13 ms·

None of these solutions offer any advice on the business model, which means they're dead on arrival. For a new social media to be "fixed", the company behind i

None of these solutions offer any advice on the business model, which means they're dead on arrival. For a new social media to be "fixed", the company behind it needs to have the incentives and business model to steer towards more healthy behavior. None of these cover that. We've had plenty of social media startups try to fix social, like Path, but ultimately they've failed bc a "fixed social media model" almost seems antithetical to "a good business." I'm all for Pinterest and I think it's relatively healthier than the rest, but they barely have a functional business...

acidburnNSA 5y ago
Maybe a foundation could fund a nonprofit to do it better? I'd trust that more. Signal would be a good example in messenging space.
agustif 5y ago
I was thinking about this the other day, a decentralized social network where it's own users govern and moderate it sounds like a plausible way to make this... dApps still on it's infancy, but it might come... Not sure if anyone will use it though, like the rest of the blockchains, lol
- partomniscient 5y ago
  >a decentralized social network where it's own users govern and moderate it sounds like a plausible way to make this... That's what the entire internet was like in its early days.
  - agustif 5y ago
    I actually think the future of the internet might look like this but with micro-payment-transactions enabled by blockchain everywhere... Ads killed the web
  - abecedarius 5y ago
    The big potential difference is that the early decentralized systems like Usenet and Relay treated costs and spam and paying their developers as out-of-band concerns. Whatever else you think of the newer stuff around blockchains, etc., it changes the game in just this way. If you want an online world not under the thumbs of Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc., you need a thesis about how the same takeover won't happen.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
  What makes you think that user-moderated content won't be as toxic as algo-driven one? Look at reddit for example - the vast majority of content out there is posted to cause outrage, and people parrot it across the rest of the site.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - trompetenaccoun 5y ago
    Reddit isn't decentralized. The "moderators" play enforcers for the admins, to push their agenda and cleanse the site of any content the management doesn't want to see. Outrage is their business model, it leads to increased interactions between users (i.e. flame wars) and so they spend more time on the site. Any community or mod that doesn't play along is removed, thus in the major subs you can think of them as directly working for the company, although unpaid. The users are NOT in charge, there is a crazy amount of political censorship on reddit. In the end that leaves the echo chamber it is now. Your example demonstrates how the authoritarian style of managing social media suppresses free speech but does nothing to reign in toxicity. Facebook and Twitter are similar toxic echo chambers. On an actually decentralized platform the radicals would still be there, but so would many other voices. Where users can't be banned for "wrongthink", communities must convince their audience with arguments or fear losing supporters. The chilling effect would be gone. A truly decentralized site would have plenty of communities the individual user doesn't agree with - just like in real life. And just like in real life users can deal with it by staying away.
    - belltaco 5y ago
      >Any community or mod that doesn't play along is removed This makes no sense and is completely wrong. Can you give some examples?
      - willhslade 5y ago
        Fat people hate and the Donald both fit his narrative.
- phone8675309 5y ago
  > a decentralized social network where it's own users govern and moderate it Were you ever on Usenet?
  - agustif 5y ago
    I think I recall downloading some stuff from there in the early 2000, yeah! Usenet was rad!
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Are you asking because you see Usenet as a solution or as a another nonviable approach? Usenet failed to scale past the first million or so users. Present social media platforms number in the 100s of millions to billions.
    - phone8675309 5y ago
      I ask because Usenet, before it became a distributed lossy datastore for media pirates, was "a decentralized social network where it's own users govern and moderate it", and it was a complete, well documented, shitshow.
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        Fair enough. I agree on both points. I've argued for several other reasons in addition for which Usenet died: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...
partomniscient 5y ago
When you consider business is ultimately about making money in which something has to give/lose out, and social connectivity is about hanging out with people you like - you realise these things don't go together and monetising socialisation is what dooms (what used to be) a good experience in the end.
- Grimm1 5y ago
