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Towards a world without Facebook

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Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#51

Post by danbruc »

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 would be no point to track and analyze the shit out of their behavior. Users could be customers again. So the real question is how do you convince potential users that they are better off paying for services directly?

It is of course not that simple, it never is, think for example about people seeing ads for Gucci bags and actually buying them and how they subsidize people which may see those ads but never actually buy the products because they can not afford them and which may also not have the money to pay for services directly.

But I do not think any of the peripheral issues fundamentally changes the core challenges, getting people off of ad supported services.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#52

Post by 2aa07e2 »

The sudden push from journalists to detach their readership from facebook is remarkable. They media has been pushing the social media website very aggressively from 2007-2008 up until very recently.

Just a few days ago I used a chrome extension to delete all my likes/reactions, posts, and comments (I cringed multiple times while it was scrolling and deleting them). I left 3 or 4 of my photos, and decided against deleting the whole account only because it's an invaluable address book. Realistically, the inertia of people to leave it will keep me as a user for a long time.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#53

Post by bognition »

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 can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of engineering manpower.

I'm not sure thats true. At the time of their acquisitions Instagram had 13 employees and WhatsApp had 55. Both of those are extremely small when compared to the size of Facebook. And given the size of the acquisition price tags i'd wager facebook felt like both were existential threats.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#54

Post by sharpercoder »

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…

simpler is not directly needed, as Facebook already reaches the minimum viable simplicity for many functionalities. More compelling certainly would help.

The killer in getting adoption of any social network is the network effect. You want to be on the social media application because your friends & family is on it.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#55

Post by sumeno »

ams6110 wrote: post #31
eyeareque wrote: post #9

After ditichong Facebook long ago it seems amusing to me that people have such a connection with it and find it hard to leave. Sure it may seem hard at first. But your true friends will not lose contact with you. You might not know random life events about your seldom communicated with old high school peers though.

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.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#56

Post by ReverseCold »

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…

The blockchain can just be used to do PKI. People having cryptocurrency wallets installed means they have a private key, and when people have private keys you can do a whole lot of cool stuff.

My blockchain/IoT startup[0] primarily uses the blockchain as just that, a backend for PKI.

[0]: https://ethyl.io/

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#57

Post by dralley »

sweeds wrote: post #40
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.

The one main advantage that I'm aware of is that a distributed, decentralized database for a social network would mean that there is no one private company that gatekeeps, owns, and sells the personal data within. For all intents and purposes, Facebook's database is closed source. The community doesn't know exactly what this private company does with this data. We have to trust them with it. A blockchain database is…

That's a complete bastardization of the concept of "trust" as applies to distributed systems.

You're not 'trusting' a single entity in that case because you're making literally all the information public for anyone to see, use, resell, etc.

That's like saying we shouldn't have to trust Equifax, let's just make everyone's name, address, SSN, and credit history public on the internet to begin with.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#58

Post by somethingsimple »

2aa07e2 wrote: post #52

The sudden push from journalists to detach their readership from facebook is remarkable. They media has been pushing the social media website very aggressively from 2007-2008 up until very recently. Just a few days ago I used a chrome extension to delete all my likes/reactions, posts, and comments (I cringed multiple times while it was scrolling and deleting them). I left 3 or 4 of my photos, and decided against dele…

What extension is that?

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#59

Post by rootlocus »

seattle_spring wrote: post #38

Boy this is getting old. I hope FB dies for no other reason than for HN to get real content again instead of the same old tired anti FB crap that's dominated the front page for the last 2 weeks.

Yeah! Any technology that affects the lives of millions of people in potential harmful ways should die because it gets to the front page of my favourite news aggregator TWO days in a row!
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