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"The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show you good, enrishing content from your friends and family." Well, it is someone else's website. Wha

"The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show you good, enrishing content from your friends and family." Well, it is someone else's website. What do you expect Zuckerberg has his own interests in mind. In 2020, it is still too difficult for everyone to set up their own website, so they settle for a page on someone else's. If exchanging content with friends and family (not swaths of the public who visit Facebook - hello advertisers) is the ultimate goal, then there are more efficient ways to to do that without using Zuckerberg's website. The challenge is to make those easier to set up. For example, if each group of friends and family were on the same small overlay network they set up themselves, connecting to each other peer-to-peer, it would be much more difficult for advertisers to reach them. Every group of friends and family on a different network instead of every group of friends and family all using the same third party, public website on the same network, the internet. Naysayers will point to the difficulty setting up such networks. No one outside of salaried programmers paid to do it wants to even attempt to write "user agents" today because the "standard", a ridiculously large set of "features", most of which benefit advertisers not users, is far too complex. What happens when we simplify the "standard"? As an analogy, look at how much easier is is to set up Wireguard, software written more or less by one person, than it is to set up OpenVPN.

baq 6y ago
i have a fundamental issue calling a content-curating, psychological-experiment-running platform visited by hundreds of millions of people daily 'someone else's website'. the fact that it is privately owned doesn't matter if nation states use it to wage information wars against other nation states' citizens. to make matters worse, the 'someone else' in question knows about it perfectly well and is fine with it because it means he's showing more ads. this is plain and simple fucked up.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  Well, that is what it is. No one knew a single website could grow so large, but it did. Even though there are thousands of people working for its owner, when reading articles like the OP we are reminded how much control he still has over it. No doubt he still thinks of it as his personal creation. Of course, "99.99999%" of the content is not his. Perhaps most of the people who sign up on Facebook are not employed by nation states but just ordinary people who want an easy way to stay connected to friends and family. Maybe these people should have a better way to stay connected than using a public website.
  - baq 6y ago
    indeed this happened but that's hardly a reason to let it continue to be.
ggggtez 6y ago
I don't think that "user-agents" are the hard part either. At this point, I think any grad student would happily write a NN implementation that took various posts as input, and returned to you a sorted list based on your preferences (with input layers like: bag of words, author, links, time, etc, that the user could put more or less weight into just by simple upvote/downvote). The problem is that no one has the incentive to host such a service for free, and users wants the content to be available 24/7. So it's not as simple as just setting up a peer-to-peer network. Users who just use a phone as their primary computer will still want to be able to publish to their millions of followers, and so it wouldn't work to have those millions of people connect directly to this person's device. Maybe you can solve that with a bit-torrent like approach, but the problem gets harder when you include the ability to send messages privately.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  "Users who just use a phone as their primary computer will still want to able to publich to their millions of followers, and so it wouldn't work to have these millions of people connect directly to this person's device." You have shifted the discussion from small overlay network for friends and family to large overlay network for "millions of followers". Those methods of sharing content with "millions of followers" are already available and will no doubt continue to be available. A small private network is a different idea, with a different purpose. People will always have the choice of using a public network however a small overlay can avoid sending traffic through third party servers, like Facebook's. There is no requirement that a service has to be "free", or supported by ads. This is something else you injected in the discussion. I use free software to set up overlays, but I have to pay for internet service and hosting. The cost of the "service" is not the setup it is the internet access and hosting.
  - ggggtez 6y ago
