12 ms·

Searching for a Future Beyond Facebook

99 points by kawera 9y ago

Martin1972 9y ago
Great!
amelius 9y ago
A lot would be solved by outlawing targeted advertising.
- Letmesleep69 9y ago
  Seems impossible without outlawing all advertising. Advertising in the nytimes over some other paper or advertising on fox over cnn are all examples of targeted advertising. You'd have to make people randomly choose advertising spots from all of media. Doesn't seem feasible.
  - amelius 9y ago
    Yeah, you'd have to define it precisely, and make a few broad exceptions to make it practical. I should have added "by default" to my sentence.
    - vinceguidry 9y ago
      It's a common misconception that you have to define law precisely in order for it to be useful. States of affairs are rarely fixed with one law, many times it's useful to proceed with the poor law that you can get passed as opposed to no law at all, and spend another season building up political will to pass a better one. The countless piracy acts that keep getting thrown at us every few years get slightly weaker as the content industry just tries to wedge a foot in the door. Obamacare was intended to be like this. Legislators knew it was going to get attacked the second the ink was dry, so they built in a bunch of clauses making it extremely difficult to 'simply repeal'. New health care legislation almost certainly has to build on top of Obamacare, enough political capital can't possibly be raised to do anything else.
  - pdkl95 9y ago
    > Advertising in the nytimes over some other paper or advertising on fox over cnn are all examples of targeted advertising. "Targeted" advertising generally refers to the tracking-based targeting of individual people. Re-defining the term to include all types of advertising makes the term mostly useless. > Doesn't seem feasible. Banning targeted advertising would be easy with legislation that bans tracking and showing ads to individuals. > You'd have to make people randomly choose advertising spots from all of media. Traditional advertising methods worked fine for centuries. Nobody[1] places ads randomly; you advertise where your product's audience will see it. [1] Advertising intended to build general brand awareness instead of selling a specific product or service might buy ads somewhat randomly, because the goal is simply getting the brand name seen widely and often.
    - Letmesleep69 9y ago
      Well I understood targeted advertising as advertising with a target in mind. So advertising on msnbc to target liberals and fox for conservatives. In terms of tracking people and using their data to precisely target them then I agree with Richard Stallmann's article here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/03/facebook-abusing-data-law-privacy-big-tech-surveillance https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/03/facebo...
      - zrobotics 9y ago
        That's too broad of a definition, it effectively reduces the term 'targeted advertising' to just 'advertising'. For example, even if my advertisement isn't trying to target broad categories of people (roadside billboard, etc) any ad will have a target in mind: consumers of my product. So no, targeted advertising is not any ad with a target in mind, that is just advertising. Targeted ads are distinguished from regular ads based on targeting a specific individual. An ad in the WSJ may be aimed at a broad category of people interested in business news, but if I know for a fact that 'Letmesleep69' happens to be a reader of that paper and I take out an ad that specifically refers to that user name, then it would be a targeted ad. edit: formatting
        9y ago
  - cmrdporcupine 9y ago
    I'm sure there's a technical solution at the browser level -- a way to break cookie matchers. At least when I worked in retargeting, cookie matching was the secret sauce. Preventing third party sources (images, scripts, "share buttons" etc.) from issuing or checking browser cookies might break a whole pile of useful things, but it'd make the world of retargeted ads dry up quickly.
    - dreamfactored 9y ago
      The freely available non-cookie fingerprinting libraries are incredibly effective now.
  - Lionsion 9y ago
    >> A lot would be solved by outlawing targeted advertising. > Seems impossible without outlawing all advertising. Advertising in the nytimes over some other paper or advertising on fox over cnn are all examples of targeted advertising. You'd have to make people randomly choose advertising spots from all of media. Doesn't seem feasible. Not the OP, but I think he has a good idea stated over-broadly. Let me fix it: A lot would be solved by outlawing profile-based targeted advertising. If Facebook can't use you profile to individually target you, the advertisers are left to target the mass of "Facebook users" like they target the mass of "NY Times readers."
    - dreamfactored 9y ago
      Yes, and this also nicely self-regulates the media marketplace to balance monopolies like FB. Want to target a narrow niche, advertise in specialist media to a smaller audience at higher rates. Want to carpet bomb, advertise in mass media at bulk rates. Mass media being able to segment their audience has killed specialist titles income stream and created monopolies. Without that regulation FB has been allowed to have their cake and eat everybody elses.
- himom 9y ago
  Never gonna happen. The holy grail for advertisers is show you an ad on your phone, on your computer, on your car and in-person on signs and billboards enough that you’ll buy whatever it is to shut them up.
- joering2 9y ago
  GDPR does a beautiful thing bu limiting your ability to profile people without telling them exactly how you algorythm them and ability to opt out. Perhaps enough people on Facebook will be creeped out when they find out whats under their Faceook hood.
  - MarkMc 9y ago
    The problem is that Facebook have complete control over the user experience of opting out: To opt in just click 'Agree and Continue'. You won't ever hear from Facebook about this issue again. To opt out click the much less visible 'Other Options' link, then scroll to the bottom of the page and expand each section and untick each box, then click 'Yes' when Facebook asks if you are sure, given that it will cause these problems for you. Then click 'Continue'. Now every 3 months Facebook will ask if you still want to opt out. Plus Facebook can frame the opt-out option in the most unattractive light. When I try to disable 'ads personalisation' in Google it tells me 'You'll no longer be able to block or mute some ads'. Who wants to give up the ability to block ads?