  You can monetize socialization we've done it forever, clubs come to mind for instance. No one wants to pay directly for social media unlike in person experiences though so we have what we have.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    > No one wants to pay directly for social media unlike in person experiences though so we have what we have. For the longest time I paid for MeWe, hoping they'd introduce pseudonyms and become a non Google Google+. I would actually have paid for Google+ too if they had kept it around.
    - Grimm1 5y ago
      Why did you stop paying for MeWe? Just the lack of pseudonym introduction?
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        Either that, or perhaps the huge influx of far-right sympathizers.
        skinkestek 5y ago
        I saw no such influx but then again I was only into chili growing, general gardening, photography and that kind of stuff. I'd like to discuss mental health issues as well but personally I don't feel like posting to ADHD or anything when my family or my boss or my future boss can trivially easy (two clicks, no mental gymnastics) go from my post there to my professional profile. Besides, the term "far-right" is so utterly abused now that it doesn't mean anything except "people I don't like".
echelon 5y ago
Regulation. I think regulation is the answer that aligns with the business model. All businesses are forced to align in the same way, and no company can benefit from breaking the rules. If you fine companies for every day foreign bot accounts use the platform to spread misinformation, they'll staff up on countermeasures. If you pass laws against amplifying fake news and spreading negative sentiment, there will be machine learning investments like we've never seen before. Comments that have low confidence scores won't be shared broadly. If you regulate these companies like common carriers, they'll respect free speech on all sides of the aisle as long as it isn't law breaking.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
  You assume that regulators and enforcers are free of bias, I have bad news for you...
- j16sdiz 5y ago
  International regulations on social media would be interesting. I guess US and China won’t agree on what is fake news.
  - Const-me 5y ago
    They don't have to agree. US-based Google seems OK serving customers from China under the terms of Chinese laws.
    - nradov 5y ago
      Most Google services are blocked in China.
  - cvwright 5y ago
    Federation is going to become necessary. Like with email, or with Matrix chat. Different jurisdictions are going to have laws so divergent that a single platform won't be allowed to operate globally anymore. So we'll have to have many different providers that can all talk to each other. Maybe this will be mandated by fiat. Or maybe it will just evolve naturally in response to incentives.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
The business models are the problem. It's far too lucrative to do what the big social media companies are doing, which is to exploit the social behavior of their users in return for hard advertising cash. Users are of course willing victims here but if you step back a little, social media is mostly a very low tech business of connecting people with each other via "feeds" of information. As long as they "engage" with it, basically you are printing money. There is no incentive to fix that because it isn't broken for the likes of Facebook. Of course for the rest of us there is a huge incentive. But it raises the question of how. How is it going to work, and how are you going to convince people to use it. The first part has lots of answers in the form of social networks without a lot of users. So, the latter part is the problem. As for authenticity and integrity; some notion of using cryptographic signatures could work. It's not particularly hard. News especially should only be coming from authentic sources. It's such a low tech solution to just sign your work and stake your ruputation. But somehow that's not a thing. Instead, our social media feeds are full of crap from dubious sources. Because click bait works and sells clicks. That points to a solution. The likes of Facebook should start authenticating sources of information and start accounting for reputability. They are obviously incentivized to instead serve you clickbait. So the solution is to incentivize them otherwise. Hold them accountable. They help spread misinformation and profit from it. That could have consequences. When it does, Facebook will adapt.
- blooalien 5y ago
  https://keybase.io/ https://keybase.io/ had a pretty neat thing goin' where you basically claim your online identity to the world at large through publicly available cryptographic signing proofs that anyone can easily verify through their website or desktop app. If sources of news or science or other important public information would cryptographically prove their information came from them in a way that was easily understood by the general public then it'd hella harder to spread disinformation without it bein' tied right back to it's source or instantly dismissable due to lack of provable origin details.
chr1 5y ago
One possible business model is to replace most of politicians the way Uber have replaced most of taxi company owners. Politicians are supposed to translate needs of people who elect them to bureaucrats who are supposed to bring that to reality, but they do their job very inefficiently wasting a huge amount of money. If there was a combination of facebook, change.org and https://voteflux.org https://voteflux.org, allowing people to directly vote about issues they care, trade votes, propose laws, create local communities with custom laws, and in general control the way government spends taxes, there will be enough money saved to allow the companies providing this service to be richer than facebook without using any shady tricks.
