13 ms·

We Need More Alternatives to Facebook

185 points by submeta 9y ago

Eerie 9y ago
No, we don't need More Alternatives to Facebook. We need Less Alternatives to Facebook. That is, Zero Alternatives to Facebook AND Zero Facebook. Stop wasting your time!
- danellis 9y ago
  Why is keeping in touch with friends in one place online wasting time?
  - Eerie 9y ago
    Facebook is not about keeping in touch with friends, it is about selling your views to advertisers by maximizing the time you spend on the site. To keep in touch with friends you should use a fucking mail list.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      So anyone who doesn't do things your way is wrong, OK. Thanks for clearing that up.
      - type0 9y ago
        But forcing others to use unethically driven website by the means of social pressure is even more wrong. Two wrongs don't make you right.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - danellis 9y ago
      > Facebook is not about keeping in touch with friends You are mistaken. I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends. It's a pretty epic level of arrogance to try and tell me what I use it for.
  - type0 9y ago
    More like waisting your freedom, integrity, privacy etc...
    - danellis 9y ago
      Can you give me an example of how my freedom, integrity or privacy have been wasted? They're not taking anything I haven't willingly given them.
      - type0 9y ago
        How do you know, if the latest reports is to go by they are buying personal information from third parties in order to construct better dossiers.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
mattbgates 9y ago
Google tried and failed. There are alternatives in other countries.. V Kontakte and odnoklassniki for Russia, WeChat and Qzone for China, though other countries other than those two are using what Americans use. There are a few other things like Snapchat and Kik that teenagers are using. Basically, if you think about the time you were a teenager: your parents are old. If they are using Facebook, than Facebook must not be cool. If your parents aren't using it, than it must be cool. In Facebook's defense: adults are more valuable as users than teenagers are, as they are clicking on ads and buying things. So there wouldn't be any reason for Facebook to even try to be that "cool" place where teenagers go. So for someone to capture that niche the way Facebook had done would be very hard to do. I'm around Zuckerberg's age and at first, Facebook never appealed to me, until they removed the .edu cap. So that was an important step of getting Facebook to the entire world. It made everything so easy to connect with people and "keep in touch" via messages, wall posts, and photos. The "Like" button seemed to be something the world had never really seen as well and made it even easier to "show" you acknowledged it, rather than having to respond. I'm sure if Google Plus attempted to be a compliment, rather than be a replacement, it would've had more success. And the next big social media network that is an alternative to Facebook will need to focus on that. People don't really like "change". However, they are willing to learn and switch to things that are more useful and helpful. For the older generation, which on Facebook -- 25+ is probably the most prominent users -- they really don't care to switch because their friends and families aren't using anything else. This is where Facebook has great strength. Where Facebook and Google tend to fail is: they want to be everyone's everything. They seem to want to dominate all aspects of our lives. And while it sounds great and it has worked in China (with WeChat), it is not appealing to everyone that uses their products. However, when you have so many products within your already-huge enterprise: those products get lost or belittled. How many features does Google and Facebook have that many people don't even know exists? Facebook is social media and Google is search. Both have a little bit of extra pull with the open source and developer community, BUT.. they need to stay focused on what they are best at doing. As a web app developer, I keep an eye on those failed or lesser known products from Facebook and Google, and make my own and charge for them. It is likely that they are free on Facebook and Google, but people might not know they actually exist because again: Google is for search, Facebook is for social communication. Anything more than that... is lost.
thr0waway1239 9y ago
I wonder what traits will define the Facebook transcender like the Windows transcender [1] mentioned in PG's essay. You can argue that since that essay (2005) the iPhone/iPad and Android and then eventually "all meaningful apps becoming web enabled" has mostly made Windows the last choice amongst the candidates rather than the first when it comes to selecting personal computing devices. Right now, people who use Windows see it in the same way people see crusty old government bureaucracies - it is just one of those things you deal with because you have to, and move away from ASAP. [1] http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html
tracker1 9y ago
What we need are (as much as possible) unbiased sources of news, or news feeds. Right now, there's so much bias in the media, and in news outlets to the point where it's hard to distinguish fact from fiction, or see news that might otherwise make things "difficult" for those organizations. The profit above all else direction the large media news outlets have taken may serve their profit motives, but do little to actually further human knowledge of current or pressing events.
- cJ0th 9y ago