    - jononor 8y ago
      I suspect, and hope, that the screen FB implemented is seen as in violation of GDPR. Especially hiding the 'no' options on a second page.
- BeetleB 9y ago
  >A lot would be solved by outlawing targeted advertising Many users are in favor of targeted advertising. In a lot of forums where this is discussed, I usually just look for heavily downvoted comments - there's usually a bunch saying "I'd rather not have ads, but if I do have them, I want personalized ads." Downvoting them won't make the sentiment go away.
  - amelius 9y ago
    No, but I guess properly informing them about the consequences for privacy will. > there's usually a bunch saying "I'd rather not have ads, but if I do have them, I want personalized ads." How badly do they want that? It sounds to me like they don't really care.
    - BeetleB 9y ago
      >No, but I guess properly informing them about the consequences for privacy will. That's a poor assumption on your part that they are not properly informed. In real life, when I've met such people, they are properly informed. It would be arrogant for me to think that the ones on the Internet forums are any different - especially when they are responding to submissions that are clearly outlining the negatives of this kind of tracking.
      - amelius 9y ago
        Then we'll have to see who has a stronger voice: the ones who prefer privacy, or the ones who prefer personalized ads.
  - 0xdead_beef 9y ago
    I'd rather be exposed to generic advertising in the form of billboards, banners, and commercials, than head towards the dystopian future of The Minority Report in which you're constantly tracked, biometrics measured, and eyeballs scanned in order for advertisers to bombard you with personalized greetings and targeted ads that follow you relentlessly. It's already too creepy that my smartphone has trained its autocorrect with words I've never texted before but can extrapolate from my digital footprint.
- jarjoura 9y ago
  Not all targeted advertising is bad. Would you try to stop a local high school fundraiser for intelligently reaching out to the community? Or your family's local small business from advertising to the audience most likely to want to shop there? Targeted advertising in some shape or form has existed for a hundred years. Just open any magazine that is targeted at a specific audience and you'll see widely different ads running in those magazines. McDonalds or Coca-cola aren't going to waste ad dollars running campaigns in hunting or boating magazines for example.
  - adamsea 9y ago
    > Would you try to stop a local high school fundraiser for intelligently reaching out to the community? Or your family's local small business from advertising to the audience most likely to shop there? Can we just ban the rest of it then? ;)
  - thatfrenchguy 9y ago
    > Would you try to stop a local high school fundraiser for intelligently reaching out to the community Yes, because it makes inequality worse ;-)
- adamsea 9y ago
  I would also like to outlaw advertising in the following places: the in-flight announcements of airplanes, the loud, blaring tv kiosks at gas stations, and during movie previews. In other words, create a modicum of public space which doesn’t have constant, intrusive noise.
Yetanfou 9y ago
Facebook (et al) is nothing but a blip on the time line of human history. Just like "we" have a history without Facebook I see no problems in a future without Facebook. Part of this future will come to pass due to legislation (GDPR being a good start), part of it due to the product - Facebook's users - becoming sentient and aware of the way it has been used. Another part will come to pass due to the ever rising censorship on sites like Facebook which will eventually lead to it becoming a bland repository of pablum as anything which could be construed as being even the least controversial will be locked behind dire warnings or flat-out refused with an accompanying block for the user.
- joncrane 9y ago
  > Facebook's users - becoming sentient and aware > a bland repository of pablum I believe you are overestimating the intelligence and "woke-ness" of the Facebook user community, and of humanity in general.
  - Lionsion 9y ago
    > I believe you are overestimating the intelligence and "woke-ness" of the Facebook user community, and of humanity in general. That's an extremely cynical and pessimistic outlook that allows for little actual improvement. If enough motivated people blast their feeds with news about how Facebook users are being used and exploited, I could see enough Facebook users becoming "sentient and aware" to cripple the network. It won't die completely, at least no right away (MySpace is still around, after all), but I think a dent can be made.
- hinkley 9y ago
  It seems we are going to follow the Superfund model here though. Only after the industry has polluted some places (lost control of huge amounts of PII for whole groups of individuals) will we make it illegal for somebody else to do the same thing. And the public will be stuck with the cleanup.
himom 9y ago
Facebook’s downfalls are numerous: - ads - promotion of gossip to a global audience - peer-pressured risk-taking - pics, videos and other content that’s usually boring A real friends platform: - video / text chat - arranging spontaneous and planned activities - gather/raise funds for group activities - where people are at - what people are up to - finding new friends from friends of friends for activities - find new interests, get recommendations - visualize social circles - paid for by users - never sells data
- the_common_man 9y ago
  Who pays for the real friends platform?
  - jacobush 9y ago
    Who pays for the real friends?
    - pgeorgi 9y ago
