13 ms·

Former Facebook, WhatsApp employees lead new push to fix social media

• satchet 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/Uz8Jp https://archive.ph/Uz8Jp
• dang 4y ago
  Url changed from https://twitter.com/neerajarora/status/1521964283466113024 https://twitter.com/neerajarora/status/1521964283466113024, which points to this.
  • soneca 4y ago
    I personally preferred the tweet because I can’t read the article. Also, the tweets are personal statements (which seemed relevant to me), not just a link to the article (only mentioned in the last tweet of the thread).
• RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
  Former arsonists, industrial polluters lead new push to fix climate change.
  • codespin 4y ago
    That's a thought provoking way to put it. Part of the problem is however that only internal employees fully understand the destruction that was going on.
    • RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
      Intimate familiarity with how you started a fire doesn't necessarily correlate with the skills to put it out.
      • apengwin 4y ago
        sure but in general i feel like it would help a lot
      • afro88 4y ago
        ... But can help others put it out. "It's a chemical fire" leads to people putting it out with a radically different substance.
      • tedk-42 4y ago
        It's always funny to see how defensive people get about criticism. More that likely this 'fix' for social media will either fail or just end up being another social media platform with the aim of attracting engagement and selling user data / screen time for ad space.
    • upsidesinclude 4y ago
      Only former employees were fully complicit. Anyone with a critical view of these organizations has seen exactly the extent of the harm. The endless news releases should be an adequate trail to follow. People, at large, have chosen to ignore all the unbelievable actions so they can continue to stalk others online -cough cough- I mean, keep in touch with grandma.
  • baby 4y ago
    I hate this types of comments because as an ex-fb I did care deeply about communication tools and social networks.
    • olliej 4y ago
      It doesn’t matter how much you care about those if your business model is still just to stoke extremism. If I come across someone that has Fb on their resume I’m going to be considering the period of their tenure in my assessment of their character.
      • tomnipotent 4y ago
        So your answer to extremism is more extremism? Maybe the thing you should be taking away from Facebook in their resume, is that they're no longer working there. There's nothing to be gained from crapping on ex-Facebook employees that doesn't seem to boil down to ego-stroking and making sure people know how high your moral horse is.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • olliej 4y ago
          No, I'm going to look at the period of their tenure - if they made the choice to go to Fb when it was well clear what it was, that's on them - if they started before and then left once it became clear that would be a positive. All in all, if you choose to work for a shitty company, or doing shitty things, you should assume people will use that as part of their opinion of you. I do not get how that becomes any extremism of any kind - that's just standard outcome of reading someone's resume?
          • baby 4y ago
            And if you write comments like this, you should assume some people are going to think your a judgmental and closed minded person
      • 4y ago
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • nowherebeen 4y ago
    Yep and they are using the money earned from it to fund their project (and possibly get rich again in the process). It's blood money.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• jsemrau 4y ago
  Social needs to change. The engagement model of current social sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc only brings out the worst in people. This will be even amplified once there are crypto payments coming into the equation. Might be a naive view, but I believe in community enforced rules through DAO ownership because these structures have some potential to encourage free speech within a normative environment that discourages hate speech and spam.
  • boopboopbadoop 4y ago
    Is a DAO similar to the Reddit model, I.e. subreddits have rules and mods that enforce them?
    • jsemrau 4y ago
      The DAO model is more the ownership and governance portion where you own a portion of the forum and thus are incentivized to participate in it's success.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • nobody9999 4y ago
        >The DAO model is more the ownership and governance portion where you own a portion of the forum and thus are incentivized to participate in it's success. How is that any better than hosting your own forum and federating with others of your choice? If I'm running my own forum, I (obviously) have a stake in the success of my own forum. If my goal is to profit from running a forum, that can also be done in a decentralized, federated fashion without DAOs too. As someone else pointed out[0], DAOs don't really add any real value in this case. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268355 I
        • jsemrau 4y ago
          >If my goal is to profit from running a forum, that can also be done in a decentralized, federated fashion without DAOs too. Yes, that is likely true. I think DAOs are interesting because they make partial ownership by the users of the forum easier. Personally, I don't care about decentralization or federation. I ran a Mastodon and DeSo node for a while and I am not sure if it actually adds anything to user experience or actually solves a real-world problem. What interest me in the "organization" of the DAO is where it allows people that share a common interest build something together without incorporating a business and distributing shares. Do I need a DAO or run a forum or website (VPS or otherwise) for any of this? Realistically, I could phone a number of friends to meet up regularly for beers and discuss football. But I think the development path could be Friends doing a meetup locally -> International friends that want to meet -> International friends that want to build something together and earn by doing so. I think the problem that a DAO solves is to get people together that share a common interest and provides an efficient way to ensure proper governance and compliance. Will the world continue without DAOs. Yes for sure. Could DAOs develop in ways for communities (clubs, teams, political parties, etc) to govern themselves, maybe. Still I think its worthwhile to think into this direction. I am currently hoping to get funds from Cardano's Fund8. And the voting process is completely organized by the community of Cardano users through a supported wallet. And I think from a fund-raising perspective, this is really efficient since it crowd-validates your idea and provides a transparent way forward.
