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I was struck with the same thing. There is a reason we moved from newsgroups, to HTML and browsers to search engines. Each step became a better, more powerful

I was struck with the same thing. There is a reason we moved from newsgroups, to HTML and browsers to search engines. Each step became a better, more powerful tool to find content faster, more efficiently. These days so many of the tools we're using are so entrenched, even with some of the changes the author talks about, it would still be a monumental task for people to change. I mean, look at how bad FB is (on several levels) and look at all the alternatives which allow you to keep your information private and share what you want like Diaspora or Freenet. I tried (repeatedly) to get friends and family to join my Diaspora pod and tried to convey all the advantages of it being private. Nope, nada, no way. None of them ever joined and many just said FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives, it was crazy.

hateduser2 9y ago
Don’t forget that we WANT to eliminate all the middlemen if we can, because middle men = bloat. It IS undeniably cheaper to interact directly than it is through a middle man. Don’t forget that! This is analogous to function pointers (or vtables or dynamic dispatch) in programming. It’s a really tight analog actually, almost literal. It’s slower (more expensive) to go through a cranks. You only do it for external reasons, but you should always try to eliminate them. I hope people around here saying these companies add value aren’t forgetting that we want to destroy them because in an ideal world things are more direct than they are already. We SHOULD want that too, that is the right direction to move in.
- rdiddly 9y ago
  There's no way there's any "right and wrong" or any "should" about this. Also, middlemen save me money all the time. Without my grocery & retail middlemen I'd be out there trying to find an apple orchard, a dairy, a tailor, all by myself, and hassling them to sell me quantities too small to make any money on. And that's just the first dumb example I thought of. There is value in aggregation and in making connections and in brokering. My middlemen make me richer by me paying them. That's why middlemen have been around since there's been commerce and why you can't engineer them away. Engineering them away is just doing it cheaper, beating them in the "middleman services" market and becoming the new middleman. Facebook is a shit middleman that doesn't provide enough value to me, so they're not included in this.
  - hateduser2 9y ago
    No right or wrong? Why not?
    - rdiddly 9y ago
      Well it's not always inefficient to have a middleman (sometimes it's more efficient, like in my example above), so you can't say categorically either "with a middleman" or "without a middleman" is always better, i.e. "right." Also, let's say we're looking at one of the times when the middleman is less efficient. Even if a customer wants to take on those inefficiencies on purpose, we can't judge that person as being "wrong" because they might have other reasons. It's more complicated, is all I was really trying to say.
gregknicholson 9y ago
> FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive! This reads like an episode of Black Mirror, only scarier because it's not science fiction: https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical/present-day-party.html https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...
- freeflight 9y ago
  > Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive! How so? What makes Facebook so appealing is the fact that pretty much everybody is on there, just like a telephone book. As such an alternative, with a huge positive effect, has to deliver at least this "centralization" to fulfill the same needs Facebook has been serving until now. This is a pretty common theme around IT savvy communities: People complain about Facebook and how there are so much better alternatives and how you supposedly don't even need Facebook. But the reality for over 2 billion people (among them many friends and family members of said tech-savvy folk) out there looks quite different, they use Facebook because it's what everybody uses, it wouldn't even work without that, which is what most Facebook competition comes to realize sooner or later. I just don't see any good solution to any of this that doesn't involve some paradigm shift how we handle private information as societies and as businesses.
  - gregknicholson 9y ago
    What if a lot of your friends and family are on it, and some interesting people you don't know yet are on it, and your favourite brands… aren't? What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it?
    - freeflight 9y ago
      > What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it? Facebook might have started out that way, but don't think that angle is gonna help you build a new, even bigger, Facebook. How long did Facebook actually stick to its "Only students" rule? Imho that was more marketing than anything else.
anigbrowl 9y ago
I've been trying to explain this for years here. People don't care that much about privacy because they can't see it and it's hard for them to conceptualize the scope of what they're giving up. It's a selling point, but not that great of a selling point - certainly not good enough to overcome the network effect. I forget who pointed it out, but I like the point that to disrupt a big incumbent you need to be not just 10% better, you need to be 50% better. You can get started by doing something that nobody else does which is useful. What FB did better than anyone else was provide a clean interface to social network curation that made it far more useful to the initial population than the alternatives that existed at the time.

