Earlier quoted context omitted.
Registering a domain name may as well be magic to a large portion of the population.
Not really. I know people with zero tech knowledge who have done it. Anyone able to register a trademark. Art director, actors etc.
Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
241–250 of 444 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because maybe Facebook nukes her account, for whatever reason.
When has this actually happened? And by this I mean that out of nowhere Facebook suddenly has deleted someone's page and then not restored it? I get what you are suggesting, but I can't help but to think you are making this way bigger issue than it actually is. Also all of you are missing the most obvious point: if it hasn't happened to a lot (and I mean literally more than 10-20% of user base) it is not a significan…
It's real. It happens all the time. I have seen it again and again.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because maybe Facebook nukes her account, for whatever reason.
When has this actually happened? And by this I mean that out of nowhere Facebook suddenly has deleted someone's page and then not restored it? I get what you are suggesting, but I can't help but to think you are making this way bigger issue than it actually is. Also all of you are missing the most obvious point: if it hasn't happened to a lot (and I mean literally more than 10-20% of user base) it is not a significan…
Searching "facebook blocked" suggests that it's a common problem.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#244Make your website of record your website. Make social media platforms and others (e.g. Google) secondary to that. Don't let Google and Facebook control how you build your website. I am amazed at companies that take their websites and subjugate them to their Facebook page. You may gain social attention but you are handing over control. Never, ever, ever say to contact me go to facebook.com/xxxx or my email address is…
By making your email something custom instead of @gmail, you're spending some energy, time, and money to protect against a perceived threat. I guess my real question is, what exactly is that threat, how damaging is it, and how likely is it to occur? By my mental math, I can't really justify spending even a few bucks, or more expensively, a few hours, protecting against some consequence that I can't really quantify at…
So now she's forced to get another email address to log into Tumblr. I got around that by creating an email address at my own personal domain that forwards to her current bellsouth.net address, and that was good enough for Tumblr.
Enjoy your free Internet.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#245What I'm getting from this thread is that we're sort of fucked. The only way to stop Facebook and Google was to become them before they had a chance to. That way you'd presumably be more benevolent. Maybe that's true for Facebook, but it's still hard to imagine for Google. I think the bigger problem is cross-generational power. YC itself is somewhat terrifying in this regard, but that's a different topic. In regards…
So what happened?
A competitor came long with less scruples. Facebook erupted on the scene very happily crossing the creepy line to wring every bit of data they could out of their users.
So Google now has to compete with this company that has far, far more data (advertiser captnip) than they do. And no one really seems to care - Facebook grows to 2 billion users. Google can either be outcompeted on this front, or they can race to compete, gather more and more data.
Google perhaps tried to stop Facebook by becoming them, but there's so much money in this industry that people are willing to do anything unethical to get past you to get it.
Same with the open web. Same with vendor lock-in. Etc.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#246The UK government is working on it's own Internet [1]. It's going to really take off and be the next big thing!! No encryption too, so it's nice and safe from all those terrorists. Can't wait!! [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#247Make your website of record your website. Make social media platforms and others (e.g. Google) secondary to that. Don't let Google and Facebook control how you build your website. I am amazed at companies that take their websites and subjugate them to their Facebook page. You may gain social attention but you are handing over control. Never, ever, ever say to contact me go to facebook.com/xxxx or my email address is…
By making your email something custom instead of @gmail, you're spending some energy, time, and money to protect against a perceived threat. I guess my real question is, what exactly is that threat, how damaging is it, and how likely is it to occur? By my mental math, I can't really justify spending even a few bucks, or more expensively, a few hours, protecting against some consequence that I can't really quantify at…
Perceived by some but apparently not by many others who are still clueless. I know multiple people who invested considerable time and energy into building up Facebook pages only to suddenly be cut off from fans who had followed them when fb decided to go the pay to play route. I personally lost my YouTube channel, due to sheer incompetence on Google's side after they moved to the single login system across Google, Plus, YouTube, etc. I tried many times over multiple years to get access again but their support is crappy as I'm sure you've heard many times before...
For a short term experiment, it's totally reasonable to give it a shot. But if you're trusting Google, Facebook or any other tech giant (or even small startup) with things important to you, you're making a mistake. Not backing up something as important as all your email history in Gmail would be insane, in my opinion. Even with a backup, you could lose access to a lot of other services if Google ever locks you out, as they have done to many, many people in the past.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#248Make your website of record your website. Make social media platforms and others (e.g. Google) secondary to that. Don't let Google and Facebook control how you build your website. I am amazed at companies that take their websites and subjugate them to their Facebook page. You may gain social attention but you are handing over control. Never, ever, ever say to contact me go to facebook.com/xxxx or my email address is…
I have been working on a purposed solution over at http://www.peerprofile.com which allows creation of a personal domain and instead of getting locked in provides an open model.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#249I'm working on a project to separate data from presentation. Too much data is overly wrapped with presentation (e.g. HTML) so we are forced into using a certain display method (popular commercial web browser). A related problem is that human readable data is often unnecessarily encoded into binary machine data. If we weren't wasting so much space on presentation, we could have just served the human-readable data. In…
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#250My biggest gripe with the "modern internet" is e-mail. MS and Google dominate the e-mail scene, and they are making it ever more unpleasant to run your own mailserver. They will frequently blackhole mails, without bounces, warnings or any recourse. I'm not sure what can be done about that, but it's certainly becoming an up hill battle.
I try and get everyone I know to use (and pay for) Fastmail. It has a great interface. Great calendar. Awesome spam filter. Etc... It costs $30/year to send messages around the globe. That seems like a steal to me. Ultimately, email clients are services that have maintenance and development costs - if you're not paying for it, someone is selling your information to fund the service.