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Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

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Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Or is that rephrasing your description?" I think so? There is an obvious circuit equivalent where links are interpreted as one-way resistors. You get a charge potential automatically given the circuit and a choice of source / sink nodes (which you need to decide on anyway to apply pagerank).

The notion of a potential & sink seems to be key, and the idea that if you identify a collectively chained circuit, it cannot be both source and sink to itself. Which is what link farms (self-referral) or "mutual admiration societies" are. The question is whether or not you can determine the interconnectedness. Since DNS obscures true ownership relations, that's a challenge. Cluster analysis generally shows such rela…

“The question is whether or not you can determine the interconnectedness.” I’m not sure what you mean by this. The algorithm I'm describing doesn't require any data beyond what is already used by PageRank.

I have a feeling that you think the electrical potential must be defined by some ad-hoc method before applying an electrical algorithm, and this requires fancy techniques like cluster analysis and the like? This is not the case. Let me re-emphasize that you only need to specify the network of resistors (which is the link graph) and the source and sink, and then the potential is defined automatically in terms of those things (the same way as in physical circuits).

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#472
The secret to a good social network is reputation. Upvoted content floats to the top, while downvoted content is pushed out of sight.

It's not always fair, and certainly does not always bring the best content to light, but it's a lot better than a purely level playing field of equals, where a fool's opinion is weighted exactly against that of a great philosopher.

Charging for access is problematic, however. People have been trained to expect free stuff, and unfortunately it's not clear the value proposition of Wales' offering. To avoid seeing ads? To have vastly better content? To be a superior UX? He has a pretty tough row to hoe.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. What Reddit brings to the table is: 1. Easy sharing: Subreddits, which are an easy location to share interesting information about a common topic. Creating your own website is an order of magnitude harder, especially if you want to allow anyone on the internet to post to it 2. Discoverability: You can easily discover subreddits information related to your interests. Reddit's ability to aggregate the vario…

Kickass moderation by committed individuals who are also experts in the field. See AskHistorians, Science, ModeratePolitics etc. This combined with huge communities results in incredible conversations.

Within a narrowly defined range of acceptable debate (see: Noam Chomsky)

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#474
post #62

I checked it out by creating an account. It detected my country as India, and showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month or $100 a year. Contrast this to (using current conversion rates from INR to USD): * Netflix here starts at $2.8 for the cheapest (mobile only, single screen) plan and has its highest plan (4K, four screens) at $11.2 a month. Netflix is considered so expensive that a…

it probably cost less than $1/month to host the average user... this is just craziness

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion of a potential & sink seems to be key, and the idea that if you identify a collectively chained circuit, it cannot be both source and sink to itself. Which is what link farms (self-referral) or "mutual admiration societies" are. The question is whether or not you can determine the interconnectedness. Since DNS obscures true ownership relations, that's a challenge. Cluster analysis generally shows such rela…

“The question is whether or not you can determine the interconnectedness.” I’m not sure what you mean by this. The algorithm I'm describing doesn't require any data beyond what is already used by PageRank. I have a feeling that you think the electrical potential must be defined by some ad-hoc method before applying an electrical algorithm, and this requires fancy techniques like cluster analysis and the like? This is…

Thanks. I need to think about this.

The source and sink are arbitrary? Or do they need to correspond to some actual reality?

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. What Reddit brings to the table is: 1. Easy sharing: Subreddits, which are an easy location to share interesting information about a common topic. Creating your own website is an order of magnitude harder, especially if you want to allow anyone on the internet to post to it 2. Discoverability: You can easily discover subreddits information related to your interests. Reddit's ability to aggregate the vario…

You missed the most important point: 3. Discussions Try discussing anything on a random website. Discussions, just like on HN, are usually better than the linked content.

I've found that Reddit (in terms of content, not UI) has gotten somewhat better in recent years, while most discussion venues have either gotten much worse or gotten rid of commenting altogether.

In relative terms, it's superior to most of its alternatives (present site excluded, of course).

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#477
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I only started browsing reddit after advertisers forced them to purge the most toxic users/content from the site. Reddit, as a site, is built around you having to subscribe to things to see it on your front page. Are you saying that opinions you disagree with (toxic) merely existing invisibly prevents you from using a platform? Because if that's not the case you were never forced to interact with those subs unless…

The toxic elements didn't exist invisibly. They bled out regularly into unrelated subreddits. For example, the fat phobia of /r/FatPeopleHate seemed ever present for a time. Popped up in many different places. And then after the sub was banned and many of its users banned, that particular form of insults & speech mostly vanished. It was a huge quality of life improvement for the site overall. There have been similar…

[deleted]

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#478
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Aether : https://getaether.net/ ?

Ah, somebody posted it before I could. :) (Disclosure: I’m the creator of Aether, happy to answer any questions)

How do you install it on linux? I'm getting the error,

error: cannot find signatures with metadata for snap "Aether-2.0.0-dev.14+1909192130.00bf3c3.snap"

SO [1] suggests this can be forced with `sudo snap install --dangerous` but that doesn't sound right.

[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/822765/snap-install-failure-...

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#479

What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).

There already is a decentralized Reddit where subreddits are called websites and anyone can start one and run it as they please. What Reddit and similar sites bring to the table is a single pool of authenticated users. Once a user is logged into Reddit, posting on different subreddits is frictionless. Even with oauth and the like, it is hard to replicate that with a distributed set of sites.

> There already is a decentralized Reddit where subreddits are called

...newsgroups...

> and anyone can start one and run it as they please.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, somebody posted it before I could. :) (Disclosure: I’m the creator of Aether, happy to answer any questions)

How do you install it on linux? I'm getting the error, error: cannot find signatures with metadata for snap "Aether-2.0.0-dev.14+1909192130.00bf3c3.snap" SO [1] suggests this can be forced with `sudo snap install --dangerous` but that doesn't sound right. [1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/822765/snap-install-failure-...

Yep, the flag is right. Unfortunately the way snap is designed is that they really don’t want you to distribute binaries outside their special snap store, to the point that if you try, they try to scare your users off by naming ‘install outside snap store’ flag as ‘--dangerous’.
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