      The payment isn't for the friends, but for the environment in which you meet them: You could pay membership fees for a club to be able to use their rooms to hang out with your peers. (paid community server) You can meet at your home, where you have to clean up and bring snacks yourself. (personal hosting) Or you can meet in a cafe, where access is free, with the expectation that there will be a different but related financial transaction (food and beverages). ("free" servers paid by ads) I can't think of a good analogy of meeting your friends in a fully public space.
  - 2sk21 9y ago
    Related question: can they even pay? The vast majority of the new users of Facebook are from developing countries with low income. There is no way to make them voluntarily pay for access to a social network.
  - Fedoranimus 9y ago
    > - paid for by users This suggests that the users would.
realpeopleio 9y ago
"we must devise new business models and structural incentives that aren’t rooted in manipulation and coercion...In the short-term, that might be achieved by turning to basic subscription services, by paying for the things we use." That's why we made RealPeople.io (https://realpeople.io https://realpeople.io) have no ads at all. Users pay to use, and there's no AI, no sharing your data. Rather than trying to just convince users to take our word for it, we just built it into our business model. Our financial incentives align with keeping user data private. And since we don't get paid based on how many pages the user views or how long the user is on the system, there's no financial incentive to getting the user addicted.
- can3p 9y ago
  Is it possible to see any blog or real page without signing up? And is there an api to read/write/manage blog?
- jasode 9y ago
  >And since we don't get paid based on how many pages the user views or how long the user is on the system, there's no financial incentive to getting the user addicted. Arguably, most of Facebook's addiction is the existence of virtually all their friends on the network. Your $9/year cost is a lavish amount of money that exceeds the measly $1/year that 70% don't want to pay.[1] Why don't people want to pay 8 cents a month to avoid ads?!? That's a good question! Whatever the answer is, it affects how an alternative social network can grow and/or financially sustain itself. If most of the people aren't in a $9/year network, then yes, it won't be addictive. The Google+ social network has targeted ads and yet it's not addictive -- because it's missing the network effect of having "everybody" on it. Have you considered realistic human incentives in your economic model? [1] https://www.tune.com/blog/mobile-ads-70-of-smartphone-owners-wont-pay-even-1-to-avoid-ads/ https://www.tune.com/blog/mobile-ads-70-of-smartphone-owners...
  - lhorie 9y ago
    One could argue that LinkedIn has everybody on it (at least insofar as you are a working white collar adult), but it's not addictive either.
overcast 9y ago
Until the day the general population actually pays for online services(this will never happen), Facebook like enterprises will exist. I know you'll respond and tell me that you'd pay, but the vast majority of people will not, and that's why any type of paid social network will fail. They require mass adoption to be successful.
- vixen99 9y ago
  Maybe one day the difficulties of establishing a nano/micro payment system will be overcome. https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/2010-11/MicropaymentsAndTheNet/issues.html https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/2010-...
  - DSingularity 9y ago
    Thanks for the link. Regarding mental transaction costs, why not make refunds one-click-away? If after consuming the digital good or using the service a user feels “oh my this wasn’t worth it”, it takes one click to undo his usage. Wouldn’t that eliminate this cost by relaxing the user?
    - freeone3000 9y ago
      It'd hamper adoption by vendors. If I knew your could refund whenever, how do I know when it's safe to take out that money?
      - DSingularity 9y ago
        My guess is you model it and exploit how over time everything normalizes. Bottom line is that 99.9% of users won’t request refunds. And for those that do, well they are micro transactions right?
    - always_good 9y ago
      Actually, infinite refunds / charge-backs are responsible for major friction in our existing systems. Those mechanisms are expensive and add a cost to every dollar sent through them. Really, microtransactions should be final by default unless you specifically need the machinery of escrow or clearing delay.
SakeOfBrevity 9y ago
"(...) when it comes to Facebook, the rot is deep. It can’t be excised. It can only be replaced by something else, by a form of connectivity that treats people not as laborers or commodities, but as human beings." Almost on point. Facebook has ingrained itself into socio-individual behaviour schemas. Social medias are likely here to stay for a long time and I don't see a company treating it's users as 'human beings' not 'commodities' being a front-runner to win a hypothethical future social media companies race; there are just no areas left that any rival company could simultaneously 1) exploit to stay profitable 2) make people use it. There will likely be some decentralized services but that's all.
- Lionsion 9y ago
  > ...and I don't see a company treating it's users as 'human beings' not 'commodities' being a front-runner to win a hypothethical future social media companies race; there are just no areas left that any rival company could simultaneously 1) exploit to stay profitable 2) make people use it. There are a few billionaires who are having second thoughts about a lot of this, I wonder if one could fund a rival non-profit network and run it at a loss until it has enough momentum. I know I'd shill for a non-profit, user-respecting social network and donate for its upkeep, but I just don't have the resources to keep one going.
GarrisonPrime 9y ago
It’s too bad an otherwise well written article on an important topic soiled itself with political statements. If you think it didn’t, I suggest you have some hidden biases.
arca_vorago 9y ago
