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Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

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Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#311

Post by gruez »

robbedpeter wrote: post #147
gruez wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>all they had to do was keep up with dsl capabilities The terms of the settlement are bizarre, but there does appear to be strings attached to the money, contrary to what you claimed. >CenturyLink will receive more than $91 million over the next six years to deploy 10 megabit-per-second download and 1 megabit-per-second upload broadband to 33,000 high-cost rural locations in Montana.

6 years later... DSL is capable of the specs in the requirements. Centurylink has done basically nothing but maintain status quo and upgraded minimal copper and dsl connections. Wibaux montana can get satellite or dsl. Centurylink pocketed the cash and called it good. Wolf Point has a similar situation. Montana is about to see about 300 million in federal funding and big ISPs are lobbying to slurp it up, and guess wh…

>DSL is capable of the specs in the requirements. Centurylink has done basically nothing but maintain status quo and upgraded minimal copper and dsl connections.

right, because the terms of the funding seems to be that they bring access to new homes, not upgrade existing lines to faster connections. is this just a disconnect between what the public was expecting (ie. "dsl gets upgraded to fiber!") versus what was actually required (ie. "more people get dsl!")?

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#312

Post by 88913527 »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #238
tomjen3 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes think the Internet is like the Mirror of Erised from Harry Potter. It can show us what we want: if what we want is knowledge it will show us that, if what we want is proof that we are right it will show us that and if we want to see how horrible other people are, that is what we will see. It was just that people turned out to value less truth less, than being told they were right. You can fault the engine…

I think the problem is also that we also are shown what other people want to see. I genuinely don’t want to see political positions of my relatives, or my neighbors getting into heated internet fights. But I do want to see my relatives small joys, and I do want to know important neighborhood news and activities. That I can’t filter appropriately makes social media toxic, as I can feel my social animal brain see heigh…

I wonder if there's a single Product owner in social media organizations advocating for these points, but they're being drowned out by optimizing for profits. I could easily imagine, at the top of the timeline, a dropdown toggle that lets me toggle politics, neighborhood news, etc. But of course, I can't, so I've left FB altogether. At least with Reddit I can browse by topic, which somewhat puts me back in the driver seat. I can go to r/MyCity or r/cooking, but what I don't have then is those small, non-political joys posted by family/friends. Texting and phone calls for small life updates it is.

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#313

Post by [deleted] »

smt88 wrote: post #141
havelhovel wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the author cites Palestinians and Israelis both relying on WhatsApp as justification for breaking down and regulating Facebook. Pray tell, if nationalized, how many nations would be impartial enough to let both sides continue to use such an (apparently) essential communication platform?

No one is proposing nationalizing WhatsApp or Facebook. I have no idea who you're arguing against, but it's not the author of this thread.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#314

Post by 0xcafecafe »

blippage wrote: post #197
sandworm101 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the US story. It has less to do with facebook and more to do with the US political system. There are plenty of countries who have very different systems that have not followed the same path in recent years. Tech companies are part of the problem but should not be made scapegoat to avoid the deeper issues within the American political system, issues that existed long before the internet was a thing.

UK Brit here. Countries like the UK and the US certainly have their flaws, but I'd take them before nearly everything else that's on offer. China's system seems terrible. The whole of Africa seems like a corrupt system. The EU seems mostly woke, and I'm not sure I particularly want that. Canada seems to have bought a first class ticket on the Progressivist crazy train from what I've been hearing. What's left? Not muc…

>>The EU seems mostly woke

Can you please elaborate more on that? I thought US is going more woke and France in the EU is pushing back on wokeism.

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#315

Post by baud147258 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #295
baud147258 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people use WhatsApp, the mobile networks get $0 Doesn't the network get at least the fee for the internet connection?

Oh, I guess that’s true! But only if the user isn’t on wifi, and only if they don’t have an unlimited (or semi-unlimited) data plan.

even then, with an unlimited (or semi-unlimited) data plan, the provider/ISP would have been paid at some point. Same with wi-fi, except that the user might not be the one paying for the connection between the wi-fi hotspot and internet, but the entity providing the connection to the WA servers would have received some money. In both cases, there's no direct relationship between messages sent/minutes of voice call and the money paid to the network provider, but the network provider still receives money in exchange of providing the connection.

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#316

Post by [deleted] »

smt88 wrote: post #141
havelhovel wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the author cites Palestinians and Israelis both relying on WhatsApp as justification for breaking down and regulating Facebook. Pray tell, if nationalized, how many nations would be impartial enough to let both sides continue to use such an (apparently) essential communication platform?

No one is proposing nationalizing WhatsApp or Facebook. I have no idea who you're arguing against, but it's not the author of this thread.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#317

Post by ewzimm »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #75

Was talking about this with a friend today, and I think this incident highlights why I sometimes get really depressed about my career and technology. I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the domina…

I remember the late 90s a little differently. At least in the USA, it was a time where most people used centralized networks like America Online and Compuserve, and instead of websites, brands would direct you to their AOL keyword. Everyone was concerned about the centralization of power, but there was a lot of hope about the possibility of decentralized information. AOL lost its power in the begenning of the millenium, but it was quickly followed in popularity of other centralized networks like MySpace. Meanwhile, the decentralized networks only continued to grow along with them.

Maybe the mistake was thinking that the Internet would either be centralized or decentralized, that one model would win in the end. The large organizations never gave up, but the small networks didn't either. There's no meaningful end to depth of the current Internet, and the decentralized part is larger than ever. Even Gopher space has continued to slowly grow. Maybe the only thing we lack is curiosity, and that's easy to rediscover.

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#318

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

MaKey wrote: post #213
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #36

I ditched WhatsApp when I switched from Android to iOS and WhatsApp would not import my history. I lost years of texting and image history, and just decided there was no reason to use WhatsApp if they can’t keep my history (possibly the most important part of texting including the images!)

This feature is coming: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/11/22619664/whatsapp-android...

Too late for me. I won’t use them again.

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#319

Post by havelhovel »

smt88 wrote: post #141
havelhovel wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the author cites Palestinians and Israelis both relying on WhatsApp as justification for breaking down and regulating Facebook. Pray tell, if nationalized, how many nations would be impartial enough to let both sides continue to use such an (apparently) essential communication platform?

No one is proposing nationalizing WhatsApp or Facebook. I have no idea who you're arguing against, but it's not the author of this thread.

The parent comment spoke directly of nationalization. I was indulging their scenario, not seeking to argue with the original Tweet’s author or anyone in particular.

Re: Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable

#320

Post by kawera »

red_trumpet wrote: post #153
jkelleyrtp wrote: post #94

Why would breaking Facebook down and regulating them solve anything related to the global dependence on WhatsApp? Aren’t the only people who know how to run these services already running them? Like, do we expect the government to take WhatsApp away from Facebook and then create government contracts for companies like Oracle to maintain the infrastructure? So we’re back to square one but with the bureaucratic mess of…

If you regulate WhatsApp so that it has to be interoperable with other IM systems (similarly to how email or matrix work), then not everyone has to be dependent on WhatsApp.

Exactly, protocols over platforms.
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