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

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

#391

Post by tunesmith »

intended wrote: post #310
tunesmith wrote: post #132

I think the general incentive we've been seeing is the incentive towards faster and thoughtless opinion-sharing. Reactive (in the bad way) behavior is incentivized, and thoughtful behavior is discouraged, because by then people have moved on to the next thing. So I'd generally like to see more effort put into making it easier for people to engage in more thoughtful ways. This can also be applied to advertising. I'm t…

No it cant. You miss the critical purpose served by more emotional hind brain thinking - its easier to repeat and get predictable responses to. Think of this as much older hackers using new tools to do better at their subject - their subject being the hacking of human brains. --- A simple way to test the effectiveness of your proposal is to see how forums perform. The more complex a topic, the fewer participants and…

Your point about forums assumes that forums encompass the full gamut of how people can communicate. "There is decreasing participation for complex topics in forums, therefore people don't want to engage in complex topics." But that doesn't account for the possibility that the form of forums themselves are the problem. With a new kind of forum, perhaps people would engage more in deeper arguments. At the least, lack of participation in other forms of forums wouldn't disprove that.

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

#392

Post by kakarot »

interfixus wrote: post #242
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #233

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.

What happened for me was that people stopped seeing my controversial posts to the point where the only reason I still had facebook, which was to discuss tech, philosophy, and politics with the masses, became void.

That was an awakening moment for me. Promptly deleted the damned thing and every other social media account I had. Technological echo chambers are going to do so much harm to society.

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

#393

Post by kakarot »

sumeno wrote: post #355
mixmastamyk wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and it's not like you couldn't ask a technical friend to get it done.

I'm not an advocate for anything that results in even more people bugging me to do "computer stuff" for them

I've read all of your comments in my subthread and I agree with everything you've said. Especially this! It was immediately what came to mind but I hit my post count.

This problem of getting people to care about alternatives to Facebook seems to be something you've given a lot of thought as well. Mind if I ask what field you work in?

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

#394

Post by a1exyz »

jwint162 wrote: post #248
doke01 wrote: post #60

Make 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…

The problem with this is that these platforms thrive because of their existing network effects. Even if you own your very own well built .com the vast majority of these dot coms will still have a combination of facebook, twitter, youtube accounts etc which mirror content available on your personal site. This provides distribution that is otherwise difficult to come across. I have been working on a purposed solution o…

do you use this?

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

#395

Post by nilved »

virmundi wrote: post #388
nilved wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense. You use a password manager so you don't need to manage the passwords. If you don't like the concept of having passwords at all then use a stateless, hash-based password generator instead.

How does one integrate that with Facebook or Google or Nameasite?

A browser extension could be made pretty easily. If you have a terminal open, do `echo mymasterpassword facebook.com | shasum -a 256 | pbcopy`.

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

#396

Post by nicky0 »

mileycyrusXOXO wrote: post #225
monk_e_boy wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not use another single sign on service? Look. I'm not an idiot. I write open source. I love free and open web. Google login works. We use use Gmail - it works. We use google classroom - it just works. Most websites offer Google Login - it just works. When you have 30 students and you waste 2 minutes logging into a website -- that is 2 x 30 == 60 minutes of student learning lost. Little things like that add up.

Perhaps you should consider being less defensive. I believe (could be wrong) OP asked a genuine question and was interested to hear a response. S/he didn't call you an idiot or question your love for the free web. I think your last paragraph would be sufficient to explain your reasons along with a single, "it just works."

Their response was perfectly reasonable and interesting.

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

#397

Post by nicky0 »

cedex12 wrote: post #250
Fezzik wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the advantage of fastmail compared to, for instance, the free iirc 5 mail addresses that gandi offers you when registering a domain name: https://www.gandi.net/domain ?

Calendar and address book (with CalDAV and CardDAV) is another thing.

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

#398

Post by AndyMcConachie »

aaronpk wrote: post #113
AndyMcConachie wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is implementing these? I saw there was an Apache project as a reference implementation a while ago but it was now abandoned. Is there a new reference implementation or are there plans for creating one?

Micropub clients: https://indieweb.org/Micropub/Clients Micropub servers: https://indieweb.org/Micropub/Servers Webmention implementations: https://indieweb.org/Webmention More details: https://indieweb.org/indieweb_network

Thank you.

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

#399

Post by mirimir »

kakarot wrote: post #392
interfixus wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What happened for me was that people stopped seeing my controversial posts to the point where the only reason I still had facebook, which was to discuss tech, philosophy, and politics with the masses, became void. That was an awakening moment for me. Promptly deleted the damned thing and every other social media account I had. Technological echo chambers are going to do so much harm to society.

Yes, Facebook has an insidious shadow-ban system. Its goal is showing people what they like, and not what they don't like. So they're happy Facebook users, seeing happy Facebook ads.

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

#400

Post by pikachuaintcool »

beefman wrote: post #379
pikachuaintcool wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Hm. Personally I thought it was around 2010, when Facebook chat replaced AIM. And the iPhone 4 came out.
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