- blooalien 5y ago
  Hahahahah! Pure freakin' GENIUS this is! Needs to happen. We'll just replace politicians outright. ———————————————————————————————————————— So, I'm totally okay with this comment gettin' downvoted, but can ya at least like … I dunno … add to the conversation maybe? Perhaps a small comment on why his idea isn't pure genius? Or why I shouldn't find it amusing? Or how about why replacing politicians with a better system could somehow be a bad thing? Downvote me if you like, but downvotes without context don't help me (or anyone else) understand anything you might be trying to get across. ———————————————————————————————————————— Just for fun, I'll propose another idea; Let's start drafting people into political office. "Congratulations {random citizen}! You've just been elected President!" And just like a regular wartime military draft, refusal to do the job to the best of your ability = jail time.
- wussboy 5y ago
  Allowing people to vote on issues they care about would be a disaster. We'd have the death penalty back in a week, and abortion/immigration/drugs outlawed in a month. Democracy doesn't work because the masses are smart and get to have their say. They work because democracies are an agreement that we can do anything in our power to change the government EXCEPT violence. Making the government more responsive to the population will result in worse government, not better. I'm not advocating for totalitarianism. I'm just cautioning against thinking that it's the wisdom of the people that makes good democracy.
GuB-42 5y ago
> I'm all for Pinterest and I think it's relatively healthier than the rest I can't think of Pinterest as more than pollution of Google image search. They may be good, but the first impression is so bad that I don't want to go further.
morpheos137 5y ago
One of the core problems with "social media" in 2021 is the default assumption that it should be monetised and a business. There is a difference between providing infrastructure for social connection and farming/harvestings/leveraging the information gathered from what is constructed on that infrastructure. The current situation is akin to if AT&T had listened in on all phone conversations (assuming no technical barriers) and sold ads based on what you said to friends and family. Before you made a call you would need to listen to a personalised ad on your reciever. Before facebook or myspace or twitter there were blogs/personal websites, forums, email and instant messaging. All these options worked for expressing one's self online and none of them were under a centralised, for-profit entity. Wikipedia is a good example of a decentralised social network although it appears to be increasingly infected with the reddit/twitter virus.
- jefftk 5y ago
  What do you mean that Wikipedia is infected?
  - morpheos137 5y ago
    Originally wikipedia did not condone advocacy or propaganda now it does as long as it can be attributed as a "fact" because it has been published by a "reliable source." Who decides what is a reliable source? The same sort of clique that moderates /r/worldnews or /r/politics. Reddit is an Orwellian cancer.
    - jefftk 5y ago
      Wikipedia's policies on this are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability These are the same policies Wikipedia has had for over a decade, with only relatively minor changes. Are you saying they're being interpreted differently? Could you give an example?
      - 5y ago
olah_1 5y ago
> ultimately they've failed bc a "fixed social media model" almost seems antithetical to "a good business." Local governments like cities / towns should provide federated apps like Matrix / Activity Pub as a service. Your tax money should pay for the maintenance of the servers.
- MilnerRoute 5y ago
  I've always wanted to see that happen. When television came along, governments funded public broadcasting channels. Now that social media has come along...why couldn't there also be a publicly-funded social media service?
- cvwright 5y ago
  You want to put the next Trump in charge of your social network???
  - olah_1 5y ago
    No. It would be my city's technology officer, basically. Subsidiarity.
bingidingi 5y ago
We should probably start to consider that business might be the problem.
- cvwright 5y ago
  Yeah, what did businesses ever do for us? Besides CPUs that get faster and more efficient every year, phones that get smaller and last longer, global interconnected networks, cars that don't burn fossil fuels, ...
  - bingidingi 5y ago
    Oh right, business never causes problems… thanks for clearing that up, silly me. Cool that social media companies invented CPUs, I had no idea.
noaheverett 5y ago
