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Towards a world without Facebook

techcrunch.com

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Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#91

Post by remir »

ams6110 wrote: post #31
eyeareque wrote: post #9

After 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'm not sure I can imagine the perspective of the generation that has grown up with social media for their entire memory. I was in my mid to late twenties before having a mobile phone began to become a routine thing. I myself didn't have one until I was in my thirties. I have always lived in a world without Facebook, because I never started using it. I seem to get along just fine. Not sure what all the fuss is about.

I guess it's about the dopamine rush of the always flowing new content and never ending notifications.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#92

Post by asabjorn »

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…

A moat is only useful if the project serves its purpose well. The question I ask myself is how a product that so demonstrably[1] makes people unhappier the more they use it can be sustainable. What problem does Facebook cure?

The engagement loops trigger behavioral patterns that are supposed to encourage healthy relationships, but in this case it pulls us into a low-fidelity world of screens that pulls us away from enjoying the moment together with people that actually chose to be there in real life with us.

The endless feeds are arguably even more destructive as it removes the natural stopping point and the small moments of boredom where our minds get a chance to be creative instead of just consuming.

Maybe real life has a moat that is stronger than Facebooks network? I believe all need people that are offended when we don't hang out often enough more than Facebook likes and pretty pictures, so if the choice is between the two ....

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-u...

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#93

Post by TimJRobinson »

wellboy wrote: post #67

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.

Yes! After reading the Nano whitepaper a few months ago I realized it could be a protocol for a general, free, scaleable social network. I've been prototyping and designing it for the past few months. You don't need to increase the transaction data size, just make the transactions pointers to the data which lives somewhere else like IPFS or S3, keep the chains small.

However a week ago I discovered scuttlebutt.nz who also had the same idea, about a year before me, and already had a working useable app. So I've been using it and will probably be hacking on this for a while and see how I could incorporate some of the ideas I came up with prototyping my own network.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#94

Post by zerostar07 »

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…

> requires a lot of resources

That doesn't like a problem that is hard to solve. Any website that will have the growth of facebook can invent solutions along the way.

> polishing up the UX to what the masses have come to expect

I rarely visit facebook but i don't think it's particularly good UX. Tiny Links all over the place, you can barely follow a conversation without getting distracted.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#95

Post by calibas »

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...

I have friends who are almost religious about the "virtues of blockchain", but have little to no understanding of how it actually works. There seems to be this idea that adding blockchain to any existing technology will magically make it better.

I'm all for blockchain technology, but it's not the solution to everything. It's great when you want relatively immutable, decentralized record keeping.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#96

Post by tunesmith »

For me the trinity is facebook, twitter, and slack, so I've started figuring out how to replace them all at once.

So far riot/matrix seems like it pretty much strictly dominates slack and discord, at least for my purposes.

I know some facebook friends who have started using slack as a way to keep in touch with strong-tie friends, as a way to rely less on facebook and facebook messenger. So riot/matrix could reduce my reliance on facebook in some ways, too.

I haven't tried it out yet, but it seems mastodon is the most likely twitter replacement. Twitter has sucked for me starting about six months ago when things got algorithmic, it totally screwed up my curation.

As for the rest of facebook... I don't know. I was reading this thing about addiction, and how the bitch of addiction is that not only is it the thing you're addicted to, but it is also the thing that makes it harder to kick the addiction. (In the case of a substance, it hacks your brain to make it more difficult to resist impulse/urge.) Seems like something of a parallel, in how using facebook makes it harder to leave. The only path out in those cases is to take slow incremental steps that make it easier to resist over time. So, carving out the pieces of facebook that are important to you. For me that might be a public blog to share my thoughts, an email list, actually gathering email addresses and phone numbers for people on facebook I might want to stay in touch with, etc. Although I still want to check out Disapora and Scuttlebutt... and I don't know if ActivityPub is relevant here.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#97

Post by zaphod4prez »

sumeno wrote: post #55
ams6110 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I can imagine the perspective of the generation that has grown up with social media for their entire memory. I was in my mid to late twenties before having a mobile phone began to become a routine thing. I myself didn't have one until I was in my thirties. I have always lived in a world without Facebook, because I never started using it. I seem to get along just fine. Not sure what all the fuss is about.

Those kids these days with their new fangled gadgets and social media. In my day we walked two miles uphill each way to share pictures of cats with our friends.

I'm confused about why you're dismissive of this person pointing out a very real and interesting situation...not a unique one, but intergenerational gaps in beliefs/lifestyle/socialization/etc is a pretty fundamental challenge throughout the modern world, and the gap caused by iphone/facebook/whatever is a particularly concerning and current one.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#98

Post by nordsieck »

asabjorn wrote: post #92
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…

A moat is only useful if the project serves its purpose well. The question I ask myself is how a product that so demonstrably[1] makes people unhappier the more they use it can be sustainable. What problem does Facebook cure? The engagement loops trigger behavioral patterns that are supposed to encourage healthy relationships, but in this case it pulls us into a low-fidelity world of screens that pulls us away from e…

Despite the title of the article, it doesn't show that Facebook use makes people unhappy - merely that it is correlated with unhappiness.

> A moat is only useful if the project serves its purpose well.

It's not clear to me that the purpose of Facebook is to make people happy. Instead, I think it's purpose is to be an low friction way to keep connected to lots of people. It seems to fulfill that purpose quite well.

That people are uncomfortable with boredom is not an inditement of the balm with which they sooth themselves.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#99

Post by remir »

beamatronic wrote: post #21

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.

Before they were acquired by FB, WhatsApp charged like 1$ per year for the service. Since they were mobile-first and most people had entered their credit card info to join the App Store/Play Store, the transaction was friction-less for users.

I thought that was genius.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#100

Post by fabianhjr »

baggachipz wrote: post #90
TimJRobinson wrote: post #81

This already exists. It's called scuttlebutt and it's awesome. No coin or ICO involved, just a bunch of smart programmers solving hard problems. The best bit is you can use it with just an app, you don't need to setup your own sever or trust someone else's to host your content like every other decentralized social network I've seen.

From what I see, last commit was a year ago and that was just to bump the version number. Is more work being done on this? It looks interesting. edit never mind, I was looking at https://github.com/dominictarr/scuttlebutt

Still very active: https://github.com/ssbc/
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