  There obviously are bad news that no one should consume (i.e. "fake news") but I'd argue there is no such thing as good news in the sense that every one should read them to become informed. To enable the public to make informed decisions every individual should come to face with a random selection of sources on a daily basis so that echo chambers get reduced and a problem-solving mentality can come into being. The problem - as you've stated - is indeed that all news websites want to maximize views/profits. This, for one thing, leads to market segmentation (echo chambers). For another thing, Hotelling's law is at work within each segment so that the news from your preferred sources are very similar. If CNN writes about Trump's tweet instead of mass starvation then chances are very high that it's the same with CBS.
  - oculusthrift 9y ago
    I think that if everyone in America read NYT or WaPo, we'd be a lot better off. Because they atleast live in a world where facts matter. But hey, that might trigger some people.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    I liked the old term for "fake news." Before 2016 we just called it "news." What seems like a free press in the US and the world is heavily controlled by less than a dozen conglomerates. They often game the system, mixing propaganda with news to create a narrative. Just look at all the pro-Monsanto comments on Hackernews and the recent court revelations that Monsanto had a big marketing program to post pro-company commends on tons of major/minor social networks.
65827 9y ago
The alternative increasingly is to simple delete facebook and live a more offline life. Starting to see it become more and more trendy nowadays, especially among teenagers. It's considered retro and hip to just schedule social time and disconnect completely
- quadrangle 9y ago
  I wish this anecdote were true, but I bet this is a rose-glasses thing where the metrics show things getting worse. While a minority of Americans might avoid Facebook, places like Fiji have been completely colonized where everyone has zero-rated Facebook on their mobile devices and so the development of anything outside Facebook has been sabotaged and Facebook is the new AOL with network effects destroying the potential for an open internet.
  - AJ007 9y ago
    If Facebook is the new AOL, the analogy fares poorly for Facebook's future. Becoming a global media monopoly, Facebook is going to have trouble. They may be able to skirt US anti-trust authorities at home, but not abroad. More local jurisdictions will demand global jurisdiction over what Facebook chooses to do. The bigger they become the more targets are painted on them. They are already far too large to escape scrutiny. At some point, the damage will be done and Facebook will cease to be effective. Here in the US, I have almost zero need to anything Facebook provides. The people I am friends with on Facebook are the ones I see once every 2 to 5 years. I don't miss anything besides pictures of someone's latest baby. Google, however, is a whole other monster.
    - quadrangle 9y ago
      I wish that Facebook as new AOL would just have the same outcome and give way to a free and open internet. BUT Facebook gets to be AOL2 in a world where they have far far far more clout (order of magnitude larger user base and many orders of magnitude more significant impact on real life — not just an online diversion but central to politics, life, work, business, etc) and are smart enough to learn all the lessons from AOL's history in order to not repeat the same mistakes. Facebook's internet.org lost in India but won elsewhere. We're talking major power struggles where it's not clear that Facebook will lose in the end. Google is indeed a whole other monster with a different set of issues. It's more of a blob with tons of parts, some more benign than others. Some parts comparable to Facebook, some more legitimate.
ohthehugemanate 9y ago
Every time I see a sentence that starts with "we need..." I automatically think "shut up and build it, or you're just complaining." If it's a real need, then building it is a good idea, and will probably make you money. But 99.9% of the time, it's just a turn of phrase way to bitch about the way the world and human kind actually works. Yeah, if we had another Facebook the world would be better. And if I had wheels I'd be a cart. What's your point? We don't have another Facebook, and we aren't likely to get one, because we don't actually "need" that enough to pay tens or hundreds of people to build it. You just want to wish it into existence. TL;DR: shut up and build it, or stop complaining.
- madiator 9y ago
  You want Technology Review to build a social network?
  - pg_is_a_butt 9y ago
    aren't they already a social network? you're all idiots.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  i mean i could see what you're saying if it was an engineer who was complaining. But if this is a journalist then i think it is fine. Perhaps someone will read the article and build it and we'll all be better off.
- ben_jones 9y ago
  I've actually spent quite a bit of time working on a design document for an open source version of the Facebook platform. I got a fair bit of the architecture and requirements down for what I believed would make the project successful. Then I came to the slow realization that the world had categorically no use for a Facebook alternative. The features of Facebook are largely meaningless. What matters is the absolute stranglehold Facebook has and will maintain via acquisitions of users. It's not a question of simply getting the user to register for another site. Many Facebook users will have as many as five or more Facebook products on their mobile. They'll also be logged into a half dozen other properties on the internet with Facebook's OAuth scheme. Icing on the cake? Tinder. Every college aged person I've spoken to has little interest in Facebook. But they've all reinstalled it in order to use Tinder. You cannot get a mass migration to occur unless their is an absolute PR Apocalypse at Facebook or if you can offer absolute parity to the slow dopamine drip provided by constant notifications and social validations coming from all their products. At once.
kem 9y ago