I think we're at a shifting point where people would be willing to pay for social media vs seeing ads and/or having their data being sold. I recently launched Glue[1] in my hope to have a social network that respects user privacy, offers an ad-free option and selfishly scratches the itch for features I wanted. I ran my previous startup (Twitpic) completely on ads and it wasn't an enjoyable experience from the business side. It also does not (usually) align with the user's best interest. Ad business models requires attention to feed it, which in turn requires social media companies to build features to get as many eye balls for as long as they can on their app. I also don't think paid only is the answer either for most cases. Some are ok with seeing ads in exchange to not have to pay to use. I'm curious to see if there is a balance that can be struck with services offering both options. Brave's new search engine[2] is another example saying they will offer a paid option in the future. I used their beta and it's solid. I'd be willing to pay for it to be free of Google and help sustain it. [1] https://glue.im/glue/glue-a-social-network-that-respects-your-privacy https://glue.im/glue/glue-a-social-network-that-respects-you... [2] https://brave.com/brave-search/ https://brave.com/brave-search/
- cvwright 5y ago
  I hope you're right about people being ready to pay. And I think you are. There's a huge un-tapped market just in the US, of people who have mostly or totally checked out of the existing platforms. Glue looks cool. How does this compare to something like Mastodon? I'm working on something related, called Circles [1]. It builds on Matrix for decentralization and E2E encryption. We're also in beta, hoping to launch later this month. [1] https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios
  - noaheverett 5y ago
    Hear hear! I deleted my Facebook 2007'ish and never joined Instagram, Twitter is only traditional social media site I use, so I can attest to those checking out (or never joining). Even with Twitter, I have to make an effort to not "doom" scroll before bed. Circles looks cool as decentralized and E2E are fascinating to me. Glue doesn't have a whole lot in common with Mastadon, but similar microblogging features I believe. Hit me up sometime, would like to hear more about your project. - noah@ark.fm
cvwright 5y ago
IMO there are two critical components to fixing the social media business model: 1. The platform/provider/server needs to work for the users, not for some shady third party like the advertisers. The most obvious way to do this is to have the users pay for the resources that they consume. There are alternatives, too -- users could band together to form cooperatives, or some benevolent foundation could kick in a lot of funding. (This last one is the current model for Signal; I guess we'll see how well it lasts...) 2. Key to making #1 work is that all the content needs to be end-to-end encrypted. Otherwise the platform will be too tempted to also start doing targeted advertising, in addition to charging for access. Neither of these is all that difficult. We have all the technology right now. Mostly we just need to get people together and do it.
- nradov 5y ago
  End to end encryption is great for messaging. I fail to see the point of encryption for sharing social media posts with friends.
  - cvwright 5y ago
    It’s the only thing we have that can prevent the server(s) from analyzing everyone’s posts, including images, to build a tracking profile that would make an East German secret policeman blush.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Who do you think is going to pay for social media? Are they still going to pay when most people leave the service because they won't pay? What regular person would rather pay then see ads? If you gave people tvs they would put up with the ads. If you give people free dialup internet they would put a banner across their browser. Paying is a non-starter. End to end encryped what? Posts/videos? Who cares..
  - cvwright 5y ago
    > Who do you think is going to pay for social media? Initially? Parents of young children, who want a safe and easy way to share photos and videos with their friends and family. After that, people who enjoy having a nicer experience than the garbage tier platforms we have today. > What regular person would rather pay than see ads? Everyone who pays (or has paid) for Netflix instead of watching network TV. Before that, everyone who paid for cable when it was ad-free. > Paying is a non-starter That’s what they said about music after Napster, too. How’s Spotify doing these days?
dredmorbius 5y ago
Item 6 in the article specifically addresses business models. Scott Galloway advocates for subscription-based models (I feel he's misguided). And the question was the subject of an earlier article on the summit, mentioned and linked within the article: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/case-new-social-media-business-models https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/case-new-socia...
xg15 5y ago
> "bc a "fixed social media model" almost seems antithetical to "a good business." Or putting it the other way around: The only way to make money with social media is by compromising your users' mental health.
raffraffraff 5y ago
I feel like I'm missing something with Pinterest. My experience of it is that it turns up annoyingly often in search engines, and has hits on pinterest.co.uk, pinterest.ie, pinterest.fr, pinterest.com etc. It's one of the sites that prompted me to install a browser addon that filters out Google hits I've blacklisted every one of their domains.
altdataseller 5y ago
"they barely have a functional business..." They made almost $2 billion in the last 12 months. How is that not thriving?

