Towards a world without Facebook • Hacker News Board

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#61

Post by sumeno » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:27 PM UTC

tammer wrote: post #47

The blockchain is a potential solution. But deep down I have high expectations for IPFS — I think a workable, usable alternative for Facebook there could be the beginning of a real movement towards a decentralized Internet. Also, for anyone in this space: the Facebook killer app is Events. I can share photos & statuses in myriad ways, but I truly only have one way to access a complete events calendar for my city, org…

Facebook's killer feature is the people, not anything else. Everything else is worthless without people and nobody is going to unseat Facebook with some technological solution unless they can convince people to use it and make it dead simple to use.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#62

Post by ballenarosada » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:30 PM UTC

jjguy wrote: post #46

For those of you who read this article and believe there may be a thread of a good idea within, go read Neuromancer. Gibson had a vision of an Internet with decentralized social media, including decentralized code execution, 35 years ago, and we have not yet realized it - or anything remotely close.

Gibson's cyberspace is a terrifying place where corporations, who execute total control over financial reality, operate centralized computer systems powerful enough to fry a human mind. It's not about a decentralized execution model.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#63

Post by bitL » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:31 PM UTC

Zee2 wrote: post #23

Spearchucker wrote: post #12

I 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.

Blockchain doesn't store data themselves. We would end up with petabytes of new blockchain data every day otherwise.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#64

Post by viach » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:33 PM UTC

But blockchain means all the information is public. So, author thinks it's better to just publish all your stuff by yourself on blockchain than it could be leaked from the evil Facebook's private database?

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#65

Post by Tempest1981 » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:33 PM UTC

danbruc wrote: post #51

Decentralization is a red herring, there is nothing wrong with centralized services, it may actually just add to the problems to overcome. What is wrong is that users are not paying for those services. Well, they are paying for them, but only indirectly via the share of the ad budget included in the price of all the things they buy. That is the core problem, if users would simply pay for the services they use there w…

> if users would simply pay for the services they use there would be no point to track and analyze ... behavior.

Couldn't they make even more profit by doing both? If they find the optimal balance?

I pay for cable TV, and still see lots of ads, so I guess I'm cynical.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#66

Post by sumeno » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:38 PM UTC

ReverseCold wrote: post #56

cornholio wrote: post #5

The 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…

The blockchain can just be used to do PKI. People having cryptocurrency wallets installed means they have a private key, and when people have private keys you can do a whole lot of cool stuff. My blockchain/IoT startup[0] primarily uses the blockchain as just that, a backend for PKI. [0]: https://ethyl.io/

Why does the average Facebook user care?

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#67

Post by wellboy » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

The tech that is proposed in the article sounds a lot like Nano's block lattice, where everyone has their own blockchain.

You could even potentially use it to run this social network by just increasing transaction data size.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#68

Post by Spearchucker » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

tammer wrote: post #47

The blockchain is a potential solution. But deep down I have high expectations for IPFS — I think a workable, usable alternative for Facebook there could be the beginning of a real movement towards a decentralized Internet. Also, for anyone in this space: the Facebook killer app is Events. I can share photos & statuses in myriad ways, but I truly only have one way to access a complete events calendar for my city, org…

IPFS claims to use a blockchain, and that nodes in the directed graph cannot be changed. This means IPFS is of no more than cursory interest to me. I want to be able to curtail and even delete my stuff. When I delete a thing, it must be gone. I don't want a record of it, or that it existed. If I retain a thing privately, I don't want it known publicly that I have it.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#69

Post by wellboy » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #43

The fundamental problem is economic. It's not that Facebook is invulnerable or that it can't be disrupted—of course it can! The reputational risk Facebook is facing is existential, if it reaches a tipping point things could go south very quickly for them. The bigger problem is that making something like Facebook requires a lot of resources. You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of eng…

Given that probably 90% of FBs engineering power was spent on scalability and data mining, it seem more feasible than you make it sound.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#70

Post by Yoric » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #36

tlb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whomever would run the database? No person or company is allowed to own more than 24.9% of a banking charter, and preferably not more than 10%. The reason is that having multiple entities each pursuing their own agenda makes it less likely that everyone will collude and run off with the money. It doesn't especially matter…

> No person or company is allowed to own more than 24.9% of a banking charter, and preferably not more than 10%.

I'm curious, is that a law? From which country?