4 ms·
Well yeah, that's one technical reason. But I suspect we would have found a work around if these systems had caught on to begin with. If a site or service is po
by CM30 10y ago
Well yeah, that's one technical reason. But I suspect we would have found a work around if these systems had caught on to begin with. If a site or service is popular, then that can influence what technology is adopted and how we use it.
No, I think the real major reasons are marketing related. For example, Facebook's network effect is very strong, even compared to sites like Twitter and Instagram. The service is only replaceable by one that grows extremely quickly, to the point things don't settle down enough for the site to feel like a ghost town.
And it ties into the real reason said effect is so strong.
These P2P and decentralised networks are only appealing to a certain minority of users.
They're basically marketed as 'censorship resistant' or 'free speech focuses'. And while these are nice things to be, they're not a selling point for 90% of the social media userbase. The vast majority of people either don't feel they're being censored or don't really care about anything controversial.
As a result, the only people using these services are niche groups using subject specific networks and activists banned or unwelcome from the major ones. It's like why Voat failed to unseat Reddit; because the only people who joined were those interested in discussing controversial issues and hence the site wasn't useful for people wanting to discuss more mundane things.
It's the social and marketing factors that really sunk any P2P attempts at a Facebook clone (or any other decentralised social networks). They just don't have value for people wanting to discuss non controversial things.
- teraflop 10y agoYep. Another way to put it is that by ditching Facebook in favor of something open-source and decentralized, you automatically become "that guy": https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/
- pjc50 10y ago"Censorship resistant" also means, in practice, that a large amount of your content is awful. Whereas the average person wants something with the sharp edges removed. Facebook's moderators, inconsistent as they are, are genuinely adding value.
- guard-of-terra 10y agoI don't see why do you think such system will force you to experience content you don't want. It's just when your tastes diverge from what's forced on us as acceptable, you shouldn't let in the dark.
- pjc50 10y agoThere's no way a priori to determine whether I want content without looking at it. At best I can delegate this up to a moderator to look at it for me. There are entire subcultures of people who make a game of trying to get people to see images they don't want to see. This has been happening since slashdot and goatse.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago> There's no way a priori to determine whether I want content without looking at it This is plain false. HN does it, for example. > At best I can delegate this up to a moderator to look at it for me It's an algorithm, not a moderator. Moderators are currently employed for two things: a) censorship, b) influencing opinions. Everything else algorithms do just fine.
- pjc50 10y agoHN is also a moderated system, there's this guy called dang you may have heard of.
- guard-of-terra 10y agoBut he's not going around curating your reading lists, does he? That's the point. In your own P2P Facebook, you'll be your own dang.
- fdgdasfadsf 10y agoHN's algorithm for deciding what gets on the first page is not totally trivial. Is it published anywhere?