acidburnNSA 5y ago

Maybe a foundation could fund a nonprofit to do it better? I'd trust that more. Signal would be a good example in messenging space.

agustif 5y ago

I was thinking about this the other day, a decentralized social network where it's own users govern and moderate it sounds like a plausible way to make this... dApps still on it's infancy, but it might come... Not sure if anyone will use it though, like the rest of the blockchains, lol

partomniscient 5y ago
>a decentralized social network where it's own users govern and moderate it sounds like a plausible way to make this... That's what the entire internet was like in its early days.
- agustif 5y ago
  I actually think the future of the internet might look like this but with micro-payment-transactions enabled by blockchain everywhere... Ads killed the web
- abecedarius 5y ago
  The big potential difference is that the early decentralized systems like Usenet and Relay treated costs and spam and paying their developers as out-of-band concerns. Whatever else you think of the newer stuff around blockchains, etc., it changes the game in just this way. If you want an online world not under the thumbs of Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc., you need a thesis about how the same takeover won't happen.
isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
What makes you think that user-moderated content won't be as toxic as algo-driven one? Look at reddit for example - the vast majority of content out there is posted to cause outrage, and people parrot it across the rest of the site.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  Reddit isn't decentralized. The "moderators" play enforcers for the admins, to push their agenda and cleanse the site of any content the management doesn't want to see. Outrage is their business model, it leads to increased interactions between users (i.e. flame wars) and so they spend more time on the site. Any community or mod that doesn't play along is removed, thus in the major subs you can think of them as directly working for the company, although unpaid. The users are NOT in charge, there is a crazy amount of political censorship on reddit. In the end that leaves the echo chamber it is now. Your example demonstrates how the authoritarian style of managing social media suppresses free speech but does nothing to reign in toxicity. Facebook and Twitter are similar toxic echo chambers. On an actually decentralized platform the radicals would still be there, but so would many other voices. Where users can't be banned for "wrongthink", communities must convince their audience with arguments or fear losing supporters. The chilling effect would be gone. A truly decentralized site would have plenty of communities the individual user doesn't agree with - just like in real life. And just like in real life users can deal with it by staying away.
  - belltaco 5y ago
    >Any community or mod that doesn't play along is removed This makes no sense and is completely wrong. Can you give some examples?
    - willhslade 5y ago
      Fat people hate and the Donald both fit his narrative.
phone8675309 5y ago
> a decentralized social network where it's own users govern and moderate it Were you ever on Usenet?
- agustif 5y ago
  I think I recall downloading some stuff from there in the early 2000, yeah! Usenet was rad!
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Are you asking because you see Usenet as a solution or as a another nonviable approach? Usenet failed to scale past the first million or so users. Present social media platforms number in the 100s of millions to billions.
  - phone8675309 5y ago
    I ask because Usenet, before it became a distributed lossy datastore for media pirates, was "a decentralized social network where it's own users govern and moderate it", and it was a complete, well documented, shitshow.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Fair enough. I agree on both points. I've argued for several other reasons in addition for which Usenet died: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...

partomniscient 5y ago

When you consider business is ultimately about making money in which something has to give/lose out, and social connectivity is about hanging out with people you like - you realise these things don't go together and monetising socialisation is what dooms (what used to be) a good experience in the end.