Look, the truth of the matter is we opened the floodgates to computing for the masses too quickly without the proper protections and training. So up until about ~2000 it was mostly just the geeks using computers. Suddenly though, with the nice gui of Windows and Mac, the kind of users who used their cd tray as a coffee cup holder exponentially multiplied... and thus /r/talesfromtechsupport was born. They never learned to control and own their systems. Then those users start buying other computers, with software they didn't have the option to control, in the form of smartphones. Now there are huge swaths of users who are so used to being stuck in a user prison they don't own or control that they think it's normal! It's not. Join the GNU+Linux revolution today! So the problem with fb and twitter etc, is that they took what would have been a great model (individual websites) and tried to force everyone on their platform and then find various ways to lock them there... and now with all the backlash there is a growing awakening of computing freedom, but the problem is they keep thinking of blockchain or meshnet style decentraliztion to fix the problem, when the real problem is one of ownership. So in my opinion we need a good copyleft foss federation tech and people to own their own data. The internet isn't fully decentralized... it's more of a heirarchical starspoke topology, and it's high time SV and the rest wakeup from buzzword bingo of decentralization. (If I hear one more story about how we don't need servers cause we're going to the cloud I'm going to explode, for example). This is also why I think something like the freedombox is probably the closest thing to what the future lookes like.
- pier25 9y ago
  It's not a matter of freedom or control, it's about convenience.
  - choward 9y ago
    People don't actually realize that the convenience comes with a cost though because they haven't been exposed to the other end of the spectrum.
    - pier25 8y ago
      Difficult to say, but I'd say convenience defeats everything (for most people) even if they understand what is going on.
olivermarks 9y ago
TLDR "Ultimately, to challenge Facebook, Google, and the many unknown players of the data economy, we must devise new business models and structural incentives that aren’t rooted in manipulation and coercion; that don’t depend on the constant surveillance of users, on gathering information on everything they read and purchase, and on building that information into complex dossiers designed to elicit some action — a click, a purchase, a vote. We must move beyond surveillance capitalism and its built-in inequities. In the short-term, that might be achieved by turning to basic subscription services, by paying for the things we use. But on a longer time horizon, we must consider whether we want to live in a world that converts all of our experiences into machine-readable data — data that doesn’t belong to us, that doesn’t serve us" // I have no idea how we can avoid this - Google is so invasive it is increasingly tracking and recording everything about our lives. Gillian Tett had a good piece in the FT about how autocomplete in search fields influences our thinking. https://www.ft.com/content/7dc8eae4-4d99-11e8-97e4-13afc22d86d4 https://www.ft.com/content/7dc8eae4-4d99-11e8-97e4-13afc22d8... Google maps records any changes we make to our property for future permit/permissions comparisons etc - we have no control over this and little ability to opt out.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
DSingularity 9y ago
Aside from privacy there is another important issue to consider. Facebook makes censorship decisions it has no authority and probably little expertise to make. All with little to no accountability. Consider the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the censorship of Palestinian voices as an example. In general there should be no tolerance for speech that incites violence. Everybody agrees to this. But in this particular case things are different. The Palestinians are an occupied people and the Israeli army and Israeli colonizing settlers are occupying forces. The international community is almost in total agreement — the Palestinians have every right to engage in armed resistance against the occupation forces. Yet Facebook still delete accounts which call for resistance. To make matters worse, they allow the formidable, multi-million dollar funded, Israeli state-aponsered propaganda machine to use Facebook to normalize occupation, to demonize Palestinians, to dehumanize Palestinians, and to disrupt foreign protest/resistance in western democracies. How is this not morally bankrupt!? Come on. I do not understand this — how can any educated individual support a company like Facebook is beyond me. How can all those top notch researchers work for them? Facebook has 0 moral integrity. It tells quite a story about us techies. While they are some of the smartest people they are also the least morally-driven people. So selfish. Look at the world you Facebook engineers are creating. A world where a massive, world-wide, media platform doesn’t direct flows of information based on ethics and responsibility. The information flows based on profit and power. Of course Facebook will acquiesce to the majority of Israeli government requests. They project billions of dollars worth of power. Palestinians barely have enough to eat. Screw what the Palestinians think, what can they do? When Facebook and it’s platform acts as the Israeli propagandist and censor Facebook only loses if it’s users or employees get upset. What are the chances of that? Who controls what reaches our newfeeds? Are our feeds not filtered by what’s popular according to the masses and what hasn’t been downvotes to oblivion? I truly despise Facebook. I hate how they have no accountability. I hate the effects they are having on the world and people. I hate the way they influence how people think and nobody calls it censorship. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2016/09/12/facebook-google-israel-social-media https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2016/09/1... [2] https://israelpalestinenews.org/israel-partisans-work-censor-internet/ https://israelpalestinenews.org/israel-partisans-work-censor...
a_brawling_boo 9y ago
I am surprised no one has mentioned mastodon. Organizations or individuals can set up their own server and people can interact with their local communities that can police and or use the data as they want, AND there is a federated feed of all the mastodon instances where you interact in a public forum.

