Because Facebook is free and taxes aren't.
Ask HN: Why are there no public social networks?
41–50 of 69 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are there no public social networks?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens in a country 1/5 the size in population and 1/10 the size economically shouldnt be expected to perform the same on something literally 10x bigger. You likely are much closer to your political representatives than we are. The amount of money flowing into your politicians pockets are less. Here I expect the government contract to be unfavorable to the population at large. I expect the leading politicians t…
USDS and 18F are staffed by confident people from industry. The federal government, when it comes to software, is not as incompetent as you think.
An organization staffed by competent people that reports to people that are neither competent in the relevant domain nor willing to defer to those that are remains, as an organization, incompetent. As USDS and 18F are both in the executive branch entities, their organizational competence is limited by the leadership of executive branch; this is particularly true of USDS, which is in the Executive Office of the President.
Re: Ask HN: Why are there no public social networks?
#43Not a good idea - how would that even be moderated, given that there is always, always, always going to be pushback from politicians and their followers (not necessarily constituents) depending on how the social currents are trending that minute.
Given the constraints of the 1st Amendment in the US, it might not even be possible to moderate a public social network, which would then quickly devolve into something resembling the most excessive wet dreams of 4channers everywhere.
Whatever good might arise would be drowned out by the impulsive emanations of every 14-year old with a passing whim.
Re: Ask HN: Why are there no public social networks?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
The meme that (all) government is terrible at technology is getting tired. It is not necessarily true that a publicly run system will inevitably be crap/inefficient/archaic. A good example is the British gov.uk group, who have made some well thought out, usable and technologically sound systems. Please stop perpetuating this lie. You can, and should expect better of your public digital systems. Don't let them use "Pu…
What happens in a country 1/5 the size in population and 1/10 the size economically shouldnt be expected to perform the same on something literally 10x bigger. You likely are much closer to your political representatives than we are. The amount of money flowing into your politicians pockets are less. Here I expect the government contract to be unfavorable to the population at large. I expect the leading politicians t…
In the UK, voters are a fair bit closer to MPs than people in the US (where I currently live) are to their congress representatives. Though much much further from Members of the House of Lords than from Senators. However there is a complete missing segment of local politics that exists in the US, and that has good engagement, that is much less powerful/engaging in the UK (State and city level, compared to County/city Councils)
Comparing like for like in size and budget, shouldn't the larger states, eg Texas and California have good state level systems. And then the slightly small, but still well funded ones (such as Florida and New York) should have better systems?? I'm assuming that there is a lower limit for the system quality/population size trade off, where it stops being beneficial.
There are also some parts of the US government that have pretty good systems as far as I'm aware, in the military and security.
"The amount of money flowing into your politicians pockets are less." This is absolutely true, the amount of corruption in US politics is astounding.
I disagree that just being bigger leads to worse technology and systems. There are numerous, different reasons they are bad, and this is not directly linked to the size.
Re: Ask HN: Why are there no public social networks?
#45I'm assuming you mean available to the general public, run by the government? There probably are smaller, niche social networks for gov employees to collaborate. If there aren't there probably should be. But to answer the assumed question, it's because there is no practical way they could compete with private companies. Sure, theoretically they could dump tons of money into developing cool new features, slick UIs, an…
The "they'd never develop great features" argument is an interesting one, as I think most social networks can contribute most of their success to the network effect itself. Once that positive feedback loop gets churning, it's hard to turn it around.
Twitter's a neat counterexample here, I think. On the front-end, at least, the features released by Twitter in the last few years haven't left me awestruck. Yet it has become a seemingly self-sustaining space on the internet for public discourse.
Re: Ask HN: Why are there no public social networks?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens in a country 1/5 the size in population and 1/10 the size economically shouldnt be expected to perform the same on something literally 10x bigger. You likely are much closer to your political representatives than we are. The amount of money flowing into your politicians pockets are less. Here I expect the government contract to be unfavorable to the population at large. I expect the leading politicians t…
USDS and 18F are staffed by confident people from industry. The federal government, when it comes to software, is not as incompetent as you think.
This is literally the problem.
Instead of having a department make software, they are supported from a vastly superior group of developers that work temporarily with that department.
Maybe its too much to ask, but shouldnt the company providing the software also employ the talent that is used to make the software?
Re: Ask HN: Why are there no public social networks?
#47So you would rather trust the government instead? They mostly work with private companies to run their IT stuff so at the end of the day your data would end up on some private servers anyway.
That's a false dichotomy - in many countries, there are public institutions that are (somewhat) independent on the government. (In Czech Republic, we have universities, radio and TV station that are run like that.)
It could also be a cooperative, or a non-profit.. there are many models.
Re: Ask HN: Why are there no public social networks?
#48The biggest challenge I see to starting a government run social network (assuming US here) is the free speech issue. While Twitter and FB can censor hate speech, there would be an expensive legal battle over the government doing the same thing.
Re: Ask HN: Why are there no public social networks?
#49Have you ever used a government website? With the exception on gov.uk, they are all god-awful. I suspect lack of talent within the government is one major reason.
Login.gov (SSO for gov services) is quite good. I think they’re modernizing.
Re: Ask HN: Why are there no public social networks?
#50Not sure why you are being downvoted as this is a very interesting question indeed. Social networks tend to kill each other due to network effects as people are flocking to the most used network since there's the largest value for everyone. So having multiple networks might not really work well. It wouldn't have to be several networks though and it doesn't even have to be your own government running it to provide the…
International governments are another version of your Iceland example. A UN-run Twitter?