Grimm1 5y ago
You can monetize socialization we've done it forever, clubs come to mind for instance. No one wants to pay directly for social media unlike in person experiences though so we have what we have.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  > No one wants to pay directly for social media unlike in person experiences though so we have what we have. For the longest time I paid for MeWe, hoping they'd introduce pseudonyms and become a non Google Google+. I would actually have paid for Google+ too if they had kept it around.
  - Grimm1 5y ago
    Why did you stop paying for MeWe? Just the lack of pseudonym introduction?
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Either that, or perhaps the huge influx of far-right sympathizers.
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        I saw no such influx but then again I was only into chili growing, general gardening, photography and that kind of stuff. I'd like to discuss mental health issues as well but personally I don't feel like posting to ADHD or anything when my family or my boss or my future boss can trivially easy (two clicks, no mental gymnastics) go from my post there to my professional profile. Besides, the term "far-right" is so utterly abused now that it doesn't mean anything except "people I don't like".

echelon 5y ago

Regulation. I think regulation is the answer that aligns with the business model. All businesses are forced to align in the same way, and no company can benefit from breaking the rules. If you fine companies for every day foreign bot accounts use the platform to spread misinformation, they'll staff up on countermeasures. If you pass laws against amplifying fake news and spreading negative sentiment, there will be machine learning investments like we've never seen before. Comments that have low confidence scores won't be shared broadly. If you regulate these companies like common carriers, they'll respect free speech on all sides of the aisle as long as it isn't law breaking.

isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
You assume that regulators and enforcers are free of bias, I have bad news for you...
j16sdiz 5y ago
International regulations on social media would be interesting. I guess US and China won’t agree on what is fake news.
- Const-me 5y ago
  They don't have to agree. US-based Google seems OK serving customers from China under the terms of Chinese laws.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Most Google services are blocked in China.
- cvwright 5y ago
  Federation is going to become necessary. Like with email, or with Matrix chat. Different jurisdictions are going to have laws so divergent that a single platform won't be allowed to operate globally anymore. So we'll have to have many different providers that can all talk to each other. Maybe this will be mandated by fiat. Or maybe it will just evolve naturally in response to incentives.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

The business models are the problem. It's far too lucrative to do what the big social media companies are doing, which is to exploit the social behavior of their users in return for hard advertising cash. Users are of course willing victims here but if you step back a little, social media is mostly a very low tech business of connecting people with each other via "feeds" of information. As long as they "engage" with it, basically you are printing money. There is no incentive to fix that because it isn't broken for the likes of Facebook. Of course for the rest of us there is a huge incentive. But it raises the question of how. How is it going to work, and how are you going to convince people to use it. The first part has lots of answers in the form of social networks without a lot of users. So, the latter part is the problem. As for authenticity and integrity; some notion of using cryptographic signatures could work. It's not particularly hard. News especially should only be coming from authentic sources. It's such a low tech solution to just sign your work and stake your ruputation. But somehow that's not a thing. Instead, our social media feeds are full of crap from dubious sources. Because click bait works and sells clicks. That points to a solution. The likes of Facebook should start authenticating sources of information and start accounting for reputability. They are obviously incentivized to instead serve you clickbait. So the solution is to incentivize them otherwise. Hold them accountable. They help spread misinformation and profit from it. That could have consequences. When it does, Facebook will adapt.

blooalien 5y ago
https://keybase.io/ https://keybase.io/ had a pretty neat thing goin' where you basically claim your online identity to the world at large through publicly available cryptographic signing proofs that anyone can easily verify through their website or desktop app. If sources of news or science or other important public information would cryptographically prove their information came from them in a way that was easily understood by the general public then it'd hella harder to spread disinformation without it bein' tied right back to it's source or instantly dismissable due to lack of provable origin details.

chr1 5y ago

One possible business model is to replace most of politicians the way Uber have replaced most of taxi company owners. Politicians are supposed to translate needs of people who elect them to bureaucrats who are supposed to bring that to reality, but they do their job very inefficiently wasting a huge amount of money. If there was a combination of facebook, change.org and https://voteflux.org https://voteflux.org, allowing people to directly vote about issues they care, trade votes, propose laws, create local communities with custom laws, and in general control the way government spends taxes, there will be enough money saved to allow the companies providing this service to be richer than facebook without using any shady tricks.