    Your idea doesn't sound particularly tenable. A pay social network that limits you to only your close friends and family, that will have no network effects, have less features, and be more difficult to set up... It's easy for people to point what they don't like about Facebook, but I don't think you are really comprehending why they dominated the social network space to begin with. It's not as easy as making a product that doesn't advertise, if it costs money to use instead.
StandardFuture 6y ago
Excuse my ignorance, but isn't the overlay network setup problem one that has problems at almost every level of the stack? If there is not any definitive technical problems to overcome, why is it not possible to create a mobile app that friends and family could use as their own private network? Isn't the internet supposed to be every node acting as it's own server and client simultaneously anyways? Is the problem just the inability to truly decentralize discovery, registry, and identity authentication of nodes in the network? Or is the problem that most ISPs don't want people operating services out of their homes or off of their phones?
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  "Excuse my ignorance, but isn't the overlay network setup problem one that has problems at almost every level of the stack?" It works for me and has worked for others. The keyword here that distinguishes this idea from almost every other "peer-to-peer overlay network" project that you can read about is "small". If you limit the size of the network, you can avoid some problems. Most projects you read about aim at the ability to create a single, large network that potentially everyone can join. Open to the public. However using a different approach it is possible to create only small networks that are only open to people you know, e.g., friends, family, co-workers. There are still problems, but there are always going to be some problems. The internet you are using right now has problems. The question is does it work well enough. The small overlay network idea has worked well enough for me that I consider it one of the better ones. It is really impossible to debate these ideas on the internet. Opinions are strong and negativity is even stronger. If you want an answer you need to try things out yourself and draw your own conslusions. No peer-to-peer solution is "perfect" and if you are always looking for the solution with zero negatives and zero limitations, you will never find it. Worse is if you never actually try these solutions, you just read about them. After you try many of them and learn what you like and do not like about the design/implementation, it is easier to chose one idea that works for your use case. Everytime someone starts promoting a peer-to-peer project you can quickly evaluate it, based on what types of designs/implementations have worked for you and which ones didn't. Well, that's my opinion, anyway.
gmax 6y ago
It may not be that hard to set up things for yourself, have been toying with something like that for messaging https://cweb.gitlab.io/StoneAge.html https://cweb.gitlab.io/StoneAge.html. The deeper question is how to sustain this kind of products and make them competitive without comparable funding.
lordlic 6y ago
I guess it's worth clarifying what exactly you're talking about. If you want to share images and text with a small group of people, okay, that might be useful in some cases. But that's not the use case that Facebook users have in mind - you're setting the bar almost comically low and the impact on the actual landscape of the web will be exactly zero. If you mean something that can make a splash in the social media space to address the "user agents on Facebook" problem, color me skeptical about the prospect of competing on useful features with the Facebook behemoth while fighting the complexity up and down the stack of making everything decentralized and trying to make it friction-free for casual users to run, with no funding from ads, and starting out at square one on network effects. Yes, Mastodon is a possible counter to this line of argument, but Twitter is so stagnant and their product is so simple that I feel like it's almost a unique case. And for most people the Facebook use case includes being able to find all their real-life contacts; by that measure even Mastodon would fail.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  You can be as skeptical as you want to be. Even assuming this idea was intended to "make a splash" (it isn't), these sort of comments make no difference whatsoever. We have all seen how HN commenters have criticised ideas that, rightly or wrongly, later went on to become successful businesses. The thing is, this is definitely not intended to be a business. It is just some software that exists and that works. If it works for me, then it is "successful". There is no budding "founder" to shoot down. Just a user with some software that works. The assumptions of "make a splash in the social media space" and "competing with Facebook" are all wrong. The business of Facebook is not the "comically low" bar of sharing text and images with friends and family. An overlay solution that avoids sending traffic to a third party server is not "competing with Facebook". However it could be used to avoid Facebook which is the point we are discussing here. The fact that only a small number of people actually use a solution does not mean it is a "failure". If the software is relatively small, compiles fast, runs on different OS and architectures, stays available for download and reliably works as intended, then to me it is "successful". The way I evaluate "success" and "failure" of a software is probably different from many commenters/readers.
