Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by sp332 » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 2:08 PM UTC

fierarul wrote: post #15

I guess one could write a book about anything, but wouldn't this message read better on a flyer or short article? Is deleting a social media account such a brave move that people have to really ponder it, read a book, maybe talk with close family and friends before making a decision? The 1st Facebook account removal I saw was something sudden: this girl had a really bad experience and the next day all her stuff was g…

Sure, it's going to affect the set of people you interact with in the future. It might hurt your relationships or cut you off entirely from some people. It limits your ability to ask for help or look for work. And it could lead to feeling left out, always behind on what's happening, constantly missing out.

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

#72

Post by gambler » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 2:10 PM UTC

magwa101 wrote: post #68

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…

>I don't know how non tech people deal with it.

They silently suffer, develop coping mechanisms and time-intensive workarounds. Most don't even understand how things could be better. This is part of the reason so many interfaces are horrible. This isn't even specific to social media platforms. People adapt to crap. Sounds like this is what Jaron is talking about.

Design thinking should be taught in schools or as Gen Ed in colleges.

When I worked on user-facing apps my silent motto was "reduce user suffering". Of course, this isn't the kind of thing your employer usually wants to hear.

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

#73

Post by lazyjones » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 2:11 PM UTC

I would be interested in his opinion about slapping the user in the face with greyed-out content and a subscription box on top when he tries to follow a link to read this interview. Isn't this a great example for how the digital world doesn't let us do what we intend to and doesn't deliver on its promises?

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

#74

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 2:11 PM UTC

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…

Twenty years ago I was involved in founding something similar, the SRCF: https://www.srcf.net/faq/about#why

The intention was to provide hosting for web pages relating to university societies, with good facilities for transfer of ownership (since there was annual turnover of the society administrators). Nowadays this role would be filled by Facebook pages, but the SRCF is still there and still useful.

I believe if you want to get the co-op model off the ground you have to start with a particular user community that you're a member of. Then you can start scaling it to other communities. But crucially this process must be lead by thinking of the user community and their needs, not the technology - the technology is secondary and you can always tape together a solution somehow.

(We "nearly" came up with Facebook, called people.ucam.org, but we weren't even the only people in the university looking at the question of "how to stay in touch with your friends after graduating"; it was a common problem of the time)

Another example of a community-driven content hosting site / social network is "Archive of our own": AO3, for fanfic (often NSFW)

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

#75

Post by athenot » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 2:13 PM UTC

decasia wrote: post #62

athenot wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

The angle we can exploit is to find all the places where UX is degraded by advertisement, and attack them. With increased competition and shareholder expectation, Facebook will have no choice but maximize the value they can extract out of each user. Right now they are doing a fairly good job at keeping things minimally intrusive, but I think that boundary is going to shift with time.

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

#76

Post by zaarn » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 2:25 PM UTC

hannasanarion wrote: post #45

decasia wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Federated communities would be neat and basically are how the "real world" already interconnects, socially speaking. I don't think that's exclusive of what I had in mind. But you have to actually have the communities before you can do the federation (this is also how it works in the offline world — it's not like people design interoperability protocols and THEN found villages).

So what you're saying is, we should try to convince the existing villages (Facebook, reddit, Twitter) to adopt interoperability protocols?

Nah, I would favor a pitchfork-and-torches approach to Facebook and Twitter, the entire company behind it is so unlikely to change that a radical rebuild is required.

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

#77

Post by gambler » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 2:25 PM UTC

nobody271 wrote: post #23

Jaron Lanier is an interesting character. He's not just a smelly hippy. He's pretty smart but I don't buy into him being a "Silicon Valley Philosopher". No one can predict the future. Anyways, for a rip roaring good time I highly recommend this debate on artificial intelligence featuring Jaron ( https://youtu.be/Qqc0t8ghvis ). On the opppsing side is Martine Rothblatt (male turned female, inventor of satellite radio,…

>No one can predict the future.

He wrote Digital Maoism article at the peak of Web 2.0 hype. That's pretty darn good demonstration of foresight.

https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maois...

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

#78

Post by devmunchies » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 2:29 PM UTC

I’m not totally convinced this guy has quit his social media accounts, with his unoriginal opinions on Trump, MeToo, BLM, etc.

I haven’t been on FB, Insta, Twitter in years, or Reddit in months and I don’t even think about those things anymore.

But I guess he could just hang around people who are still deep into social media.

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

#79

Post by nabla9 » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

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…

The biggest roadblock is Nelson's need to control it. Nelson had great a concept but he is bad businessman and not good enough software developer.

Ted Nelson actively sabotaged attempt to create open source implementation. He initially seemed to approve it, but turned against it. Nelson has patented zzstructure, so there is little you can do until the patent expires (I think it will expire very soon)

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

#80

Post by JepZ » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

benjaminjackman wrote: post #60

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…

Do you have a recommended guide for setting an XMPP server that supports end-to-end encryption?

Sadly I don't. I have mine running since a while, and some things might not be state-of-the-art anymore.

The server doesn't really have to support end-to-end encryption as that is part of the clients (in fact, there are some server-side extensions which have to be present, but those are mostly enabled by default).

Afaik, the default ejabberd configuration is very close to what you need, and there is just one part that you have to remove to enable OMEMO [1]. I don't understand why but recently the ejabberd devs introduced that part to their default configuration which makes it harder to use end-to-end encryption.

Nevertheless, if you are very interested in a detailed guide, I could write one as I am thinking about setting up a secondary server as a testing environment.

[1]: https://github.com/processone/ejabberd/blob/master/ejabberd....