6 ms·

I can't understand why people are letting this happen. Not Threads blocking the EU, but Threads at all. Everyone--everyone--knows how bad Meta is for privacy,

I can't understand why people are letting this happen. Not Threads blocking the EU, but Threads at all. Everyone--everyone--knows how bad Meta is for privacy, advertising, and election tampering. So many people, especially those in the target demographic of Threads, have left Facebook because either they've witnessed the site get worse and worse overtime, to the point where it lost all utility for them. Why are we doing this? This is a perfect opportunity for everyone to say no. No, we don't want another privacy invading advertising engine. And yet, everyone is just rolling over and accepting it.

MicropenisMike 3y ago
Because the alternative is Twitter.
- tazjin 3y ago
  You can also just not use either.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  Wouldn't the other big tech firms be able to build a Twitter clone? Why am I not hearing about a Google version, or a Microsoft version? You'd think someone inside one of the Trillion dollar firms would have had the idea.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    Google building a social media product. That will definitely go well this time around.
    - Pxtl 3y ago
      5th time's a charm.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    Google bringing back Buzz (the Twitter-alike that was briefly in gmail) would perhaps be the funniest possible outcome of all of this.
- aloisdg 3y ago
  The alternative is mastodon/pleroma/misskey/calkey, etc.
  - ahahahahah 3y ago
    Sure, and the alternative to mac/windows is linux. Which I guess is actually unfair to linux. mastodon/etc are terrible, they will never be used by more than an unimportant minority of people.
  - Pxtl 3y ago
    I've tried making do on Mastodon. It's just not as well-made. The federation thing gets in the way, the discoverability of content is hard, one prolific tooter can too easily flood your feed - it's a decade behind Twitter and Threads in terms of usability. Even the basic information density of the web layout is poor. I'm willing to look past these flaws and stick with the fediverse, but if nobody I want to follow is doing that, there's no point. I hope Gargron et al can make it happen and beat both Threads and Twitter, but so far they've just been too stubborn (like the search and quote-tweet things) and haven't iterated fast-enough to really compete.
  - vitorgrs 3y ago
    Mastodon don't even have a proper search.
- intrasight 3y ago
  Hacker News is a fine alternative
  - jdiff 3y ago
    HN is in no way an alternative, and that's okay. For the masses that use Twitter, HN is completely uninteresting and completely fails to replace Twitter. HN is too niche, too obscure, too old, and too strict to be a Twitter, and that's what makes it great.
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  At least Twitter fixed the election tampering problem, and now allows the free flow of information, even if TPBT object to it. Threads will still be as bad as FB in those regards.
  - phyrex 3y ago
    What do you think Twitter did that Facebook didn’t do?
  - jdiff 3y ago
    Twitter did no such thing, Twitter now personally silences loud dissenters and engages openly in anticompetitive behavior meanwhile doing less moderation than they ever have. Plugging your ears and ignoring it is not "fixing" the election tampering problem.
  - malermeister 3y ago
    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-chad-loder-twitter-b2271556.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic... Free flow of information, huh?
nordsieck 3y ago
Depends on what you want. If it's views/likes/etc., you have to go where the people are. And a lot of people are on FB/Insta. > Why are we doing this? This is a perfect opportunity for everyone to say no. No, we don't want another privacy invading advertising engine. And yet, everyone is just rolling over and accepting it. Have you considered that your values are different from most peoples'?
badwolf 3y ago
Turns out many people just don't care that much, or get value out of using a social networking app/site.
apples_oranges 3y ago
I never bought this privacy invasion thing. It just seems like a nice cause to rally behind, but from what I see most people don't care. But yeah, sure, it's nice to focus all emotional power and reduce a complex issue to one stock ticker, so it can be hated or publicly disagreed with in an economical way. But the law should be the law and our regulations should reflect some sane ground rules of our societies. You don't have to use it, but calling it a perfect opportunity just seems a bit lazy I guess.