What did I just read
A cryptocurrency ad disguised as "a world without Facebook".
Towards a world without Facebook
11–20 of 164 posts
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#12I have no idea how blockchain helps social media. If my details, my posts or other "my thing" end up in one they're indelible, no? So how does that help me exercise my right to be forgotten? Besides the perf question of syncing blockchains, or the design hit of federating them, or apportioning by some yet-to-be-defined traffic/post/data taxonomy...
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#13A fundamental distinction needs to be made between blockchain-based and non-blockchain-based decentralized services. Blockchains are insanely ambitious, century-scale, state-killing, finance-replacing behemoths. WE DON'T NEED ANY OF THAT STUFF TO REPLACE FACEBOOK! You're exploding the problem way out of scope, and constant focus on blockchains seems almost like a false flag to demotivize people who just want to build decentralized alternatives to Facebook, which is already an astoundingly huge problem.
Stop trying to put blockchains in web decentralized systems. They're not going to work for several more decades. All we need to do to kill Facebook is solve the self-hosting P2P UX problem, and create a W3C-like body that allows developers to participate in standards creation process for how we schematize common social data. That's it. Once everyone is running a federated node in the cloud or in their basement, then you can go back to doing blockchain stuff.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#14After ditichong Facebook long ago it seems amusing to me that people have such a connection with it and find it hard to leave. Sure it may seem hard at first. But your true friends will not lose contact with you. You might not know random life events about your seldom communicated with old high school peers though.
How will I know if my college roommates got fat though?
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#15I was thinking about this a few months ago. I stopped though because I realized most user content (well in my network at least) was photos and video. Which don't belong in a block chain. In fact if you really start to unroll the implentation, a block chain is t even required. I think we just need a common protocol. Then multiple "vendors" can host the information (encrypted so they can't read it), and multiple "vendo…
That sounds like what the folks at Mastodon are trying to do. On the surface they seem to have decent implementations. But every time I think about signing up to an instance, I realise that all the friends I care about (in the social media sense) are on Facebook. It becomes a non-starter for me. The value of Facebook is the social graph, and we put up with it's shortcomings because of that.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#16How about starting by just having a good, open source social platform for the Web, like Wordpress is for blogs. Wordpress is used to host 20% of all new websites.
Meanwhile, to post a comment on TechCrunch, I had to register yet another account with yet another password, and after that the comment I was writing was lost (despite the site saying it will save it). And then I still couldn't post it on a mobile phone!
This is 2018, and you can see how the state of decentralized social networking sucks. I made a video about it:
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#17The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts. For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online pu…
My 90 year old grandpa still uses my late grandmother's AOL account and is afraid to stop paying the monthly service. He doesn't use Facebook mostly only FWD:FWD:FWD emails.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#18Facebook capitalised by being in the right place at the right time, a time when the internet was opened to the non-tech savy, the "regular" world spilled into what was already a social experience. This is why Facebook now has the moniker of the "mom" platform. Technology like blockchain might free the business model from having to generate revenue and better align the experaince.
But I have an easier time believing people will just dump social media than some Utopian public social ledger is going to solve what is essentially a psychological shitfest.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#19The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts. For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online pu…
You're right, this is a weird article with a bizarre solution. Throwing obscure technology at a simple human problem is not the solution here. Facebook simply made social communication easier for the average Joes, and in the quest to do so became a monster. IRC/AIM/MSN/Gmail before that, and Snapchat/Slack after that shows that humans just want to communicate about silly things.
Whatever comes next needs to solve the problem to share the silly tidbits, without the greed to turn the users into a data farm.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#20The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts. For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online pu…
I think you're downplaying the technical sophistication of Facebook, as well as the pioneering moves it made during its growth phase. Compared to MySpace, which was incumbent during its rise, Facebook did everything faster, with less friction for the everyday user. MySpace would often try and stuff full interstitial page loads between core parts of its user interface.
Facebook invented photos tagged with social profiles. Facebook invented the one-column social news feed. Since going public, Facebook's ad platform has remained at the forefront of useful and powerful online services. You can target users by interest, worldwide location, age, and more. It is an elegant platform that has been mishandled by aloof executies.