hateduser2 9y ago

Don’t forget that we WANT to eliminate all the middlemen if we can, because middle men = bloat. It IS undeniably cheaper to interact directly than it is through a middle man. Don’t forget that! This is analogous to function pointers (or vtables or dynamic dispatch) in programming. It’s a really tight analog actually, almost literal. It’s slower (more expensive) to go through a cranks. You only do it for external reasons, but you should always try to eliminate them. I hope people around here saying these companies add value aren’t forgetting that we want to destroy them because in an ideal world things are more direct than they are already. We SHOULD want that too, that is the right direction to move in.

rdiddly 9y ago
There's no way there's any "right and wrong" or any "should" about this. Also, middlemen save me money all the time. Without my grocery & retail middlemen I'd be out there trying to find an apple orchard, a dairy, a tailor, all by myself, and hassling them to sell me quantities too small to make any money on. And that's just the first dumb example I thought of. There is value in aggregation and in making connections and in brokering. My middlemen make me richer by me paying them. That's why middlemen have been around since there's been commerce and why you can't engineer them away. Engineering them away is just doing it cheaper, beating them in the "middleman services" market and becoming the new middleman. Facebook is a shit middleman that doesn't provide enough value to me, so they're not included in this.
- hateduser2 9y ago
  No right or wrong? Why not?
  - rdiddly 9y ago
    Well it's not always inefficient to have a middleman (sometimes it's more efficient, like in my example above), so you can't say categorically either "with a middleman" or "without a middleman" is always better, i.e. "right." Also, let's say we're looking at one of the times when the middleman is less efficient. Even if a customer wants to take on those inefficiencies on purpose, we can't judge that person as being "wrong" because they might have other reasons. It's more complicated, is all I was really trying to say.

gregknicholson 9y ago

> FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive! This reads like an episode of Black Mirror, only scarier because it's not science fiction: https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical/present-day-party.html https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...

freeflight 9y ago
> Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive! How so? What makes Facebook so appealing is the fact that pretty much everybody is on there, just like a telephone book. As such an alternative, with a huge positive effect, has to deliver at least this "centralization" to fulfill the same needs Facebook has been serving until now. This is a pretty common theme around IT savvy communities: People complain about Facebook and how there are so much better alternatives and how you supposedly don't even need Facebook. But the reality for over 2 billion people (among them many friends and family members of said tech-savvy folk) out there looks quite different, they use Facebook because it's what everybody uses, it wouldn't even work without that, which is what most Facebook competition comes to realize sooner or later. I just don't see any good solution to any of this that doesn't involve some paradigm shift how we handle private information as societies and as businesses.
- gregknicholson 9y ago
  What if a lot of your friends and family are on it, and some interesting people you don't know yet are on it, and your favourite brands… aren't? What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it?
  - freeflight 9y ago
    > What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it? Facebook might have started out that way, but don't think that angle is gonna help you build a new, even bigger, Facebook. How long did Facebook actually stick to its "Only students" rule? Imho that was more marketing than anything else.

anigbrowl 9y ago

I've been trying to explain this for years here. People don't care that much about privacy because they can't see it and it's hard for them to conceptualize the scope of what they're giving up. It's a selling point, but not that great of a selling point - certainly not good enough to overcome the network effect. I forget who pointed it out, but I like the point that to disrupt a big incumbent you need to be not just 10% better, you need to be 50% better. You can get started by doing something that nobody else does which is useful. What FB did better than anyone else was provide a clean interface to social network curation that made it far more useful to the initial population than the alternatives that existed at the time.