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Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

nytimes.com

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Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#61

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)

I think people care a lot more today than they used too. The problem is people use facebook because they have to.

If people really cared about their privacy they wouldn't broadcast their personal lives to millions of people (see social media). Until that's corrected (how do you get out of that social cycle where you have to market and yell louder than everyone else?), it's going to continue.

People are mad at FB the same way people get mad when they realize they've been in manipulative relationships, but I'm not sure many people really want to accept that they gave into that despite all the warning signs that have been there for years and it's their own actions which enabled FB to be what it is.

Some of the issue is the belief that anyone really needs FB. We've conditioned ourselves into it, but you don't need it any more than you need TV.

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#62
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to create distributed but capitalistic systems with blockchain. Without blockchain most distributed / P2P systems fail because they rely on volunteers to run the system.

I don't think that's why they fail. Lack of adoption primarily due to difficulty of use is mostly why they fail. Lots of us are willing to donate our resources, but that won't affect the success or failure of the platform. People need to be working on simple to use platforms, everything else is secondary (including scaling and featureset). Max effort needs to be towards onboarding, wizards, easy walkthroughs, etc. It…

But still, with blockchain you can design all kinds of incentives directly in the protocol without anyone in control. I'm not saying it's easy or if it's actually viable, but blockchain has properties that could make P2P social network possible in economic sense.

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#63
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?

[deleted]

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#64
post #13

I don't want my stuff in the "cloud", I want it shared from my lawn. My own personal space to where people can access my stuff, that I share, and we can converse over whatever that is ... my own GDPR rules.

Have you seen Beaker [0]? It doesn't require you to setup a complex web server and configure a bunch of stuff, you just run the browser and it'll start sharing your website. It's a move back to a truly decentralized web. [0] https://beakerbrowser.com/

Didn’t Opera offer something similar in the past? A small “private space” you could optionally share with others (as long as they used Opera too).

I ask because Beaker claims to be “the first and only...”

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#65
post #4

I think in the long run we will use a decentralised/federated system. Privacy concerns aside, it just doesn't make sense to rely on one service or expect one social network to meet everyone's needs/desires.

I think this is exactly how health/medical data should exist. My family should have their own health/medical network node and only my direct healthcare providers should be able to access the data from it and only after I authorize them with a digital signature. Whatever data they generate about my person (or persons in my family) should be owned by me, stored in my family network, and only available to others after I…

The average Joe will never manage to do that. So unless the state develop, maintain, and make available free of charge, such a service, it will never happen.

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#66
"Do these hundreds of millions of people who cannot wait to tell the world what they are doing practically minute by minute not realise that anyone with an ounce of brain can find out everything about them just by reading their posts?

As the FBI admitted a while back, Facebook was the best thing that happened to collecting intelligence and saving money (because everything is in the open).

By having "free" access and use of Facebook, these people have made Mark Zuckerberg a multibillionaire."

Source:

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/letters/2018-04-04...

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#67
"Australia's privacy commissioner has launched an investigation to determine whether Facebook breached the Australian privacy act.

...

Facebook has admitted 311,127 Australian users are likely among the up to 87 million users worldwide whose data was unknowingly and "improperly" shared with the British political consultancy agency."

Source:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/05/facebook-...

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this and I want it to be real but it won’t work. Here’s why... As an individual, I won’t lose my medical records because I have three backups and offsite and whatever. You probably do too. But how do you remain really decentralized when the system has to work for a 76-year-old who can’t even remember what Google is, much less his password. Will this work in the golden hour after a stroke, when literally every…

> So we would make a medical record “bank”, which is federated sensibly, and require everyone to use it. And eventually we end up with a similar system that we have now. Except accessing your encrypted records require the presentation a doctor's key and your key, which might be a standardized health card with a chip. So not entirely similar to what we have now, it could be considerably safer.

> it could be considerably safer.

If my card is lost or broken? The system you describe seems clearly at less risk of inappropriate disclosure. Whether it's safer is perhaps another question.

Re: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't this exist already? Sounds very feasible. Your "friends" are people in a given mailing-list, and even a minute action such as "like" could also just be an email sent to that mailing-list, with some proper tagging in the subject header, so that the email client knows not to display the email but rather act on it as an event handler.

One important functionality gap, between FB and email, is that email always creates copies that are easily controlled by the recipient by design. While it's technically true that a FB recipient could be auto-scraping everything, practically that's not true, which allows people to retroactively delete things with a large chance of success. I feel like reasonably effective retro-active deletion is an important feature…

Very good point. I guess if we're going to use email as a substitute for Facebook we could use messages containing deletion/update directives. Clients could still of course decide to ignore them or interpret them however they wish.
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