4 ms·

Facebook is unfixable. We need a nonprofit, public-spirited replacement

64 points by jrepinc 9y ago

mankash666 9y ago
Many open source, non-profit, social media sites exist. one of the reasons for-profit sites thrive is due to their profit incentive that ends up making them more engaging
- penglish1 9y ago
  Too engaging is part of the problem, of course. A public park or beach might arguably less engaging than the commercially driven next season of that show on Netflix. Doesn't mean that there shouldn't be thriving parks/beachs. Or.. that there cannot be thriving parks and beachs. There provably are. There are also lousy ones overrun with trash that no one likes or uses. So the issue would seem to be - how best do we make the open source, public funded options more like the parks and beaches that everyone uses, and less like the ones that people hate...without a profit motive.
wlesieutre 9y ago
Ello comes to mind, they’re incorporated as a public benefit corporation and the charter prohibits them from selling ads or user data. It’s turned into mostly an artist colony and I have no idea if they’re making money. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ello-becomes-a-public-benefit-corporation-and-legally-vows-to-forever-remain-ad-free-founders-and-investors-sign-charter-376792333.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ello-becomes-a-publ...
drharby 9y ago
I mean, facebook didnt exist at some point so, no we don't need it.
- jogjayr 9y ago
  Wish I could upvote more than once. There are plenty of digital alternatives for keeping in touch, organizing events and meetings, and sharing pictures with friends and family, that don't require having a Facebook account. The type of in-touch-keeping that FB facilitates is superficial, ephemeral, and essentially meaningless. Broadcasting events in your life, and passively consuming others' broadcasts in turn, is in no way a real relationship - it's just a really in-depth look into the lives of strangers, no different from reading a celebrity mag.
tCfD 9y ago
Getting the critical mass of public spirit necessary to sustain any self-correcting decentralized trust system is going to run smack into the individual tendency to optimize one's commitment of personal resources toward their own personal objectives. Asking people, or even tricking them through hype, to voluntarily deleverage themselves (through agreeing to a set of voluntarily sharing constraints encoded as rules in a 'trustless' network protocol, ie blockchain) will never work at global scale, until a global scale referendum of some sort addresses and settles very basic questions about what we prioritize and value as a civilization. Such as "are centralized systems of governance so hopelessly broken that the only remedy is to devolve trust back to individuals, which has the side effect of settling them with ascertain decision cost premium that they have hitherto instinctively tried to optimize away by outsourcing it to specialized custodial agents?" "Are people really willing to pay a decentralization premium that isn't subsidized by a hype and speculation casino game?" Until this discussion occurs (and I'm not holding my breath), every nominally 'flat' system of governance that is sold as a solution to centralized control will merely serve the opposite goal, by obfuscating its underlying informally centralized hierarchy of leverage and influence.
- tCfD 9y ago
  Edit to my above comment, since my client doesn't seem to allow previewing or editing unfortunately.... 'side effect of settling them with ascertain' should be 'side effect of saddling them with a certain' Also I think the original articles proposal of a non-profit solution is Noble but the bigger facility for moral hazard is lack of transparency, and lack of transparency is as much a problem of compressing complexity so that the information made transparent is digestible to most of the users in a reasonable amount of time, without introducing biases through that compression which skew the interpretation of the information. There's a lot of information about how the power in society is conducted through structures of influence, but making this information accessible to people so that they can avoid or associate with portions of it as freely as possible is a basket of paradoxical UX and ethical snakes to untangle.
gravis7777 9y ago
Well go ahead and start it. I just don't want public funds paying for it. Good luck to you!
robgibbons 9y ago
We already have GNU Social, Mastodon, or any of the half-dozen other federated, free/open-source offerings. One major problem is in resisting Facebook's existing network effect. It's a difficult proposition to simply replace a multi-billion user network.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
The article makes a mistake in comparing Wikipedia to Facebook. Wikipedia has roughly 100M daily unique devices which access it. https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/reportcard/#daily-unique-devices https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/reportcard/#daily... Wikipedia had roughly 140K users who performed an action in the last month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics Facebook had 1.4 billion daily active users https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-dau/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d... That is over 2 orders of magnitude difference in logged in users, and 1 order of magnitude in daily visitors. Add to that the fact that Facebook has much more dynamic content compared to the mostly static content of Wikipedia. I don't think managing something on the scale of Facebook is something Wikipedia Foundation would be remotely close to being able to do.
anoncoward7780 9y ago
queue the "it can't be done" crowd. And the "just stop using your -carefully crafted for you- addiction machine" crowd.
yuhong 9y ago
I just posted the final version of the Google/DoubleClick essay: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/2018/04/google-doubleclick-mozilla-essay-final.html http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/2018/04/google-doubleclick-moz...
8bitsrule 9y ago
Maybe the FidoNet model was on the right track. With modern speeds and encryption, no terminal nodes (deliver fully-encrypted to next node, erase) a zillion possible pathways (route as randomly zig-zaggy as needed) to take between source and sink. Not perfect, but gotta beat one S.O.B. grunting and rubbing his hands gother.
hw 9y ago
Instagram would've killed it if it didn't get bought by Facebook. The days are gone where you need a social network to keep track of your friends. Messaging apps (Messenger, Whatsapp) are making a comeback (remember when ICQ and AIM was cool before social networks took over). We don't need a social network. Kids don't need to get poisoned by a social network to the point where they think liking someone's post or stalking someone on Facebook is socializing. Worse of all, people don't understand the amount of personal information they 'leak' to Facebook by just sharing their photos, where they've been or where they are when they post. As for a nonprofit public-spirited replacement, there's no guarantee either that your data will be protected. Facebook, a multi billion corporation, while is in the middle of a privacy and data leak problem, is likely more capable in protecting data than a nonprofit given the amount of resources at FB's disposal.
JohnClark1337 9y ago
Build something that the kids love, and that is enticing to their parents, and eventually they drag granny and grandpa into it kicking and screaming, and then we have everyone on a new platform. And then the kids get bored and leave, and the parents start to dwindle, and you're left with granny and grandpa and their all-caps rants until they get dragged off to the next platform.

