6 ms·

Are closed social networks inevitable? (2010)

170 points by szx 10y ago

maaaats 10y ago
Not the same definition as discussed here, but: All my social networking among friends is "closed". I almost never post publicly, everything happens in closed groups on facebook, in a group chat, in a Slack for a group of friends/coworkers/organization, Snapchats where you're either in or you're out etc.
gaxun 10y ago
My "social network" is the internet. I can control where my domain resolves and I can serve content over HTTP and handle email via SMTP. Anyone can link to my site from whatever social network they use. I may or may not be able to link to everyone else, though. So far, I have no external links on my site. They're too likely to be broken in a year or three. If I get email related to my site, I often post it to the site. I hope I can continue to interoperate with other people like this. I have tried a couple other social networks like Hacker News and Twitter, but if they disappeared or acted in a way I didn't like, I could abandon them without much loss. Do I have any reason to be scared that my current setup might become "closed" in the future? Not trying to be paranoid, just wondering.
- cm3 10y ago
  Concerning external links, I'm surprised that big news sites don't seem to have stable links whereas tech sites like /. do. Go to Wikipedia, and follow a few referenced links to major news organization websites. You'll find many dead links. Given that they use complex, professional CMS solutions, I don't understand why they would break links. It's not like they cannot serve ads for old articles. Wired's old articles seem to be there but barely so with sometimes broken img links. > If I get email related to my site, I often post it to the site. But only after consent from your the sender, right?
  - gaxun 10y ago
    Just to be clear up front, my site is actively trying to be a demonstration of the ideas I outlined in the above post, in addition to being an actual site. It's still a work in progress and I'm letting it evolve piece by piece. There are many unanswered questions. > But only after consent from your the sender, right? I'm struggling to decide the right way to handle this. So far, if the message is substantial and I want to reply for follow-up, I also ask directly for permission. If it is a small message or I otherwise don't end up with consent, I'll remove any personally identifying information and/or paraphrase the message. You can see this in action at [0]. I'd love to know where most people think the proper line is. I usually consider direct email to be a rather private communication channel. [0] https://www.gaxun.net/commentary/knuth-challenge/comments/ https://www.gaxun.net/commentary/knuth-challenge/comments/
  - ChoHag 10y ago
    Have you ever maintained one of their CMS solutions? "Professional" has many meanings...
  - test1235 10y ago
    >I'm surprised that big news sites don't seem to have stable links BBC is an exception to this - the way they publish their news pages means they have articles going back over a decade (with the original styling) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1537469.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1537469.stm
    - 7952 10y ago
      I love how they show the whole page as it was on the day.
    - cm3 10y ago
      That's brilliant, and I wouldn't expect anything less from the BBC. They are technically competent and innovated in the broadcasting space, like a few other networks did/do. It surely helped that the BBC have (had?) an R&D department.
- drcode 10y ago
  Yes, gaxun, you are living the dream and using the internet like it was originally intended- However, very few people can live your "extreme" lifestyle, it's cumbersome, enforces significant constraints, and requires significant technical knowledge. You are one of the few people right now using the internet in a decentralized fashion- I hope that the recent advances around cryptography, mesh nets and blockchain systems will soon make it practical for more people to join your ranks!
  - gaxun 10y ago
    You can also call me a hypocrite. My MX records point to Google and my A record points to gitlab.com's GitLab Pages. I'm actually not brave enough to open a few public ports on a server I own and manage and drive traffic there. It's a mix between "scared" and "it only took an hour to set up the entire thing the easy way." But I can sleep soundly knowing that if any of the providers I'm currently using become incompatible, I can move things very quickly to a new location.
    - __jal 10y ago
      Take it at your own speed, when you're confident in your abilities. Especially mail is difficult to get started with now - domains that don't have years of (spam-free) reputation tend to be blocked a lot, creating a bit of a chicken and egg issue[1] to get past, and it is... extremely frustrating to figure out what hoops j-random-webmail.com demands you jump through. Also, setup is complex, mainly due to the accretion of of anti-spam half-measures that need to junk up your DNS if you want people to accept your mail. But trust me, even with all that, setting up mail today is still much easier than it was in the Sendmail days. Assuming you're interested, and you want to, I'd encourage you to try running more services. When experimenting, don't keep private things on your host, make sure you have your machine access covered (passwords, keys, magic customer service phrases, whatever) and keep an eye on it. If it is compromised, consider it a learning experience and recreate your config (I'm assuming you're running a cheap virtual host; if this is hardware, that's a bit different). It isn't that hard to do, and I think too many people are much more scared of running their own services than is sensible or real. Netizens, arise! You have nothing to lose but your shackles. And maybe some time that you otherwise would have wasted on Facebook. [1] A few sites still block my domain, despite being single-owner, always spam-free and online for almost 20 years. I don't feel bad about not having them as potential conversation partners.
- platz 10y ago
  Good on you - now just convince a billion other people to do the same and we should be alright. A bunker does nothing to help avoid the war itself.
  - tdkl 10y ago