blooalien 5y ago
Hahahahah! Pure freakin' GENIUS this is! Needs to happen. We'll just replace politicians outright. ———————————————————————————————————————— So, I'm totally okay with this comment gettin' downvoted, but can ya at least like … I dunno … add to the conversation maybe? Perhaps a small comment on why his idea isn't pure genius? Or why I shouldn't find it amusing? Or how about why replacing politicians with a better system could somehow be a bad thing? Downvote me if you like, but downvotes without context don't help me (or anyone else) understand anything you might be trying to get across. ———————————————————————————————————————— Just for fun, I'll propose another idea; Let's start drafting people into political office. "Congratulations {random citizen}! You've just been elected President!" And just like a regular wartime military draft, refusal to do the job to the best of your ability = jail time.
wussboy 5y ago
Allowing people to vote on issues they care about would be a disaster. We'd have the death penalty back in a week, and abortion/immigration/drugs outlawed in a month. Democracy doesn't work because the masses are smart and get to have their say. They work because democracies are an agreement that we can do anything in our power to change the government EXCEPT violence. Making the government more responsive to the population will result in worse government, not better. I'm not advocating for totalitarianism. I'm just cautioning against thinking that it's the wisdom of the people that makes good democracy.

GuB-42 5y ago

> I'm all for Pinterest and I think it's relatively healthier than the rest I can't think of Pinterest as more than pollution of Google image search. They may be good, but the first impression is so bad that I don't want to go further.

morpheos137 5y ago

One of the core problems with "social media" in 2021 is the default assumption that it should be monetised and a business. There is a difference between providing infrastructure for social connection and farming/harvestings/leveraging the information gathered from what is constructed on that infrastructure. The current situation is akin to if AT&T had listened in on all phone conversations (assuming no technical barriers) and sold ads based on what you said to friends and family. Before you made a call you would need to listen to a personalised ad on your reciever. Before facebook or myspace or twitter there were blogs/personal websites, forums, email and instant messaging. All these options worked for expressing one's self online and none of them were under a centralised, for-profit entity. Wikipedia is a good example of a decentralised social network although it appears to be increasingly infected with the reddit/twitter virus.

jefftk 5y ago
What do you mean that Wikipedia is infected?
- morpheos137 5y ago
  Originally wikipedia did not condone advocacy or propaganda now it does as long as it can be attributed as a "fact" because it has been published by a "reliable source." Who decides what is a reliable source? The same sort of clique that moderates /r/worldnews or /r/politics. Reddit is an Orwellian cancer.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    Wikipedia's policies on this are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability These are the same policies Wikipedia has had for over a decade, with only relatively minor changes. Are you saying they're being interpreted differently? Could you give an example?
    - 5y ago

olah_1 5y ago

> ultimately they've failed bc a "fixed social media model" almost seems antithetical to "a good business." Local governments like cities / towns should provide federated apps like Matrix / Activity Pub as a service. Your tax money should pay for the maintenance of the servers.

MilnerRoute 5y ago
I've always wanted to see that happen. When television came along, governments funded public broadcasting channels. Now that social media has come along...why couldn't there also be a publicly-funded social media service?
cvwright 5y ago
You want to put the next Trump in charge of your social network???
- olah_1 5y ago
  No. It would be my city's technology officer, basically. Subsidiarity.

bingidingi 5y ago

We should probably start to consider that business might be the problem.

cvwright 5y ago
Yeah, what did businesses ever do for us? Besides CPUs that get faster and more efficient every year, phones that get smaller and last longer, global interconnected networks, cars that don't burn fossil fuels, ...
- bingidingi 5y ago
  Oh right, business never causes problems… thanks for clearing that up, silly me. Cool that social media companies invented CPUs, I had no idea.