64 points by jrepinc 9y ago

Many open source, non-profit, social media sites exist. one of the reasons for-profit sites thrive is due to their profit incentive that ends up making them more engaging

penglish1 9y ago
Too engaging is part of the problem, of course. A public park or beach might arguably less engaging than the commercially driven next season of that show on Netflix. Doesn't mean that there shouldn't be thriving parks/beachs. Or.. that there cannot be thriving parks and beachs. There provably are. There are also lousy ones overrun with trash that no one likes or uses. So the issue would seem to be - how best do we make the open source, public funded options more like the parks and beaches that everyone uses, and less like the ones that people hate...without a profit motive.

wlesieutre 9y ago

Ello comes to mind, they’re incorporated as a public benefit corporation and the charter prohibits them from selling ads or user data. It’s turned into mostly an artist colony and I have no idea if they’re making money. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ello-becomes-a-public-benefit-corporation-and-legally-vows-to-forever-remain-ad-free-founders-and-investors-sign-charter-376792333.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ello-becomes-a-publ...

drharby 9y ago

I mean, facebook didnt exist at some point so, no we don't need it.

jogjayr 9y ago
Wish I could upvote more than once. There are plenty of digital alternatives for keeping in touch, organizing events and meetings, and sharing pictures with friends and family, that don't require having a Facebook account. The type of in-touch-keeping that FB facilitates is superficial, ephemeral, and essentially meaningless. Broadcasting events in your life, and passively consuming others' broadcasts in turn, is in no way a real relationship - it's just a really in-depth look into the lives of strangers, no different from reading a celebrity mag.