    How can we expect for humanity to explore space, if the majority is "nannied" from comprehending technology ?
- begriffs 10y ago
  Nice, that's the spirit! I recently wrote an article about this concept, https://begriffs.com/posts/2016-07-08-returning-original-social-network.html https://begriffs.com/posts/2016-07-08-returning-original-soc...
- rsync 10y ago
  "Do I have any reason to be scared that my current setup might become "closed" in the future? Not trying to be paranoid, just wondering." Yes, a little bit, I think ... specifically with regard to running your own email server. I have run my own personal email server for about 20 years and rsync.net and Oh By have their own email servers as well. What I have noticed is that gmail (and AOL) consistently classifies my email as spam even though my configuration and spam scores are flawless. I am on 10+ year verified clean IPs, I have everything (DKIM/DMARC/SPF) configured ... and email to new addresses very, very often (although not always) goes to their spam folders. Google/AOL/MSN/whomever are incentivized to not support private email servers. If you have personnel and resources dedicated to making this work (as a medium/large business might) then you can keep up with this wack-a-mole email issue. If you do this on your own it becomes very expensive in terms of time and frustration. Personally, I will not give up self-providing my own email[1] but in answer to your question, there is a lot of pushback against running your own SMTP. [1] In fact, it is my ambition to begin self-providing my own dialtone ... providing my own VOIP service, etc.
eridius 10y ago
I only read the start of this, but already there's 2 big problems with the idea of a collectively-owned social graph: 1. I may want to have different social graphs on different networks. Facebook for friends and family, LinkedIn for work, Google Plus for hell if I know, etc. Not only would I probably want different graphs for the different networks, I'd also explicitly want to avoid having those networks know about the social connections I have outside of it (e.g. I don't want to just tell LinkedIn to ignore my family, I specifically don't want it to have access to that info in the first place). 2. The social graph isn't the only component of the network effect. Even if we had a collectively-owned social graph, all of the content that you produce or consume is limited to a single social network. So even if Google Plus could see my entire Facebook social graph, anything I post on Facebook would not be on Google Plus (and vice versa). So the network effect is still strong, because everybody would still have to gravitate to the same social network in order to see each others' posts. The only way this really works is if we have a federated social network, where all federated networks share the same social graph and have access to all the content. But while federation works for a messaging platform, it doesn't really work all that well for a social network because it also means all networks have to have the same feature set, and that's hugely restrictive. If Facebook was federated with Google Plus, Facebook couldn't introduce any new features since Google Plus doesn't have them. Or Google Plus couldn't introduce its Circles concept because Facebook doesn't (didn't?) have that.
- mjevans 10y ago
  I agree, I too only read the first part to get a 'flavor' for the discussion and the viewpoints of those in it. The speakers are trying to convey too much nuanced information at once for each point, and the text is presented in a small annoyingly dense format. More editorial structure to make it easy to scan for the main points, and read through their related details as necessary would be required for me to have an interest in ingesting the content. That isn't to say 'make it bite sized', that's saying "Give it structure, organization, and consolidate like things together".
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
sparkzilla 10y ago
MySpace appeared to be a big winner too. Facebook's time will come.
- wizardforhire 10y ago
  ... and not a moment too soon.
- bluedino 10y ago
  I hear this but I'm not sure something will replace MySpace as violently as facebook did. Nothing says they can't come along even though competitors come and go. People still buy things on eBay and craigslist, people still shop on Amazon, people still search with Google.
  - sparkzilla 10y ago
    The big Internet brands have various levels of vulnerabilities/opportunities for competitors. Google search is weakening day by day. Wikipedia's design and software is static. Facebook can't decide whether it's a social network or a news network. Amazon and Ebay are vulnerable to niche competitors. Change is coming, and when it does it's usually unexpected.
    - qmalzp 10y ago
      Does anyone else think the static design of Wikipedia is a good thing?
      - Spakman 10y ago
        I love the static nature of Wikipedia's design.
tsunamifury 10y ago
We already have an open graph, its the Internet Protocol and associated addresses. All other experiences that are delivered over IP are just sub-protocols with attached UX that is preferable for the users.
- groby_b 10y ago
  It's probably worth pointing out that a graph consists of nodes and edges. The Internet (protocol(s)) standardized building & discovering nodes, but they are not standardizing edge discovery. And they only cover a very ephemeral mode of edge building. That is what the social graph is about - making it possible to describe and discover the edges.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    What would you hope to have / expect to find for edge discovery? Any examples? What types of edges might you want to have that existing models don't support?
    - groby_b 10y ago
      The things a social graph gives you - Friends of a Friend, graph overlap, graph complexity, etc. All these metrics matter a lot in the social space. We can't get them (with, see below, a few exceptions like HTML - and boy is having the edges there a useful thing)