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  I'm in an "elite coastal city" or whatever but people are conversationally very aware & very disgusted by the state of affairs. It gets brought up socially a good bit, and far outside the tech circles. But we want to connect & share & use the internet, and these are incredibly easy ways to participate widely with the rest of the planet. Heck yes I love having some Robert Reich in my feed; man is epic, on point. Can I drop him a comment telling him how much he rocks or elaborating a point? Yes I can. Right now there is no other avenue into the noosphere. I'm all for ActivityPub but the network effect here is immense. This is happening because of Metcalfe's Law, the value of the network is users^2. So there is no alternative. You either give up your privacy & let Facebook/Meta/whomever data mine you, or you stop participating with the planet. As for the law, I have little hope that we can mete out a just relationship through regulation. EU is trying but just look at Privacy Shield difficulties; making a product which is compliant with all the overlapping & abutting laws across the globe is diabolically difficult. That Threads is saying, yeah, we can't, it's too hard is evidence that more attempts to add more laws, to try to regulate a balance is optimistic. It has the Utopian fragility, the dream that a just society can be produced & synthesized, which maybe it can, but too often there is a naivete about control, and a rigidity & inflexibility which creates brittleness. The law has it's idea of what it wants but it keeps becoming decoupled from whats happening in the world; lawmaking is singular, produces isolated static artifacts, but the world is full of billions of people responding & changing & shifting. Competition seems like the must to me. Cory Doctorow & EFF were talking about Competitive Compatibility for a big, trying to make it viable to switch across networks & not have to lose all your friends & data to do so. A market & freedom based approach won't immediately or directly resolve the privacy concerns, but I think it would let new things get started that could be viable winning alternatives. Right now we are locked in to unprivate.
hhh 3y ago
I like Threads, and think anything driving the normalization of ActivityPub is good. Twitter has collapsed in usability for me. I don’t see community notes, when I search something there’s nothing but crypto scams at the top.
rPlayer6554 3y ago
I don't think many people are so concerned about the privacy features on their social network. Social networks to some degree are inherently about making private things public. A lot of the backlash Facebook gets from the average person is about their political moderation. At some point the public has been informed that Facebook uses their data to advertise, and apparently that cost is worth it to them for the products they give. So far no one has really found a good paid model for social networks, and ads that use data are way more profitable, so here we are. Companies aren't a charity, they gotta make money somehow.
makestuff 3y ago
People who want to be influencers see this as "the next big thing" and want to gain a following before it is saturated. They missed out on Tiktok/Twitter/Instagram/etc. so this is their path to making it big.
constantcrying 3y ago
Almost nobody cares about privacy. Do you think those instagram users, who post their face + location, onto the public internet are particularly concerned about meta collecting their data?
tyjen 3y ago
Many people follow celebrities/public figures/politicians who market Threads as the new "Digital Town Square," or themselves like a "curated" space that conforms to their beliefs, and the ability to silence people who deviate too far from their beliefs. Those same aristocrats are not informing their followers of the privacy dangers, because they also benefit from a commoner's privacy loss. Most common people aren't thinking about the potential consequences on the individual or societal level, because the dangers are not marketed at a similar scale and it's not something the average person thinks about without strong external influence.
arpyzo 3y ago
As others have pointed out, people don't care about these things. Either at all, or simply not enough for forgo the value they get from social media. Perhaps the question you're really trying to ask is why people don't place a greater value on these things?
vitorgrs 3y ago
People (like me) are looking for a Twitter alternative. The alternative need to have a minimum viable product. Mastodon is 7 years old and still don't have a search or quote feature. BlueSky is newer, but the app it's totally awful (takes 30 seconds to open here on Android), you can't post videos. Ironically Meta owns React Native, but Threads is built with native tech, meanwhile BlueSky it's React Native.... Of course - people need to be there too. I use Twitter mainly for news, politics and tech. Most of this is on Threads. Meanwhile on Bluesky and Mastodon, almost none of this is there for me. On Mastodon you have a bunch of accounts replicating twitter accounts exactly because it lacks greatly these accounts.
freetinker 3y ago
I used to think so too. However, I think the view that “everyone” knows is a distortion. The HN audience knows, but quite a few people in my life (friends, family, coworkers) don’t have a clue.

