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$1M to build decentralized social networks

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Re: $1M to build decentralized social networks

#121

Post by jessaustin »

kodablah wrote: post #120
jessaustin wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can share those tags (and why not?), now you have decentralized "authorities" for names. "Squatting" is only a problem if someone else can take an identity after I've used it within the service. Squatting on previously-unused-in-the-service IRL identities doesn't matter at all.

> If you can share those tags (and why not?), now you have decentralized "authorities" for names. Until an indexing service becomes a defacto standard, once again making it centralized. This is what I meant about federation (i.e. sharing your name lists) gravitating towards centralization. > Squatting on previously-unused-in-the-service IRL identities doesn't matter at all. It does when I can register thousands and t…

There isn't a point to generating thousands and thousands of UUIDs, but it's only the UUIDs that need to be reserved after use. The human-readable names needn't be universal. If too many of your tags point to squatters, then no one will want to share them.

Re: $1M to build decentralized social networks

#122

Post by TaylorAlexander »

newscracker wrote: post #44
fein wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now my most social sites are YouTube and reddit So out of the fire, and into the frying pan.

I thought this was weird too, because both YouTube and reddit are quite addictive, just like Facebook. YouTube's recommendations are an endless pit of wasted time unless one takes care to view only a small, curated set of channels with daily time limits. As for reddit, it's quite noisy (like Twitter) and attracts a lot of what I consider low value comments and posts (the kinds that are discouraged on HN and get ruthl…

On YouTube and reddit I am a “content creator” and my specialty is 3D printed robots. I am good at what I do and people appreciate it, so I don’t get a lot of trolls. Also it’s all open source so people tend to just really appreciate my posts!

Re: $1M to build decentralized social networks

#123

Post by krapp »

dcbadacd wrote: post #109
krapp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've said this before, the only data an user should have the right to remove should have no value to someone else. >I absolutely hate reddit threads filled with "[deleted]", people deleting their Mediafire accounts, picture hosts removing infrequently fetched images and so on and on. I disagree - the right of users to assert control over their identity and data supersedes your desire to control or use that data for…

> the right of users to assert control over their identity and data supersedes your desire to control or use that data for your own purposes The right of users to assert control over their identity is different from the control over all of the data the user put online. Your right to your data should end with my right to my data. As I said, data deletion is so often damaging it's ridiculous. > or your desire to have t…

>The right of users to assert control over their identity is different from the control over all of the data the user put online.

I don't believe it is - the data you put online is your online identity, for better or worse. Control of one is control of the other, especially when it comes to social media, which often has the mediation and sale of that identity as part of its business model.

>Please don't twist my words, I never said that.

To me, that's implied in the belief that deletion is harmful and needs to be managed. If that misrepresents your views, I apologize.

But a lot of people do seem to have the concern lately that things like the "right to be forgotten" are a threat to data archiving and the public record, and they're right, but... that doesn't matter. That's the web working as intended, it's meant to be stateless and ephemeral by design. Link rot, unfortunate as it is, is a feature, not a bug.

>Over time I've accumulated access to various collections of images of for example events that have happened in the past. I made those pictures, I shared them, I have control over them, do you think it's right I now go around and wipe them?

Yes, if you want to, I think it's entirely your right. Why should you have the right to add data to a service, but not to delete it if you choose? Particularly when those services claim an arbitrary right to do so themselves?

Mind you, I'm not saying you have the right to delete it everywhere, because that's infeasible, but you should have the right to delete what you published from whatever service you published to.

Re: $1M to build decentralized social networks

#125

Post by rplst8 »

muneeb wrote: post #29
rplst8 wrote: post #17

They want it built on their tech here: https://blockstack.org/ . "New Internet" aye? Is this an based on an episode of Silicon Valley ?

Muneeb Ali, Blockstack co-founder here. I'm a technical consultant to the Silicon Valley show (season 5) along with my co-founder Ryan. So yes there is a link to the show but the project is not based on the show :-) Blockstack was in the R&D phase until early 2017 (building the core tech & infrastructure), we launched our browser last summer and now have decentralized apps built on the platform that are live. These a…

Wow, that's cool. I sincerely wish you the best of luck. I've long thought that a distributed, decentralized Internet (more the backbone and last mile replacement) could be a powerful and game changing thing.

Re: $1M to build decentralized social networks

#126

Post by mayniac »

swsieber wrote: post #53
onion2k wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody needs a social network anymore This sort of comment is why people in tech are very often seen as being incredibly bad at solving non-trivial social problems by people outside of our industry. Somewhere between a third and a half of all the people on Earth see enough value in social networks to use one regularly. There are plenty of problems with the way networks work, and what they do to our mental health, but…

Somewhere between a third and a half of all the people on Earth see enough value in social networks to have signed up for one at some point . Somewhere between a third and a half of all the people on Earth use a product designed to addict them . I agree in general though - they can be useful, and they can fill a real purpose.

I think a better argument is that between a third and a half of all people on Earth see enough value in some elements of social networks to sign up for them.

A lot of people I know only use Facebook for messenger. Some only use it for private groups. Some for events. Some for the newsfeed. Those people use twitter, instagram, whatsapp, snapchat, or discord for the features they don't use on Facebook.

IMO instead of looking for a service which could distribute the back-end servers of a single social network we should be encouraging the distribution of features, and make sure they can interact with each other smoothly.

Re: $1M to build decentralized social networks

#127

Post by onion2k »

swsieber wrote: post #53
onion2k wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody needs a social network anymore This sort of comment is why people in tech are very often seen as being incredibly bad at solving non-trivial social problems by people outside of our industry. Somewhere between a third and a half of all the people on Earth see enough value in social networks to use one regularly. There are plenty of problems with the way networks work, and what they do to our mental health, but…

Somewhere between a third and a half of all the people on Earth see enough value in social networks to have signed up for one at some point . Somewhere between a third and a half of all the people on Earth use a product designed to addict them . I agree in general though - they can be useful, and they can fill a real purpose.

Somewhere between a third and a half of all the people on Earth see enough value in social networks to have signed up for one at some point.

I was referring to daily- and monthly-active-users numbers. That's people who sign in and interact with their accounts at least once a day or a month respectively. Those are the important numbers, and they're a fairly accurate representative of the number of people who currently use social media. I think it's fair to say people who stop seeing any positive value in their accounts stop being monthly active users.

Re: $1M to build decentralized social networks

#128

Post by trumped »

raimue wrote: post #116
trumped wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But for places like Reddit and Hackernews, it might help prevent content from being censored

On the other hand, it might also make it impossible to moderate the content.

the voting system could address that...

Re: $1M to build decentralized social networks

#129

Post by raimue »

trumped wrote: post #128
raimue wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, it might also make it impossible to moderate the content.

the voting system could address that...

Moderation is not only about voting. The titles of submissions are regularly edited, for example to add year numbers to add context when an article was published.

Of course such edits could be stored in new blocks with the information to replace the title of previous blocks. However, it would not be possible to delete any content.

Re: $1M to build decentralized social networks

#130

Post by trumped »

raimue wrote: post #129
trumped wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the voting system could address that...

Moderation is not only about voting. The titles of submissions are regularly edited, for example to add year numbers to add context when an article was published. Of course such edits could be stored in new blocks with the information to replace the title of previous blocks. However, it would not be possible to delete any content.

So you answered your own question... just don't look at the blocks that are marked as "outdated/spam/etc" if you don't want to (but history would still be preserved)
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