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        So, relationships, essentially. An article I ran acrosss a few days back pointed out how the nature relationships also matters. It starts off noting that gender is often given as binary (M/F), when reality can be more complicated (though most of the complications are a distinct minority case). That's something I ran across years back looking at healthcare data, where "gender" had in some cases five values: male, female, indeterminate, other, and unknown. Relationships, though: "friend", "family", "co-worker", "ex-spouse", "enemy", ... Any thoughts on capturing something such as this (or of similar complexity) on a graph? Or references? I suspect international or inter-corporate relationships might be similar.
sirclueless 10y ago
Who is "Rebecca"? I agree with 90% of her statements, and she appears in this conversation to have further ambitions of continuing with the ideas and convincing some powerful people, especially Paul Krugman, of their validity. Did she ever succeed? Did she write her thoughts in a more digestible format and make those writings public? Does she have further commentary on her thesis on the capitalist or non-capitalist tendencies of modern software companies, or on other topics? Mostly I'd just love to read more of her writing, if it exists. Edit: I believe she is Rebecca Frankel, according to http://danluu.com/programming-blogs/#rebecca-frankel http://danluu.com/programming-blogs/#rebecca-frankel. Still interested in any pointers to more of her writing if it exists.
- jimminy 10y ago
  I would assume it is Rebecca Frankel as well. I looked for a connection to Piaw and he had blogged about her during the period this conversation had taken place.
  - sirclueless 10y ago
    Yes, she is a truly excellent writer. I went digging into a Buzz post about the Boston startup scene that Piaw referenced, and could only find a crufty unstyled version in the Internet Archive. If you can forgive the formatting, it's still excellent reading: https://web.archive.org/web/20100613173203/http://www.google.com/buzz/piaw/B4wChKfzFka/Theres-no-reason-why-the-Boston-area-shouldnt-be https://web.archive.org/web/20100613173203/http://www.google...
    - laser 10y ago
      Better copy: http://danluu.com/mit-stanford/ http://danluu.com/mit-stanford/
      - shalmanese 10y ago
        Prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1416348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1416348
szx 10y ago
From TFA: "Lessig told me I had to write an account that fit in five pages in order to hope to be heard, to which I reacted with some despair. I can’t! There is more than five pages worth of complexity to this problem! If I try to reduce beyond a certain point I burn the sauce. You are watching me struggle in public with this problem."
cloudjacker 10y ago
> “The Social Graph” and its associated apps should be like the internet, distributed and not confined to one company’s servers. It is like this though. Any one of us can re-create our social graph in a heartbeat on any of these services at any point in time by importing our contacts and letting the network present us with our associations at the moment in time we want it to. I've done this with linkedin, having zero presence there until the moment I wanted to network in a new area. I've done this with snapchat Telegram anything I want at that point in time there is no need for continued presence on any one of them since you can come and go as you please with new profiles and reconnecting to existing associates.
- laksjd 10y ago
  That's a great concept: The fact that a list of {name, email, mobilephone number} allows you to effectively re-create your own network wherever you want is pretty cool. I read the open/closed in the article as less about that and more about the fact that e.g. I can't push a twitter post to Facebook without Facebook specifically putting that function into Facebook. I also can't combine the comment streams from Twitter and Facebook. That's the kind of openness that I thought the article was referencing.
zubat 10y ago
Answers to this question tend to get philosophical very quickly. The literal act of sending a message is democratized to the extent that we share protocols like English, UTF-8 or SMTP across our systems. But the social value of the message is oft contextual, creating an infinite number of spaces for socialization. You can have the same group of people in same room and yet send them on a radically different conversation by priming them to focus on something new. Hence I think it is beyond the power of a company to monopolize the social sphere in Orwellian fashion, but monitoring, nudging, and creating an atmosphere - those things happen in any coffeehouse or bar. Small towns are known more for lack of privacy than the opposite. In the past week I "returned" to Facebook after years of effective silence on it. The impulse was relationship-based, as many of these things are, but I had to decide on a method of engagement and decided that I was going to treat FB as a direct extension of Twitter, which I've kept up with - just tweet as usual but follow a second thread. I used to want to keep them separate to have parallel lives, but since I abandoned FB that "life" was already dead and I have learned a way of public living on Twitter that I am comfortable with. Fortunately there is enough linkage between the two that this is straightforward. They have presented a tool that adapts to my preference, rather than an imposition or decorum. This, I think, is the direction that social software is moving towards inexorably - to separate or merge bodies, accounts, and personas as needed, across systems, according to various models of seeing the world.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Usenet was pretty much utterly anarchic. It faded. I'm still not completely sure why - the people who got off of it can't really say. Perhaps it's as simple as port blockers on corporate networks and people going around corporate networks with phones.
  - spc476 10y ago
    Spam, AOL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September) and the high cost of hosting the binary groups are mostly responsible for the decline of USENET. I know I slowly stopped reading it as the spam and new customs (top posting, not trimming posts) crept slowly in, and most of the action switched to web forums (because of shiny HTML and what not).
forgotpwtomain 10y ago