MicropenisMike 3y ago

Because the alternative is Twitter.

tazjin 3y ago
You can also just not use either.
lordnacho 3y ago
Wouldn't the other big tech firms be able to build a Twitter clone? Why am I not hearing about a Google version, or a Microsoft version? You'd think someone inside one of the Trillion dollar firms would have had the idea.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Google building a social media product. That will definitely go well this time around.
  - Pxtl 3y ago
    5th time's a charm.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Google bringing back Buzz (the Twitter-alike that was briefly in gmail) would perhaps be the funniest possible outcome of all of this.
aloisdg 3y ago
The alternative is mastodon/pleroma/misskey/calkey, etc.
- ahahahahah 3y ago
  Sure, and the alternative to mac/windows is linux. Which I guess is actually unfair to linux. mastodon/etc are terrible, they will never be used by more than an unimportant minority of people.
- Pxtl 3y ago
  I've tried making do on Mastodon. It's just not as well-made. The federation thing gets in the way, the discoverability of content is hard, one prolific tooter can too easily flood your feed - it's a decade behind Twitter and Threads in terms of usability. Even the basic information density of the web layout is poor. I'm willing to look past these flaws and stick with the fediverse, but if nobody I want to follow is doing that, there's no point. I hope Gargron et al can make it happen and beat both Threads and Twitter, but so far they've just been too stubborn (like the search and quote-tweet things) and haven't iterated fast-enough to really compete.
- vitorgrs 3y ago
  Mastodon don't even have a proper search.
intrasight 3y ago
Hacker News is a fine alternative
- jdiff 3y ago
  HN is in no way an alternative, and that's okay. For the masses that use Twitter, HN is completely uninteresting and completely fails to replace Twitter. HN is too niche, too obscure, too old, and too strict to be a Twitter, and that's what makes it great.
stronglikedan 3y ago
At least Twitter fixed the election tampering problem, and now allows the free flow of information, even if TPBT object to it. Threads will still be as bad as FB in those regards.
- phyrex 3y ago
  What do you think Twitter did that Facebook didn’t do?
- jdiff 3y ago
  Twitter did no such thing, Twitter now personally silences loud dissenters and engages openly in anticompetitive behavior meanwhile doing less moderation than they ever have. Plugging your ears and ignoring it is not "fixing" the election tampering problem.
- malermeister 3y ago
  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-chad-loder-twitter-b2271556.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic... Free flow of information, huh?

nordsieck 3y ago

Depends on what you want. If it's views/likes/etc., you have to go where the people are. And a lot of people are on FB/Insta. > Why are we doing this? This is a perfect opportunity for everyone to say no. No, we don't want another privacy invading advertising engine. And yet, everyone is just rolling over and accepting it. Have you considered that your values are different from most peoples'?

badwolf 3y ago

Turns out many people just don't care that much, or get value out of using a social networking app/site.

