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Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

nytimes.com

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Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#271

Post by JKCalhoun »

mpweiher wrote: post #58
panarky wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like a smoking addiction It's awesome to watch massive shifts in values and priorities. Smoking used to be seen as cool, sexy, even healthy. Now it's widely seen as unhealthy and disgusting. Same thing with high-fructose carbonated beverages. I remember people using terms like "retarded" and "gyp" without hesitation. Today even people who hate political correctness don't talk like that in public. It wasn't lon…

> men abusing women in the workplace was routine and unremarkable When was this?

Somewhat related: I was wandering YouTube the other day and stumbled upon an old T.V. segment with Hunter S. Thompson and a Hell's Angel sharing the program's stage. The amount of joking about wife beating (and audience approval of said joking) was frankly shocking to watch. Easy enough to search for, I'll leave off the link.

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#272

Post by rmc »

on_and_off wrote: post #268
vinniejames wrote: post #46

We did replace it, almost 10 years ago. It was called Diaspora[1], no one cared about privacy then. No one really cares about privacy now, at least not enough to do anything about it. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

>No one really cares about privacy now I spoke with several non-tech people about the facebook fiasco. The issue is that even a brilliant neurosurgeon does not understand the TOS he has signed with Facebook and what they entail. Surely, there is some naïveté from people that don't expect facebook to do much with their data, but tech has also failed to teach users about this. Even self proclaimed privacy champions rou…

This is why a contract should not be legally binding if it's unclear. I don't mean "clear to a lawyer", but what the common person, spending the standard, common amount of time, with the advice you expect them to have[1], would think of as "clear".

EU Data Protection law (like the GDPR) helps here, requiring informed consent. If you don't understand something, then you're not informed, and it shouldn't be binding.

[1] When (say) signing a form for surgery, the surgon can presume that the person has been advised by a doctor. When buying a house, you can presume a lawyer was involved, etc. When signing a ToS for Facebook, we all know there was no legal advice recieved.

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#273

Post by russdpale »

jopuwep12489 wrote: post #204
obstacle1 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem is people use facebook because they have to. It's remarkable how common this opinion is given its obvious shallowness. Nobody has to use Facebook. What are the consequences of not? You can't chat with your friends or view their selfies or see event listings. Or rather to do these things, you have to make an effort to use some other more private mode of communication like phone or in-person or classifieds…

When I was in a band, the people promoting and organizing the shows didn't have email or phone numbers. Seriously. I'd ask. It was all college kids who couldn't afford a phone plan, so they just used public wifi + facebook messenger. Email was apparently not cool enough for them, or too difficult to use. So to get gigs, I had to make a Facebook account. Granted, I tried to put as little as possible on it. Until very…

Holy moly. Who doesn't want to learn email....? People are so lazy!!

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#274

Post by zaarn »

nine_k wrote: post #256
jug wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It's absolutely about four simple steps: 1. Going to a mobile-first website or app. 2. Clicking a link. 3. Typing in your new e-mail and password. 4. Being able to add anyone in the world as friends. It cannot be about local "hubs" vs the global "public" / federation, being forced to make that distinction would feel like a step backwards for the users. It can be distributed in the back end, but not in the front…

I see two assumptions: (1) Everyone's identity is their email. (2) The person whose email you're typing in has already signed in to the service (or meta-service if it's a federation), and agrees to communicate with you. If you squint just right, this exact thing already exists; it's called email, and adding to friends means adding to a mail list. I wonder why there were no (known to me) attempts to actually use the e…

EMail has it's problems. ~~Abusing~~ Using it for social media updates doesn't sound like something Email can solve well.

It's not necessarily fast, delivery may take only 1 second but I've also had email take days until it was delivered successfully.

Reliability is meh, it has some resilience to services being offline for a bit, so I'll give you that.

The near-zero cost is also not quite true. It's only true if you sell your data to the provider of your choice, gmail or yahoo or AOL. If you want privacy on email, you'll have to pay for it, otherwise you pay by other means first.

There is a chat app that uses email to function, it also features encryption but IIRC the userbase is very small and last i tried it for testing, it did quite spam my inbox.

