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We should replace Facebook with personal websites

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Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#261

Post by WorldMaker »

zild3d wrote: post #169
jasode wrote: post #11

>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…

> The way most people use Facebook is more of an RSS feed For many it's become more of an address book

Or a shared calendar

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#262

Post by r3bl »

paulddraper wrote: post #133
ticmasta wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nefarious problem with FB is the illusion of recommendation/discovery. They're not trying to find new and interesting things for you the way say, the cultural aspects of HN performs this feat; they're trying to define your profile and then serve up more of the same to increase engagement or capture your entire sphere of awareness so they can manipulate and shape your perception.'

> they can manipulate and shape your perception. That sounds pretty malicious for what basically amounts to attempting to serve you the content and ads you want.

They've already intentionally manipulated emotions of a "small number of users" (700k), proved it was possible, and released a paper on it: https://slate.com/technology/2014/06/facebook-unethical-expe...

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#263

Post by marknadal »

pmlnr wrote: post #15

Homepage. It's your home on the internet. It's good for you. Things to get started with: - https://www.netlifycms.org/ - completely free static website on top of github pages - http://mastodon.social/ - federated microblogging, which can be self-hosted as well - https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/ - one click wordpress for 5$/m - https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/projects/wordpress/ - another near on…

Also:

- Decentralized YouTube (1M+ monthly visitors) https://d.tube/

- P2P Reddit (260K+ monthly visitors) https://notabug.io/

Both built with GUN :)

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#264

Post by gurumeditations »

j-c-hewitt wrote: post #205

My time on Facebook has actually taught me that I want to know a lot LESS about people like casual friends, family, and business associates. I want to know as little as possible about their political opinions, their religious beliefs, their favorite sports teams, and other affinities that they have. I stopped using FB as a user entirely once I realized that it was diminishing my opinions of other people much more tha…

Related to this, I think as a whole, too much connectivity destroys societies. You talk about how you don’t want to know people’s personal beliefs, you just want to be able to get along with them to do business. This used to be the default for society, but this issue of knowing uncomfortable details about others (all sorts of things from political differences to crime and misconduct) shatters people’s trust in each other and society.

Social networks also act as a hyperfunnel for everyday people to become radicalized in their beliefs (usually political instead of to violence), but that’s a different issue.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#265

Post by ChuckMcM »

martythemaniak wrote: post #226
ChuckMcM wrote: post #210

The alternative, now that network bandwidth isn't in the 56Kbps range and sometimes on and sometimes off, is doable. If you look at the "end" game, imagine that everyone has a machine at their house that they can access locally in their web browser. It has easy tools for posting updates and pictures. When you create a "profile" on it, you can choose to upload that profile to a well known repository of profiles. There…

I had a very similar idea, except the machine you're referring to here is your phone. Once you restrict yourself to text and low-res pictures, your phone can be your server. A single app would let you edit your profile and post items to a feed. This includes a web server. You can also use it to view friends' profiles and chronological updates from their feeds. All data lives on your phone, fetching updates happens by…

I would love to see phone homed Apps like this make an appearance on the market. One downside is that your data is in your pocket which means it is lost when you lose your phone. That might be avoided with a thread to back up the data to a home server of some sort.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#266

Post by dasil003 »

davidivadavid wrote: post #188
ryandrake wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recommendations + Discovery = Filter Bubble. These mis-features are exactly what we should be moving away from!

I'll take good recommendations, thank you. 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.

Sure, we all want good recommendations, but how do we define "good"? I see some obvious problems with the way tech recommendations are playing out that have nothing to do with the filter bubble issue.

First, we are outsourcing recommendations to profit-driven corporations. At best, the recommendations I want to see will be mixed with the ones advertisers want me to see. Revenue expectations of social media companies currently ensure this is a non-trivial issue with no easy middle ground.

Even assuming the recommendations are reasonably good, you still have the problem that these ML-type recommendations require massive datasets and therefore it naturally gravitates towards a winner-take-all situation. Having one giant borg of a recommendation engine is bad.

We are replacing a rich tapestry of individual word-of-mouth and small-scale communication channels with a massive mono-culture. Scalability is worshipped in tech companies (it's great for getting rich!), but it's not a inherently a good thing. In nature we find diversity trumps scalability, and I feel the same way about culture.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#267

Post by BeetleB »

klez wrote: post #154
IshKebab wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the idea of everyone setting up a personal website with their real name and a recognisable photo of themselves is pretty laughable. Are people going to upload photos and implement an account system to restrict access too? That was Facebook's original raison d'etre (and the source of its name).

You don't need to implement anything. There are self-hosted CMSs and blog platforms that have been doing this for a long time. I'm not saying it's as easy as Facebook, but it's not "you need to be a developer"-hard either.

While you don't need to implement things, as a developer, I gave up on self hosting. Having N self-hosted services, and having to keep them up to date for security purposes (and worry about updates breaking things) was really not worth the effort.

Self hosting is a pain. Let's not kid ourselves. It seems easy initially, but over the years, you really feel like it's better just to pay someone to manage it all for you.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#268

Post by BeetleB »

newscracker wrote: post #126
___alt wrote: post #52

Facebook is a bit more than just personal pages. * It has built-in authentication and ACL, you get to choose who sees your stuff or not (not counting overarching privacy issues). * It has built-in syndication, which means that it's easy to follow everyone's updates. * It has discovery abilities that helps finding people you want to connect to. * It has group conversation. * It has event planning. Personal pages have…

> Facebook is a bit more than just personal pages. I'm going to argue on the following points based on observations. > - It has built-in authentication and ACL, you get to choose who sees your stuff or not (not counting overarching privacy issues). Almost nobody knows well about how to control who see what, and even when they do, hardly anyone changes it often. Almost everyone leaves it at something that may not be a…

>Almost nobody knows well about how to control who see what, and even when they do, hardly anyone changes it often.

To be fair, that's true for most permissions on UNIX/Windows for the average person. Having a flexible ACL system that is user friendly is likely impossible. Either you make it friendly, but reduce its capabilities, or you make it complex and provide flexibility.

Re: We should replace Facebook with personal websites

#269

Post by krapp »

ufmace wrote: post #237
krapp wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the major web services (Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire) required anyone to know FTP, and they weren't any more difficult to use than Wix or Wordpress, which target non-technical users today. 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 languag…

The trouble is, all of those "easy" website building services are still much harder and more customizable than Facebook. If you remember MySpace, you'll also remember that a pretty signifiant minority of pages were horrifically ugly and did super-annoying things. It seems most people are either terrible at web design or have no interest in it, even if you give them a pile of dead-easy templates. Part of the reason mo…

I don't think "customization" is necessarily a problem, even if people want to make butt-ugly sites. Part of what the web offers people is the opportunity to express themselves creatively, both in terms of design and content.

I can't complain about anyone else's lack of design skills... I once had all of the text on my website bright red Nosferatu on a black background in tables with 3d bevels and a background I swiped from a surreal art site.

But there's no reason some modern, stripped down and ultra-minimalist version of a self-hosted site service couldn't borrow from Facebook's UI design (which, all else considered about the service, obviously works for the general public) and have publishing a "page" be as simple as publishing to their Facebook feed, complete with some non-editable css.

But then that gives you none of the benefits (in my mind) to having your own site (complete control over code and content) as well as none of the benefits of Facebook (integration with your social graph and discoverability) and keeps all of the downsides of a third party host.

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