11 ms·

>most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online. Where does the author get that idea? The majority of Facebook's 2 b

• saucoide 8y ago
  When i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and requiring the other user's approval to get the actual content, you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose, or just run your own locally. life would be so simple
  • ip26 8y ago
    The magic usually missing from RSS is really good recommendation/discovery. I've got a list of feeds I follow, and that's all I'll ever get.
    • startupdiscuss 8y ago
      Is there discovery on Facebook? Most people I add because I meet them in read life. Actually, 100% of the people I add on FB after I've met them in real life. Maybe if there was a good search and easy add mechanism for people I've met, it would fulfill the discovery aspect. I agree with you, it does feel easier to find people on FB.
      • ip26 8y ago
        No, discovery of news & sources. Your friends who know about <your hobby> are a great news source/filter. Whereas with RSS there's not a good method to find new news you care about.
    • max76 8y ago
      Maybe someone should create an RSS feed that curates other RSS feeds and forwards them to their recipients. I'm not sure how to monetize this, but it would add some discovery to rss.
      • Kye 8y ago
        You described a link blog. kottke.org and Daring Fireball are good examples.
      • criddell 8y ago
        > I'm not sure how to monetize this Make it good enough to pay for.
        • wasdfff 8y ago
          For glorified opml export?
          • spdionis 8y ago
            For research and curation of content.
      • JetSpiegel 8y ago
        It's hard to compete with HN and Reddit...
    • ryandrake 8y ago
      Recommendations + Discovery = Filter Bubble. These mis-features are exactly what we should be moving away from!
      • ip26 8y ago
        No discovery = isolation bubble
        • Kye 8y ago
          I found this out when I switched from Pocket to Instapaper. Instapaper has a curated list of articles updated about once a month, and I don't read half of them. Pocket recommends articles based on what you read, and it's not just more of the same. I'm probably going to switch back.
        • wasdfff 8y ago
          You can follow hn and other aggregators like reddit via rss. I have it set up for hn where I only get posts that have hit 100 points, otherwise it’s a firehose.
      • marcosdumay 8y ago
        > Recommendations + Discovery = Filter Bubble. Yep. When it decentralized you can control how strong are the bubble walls and can try different bubbles from time to time.
      • davidivadavid 8y ago
        I'll take good recommendations, thank you. I'm surprised so few people here have picked up on the fact that "filter bubble" is a rhetorical trick about as obvious as the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" dichotomy. People like getting good recommendations, and they'll always like them. "Filter bubbles" are here to stay.
        • stcredzero 8y ago
          Good recommendations are like a convenient browser that comes with your OS. The problems come in when it's just one company that has the public locked in to their particular solution.
    • ticmasta 8y ago
      The nefarious problem with FB is the illusion of recommendation/discovery. They're not trying to find new and interesting things for you the way say, the cultural aspects of HN performs this feat; they're trying to define your profile and then serve up more of the same to increase engagement or capture your entire sphere of awareness so they can manipulate and shape your perception.'
      • aaaaaaass 8y ago
        hacker news is always more of the same? let's not pretend like they are any better.
      • paulddraper 8y ago
        > they can manipulate and shape your perception. That sounds pretty malicious for what basically amounts to attempting to serve you the content and ads you want.
        • techbio 8y ago
          >> capture your entire sphere of awareness Malicious sounding, indeed.
        • stcredzero 8y ago
          That sounds pretty malicious for what basically amounts to attempting to serve you the content and ads you want. Basically, serving you the content and ads you want can turn out to be pretty malicious. By doing so, a big company can manipulate and shape your perception. Year by year, data processing is making big companies ever more potent at doing just this. Is it any wonder that it eventually got to a point where we started seeing problems?
        • r3bl 8y ago
          They've already intentionally manipulated emotions of a "small number of users" (700k), proved it was possible, and released a paper on it: https://slate.com/technology/2014/06/facebook-unethical-experiment-it-made-news-feeds-happier-or-sadder-to-manipulate-peoples-emotions.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/06/facebook-unethical-expe...
    • mpweiher 8y ago
      RaaS? Recommendations as a Service? Disaggregated.