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#275

Post by Joeboy »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #267
Joeboy wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people I know think privacy is important. Of course they do. What sort of person is going to tick the "I don't care about privacy" box? I guess the same kind of person that ticks the "I'm OK with mass extinction" box. Those opinions are not very relevant in the real world.

Really? If I killed all the remaining snowy owls you’d see that as morally equivalent to treating all my data as discoverable? I don’t see it.

No, I see ticking a box marked "I don't care about privacy" as comparable to ticking a box marked "I'm OK with mass extinction". In the sense that in theory nobody's outward preference is for invasion of privacy or mass extinction, but in practice few people are prepared to make changes that prevent those things.

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#276

Post by sidcool »

brandonmenc wrote: post #237
sidcool wrote: post #39

I tried explaining my 20 year old cousin about FB. Her constant argument was "I don't share anything private on FB". She checks in on FB everywhere she goes. Posts her pics all the time. I could not instill any sense of concern for privacy. What I could conclude is that the appeal of social is too great to have any caution. Call me a pessimist, but I don't think FB is going anywhere. People will keep using it inspite…

> It's like a smoking addiction. It's bad but very difficult to give up. Social media is socializing now, whether you like it or not, and whether you're along for the ride or not. In that light, it's strange when people say it's "addicting," like that's a bad thing. It's supposed to be - we're social creatures. Sharing things about your life with friends and family is not some horrible drug we need to curb.

The problem is that FB encourages a popularity contest online. This is not healthy. We are social creatures, but the internet based social does not cater to our social needs. It caters to our dopamine kick needs.

Several studies have proven the ill effects of social network. So you are only partly correct.

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#277

Post by sidcool »

akkat wrote: post #156
tomcooks wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everytime you say, hear or read the word "Facebook" replace it with either "mom and dad" or "the creep". Works great.

Except it doesn't. Situation a: Facebook knows what I did last night. Result: I get ads tailored to what I did. Situation b: Mom and Dad knows what I did last night. Result: I get grounded.

There is a high probability that you did something wrong last night. /s

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#278

Post by soapdog »

fenwick67 wrote: post #220
soapdog wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey I Love Scuttlebutt, I am actually writing a client for it. But I don't think the objective here is privacy. If I follow you on ssb, I will start replicating your feed (unless you block me), and all you post publicly will be in my own HD which I could use to generate some "intelligence". There are no incentives in ssb for those marketing type actions we see on FB and Twitter but we can still mine it. Of course you…

SSB does support encrypted private messaging, notably. You could send a private message to a group of (7 or fewer) friends and then only they could open it.

yes and as far as I know there is work being done to make private channels a thing. So in the near future, private conversation might be able to include more than 7 people.

I just have this feeling that people sometimes talk about SSB as if it is like "private by default" and thats not really the case, public feed is quite public (and I don't think that is bad).

I for example considered using private messages to myself as a diary. I know they will remain private.

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#279

Post by dbbk »

Sir_Substance wrote: post #120
vinniejames wrote: post #46

We did replace it, almost 10 years ago. It was called Diaspora[1], no one cared about privacy then. No one really cares about privacy now, at least not enough to do anything about it. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

Diaspora (still!) doesn't do: 1. Chat (It could just integrate a javascript XMPP client and let people use whatever chat server they liked) 2. Event management and invites When I suggest people leave Facebook, these are the things people complain there are no alternatives to.

I don't know what it's like in the US, but in the UK pretty much all of university social life is organised via Facebook Events and Groups. There literally is no other option available that people could move to, except for maybe Meetup.com, which would be a poor substitute.

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#280

Post by dbbk »

jhasse wrote: post #136
Sir_Substance wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diaspora (still!) doesn't do: 1. Chat (It could just integrate a javascript XMPP client and let people use whatever chat server they liked) 2. Event management and invites When I suggest people leave Facebook, these are the things people complain there are no alternatives to.

> 2. Event management and invites https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1359

That issue has been open for 7 years... what is your point? To me that only demonstrates that the project is dead.
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