8 ms·

Facebook is an abomination which ate up the entire Web in some 3rd-world countries. For many no access to Facebook means loosing connection to everything includ

Facebook is an abomination which ate up the entire Web in some 3rd-world countries. For many no access to Facebook means loosing connection to everything including services essential for their offline life. Even in a very developed EU country I already happen to face cases when something is only available via Facebook because some companies don't bother having their own websites/emails/phones (often on purpose - to improve their Facebook rank). This is a very serious problem - hyper-centalization in hands of one corporation which can fail you intentionally or not. Facebook is becoming sort of the Chinese system (AFAIK standard WWW is almost nonexistent in China, they mostly use apps within social networks which are easier for the government to control) for the whole world. Looking more broadly it's another layer of the malicious trend to wrap the things in more and more layers. First we had native desktop apps (which always could communicate data to network servers). Then we have wrapped the apps in the browser (which essentially is an OS on an OS) but we had our pages on independent servers. Then we invented "social networks" and are putting everything in there. We could just improve desktop apps tech (including discoverability, delivery, interoperability, portability and UI design flexibility) but we chose the browsers. We could stop here, use the standard WWW and improve experience of using RSS/Atom/RDF/XMPP/etc but we gave up our pages/subscriptions/contacts to Facebook.

suifbwish 5y ago
Maybe everyone should stop doing things because they are popular. I guess the definition of popularity is something embraced by a majority though.
pmlnr 5y ago
Yes. We know. Any ideas how to fix it?
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  Improve web standards, build easier web publishing and subscription tooling (easy and pleasurable for non-IT people to use), create and propagate a desktop app toolkit at least as flexible and cros-platform as the web frontend stack is + a good cross-platform and preferably decentralized "app store". This would require a lot of effort somebody has to fund however. I would expect governments to fund this if they recognized the seriousness of the problem. Governments already start taking climate change more and more seriously, this (web) problem is the next we face. Perhaps if I were a person in the government in charge of this I would just pay the Qt company to make full (including the Qt Design Studio) modern Qt totally free for everybody to use (as HTML, CSS, JS and the browsers are) and keep developing it. It is more cross-platform and fast than Chrome, very powerful and is not limited to classic widgets but can also do any visually fancy stuff with ease. This way (after addressing the discoverability problem also) we could revert straight to the native app phase.
  - pmlnr 5y ago
    You are intending to solve a people problem with a technical solution. The approach, sadly, never works.
    - rglullis 5y ago
      Not just that, the proposed solution also depends on the government being effective.
    - dTal 5y ago
      Facebook itself is a technical solution to a people problem. How can you say it never works? Why shouldn't it work? In fact, come to think of it, all technical solutions ultimately solve "people problems". Everything bottoms out at the human level.
      - quaintdev 5y ago
        You can build a solution with tech to solve problems of people but FB is not solving problems of people but straightaway exploiting their weakness to solve its own revenue problem thereby adding to existing problems.
      - datavirtue 5y ago
        Solution? Looks like a problem to me.
  - mch82 5y ago
    The Qt idea is a cool one… pay them to convert the license to Public Domain, like SQLite. That said, my biggest takeaway from Facebook is that Qt may be overkill. Small businesses seem to want to post plain text (like on Hacker News), photos, and videos. Even Wordpress is probably too complicated. Thinking about the Firefox ads article that was front page today, I wonder if Mozilla could instead make money by selling extremely basic web hosting and putting an edit button into the browser?
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    Discovery is accidental. It requires trying lots of different things to find market fit. Facebook found market fit (accidentally). They were not planning on being the platform choice of grandma's. They invented the mission they are on now after the fact (connecting people).
- killtimeatwork 5y ago
  It's not a problem yet. Facebook works fine for both businesses that choose to use it (instead of a custom webpage), and for their customers. Once Facebook usage becomes a real nuissance for whatever reason, businesses will slowly migrate off of it.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    The same can be said about climate change. It (rather than it's expected consequences and regulations already being implemented) seems being rather far from a real nuissance for the most of the developed world (e.g. it has zero effect on life and businesses of myself and everyone I know, in Europe) at the moment but it's obviously a severe problem for the nearing future so we mostly agree we must start fixing it now.
    - cdogl 5y ago
      I don't think this is a helpful comparison. The impact of climate change can be predicted (to whatever degree of accuracy) because of how sophisticated the hard sciences have become. However sympathetic one might be of any critique of Facebook, any prediction of its future impact is fundamentally speculative.
      - qwerty456127 5y ago
        So, as I meant to express, the only problem with this problem is it is hard for the majority to see.
    - rpastuszak 5y ago
      > (e.g. it has zero effect on life and businesses of myself and everyone I know, in Europe) Speaking to people working in agriculture and fishing industry (Portugal and the Baltic sea), I can tel you that their opinion differs from yours by a large margin. Sometimes this can mean shifting the harvest date by a month, sometimes not being able to find certain types of fish due to seemingly minor water temperature/climate changes. I live in a similar bubble as an average HN reader, so I see where you're coming from though.
