191–200 of 210 posts
A good moment to mention again that you cannot actually delete your Hacker News account.
Hacker New is certainly not GDPR compliant. I've been asking admins to delete an old account that has identifiable information (which I posted while I was a minor) and which is embarrassing. They did not care and the info is still public.
The thing I keep thinking is that I want to have social software built on a co-operative model (like a food co-op): you all pay some nominal membership fee (could you fund servers and developers on $5/year/user?), and the software would then be developed to fit the agreed-upon needs of the community, without dark patterns or behavior modification projects, openly, and with some kind of community governance (which nee…
I'm not a big government advocate, generally speaking, but enacting this at a federal level, would be akin to a modern day postal service. Social media communication without the bells and whistles--or the obsession with engagement. I'd be all for it.
There is no way for me to stop the US postal office from delivering me giant catalogues of advertisements multiple times a week. I regularly get mail addressed to "current resident." I ought to be able to go to the postal office and say, "If someone doesn't know my name, just don't deliver the letter." It's friendlier for the environment, it would make the experience of checking my mail more pleasant.
The reason I can't do that is because spam is a giant source of revenue for the US Postal service. Coincidentally, the US Postal service has a number of services specifically designed to make it easier for advertisers to get mail into my mailbox. There is, in my mind, no reason to believe that a nationally owned social media platform would have any different incentives than Facebook would.
Email, a federated service that doesn't really make the government any money, doesn't have those incentives. So open protocols that are unaffiliated with any single organization (government or company) work better in my experience, unless whatever service is created is isolated from making profits in traditional ways. There are some good examples of that, but I'm not completely sure the Post Office is one of them.
The thing I keep thinking is that I want to have social software built on a co-operative model (like a food co-op): you all pay some nominal membership fee (could you fund servers and developers on $5/year/user?), and the software would then be developed to fit the agreed-upon needs of the community, without dark patterns or behavior modification projects, openly, and with some kind of community governance (which nee…
This reminds me of The WELL: https://www.well.com/
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Sounds like a reasonable description of pretty much every communication/social platform since the 90s.
Since forever. Newspaper, books, TV, Radio, postal services etc... all have a cost associated and all are selective in how, where and what they publish or deliver. Everyone is trying to influence everyone else. The question is simply what degree and magnitude you are willing to accept.
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I'm not on Facebook. I know plenty of other adults who don't have an account. My daughter tells me that the young folks have completely abandoned it, a good while ago.
Indeed, and I quite understand this: once relatives (parents and grandparents) joined the Facebook bandwagon, the fun was over. What once was some youngsters'-inner-circle has become the new sons-and-daughters-surveillance service. And as with all the forms of surveillance, kids are escaping it.
I'm in SE Asia right now, in a country where Facebook Zero makes it available to everyone regardless of income, and guess what? Not only does everybody have a Facebook account, many women have at least three: one for friends, one for family, and one that is anonymous to hide their activity from their friends and family.
I know it's against Facebook's TOS, but it's so easy to create a pseudonymous username. So it's the same for American teenage kids: they just create a new account with a fake name. If they are abandoning Facebook it's because they like Instagram or Snapchat more, not because their parents are on Facebook.
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I think the parent referred to fiddling with OMEMO fingerprints, that a) is automated in "good clients" (Conversations) b) can't be easy and paranoid-secure at the same time. I also run XMPP server for friends and family and actually all of them are very happy with it. With Conversations this entire experience looks like any other modern messenger. Network effects are of course a problem in any decentralized environm…
> I also run XMPP server for friends and family and actually all of them are very happy with it. With Conversations this entire experience looks like any other modern messenger. Does Conversations do something extra to support sending messages to people who are offline? If so, how well does it work? Because that's what I find to be the biggest gripe people have (myself included) with XMPP.
Conversations can display a "tick" on the sender's side so you know that a message has been delivered to the user (not just stored on a server).
I guess it works well as I've never heard about a lost message.
You can check the server with compliance tester: https://compliance.conversations.im
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It's the "wishes to manipulate them" part that's the problem.
As a network engineer, this is part of why I tell junior neteng and NOC staff that there is definitely such as thing as ethics in network engineering. And train them on what constitutes ethical vs unethical behavior on the part of an ISP. I'm fortunate enough to have admin rights over the infrastructure of a small to medium sized regional player, where the senior management are principled individuals who would not ev…
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That's a great point. No need for moderation through postal mail because it's all 1-to-1 communication. OTOH, all broadcast media is heavily moderated today.
Lol postal mail has a long history of moderation. A lot of first amendment case law with respect to obscenity and fraud comes from postal cases.
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I'm not a big government advocate, generally speaking, but enacting this at a federal level, would be akin to a modern day postal service. Social media communication without the bells and whistles--or the obsession with engagement. I'd be all for it.
Every company that sends me unsolicited emails is forced by law to have an unsubscribe button on those emails. I have a huge amount of control around filtering spam and blacklisting and whitelisting specific addresses. There is no way for me to stop the US postal office from delivering me giant catalogues of advertisements multiple times a week. I regularly get mail addressed to "current resident." I ought to be able…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since forever. Newspaper, books, TV, Radio, postal services etc... all have a cost associated and all are selective in how, where and what they publish or deliver. Everyone is trying to influence everyone else. The question is simply what degree and magnitude you are willing to accept.
You have a strange postal service. Where I live, the norm is that you put your letter in an envelope and it would be illegal for the postal service to open the envelope. If you pay the postage, your letter will be delivered, no matter what the content, and without any changes to the content.