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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

#331

Post by mewpmewp2 »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #297
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be bad to have a healthy form of crack? By healthy I would mean physically non addictive and without any negative long term effects. If you used it right it would just give you euphoria, motivation, stimulation and potentially nootropic effects?

> By healthy I would mean physically non addictive and without any negative long term effects. But how would something like work? It's the substance's ability to cause euphoria that makes it addictive. You cannot have one without the other. Addiction occurs when one loses the ability to regulate their dopamine-driven activity, causing something akin to an infinite loop. Adderall is basically legal meth, and it's easi…

It should somehow be able to reset or configure brain's chemical state.

There's 2 addictions, physical and psychological. Psychological, could yes still happen of course even if you restored the balance of dopamine and other relevant chemicals, but in theory you could at least get rid of withdrawals if you were able to manipulate those chemicals. We don't have a way to do that, and may be we won't have, and maybe we'll invent something completely different first that would make something like this or drugs completely obsolete. But just in theory.

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

#332

Post by m_fayer »

d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #291
m_fayer wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About the same age here. One thing that adds to this feeling for me, is that any device I own that has an OS, unless that OS is Linux, feels distinctly hostile. I can't own a handheld computer that's not trying to enmesh me in an "ecosystem" of some sort, curate my options without my consent, do god-knows-what in the background, brick itself on a timer, and the list goes on. It's even worse with laptops and desktops,…

I think the core of the problem here is the free ad-supported model that's so pervasive in the industry. Data mining in order to optimize targeted ads is the business driver for this bad behavior and society has struggled to grasp it's implications. The problem is that once something is free there's no going back. You'll never be able to compete with free. Free is the new antitrust. The only players that will be able…

I would say that there's two models driving us to hell. In addition to the ad-supported model, there's also the "everything is a service" model. The AAS model is increasingly the only alternative to the ad-supported model that's available to those of us willing to pay for nice things. Teslas and iPhones are certainly not free, yet they're just as much inscrutable black-boxes as low-end smartphones and commodity "smart" TVs. The only difference is that they spend less time misbehaving because of careless updates, since this model motivates the manufacturers to invest more in QA. They're less openly hostile-seeming because they view the user like a high-end hotel views a guest - to be pampered and indulged. But the "user" is still a guest with limited-time and carefully-controlled access to the facilities, not an owner.

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

#333

Post by dennis_moore »

mellavora wrote: post #206
sandworm101 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let the sheep have their facebook apps. Modern tech has also brought us strong open source tools. We have stronger encryption in any linux distro than any army had in the 90s. We have communication pathways (Tor) that defeat censorship. I can send an email today, encrypted then sent via Tor, that no government can censor, read or even detect that I have sent. I have a dongle that plugs into my phone that can decode a…

Sheep are interesting animals. I was in the Rockies last week, read a newspaper article about a female sheep who killed a bear who was threatening her children.

I think that was a goat...

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

#334

Post by KineticLensman »

jcims wrote: post #292
freetinker wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m going to count HN as a social network. It’s one of my favorite places on the internet. It surfaces great content, and the comments are a gold mine of top-notch information and advice (by and large). What general principles can we learn from HN that can be applied elsewhere? Does HN self-select its audience? No profit motive? Great moderation? (Thanks Dang!)

To me a few things: - dang’s moderation and example - no images - no intentional sub-cultures - smaller audience - topical - charmingly ugly - a generally invested community that appreciates this is a special outcome The interesting thing to me is that Slashdot shares many of these attributes, has a relatively sophisticated moderation feature and is a cesspool. It feels like a ship adrift in the Caribbean and the fou…

> The primary difference IMHO is dang.

I certainly agree that dang's moderation is excellent and contributes to the uniqueness of HN. But "+5 Funny" on Slashdot was a big driver in the other direction, rewarding the endless hot grits and Cowboy Neal humour, which usually drowned out more sophisticated comments.

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

#335

Post by jcims »

KineticLensman wrote: post #334
jcims wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me a few things: - dang’s moderation and example - no images - no intentional sub-cultures - smaller audience - topical - charmingly ugly - a generally invested community that appreciates this is a special outcome The interesting thing to me is that Slashdot shares many of these attributes, has a relatively sophisticated moderation feature and is a cesspool. It feels like a ship adrift in the Caribbean and the fou…

> The primary difference IMHO is dang. I certainly agree that dang's moderation is excellent and contributes to the uniqueness of HN. But "+5 Funny" on Slashdot was a big driver in the other direction, rewarding the endless hot grits and Cowboy Neal humour, which usually drowned out more sophisticated comments.

Totally agree. I think the intent was to let people focus on the types of comment they want, but it just ended up gamifying moderation.

Which reminds me of another HN feature that I think is material to its ability to sustain its culture:

- Private vote counts

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

#336

Post by rybosworld »

chuckee wrote: post #330
rybosworld wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The idea is to break up Facebook because they've been buying competitors instead of trying to compete." That seems like your own interpretation of the tweet. The author says in a later tweet that they think Whatsapp should be treated as a utility. That seems to suggest they do want Whatsapp to be handed to the government.

Plenty of utilities are privately owned - telephone companies and ISPs, for the most relevant example. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utility

Privately owned does not imply privately run.

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

#337

Post by chuckee »

rybosworld wrote: post #336
chuckee wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of utilities are privately owned - telephone companies and ISPs, for the most relevant example. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utility

Privately owned does not imply privately run.

Are telecoms not privately run? Or are you defining anything that's regulated as "not privately run"?

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

#338

Post by hardlianotion »

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 whole of Africa is a host of very different systems. It's rather annoying fielding this stuff that appears quite ignorant.

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

#339

Post by ClumsyPilot »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #38
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Shouldn’t we focus on making those services accessible and affordable? " This. If calls and international calls were acessible, whatsapp wouldnt exist

> This. If calls and international calls were acessible, whatsapp wouldnt exist Whatsapp offers a whole lot more: read receipts, group chats, images and video, voice notes, location sharing, a web client (albeit a quite limited one), and it has a generally pretty good UX/UI (much better than Androids stock messaging app). Regardless of the economics, on a technical level calling/texting isn't competitive with Whatsap…

"at the technical level calling/texting isn't competitive with Whatsapp."

This does not seem to an a comment informed about how the network works

VoLTE is better quality audio than what's app, it gracefully works in large crowds and countryside instead of degrading into individual sylabiles the way whats app does. Latency is 10x lower. There is no central server that cam fail like it did last week. Calling is an intrinsic, optimised part of the mobile network, replacing it at a higher layer will always be inferior.

Its the economics that moves the needly, my mom would have neber installed an app to get all the other fluff like read reciepts

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

#340

Post by etblg »

TheHypnotist wrote: post #286
Jugurtha wrote: post #68

How does the author come to the conclusion to break Facebook down and regulate it after the outage ? There are a lot of power outages in the world by companies that are regulated, sometimes even state-owned.

My guess is, using your analogy, how often do you see a power outage in New York causing an outage in Nebraska? Although, given the tech landscape today, that's not a great 1:1 example anyway.

Well the 2003 Northeast blackout was started by a power utility in Ohio, and took out most of the north-east USA and even Ontario -- making it an international outage.

The 2011 Southwest blackout was caused by a substation in Arizona, and took down power in large parts of California and Tijuana (another international one, fun).

There was apparently one in 2019 in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay that was started by a transmission line in Argentina.

Not super common, but more common than you'd think, power grids are very interconnected and weird.

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