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Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

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Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#101

Post by turk184 »

cookiecaper wrote: post #27
justinmk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A distributed web with many small nodes would still be hard to control and police effectively. I would guess that today's distributed web (IPFS, etc.) has more content, and users, than the "wild web" of 1992 or whatever era you fondly recollect. Yes, centralized players created tools that produced exponentially more content (and control). But it's lazy to blame that peripheral phenomenon for a perceived "loss". The…

IPFS is stopped by its insistence on things that are considered anti-features by non-cryptopunks, like immutability. There's a lot of promise behind the "distributed web" or "P2P web" prototypes, but they haven't been effectively commoditized, and their value proposition over the top-level "spyweb" isn't strong enough for normal users who don't understand the inner workings. In fact, they tend to offer less end-user…

You don't get it--the next step in the evolution is something so completely decentralized that it can't be controlled at all. I'm talking about small devices placed in key locations that broadcast and forward data at fairly low bandwidth. Because there is no future for the all-censorship-all-the-time Internet and it's not going to look like the one we have today.

What most pisses me off is that US tech companies are helping the Chinese enslave their own people. No ethics.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#102

Post by indigochill »

kayoone wrote: post #81
mirimir wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The wild Internet is definitely still there. It was there before Eternal September. And yes, it's still there, and far richer than it's ever been. > The problem is that it got too hostile for most users due to spam, viruses, malware, phishing, trolls, doxing, and so on. It's arguably those mainstream users who are problematic. In large part, they're the trolls. And the ones who are trolled, of course. And they're t…

> It's arguably those mainstream users who are problematic That sounds a bit ignorant. Those mainstream users are the vast majority, they make a lot of internet business models worthwhile and made the internet the success that it is. Of course they also attract sharks as you rightfully say, but we should try to improve their experiences instead of denying them any sense or intelligence and putting them in walled gard…

I'm curious what you propose to improve their experiences.

I think you need walled gardens for mainstream users. The reason is that the weakest link in any security system is people. Especially normal, pleasant, trusting, non-confrontational people. People like my grandparents, who just install whatever a guy who claims to be tech support tells them to install.

Should people like my grandparents have a good experience on the internet? Absolutely. Can they have it without taking away all their freedom to make mistakes? I don't see how. Any freedom we give them will be exploited by the sharks. Education is a good thing which can make them more shark-resistant, but not everyone will take it upon themselves to be educated.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#103

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

CaptSpify wrote: post #71
privaroonie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the early days of the web, I always wanted an easy way to have a personal "presence" online, to stay in touch with friends and have a sort of virtual "contact list". Friendster (in its original incantation) was probably the best realization of that. I'd say that sort of thing was more or less needed & inevitable, at least at the time. Facebook originally started as a "better" version Friendster (and its succe…

How do things like blogs and rss feeds not fill this gap? Is it simply ease of setup/use?

Most users apparently aren’t tech-savvy enough to use an RSS reader that requires manually adding feeds. It has been noted how the demise of Google Reader played a major role in the demise of blogs overall, since so many of those following blogs could only use that one single portal.

Today, plenty of blogs still offer RSS feeds, but without Google Reader around to easily allow people to subscribe to them, they just aren’t being used as much. Also, because nowadays blog owners feel such pressure to monetize, RSS feeds tend to be hidden and discouraged because they could allow users to read content without viewing advertisements. I know one cranky and avaricious blog owner who will automatically ban you from his site if you point out that the site has an RSS feed.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#104

Post by chasd00 »

the web is still as wild as you want, if you hate facebook then write a better facebook. That use to be how it worked, not sure what changed. Maybe people just aren't as creative as they use to be.

When i was single and had free time public IPs were golden because then you could run a webserver and DNS and once you've registered a domain name you could get whatever you wanted out on the web.

I can get a public IP, server, and DNS for basically free now with a few clicks. If something sucks and you think it could be better than go do it and let the world be the judge. The web is more accesible now than ever.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#105

Post by driverdan »

rdtsc wrote: post #72
driverdan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least this should ring a bell to all those who still think they can write anything on FB about a Government and get away with it. They should be able to. Free speech is a human right. FB should not be helping governments violate human rights. > This reiterates the capitalist world that we live in where Democracy is just a myth. Those are two different things.

