How about moving away from free services and demanding security, privacy, and customer support. Change our attitudes so we are not willing to be the product any more.
Towards a world without Facebook
21–30 of 164 posts
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#22Why should decentralization equal blockchain? I didn't quite get the idea. Decentralization for social networks was proposed a long time ago. The problem is not in application of it, but in the fact that good social networks aren't supposed to be commercial. And that means someone should invest volunteer time to advance them.
Diaspora grew over the years, and it's still growing. But the growth is slow.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#23I 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...
Couldn't the indelible blockchain-embedded data be pointers to data hosted elsewhere? If the externally hosted data is "forgotten", the blockchain-verified pointers would be useless.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#24I 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...
Couldn't the indelible blockchain-embedded data be pointers to data hosted elsewhere? If the externally hosted data is "forgotten", the blockchain-verified pointers would be useless.
Why?
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#25The 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…
When people propose blockchain solutions, I always think: How would it work with just a regular database? How would a blockchain make it better? What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whoever would run the database?
There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#26After 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.
I upvoted you. What gets down voted on HN no longer makes sense to me. You make a really good point alluding to the direction our society is heading. I think a world where everything is digital and behind a "veil" of keyboard and monitors is a dangerous one. We need to make sure we don't lose touch with the reality that is the physical world so we don't live 100% online. All I see these days are groups of teenagers standing together looking at their phones...it's fucking terrible.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#27The 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…
AOL had pretty much the same moat, so there is hope that Facebook can be dethroned.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#28I 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.
Then sign up on a Mastodon instance, make some new friends, and set up a cross-poster.
Edit: I'm getting down-voted - let me expand ... I've set up a Mastodon account, started to integrate, and made new connections. I've also set up a cross-poster, so I can work on either, and I'm finding that my more valuable connections are also migrating to Mastodon. So although it's playing the long game, that's a strategy.
If you don't start, it will never happen.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#29How about moving away from free services and demanding security, privacy, and customer support. Change our attitudes so we are not willing to be the product any more.
So basically we pay $1 a year instead of giving facebook all our our information?
That might sound reasonable but unfortunately most would probably not pay the $1 even if it was revealed that FB had video of all its users 24/7 since 2008.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#30I 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...
Couldn't the indelible blockchain-embedded data be pointers to data hosted elsewhere? If the externally hosted data is "forgotten", the blockchain-verified pointers would be useless.
IPFS. There are multiple projects in this space.