6 ms·

Can we just have a social network that doesn't target anyone, for anything, and just lets us communicate, and build relationships without trying to manipulate u

• bilbo0s 8y ago
  Any social network that has people posting any personal data at all, will be mined. For one purpose or another. (And probably for one purpose AND the other.) Almost the only way to stop it would be to make it explicitly illegal, and even then they would still allow mining for certain purposes. There's just no way to get away from it at this point. (Other than just not using social networks at all I suppose?)
  • munk-a 8y ago
    Putting personal data out there means... putting personal data out there, advertisers mining that data is a hard problem to solve. So can we re-orient the need for a solution to the injection of advertising into the platform? Lets solve this problem one step at a time and first stop those advertisers from leveraging the platform to distribute advertisements, instead only allowing them to mine the data to support ad campaigns. Once that's done we can look at salves for the data mining of social media, though I can't see that being possible without really resilient privacy enforcement.
• gravy 8y ago
  Real life?
  • Simulacra 8y ago
    Ha! Touche, and a very good point.
• Gokenstein 8y ago
  we had that. It was called livejournal. And everyone stopped using it.
  • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    Wasn't that exodus predicated by the same sort of "undesirables" reputation? Though I'd much rather have a thousand Harry Potter erotic fan fiction authors than a handful of neo-nazis sharing my website.
  • pjc50 8y ago
    .. because it was bought by a Russian parent company who brought in restrictive policies. And, obviously, surveillance.
• zxcvvcxz 8y ago
  Nothing like this can exist without some money for the owners to maintain and create it. Nothing's free. Why can't people understand this?
  • jjulius 8y ago
    OP didn't say it had to be free. You could also have a social network that just displayed ads without any kind of targeting and user-tracking whatsoever.
    • fixermark 8y ago
      ... it's just that in the marketplace of ad channels for advertisers to invest their budget in, that network loses out to networks with targeted ads.
      • jjulius 8y ago
        Who's to say that if the general public were presented with two free (to the user) social networks, one that targets ads and one that doesn't, that people would opt to use the targeted one over the non-targeted one?
        • fixermark 8y ago
          My snarky answer is "Google vs. DDG's usage numbers," but a more serious answer is that yes, that'd be a possibility (but I'd sadly put it on the low end of probable outcomes given what we know about both the stickiness of existing social networks vs. newcomers and how much concern for privacy users actually tend to demonstrate).
          • jjulius 8y ago
            Fair! :)
        • anigbrowl 8y ago
          Available evidence suggests that enough people want to be on whatever the biggest platform is for that to give it a decisive advantage over the competition.
• beamatronic 8y ago
  Yes, but you would have to pay for it. And convince your friends to also. Actually maybe the subscription model would let you pay for their subscriptions as well.
  • unclebucknasty 8y ago
    It's funny because the idea of paying for it reads like a non-starter. Maybe it is. Crazy times when we'd trade away so much for so little vs just paying some nominal amount. But I sometimes wonder if it's just as much a convenience thing as it is the actual money. That is, if the sign up process was just as easy with payment as it is now, would a lot more people go for it than assumed (at some price point)? In any case, I don't think that pay or have your privacy co-opted are really the only paths to a viable social network business model.
    • WilliamEdward 8y ago
      Signing up or putting in financial information is not the hard part, the hard part is the anxiety of constantly having a stream of money leaving your account every month bit by bit. We try to avoid this as much as humanly possible.
      • unclebucknasty 8y ago
        >the anxiety of constantly having a stream of money leaving your account every month bit by bit I don't know that this is true writ large. Monthly budgeting is, essentially, how most people operate, whether for expenses of necessity or choice. That is, much of our financial lives are oriented around (largely monthly) cash-flow management. So, we prioritize what's necessary or important to us, then add it to the mix. I don't know why a subscription to a service like FB would be any different than, say, Netflix (if the price were "right"). OTOH, there's an ease in just slipping into something with an e-mail address. So, I believe the friction of going from no payment to any payment is the much bigger leap to overcome (again, provided the price in question is reasonable). But, there is also now the notion to overcome that some things (like a social network) "should" be free. But, that's another topic.
• fixermark 8y ago
  Email never stopped existing.
  • madrox 8y ago
    I don't understand why this isn't the top comment.