This touches on so many issues at once I don't even know where to start (private versus public, social medial popularity cycles, distributed versus centralized services...) I think it's not just an alternative to Facebook we need, it's a distributed paradigm, with a distributed network, with distributed services. The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents). The success of things like Facebook and Twitter has never seemed like that much of a mystery to me: they basically allow people to have a web page without needing to make one. There was MySpace that did that, and then people wanted to add on privacy and discussions, etc. to their webpage, so Facebook supplied that; Twitter was basically providing a way for people to post rss/Atom feeds, etc. But then you cede control to these large providers. I don't think that model completely applies anymore, with messaging, photo sharing, and what not becoming so integrated, but I think the fundamental issues are the same, in that that the internet was developed with a greater ratio of providers:users in mind than is the case now. I think there was a much more federated model in mind when the internet was developed than is the case today.
- X86BSD 9y ago
  I've just started using mastodon.social as a replacement for FB and like it just fine. Give it a look.
  - glenstein 9y ago
    I think it's more of a replacement for twitter. And I am genuinely excited about Mastodon, with ~600k users and 1400 instances, I think something special is happening there. I guess diaspora* is supposed to be the decentralized facebook replacement, but I don't think it's any good. I dare say that it's too late for even a good replacement to compete with facebook. Google tried while there was still time (and failed). But now? I don't think you can.
    - 9y ago
donpdonp 9y ago
http://scuttlebot.io/ http://scuttlebot.io/ is a distributed log file meant to be an application platform. It has some nice design choices and is worth looking at in the context of making a new social network.
- tomcam 9y ago
  Didn't know about that. Thank you – it looks like a well-put together project
ams6110 9y ago
To me, the alternative to Facebook has been around for a long time: email. The people I keep in touch with online all have email accounts. Sending email to one, a few, or all of them is easy.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  That's fine if you already have a strong social network. Email is a terrible tool for discovery of new things, which was why Usenet came into being. Usenet was imperfect but great in many respects. I harbor a lot of resentment towards the people who wrecked it.
- gvurrdon 9y ago
  Email mostly works for me, particularly for friends and family. The problem is that many people prioritise Facebook over email and frequently forget to reply, or don't send email in the first place as they assume that everyone has seen their Facebook post. So, outside friends and family, not having a Facebook account tends to mean not getting information.
godelski 9y ago
It seems to me that a social network is one of those natural monopolies. It works so well because so many people use it. Remember the big reason many social network alternatives failed, no one else was on them. There are some things (very few in fact) that just work better as monopolies. But that just means you need to regulate it differently. And there's an interesting discussion, how best to regulate natural monopolies.
- slim 9y ago
  Nationalise Social Networks
  - godelski 9y ago
    More "Facebook is not currently in a competitive market. Don't treat it like it is. When it goes back to a competitive market, treat it as such."
  - type0 9y ago
    And what would you call that National social network, Fascistbook?
- adventured 9y ago
  The big reason many other networks failed, is because no one else was on them? Prove that as the cause, as opposed to them sucking as the reason. MySpace & Friendster were already very substantial when Facebook came along and destroyed them, because they were horrible services. The better question is, why would you need or want to regulate it as a natural monopoly? Specifically: to accomplish what? Let me give you some examples. 1) To force FB to open up, allowing other social networks to openly ride on its network / social data (the broadband one pipe lots of delivery companies premise). Ok, now you're begging for a radical increase in abuse of personal data. And you're going to need some new (or expanded existing) bureaucracy agency to manage it all, which will open up new government abuses without a doubt (happens every time; and said agency will radically slow down innovation, which also happens every single time). Some obnoxious SNEA - Social Network Enforcement Agency - will get created, and that'll be the end of any innovation in social media; if you give the Feds an inch of new power, they'll take a thousand miles. Besides, you can already replicate your social network onto other platforms by allowing FB apps to access your list of friends. Most people don't care because there simply are not that many highly compelling social concepts to explore that are worth the effort to maintain/use. There will never be large numbers of compelling social offerings; there inherently can't be as people have finite time, the hurdle to acquire it is very high. It's work/effort to maintain these networks for the end user, they do not want to have to upkeep it all. 2) To enforce higher standards on privacy. Well, we can already pass legislation to do that comprehensively across all media platforms, if it makes sense. It'd be ridiculous to regulate one platform for that purpose. 3) To limit various corporate abuses by FB (Instagram/Snapchat, ala Internet Explorer/Netscape). Well, we already have anti-trust laws for that and thousands of other laws & regulations and numerous giant three letter enforcement agencies. Meanwhile, while the argument is being made for regulating Facebook as a natural monopoly, the next technology paradigm is being born somewhere to make them far less relevant. That process has been repeating itself for 60 years or so now, requiring very little actual regulation by the government.
erikb 9y ago