• nostromo 4y ago
  (I wrote this comment in reply to the original post, not the new post which is entirely different. Original post: https://twitter.com/neerajarora/status/1521964283466113024 https://twitter.com/neerajarora/status/1521964283466113024) Fool me once... It reads as very self-serving for these folks to create a business model that is clearly economically unsustainable and fueled only by venture capital, then sell their company to Facebook for billions of dollars -- and then to pretend like they're shocked that Facebook wants to make their money back. Of course they do. You knew that. We all knew that. And you still sold your business anyway. That's fine -- good job -- we're happy for you -- but don't act holier-than-though now that you're rich and bored. And don't start a new company backed by venture pretending you're not hoping to do it all over again.
  • aroraneeraj 4y ago
    WhatsApp was making decent money and not burning VC money at all when we sold to FB. this was in 2014. There is no such thing as clearly economically unsustainable. It is just harder.
    • throwaway9041 4y ago
      WhatsApp was operating at a loss when Facebook bought it in 2014 and this is when it had 600 million users. Now it has over 2 billion. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/28/whatsapp-revenue/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/28/whatsapp-revenue/amp/
      • aroraneeraj 4y ago
        yeah read the story. " Its net cash used in operating expenses during the first half of 2014 was $13.5 million, which sounds much more reasonable."
        • aahan5 4y ago
          Would the WhatsApp business model of 2014 be able to afford the vital features nowadays of voice calls, video calls, large files, etc? Do you really believe that WhatsApp would have been able to get that 1 dollar from emerging markets as well, which have a tougher time performing online transactions?
• rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  Decentralization and self-sovereignty is the only way to fix it.
  • michaelchisari 4y ago
    Federation is manageable. True decentralization however is a nightmare.
    • rgrieselhuber 4y ago
      Why?
  • tootie 4y ago
    Decentralization solves nothing. It removes blame by by removing leadership but it makes problems harder to address. You absolutely need governance. Combination of centralized and community. The inhibitor to quality discourse is the profit motive. So long as your business generates profit by attracting phalanxes of lunatics to either look at ads or pay fees you'll have an incentive to let them have free reign.
    • rgrieselhuber 4y ago
      What problems does decentralization make it harder to address?
      • tootie 4y ago
        Assigning responsibility and addressing problems. If there's toxic or illegal content, then it can be removed from a node but not the network. You'll just end up with forks for different subgroups. Back to the old days of thousands of individual forums (which, in fact, still exist). That's a fine thing unto itself, but it's not going to be a Better Twitter. It's just something else. It can be successful on it's own the way cryptocurrency has been, but cryptocurrency also hasn't come close to meeting any of its original goals.
• outside1234 4y ago
  • OrvalWintermute 4y ago
    attacking someone's appearance is the least pertinent way of contributing to the conversation around these founders, and this company. Please, be better.
• wallfacer120 4y ago
  Its not the platform that you dislike, its the people on the platform. Every single new platform you go to, there you and they will be.
  • nowherebeen 4y ago
    Ah no. Those 100 posts you see on your feed are not random. For your statement to be true, it would assume that social networks do not use algorithms to pick what you see. The unfortunate truth is that fights creates audience engagement which drives up user retention and thus stock prices. Financial analyst look at how much time a user spents on each platform to issue a price forecast.
    • hugey010 4y ago
      I believe that it not only increases engagement, but also increases likelihood to click ads and buy things. People seem to like to shop as a distraction / coping mechanism. I have no evidence of this but I have thought quite a bit about why social networks angering push content the way they do.
      • nowherebeen 4y ago
        Yes, it's correlated. YouTube ads are a great example. The more you use the platform, the more likely you will see an ad. At the end of the day, these companies maximizes profits for shareholders. Users are a means to do so. Advertisers are the true customers.
    • filoleg 4y ago
      How does any of this apply to WhatsApp? It isn't social media, it is a messaging app. And as far as anyone who actually uses it is concerned, it works just as well now as it did before the acquisition. If not better, given it finally has a migration story between devices, no matter how imperfect it is. I literally cannot think of a single thing, when it comes to WhatsApp specifically, that got worse.