    • anigbrowl 8y ago
      Because email does not do as good a job as social media for most people. If it were so great, how was there sufficient demand for social networking companies to grow large? Even in the 1990s people used usenet because social discover and public conversation over email is cumbersome.
• luckylion 8y ago
  Who would pay for that though? And why shouldn't it manipulate? I'm fine with manipulating people. Nudging is okay in my book if you're benevolent and aiming to make people's life better. It's just shit when all you want is to make them buy some product to fill the void you've helped create.
  • jjulius 8y ago
    >And why shouldn't it manipulate? Why should it? And why not have a social network that just serves up ads that aren't based on tracking/targeting users?
    • luckylion 8y ago
      Because manipulation is great. You can help people by manipulating them, you can measurably improve their lives. That's a big reason for me. That's like "why should we heal the sick?" You can use a scalpel for good and you can use it to hurt people. There's no use in just saying "we shouldn't use scalpels, ever" to me. Ads that are completely random won't pay the bills, and ads that are content-based (without looking at the user) might, but will also target the user, they just won't follow them around. If I want to reach people interested in the Nazis, I'll just put my ads on pages dealing with Nazi stuff, because that's what people interested in Nazis tend to look at and other people don't.
      • jjulius 8y ago
        >Because manipulation is great. You can help people by manipulating them, you can measurably improve their lives. That's a big reason for me. That's like "why should we heal the sick?" Are you really comparing targeted ad manipulation to medical professionals healing people? And yes, it can help improve lives, but there's also a flipside to what it can do (read: Cambridge Analytica, Russia, etc.). There are negative connotations to manipulation that you need to keep in mind. >Ads that are completely random won't pay the bills... It's worked for TV and radio for decades. They're still somewhat targeted but in a far, far less invasive manner, and they're not individualized.
• spinach 8y ago
  That would at the very least, mean that users would pay a fee to use their product. As of now, as a free product that is the only way to monetize. The internet loves it's free, open products but at the same time, ironically, loves to build products whose founders are billionaires and even raises them to near hero status. It culminates in the users having a pretty terrible experience in the way of manipulation and privacy.
  • phil248 8y ago
    Really though? Advertising supported multi-billion dollar industries for decades without mining our personal info. Just because they can doesn't mean they have to. If companies want to advertise to Facebook's hundreds of millions of users, they will do so without targeting if that's their only option.
  • jonas21 8y ago
    And, if your friends are anything like mine, only a small fraction would be willing to pay, making it a pretty lousy social network.
  • kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    Commercial radio and broadcast television worked without fine grained metrics on the users. There's nothing special about the internet that makes invasive tracking a necessity.
    • floatrock 8y ago
      "Worked." How are they doing now? It's a cats-outta-the-bag situation. What DOES makes invasive tracking a necessity is it works so much better than the free models that came before it. If you're not doing it, your competition is, and they're getting one up on you. I don't think we have a free model that monetizes more efficiently than invasive tracking, so the only option you're left with is a not-free model. And for consumer-social, "not free" is a small niche (eharmony comes to mind as making it work, but even they bought all the free dating companies because the free ones were eating the market...)
  • 8y ago
• overcast 8y ago
  Phone, email, texting, real life activities? Where did the obsession come from with having to be in real time constant contact with a ton of people who we didn't care about staying in contact with before? Other than a common place to share photos, which existed prior, why?
• twblalock 8y ago
  Even in a decentralized/federated network there will always be people trying to mine data for the purposes of advertising and political campaigning. It's human nature to try to take advantage of others for personal and financial gain.
  • chabes 8y ago
    “It's human nature to try to take advantage of others for personal and financial gain.“ Is it? Or is it the perverse financial incentive structure that leads humans to put financial gain over all other priorities? Would humans still make decisions to take advantage if the incentive structures were built differently?
    • twblalock 8y ago
      > Would humans still make decisions to take advantage if the incentive structures were built differently? Human history proves that yes, they still would.
      • anigbrowl 8y ago
        That seems way too general of a conclusion to be adopting as a premise. At the very least it ignores the distribution of behavior in a population.
• disease 8y ago
  Mastadon?
