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

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431–440 of 444 posts

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

#431

Brendan Eich, the inventor of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla, launched this recently: https://www.basicattentiontoken.org/index.html It's a token for advertisement that rewards the user, to be used at Brave browser: https://brave.com https://github.com/brave

I love the idea but if we can't get 70% of the population to use ad blockers, what chance do we have of people moving over to a new, unheard of browser? People switched to Chrome because Google told you it was a better experience every time you made a search. I don't see how people of my parents generation (60s) will ever hear about Brave.

The BAT is for more apps, Brave is just first.

Do your parents like paying half their data plan ($23/month in the US) to load tracking scripts and ads? See https://medium.com/@robleathern/carriers-are-making-more-fro.... Brave is 3-7x faster on top news/media sites than Chrome on Android.

All this and more is discussed at https://basicattentiontoken.org/.

How do small faster browsers get big? Marketing. To counter, big browsers have to block by default and none will (Apple comes closest and is our best ally). They're all beholden.

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

#432
post #335

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…

> When has this actually happened? Germany and France do this regularly for what they consider "hate speech" (for example retweeting newspaper articles about attacks by migrants). Germany has just installed a law that allows imposing multi million EUR fines on companies for repeatedly violating requests to delete user content that violates these fuzzy criteria. There's a huge influx of German users to gab.ai because…

How would this be any different on self hosted platform

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

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> Maciej Cegłowski already recreated the Google AMP demo page

He solved a different problem.

I don't think anybody at AMP claims that fast pages aren't possible. Their claim is that there's a need to enforce certain rules to achieve a certain quality of service.

> teach people how to make their sites faster

In a way, that's what AMP is doing. It picks a subset of HTML5 that can be rendered efficiently, and - for now - uses javascript to fill in the blanks (eg. where desired capabilities are forbidden due to how they're commonly implemented: provide build a polyfill that's better suited) and for enforcement of these rules.

As linked in my parent post, there are already efforts to offload some of these constraints into standards to be enforced by browsers - I fully expect the AAMP scaffolding to let go of that soon after (or revert to shims)

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

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... Can I assume you are doing something about this? Like are you going to buy a farm and start "cultivating rich breadbaskets"? If answer is anything, but: "Yes" followed by a planned date, then you are just blowing out air. It's easy to say "hurdur we used to be close to earth and things were so much better" from your yoga mat using latest MacBook Pro, but unless you are actually getting up at the crack of dawn t…

Yes. No I won't buy a farm, as distant intentional communities seem to inevitably stagnate in isolation. My MacBook is a 2011 MacBook Air. I think you might be pretty interested in how I see the path back. It won't be retreading the path we came in on. And things will be very different when we get there.

Don't be lame with the Facebook tease. Tell us or don't, and for the record, I am interested.

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

#435
post #143
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website in a box (docker), put it wherever. This might be a good idea.

Why would my mother do that instead of just using Facebook which is already there and already had all of her friends and family on it?

She wouldn't. But there are many people who don't like Facebook for privacy reasons or other reasons mentioned in this sub-thread. They might opt for such a service. And then it would grow organically if the experience/total package really was more in line what people want out of a web presence. Its not like the whole world would switch overnight

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

#436

I've seen a lot of good comments on this page, but we really need to start looking at the problem from a customer's point of view. Why should the end user care about this problem? Have you heard your non-entreprenuer/engineer friends or others online complain about this problem? If the answer to above two questions is Negative, then the problem/pain point simply is not large enough to fix. And, as a potential success…

This thread provides a wide enough sample population of people who have a problem with these services. Additionally, this population is getting bigger. I do hear friends and family concerned about facebook -even in the early days. Does grandma care? no. She doesn't need to. We just need to create replacements for these services that replace the need to use them (facebook and google for instance) to 100% satisfaction for those interested. Then we can worry about growing them. We don't need to worry about the entirety of mankind... yet. Startups 101

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

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I tried not to make value judgement in my comment, because, well, I don't really know wether this whole thing is good or bad. I'm just observing the phenomena - seems like confluence of power is unavoidable, a law of nature if you will, so it would have gotten to this regardless. The fact that billions of people can do something they couldn't do before is commendable, but it also raises the bar for everyone - just li…

