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Towards a world without Facebook

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Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#111

Post by danbruc »

AHMagic wrote: post #108
danbruc wrote: post #51

Decentralization is a red herring, there is nothing wrong with centralized services, it may actually just add to the problems to overcome. What is wrong is that users are not paying for those services. Well, they are paying for them, but only indirectly via the share of the ad budget included in the price of all the things they buy. That is the core problem, if users would simply pay for the services they use there w…

Here's why I don't think decentralization is a red herring: in a centralized service, if you disagree, you don't have another option. If you didn't like AOL and quit, there was no way for you to maintain contact with AOL users unless both parties used a different platform. Decentralized systems like phone, e-mail, and mail allow you to maintain contact with people while having control over your provider. I understand…

That is a somewhat valid point but I think you and me are using decentralized in different senses here. When I said decentralized I meant a decentralized application, something without central servers. You are more talking about standardized protocols that can be implemented by different vendors and which together form a federated network. There is certainly also some overlap there.

But your examples of phone, mail, and email are essentially all centralized systems with a certain number of vendors for each but together forming a larger federated network due to standardized protocols. Email is probably the closest of your examples to what I call distributed because at least in theory everyone could run his own mail server although in practice it is probably not so easy because spam made everyone pretty paranoid when it comes to forwarding emails from random mail servers.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#112

Post by matte_black »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #81

This already exists. It's called scuttlebutt and it's awesome. No coin or ICO involved, just a bunch of smart programmers solving hard problems. The best bit is you can use it with just an app, you don't need to setup your own sever or trust someone else's to host your content like every other decentralized social network I've seen.

Unfortunately a name like scuttlebutt does not inspire me to join.

I am also unlikely to recommend it to people in real life. How could they get something so simple so wrong?

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#113

Post by threatofrain »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #87
dasil003 wrote: post #43

The fundamental problem is economic. It's not that Facebook is invulnerable or that it can't be disrupted—of course it can! The reputational risk Facebook is facing is existential, if it reaches a tipping point things could go south very quickly for them. The bigger problem is that making something like Facebook requires a lot of resources. You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of eng…

You could have said this same argument about Wikipedia vs Encarta back in 2000. An open source, distributed social network doesn't need many servers and can be built by volunteers, so you don't need VC funding or a monetization model. Just get everyone to host and share their content and the content of their peers. It may be like Linux and never be fully mass market, but that's totally fine by me, I share different c…

I think the volunteer model abuses a minority of weird humans with the instinct to help too much. We need a model that scales while addressing the status quo diversity of humanity. What I really mean is the fact that almost nobody wants to help, and almost everyone wants free stuff at world-class level (they don't want shitty free things, they want Google/FB level of free).

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#114

Post by memorymappings »

This is so annoying. "A world without Facebook" like it's some kind of almost apocalyptic reality. I'm only 27 and I remember when Facebook came out when I was in highschool. Miraculously, I also remember life before highschool and it was just fine too.

I deleted my account in 2014. Wow big woop. I didn't die, and I still stayed I. Touch with my family and friends I cared about. I spent less time passively stalking people I don't care about. Wow. Amazing. Mind boggling.

I also deleted my account before it became a fad to write some emotional diary about what it's like to get rid of your account like losing a child or approaching the topic like you just jumped to the other side of a heated world wide political debate and too a stand, about the same time as women started to post with no makeup (like wow, you are some kind of fantastical hero making a YouTube video or posting an fb or Instagram pic without spending an hour caking on foundation, more girls should "be brave" and step out like you) and I honestly can't tell them apart.

Stop making getting rid of Facebook a big deal and it won't be a big deal to not have one, the same way I'm a girl and never gave two cents about makeup, quite literally, and I don't make it a big deal to not wear it. I don't waltz around like some superior than thou feministic hero that girls should tremble to their knees.for guidance on how to give up their addiction to drug store eyeliner.

News flash. Your social life will not dissapear, in either case.

What is the deal. We have better things and more interesting things and more important things, all of us to focus our time and energy on than how other people perceive our obnoxiously curated profiles.