    • darkarmani 8y ago
      RSS is really just the content/transport method. For a decentralized FB, you would move the intelligence into your local client and it would like more like a web-of-trust network. 1. You connect to friends and you either manually assign or "grow" a bunch of weights to your amount of trust in them and your interest in various topics they might post. 2. You and your friends make posts and assign "topic" metadata to the posts. The value of the system depends on your friends properly assigning metadata to posts. But it makes it easier to filter out extended families' political shitposting (based on trust and negging untagged posts). 3. Your feed is selected based on the weight of your friendship times the weight you base on the interest of the topic. If your best friend posts something about computers and you have positively weighed that topic it would bubble up. 4. Friends-of-friends can transitively receive a proportion of the trust score you have in your friend. Highly trusted friends will make you trust their friends more. 5. Down-votes and upvotes would train your local agent. They could also be fed back to the originator IF votes were signed by trusted encryption keys to prevent your friend from faking his vote count on the "post". This decentralizes the network out of FB and democratizes the algorithms / system for what and how you want to receive your information.
      • NotAnEconomist 8y ago
        I think there's middle ground that likely is more commercially viable: 1. Everyone makes a website. 2. Those websites submit articles to content indexes. 3. Part of your website hosts your own reader client: 3.a The reader subscribes to a set of indexes. 3.b It can also subscribe to individual feeds. 3.c Your client decides how to mix the feeds into displays, eg, you could have several indexes feed into one "feed" and have all of your family feeds in a second "feed". 4. Most of this is actually done via cloud hosting of managed packages, rented. There's still many strong factors in favor of centralization, but if it's built around interop, then having a few large providers than mesh together is still an improvement and begins a competition to provide better services. It's what happened with blogs and RSS anyway.
        • CodeCube 8y ago
          > submit articles to content indexes ... aaaaaand, there it goes; the spammers already ruined it ;)
    • wasdfff 8y ago
      Follow feeds that post from a variety of sources. I follow a HN rss, a couple multireddit RSS feeds, and even newsletters from nyt and la times will include stories from a variety of places. “Discover” hardly ever means, “check out what’s interesting,” usually it’s “check out this targeted ad”
      • ip26 8y ago
        Ah, but if I'm too broad, then I get a firehose of news. RSS gives you everything that comes down the pipe- unless you set up filters, I suppose
        • asdff 8y ago
          For reddit you can get a feed for the top posts only, and for HN you can set a score threshold. I even follow newsletters over rss (killthenewsletter), which if you subscribe to some daily digests you get exposed to stories from a variety of sources on many topics. I can still run through like 250 headlines in about 30 minutes, reading or saving what I like to pocket and skimming over the rest. There is definitely set up and optimization with RSS, getting the right mix of feeds that you want, but I don't see any targeted posts or advertising when I browse the internet now. Its also really good for following journal articles in my field. Pubmed has active search RSS, for instance, and every journal pushes their new articles to RSS.
          • hotmud 8y ago
            > [F]or HN you can set a score threshold… How does one do that? I'm interested.
            • JetSpiegel 8y ago
              https://github.com/edavis/go-hnrss https://github.com/edavis/go-hnrss Shameless plug: Binaries here: https://gitlab.com/somini/go-hnrss/ https://gitlab.com/somini/go-hnrss/
    • hinkley 8y ago
      The way I grew my feed was to look around any time an article in my feed linked to another site. The thing is though we want to talk about the stories and ask questions. I mean, that’s why we’re all here, right? Comment forums on a million sites don’t work. In the early days of the web someone had the idea that you should be able to run your own group commentary without the site aurhor’s permission. You’d register for the service and your browser would tell you or show you that there’s a conversation going about this page. I still feel like we need this.
      • cakeface 8y ago
        There are some w3c tools around open annotations that might be a good fit for this.
    • tmaly 8y ago
      I think something like personal AI, like something out of a William Gibson novel could fix this issue.
    • unicornporn 8y ago
      Blogrolls worked quite well for me.
    • FranzFerdiNaN 8y ago
      I use Feedly for my rss-feeds and they do recommend other sites to follow if you search for a feed.
    • QML 8y ago
      Can't you just have a website like Medium that acts as an aggregator (of RSS feeds) instead of a platform? The issue I have to whether stick with RSS feeds, which seem like it's dying, or to use ActivityPub, which doesn't seem to be developed that heavily.
      • pmlnr 8y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)
        • QML 8y ago
          I think in addition to this an aggregator, you also need a website that helps create an RSS feed for each user while simultaneously abstracting that notion away. Thanks for the pointer though :)
        • njn 8y ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)
    • krausejj 8y ago
      we're working on this problem with mendoapp.com but instead of following "feeds" you follow people, and it queues up links they've shared on twitter
  • snackematician 8y ago
    Maybe more of an email list than an RSS feed then? You can control who is a member of the list to receive content. It would be cool if social media could be done through email, sort of like Usenet.