Potentially this could have been titled: 'Technology, Freedom, Economics and Scarcity'. Rebecca is rarely well articulated, her arguments are innovative, nuanced and delightful to read; to which the closed social network issue seems merely as an aside.
- jrm415 10y ago
  Perhaps you meant that she is _really_ well articulated (rather than rarely)?
  - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
    No, I meant _rarely_ as in it is rare to find a person so well articulated in their argument.
    - bbcbasic 10y ago
      I took it as she is articulate only on occasion.
      - swagasaurus-rex 10y ago
        it was a rarely well articulated appraisal
    - throwanem 10y ago
      'Unusually' better captures the meaning you intend. Both words denote roughly the same, but they differ a great deal in their connotations.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
The part that jumped out at me was this: Piaw: "The magic trick that Facebook pulled off was getting the typical user to provide and upload all his/her personal information. It’s incredibly hard to do that: Amazon couldn’t do it, and neither could Google. I don’t think it’s one of those things that’s technically difficult, but the social engineering required to do that demands critical mass. That’s why I think that Facebook is (still) under-valued." Rob: "@Piaw - it was an accident of history I think. When Facebook started, they required a student ID to join. This made a culture of “real names” that stuck, and that no one else has been able to replicate." I added the emphasis. I think this exchange is significant in thinking about an open and better replacement. Why hasn't popped into my head.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Facebook also grew, specifically, on the appeal of Harvard / Ivy Leage / Selective University association. Part of the reason for being on the network was to 1) show who you were and 2) associate with a high-affinity social cohort. I've been pointing this out for years, recently ran across another source, at Unz, who makes the same observation.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    That's another good point. I couldn't be sure if it was fiction or accurate but The Social Network movie kept referencing the exclusivity of the clubs that everyone wanted. He was moving that experience online. So, being the cool thing plus your list being exclusive and in your control could definitely be a driver. Each of these are individually motivating for users.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      The risk Facebook runs is in having lost that cachet. Facebook transitioned from "the cool kids" to "all the kids". They've been playing a highly defensive game, through pricey acquisitions, of seeing that they remain "all the kids", though with significant leakage forming. No single other party has decided to enter into the frey with a decentralised social networking model (Google could have, didn't, and at this point I'm suspecting won't, more on that: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/3L3Z5GhJ5An https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/3L3Z5GhJ...). One thought that's been bubbling up my head is that we still don't fully understand networks, values, and costs. First it was Sarnoff (V = n), then Metcalfe (V = n^2), then Tilly-Odlyzko (V = n(log(n))). I argue that V = n(log(n)) - kn That is: there's a decreasing value for each additional user, but a constant cost function. Where log(n) < kn, adding additional users hurts you. You also risk a smaller, higher-value network beating you out. There are a few implications, one of which is that network size is highly dependent on 'k'. This strikes me as a very general characteristic, common for pretty much any network-type structure: social networks, phone systems (crank and sales calls), cities (crime, disease, congestion), computer chips (heat, noise, defects), and more. There are also some psychological and perceptual limitations at play. I've been trying to find what I can on human limits of information consumption. Several sources (Stephen Wolfram, Walt Mossberg) suggest ~100 - 300 emails/day is a near upper limit, the NY Times comments moderation desk averages slightly fewer than 800 comments/day per person. That's about one every 36 seconds, straight. I know my own bandwidth for articles, comments, posts, and books is limited, as well as my capacity for handling longer forms once I've started consuming shorter-form content. I'm tumbling this around to see what I can get out of it. Not sure yet.
ChoHag 10y ago
Yes, initially. Pretty much everything starts off closed. (DNR)
GuiA 10y ago
Brilliant, and eloquently phrases something I've tried to convey to myriad technologists during my time in the valley: "When I was young my father read to me “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” advertising it as a great classic of futuristic science fiction. Unfortunately, I was unimpressed. It didn’t seem “futuristic” at all: it seemed like an archaic fantasy. Why? Certainly it was impressive that an author in 1869 correctly predicted that people would ride in submarines under the sea. But it didn’t seem like an image of the future, or even the past, at all. Why not? Because the person riding around on the submarine under the sea was a Victorian gentleman surrounded by appropriately deferential Victorian servants. Futurists consistently get their stories wrong in a particular way: when they say that technology changes the world, they tell stories of fabulous gadgets that will enable people to do new and exciting things. They completely miss that this is not really what “change” – serious, massive, wrenching, social change - really is. When technology truly enables dreams of change, it doesn’t mean it enables aristocrats to dream about riding around under the sea. What it means is that enables the aristocrat’s butler to dream of not being a butler any more — a dream of freedom not through violence or revolution, but through economic independence. A dream of technological change – really significant technological change – is not a dream of spiffy gadgets, it is a dream of freedom, of social & economic liberation enabled by technology."
- 13of40 10y ago
  Reminds me of the time I dreamed up the web browser back in about 1991 and I was convinced it would be the next big thing for dialing up to BBSs.
- enneff 10y ago