seph-reed 6y ago
Why are you defending Zuckerberg for being a dick? If you have power, you have responsibility: full fucking stop. The idea that it's okay to be a selfish child with power is tantamount to allowing driving while drunk. Power is deadly, you can just as easily crush a persons life as you could their legs with a car. Don't drive drunk, don't be in power if you can't be a responsible citizen about it.
- CompSciPunk 6y ago
  Power does not imply responsibility, nor visa versa, there is definitely a venn diagram here. Dictators - all power, no responsibility. Manager of a homeless shelter - lots of responsibility, little power. I believe, with nothing to back this up, that social media would be improved with a better educated population. One that knows and values the basic tenets of critical thinking and debate. No amount of policing will make people smarter or more courteous. People have to choose to be more civil and be more interested in views counter to their own.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- matz1 6y ago
  The poster doesn't defending Zuckerberg, merely trying to explain why Zuckerberg did what he did. >If you have power, you have responsibility: full fucking stop. No, if you have power you get to decide the rule. Same as drunk driving, the reason we are not allowing driving while drunk is because the people who are against drunk driving has more power than the people who are pro drunk driving. The side that has more power get to decide what the law is.
  - seph-reed 6y ago
    You're confusing legal responsibility with responsibility proper. Dictators are responsible for the death of millions, even if they make laws that say otherwise.
    - matz1 6y ago
gdilla 6y ago
Some families already have their own slack. chat, post articles, share pics, and even put content in appropriate channels that you're free to join or leave! I already do this with my friends group of about 20 cuz it's more than good enough.
bobthepanda 6y ago
Email exists. Wordpress has free site hosting. SMS is ad free. If people wanted to create a free webpage for friends and family to see there are loads of options. The problem is that, generally speaking, most people do not find the value proposition as a Facebook replacement compelling.
- int_19h 6y ago
  That's because the real value of Facebook is in the social graph, and it's locked in there.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  Where are you getting this idea of "Facebook replacement"? You introduce your own idea, then shoot it down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man Facebook does not provide software to set up small overlay networks. Nor is the business of Facebook to provide messaging or free web pages. That is just bait. The business of Facebook is providing a way to advertise to targeted audiences within the billions of people who visit Facebook. That is what people pay for. It is a website with billions of daily visitors. Unless you have a webite with billions of visitors then you are not competing with Facebook. A small overlay network is not a website, it is a computer network. It does not have a large audience because the number of nodes is small. It is an interface you see when you type ifconfig or ip addr, not an email server, a blog website or an SMS provider. You could could use it for those things or you could use it for other things, anything you can do on a LAN. It makes zero difference what you think people want. This is not a popularity contest of any sort. If you want to argue against the premise of my comment then you need to argue that small, personally-managed overlay networks and peer to peer connections are less efficient for sharing content with friends and family than using a public website, subject to "curation" and "censorship".
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    > In 2020, it is still too difficult for everyone to set up their own website, so they settle for a page on someone else's [for] exchanging content with friends and family This is patently not true. People were using email for this prior to Facebook's existence, which worked well enough ("Share photos via email! Share videos via email! Here's a funny story from grandma! RSVP to my birthday!") and was painless to set up; in fact, all the people who have Facebooks also have emails! But very few people are doing this anymore as their main mode of communication with friends and family; this kind of activity is now happening on Facebook, where people are happy with the ease that it facilitates. Small networks works fine, but nobody's interested, hence why Facebook is worth billions and billions of dollars and is a large website.