    • saucoide 8y ago
      Yes, but ideally it would be 2-ways, and there is still the problem with discovery, more in general i just think there shouldn't be social media sites, "social media" should be a protocol
    • wasdfff 8y ago
      You mean like newsletters? No need to reinvent the wheel.
      • schnevets 8y ago
        Email/newsletters are a promising protocol, but you would have to rethink the UX to be more like a newsfeed, where a concise version of the message is shown once, and then automatically marked as read. I have noticed friends reverting back to RSVP e-mails via Paperless Post Flyer. I'm still not sure if one person in this social group is not on Facebook, causing the change, but it has been a welcome adjustment. If Facebook Events can be replaced by an e-mail approach, I don't see why other products can't follow suit.
        • asdff 8y ago
          >where a concise version of the message is shown once, and then automatically marked as read. So like a rule to push it into your newsletter folder?
  • walterstucco 8y ago
    You are describing Xanadu
  • dtougas 8y ago
    Didn't you just describe Twitter?
    • yakshaving_jgt 8y ago
      Twitter could be great if you could truly tune-out the stuff you don't want to see. For a long time I held onto my account, trying to mute anything part of SJW or communist discourse, but to no avail. Twitter shows you stuff you didn't sign up for anyway, I suppose to maximise engagement.
  • stcredzero 8y ago
    When i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and requiring the other user's approval to get the actual content That last phrase could add a lot of friction. you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose That would indeed replace Facebook. However, then you have a chicken and egg problem. Those clients won't be much good unless people provide data by using them, and people won't use them because they don't already have the data to provide good recommendations.
    • viraptor 8y ago
      There's already a lot of aggregators which are partially-social. For example theoldreader tells me that someone likes a specific post from RSS feed. Not sure if they have recommendations, but they could certainly generate them if they wanted.
      • stcredzero 8y ago
        One thing that could be really cool, would be the UI of RSS readers applied to social media. Like, you could have the ads and recommendations in their own branch of the tree.
  • naravara 8y ago
    >When i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and requiring the other user's approval to get the actual content, you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose, or just run your own locally. life would be so simple Up until you get to "different clients" you're basically describing classic Google Reader.
    • FranzFerdiNaN 8y ago
      I still miss google reader. If was such a fine product that just worked so of course it had to go.
  • grahamburger 8y ago
    That sounds a lot like ActivityPub / Mastodon.
  • brlewis 8y ago
    My ideal social media was FriendFeed, and yes it was in many ways similar to an RSS feed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed
  • akirk 8y ago
    I've been actually building something like this on the side with the Friends plugin for WordPress: https://wordpress.org/plugins/friends/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/friends/ (source at https://github.com/akirk/friends https://github.com/akirk/friends) It's based on the idea that you'd publish to your personal website either publicly or privately. The private posts can only be read by your friends (who own personal websites themselves and have established a friendship connection using a friend request). The implementation is just a (not yet standardized) friend ship request REST protocol plus authenticated RSS feeds (using a secret key exchanged by the above process). Since the whole decentralized social network idea is a chicken-and-egg game, I've constructed the plugin in a way so that it is useful to use by yourself: You can subscribe to RSS feeds, filter feeds with your own rules, and get full-content e-mail notifications for all or selected posts. The plugin also implements Emoji-Likes on posts and allows recommending posts to your friends. It doesn't have an automatic recommendation engine (yet?). Actually, there is no need to have this restricted to WordPress since it uses very much established technology, so it could interoperate with any other compatible platform. I just implemented it with WordPress for its ecosystem and that you can use existing mobile apps to read on it and share to it. Overall the whole endeavor allows you to have your personal social network decentralized, ad- and spam-free since you select who you listen to. The plugin is already well usable but it only progresses at side-project speed, so help is welcome (not only development work but also trying it out, posting about its features with screenshots/-casts, etc.)! You can read more about some technical details at https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/03/decentralized-social-networking-with-wordpress/ https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/03/decentralized-social-ne... and take a look at the presentation: https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/08/wordpress-meetup-presentation-decentralized-social-networking-with-wordpress/ https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/08/wordpress-meetup-presen...
• rock_hard 8y ago
  Can you back that claim about the majority of Facebook users not producing content with data please EDIT: Specifing the claim
  • Someone1234 8y ago
    The author of the article did not, so why should a comment saying differently be held to a higher standard? Plus asking for data about a long post without referencing which part you even want data on is unconstructive.
    • prophesi 8y ago
      Two wrongs make the latter right.