bko 5y ago
> some companies don't bother having their own websites/emails/phones (often on purpose - to improve their Facebook rank). I don't think Joey's Pizza is going to have a web presence if not for Facebook. I don't think they should have to hire a developer or use the latest no-code platform to just throw up their name, location and address on the web. It's centralized, sure, but its free, simple, SEO optimized and as a user I'd prefer that to some home-spun website. There are issues with Facebook, but people who hate on it tend to try to make everything an issues. And having Joey's pizza on Facebook and it being unavailable for a few hours every decade or so is not a big concern. There's a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of web presence that Facebook addresses. Other websites and apps are still going to exist as long as regulations don't neuter the competition as would invariably be the case.
- dTal 5y ago
  Joey's pizza did have a web presence before Facebook. Facebook is "the latest no-code platform". If Joey's pizza can get an actual, physical "Joey's pizza" neon sign constructed, they can make a web page. Let's not kid ourselves - it's extremely easy. People were doing it in their bedrooms in the 90s.
  - quaintdev 5y ago
    Its 2021 and one should be able to deploy websites in one click from their mobile phones.
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      For at least the past 100 years it has not been a problem to give a person a button or a phone to let them solve any problem with a single press/call (the US and Russia presidents even are supposed to have buttons and phones to exterminate the entire life on Earth). The only thing to consider has always been at what price (in a broad sense, not just money) it came. It still is the thing to consider although this has became less obvious and departed more away from the money part in the cost looking from the perspective of the end user.
GuB-42 5y ago
> Facebook is an abomination which ate up the entire Web in some 3rd-world countries. That's because they actually paid carriers to provide Facebook access for free to people. See Facebook Zero and Internet.org. The latter is particularly insidious because it looks like a charity offering internet access to those who can't afford it. It is not the whole internet, but there is a list of mostly educational websites, like Wikipedia, but in the middle of that list, there is of course Facebook. So really, they are offering Facebook access under then name "internet".
ren_engineer 5y ago
>This is a very serious problem - hyper-centralization in hands of one corporation This has happened in every industry due to economies of scale and network effects. We've seen the negative issues of this with our supply chain problems, everything got outsourced for efficiency at the cost of redundancy. Even the news sites complaining about Facebook are examples of this, we are down to a handful of major media companies controlling everything
dr-detroit 5y ago
replace "china" and "third world" with the 88% of the US population you have no interaction with who arent tech elites and you would become correct
dr-detroit 5y ago
replace "china" and "third world" with the 88% of the US population you have no interaction with who arent tech elites and you would become correct
ctrlp 5y ago
The decentralized web needs to happen but it likely won't for a long time given the current trends, which are towards centralization. It's possible that the only truly useful information will one day be found on an "alternet" of decentralized sites. Maybe people will use the traditional web for services like shopping but use the "alternet" for getting real news and maintaining uncontrolled communities. We're seeing this already with the recent public/private censorship regime driving people into alternate, less controlled, forums. At some point it could just be like two separate internets for two separate purposes. Those who know how to access both will have an advantage.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Humans: bronze age social skills with digital age weapons.
tjpnz 5y ago
It's not just commercial interests but government too. In my native New Zealand I've seen government officials directing people to FB for public health information. Is the same information available on their own website? Difficult to tell given how many of the .govt.nz sites just aggregate links back to Facebook.
pjc50 5y ago
> We could just improve desktop apps tech (including discoverability, delivery, interoperability, portability and UI design flexibility) but we chose the browsers Who do you mean "we"? There is, in a fundamental sense, no "we", only a bunch of competing companies, uncoordinated individuals, and tiny groups of enthusiasts. The browser situation is the no-mans-land in the middle of a war between platform monopolists on the desktop, platform monopolists in the browser, malware authors, privacy-invading advertisers, software pirates, and the poor third party developers just trying to find a place to sell software. Neither Microsoft nor Apple are going to surrender the total control of their platforms; cross platform development is always going to straddle those.
theknocker 5y ago
Why is the dumbest, most shill-like comment the top one every single time?
treeman79 5y ago
Hacking is a major problem with hosting anything. Hackers are much better then anyone you can afford to hire. Think of the endless hacked Wordpress sites. Heck how many times has a small company forgot to renew their domain name. What’s the solution to this problem? You outsource to someone that mostly stops hackers. Now accounts being hacked is a major problem as my wife and her friends can attest to. What’s the solution to that? Just make another account. Highly annoying and upsetting. But a simple and easy solution. Those solutions are all free and easy. So yes Facebook is evil. But it’s also extremely practical for small little groups that can barley use a computer.

