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Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

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Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#61

Post by atomical »

fredley wrote: post #16

> Yeah, actually, one thing that’s really interesting is that Facebook is not a normal company, in the sense that its valuation when it went public wasn’t based on how much money it made, which is what would normally happen with a business. It actually somehow talked the SEC into creating this other category, where it would be valued based simply on how much it was used, just on user engagement. And I think that was…

I came here to post that too. It doesn't seem to be true. How can the SEC override a P/E ratio that is displayed on almost all financial sites?

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#62

Post by decasia »

athenot wrote: post #57
JepZ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, while I dream the same dream, it feels awkward asking my family and friends to pay 5€ per year so that we can share the cost of running our XMPP-Server. Currently, I pay all the bills and manage the server myself (so no cost/effort for them), and they still keep using WhatsApp with most of their contacts. I don't know what the root of that evil is, but there are undoubtedly multiple factors involved. First of a…

This is all summed up in one word: friction. What the big platforms have done is eliminate friction at all the critical parts, to make it easy for users to onboard, easy to share, easy to grow within the platform, and of course hard to leave. I've been thinking about a low cost but not free platform too. If it ever happens, it will have to be AT LEAST as frictionless and enticing as the existing platforms. The table…

I think this is exactly right. Users expect a really nice, contemporary-feeling UX. And for something that cost money it would have to be above and beyond.

That said, the fact is that the mainstream alternatives are handicapped by their own success and are afraid to change anything of their core features. Starting a new platform would be an opportunity to revisit many of the original design choices, and perhaps one could do surprising new things at that point.

I think the co-operative model is interesting economically as well because as far as I can tell, there are at least some cases where it does work out to be economically stable on a reasonably long term basis (decades anyway), and I presume it changes things a lot, organizationally, if the main goal isn't just "lowest common denominator software for the sake of maximal mass adoption and growth."

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#63

Post by pdog »

decasia wrote: post #7

The thing I keep thinking is that I want to have social software built on a co-operative model (like a food co-op): you all pay some nominal membership fee (could you fund servers and developers on $5/year/user?), and the software would then be developed to fit the agreed-upon needs of the community, without dark patterns or behavior modification projects, openly, and with some kind of community governance (which nee…

Why charge users at all? Social software could be funded entirely by voluntary donations or a small foundation.

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#64

Post by deadbunny »

atomical wrote: post #61
fredley wrote: post #16

> Yeah, actually, one thing that’s really interesting is that Facebook is not a normal company, in the sense that its valuation when it went public wasn’t based on how much money it made, which is what would normally happen with a business. It actually somehow talked the SEC into creating this other category, where it would be valued based simply on how much it was used, just on user engagement. And I think that was…

I came here to post that too. It doesn't seem to be true. How can the SEC override a P/E ratio that is displayed on almost all financial sites?

It can't, he's talking out his arse.

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#65

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

decasia wrote: post #49
dwighttk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's revenue though, right? Parent was asking about cost. This network would have no ad revenue.

Yeah, from the perspective of starting something cooperatively funded from scratch, I think it's basically about "what would it cost to get something running and keep it worth using," balanced against "what would people actually be willing to pay?" In my dreams, if the price point were low enough, like "the cost of two coffees per year" or something, and it wasn't irritating to pay it, there are plenty of people who…

The issue isn't often the cost but payment friction.

When I started using privacy.com, I found it a lot easier to fund stuff because it was frictionless to generate a CC and drop it into a payment form automatically.

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#66

Post by tomjen3 »

decasia wrote: post #7

The thing I keep thinking is that I want to have social software built on a co-operative model (like a food co-op): you all pay some nominal membership fee (could you fund servers and developers on $5/year/user?), and the software would then be developed to fit the agreed-upon needs of the community, without dark patterns or behavior modification projects, openly, and with some kind of community governance (which nee…

If you could get the users together that model could work, but you still run into the winner takes all problem with social networks: nobody likes Facebook, but that is where all your friends are.

Of course, for some communities the value is that all your friends aren't there, but in general even if I was willing to pay for that service (and it would probably have to be 5 usd/month, not per year due to scale) most of the people I know wouldn't be willing to pay that and so the idea is DOA.

It is however quite possible that model would work for other types of software -- after all that model was exactly what Danish farmers used to fund the companies that could process their milk.

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#67

Post by sp332 »

spot wrote: post #35
crispyambulance wrote: post #32

I wish there was still hope for Ted Nelson's concept of Hypertext. Up until some time in the mid 90's people were thinking of the internet as something intrinsically decentralized. The idea was that we, as individuals, would participate in new forms of discourse and creation through the "media" of hypertext _without_ intermediaries other than (perhaps) agents we would create for ourselves on an individual basis (like…

Nelson's concept was more centralized, and that's why it failed. Having no implementation didn't help.

There is an implementation in Javascript. https://gist.github.com/ldodds/a7f901c7f0118e83a645 "A Xanadoc file is a text file containing a list of URLs, which each have an encoding declaration, a character offset and length to read. It describes a compound document that is composed from these specific sections of other documents." This page says the demo only works in Firefox but I didn't notice any trouble with Chrome. Just give it a few seconds to load.

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#68

Post by magwa101 »

I do feel like I'm a sysadmin for my life. I don't know how non tech people deal with it. Some of the BUMMER platforms I dislike (unnamed) are ones I rely on to make money, and they constantly prod you to engage with the platform to fix their bugs. Examples are they allow phishing attacks but then force you to reply or your "ranking" score goes down. Super irritating.

I do notice the most engaged communities are the ones that feel they are part of improving the product. The developers are responsive and there is good flow. Everyone feels good, except, they're basically the product managers for a sub par product and they will not be rewarded for their time.

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#69

Post by decasia »

pdog wrote: post #63
decasia wrote: post #7

The thing I keep thinking is that I want to have social software built on a co-operative model (like a food co-op): you all pay some nominal membership fee (could you fund servers and developers on $5/year/user?), and the software would then be developed to fit the agreed-upon needs of the community, without dark patterns or behavior modification projects, openly, and with some kind of community governance (which nee…

Why charge users at all? Social software could be funded entirely by voluntary donations or a small foundation.

It's a good question. I guess I would say that in my limited experience, co-operatives that fund by providing products and services (food, housing) seem to accumulate less organizational bloat and overhead, because their continued funding is directly coupled to providing a good user experience.

But in foundations and donation-based nonprofits, what you see is that they become organizationally focused on chasing donations, they have more and more irritating "please donate to us" fundraising staff, they may have to bend their mission towards whatever can please the local philanthropists, and they sometimes end up seeming more worried about organizational survival (via procuring money) than with whatever their mission is supposed to be. Another way of putting this is that it seems pretty hard to make voluntary donations provide stability, and organizations like stability.

I'm open to having my mind changed about this, but it seems to me that it creates some major new organizational failure modes when you decouple the mission from the source of revenue.

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