We actually have alternatives. G+, Twitter, Gnu Social, Slack, Wechat. The question is what's your flavour and how do you convince your friends to switch with you.
evdev 9y ago
From my perspective, problems with facebook: 1) Anti-privacy, megalomaniacal nature of network. 2) Social cost of having removed the normal ways we moderate each other's behavior. E.g. when someone is a narcissistic bore, you talk to them less and less at the barbecues and eventually events start happening they're not invited to. Facebook takes the people most willing to ignore social boundaries and customs and puts them center stage. 3) Opportunity costs of not having mechanisms to form more naturally-moderated social groups, but with a wider pool of potential people than are in your physical social graph. This has always been the dream of the social internet. 4) "Fake news", specifically the moral hazard of providing an environment that plays to the "worst" tendencies of media consumption. This is obviously dependent on our values, and how patronizing we're willing to be. But the hazard is a real issue especially when your network attracts people under one pretense--hang out with your friends/kids/grandkids--and then has this non-advertised effect of sticking you in a media echo chamber. This unlike when people choose to go out and fight their echo chamber in a way that's fairly important. 5) Like 3) but now for "good" media consumption, or a Healthy Democratic Civil Discourse, or whatever. I'm glib because this is on the razor's edge of smuggling in whatever values we daydream about imposing on the world. A lot of us can come up with the David-and-Goliath dream of a distributed network, but I think it's interesting that this is probably neutral-at-best for 4), which is the issue du jour. One could easily see things getting worse and articles being published with the thesis that people need to be de-balkanized for the sake of civic discourse. Also, the REAL contrarian take here is that things are close to optimal. People are succeeding at 3) and by extension 2), just in niche special interest groups that aren't salient to us in the steady state. The "problem" is that many of us lack the conviction or self-direction to quit media behaviors we don't like. Meanwhile 4) and 5) are really about the bankruptcy of modern ideologies, etc. etc.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  I don't get your 2) because I have no problem ignoring people I don't like. But I agree that bad behavior is rewarded and that this is a problem on social networking in general (jackassery on YT, Twitter trolls, things like Infowars) I'd add to your list the imposition of censorship with no feedback mechanism - Facebook's 'community standards' are wholly arbitrary, and I find it extremely disturbing that you can share almost any kind of violent content there with no problem, but anything too sexual risks a date with the banhammer. It's perpetuating standards of social control and sexism that actively hurt people.
ouid 9y ago
There's lots of alternatives to Facebook. Facebook is for people who don't care about alternatives.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  No it isn't. I've had accounts on numerous alternative social networks and none of them are much good as general platforms because there aren't enough other people using them, or using them often enough. Stop pretending network effects don't exist or that your social media usage habits must be true for everyone else.
  - ouid 9y ago
    replacement != alternative. Not using Facebook is a proper alternative to Facebook. What Facebook provides isn't necessary, and what's bad about Facebook is probably intrinsic to the entire social media model.
WCityMike 9y ago
My perfect Facebook would be crosspollinating Facebook and the structure of a RSS reader. I want to be able to skim through EVERY update on EVERY page and person I follow, star/flag the ones I'm interested in, and then read the ones I'm interested in. Because of its popularity, Facebook has all the content I'm interested in within its walled garden -- but its browsing experience sucks. IMO.
dyeje 9y ago
There are plenty of alternatives already, you just need to use them.
dgudkov 9y ago
Many people miss the fact that Facebook as a product is not about the website and related services. It's your social connections that are the product for you (and for Facebook itself). The technology is just a wrapper and is secondary in this case. In order to create a viable alternative to Facebook one should find a way to create a new kind of social good attractive to many (which is much harder when Facebook already exists). So it's more about social good engineering rather than coding.
andreasgonewild 9y ago
Agreed; distributed, free and secure group communications is a much needed, missing piece of the puzzle. If only I could figure out how to make it pay the rent. A couple of extra brains/hands wouldn't hurt either... https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis
5_minutes 9y ago
We just need a modern version of Geocities.
nemoniac 9y ago
How on earth has Facebook become the arbiter of our collective morality?
davnicwil 9y ago
Shameless plug, but very relevant since it is literally built to be an alternative to the current mainstream social networks: I'm hacking on https://postbelt.com https://postbelt.com - a privacy-first, ad-free, text-only, discussion-focused social network. Check it out if it sounds interesting :-)
wcummings 9y ago
Email and something like Google Groups does 80% of what Facebook does.
skrowl 9y ago
... and Reddit!
fergazen 9y ago
I've developed a sort of 'core technology' that can be used to build out what can hopefully become another option in the social media arena. It's open source. It's supports a fully threaded 'tree' of content, rather than just a linear stream like Facebook and Twitter. You create SubNodes, rather than 'tweets' for example. Technology stack is Java, TypeScript, Google Polymer, Jackrabbit JCR, MongoDb, SpringBoot. Demonstration site is: http://sbnode.com http://sbnode.com