suifbwish 5y ago

Maybe everyone should stop doing things because they are popular. I guess the definition of popularity is something embraced by a majority though.

pmlnr 5y ago

Yes. We know. Any ideas how to fix it?

qwerty456127 5y ago
Improve web standards, build easier web publishing and subscription tooling (easy and pleasurable for non-IT people to use), create and propagate a desktop app toolkit at least as flexible and cros-platform as the web frontend stack is + a good cross-platform and preferably decentralized "app store". This would require a lot of effort somebody has to fund however. I would expect governments to fund this if they recognized the seriousness of the problem. Governments already start taking climate change more and more seriously, this (web) problem is the next we face. Perhaps if I were a person in the government in charge of this I would just pay the Qt company to make full (including the Qt Design Studio) modern Qt totally free for everybody to use (as HTML, CSS, JS and the browsers are) and keep developing it. It is more cross-platform and fast than Chrome, very powerful and is not limited to classic widgets but can also do any visually fancy stuff with ease. This way (after addressing the discoverability problem also) we could revert straight to the native app phase.
- pmlnr 5y ago
  You are intending to solve a people problem with a technical solution. The approach, sadly, never works.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    Not just that, the proposed solution also depends on the government being effective.
  - dTal 5y ago
    Facebook itself is a technical solution to a people problem. How can you say it never works? Why shouldn't it work? In fact, come to think of it, all technical solutions ultimately solve "people problems". Everything bottoms out at the human level.
    - quaintdev 5y ago
      You can build a solution with tech to solve problems of people but FB is not solving problems of people but straightaway exploiting their weakness to solve its own revenue problem thereby adding to existing problems.
    - datavirtue 5y ago
      Solution? Looks like a problem to me.
- mch82 5y ago
  The Qt idea is a cool one… pay them to convert the license to Public Domain, like SQLite. That said, my biggest takeaway from Facebook is that Qt may be overkill. Small businesses seem to want to post plain text (like on Hacker News), photos, and videos. Even Wordpress is probably too complicated. Thinking about the Firefox ads article that was front page today, I wonder if Mozilla could instead make money by selling extremely basic web hosting and putting an edit button into the browser?
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Discovery is accidental. It requires trying lots of different things to find market fit. Facebook found market fit (accidentally). They were not planning on being the platform choice of grandma's. They invented the mission they are on now after the fact (connecting people).
killtimeatwork 5y ago
It's not a problem yet. Facebook works fine for both businesses that choose to use it (instead of a custom webpage), and for their customers. Once Facebook usage becomes a real nuissance for whatever reason, businesses will slowly migrate off of it.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  The same can be said about climate change. It (rather than it's expected consequences and regulations already being implemented) seems being rather far from a real nuissance for the most of the developed world (e.g. it has zero effect on life and businesses of myself and everyone I know, in Europe) at the moment but it's obviously a severe problem for the nearing future so we mostly agree we must start fixing it now.
  - cdogl 5y ago
    I don't think this is a helpful comparison. The impact of climate change can be predicted (to whatever degree of accuracy) because of how sophisticated the hard sciences have become. However sympathetic one might be of any critique of Facebook, any prediction of its future impact is fundamentally speculative.
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      So, as I meant to express, the only problem with this problem is it is hard for the majority to see.
  - rpastuszak 5y ago
    > (e.g. it has zero effect on life and businesses of myself and everyone I know, in Europe) Speaking to people working in agriculture and fishing industry (Portugal and the Baltic sea), I can tel you that their opinion differs from yours by a large margin. Sometimes this can mean shifting the harvest date by a month, sometimes not being able to find certain types of fish due to seemingly minor water temperature/climate changes. I live in a similar bubble as an average HN reader, so I see where you're coming from though.