> Free speech is a human right. FB should not be helping governments violate human rights. I think it is usually framed in as a human right against government intervention. That is the government can't shut you up if you want to criticize it. However FB is not the government. FB can stop and censor people because it is a private entity. Nobody has a right to use FB's resources (server time, bandwidth) for free to say…

While you raise some interesting discussion points about 3rd parties that's not what I was referring to. FB can have whatever internal content guidelines they want, independent of governments. What I'm talking about is creating tools that allow oppressive governments to violate human rights.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#106

Post by jasode »

CaptSpify wrote: post #71
privaroonie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the early days of the web, I always wanted an easy way to have a personal "presence" online, to stay in touch with friends and have a sort of virtual "contact list". Friendster (in its original incantation) was probably the best realization of that. I'd say that sort of thing was more or less needed & inevitable, at least at the time. Facebook originally started as a "better" version Friendster (and its succe…

How do things like blogs and rss feeds not fill this gap? Is it simply ease of setup/use?

>How do things like blogs and rss feeds not fill this gap?

Things like a standard WordPress/Geocities blog or RSS feed do not have an address book or shared group calendar.

Also, think about the "record locator" for a WordPress site or RSS: it's a _url_. In contrast, the "record locator" for Facebook friends is a [person's real name] or [phone number] or [email address].

It should be obvious that the ramifications of those differences are profound.

E.g. a new user signs up for Facebook, then uploads her contact listing, and then instantly sees suggested contacts including family members, coworkers, old high school & college buddies.

Yes, the sign up steps for Facebook is easier than WordPress but beyond that, the social dynamics of discovering other accounts and sharing are more optimized for the typical ~2 billion users.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#107

Post by iamatworknow »

659087 wrote: post #86
tluyben2 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think so; not because it is so great but because it's more 'cheap tv' for people. Just stare at videos and how great your 'friends' are doing. Hype yourself up and feel your did something today as you wrote something or posted something and got more than your own like. My contacts are 90% people I know well and see regularly (a lot of them smart people) and yet my timeline feels fake and plastic; it is just easy wa…

> only use messenger and occasionally upvote someone's birthday If someone means little enough to you that this is how you wish them a happy birthday, maybe you shouldn't bother at all. If they mean something to you, pick up a phone and call them. All you're accomplishing, is helping Facebook encourage that person to continue using it by giving them that little dopamine hit from your "upvote". If people looked at Fac…

Removing my birthday from facebook a few years back was a very enlightening experience. I went from ~100 people wishing me a happy birthday to probably 5.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#108

Post by mirimir »

mirimir wrote: post #90
wickawic wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And many didn't. Weasel words abound.

Do you deny that commercialization of the Internet in the mid 1990s was controversial?

OK, I gotta repeat this dead comment, because it's so good:

> Incredibly so. But I have realized that the large majority of Internet users today have no point of reference to that time because they were either not alive, where very small children, or weren't paying any attention to what was going on. But for a brief time, humanity was being uplifted instead of being loaded onto digital cattle cars. There truly is a threat here--technocracy is turning America into a gulag and it needs to stop. No, I am not kidding. It's not just the Internet, it's all the companies collecting massive data "to better serve us" that are creating the . chains.

> I'm just glad I experienced that early period. Sunsite at UNC was the greatest. There were many true humanitarians back then. Today, we have the growing evil of Google and the Never-Was-Anything-But-Evil Facebook!

Yeah, it's been very sad to see possibility crushed, and people pervasively surveilled and manipulated.

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#109

Post by StavrosK »

throwanem wrote: post #97
StavrosK wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing stops it, I guess it's just that nobody has bothered to make one yet. It's works exactly as you describe, though, pretty simple.

https://www.ghacks.net/2016/05/23/install-google-chrome-exte... might be worth a look. Haven't tried it, but the claim is that it mechanically transforms Chrome extension metadata and containers into Firefox's formats, and supports automatic signing via AMO for permanent installation. Assuming that, the rest should Just Work modulo possibly still incomplete WebEx API support in Firefox. If you try it, I wouldn't mind…

Holy hell, it just worked! That's amazing, thank you for that. I bet it helps that the extension is just redirecting and collecting stats, but everything seems to work fine!

Re: Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein in a Wild Web

#110

Post by throwanem »

StavrosK wrote: post #109
throwanem wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.ghacks.net/2016/05/23/install-google-chrome-exte... might be worth a look. Haven't tried it, but the claim is that it mechanically transforms Chrome extension metadata and containers into Firefox's formats, and supports automatic signing via AMO for permanent installation. Assuming that, the rest should Just Work modulo possibly still incomplete WebEx API support in Firefox. If you try it, I wouldn't mind…

Holy hell, it just worked! That's amazing, thank you for that. I bet it helps that the extension is just redirecting and collecting stats, but everything seems to work fine!

That's great to hear! Most welcome, and glad to know there's a plausible option - with the rapid deprecation of the old API, this might save a lot of time. (I can't rely on replacing all my old extensions with shell oneliners, after all...)
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