181–190 of 318 posts
It was an attempt to extend the blogging model with open standards so that others could consume it the way they consume the news feed today.
Unless you were around for it back then, you probably never heard of DiSo, which tells you all you need to know about how good of an idea it is in practice. Or maybe it was ahead of its time. I don't know.
The precursor to Facebook, at least among my peers, were personal blogs on Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, etc and the precursor to that was personal web sites on GeoCities and Tripod. Many of my friends linked to each other's sites and it formed a pseudo-social network.
Facebook was better because you could control who saw your website by limiting your friend list. They had the social framework in place, you just had to sign up. Facebook is also a great place to share local news.
Something like it will probably, eventually replace the local newspaper and TV stations.
>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
That last phrase could add a lot of friction.
you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose
That would indeed replace Facebook. However, then you have a chicken and egg problem. Those clients won't be much good unless people provide data by using them, and people won't use them because they don't already have the data to provide good recommendations.
1. Our high school class. Yes we used to use a mailing list but it's so much better with Facebook, with people freely sharing what interesting shit happens. We are a very closely knit class, at the 25th graduation anniversary like 25 of the 34 was there.
2. I have a group of friends doing all sorts of awesome shit (some of the more memorable include taking a medieval sword duel intro class, another shooting foam arrows at each other, there was laser tag, trampolines, Halloween mazes and much more) and the event functionality is just damn perfect: you create an event, everyone can post on it (I am coming, I am not coming, I need transport) all of the posts can be commented out. And people can just write posts into the group suggesting more events.
For both you'd need more than thirty people install a new app (remember how few apps are actually used) and actively use them at the same time or you will be missing events. This won't happen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's middle ground that likely is more commercially viable: 1. Everyone makes a website. 2. Those websites submit articles to content indexes. 3. Part of your website hosts your own reader client: 3.a The reader subscribes to a set of indexes. 3.b It can also subscribe to individual feeds. 3.c Your client decides how to mix the feeds into displays, eg, you could have several indexes feed into one "feed" an…
> submit articles to content indexes ... aaaaaand, there it goes; the spammers already ruined it ;)
Like they did with email. Then you have companies come with robust AI tech and filter the spam, and also give good recommendations. A few of those companies come to dominate the market
... aaaaaand, there it goes; we're back to the situation we have now with Facebook and Google.
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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.
Recommendations + Discovery = Filter Bubble. These mis-features are exactly what we should be moving away from!
I'm surprised so few people here have picked up on the fact that "filter bubble" is a rhetorical trick about as obvious as the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" dichotomy.
People like getting good recommendations, and they'll always like them. "Filter bubbles" are here to stay.
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You’d think that if personal websites were a valid substitute for Facebook, the whole thing would have never taken off in the first place. Personal websites didn’t see massive adoption the first time around, and we can safely doubt they ever will.
Because they were obtuse to set up for 99% of people. Myspace basically made quick and easy personal pages for the masses, and everyone used it because it was quick and easy. If a company is able to do it right for the 99% of people who don't know what FTP is, then its got a shot.
Before the standard of "web development" became "learn the terminal, Git and some Linux, unit testing, install and learn Node, learn Docker or some other container, learn ssh, learn a framework and any of several languages that compile to javascript" it really was simple enough that plenty of "normal" people grasped it without any issue.
>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…
It’s part domain registration, web builder (simple website with fees you add content to via text message), part automated dns records, part social media/search engine.
So imagine these personal websites are all connected, one website can follow another, that’s it. You own the content, traffic, ad revenue. You could search content across these distributed websites with the tomorrowbook search engine, you could use tomorrowbook to register a domain (built in dns/website for the nontechnical) or use your own registrar and embed the tomorrowbook feed into your site.
Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11473190