      • deleted 4y ago
• charcircuit 4y ago
  So Discord, but it isn't free and has more limitations
• sergiotapia 4y ago
  >Real people. Real life. In real private. With no ads. They just took a fat chunk of investment, what's their business model to show a return?
• trompetenaccoun 4y ago
  >Gates says Elon Musk could make misinformation worse. Gates knows about how to make the world a better place. Everyone should read his op-ed that he wrote for the Communist Party in the People’s Daily, Chinese state media. He talks about how China has liberated hundreds of millions of people and has "achieved miracles beyond the reach of any other country over the past several decades".
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • I_DRINK_KOOLAID 4y ago
    It's true though. Modern day China looks nothing like the 80s. The speed at which they eradicated poverty is unprecedented. Of course if you expect Beijing or Shanghai to be as free, safe and clean as Zurich, Amsterdam or Copenhagen then you'll be disappointed...then again not even NYC, LA, London manage to reach such peaks in all the 3 aforementioned fundamentals That's why , like everything there is a leaderboard in which you compete against others, as well as yourself from the past. China is still behind when matched against the West, but nobody improved over their past self as much as them.
    • trompetenaccoun 4y ago
      I grew up in the Mainland, it is much worse now freedom and equality wise than ever in my lifetime. Of course some foreigners only see the skyscrapers and not the concentration camps. It was the same sort of materialistic thinking that lead them to outsource everything in the first place. If we talk about degeneration, we can also talk about Westerners parroting a totalitarian regime's talking points. It was the party that starved the people and it was the party that "saved" them. Amazing job. Meanwhile no one starved in free China (RoC) and the GDP per capita is still multiple times higher there. But I never see any of you guys talk about the supposed Taiwan miracle. It obviously don't work for that sort of propaganda. It was rich elites like Gates, Munger & co who enabled the CCP, made them rich and created the system as it exists today - a perfect dystopian nightmare. It now comes back to bite you in the ass, many simply have not realized it yet. Just like they had no problem doing business with Russia right up to the war. Here's a bit of Gates mental diarrhea from 12 years ago: >But today his reinvention suffered something of a setback when he played down China's attempts to stifle dissent on the internet as "very limited". https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/25/bill-gates-web-censorship-china https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/25/bill-gate... Today Bing remains the only American search engine that isn't blocked in China, because they censor like no tomorrow. Even 'be evil' Google is less evil than Bill Gates, this guy has all the money but no morals whatsoever. He's the last person in a position to lecture anyone on misinformation, his company is part of the worst misinformation network on the planet - the CCP intranet aka inside the GFW, where over a billion people are trapped viewing what is increasingly aggressive totalitarian propaganda.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• stereoradonc 4y ago
  This is as pretentious as saying you need poison to counteract poison. The fix for social media is NOT another app- you need to realise if that has any ROI for your social interaction. Most users doom-scroll or track/stalk others and "pseudo-react" as just extensions of lab-rat experiments for minor dopamine hits and hooked to digital drugs.
  • Zak 4y ago
    > poison to counteract poison Atropine is the standard antidote to several nerve gases and pesticides. It is itself quite toxic, as are the standard antidotes to atropine overdose. Analogies often fall apart when examined literally, but I do think there's a role for software to play in mitigating the harms of social media. This is almost certainly not that software, but I like online one-to-many and many-to-many communication with people I actually know, and miss what Facebook provided when most of what it showed me was original content from my friends and family.
• jmyeet 4y ago
  I hate to be that guy but there are ton of reasons this is doomed from the start. First, getting people to pay any money is such a massive barrier to entry that it limits your audience by orders of magnitude. WhatsApp (pre-FB) is a rare outlier. Likely the only reason this worked is there simply weren't any other messaging apps for many of their platforms at the time and SMS prices were still outrageously high. none of that is true anymore. Second, just the name ("HalloApp"). I mean the fact that it's "Hallo" not "Hello" tells you a lot. This is developed on a budget. It's also too close to "WhatsApp" so (combined with the subscription) it just smacks of former WA engineers trying to create WA 2.0. 2.0s almost never succeed (MariaDB being a rare exception). Third, it's not really clear to me what the messaging model here is from just reading this. How is this going to be different from the user's perspective compared to WA, Messenger or whatever? Fourth, any new platform that is similar to another is simply going to be a haven for those that are banned on the original platform or who otherwise feel they proselytize whatever whacko positions they hold. This is not the basis for a healthy platform. Lastly, people. The dirty secret of social media is that the core problem is people. On anonymous online spaces people are hateful and vindictive. They believe crazy shit and want everyone to know about it.
  • throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
    >Fourth, any new platform that is similar to another is simply going to be a haven for those that are banned on the original platform or who otherwise feel they proselytize whatever whacko positions they hold. This is not the basis for a healthy platform. wait, you think people get banned for wrongthink on whatsapp? lmao
  • MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    > 2.0s almost never succeed Video games? DotA?
    • na85 4y ago
      Network effects work differently in video games. Often you'll have a relatively niche game like PUBG that validates a concept (battle royales) which is then done in a more polished way by a second-mover (Fortnite, WOW, TF2, CSGO, StarCraft 1, Unreal Tournament, etc) with commensurately greater success.
• danamit 4y ago
  >Instead of ads, HalloApp plans to charge subscription fees, likely a dollar or two and less than $5 a month lol nah thanks.
• I_DRINK_KOOLAID 4y ago
  • ipaddr 4y ago
    You are not a nobody. You are a 'hiker, fishmen, who makes under 50k has a wife three kids lives in Salt Lake City, 28 who loves walking dead and works at ibm who went to this mall at this time". You are not a random data point in a sea. You are many datapoints connecting you in a map of people, time and space.
    • I_DRINK_KOOLAID 4y ago
• beachy 4y ago
  > Users who violate the rules must talk to a “conflict coordinator” and read documents about why their behavior was problematic before they can post again. These moves are intended to “lay a foundation for users and set a different expectation” for how users should behave online, Ms. Austin said. There are lots of great ideas about how to tame problematic online behaviour. But in the end I've only see one working well and at scale - here at HN, @dang's courteous yet determined interventions. As luck would have it, I noticed a new one this morning, classic dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31265977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31265977 Perhaps there is literally no tech. that can do as good a job as a motivated savvy human.
  • aaomidi 4y ago
    Dang is great most of the time but effectively ends up pushing a "centrist" semi liberal view point. I do not envy what dang does. It's a hard job. But at the end of the day these positions end up effectively enforcing the middle ground logical fallacy.
    • chillacy 4y ago
      From what I've seen and noticed myself, exposure and engaging with different arguments in good faith (e.g. able to switch sides and argue for the other side in as convincing a way, as one might do in a debate club) tends to either move people towards the center or makes them agnostic to any solution. At least in political questions, or questions of "ought" as opposed to "is".
    • dvt 4y ago
      > I do not envy what dang does. It's a hard job. But at the end of the day these positions end up effectively enforcing the middle ground logical fallacy. Dang has personally dinged me a few times -- maybe I'd disagree with a few, but the guy seems alright. Sometimes I troll and don't get caught, sometimes I'm being honest but dang dings me. I dunno', but this is by far the best forum on the modern web. Of all fallacies, the "middle ground fallacy" seems to me to be the best.
    • dotnet00 4y ago
• karaterobot 4y ago
  On the one hand, I think the things they are changing sound like things that should be changed: limited group sizes rather than a public broadcast, and subscription-based rather than ad-based. Guarantee data confidentiality and you've got a neat platform I still wouldn't use. On the other hand, we know how this story goes: they either fail outright, or they succeed and scale up, slowly adding more and more features people request in order to create more growth, until eventually they look like the platforms they started as a reaction against. Because Facebook, et al. didn't randomly arrive at the combination of qualities that makes them destructive, they got there by giving people what they asked for. Until you change what people ask for, you're either going to keep creating Facebooks, or get driven out of business by Facebook. Replace Facebook with the social media platform of your choice.
• asdff 4y ago
  Can it ever be fixed? IMO the incentive structure is such that the users are always the product to be farmed, be it now or when the board composition changes in a few years.
• nemo44x 4y ago
  How to fix social media: ignore the losers who are on it all day and aren’t there to promote their thing. Charge the people who are there to promote their thing.
• michaelchisari 4y ago
  They’re on the right track but seeking VC money is the wrong direction. Their ad-free, non-exploitive vision might hold for a time but when the investors come knocking for their orders of magnitude return, those ideals will be the first to go.
• Schroedingersat 4y ago
  So move to a new, centrally controlled, opaque platform that can he sold to the highest bidder when it gains traction?
• born-jre 4y ago
  i want new social media to target teens/young people with some novel trendy feature, way i see new social media will only take off cz it is trendy to use and old people are not there and slowly everyone/old people starts to use. FB -> Insta -> Snap/jikjok or whatever It would be nice if that company later sneaked like better privacy, open protocol / interoperability with activity-pub or whatever. i mean people won't use a social media cz it respects privacy etc.
• 1B05H1N 4y ago
  What's going to stop these guys from selling to fb like they did with whatsapp?
• godmode2019 4y ago
  *Former PayPal employees lead new push to fix social media