bko 5y ago

> some companies don't bother having their own websites/emails/phones (often on purpose - to improve their Facebook rank). I don't think Joey's Pizza is going to have a web presence if not for Facebook. I don't think they should have to hire a developer or use the latest no-code platform to just throw up their name, location and address on the web. It's centralized, sure, but its free, simple, SEO optimized and as a user I'd prefer that to some home-spun website. There are issues with Facebook, but people who hate on it tend to try to make everything an issues. And having Joey's pizza on Facebook and it being unavailable for a few hours every decade or so is not a big concern. There's a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of web presence that Facebook addresses. Other websites and apps are still going to exist as long as regulations don't neuter the competition as would invariably be the case.

dTal 5y ago
Joey's pizza did have a web presence before Facebook. Facebook is "the latest no-code platform". If Joey's pizza can get an actual, physical "Joey's pizza" neon sign constructed, they can make a web page. Let's not kid ourselves - it's extremely easy. People were doing it in their bedrooms in the 90s.
- quaintdev 5y ago
  Its 2021 and one should be able to deploy websites in one click from their mobile phones.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    For at least the past 100 years it has not been a problem to give a person a button or a phone to let them solve any problem with a single press/call (the US and Russia presidents even are supposed to have buttons and phones to exterminate the entire life on Earth). The only thing to consider has always been at what price (in a broad sense, not just money) it came. It still is the thing to consider although this has became less obvious and departed more away from the money part in the cost looking from the perspective of the end user.

GuB-42 5y ago

> Facebook is an abomination which ate up the entire Web in some 3rd-world countries. That's because they actually paid carriers to provide Facebook access for free to people. See Facebook Zero and Internet.org. The latter is particularly insidious because it looks like a charity offering internet access to those who can't afford it. It is not the whole internet, but there is a list of mostly educational websites, like Wikipedia, but in the middle of that list, there is of course Facebook. So really, they are offering Facebook access under then name "internet".

ren_engineer 5y ago

>This is a very serious problem - hyper-centralization in hands of one corporation This has happened in every industry due to economies of scale and network effects. We've seen the negative issues of this with our supply chain problems, everything got outsourced for efficiency at the cost of redundancy. Even the news sites complaining about Facebook are examples of this, we are down to a handful of major media companies controlling everything

dr-detroit 5y ago

replace "china" and "third world" with the 88% of the US population you have no interaction with who arent tech elites and you would become correct

dr-detroit 5y ago

replace "china" and "third world" with the 88% of the US population you have no interaction with who arent tech elites and you would become correct

ctrlp 5y ago

The decentralized web needs to happen but it likely won't for a long time given the current trends, which are towards centralization. It's possible that the only truly useful information will one day be found on an "alternet" of decentralized sites. Maybe people will use the traditional web for services like shopping but use the "alternet" for getting real news and maintaining uncontrolled communities. We're seeing this already with the recent public/private censorship regime driving people into alternate, less controlled, forums. At some point it could just be like two separate internets for two separate purposes. Those who know how to access both will have an advantage.

datavirtue 5y ago
Humans: bronze age social skills with digital age weapons.

tjpnz 5y ago

It's not just commercial interests but government too. In my native New Zealand I've seen government officials directing people to FB for public health information. Is the same information available on their own website? Difficult to tell given how many of the .govt.nz sites just aggregate links back to Facebook.

pjc50 5y ago

> We could just improve desktop apps tech (including discoverability, delivery, interoperability, portability and UI design flexibility) but we chose the browsers Who do you mean "we"? There is, in a fundamental sense, no "we", only a bunch of competing companies, uncoordinated individuals, and tiny groups of enthusiasts. The browser situation is the no-mans-land in the middle of a war between platform monopolists on the desktop, platform monopolists in the browser, malware authors, privacy-invading advertisers, software pirates, and the poor third party developers just trying to find a place to sell software. Neither Microsoft nor Apple are going to surrender the total control of their platforms; cross platform development is always going to straddle those.

theknocker 5y ago

Why is the dumbest, most shill-like comment the top one every single time?

treeman79 5y ago

Hacking is a major problem with hosting anything. Hackers are much better then anyone you can afford to hire. Think of the endless hacked Wordpress sites. Heck how many times has a small company forgot to renew their domain name. What’s the solution to this problem? You outsource to someone that mostly stops hackers. Now accounts being hacked is a major problem as my wife and her friends can attest to. What’s the solution to that? Just make another account. Highly annoying and upsetting. But a simple and easy solution. Those solutions are all free and easy. So yes Facebook is evil. But it’s also extremely practical for small little groups that can barley use a computer.