185 points by submeta 9y ago

No, we don't need More Alternatives to Facebook. We need Less Alternatives to Facebook. That is, Zero Alternatives to Facebook AND Zero Facebook. Stop wasting your time!

danellis 9y ago
Why is keeping in touch with friends in one place online wasting time?
- Eerie 9y ago
  Facebook is not about keeping in touch with friends, it is about selling your views to advertisers by maximizing the time you spend on the site. To keep in touch with friends you should use a fucking mail list.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    So anyone who doesn't do things your way is wrong, OK. Thanks for clearing that up.
    - type0 9y ago
      But forcing others to use unethically driven website by the means of social pressure is even more wrong. Two wrongs don't make you right.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - danellis 9y ago
    > Facebook is not about keeping in touch with friends You are mistaken. I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends. It's a pretty epic level of arrogance to try and tell me what I use it for.
- type0 9y ago
  More like waisting your freedom, integrity, privacy etc...
  - danellis 9y ago
    Can you give me an example of how my freedom, integrity or privacy have been wasted? They're not taking anything I haven't willingly given them.
    - type0 9y ago
      How do you know, if the latest reports is to go by they are buying personal information from third parties in order to construct better dossiers.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

mattbgates 9y ago

Google tried and failed. There are alternatives in other countries.. V Kontakte and odnoklassniki for Russia, WeChat and Qzone for China, though other countries other than those two are using what Americans use. There are a few other things like Snapchat and Kik that teenagers are using. Basically, if you think about the time you were a teenager: your parents are old. If they are using Facebook, than Facebook must not be cool. If your parents aren't using it, than it must be cool. In Facebook's defense: adults are more valuable as users than teenagers are, as they are clicking on ads and buying things. So there wouldn't be any reason for Facebook to even try to be that "cool" place where teenagers go. So for someone to capture that niche the way Facebook had done would be very hard to do. I'm around Zuckerberg's age and at first, Facebook never appealed to me, until they removed the .edu cap. So that was an important step of getting Facebook to the entire world. It made everything so easy to connect with people and "keep in touch" via messages, wall posts, and photos. The "Like" button seemed to be something the world had never really seen as well and made it even easier to "show" you acknowledged it, rather than having to respond. I'm sure if Google Plus attempted to be a compliment, rather than be a replacement, it would've had more success. And the next big social media network that is an alternative to Facebook will need to focus on that. People don't really like "change". However, they are willing to learn and switch to things that are more useful and helpful. For the older generation, which on Facebook -- 25+ is probably the most prominent users -- they really don't care to switch because their friends and families aren't using anything else. This is where Facebook has great strength. Where Facebook and Google tend to fail is: they want to be everyone's everything. They seem to want to dominate all aspects of our lives. And while it sounds great and it has worked in China (with WeChat), it is not appealing to everyone that uses their products. However, when you have so many products within your already-huge enterprise: those products get lost or belittled. How many features does Google and Facebook have that many people don't even know exists? Facebook is social media and Google is search. Both have a little bit of extra pull with the open source and developer community, BUT.. they need to stay focused on what they are best at doing. As a web app developer, I keep an eye on those failed or lesser known products from Facebook and Google, and make my own and charge for them. It is likely that they are free on Facebook and Google, but people might not know they actually exist because again: Google is for search, Facebook is for social communication. Anything more than that... is lost.

thr0waway1239 9y ago

I wonder what traits will define the Facebook transcender like the Windows transcender [1] mentioned in PG's essay. You can argue that since that essay (2005) the iPhone/iPad and Android and then eventually "all meaningful apps becoming web enabled" has mostly made Windows the last choice amongst the candidates rather than the first when it comes to selecting personal computing devices. Right now, people who use Windows see it in the same way people see crusty old government bureaucracies - it is just one of those things you deal with because you have to, and move away from ASAP. [1] http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html

tracker1 9y ago

What we need are (as much as possible) unbiased sources of news, or news feeds. Right now, there's so much bias in the media, and in news outlets to the point where it's hard to distinguish fact from fiction, or see news that might otherwise make things "difficult" for those organizations. The profit above all else direction the large media news outlets have taken may serve their profit motives, but do little to actually further human knowledge of current or pressing events.

cJ0th 9y ago
There obviously are bad news that no one should consume (i.e. "fake news") but I'd argue there is no such thing as good news in the sense that every one should read them to become informed. To enable the public to make informed decisions every individual should come to face with a random selection of sources on a daily basis so that echo chambers get reduced and a problem-solving mentality can come into being. The problem - as you've stated - is indeed that all news websites want to maximize views/profits. This, for one thing, leads to market segmentation (echo chambers). For another thing, Hotelling's law is at work within each segment so that the news from your preferred sources are very similar. If CNN writes about Trump's tweet instead of mass starvation then chances are very high that it's the same with CBS.
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  I think that if everyone in America read NYT or WaPo, we'd be a lot better off. Because they atleast live in a world where facts matter. But hey, that might trigger some people.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  I liked the old term for "fake news." Before 2016 we just called it "news." What seems like a free press in the US and the world is heavily controlled by less than a dozen conglomerates. They often game the system, mixing propaganda with news to create a narrative. Just look at all the pro-Monsanto comments on Hackernews and the recent court revelations that Monsanto had a big marketing program to post pro-company commends on tons of major/minor social networks.