99 points by kawera 9y ago

Martin1972 9y ago

Great!

amelius 9y ago

A lot would be solved by outlawing targeted advertising.

Letmesleep69 9y ago
Seems impossible without outlawing all advertising. Advertising in the nytimes over some other paper or advertising on fox over cnn are all examples of targeted advertising. You'd have to make people randomly choose advertising spots from all of media. Doesn't seem feasible.
- amelius 9y ago
  Yeah, you'd have to define it precisely, and make a few broad exceptions to make it practical. I should have added "by default" to my sentence.
  - vinceguidry 9y ago
    It's a common misconception that you have to define law precisely in order for it to be useful. States of affairs are rarely fixed with one law, many times it's useful to proceed with the poor law that you can get passed as opposed to no law at all, and spend another season building up political will to pass a better one. The countless piracy acts that keep getting thrown at us every few years get slightly weaker as the content industry just tries to wedge a foot in the door. Obamacare was intended to be like this. Legislators knew it was going to get attacked the second the ink was dry, so they built in a bunch of clauses making it extremely difficult to 'simply repeal'. New health care legislation almost certainly has to build on top of Obamacare, enough political capital can't possibly be raised to do anything else.
- pdkl95 9y ago
  > Advertising in the nytimes over some other paper or advertising on fox over cnn are all examples of targeted advertising. "Targeted" advertising generally refers to the tracking-based targeting of individual people. Re-defining the term to include all types of advertising makes the term mostly useless. > Doesn't seem feasible. Banning targeted advertising would be easy with legislation that bans tracking and showing ads to individuals. > You'd have to make people randomly choose advertising spots from all of media. Traditional advertising methods worked fine for centuries. Nobody[1] places ads randomly; you advertise where your product's audience will see it. [1] Advertising intended to build general brand awareness instead of selling a specific product or service might buy ads somewhat randomly, because the goal is simply getting the brand name seen widely and often.
  - Letmesleep69 9y ago
    Well I understood targeted advertising as advertising with a target in mind. So advertising on msnbc to target liberals and fox for conservatives. In terms of tracking people and using their data to precisely target them then I agree with Richard Stallmann's article here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/03/facebook-abusing-data-law-privacy-big-tech-surveillance https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/03/facebo...
    - zrobotics 9y ago
      That's too broad of a definition, it effectively reduces the term 'targeted advertising' to just 'advertising'. For example, even if my advertisement isn't trying to target broad categories of people (roadside billboard, etc) any ad will have a target in mind: consumers of my product. So no, targeted advertising is not any ad with a target in mind, that is just advertising. Targeted ads are distinguished from regular ads based on targeting a specific individual. An ad in the WSJ may be aimed at a broad category of people interested in business news, but if I know for a fact that 'Letmesleep69' happens to be a reader of that paper and I take out an ad that specifically refers to that user name, then it would be a targeted ad. edit: formatting
      - 9y ago
- cmrdporcupine 9y ago
  I'm sure there's a technical solution at the browser level -- a way to break cookie matchers. At least when I worked in retargeting, cookie matching was the secret sauce. Preventing third party sources (images, scripts, "share buttons" etc.) from issuing or checking browser cookies might break a whole pile of useful things, but it'd make the world of retargeted ads dry up quickly.
  - dreamfactored 9y ago
    The freely available non-cookie fingerprinting libraries are incredibly effective now.
- Lionsion 9y ago
  >> A lot would be solved by outlawing targeted advertising. > Seems impossible without outlawing all advertising. Advertising in the nytimes over some other paper or advertising on fox over cnn are all examples of targeted advertising. You'd have to make people randomly choose advertising spots from all of media. Doesn't seem feasible. Not the OP, but I think he has a good idea stated over-broadly. Let me fix it: A lot would be solved by outlawing profile-based targeted advertising. If Facebook can't use you profile to individually target you, the advertisers are left to target the mass of "Facebook users" like they target the mass of "NY Times readers."
  - dreamfactored 9y ago
    Yes, and this also nicely self-regulates the media marketplace to balance monopolies like FB. Want to target a narrow niche, advertise in specialist media to a smaller audience at higher rates. Want to carpet bomb, advertise in mass media at bulk rates. Mass media being able to segment their audience has killed specialist titles income stream and created monopolies. Without that regulation FB has been allowed to have their cake and eat everybody elses.
himom 9y ago
Never gonna happen. The holy grail for advertisers is show you an ad on your phone, on your computer, on your car and in-person on signs and billboards enough that you’ll buy whatever it is to shut them up.
joering2 9y ago
GDPR does a beautiful thing bu limiting your ability to profile people without telling them exactly how you algorythm them and ability to opt out. Perhaps enough people on Facebook will be creeped out when they find out whats under their Faceook hood.
- MarkMc 9y ago
  The problem is that Facebook have complete control over the user experience of opting out: To opt in just click 'Agree and Continue'. You won't ever hear from Facebook about this issue again. To opt out click the much less visible 'Other Options' link, then scroll to the bottom of the page and expand each section and untick each box, then click 'Yes' when Facebook asks if you are sure, given that it will cause these problems for you. Then click 'Continue'. Now every 3 months Facebook will ask if you still want to opt out. Plus Facebook can frame the opt-out option in the most unattractive light. When I try to disable 'ads personalisation' in Google it tells me 'You'll no longer be able to block or mute some ads'. Who wants to give up the ability to block ads?
  - jononor 8y ago
    I suspect, and hope, that the screen FB implemented is seen as in violation of GDPR. Especially hiding the 'no' options on a second page.
BeetleB 9y ago
>A lot would be solved by outlawing targeted advertising Many users are in favor of targeted advertising. In a lot of forums where this is discussed, I usually just look for heavily downvoted comments - there's usually a bunch saying "I'd rather not have ads, but if I do have them, I want personalized ads." Downvoting them won't make the sentiment go away.
- amelius 9y ago
  No, but I guess properly informing them about the consequences for privacy will. > there's usually a bunch saying "I'd rather not have ads, but if I do have them, I want personalized ads." How badly do they want that? It sounds to me like they don't really care.
  - BeetleB 9y ago
    >No, but I guess properly informing them about the consequences for privacy will. That's a poor assumption on your part that they are not properly informed. In real life, when I've met such people, they are properly informed. It would be arrogant for me to think that the ones on the Internet forums are any different - especially when they are responding to submissions that are clearly outlining the negatives of this kind of tracking.
    - amelius 9y ago
      Then we'll have to see who has a stronger voice: the ones who prefer privacy, or the ones who prefer personalized ads.
- 0xdead_beef 9y ago
  I'd rather be exposed to generic advertising in the form of billboards, banners, and commercials, than head towards the dystopian future of The Minority Report in which you're constantly tracked, biometrics measured, and eyeballs scanned in order for advertisers to bombard you with personalized greetings and targeted ads that follow you relentlessly. It's already too creepy that my smartphone has trained its autocorrect with words I've never texted before but can extrapolate from my digital footprint.
jarjoura 9y ago
Not all targeted advertising is bad. Would you try to stop a local high school fundraiser for intelligently reaching out to the community? Or your family's local small business from advertising to the audience most likely to want to shop there? Targeted advertising in some shape or form has existed for a hundred years. Just open any magazine that is targeted at a specific audience and you'll see widely different ads running in those magazines. McDonalds or Coca-cola aren't going to waste ad dollars running campaigns in hunting or boating magazines for example.
- adamsea 9y ago
  > Would you try to stop a local high school fundraiser for intelligently reaching out to the community? Or your family's local small business from advertising to the audience most likely to shop there? Can we just ban the rest of it then? ;)
- thatfrenchguy 9y ago
  > Would you try to stop a local high school fundraiser for intelligently reaching out to the community Yes, because it makes inequality worse ;-)
adamsea 9y ago
I would also like to outlaw advertising in the following places: the in-flight announcements of airplanes, the loud, blaring tv kiosks at gas stations, and during movie previews. In other words, create a modicum of public space which doesn’t have constant, intrusive noise.