Stop giving Facebook so much power. They have power because you give it to them. Theyve been openly untrustworthy for years. So don't give it to them .

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#115

Post by vanilla_nut »

sumeno wrote: post #55
ams6110 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I can imagine the perspective of the generation that has grown up with social media for their entire memory. I was in my mid to late twenties before having a mobile phone began to become a routine thing. I myself didn't have one until I was in my thirties. I have always lived in a world without Facebook, because I never started using it. I seem to get along just fine. Not sure what all the fuss is about.

Those kids these days with their new fangled gadgets and social media. In my day we walked two miles uphill each way to share pictures of cats with our friends.

No need to be dismissive. I'm in my early 20s, and most of my life has seen the use of social media as the core mode of communication. Can you imagine moving back to a world where you could only talk to friends in person after you'd experienced talking to friends over the phone? Or shifting back to phone calls only after you'd gotten used to text messages? Like it or not, a paradigm shift has occurred. Personally I think Facebook has gone too far: they've manipulated people too much, and their platform has become mostly useless for its core feature (social interaction) because they've put too much work into monetization, ads, algorithms, and suggested content.

I think there's a lot to be said for what is effectively a collection of personal websites where people can share their life events along with a standardized communication protocol. There are a lot of advantages, like being able to keep up with (slightly) more people and being able to stay in contact with people who live farther away, and who you don't have the money or time to visit in person regularly. But it has to be on a platform that values those things, or it'll go the way of Facebook -- exploitative, and eventually useless.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#116

Post by halvardo »

We can never replace Facebook with another Facebook, decentralised or not. It needs to be disrupted orthogonally.

Think of the individual components of Facebook that are keeping people from leaving, and create better stand-alone versions of those. Can they be integrated with other things that Facebook doesn't have? Sort of like the concept of disrupting an incumbent by integrating a different part of the value chain from – except there isn't really a (known) value chain.

We have to find new points of integration, new ways of bundling valuable features that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. It would likely have social components, and probably be defined as a social network, but don't start in that end. Start with the components.

I don't see any other way Facebook is going away in the short term.

Personally I'm really only there because of work and for discovering events. Oh, and stalking.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#117

Post by empath75 »

cornholio wrote: post #5

The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts. For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online pu…

What if we don’t need a Facebook alternative. I haven’t looked at it in 6 months and I don’t have a social-network-sized hole in my life.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#118

Post by arcticfox »

whataretensors wrote: post #103
tlb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people propose blockchain solutions, I always think: How would it work with just a regular database? How would a blockchain make it better? What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whoever would run the database? There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.

> How would it work with just a regular database? You'd set up another centralized honey pot that these psychopaths actively look for. > How would a blockchain make it better? Besides censorship protection, the platform could reward users to make itself better. Lots of things become possible when you have control over the reward system and don't just extract the value to the top. > What coalition of people will run t…

> Besides censorship protection

I personally don't think that goes under "features" to be honest. Every uncensored social network is basically a cesspool.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#119

Post by kromem »

gurrone wrote: post #39
tlb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people propose blockchain solutions, I always think: How would it work with just a regular database? How would a blockchain make it better? What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whoever would run the database? There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.

I would like to add: Do they understand that it's impossible to delete anything that got commited to the block chain once a block is accepted? I mean at least if they think about a blockchain in the sense of the Bitcoin blockchain. Implementing a deletion of prior blocks is an interesting problem.

You can absolutely delete. You just append data that represents a delete, and the client doesn't show that item or shows it as deleted.

Yes, it doesn't remove that data from the chain and a client could easily end up undoing deletes, but if you think that server based deletes actually remove the data, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise depending on the servers in question.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#120

Post by koonsolo »

chris_wot wrote: post #85
tlb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people propose blockchain solutions, I always think: How would it work with just a regular database? How would a blockchain make it better? What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whoever would run the database? There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.

I’m actually wondering why every decentralised solution MUST use the blockchain.

They don't. Even the new cryptocurrencies such as IOTA and Nano don't use blockchain anymore.
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