65827 9y ago

The alternative increasingly is to simple delete facebook and live a more offline life. Starting to see it become more and more trendy nowadays, especially among teenagers. It's considered retro and hip to just schedule social time and disconnect completely

quadrangle 9y ago
I wish this anecdote were true, but I bet this is a rose-glasses thing where the metrics show things getting worse. While a minority of Americans might avoid Facebook, places like Fiji have been completely colonized where everyone has zero-rated Facebook on their mobile devices and so the development of anything outside Facebook has been sabotaged and Facebook is the new AOL with network effects destroying the potential for an open internet.
- AJ007 9y ago
  If Facebook is the new AOL, the analogy fares poorly for Facebook's future. Becoming a global media monopoly, Facebook is going to have trouble. They may be able to skirt US anti-trust authorities at home, but not abroad. More local jurisdictions will demand global jurisdiction over what Facebook chooses to do. The bigger they become the more targets are painted on them. They are already far too large to escape scrutiny. At some point, the damage will be done and Facebook will cease to be effective. Here in the US, I have almost zero need to anything Facebook provides. The people I am friends with on Facebook are the ones I see once every 2 to 5 years. I don't miss anything besides pictures of someone's latest baby. Google, however, is a whole other monster.
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    I wish that Facebook as new AOL would just have the same outcome and give way to a free and open internet. BUT Facebook gets to be AOL2 in a world where they have far far far more clout (order of magnitude larger user base and many orders of magnitude more significant impact on real life — not just an online diversion but central to politics, life, work, business, etc) and are smart enough to learn all the lessons from AOL's history in order to not repeat the same mistakes. Facebook's internet.org lost in India but won elsewhere. We're talking major power struggles where it's not clear that Facebook will lose in the end. Google is indeed a whole other monster with a different set of issues. It's more of a blob with tons of parts, some more benign than others. Some parts comparable to Facebook, some more legitimate.

ohthehugemanate 9y ago

Every time I see a sentence that starts with "we need..." I automatically think "shut up and build it, or you're just complaining." If it's a real need, then building it is a good idea, and will probably make you money. But 99.9% of the time, it's just a turn of phrase way to bitch about the way the world and human kind actually works. Yeah, if we had another Facebook the world would be better. And if I had wheels I'd be a cart. What's your point? We don't have another Facebook, and we aren't likely to get one, because we don't actually "need" that enough to pay tens or hundreds of people to build it. You just want to wish it into existence. TL;DR: shut up and build it, or stop complaining.

madiator 9y ago
You want Technology Review to build a social network?
- pg_is_a_butt 9y ago
  aren't they already a social network? you're all idiots.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
oculusthrift 9y ago
i mean i could see what you're saying if it was an engineer who was complaining. But if this is a journalist then i think it is fine. Perhaps someone will read the article and build it and we'll all be better off.
ben_jones 9y ago
I've actually spent quite a bit of time working on a design document for an open source version of the Facebook platform. I got a fair bit of the architecture and requirements down for what I believed would make the project successful. Then I came to the slow realization that the world had categorically no use for a Facebook alternative. The features of Facebook are largely meaningless. What matters is the absolute stranglehold Facebook has and will maintain via acquisitions of users. It's not a question of simply getting the user to register for another site. Many Facebook users will have as many as five or more Facebook products on their mobile. They'll also be logged into a half dozen other properties on the internet with Facebook's OAuth scheme. Icing on the cake? Tinder. Every college aged person I've spoken to has little interest in Facebook. But they've all reinstalled it in order to use Tinder. You cannot get a mass migration to occur unless their is an absolute PR Apocalypse at Facebook or if you can offer absolute parity to the slow dopamine drip provided by constant notifications and social validations coming from all their products. At once.

kem 9y ago

This touches on so many issues at once I don't even know where to start (private versus public, social medial popularity cycles, distributed versus centralized services...) I think it's not just an alternative to Facebook we need, it's a distributed paradigm, with a distributed network, with distributed services. The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents). The success of things like Facebook and Twitter has never seemed like that much of a mystery to me: they basically allow people to have a web page without needing to make one. There was MySpace that did that, and then people wanted to add on privacy and discussions, etc. to their webpage, so Facebook supplied that; Twitter was basically providing a way for people to post rss/Atom feeds, etc. But then you cede control to these large providers. I don't think that model completely applies anymore, with messaging, photo sharing, and what not becoming so integrated, but I think the fundamental issues are the same, in that that the internet was developed with a greater ratio of providers:users in mind than is the case now. I think there was a much more federated model in mind when the internet was developed than is the case today.