Yetanfou 9y ago

Facebook (et al) is nothing but a blip on the time line of human history. Just like "we" have a history without Facebook I see no problems in a future without Facebook. Part of this future will come to pass due to legislation (GDPR being a good start), part of it due to the product - Facebook's users - becoming sentient and aware of the way it has been used. Another part will come to pass due to the ever rising censorship on sites like Facebook which will eventually lead to it becoming a bland repository of pablum as anything which could be construed as being even the least controversial will be locked behind dire warnings or flat-out refused with an accompanying block for the user.

joncrane 9y ago
> Facebook's users - becoming sentient and aware > a bland repository of pablum I believe you are overestimating the intelligence and "woke-ness" of the Facebook user community, and of humanity in general.
- Lionsion 9y ago
  > I believe you are overestimating the intelligence and "woke-ness" of the Facebook user community, and of humanity in general. That's an extremely cynical and pessimistic outlook that allows for little actual improvement. If enough motivated people blast their feeds with news about how Facebook users are being used and exploited, I could see enough Facebook users becoming "sentient and aware" to cripple the network. It won't die completely, at least no right away (MySpace is still around, after all), but I think a dent can be made.
hinkley 9y ago
It seems we are going to follow the Superfund model here though. Only after the industry has polluted some places (lost control of huge amounts of PII for whole groups of individuals) will we make it illegal for somebody else to do the same thing. And the public will be stuck with the cleanup.