I think what good we have now is that there is more information access parity. Note I specified 'access', not true information parity. This is but a single aspect of what transformation would be required for there to be true equality that is self-sustaining and antifragile. I can access most information that I truly desire, some with more work than others, but the information ecosystem I live in is vastly different than the one that, say, Mark Zuckerberg lives in. There are numerous different information ecosystems, and certainly some class inequality separating many of them. I could go on, but as I typed this I realized I agree with some of your analysis, but I see it from a different slant. I think confluence of power is inevitable, but a weak point in the armor of that power has developed due to these technologies. Those at the top know this, but are also simultaneously using new tools much more powerful and more effectively than the masses know, so are comfortable with the weak point right now. I do not think as things stand that inequality would ever be addressed, but I do think we live in a time where there are possible chains of events moving forward that could disassemble that armor in ways that are only imagination right now.

Do you find yourself an active participant in any of this, or more of a passive observer?

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

#438
post #261

Me? I don't use Facebook. I consider Google evil and harmful and avoid them. On my phone I run my own apps, and apps from F-Droid - I don't even register with Google. I have a shit-list of companies I will never work for (Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon and every Government entity anywhere in the world). I browse the net from VM's with specific purposes (one for HN). I use Tor for most browsing, including re…

That's great and all, but ignores the bigger picture of our world and current society. You have developed this for yourself, but it's pretty much meaningless if you're​ not actively putting time and energy towards addressing the more fundamental social, political, or technological issues that have created these problems and forced you to do all that in the first place. You need to have a more nuanced view than "those that choose" and "those that don't".

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

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. No I won't buy a farm, as distant intentional communities seem to inevitably stagnate in isolation. My MacBook is a 2011 MacBook Air. I think you might be pretty interested in how I see the path back. It won't be retreading the path we came in on. And things will be very different when we get there.

Don't be lame with the Facebook tease. Tell us or don't, and for the record, I am interested.

I think we'll implement the basic functions of capitalism in software, and learn to use them on a smaller and smaller scale, to the point where you could issue a bond to buy a burrito and sell your burrito farts, someone else could buy the bond, the burrito gets eaten, and dividends paid in the span of an hour.

As that technology diffuses, large corporations will lose their competitive advantage over individuals, and we'll switch over to voluntary contracts for all commerce, instead of coercive employment and property regimes. There will rarely be a time when you think "well, this deal isn't great but I don't have a lot of other choices". You'll be able to just decompose the deal and bid out its parts to an effectively infinite network of contractors, and bond it out in tiny increments. Any business plan which makes sense will be immediately implementable.

Simultaneous with this, we will also develop softwares for other political organizations besides capitalism, including communism, monarchism, fascism, etc, which we will all participate in voluntarily in the same way. Anarcho-syndicalism will be notable among these, because it is the only one with a mechanical basis in consent and a morality grounded in self-defense.

In this new regime, where people are no longer dependent on large cultural institutions for basic sustenance, consent will become a much more valuable marketing tool. People won't be used to being pushed around, so pull-based institutions will start to work better. Anarcho-syndicalism will have a powerful advantage in this market, and people will shift over to using it for most of their daily transactions. These will have to be mirrored with capital-based accounting in order to be legal in capitalist states, but the actual people involved will think less and less in terms of capital. You will come to my bakery and ask for some bread, and depending on the rules of the syndicate, I'll give it to you. In the background AIs will note a "sale", a bond if necessary, and file tax forms, but you and I won't look at them. Anarcho-syndicalism will be how we make decisions, capitalism will just be an accounting method required to not be put in jail for illegal distribution of bread.

Eventually the capital accounting will be ignored for most things, certainly basic healthcare concerns like housing, food, mental health, maintenance of sacred lands, etc. The capital contracts will still be used in the entertainment industry, which will make up the vast majority of GDP. And even within that industry, corporations will be a minority. Most work will happen inside small partnerships of 2-10 people who are working directly together, said partnerships also contracting out to the individuals as sole proprietors. Full time employment will be extremely rare.

The economics of this are based on the presumption that human health is inherently valuable, so bonding it is no problem.

In this way capitalism will "die", still existing but no longer being a central conduit of resources and power.

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