X86BSD 9y ago
I've just started using mastodon.social as a replacement for FB and like it just fine. Give it a look.
- glenstein 9y ago
  I think it's more of a replacement for twitter. And I am genuinely excited about Mastodon, with ~600k users and 1400 instances, I think something special is happening there. I guess diaspora* is supposed to be the decentralized facebook replacement, but I don't think it's any good. I dare say that it's too late for even a good replacement to compete with facebook. Google tried while there was still time (and failed). But now? I don't think you can.
  - 9y ago

donpdonp 9y ago

http://scuttlebot.io/ http://scuttlebot.io/ is a distributed log file meant to be an application platform. It has some nice design choices and is worth looking at in the context of making a new social network.

tomcam 9y ago
Didn't know about that. Thank you – it looks like a well-put together project

ams6110 9y ago

To me, the alternative to Facebook has been around for a long time: email. The people I keep in touch with online all have email accounts. Sending email to one, a few, or all of them is easy.

anigbrowl 9y ago
That's fine if you already have a strong social network. Email is a terrible tool for discovery of new things, which was why Usenet came into being. Usenet was imperfect but great in many respects. I harbor a lot of resentment towards the people who wrecked it.
gvurrdon 9y ago
Email mostly works for me, particularly for friends and family. The problem is that many people prioritise Facebook over email and frequently forget to reply, or don't send email in the first place as they assume that everyone has seen their Facebook post. So, outside friends and family, not having a Facebook account tends to mean not getting information.

godelski 9y ago

It seems to me that a social network is one of those natural monopolies. It works so well because so many people use it. Remember the big reason many social network alternatives failed, no one else was on them. There are some things (very few in fact) that just work better as monopolies. But that just means you need to regulate it differently. And there's an interesting discussion, how best to regulate natural monopolies.

slim 9y ago
Nationalise Social Networks
- godelski 9y ago
  More "Facebook is not currently in a competitive market. Don't treat it like it is. When it goes back to a competitive market, treat it as such."
- type0 9y ago
  And what would you call that National social network, Fascistbook?
adventured 9y ago
The big reason many other networks failed, is because no one else was on them? Prove that as the cause, as opposed to them sucking as the reason. MySpace & Friendster were already very substantial when Facebook came along and destroyed them, because they were horrible services. The better question is, why would you need or want to regulate it as a natural monopoly? Specifically: to accomplish what? Let me give you some examples. 1) To force FB to open up, allowing other social networks to openly ride on its network / social data (the broadband one pipe lots of delivery companies premise). Ok, now you're begging for a radical increase in abuse of personal data. And you're going to need some new (or expanded existing) bureaucracy agency to manage it all, which will open up new government abuses without a doubt (happens every time; and said agency will radically slow down innovation, which also happens every single time). Some obnoxious SNEA - Social Network Enforcement Agency - will get created, and that'll be the end of any innovation in social media; if you give the Feds an inch of new power, they'll take a thousand miles. Besides, you can already replicate your social network onto other platforms by allowing FB apps to access your list of friends. Most people don't care because there simply are not that many highly compelling social concepts to explore that are worth the effort to maintain/use. There will never be large numbers of compelling social offerings; there inherently can't be as people have finite time, the hurdle to acquire it is very high. It's work/effort to maintain these networks for the end user, they do not want to have to upkeep it all. 2) To enforce higher standards on privacy. Well, we can already pass legislation to do that comprehensively across all media platforms, if it makes sense. It'd be ridiculous to regulate one platform for that purpose. 3) To limit various corporate abuses by FB (Instagram/Snapchat, ala Internet Explorer/Netscape). Well, we already have anti-trust laws for that and thousands of other laws & regulations and numerous giant three letter enforcement agencies. Meanwhile, while the argument is being made for regulating Facebook as a natural monopoly, the next technology paradigm is being born somewhere to make them far less relevant. That process has been repeating itself for 60 years or so now, requiring very little actual regulation by the government.

erikb 9y ago

We actually have alternatives. G+, Twitter, Gnu Social, Slack, Wechat. The question is what's your flavour and how do you convince your friends to switch with you.