himom 9y ago

Facebook’s downfalls are numerous: - ads - promotion of gossip to a global audience - peer-pressured risk-taking - pics, videos and other content that’s usually boring A real friends platform: - video / text chat - arranging spontaneous and planned activities - gather/raise funds for group activities - where people are at - what people are up to - finding new friends from friends of friends for activities - find new interests, get recommendations - visualize social circles - paid for by users - never sells data

the_common_man 9y ago
Who pays for the real friends platform?
- jacobush 9y ago
  Who pays for the real friends?
  - pgeorgi 9y ago
    The payment isn't for the friends, but for the environment in which you meet them: You could pay membership fees for a club to be able to use their rooms to hang out with your peers. (paid community server) You can meet at your home, where you have to clean up and bring snacks yourself. (personal hosting) Or you can meet in a cafe, where access is free, with the expectation that there will be a different but related financial transaction (food and beverages). ("free" servers paid by ads) I can't think of a good analogy of meeting your friends in a fully public space.
- 2sk21 9y ago
  Related question: can they even pay? The vast majority of the new users of Facebook are from developing countries with low income. There is no way to make them voluntarily pay for access to a social network.
- Fedoranimus 9y ago
  > - paid for by users This suggests that the users would.

realpeopleio 9y ago

"we must devise new business models and structural incentives that aren’t rooted in manipulation and coercion...In the short-term, that might be achieved by turning to basic subscription services, by paying for the things we use." That's why we made RealPeople.io (https://realpeople.io https://realpeople.io) have no ads at all. Users pay to use, and there's no AI, no sharing your data. Rather than trying to just convince users to take our word for it, we just built it into our business model. Our financial incentives align with keeping user data private. And since we don't get paid based on how many pages the user views or how long the user is on the system, there's no financial incentive to getting the user addicted.

can3p 9y ago
Is it possible to see any blog or real page without signing up? And is there an api to read/write/manage blog?
jasode 9y ago
>And since we don't get paid based on how many pages the user views or how long the user is on the system, there's no financial incentive to getting the user addicted. Arguably, most of Facebook's addiction is the existence of virtually all their friends on the network. Your $9/year cost is a lavish amount of money that exceeds the measly $1/year that 70% don't want to pay.[1] Why don't people want to pay 8 cents a month to avoid ads?!? That's a good question! Whatever the answer is, it affects how an alternative social network can grow and/or financially sustain itself. If most of the people aren't in a $9/year network, then yes, it won't be addictive. The Google+ social network has targeted ads and yet it's not addictive -- because it's missing the network effect of having "everybody" on it. Have you considered realistic human incentives in your economic model? [1] https://www.tune.com/blog/mobile-ads-70-of-smartphone-owners-wont-pay-even-1-to-avoid-ads/ https://www.tune.com/blog/mobile-ads-70-of-smartphone-owners...
- lhorie 9y ago
  One could argue that LinkedIn has everybody on it (at least insofar as you are a working white collar adult), but it's not addictive either.

overcast 9y ago

Until the day the general population actually pays for online services(this will never happen), Facebook like enterprises will exist. I know you'll respond and tell me that you'd pay, but the vast majority of people will not, and that's why any type of paid social network will fail. They require mass adoption to be successful.

vixen99 9y ago
Maybe one day the difficulties of establishing a nano/micro payment system will be overcome. https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/2010-11/MicropaymentsAndTheNet/issues.html https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/2010-...
- DSingularity 9y ago
  Thanks for the link. Regarding mental transaction costs, why not make refunds one-click-away? If after consuming the digital good or using the service a user feels “oh my this wasn’t worth it”, it takes one click to undo his usage. Wouldn’t that eliminate this cost by relaxing the user?
  - freeone3000 9y ago
    It'd hamper adoption by vendors. If I knew your could refund whenever, how do I know when it's safe to take out that money?
    - DSingularity 9y ago
      My guess is you model it and exploit how over time everything normalizes. Bottom line is that 99.9% of users won’t request refunds. And for those that do, well they are micro transactions right?
  - always_good 9y ago
    Actually, infinite refunds / charge-backs are responsible for major friction in our existing systems. Those mechanisms are expensive and add a cost to every dollar sent through them. Really, microtransactions should be final by default unless you specifically need the machinery of escrow or clearing delay.

SakeOfBrevity 9y ago

"(...) when it comes to Facebook, the rot is deep. It can’t be excised. It can only be replaced by something else, by a form of connectivity that treats people not as laborers or commodities, but as human beings." Almost on point. Facebook has ingrained itself into socio-individual behaviour schemas. Social medias are likely here to stay for a long time and I don't see a company treating it's users as 'human beings' not 'commodities' being a front-runner to win a hypothethical future social media companies race; there are just no areas left that any rival company could simultaneously 1) exploit to stay profitable 2) make people use it. There will likely be some decentralized services but that's all.

Lionsion 9y ago
> ...and I don't see a company treating it's users as 'human beings' not 'commodities' being a front-runner to win a hypothethical future social media companies race; there are just no areas left that any rival company could simultaneously 1) exploit to stay profitable 2) make people use it. There are a few billionaires who are having second thoughts about a lot of this, I wonder if one could fund a rival non-profit network and run it at a loss until it has enough momentum. I know I'd shill for a non-profit, user-respecting social network and donate for its upkeep, but I just don't have the resources to keep one going.

