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We should replace Facebook with personal websites

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101–110 of 318 posts

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#101
It is my hope that facebook is crushed and is never effectively replaced by anything. In fact, with a few changes to privacy law, it almost becomes impossible to run a facebook anyways, because it will eliminate many forms of revenue generation for any company collecting user information.

I feel as though I live in the age of marketing, where it is more important to market yourself well than it is to, I don't know, produce. So much valuable creative and productive energy towards chasing dollars/likes/whatever. It reminds me of concepts that we regard as dark patterns in tech: Money might have at some point been a measure of productive work, but now it is a goal in and of itself, and I think that the outcome has been suboptimal.

I understand that the cat is out of the bag, and, in particular, the ability to upload and share video with the world could be one of the most important advancements in human rights ever, but it seems that many people are too distracted to be concerned. The very technology that could aid people is used to disarm them from action.

A large part of my concern is that I'm half European and half Native American. I appear Middle Eastern. I live in the United States. The cultural state here is definitely not sublime for someone with my appearance. My best friend is LGBT, and it is uncomfortable for her as well. I know that racism is a bigger problem, but the way that these systems have been "taken advantage" of by various governments to divide the US culture horrifies me.

About the "taken advantage" statement: An American company took money from a foreign government that it used to spread propaganda in the US. What facebook did is by design, and if it is allowed to stand, then what does it even mean to be a US company at that point?

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#102
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and requiring the other user's approval to get the actual content, you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose, or just run your own locally. life would be so simple

The magic usually missing from RSS is really good recommendation/discovery. I've got a list of feeds I follow, and that's all I'll ever get.

RSS is really just the content/transport method. For a decentralized FB, you would move the intelligence into your local client and it would like more like a web-of-trust network.

1. You connect to friends and you either manually assign or "grow" a bunch of weights to your amount of trust in them and your interest in various topics they might post.

2. You and your friends make posts and assign "topic" metadata to the posts. The value of the system depends on your friends properly assigning metadata to posts. But it makes it easier to filter out extended families' political shitposting (based on trust and negging untagged posts).

3. Your feed is selected based on the weight of your friendship times the weight you base on the interest of the topic. If your best friend posts something about computers and you have positively weighed that topic it would bubble up.

4. Friends-of-friends can transitively receive a proportion of the trust score you have in your friend. Highly trusted friends will make you trust their friends more.

5. Down-votes and upvotes would train your local agent. They could also be fed back to the originator IF votes were signed by trusted encryption keys to prevent your friend from faking his vote count on the "post".

This decentralizes the network out of FB and democratizes the algorithms / system for what and how you want to receive your information.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#103
post #83
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The magic usually missing from RSS is really good recommendation/discovery. I've got a list of feeds I follow, and that's all I'll ever get.

Maybe someone should create an RSS feed that curates other RSS feeds and forwards them to their recipients. I'm not sure how to monetize this, but it would add some discovery to rss.

You described a link blog. kottke.org and Daring Fireball are good examples.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#104
post #17

The author's thesis is fundamentally flawed. They say it isn't clear why everyone was so excited to have a Facebook, but that's exactly the answer - because everyone had a Facebook . One of the biggest appeals of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (which is arguable even more useless than FB), etc. is that every nobody has direct access to an audience of millions. They can scream their offensive, unoriginal, spontaneous, n…

Yeah the idea of everyone setting up a personal website with their real name and a recognisable photo of themselves is pretty laughable. Are people going to upload photos and implement an account system to restrict access too?

That was Facebook's original raison d'etre (and the source of its name).

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#105
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recommendations + Discovery = Filter Bubble. These mis-features are exactly what we should be moving away from!

No discovery = isolation bubble

I found this out when I switched from Pocket to Instapaper. Instapaper has a curated list of articles updated about once a month, and I don't read half of them. Pocket recommends articles based on what you read, and it's not just more of the same. I'm probably going to switch back.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#106
I already did. I post to my own site and use rss/Microformats reader to consume content.

Funny thing is I love it but everyone who uses Facebook (especially geeks) likes to tell me this is all wrong because 2 billion people aren’t using my website and I’m not a publicly traded company.

I think Facebook has messed with their heads. They just keep prattling about “network effect” and “owning the market”.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#107
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The magic usually missing from RSS is really good recommendation/discovery. I've got a list of feeds I follow, and that's all I'll ever get.

The nefarious problem with FB is the illusion of recommendation/discovery. They're not trying to find new and interesting things for you the way say, the cultural aspects of HN performs this feat; they're trying to define your profile and then serve up more of the same to increase engagement or capture your entire sphere of awareness so they can manipulate and shape your perception.'

hacker news is always more of the same? let's not pretend like they are any better.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#108
post #11

>most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online. Where does the author get that idea? The majority of Facebook's 2 billion users do not post to their profile feed. Instead, the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content. Some of the content is from family and friends, and some is from media outlets (NYTimes, etc). Recommending "personal websites" is talki…

Yeah I just want to see everyone's photos.. that's kinda it.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#109
post #11

>most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online. Where does the author get that idea? The majority of Facebook's 2 billion users do not post to their profile feed. Instead, the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content. Some of the content is from family and friends, and some is from media outlets (NYTimes, etc). Recommending "personal websites" is talki…

When i try to think of what my ideal social media would look like, it always ends up sounding similar to an RSS feed, with the ability to lookup and requiring the other user's approval to get the actual content, you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose, or just run your own locally. life would be so simple

You are describing Xanadu

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#110
post #15

Homepage. It's your home on the internet. It's good for you. Things to get started with: - https://www.netlifycms.org/ - completely free static website on top of github pages - http://mastodon.social/ - federated microblogging, which can be self-hosted as well - https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/ - one click wordpress for 5$/m - https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/projects/wordpress/ - another near on…

https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted - list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted locally
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