  That's one of the things that made Philip K. Dick a brilliant futurist author. His tales focused on the social problems of the people in speculative futures.
- officemonkey 10y ago
  >Because the person riding around on the submarine under the sea was a Victorian gentleman surrounded by appropriately deferential Victorian servants. As someone who actually read Jules Verne (instead of watching the Disney movie or reading a poorly-translated abridgement,) I would not characterize Nemo as a Victorian gentleman. First of all Verne wasn't English, and Nemo isn't a Victorian gentleman, he's a rebel and a terrorist. He doesn't have appropriately deferential Victorian servants, he has fellow freedom fighters. Arronax's servant Consiel is the closest to a "appropriately deferential Victorian servant" but the way he is written, he comes across as a borderline Asperger's Syndrome savant scientist, not at all like Mercury from "Bleak House." I get that people make up stuff to support their thoughts and biases, but calling Jules Verne a Victorian writer is simply incorrect. He's a lot closer to Dumas than Dickens.
guelo 10y ago
Ah yes, the Eric Schmidt-era Google was so seemingly altruistic with so much hacker ethos that all the cynical hackers dared to dream that they would save us. Alas.
7373737373 10y ago
Fundamentals to protocols machine organisation/cooperation/competition device politics physical/virtual social/economic networks scalability online vs offline vertically integrated monopolies transaction costs economies of scale inner vs outer relations resource sharing incentivisation subnetworks as actors digital money mechanism design self organisation automatisation trust risk naming routing identity consensus information surveillance standardisation networked databases decision making homoiconicity software complexity conflicts of interest controlling the narrative benefitting from scarcity/slow(ing) progress monopoly on violence fine grained markets decentralisation deterministic virtual machine property intuition denial of service operating system efficiency inevitability service discovery self optimisation source independence distributed/grid/ambient/swarm/adaptive/edge/fog computing
- swagasaurus-rex 10y ago
  can anybody tell me what this is?
  - Maakuth 10y ago
    Seems like a spam bot to me. I wonder if there's a farm of bots upvoting it - it appears faily high on the thread after all.
    - fwdbureau 10y ago
      This, or it's a comment by Nick Land
krut 10y ago
there seems to be a flaw with rebecca's only example. she seems to imply that google is responsible for the conference tables existence, which is most certainly not true. if anything, Google in this case is responsible for restricting local markets, and directing traffic to foreign ones. Conference tables have always been needed, and have always been made (most often sourced locally), Google didn't create the conference table business, it just helped direct conference table buyers to this one particular site. that seems to be to restricting market freedom, not expanding it.
- smogcutter 10y ago
  Agreed for that example, especially in light of what Google later became. Pre-Google, what would the custom conference table guy do? Presumably cold-call and place ads in trade papers. Not an insurmountable problem, assuming there's demand. All Google does is in this scenario is put you in front of office managers searching for "conference table". But I think the larger point stands - the real change is in indexing the public internet, making it possible (in theory) for a small player to reach the larger world without the capital investment that would've previously required. Reality is not living up to the early optimism over the so called "long tail", but I believe that only reinforces her point about the dangers of centralizing the internet.
  - krut 10y ago
    certainly. centralising is bad, but this article seemed more like a google shill, rather than debate about keeping/making the internet decentralised. i mean, for the majority of it she was talking about google being a white knight.
abysmallyideal 10y ago
One of the key take aways I got from this article is that it is nearly impossible to depair the efficiency of exploitative capitalism of 'physical industry' and the abstraction that is an economic, or generically a bloodless, revolution. It is economically more efficient to centralize the resources but far less robust. SV could disappear tomorrow and a significant amount of the Internet's "revolutionary" capabilities would disappear. This doesn't appeal to SV's narcissistic sell of a special snowflake, but the power they wield in their capacity to damage any progress associated with the growth of the internet. On the other hand, a distributed internet is far more diverse and robust yet the economic costs can be exponentially far more damaging and costly.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  There's nothing efficient about centralizing resources. SFAIK, this always holds except for odd edge cases of truly public { nonrival, nonexcludable } goods.
amelius 10y ago
One question: why don't we see these closed systems in good old telephony?
- throwanem 10y ago
  Once upon a time, we did: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System
- al_chemist 10y ago
  It's much more expensive to expand your phone network and network effect between distant physical locations almost does not exist. How much does it cost facebook to handle traffic in India? How much would it cost for american-only phone networt to create and connect new network in India?
  - amelius 10y ago
    So if we handwavingly turn the argument around: if Facebook and others had to physically build their own networks, we would have had an open social network :) But now that they can use the internet, the networks become closed. Interesting theory.
EGreg 10y ago
We designed a decentralized platform to power social apps. Precisely to give organizations the power and choice of running their own server and install social apps, the same way they can run Wordpress and install plugins. While regular users have their accounts seamlessly work across all domains, and connect with friends across communities and privacy just works as it should. See it at qbix.com/platform -would love to hear your opinions.