GarrisonPrime 9y ago

It’s too bad an otherwise well written article on an important topic soiled itself with political statements. If you think it didn’t, I suggest you have some hidden biases.

arca_vorago 9y ago

Look, the truth of the matter is we opened the floodgates to computing for the masses too quickly without the proper protections and training. So up until about ~2000 it was mostly just the geeks using computers. Suddenly though, with the nice gui of Windows and Mac, the kind of users who used their cd tray as a coffee cup holder exponentially multiplied... and thus /r/talesfromtechsupport was born. They never learned to control and own their systems. Then those users start buying other computers, with software they didn't have the option to control, in the form of smartphones. Now there are huge swaths of users who are so used to being stuck in a user prison they don't own or control that they think it's normal! It's not. Join the GNU+Linux revolution today! So the problem with fb and twitter etc, is that they took what would have been a great model (individual websites) and tried to force everyone on their platform and then find various ways to lock them there... and now with all the backlash there is a growing awakening of computing freedom, but the problem is they keep thinking of blockchain or meshnet style decentraliztion to fix the problem, when the real problem is one of ownership. So in my opinion we need a good copyleft foss federation tech and people to own their own data. The internet isn't fully decentralized... it's more of a heirarchical starspoke topology, and it's high time SV and the rest wakeup from buzzword bingo of decentralization. (If I hear one more story about how we don't need servers cause we're going to the cloud I'm going to explode, for example). This is also why I think something like the freedombox is probably the closest thing to what the future lookes like.

pier25 9y ago
It's not a matter of freedom or control, it's about convenience.
- choward 9y ago
  People don't actually realize that the convenience comes with a cost though because they haven't been exposed to the other end of the spectrum.
  - pier25 8y ago
    Difficult to say, but I'd say convenience defeats everything (for most people) even if they understand what is going on.

olivermarks 9y ago

TLDR "Ultimately, to challenge Facebook, Google, and the many unknown players of the data economy, we must devise new business models and structural incentives that aren’t rooted in manipulation and coercion; that don’t depend on the constant surveillance of users, on gathering information on everything they read and purchase, and on building that information into complex dossiers designed to elicit some action — a click, a purchase, a vote. We must move beyond surveillance capitalism and its built-in inequities. In the short-term, that might be achieved by turning to basic subscription services, by paying for the things we use. But on a longer time horizon, we must consider whether we want to live in a world that converts all of our experiences into machine-readable data — data that doesn’t belong to us, that doesn’t serve us" // I have no idea how we can avoid this - Google is so invasive it is increasingly tracking and recording everything about our lives. Gillian Tett had a good piece in the FT about how autocomplete in search fields influences our thinking. https://www.ft.com/content/7dc8eae4-4d99-11e8-97e4-13afc22d86d4 https://www.ft.com/content/7dc8eae4-4d99-11e8-97e4-13afc22d8... Google maps records any changes we make to our property for future permit/permissions comparisons etc - we have no control over this and little ability to opt out.

deleted 9y ago

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DSingularity 9y ago

Aside from privacy there is another important issue to consider. Facebook makes censorship decisions it has no authority and probably little expertise to make. All with little to no accountability. Consider the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the censorship of Palestinian voices as an example. In general there should be no tolerance for speech that incites violence. Everybody agrees to this. But in this particular case things are different. The Palestinians are an occupied people and the Israeli army and Israeli colonizing settlers are occupying forces. The international community is almost in total agreement — the Palestinians have every right to engage in armed resistance against the occupation forces. Yet Facebook still delete accounts which call for resistance. To make matters worse, they allow the formidable, multi-million dollar funded, Israeli state-aponsered propaganda machine to use Facebook to normalize occupation, to demonize Palestinians, to dehumanize Palestinians, and to disrupt foreign protest/resistance in western democracies. How is this not morally bankrupt!? Come on. I do not understand this — how can any educated individual support a company like Facebook is beyond me. How can all those top notch researchers work for them? Facebook has 0 moral integrity. It tells quite a story about us techies. While they are some of the smartest people they are also the least morally-driven people. So selfish. Look at the world you Facebook engineers are creating. A world where a massive, world-wide, media platform doesn’t direct flows of information based on ethics and responsibility. The information flows based on profit and power. Of course Facebook will acquiesce to the majority of Israeli government requests. They project billions of dollars worth of power. Palestinians barely have enough to eat. Screw what the Palestinians think, what can they do? When Facebook and it’s platform acts as the Israeli propagandist and censor Facebook only loses if it’s users or employees get upset. What are the chances of that? Who controls what reaches our newfeeds? Are our feeds not filtered by what’s popular according to the masses and what hasn’t been downvotes to oblivion? I truly despise Facebook. I hate how they have no accountability. I hate the effects they are having on the world and people. I hate the way they influence how people think and nobody calls it censorship. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2016/09/12/facebook-google-israel-social-media https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2016/09/1... [2] https://israelpalestinenews.org/israel-partisans-work-censor-internet/ https://israelpalestinenews.org/israel-partisans-work-censor...

a_brawling_boo 9y ago

I am surprised no one has mentioned mastodon. Organizations or individuals can set up their own server and people can interact with their local communities that can police and or use the data as they want, AND there is a federated feed of all the mastodon instances where you interact in a public forum.