    • dfxm12 8y ago
      The author of the article did not, so why should a comment saying differently be held to a higher standard? Two wrongs don't make a right, and how do you know to what standard the parent poster holds the author? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Plus asking for data about a long post without referencing which part you even want data on is unconstructive. There was one claim made in the five sentence GP post.
  • pipnasti 8y ago
    I think it would be helpful to specify which claims need data. > Recommending "personal websites" is talking about a solution to a problem that most of the billion users don't have. I thinks this is mostly a valid argument. The burden of proof for whether the problem exists is on the person proposing the solution; Solutions require action, and the side that requires action needs proof. I do think the claim that “most people use facebook like an rss feed” needs some data to back it up though. I personally use it that way, but that is andecdotal and I also have many friends who use facebook to promote their life, which is more along the lines of a personal website. EDIT: Spelling
• jsgo 8y ago
  There are also a number of people who primarily share content rather than create/write it as well. Me, I personally treat it like a blog in the sense that I'm there to either "like" it, go past it, or go to the comments section. Regardless, reproducing Facebook via personal websites would be daunting if not impossible. One, not everyone is going to feel comfortable doing HTML/CSS/JS or even working in a CMS w/ drag-and-drop/WYSIWYG. Two, if I know your name (and if it isn't unique enough, we either share connections or I know some other details about you you've posted), I can search for you on Facebook. How easily can that be created with personal websites when you're also searching against the broader web (good luck searching for your friend Mercedes's personal site. Have a friend named Mike Rowe and you guys joke about how his name is like that one guy with the tv show? Best of luck finding his site too). And we can argue "but the user can take back control of their data" which on face value is true, the problem is that I think for a lot of people I know on Facebook, they don't care. At least the convenience outweighs the concerns. And that's fine, that's their right. They weighed the pros/cons and found Facebook to have agreeable compromises. As do businesses that sell on Amazon I'm sure. I do want a solution that gets away from Facebook. The problem is it needs to be something that is easy enough for a non-tech user to manage and consume. If it is more difficult than Facebook, it can't hope for being anything more than a niche.
• MentallyRetired 8y ago
  Maybe we need some kind of open specification for "the living web" so companies like tripod/angelfire can support the spec. Maybe where you would sign into your own site and it would have polled posts from all the sites you follow (probably with rss) into a single feed. Your site IP is your identity, so commenting etc would be done as your site e.g., `MentallyRetired.com says: Hey these are cool!` I dont know, just shooting from the hip, but it seems a lot of these technologies are possible. I remember signing into places with my website. But it needs to be EASY. As easy as Facebook. And backwards compatible to avoid breakage.
• bilbo0s 8y ago
  >the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content... And HN user "jsgo" wrote... >If it is more difficult than Facebook, it can't hope for being anything more than a niche... These are the sorts of common sense observations missing from so many "let's replace Facebook/Twitter/Whatever" debates. If we're serious about replacing FB/Snapchat/Twitter/Whatever then we need to consider realistic alternatives. Using the Mastodon-like distributed media and personal website ideas to get rid of Facebook/Twitter is like using the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front to get rid of the Romans. You just have to ignore a lot of reality to assume it would ever work.
  • jiveturkey 8y ago
    That said, if someone can strike now, it is possible to displace FB. Or at least put up enough competition to sadly/ironically get bought out by them.
    • scarmig 8y ago
      Google Plus, now's your moment!
• malcolmgreaves 8y ago
  I feel that most people are stuck with Facebook because of messenger and events. Core FB functionality is still its social network and ease of interconnecting everyone's personal social graphs.
• jjuel 8y ago
  This x1000 We would need some sort of aggregator. Currently, you could call Facebook an aggregator of personal websites. Of course all of the personal websites are also hosted there, but it technically is an aggregator of those webpages. Let's not forget most of the people that I am friends with on Facebook would never be able to create their own personal website without a lot of help which is what makes something like Facebook so convenient and popular.
  • zanny 8y ago
    > We would need some sort of aggregator. It could be a protocol, independent of the browser. But the browser could support it inline, so you could just click a button to follow a content stream. It shouldn't be complex, it should be simple. Really simple. Syndication.
    • masterdrift 8y ago
      Open source social media dashboard? That way you could still use all the traditional social media apps without being reliant on any single one.
      • asdff 8y ago
        Several years ago facebook gutted a lot of RSS features. You used to be able to follow your notifications via RSS, but that went away when facebook realized people wouldn't stay on the site as long.
        • masterdrift 8y ago
          Is there no possible workaround? Zapier supports custom RSS feeds from popular social media sites, so it's definitely not impossible.
