4 ms·

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

by pmlnr 5y ago

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.

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

by pmlnr 5y ago

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

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.