apples_oranges 3y ago

I never bought this privacy invasion thing. It just seems like a nice cause to rally behind, but from what I see most people don't care. But yeah, sure, it's nice to focus all emotional power and reduce a complex issue to one stock ticker, so it can be hated or publicly disagreed with in an economical way. But the law should be the law and our regulations should reflect some sane ground rules of our societies. You don't have to use it, but calling it a perfect opportunity just seems a bit lazy I guess.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
I'm in an "elite coastal city" or whatever but people are conversationally very aware & very disgusted by the state of affairs. It gets brought up socially a good bit, and far outside the tech circles. But we want to connect & share & use the internet, and these are incredibly easy ways to participate widely with the rest of the planet. Heck yes I love having some Robert Reich in my feed; man is epic, on point. Can I drop him a comment telling him how much he rocks or elaborating a point? Yes I can. Right now there is no other avenue into the noosphere. I'm all for ActivityPub but the network effect here is immense. This is happening because of Metcalfe's Law, the value of the network is users^2. So there is no alternative. You either give up your privacy & let Facebook/Meta/whomever data mine you, or you stop participating with the planet. As for the law, I have little hope that we can mete out a just relationship through regulation. EU is trying but just look at Privacy Shield difficulties; making a product which is compliant with all the overlapping & abutting laws across the globe is diabolically difficult. That Threads is saying, yeah, we can't, it's too hard is evidence that more attempts to add more laws, to try to regulate a balance is optimistic. It has the Utopian fragility, the dream that a just society can be produced & synthesized, which maybe it can, but too often there is a naivete about control, and a rigidity & inflexibility which creates brittleness. The law has it's idea of what it wants but it keeps becoming decoupled from whats happening in the world; lawmaking is singular, produces isolated static artifacts, but the world is full of billions of people responding & changing & shifting. Competition seems like the must to me. Cory Doctorow & EFF were talking about Competitive Compatibility for a big, trying to make it viable to switch across networks & not have to lose all your friends & data to do so. A market & freedom based approach won't immediately or directly resolve the privacy concerns, but I think it would let new things get started that could be viable winning alternatives. Right now we are locked in to unprivate.

hhh 3y ago

I like Threads, and think anything driving the normalization of ActivityPub is good. Twitter has collapsed in usability for me. I don’t see community notes, when I search something there’s nothing but crypto scams at the top.

rPlayer6554 3y ago

I don't think many people are so concerned about the privacy features on their social network. Social networks to some degree are inherently about making private things public. A lot of the backlash Facebook gets from the average person is about their political moderation. At some point the public has been informed that Facebook uses their data to advertise, and apparently that cost is worth it to them for the products they give. So far no one has really found a good paid model for social networks, and ads that use data are way more profitable, so here we are. Companies aren't a charity, they gotta make money somehow.

makestuff 3y ago

People who want to be influencers see this as "the next big thing" and want to gain a following before it is saturated. They missed out on Tiktok/Twitter/Instagram/etc. so this is their path to making it big.

constantcrying 3y ago

Almost nobody cares about privacy. Do you think those instagram users, who post their face + location, onto the public internet are particularly concerned about meta collecting their data?

tyjen 3y ago

Many people follow celebrities/public figures/politicians who market Threads as the new "Digital Town Square," or themselves like a "curated" space that conforms to their beliefs, and the ability to silence people who deviate too far from their beliefs. Those same aristocrats are not informing their followers of the privacy dangers, because they also benefit from a commoner's privacy loss. Most common people aren't thinking about the potential consequences on the individual or societal level, because the dangers are not marketed at a similar scale and it's not something the average person thinks about without strong external influence.

arpyzo 3y ago

As others have pointed out, people don't care about these things. Either at all, or simply not enough for forgo the value they get from social media. Perhaps the question you're really trying to ask is why people don't place a greater value on these things?

vitorgrs 3y ago

People (like me) are looking for a Twitter alternative. The alternative need to have a minimum viable product. Mastodon is 7 years old and still don't have a search or quote feature. BlueSky is newer, but the app it's totally awful (takes 30 seconds to open here on Android), you can't post videos. Ironically Meta owns React Native, but Threads is built with native tech, meanwhile BlueSky it's React Native.... Of course - people need to be there too. I use Twitter mainly for news, politics and tech. Most of this is on Threads. Meanwhile on Bluesky and Mastodon, almost none of this is there for me. On Mastodon you have a bunch of accounts replicating twitter accounts exactly because it lacks greatly these accounts.

freetinker 3y ago

I used to think so too. However, I think the view that “everyone” knows is a distortion. The HN audience knows, but quite a few people in my life (friends, family, coworkers) don’t have a clue.