenn0 10y ago
> Yep, it's not a public utility, it's not governed by a neutral third party, it's not open, transparent or free. What did you expect? It's a surveillance and marketing platform that you subjected yourselves to out of convenience, operated for its own benefit and indirectly to the benefit of its customers, certainly not its users. With the possible exception of "surveillance" everything you just said is also true of newspapers.
- throwaway199283 10y ago
  Facebook is also the town square where people are selling the newspapers, Facebook is the streets that newspaper delivery trucks drive down, and Facebook is the sidewalks on which employees at the newspaper walk to work. There is no public space on the internet, just a network of private residences. Facebook has positioned itself as the public square. The freedoms of the press, speech and protest are predicated on equal access to these public forums and they clearly do not exist in our current media landscape.
  - the8472 10y ago
    > There is no public space on the internet, just a network of private residences. Net neutrality/common carrier rules make the streets public space. But that means only open-source, authority-less p2p communication is free. Everything else is under someone's thumb.
- lotyrin 10y ago
  Not really relevant, I didn't have to subscribe to NYT in order to stay in touch with my friends and family.
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    If you're going to start splitting hairs then you don't "have to" use any one particular method of staying in touch with people. Supreme convenience is not force.
    - amenod 10y ago
      > Supreme convenience is not force. In theory, it is not. In practice, it is. Not only that, in case when there is a fight between almost anything (such as privacy, security,...) and convenience, the latter will always win (on large scale).

clumsysmurf 10y ago

> I think the better solution to the problem as it stands is to force people to start hosting their own content I'm encouraged that Tim Berners-Lee is working on this exact problem with Solid (Socially linked data) "a way for you to own your own data while making it available to the applications that you want to be able to use it." http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-web/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-we...

DesiLurker 10y ago
you kinda already have an instance of IPFS from the creator of bittorrent, its called btsync. totally p2p. Tho somebody needs to make a 'Solid' layer on top of it. as far as social net is concerned I'd settle for a middle ground social network like ello with irrevocable privacy and non-censorship protections built in from the founding doc itself.
- meira 10y ago
  Btsync isn't open, is it?

forgetsusername 10y ago

>I just wish people would realize that corporations aren't our friends, they're here to make a profit. I wish people would stop saying that corporations are some disparate entity, rather than a collection of people with a defined purpose, like our friends and family members. People just like you in other words. Corporations don't have a mind of their own, nor do they pursue profit regardless of ethics.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> I wish people would stop saying that corporations as some disparate entity, rather than a collection of people The whole point of a corporation is to be a separate entity from the collection of people that have interests in it.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >The whole point of a corporation is to be a separate entity from the collection of people that have interests in it. It doesn't have a mind of its own, any direction comes from real live people making decisions every day. Or can you point to a single instance where this isn't the case?
whyenot 10y ago
> Corporations don't have a mind of their own Of course not, as you mentioned they are composed of human beings who make the decisions about how a company operates. I am sure you will agree that a significant number of humans will disregard ethics when it comes to personal enrichment. Let me provide one example who comes immediately to mind: Pablo Escobar (thanks, Netflix). US prisons do contain a large number of white collar criminals. > nor do they [companies] pursue profit regardless of ethics. This does not follow. Companies are composed of people, and people do disregard ethics.
leereeves 10y ago
The law says corporations are some disparate entity, except when they want protections given only to people, in which case the law can be convinced corporations are made of people.

drusepth 10y ago

>I think the better solution to the problem as it stands is to force people to start hosting their own content Does this mean people need to start moderating their own content, also? I don't want to have to decide on rules of what to keep/delete, and I don't want to just let anything go, either. If I wanted to manage my own site, I'd build one -- I almost always just want to use a service that someone else maintains for me, including determining what content to show/hide. If I wanted to manage all that stuff myself, I'd just build my own Facebook.

norea-armozel 10y ago
The way I look at is this, self-hosting should be the norm and not the exception today. We have plenty of hardware solutions for this but the consumer end of the problem is largely due to ISPs not wanting to be what they are: utilities. If we could politically fix that problem (regulate Comcast and company properly) then I think the rest should be obvious for people. The rest comes down to making hardware solutions as simple as pressing a button and go from home.

acagle 10y ago

The optimist in me would like to believe that we are still in a "Napster" world in terms of content, and we will eventually get back to a more bit torrent centric environment - what we lack is a killer UI that me, my kids, and mother-in-law will all use.

alanaut 10y ago

I would love to have a conversation on how big does FB have to become to be considered a monopoly?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

a_throwaway3838 10y ago

??? 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.

norea-armozel 10y ago
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.