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Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

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371–380 of 444 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#371

There is no going back, this 'battle' was lost a long time ago. We've tried so hard to make technology ubiquitous and accessible to everyone . We thought that that was a good idea at the time, except we didn't really understand it entirely. The consequence of ubiquitous technology is that the majority now has access to powerful tools to 'express' themselves while being subjected to constant brainwashing into behaving…

Forgive me if I exaggerate, but you sound a chef who is appalled by the lack of variety in fruits and vegetables distributed at a shelter. Billions of people can communicate and learn in ways never before possible. This is overall A Very Good Thing.

Your comparison is flawed because the majority of those in said shelter are people who didn't need a shelter in the first place and most of those in need are not in the shelter.

As for whether this is a good thing: Who is president in the US again? How did this come about?

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#372

There is no going back, this 'battle' was lost a long time ago. We've tried so hard to make technology ubiquitous and accessible to everyone . We thought that that was a good idea at the time, except we didn't really understand it entirely. The consequence of ubiquitous technology is that the majority now has access to powerful tools to 'express' themselves while being subjected to constant brainwashing into behaving…

Forgive me if I exaggerate, but you sound a chef who is appalled by the lack of variety in fruits and vegetables distributed at a shelter. Billions of people can communicate and learn in ways never before possible. This is overall A Very Good Thing.

The comparison with lack of blah at a shelter is telling, don't you think, when you think about how shelters are usually a place where people are "doled" out stuff? It is not merely a patronizing suggestion (which the billions of people are already aware of and accustomed to), but it is also taking a lot of people down a path where their choices will become severely restricted in the future. How is that "A Very Good Thing"?

Also, think about what companies start doing when they start failing. And don't make implicit assumptions that these megaliths will never fail or stumble. What would you, as the CEO who is supposed to "maximize shareholder value" do? Are you going to say "Well, we could do some shady things to exploit the data we have and buy ourselves some more time, but it is a better idea to declare bankruptcy and close the company"? Imagine a company like Facebook nearing bankruptcy. You can bet on your life that they will offer the appropriate third parties greater control of their data mining prowess in return for a bailout. Is that also overall a Very Good Thing?

Also, notice how the 2008 financial crisis unfolded. None of the offending parties got anything more than a slap on the wrist, because they had the keys to an engineering construct of extraordinary complexity (the financial system). It was just "heads I win, tails you lose". The way our lives are becoming intertwined with these tech behemoths is no different, and I don't see it playing out any differently if there is a similar crisis in the tech sector. How can that be overall a Very Good Thing?

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#373
I am experimenting with a new approach to preventing manipulation and biases in feeds. We use an algorithm to randomly crowdsource people to rate articles on their topical relevance and usefulness. Results at postwaves are still preliminary but encouraging.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good luck posting some controversial point of view on Facebook or similar platforms. They'll axe you in the blink of an eye. It's real. It happens all the time. I have seen it again and again.

You're going to need to show examples for people being banned for JUST posting a controversial point of view. Most of the time I hear this, it wasn't for the point of view, but because the person was actually breaking the ToS, and they knew it.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#375
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to that: don't host your content on other domains either. Beware of insidious threats to the WWW, like AMP.

I don't really understand this? I've never used AMP directly but I use Ghost which comes packaged with AMP. How does AMP change the domain of your content?

Your content gets served on Google.com domain with a giant "back" button at the top that takes users back to Google rather than deeper into your site. It also creates restrictions on what you can publish and how you can monetize.

Here are some recent articles about it:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google uses AMP for caching. When you click on the link, they are serving cached content from their own servers. They say it promotes user experience because it is faster. The average user can hardly tell the difference, and they might never go to your server.

It really depends on what you want to do: disseminate information (with a canonical URL that you control) or shovel users to your server? In the former case, AMP caches are a reasonable compromise since it's really just a free CDN. In the latter case, that cache is annoying because of how it needs to fit in the design of the contemporary web. See the last paragraph of https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-…

AMP isn't really about speed -- it's about the appification of the open WWW.

The correct way to fix these problems would be to teach people how to make their sites faster rather than enforce restrictions on how they create and monetize their online publications.

"Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski already recreated the Google AMP demo page without the Google AMP JavaScript and, unsurprisingly, it's faster than Google's version."

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#377
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to that: don't host your content on other domains either. Beware of insidious threats to the WWW, like AMP.

I don't really understand this? I've never used AMP directly but I use Ghost which comes packaged with AMP. How does AMP change the domain of your content?

Google Search, when used from a mobile user-agent, such as a mobile browser or some mobile-resident Google Search integration like the Google Now Launcher Search Bar, will show some results' AMP-equivalents, and uses AMP-availability as a ranking signal.

When such an AMP search result is opened from the aforementioned Google Search source, it will open in a Google Search-wrapped frame reader, such that the outside is Google Search -- although this is not visually obvious to the user -- while the inside the AMP article. The browser-level URL for this endpoint begins with 'google.com/amp/'. While it's now possible to get the article's original link from this viewer, this was not present at launch, and it was a frequent source of criticism.

This is a brief restatement of a more in-depth description I gave in a different thread [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14385122

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#378
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me and my students -- we always use a google login. With 35 students all using 4 or 5 online services each with a login.... There is no way we can keep control of all those separate login details. There needs to be a central control over login. Sure, login details are pretty old skool bonkers. I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion, but in the real world where I have to hand a class of 35 students over to another…

Either everyone is crazy or I am -- does a site that's used by less than 100 users really need to outsource their auth? If you're part of a school don't you have student accounts in some central place like LDAP/AD/IdM?

Well, for one, they're much better at it than most of us. For two, on mobile, people hate typing in logins. So at least offering an integrated one can provide a huge uptick in usability.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#379

It's too late. The culture of free exchange that existed on the usenet, over e-mail, and on the early web died circa 2013. It's tempting to blame Google and Facebook, and they definitely converted a lot of public value into private value. But I suspect it's mainly down to self-selection bias of internet early-adopters. I call the present state of affairs "eternal October".

Why do you say 2013?

That's the year Google killed Reader, and all the mailing lists I'd been on since the '90s spontaneously moved to Facebook. I think it was also the year mobile really took off

http://tumblr.jackdawresearch.com/post/136750883723/digestin...

(The last two charts are trailing-year, which better show the derivative than the more typical cumulative charts)

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every few days we have an article here in HN about a relatively big company, and people throw the classic comment that they don't understand how they need hundreds/thousands of programmers to do what they do, when the prototype of their website can be done by 2 people over a weekend. What you are doing is just a slightly more complex version of this, but the answer is still the same, scale. Software is easier to copy…

Here's an idea: A team of coders in a basement combine lots of AI discoveries done by others (Think merging orthogonal approaches like Numenta + Google Brain + Vicarious + etc). With it, they crack the neo-cortex algorithm (or a rough approximation). It learns outdoors (cameras, actuators), indoors (talking), on the internet, in libraries, on wikipedia, etc. It becomes actually useful. Not: "OK, google set an alarm."…

And we have the same problem we have now. We've just changed the company.
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