• chongli 8y ago
  How about Mastodon? [1] It's free, open source, and federated like email. If you're hoping for a commercial, centralized social network, then you're always going to have to deal with perverse incentives. [1] https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/
  • bilbo0s 8y ago
    It can still be mined. That's the crux of the problem is the mining. If you can mine it, then you can use that data to target ads, you can use it for law enforcement purposes, you can use it to stifle dissent, etc etc etc. Could also use the mined data for a myriad number of good things as well. Really is just up to the miner. Point is, it's the mining that lays the foundation for the dangers, and there is little that prevents facebook, or twitter, or whatever entity that wants to mine mastodon instances from doing so.
    • chongli 8y ago
      With Mastodon you can run your own server, so you can make it invite-only and disallow data miners from joining.
      • anigbrowl 8y ago
        The more secure and exclusive your server the less utility it provides to the network at large. Great for privacy, useless if you wish to connect with a broader community. Also assumes that both internal and external security are solid. They're probably not, and covert mining isn't that hard.
        • chongli 8y ago
          wish to connect with a broader community This is no longer in the realm of technical problems. If you want to connect with a "broader community" (i.e. people you don't know) then you don't get privacy. To say you do want privacy while also getting to connect with strangers is to insist upon the trustworthiness of strangers.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• broth 8y ago
  Don't these exist already? [1] Other than that, I can relate to the other comments of just doing away with social networks on the web and replacing it with real-life communication via talking, phone calls, emails, or text messaging. As I get older I realize how much I miss the traditional ways of communicating without being inundated and distracted by constant notifications from present day social networks. [1] https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/
  • meko 8y ago
    I deleted my fb+twitter several months ago. It was lonely at first. I realized I had let social media 'automate' my social life away. Since then I've been trying to foster actual friendships through the 'normal channels' like talking, hanging out (when I can make the time) and sms. It feels a bit Luddite in a way, and I feel less like I have 600 friends, and rather like I have 6 friends. It hasn't been some relevatory experience like some would suggest; social media does make things easier and life without it feel quieter. But like anything else, it's a trade off. biggest positive I've noticed was that I find myself less dopamine-addled. I no longer waste hours on my phone scrolling in order to relax. It took some adjustment time, but I find it easier to get my dopamine fix from more productive hobbies.
    • wsgeorge 8y ago
      I quit FB and Twitter nearly 4 years ago. Now I waste that time on WhatsApp, reddit and 4chan. I figured the problem was more with me than with the media I was consuming.
• ravenstine 8y ago
  How is that supposed to impress stakeholders?
• munk-a 8y ago
  The network effect is strong and if your family is on facebook it can seem rude to post about your life elsewhere where they lack access to it. I'd love to see a government mandate forcing cross pollinization of these networks (perhaps using diapora's node approach) that would allow smaller hosts to compete with the big guys by letting people pull feeds in from other networks. Basically we need XMPP for social media but none of the social media companies have any motivation for implementing it so... ideally the government does sometime.
  • bilbo0s 8y ago
    ??? How does any of that stop the data mining? It's the data mining and the ad targeting that people want to stop. And the FB competitors could be mining data just as easily as FB can.
    • munk-a 8y ago
      It doesn't directly stop the data mining, it stops the profitability of allowing that data mining to the social network... and making that data mining less profitable reduces the value of allowing that to the network host. If people can jump ship they'll slowly migrate to ad free platforms, then we can attack the issue of data-mining with regulations at the government level to force a cessation of private data collection.
      • bilbo0s 8y ago
        >If people can jump ship they'll slowly migrate to ad free platforms... Here's the problem, ad free, does not mean mining free. These other platforms could still be mining your data with you none the wiser. In fact, it's a virtual certainty that they would, at minimum, for law enforcement purposes. (Which would entail stifling dissent in certain nations.) One of the only ways to cut down on mining is to make it explicitly illegal. And again, even then there will be exceptions carved out by congress. But that would at least provide most people a bit of privacy in their personal data just as HIPPA provides us a bit of privacy in our health data.
• craigsmansion 8y ago
  Sadly we already have such a thing. It's the Internet itself. It's quaint how in movies people easily identify with the underdog/resistance, e.g. a "Neo" in the "Matrix", and would see themselves taking the same direction if a similar scenario would ever play out. Yet here we are, and at the first hint of inconvenience it's blue pills all around.
  • fixermark 8y ago
    If it helps the understanding, it's worth remembering that life outside the Matrix was a hardscrabble garbage existence---so much so that a character was willing to kill to get back in.