baq 6y ago

i have a fundamental issue calling a content-curating, psychological-experiment-running platform visited by hundreds of millions of people daily 'someone else's website'. the fact that it is privately owned doesn't matter if nation states use it to wage information wars against other nation states' citizens. to make matters worse, the 'someone else' in question knows about it perfectly well and is fine with it because it means he's showing more ads. this is plain and simple fucked up.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
Well, that is what it is. No one knew a single website could grow so large, but it did. Even though there are thousands of people working for its owner, when reading articles like the OP we are reminded how much control he still has over it. No doubt he still thinks of it as his personal creation. Of course, "99.99999%" of the content is not his. Perhaps most of the people who sign up on Facebook are not employed by nation states but just ordinary people who want an easy way to stay connected to friends and family. Maybe these people should have a better way to stay connected than using a public website.
- baq 6y ago
  indeed this happened but that's hardly a reason to let it continue to be.

ggggtez 6y ago

I don't think that "user-agents" are the hard part either. At this point, I think any grad student would happily write a NN implementation that took various posts as input, and returned to you a sorted list based on your preferences (with input layers like: bag of words, author, links, time, etc, that the user could put more or less weight into just by simple upvote/downvote). The problem is that no one has the incentive to host such a service for free, and users wants the content to be available 24/7. So it's not as simple as just setting up a peer-to-peer network. Users who just use a phone as their primary computer will still want to be able to publish to their millions of followers, and so it wouldn't work to have those millions of people connect directly to this person's device. Maybe you can solve that with a bit-torrent like approach, but the problem gets harder when you include the ability to send messages privately.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
"Users who just use a phone as their primary computer will still want to able to publich to their millions of followers, and so it wouldn't work to have these millions of people connect directly to this person's device." You have shifted the discussion from small overlay network for friends and family to large overlay network for "millions of followers". Those methods of sharing content with "millions of followers" are already available and will no doubt continue to be available. A small private network is a different idea, with a different purpose. People will always have the choice of using a public network however a small overlay can avoid sending traffic through third party servers, like Facebook's. There is no requirement that a service has to be "free", or supported by ads. This is something else you injected in the discussion. I use free software to set up overlays, but I have to pay for internet service and hosting. The cost of the "service" is not the setup it is the internet access and hosting.
- ggggtez 6y ago
  Your idea doesn't sound particularly tenable. A pay social network that limits you to only your close friends and family, that will have no network effects, have less features, and be more difficult to set up... It's easy for people to point what they don't like about Facebook, but I don't think you are really comprehending why they dominated the social network space to begin with. It's not as easy as making a product that doesn't advertise, if it costs money to use instead.

StandardFuture 6y ago

Excuse my ignorance, but isn't the overlay network setup problem one that has problems at almost every level of the stack? If there is not any definitive technical problems to overcome, why is it not possible to create a mobile app that friends and family could use as their own private network? Isn't the internet supposed to be every node acting as it's own server and client simultaneously anyways? Is the problem just the inability to truly decentralize discovery, registry, and identity authentication of nodes in the network? Or is the problem that most ISPs don't want people operating services out of their homes or off of their phones?

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
"Excuse my ignorance, but isn't the overlay network setup problem one that has problems at almost every level of the stack?" It works for me and has worked for others. The keyword here that distinguishes this idea from almost every other "peer-to-peer overlay network" project that you can read about is "small". If you limit the size of the network, you can avoid some problems. Most projects you read about aim at the ability to create a single, large network that potentially everyone can join. Open to the public. However using a different approach it is possible to create only small networks that are only open to people you know, e.g., friends, family, co-workers. There are still problems, but there are always going to be some problems. The internet you are using right now has problems. The question is does it work well enough. The small overlay network idea has worked well enough for me that I consider it one of the better ones. It is really impossible to debate these ideas on the internet. Opinions are strong and negativity is even stronger. If you want an answer you need to try things out yourself and draw your own conslusions. No peer-to-peer solution is "perfect" and if you are always looking for the solution with zero negatives and zero limitations, you will never find it. Worse is if you never actually try these solutions, you just read about them. After you try many of them and learn what you like and do not like about the design/implementation, it is easier to chose one idea that works for your use case. Everytime someone starts promoting a peer-to-peer project you can quickly evaluate it, based on what types of designs/implementations have worked for you and which ones didn't. Well, that's my opinion, anyway.

gmax 6y ago

It may not be that hard to set up things for yourself, have been toying with something like that for messaging https://cweb.gitlab.io/StoneAge.html https://cweb.gitlab.io/StoneAge.html. The deeper question is how to sustain this kind of products and make them competitive without comparable funding.

lordlic 6y ago

I guess it's worth clarifying what exactly you're talking about. If you want to share images and text with a small group of people, okay, that might be useful in some cases. But that's not the use case that Facebook users have in mind - you're setting the bar almost comically low and the impact on the actual landscape of the web will be exactly zero. If you mean something that can make a splash in the social media space to address the "user agents on Facebook" problem, color me skeptical about the prospect of competing on useful features with the Facebook behemoth while fighting the complexity up and down the stack of making everything decentralized and trying to make it friction-free for casual users to run, with no funding from ads, and starting out at square one on network effects. Yes, Mastodon is a possible counter to this line of argument, but Twitter is so stagnant and their product is so simple that I feel like it's almost a unique case. And for most people the Facebook use case includes being able to find all their real-life contacts; by that measure even Mastodon would fail.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
You can be as skeptical as you want to be. Even assuming this idea was intended to "make a splash" (it isn't), these sort of comments make no difference whatsoever. We have all seen how HN commenters have criticised ideas that, rightly or wrongly, later went on to become successful businesses. The thing is, this is definitely not intended to be a business. It is just some software that exists and that works. If it works for me, then it is "successful". There is no budding "founder" to shoot down. Just a user with some software that works. The assumptions of "make a splash in the social media space" and "competing with Facebook" are all wrong. The business of Facebook is not the "comically low" bar of sharing text and images with friends and family. An overlay solution that avoids sending traffic to a third party server is not "competing with Facebook". However it could be used to avoid Facebook which is the point we are discussing here. The fact that only a small number of people actually use a solution does not mean it is a "failure". If the software is relatively small, compiles fast, runs on different OS and architectures, stays available for download and reliably works as intended, then to me it is "successful". The way I evaluate "success" and "failure" of a software is probably different from many commenters/readers.