170 points by szx 10y ago

Not the same definition as discussed here, but: All my social networking among friends is "closed". I almost never post publicly, everything happens in closed groups on facebook, in a group chat, in a Slack for a group of friends/coworkers/organization, Snapchats where you're either in or you're out etc.

gaxun 10y ago

My "social network" is the internet. I can control where my domain resolves and I can serve content over HTTP and handle email via SMTP. Anyone can link to my site from whatever social network they use. I may or may not be able to link to everyone else, though. So far, I have no external links on my site. They're too likely to be broken in a year or three. If I get email related to my site, I often post it to the site. I hope I can continue to interoperate with other people like this. I have tried a couple other social networks like Hacker News and Twitter, but if they disappeared or acted in a way I didn't like, I could abandon them without much loss. Do I have any reason to be scared that my current setup might become "closed" in the future? Not trying to be paranoid, just wondering.

cm3 10y ago
Concerning external links, I'm surprised that big news sites don't seem to have stable links whereas tech sites like /. do. Go to Wikipedia, and follow a few referenced links to major news organization websites. You'll find many dead links. Given that they use complex, professional CMS solutions, I don't understand why they would break links. It's not like they cannot serve ads for old articles. Wired's old articles seem to be there but barely so with sometimes broken img links. > If I get email related to my site, I often post it to the site. But only after consent from your the sender, right?
- gaxun 10y ago
  Just to be clear up front, my site is actively trying to be a demonstration of the ideas I outlined in the above post, in addition to being an actual site. It's still a work in progress and I'm letting it evolve piece by piece. There are many unanswered questions. > But only after consent from your the sender, right? I'm struggling to decide the right way to handle this. So far, if the message is substantial and I want to reply for follow-up, I also ask directly for permission. If it is a small message or I otherwise don't end up with consent, I'll remove any personally identifying information and/or paraphrase the message. You can see this in action at [0]. I'd love to know where most people think the proper line is. I usually consider direct email to be a rather private communication channel. [0] https://www.gaxun.net/commentary/knuth-challenge/comments/ https://www.gaxun.net/commentary/knuth-challenge/comments/
- ChoHag 10y ago
  Have you ever maintained one of their CMS solutions? "Professional" has many meanings...
- test1235 10y ago
  >I'm surprised that big news sites don't seem to have stable links BBC is an exception to this - the way they publish their news pages means they have articles going back over a decade (with the original styling) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1537469.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1537469.stm
  - 7952 10y ago
    I love how they show the whole page as it was on the day.
  - cm3 10y ago
    That's brilliant, and I wouldn't expect anything less from the BBC. They are technically competent and innovated in the broadcasting space, like a few other networks did/do. It surely helped that the BBC have (had?) an R&D department.
drcode 10y ago
Yes, gaxun, you are living the dream and using the internet like it was originally intended- However, very few people can live your "extreme" lifestyle, it's cumbersome, enforces significant constraints, and requires significant technical knowledge. You are one of the few people right now using the internet in a decentralized fashion- I hope that the recent advances around cryptography, mesh nets and blockchain systems will soon make it practical for more people to join your ranks!
- gaxun 10y ago
  You can also call me a hypocrite. My MX records point to Google and my A record points to gitlab.com's GitLab Pages. I'm actually not brave enough to open a few public ports on a server I own and manage and drive traffic there. It's a mix between "scared" and "it only took an hour to set up the entire thing the easy way." But I can sleep soundly knowing that if any of the providers I'm currently using become incompatible, I can move things very quickly to a new location.
  - __jal 10y ago
    Take it at your own speed, when you're confident in your abilities. Especially mail is difficult to get started with now - domains that don't have years of (spam-free) reputation tend to be blocked a lot, creating a bit of a chicken and egg issue[1] to get past, and it is... extremely frustrating to figure out what hoops j-random-webmail.com demands you jump through. Also, setup is complex, mainly due to the accretion of of anti-spam half-measures that need to junk up your DNS if you want people to accept your mail. But trust me, even with all that, setting up mail today is still much easier than it was in the Sendmail days. Assuming you're interested, and you want to, I'd encourage you to try running more services. When experimenting, don't keep private things on your host, make sure you have your machine access covered (passwords, keys, magic customer service phrases, whatever) and keep an eye on it. If it is compromised, consider it a learning experience and recreate your config (I'm assuming you're running a cheap virtual host; if this is hardware, that's a bit different). It isn't that hard to do, and I think too many people are much more scared of running their own services than is sensible or real. Netizens, arise! You have nothing to lose but your shackles. And maybe some time that you otherwise would have wasted on Facebook. [1] A few sites still block my domain, despite being single-owner, always spam-free and online for almost 20 years. I don't feel bad about not having them as potential conversation partners.
platz 10y ago
Good on you - now just convince a billion other people to do the same and we should be alright. A bunker does nothing to help avoid the war itself.
- tdkl 10y ago
  How can we expect for humanity to explore space, if the majority is "nannied" from comprehending technology ?
begriffs 10y ago
Nice, that's the spirit! I recently wrote an article about this concept, https://begriffs.com/posts/2016-07-08-returning-original-social-network.html https://begriffs.com/posts/2016-07-08-returning-original-soc...
rsync 10y ago
"Do I have any reason to be scared that my current setup might become "closed" in the future? Not trying to be paranoid, just wondering." Yes, a little bit, I think ... specifically with regard to running your own email server. I have run my own personal email server for about 20 years and rsync.net and Oh By have their own email servers as well. What I have noticed is that gmail (and AOL) consistently classifies my email as spam even though my configuration and spam scores are flawless. I am on 10+ year verified clean IPs, I have everything (DKIM/DMARC/SPF) configured ... and email to new addresses very, very often (although not always) goes to their spam folders. Google/AOL/MSN/whomever are incentivized to not support private email servers. If you have personnel and resources dedicated to making this work (as a medium/large business might) then you can keep up with this wack-a-mole email issue. If you do this on your own it becomes very expensive in terms of time and frustration. Personally, I will not give up self-providing my own email[1] but in answer to your question, there is a lot of pushback against running your own SMTP. [1] In fact, it is my ambition to begin self-providing my own dialtone ... providing my own VOIP service, etc.

eridius 10y ago

I only read the start of this, but already there's 2 big problems with the idea of a collectively-owned social graph: 1. I may want to have different social graphs on different networks. Facebook for friends and family, LinkedIn for work, Google Plus for hell if I know, etc. Not only would I probably want different graphs for the different networks, I'd also explicitly want to avoid having those networks know about the social connections I have outside of it (e.g. I don't want to just tell LinkedIn to ignore my family, I specifically don't want it to have access to that info in the first place). 2. The social graph isn't the only component of the network effect. Even if we had a collectively-owned social graph, all of the content that you produce or consume is limited to a single social network. So even if Google Plus could see my entire Facebook social graph, anything I post on Facebook would not be on Google Plus (and vice versa). So the network effect is still strong, because everybody would still have to gravitate to the same social network in order to see each others' posts. The only way this really works is if we have a federated social network, where all federated networks share the same social graph and have access to all the content. But while federation works for a messaging platform, it doesn't really work all that well for a social network because it also means all networks have to have the same feature set, and that's hugely restrictive. If Facebook was federated with Google Plus, Facebook couldn't introduce any new features since Google Plus doesn't have them. Or Google Plus couldn't introduce its Circles concept because Facebook doesn't (didn't?) have that.