evdev 9y ago

From my perspective, problems with facebook: 1) Anti-privacy, megalomaniacal nature of network. 2) Social cost of having removed the normal ways we moderate each other's behavior. E.g. when someone is a narcissistic bore, you talk to them less and less at the barbecues and eventually events start happening they're not invited to. Facebook takes the people most willing to ignore social boundaries and customs and puts them center stage. 3) Opportunity costs of not having mechanisms to form more naturally-moderated social groups, but with a wider pool of potential people than are in your physical social graph. This has always been the dream of the social internet. 4) "Fake news", specifically the moral hazard of providing an environment that plays to the "worst" tendencies of media consumption. This is obviously dependent on our values, and how patronizing we're willing to be. But the hazard is a real issue especially when your network attracts people under one pretense--hang out with your friends/kids/grandkids--and then has this non-advertised effect of sticking you in a media echo chamber. This unlike when people choose to go out and fight their echo chamber in a way that's fairly important. 5) Like 3) but now for "good" media consumption, or a Healthy Democratic Civil Discourse, or whatever. I'm glib because this is on the razor's edge of smuggling in whatever values we daydream about imposing on the world. A lot of us can come up with the David-and-Goliath dream of a distributed network, but I think it's interesting that this is probably neutral-at-best for 4), which is the issue du jour. One could easily see things getting worse and articles being published with the thesis that people need to be de-balkanized for the sake of civic discourse. Also, the REAL contrarian take here is that things are close to optimal. People are succeeding at 3) and by extension 2), just in niche special interest groups that aren't salient to us in the steady state. The "problem" is that many of us lack the conviction or self-direction to quit media behaviors we don't like. Meanwhile 4) and 5) are really about the bankruptcy of modern ideologies, etc. etc.

anigbrowl 9y ago
I don't get your 2) because I have no problem ignoring people I don't like. But I agree that bad behavior is rewarded and that this is a problem on social networking in general (jackassery on YT, Twitter trolls, things like Infowars) I'd add to your list the imposition of censorship with no feedback mechanism - Facebook's 'community standards' are wholly arbitrary, and I find it extremely disturbing that you can share almost any kind of violent content there with no problem, but anything too sexual risks a date with the banhammer. It's perpetuating standards of social control and sexism that actively hurt people.

ouid 9y ago

There's lots of alternatives to Facebook. Facebook is for people who don't care about alternatives.

anigbrowl 9y ago
No it isn't. I've had accounts on numerous alternative social networks and none of them are much good as general platforms because there aren't enough other people using them, or using them often enough. Stop pretending network effects don't exist or that your social media usage habits must be true for everyone else.
- ouid 9y ago
  replacement != alternative. Not using Facebook is a proper alternative to Facebook. What Facebook provides isn't necessary, and what's bad about Facebook is probably intrinsic to the entire social media model.

WCityMike 9y ago

My perfect Facebook would be crosspollinating Facebook and the structure of a RSS reader. I want to be able to skim through EVERY update on EVERY page and person I follow, star/flag the ones I'm interested in, and then read the ones I'm interested in. Because of its popularity, Facebook has all the content I'm interested in within its walled garden -- but its browsing experience sucks. IMO.

dyeje 9y ago

There are plenty of alternatives already, you just need to use them.

dgudkov 9y ago

Many people miss the fact that Facebook as a product is not about the website and related services. It's your social connections that are the product for you (and for Facebook itself). The technology is just a wrapper and is secondary in this case. In order to create a viable alternative to Facebook one should find a way to create a new kind of social good attractive to many (which is much harder when Facebook already exists). So it's more about social good engineering rather than coding.

andreasgonewild 9y ago

Agreed; distributed, free and secure group communications is a much needed, missing piece of the puzzle. If only I could figure out how to make it pay the rent. A couple of extra brains/hands wouldn't hurt either... https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis

5_minutes 9y ago

We just need a modern version of Geocities.

nemoniac 9y ago

How on earth has Facebook become the arbiter of our collective morality?

davnicwil 9y ago

Shameless plug, but very relevant since it is literally built to be an alternative to the current mainstream social networks: I'm hacking on https://postbelt.com https://postbelt.com - a privacy-first, ad-free, text-only, discussion-focused social network. Check it out if it sounds interesting :-)

wcummings 9y ago

Email and something like Google Groups does 80% of what Facebook does.

skrowl 9y ago

... and Reddit!

fergazen 9y ago

I've developed a sort of 'core technology' that can be used to build out what can hopefully become another option in the social media arena. It's open source. It's supports a fully threaded 'tree' of content, rather than just a linear stream like Facebook and Twitter. You create SubNodes, rather than 'tweets' for example. Technology stack is Java, TypeScript, Google Polymer, Jackrabbit JCR, MongoDb, SpringBoot. Demonstration site is: http://sbnode.com http://sbnode.com