          • JetSpiegel 8y ago
            There's https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge, but it's a PHP app, run it on a disposable VPS.
• duxup 8y ago
  Yeah I just want to see everyone's photos.. that's kinda it.
• debt 8y ago
  "Instead, the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content." It's funny when people paint such wide strokes for 2 billion people. I would assume people use Facebook for literally hundreds if not thousands(if you can imagine) of use cases. Probably one of the most complex consumer products ever made from that perspective. I don't think it's useful to reduce Facebook to something as simple as "most people do X on Facebook". For instance, Facebook in India has nearly 300 million users. They all use Facebook the same way as the 215 million in the United States? The only people that know how Facebook is used by people is Facebook.
• trumped 8y ago
  > because that technology is missing a "real names" reverse directory lookup database. search engines solve that somewhat ... but you could have a directory that points to the correct address (a bit like a web directory or a phone book)... maybe the government could even host that...
• factorialboy 8y ago
  Agree. And those who do post about their lives (on FB, Insta, Twitter etc.) Do it for the dopamine fix one gets when others react and respond to their posts.
• solatic 8y ago
  > that doesn't mean RSS readers can replace Facebook because that technology is missing a "real names" reverse directory lookup database But that's the point, isn't it? Personal websites isn't what will "solve the customer's problem", persé, but it is what will allow Facebook to no longer be irreplaceable, which is the real reason why people stay on the platform. The question isn't whether personal websites can replace Facebook, but whether personal websites will allow room for a real Facebook competitor (which improves the passive consumption experience) to grow.
  • vonseel 8y ago
    You’d think that if personal websites were a valid substitute for Facebook, the whole thing would have never taken off in the first place. Personal websites didn’t see massive adoption the first time around, and we can safely doubt they ever will.
    • asdff 8y ago
      Because they were obtuse to set up for 99% of people. Myspace basically made quick and easy personal pages for the masses, and everyone used it because it was quick and easy. If a company is able to do it right for the 99% of people who don't know what FTP is, then its got a shot.
      • krapp 8y ago
        None of the major web services (Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire) required anyone to know FTP, and they weren't any more difficult to use than Wix or Wordpress, which target non-technical users today. Before the standard of "web development" became "learn the terminal, Git and some Linux, unit testing, install and learn Node, learn Docker or some other container, learn ssh, learn a framework and any of several languages that compile to javascript" it really was simple enough that plenty of "normal" people grasped it without any issue.
        • ufmace 8y ago
          The trouble is, all of those "easy" website building services are still much harder and more customizable than Facebook. If you remember MySpace, you'll also remember that a pretty signifiant minority of pages were horrifically ugly and did super-annoying things. It seems most people are either terrible at web design or have no interest in it, even if you give them a pile of dead-easy templates. Part of the reason most of my social media use went to Facebook earlier on was that the user pages all looked reasonably nice and didn't play terrible music or blink or whatever. You could still post ugly pictures or stupid walls of text, but there's a limit to how unpleasant you can make a Facebook page. Sometimes, less customizability is better.
• Leader2light 8y ago
  "The way most people use Facebook is more of an RSS feed rather than a 1999 Geocities personal website." Very true and Twitter is better for this in general. I keep a Twitter feed running at all times on 2nd monitor.
• zild3d 8y ago
  > The way most people use Facebook is more of an RSS feed For many it's become more of an address book
  • WorldMaker 8y ago
    Or a shared calendar
• will_brown 8y ago
  When YC experimented with applying/voting with YC applicants on HN, this was a part of my idea...tomorrowbook ;) It’s part domain registration, web builder (simple website with fees you add content to via text message), part automated dns records, part social media/search engine. So imagine these personal websites are all connected, one website can follow another, that’s it. You own the content, traffic, ad revenue. You could search content across these distributed websites with the tomorrowbook search engine, you could use tomorrowbook to register a domain (built in dns/website for the nontechnical) or use your own registrar and embed the tomorrowbook feed into your site. Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11473190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11473190
  • cft 8y ago
    In 1997 it was called Webrings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
    • will_brown 8y ago
      Well without the domain registration, dns, webbuilder, social media functions and search engine. But yes that seems to allow websites to link to one another.
• provlem 8y ago
  We are already trying here to offer FREE personal website for User at https://UserCV.com/users https://UserCV.com/users
  • w3clan 8y ago
    Personal CV websites are future, but they need more like "FEED" or "RSS" and "followers" mechanism
• yesenadam 8y ago
  Instead, the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content. Is that true? I would have thought it's mostly used for chatting with people they know, or commenting on things people have shared. But I'm just guessing.