seph-reed 6y ago

Why are you defending Zuckerberg for being a dick? If you have power, you have responsibility: full fucking stop. The idea that it's okay to be a selfish child with power is tantamount to allowing driving while drunk. Power is deadly, you can just as easily crush a persons life as you could their legs with a car. Don't drive drunk, don't be in power if you can't be a responsible citizen about it.

CompSciPunk 6y ago
Power does not imply responsibility, nor visa versa, there is definitely a venn diagram here. Dictators - all power, no responsibility. Manager of a homeless shelter - lots of responsibility, little power. I believe, with nothing to back this up, that social media would be improved with a better educated population. One that knows and values the basic tenets of critical thinking and debate. No amount of policing will make people smarter or more courteous. People have to choose to be more civil and be more interested in views counter to their own.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
matz1 6y ago
The poster doesn't defending Zuckerberg, merely trying to explain why Zuckerberg did what he did. >If you have power, you have responsibility: full fucking stop. No, if you have power you get to decide the rule. Same as drunk driving, the reason we are not allowing driving while drunk is because the people who are against drunk driving has more power than the people who are pro drunk driving. The side that has more power get to decide what the law is.
- seph-reed 6y ago
  You're confusing legal responsibility with responsibility proper. Dictators are responsible for the death of millions, even if they make laws that say otherwise.
  - matz1 6y ago

gdilla 6y ago

Some families already have their own slack. chat, post articles, share pics, and even put content in appropriate channels that you're free to join or leave! I already do this with my friends group of about 20 cuz it's more than good enough.

bobthepanda 6y ago

Email exists. Wordpress has free site hosting. SMS is ad free. If people wanted to create a free webpage for friends and family to see there are loads of options. The problem is that, generally speaking, most people do not find the value proposition as a Facebook replacement compelling.

int_19h 6y ago
That's because the real value of Facebook is in the social graph, and it's locked in there.
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
Where are you getting this idea of "Facebook replacement"? You introduce your own idea, then shoot it down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man Facebook does not provide software to set up small overlay networks. Nor is the business of Facebook to provide messaging or free web pages. That is just bait. The business of Facebook is providing a way to advertise to targeted audiences within the billions of people who visit Facebook. That is what people pay for. It is a website with billions of daily visitors. Unless you have a webite with billions of visitors then you are not competing with Facebook. A small overlay network is not a website, it is a computer network. It does not have a large audience because the number of nodes is small. It is an interface you see when you type ifconfig or ip addr, not an email server, a blog website or an SMS provider. You could could use it for those things or you could use it for other things, anything you can do on a LAN. It makes zero difference what you think people want. This is not a popularity contest of any sort. If you want to argue against the premise of my comment then you need to argue that small, personally-managed overlay networks and peer to peer connections are less efficient for sharing content with friends and family than using a public website, subject to "curation" and "censorship".
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  > In 2020, it is still too difficult for everyone to set up their own website, so they settle for a page on someone else's [for] exchanging content with friends and family This is patently not true. People were using email for this prior to Facebook's existence, which worked well enough ("Share photos via email! Share videos via email! Here's a funny story from grandma! RSVP to my birthday!") and was painless to set up; in fact, all the people who have Facebooks also have emails! But very few people are doing this anymore as their main mode of communication with friends and family; this kind of activity is now happening on Facebook, where people are happy with the ease that it facilitates. Small networks works fine, but nobody's interested, hence why Facebook is worth billions and billions of dollars and is a large website.