tCfD 9y ago

Getting the critical mass of public spirit necessary to sustain any self-correcting decentralized trust system is going to run smack into the individual tendency to optimize one's commitment of personal resources toward their own personal objectives. Asking people, or even tricking them through hype, to voluntarily deleverage themselves (through agreeing to a set of voluntarily sharing constraints encoded as rules in a 'trustless' network protocol, ie blockchain) will never work at global scale, until a global scale referendum of some sort addresses and settles very basic questions about what we prioritize and value as a civilization. Such as "are centralized systems of governance so hopelessly broken that the only remedy is to devolve trust back to individuals, which has the side effect of settling them with ascertain decision cost premium that they have hitherto instinctively tried to optimize away by outsourcing it to specialized custodial agents?" "Are people really willing to pay a decentralization premium that isn't subsidized by a hype and speculation casino game?" Until this discussion occurs (and I'm not holding my breath), every nominally 'flat' system of governance that is sold as a solution to centralized control will merely serve the opposite goal, by obfuscating its underlying informally centralized hierarchy of leverage and influence.

tCfD 9y ago
Edit to my above comment, since my client doesn't seem to allow previewing or editing unfortunately.... 'side effect of settling them with ascertain' should be 'side effect of saddling them with a certain' Also I think the original articles proposal of a non-profit solution is Noble but the bigger facility for moral hazard is lack of transparency, and lack of transparency is as much a problem of compressing complexity so that the information made transparent is digestible to most of the users in a reasonable amount of time, without introducing biases through that compression which skew the interpretation of the information. There's a lot of information about how the power in society is conducted through structures of influence, but making this information accessible to people so that they can avoid or associate with portions of it as freely as possible is a basket of paradoxical UX and ethical snakes to untangle.

gravis7777 9y ago

Well go ahead and start it. I just don't want public funds paying for it. Good luck to you!

robgibbons 9y ago

We already have GNU Social, Mastodon, or any of the half-dozen other federated, free/open-source offerings. One major problem is in resisting Facebook's existing network effect. It's a difficult proposition to simply replace a multi-billion user network.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

The article makes a mistake in comparing Wikipedia to Facebook. Wikipedia has roughly 100M daily unique devices which access it. https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/reportcard/#daily-unique-devices https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/reportcard/#daily... Wikipedia had roughly 140K users who performed an action in the last month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics Facebook had 1.4 billion daily active users https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-dau/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d... That is over 2 orders of magnitude difference in logged in users, and 1 order of magnitude in daily visitors. Add to that the fact that Facebook has much more dynamic content compared to the mostly static content of Wikipedia. I don't think managing something on the scale of Facebook is something Wikipedia Foundation would be remotely close to being able to do.

anoncoward7780 9y ago

queue the "it can't be done" crowd. And the "just stop using your -carefully crafted for you- addiction machine" crowd.

yuhong 9y ago

I just posted the final version of the Google/DoubleClick essay: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/2018/04/google-doubleclick-mozilla-essay-final.html http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/2018/04/google-doubleclick-moz...

8bitsrule 9y ago

Maybe the FidoNet model was on the right track. With modern speeds and encryption, no terminal nodes (deliver fully-encrypted to next node, erase) a zillion possible pathways (route as randomly zig-zaggy as needed) to take between source and sink. Not perfect, but gotta beat one S.O.B. grunting and rubbing his hands gother.

hw 9y ago

Instagram would've killed it if it didn't get bought by Facebook. The days are gone where you need a social network to keep track of your friends. Messaging apps (Messenger, Whatsapp) are making a comeback (remember when ICQ and AIM was cool before social networks took over). We don't need a social network. Kids don't need to get poisoned by a social network to the point where they think liking someone's post or stalking someone on Facebook is socializing. Worse of all, people don't understand the amount of personal information they 'leak' to Facebook by just sharing their photos, where they've been or where they are when they post. As for a nonprofit public-spirited replacement, there's no guarantee either that your data will be protected. Facebook, a multi billion corporation, while is in the middle of a privacy and data leak problem, is likely more capable in protecting data than a nonprofit given the amount of resources at FB's disposal.

JohnClark1337 9y ago

Build something that the kids love, and that is enticing to their parents, and eventually they drag granny and grandpa into it kicking and screaming, and then we have everyone on a new platform. And then the kids get bored and leave, and the parents start to dwindle, and you're left with granny and grandpa and their all-caps rants until they get dragged off to the next platform.