noaheverett 5y ago

I think we're at a shifting point where people would be willing to pay for social media vs seeing ads and/or having their data being sold. I recently launched Glue[1] in my hope to have a social network that respects user privacy, offers an ad-free option and selfishly scratches the itch for features I wanted. I ran my previous startup (Twitpic) completely on ads and it wasn't an enjoyable experience from the business side. It also does not (usually) align with the user's best interest. Ad business models requires attention to feed it, which in turn requires social media companies to build features to get as many eye balls for as long as they can on their app. I also don't think paid only is the answer either for most cases. Some are ok with seeing ads in exchange to not have to pay to use. I'm curious to see if there is a balance that can be struck with services offering both options. Brave's new search engine[2] is another example saying they will offer a paid option in the future. I used their beta and it's solid. I'd be willing to pay for it to be free of Google and help sustain it. [1] https://glue.im/glue/glue-a-social-network-that-respects-your-privacy https://glue.im/glue/glue-a-social-network-that-respects-you... [2] https://brave.com/brave-search/ https://brave.com/brave-search/

cvwright 5y ago
I hope you're right about people being ready to pay. And I think you are. There's a huge un-tapped market just in the US, of people who have mostly or totally checked out of the existing platforms. Glue looks cool. How does this compare to something like Mastodon? I'm working on something related, called Circles [1]. It builds on Matrix for decentralization and E2E encryption. We're also in beta, hoping to launch later this month. [1] https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios
- noaheverett 5y ago
  Hear hear! I deleted my Facebook 2007'ish and never joined Instagram, Twitter is only traditional social media site I use, so I can attest to those checking out (or never joining). Even with Twitter, I have to make an effort to not "doom" scroll before bed. Circles looks cool as decentralized and E2E are fascinating to me. Glue doesn't have a whole lot in common with Mastadon, but similar microblogging features I believe. Hit me up sometime, would like to hear more about your project. - noah@ark.fm

cvwright 5y ago

IMO there are two critical components to fixing the social media business model: 1. The platform/provider/server needs to work for the users, not for some shady third party like the advertisers. The most obvious way to do this is to have the users pay for the resources that they consume. There are alternatives, too -- users could band together to form cooperatives, or some benevolent foundation could kick in a lot of funding. (This last one is the current model for Signal; I guess we'll see how well it lasts...) 2. Key to making #1 work is that all the content needs to be end-to-end encrypted. Otherwise the platform will be too tempted to also start doing targeted advertising, in addition to charging for access. Neither of these is all that difficult. We have all the technology right now. Mostly we just need to get people together and do it.

nradov 5y ago
End to end encryption is great for messaging. I fail to see the point of encryption for sharing social media posts with friends.
- cvwright 5y ago
  It’s the only thing we have that can prevent the server(s) from analyzing everyone’s posts, including images, to build a tracking profile that would make an East German secret policeman blush.
ipaddr 5y ago
Who do you think is going to pay for social media? Are they still going to pay when most people leave the service because they won't pay? What regular person would rather pay then see ads? If you gave people tvs they would put up with the ads. If you give people free dialup internet they would put a banner across their browser. Paying is a non-starter. End to end encryped what? Posts/videos? Who cares..
- cvwright 5y ago
  > Who do you think is going to pay for social media? Initially? Parents of young children, who want a safe and easy way to share photos and videos with their friends and family. After that, people who enjoy having a nicer experience than the garbage tier platforms we have today. > What regular person would rather pay than see ads? Everyone who pays (or has paid) for Netflix instead of watching network TV. Before that, everyone who paid for cable when it was ad-free. > Paying is a non-starter That’s what they said about music after Napster, too. How’s Spotify doing these days?

dredmorbius 5y ago

Item 6 in the article specifically addresses business models. Scott Galloway advocates for subscription-based models (I feel he's misguided). And the question was the subject of an earlier article on the summit, mentioned and linked within the article: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/case-new-social-media-business-models https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/case-new-socia...

xg15 5y ago

> "bc a "fixed social media model" almost seems antithetical to "a good business." Or putting it the other way around: The only way to make money with social media is by compromising your users' mental health.

raffraffraff 5y ago

I feel like I'm missing something with Pinterest. My experience of it is that it turns up annoyingly often in search engines, and has hits on pinterest.co.uk, pinterest.ie, pinterest.fr, pinterest.com etc. It's one of the sites that prompted me to install a browser addon that filters out Google hits I've blacklisted every one of their domains.

altdataseller 5y ago

"they barely have a functional business..." They made almost $2 billion in the last 12 months. How is that not thriving?