mjevans 10y ago
I agree, I too only read the first part to get a 'flavor' for the discussion and the viewpoints of those in it. The speakers are trying to convey too much nuanced information at once for each point, and the text is presented in a small annoyingly dense format. More editorial structure to make it easy to scan for the main points, and read through their related details as necessary would be required for me to have an interest in ingesting the content. That isn't to say 'make it bite sized', that's saying "Give it structure, organization, and consolidate like things together".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

sparkzilla 10y ago

MySpace appeared to be a big winner too. Facebook's time will come.

wizardforhire 10y ago
... and not a moment too soon.
bluedino 10y ago
I hear this but I'm not sure something will replace MySpace as violently as facebook did. Nothing says they can't come along even though competitors come and go. People still buy things on eBay and craigslist, people still shop on Amazon, people still search with Google.
- sparkzilla 10y ago
  The big Internet brands have various levels of vulnerabilities/opportunities for competitors. Google search is weakening day by day. Wikipedia's design and software is static. Facebook can't decide whether it's a social network or a news network. Amazon and Ebay are vulnerable to niche competitors. Change is coming, and when it does it's usually unexpected.
  - qmalzp 10y ago
    Does anyone else think the static design of Wikipedia is a good thing?
    - Spakman 10y ago
      I love the static nature of Wikipedia's design.

tsunamifury 10y ago

We already have an open graph, its the Internet Protocol and associated addresses. All other experiences that are delivered over IP are just sub-protocols with attached UX that is preferable for the users.

groby_b 10y ago
It's probably worth pointing out that a graph consists of nodes and edges. The Internet (protocol(s)) standardized building & discovering nodes, but they are not standardizing edge discovery. And they only cover a very ephemeral mode of edge building. That is what the social graph is about - making it possible to describe and discover the edges.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  What would you hope to have / expect to find for edge discovery? Any examples? What types of edges might you want to have that existing models don't support?
  - groby_b 10y ago
    The things a social graph gives you - Friends of a Friend, graph overlap, graph complexity, etc. All these metrics matter a lot in the social space. We can't get them (with, see below, a few exceptions like HTML - and boy is having the edges there a useful thing)
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      So, relationships, essentially. An article I ran acrosss a few days back pointed out how the nature relationships also matters. It starts off noting that gender is often given as binary (M/F), when reality can be more complicated (though most of the complications are a distinct minority case). That's something I ran across years back looking at healthcare data, where "gender" had in some cases five values: male, female, indeterminate, other, and unknown. Relationships, though: "friend", "family", "co-worker", "ex-spouse", "enemy", ... Any thoughts on capturing something such as this (or of similar complexity) on a graph? Or references? I suspect international or inter-corporate relationships might be similar.

sirclueless 10y ago

Who is "Rebecca"? I agree with 90% of her statements, and she appears in this conversation to have further ambitions of continuing with the ideas and convincing some powerful people, especially Paul Krugman, of their validity. Did she ever succeed? Did she write her thoughts in a more digestible format and make those writings public? Does she have further commentary on her thesis on the capitalist or non-capitalist tendencies of modern software companies, or on other topics? Mostly I'd just love to read more of her writing, if it exists. Edit: I believe she is Rebecca Frankel, according to http://danluu.com/programming-blogs/#rebecca-frankel http://danluu.com/programming-blogs/#rebecca-frankel. Still interested in any pointers to more of her writing if it exists.

jimminy 10y ago
I would assume it is Rebecca Frankel as well. I looked for a connection to Piaw and he had blogged about her during the period this conversation had taken place.
- sirclueless 10y ago
  Yes, she is a truly excellent writer. I went digging into a Buzz post about the Boston startup scene that Piaw referenced, and could only find a crufty unstyled version in the Internet Archive. If you can forgive the formatting, it's still excellent reading: https://web.archive.org/web/20100613173203/http://www.google.com/buzz/piaw/B4wChKfzFka/Theres-no-reason-why-the-Boston-area-shouldnt-be https://web.archive.org/web/20100613173203/http://www.google...
  - laser 10y ago
    Better copy: http://danluu.com/mit-stanford/ http://danluu.com/mit-stanford/
    - shalmanese 10y ago
      Prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1416348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1416348

szx 10y ago

From TFA: "Lessig told me I had to write an account that fit in five pages in order to hope to be heard, to which I reacted with some despair. I can’t! There is more than five pages worth of complexity to this problem! If I try to reduce beyond a certain point I burn the sauce. You are watching me struggle in public with this problem."

cloudjacker 10y ago

> “The Social Graph” and its associated apps should be like the internet, distributed and not confined to one company’s servers. It is like this though. Any one of us can re-create our social graph in a heartbeat on any of these services at any point in time by importing our contacts and letting the network present us with our associations at the moment in time we want it to. I've done this with linkedin, having zero presence there until the moment I wanted to network in a new area. I've done this with snapchat Telegram anything I want at that point in time there is no need for continued presence on any one of them since you can come and go as you please with new profiles and reconnecting to existing associates.

laksjd 10y ago
That's a great concept: The fact that a list of {name, email, mobilephone number} allows you to effectively re-create your own network wherever you want is pretty cool. I read the open/closed in the article as less about that and more about the fact that e.g. I can't push a twitter post to Facebook without Facebook specifically putting that function into Facebook. I also can't combine the comment streams from Twitter and Facebook. That's the kind of openness that I thought the article was referencing.

zubat 10y ago

Answers to this question tend to get philosophical very quickly. The literal act of sending a message is democratized to the extent that we share protocols like English, UTF-8 or SMTP across our systems. But the social value of the message is oft contextual, creating an infinite number of spaces for socialization. You can have the same group of people in same room and yet send them on a radically different conversation by priming them to focus on something new. Hence I think it is beyond the power of a company to monopolize the social sphere in Orwellian fashion, but monitoring, nudging, and creating an atmosphere - those things happen in any coffeehouse or bar. Small towns are known more for lack of privacy than the opposite. In the past week I "returned" to Facebook after years of effective silence on it. The impulse was relationship-based, as many of these things are, but I had to decide on a method of engagement and decided that I was going to treat FB as a direct extension of Twitter, which I've kept up with - just tweet as usual but follow a second thread. I used to want to keep them separate to have parallel lives, but since I abandoned FB that "life" was already dead and I have learned a way of public living on Twitter that I am comfortable with. Fortunately there is enough linkage between the two that this is straightforward. They have presented a tool that adapts to my preference, rather than an imposition or decorum. This, I think, is the direction that social software is moving towards inexorably - to separate or merge bodies, accounts, and personas as needed, across systems, according to various models of seeing the world.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Usenet was pretty much utterly anarchic. It faded. I'm still not completely sure why - the people who got off of it can't really say. Perhaps it's as simple as port blockers on corporate networks and people going around corporate networks with phones.
- spc476 10y ago
  Spam, AOL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September) and the high cost of hosting the binary groups are mostly responsible for the decline of USENET. I know I slowly stopped reading it as the spam and new customs (top posting, not trimming posts) crept slowly in, and most of the action switched to web forums (because of shiny HTML and what not).

forgotpwtomain 10y ago

Potentially this could have been titled: 'Technology, Freedom, Economics and Scarcity'. Rebecca is rarely well articulated, her arguments are innovative, nuanced and delightful to read; to which the closed social network issue seems merely as an aside.

jrm415 10y ago
Perhaps you meant that she is _really_ well articulated (rather than rarely)?
- forgotpwtomain 10y ago
  No, I meant _rarely_ as in it is rare to find a person so well articulated in their argument.
  - bbcbasic 10y ago
    I took it as she is articulate only on occasion.
    - swagasaurus-rex 10y ago
      it was a rarely well articulated appraisal
  - throwanem 10y ago
    'Unusually' better captures the meaning you intend. Both words denote roughly the same, but they differ a great deal in their connotations.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

The part that jumped out at me was this: Piaw: "The magic trick that Facebook pulled off was getting the typical user to provide and upload all his/her personal information. It’s incredibly hard to do that: Amazon couldn’t do it, and neither could Google. I don’t think it’s one of those things that’s technically difficult, but the social engineering required to do that demands critical mass. That’s why I think that Facebook is (still) under-valued." Rob: "@Piaw - it was an accident of history I think. When Facebook started, they required a student ID to join. This made a culture of “real names” that stuck, and that no one else has been able to replicate." I added the emphasis. I think this exchange is significant in thinking about an open and better replacement. Why hasn't popped into my head.

dredmorbius 10y ago
Facebook also grew, specifically, on the appeal of Harvard / Ivy Leage / Selective University association. Part of the reason for being on the network was to 1) show who you were and 2) associate with a high-affinity social cohort. I've been pointing this out for years, recently ran across another source, at Unz, who makes the same observation.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  That's another good point. I couldn't be sure if it was fiction or accurate but The Social Network movie kept referencing the exclusivity of the clubs that everyone wanted. He was moving that experience online. So, being the cool thing plus your list being exclusive and in your control could definitely be a driver. Each of these are individually motivating for users.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    The risk Facebook runs is in having lost that cachet. Facebook transitioned from "the cool kids" to "all the kids". They've been playing a highly defensive game, through pricey acquisitions, of seeing that they remain "all the kids", though with significant leakage forming. No single other party has decided to enter into the frey with a decentralised social networking model (Google could have, didn't, and at this point I'm suspecting won't, more on that: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/3L3Z5GhJ5An https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/3L3Z5GhJ...). One thought that's been bubbling up my head is that we still don't fully understand networks, values, and costs. First it was Sarnoff (V = n), then Metcalfe (V = n^2), then Tilly-Odlyzko (V = n(log(n))). I argue that V = n(log(n)) - kn That is: there's a decreasing value for each additional user, but a constant cost function. Where log(n) < kn, adding additional users hurts you. You also risk a smaller, higher-value network beating you out. There are a few implications, one of which is that network size is highly dependent on 'k'. This strikes me as a very general characteristic, common for pretty much any network-type structure: social networks, phone systems (crank and sales calls), cities (crime, disease, congestion), computer chips (heat, noise, defects), and more. There are also some psychological and perceptual limitations at play. I've been trying to find what I can on human limits of information consumption. Several sources (Stephen Wolfram, Walt Mossberg) suggest ~100 - 300 emails/day is a near upper limit, the NY Times comments moderation desk averages slightly fewer than 800 comments/day per person. That's about one every 36 seconds, straight. I know my own bandwidth for articles, comments, posts, and books is limited, as well as my capacity for handling longer forms once I've started consuming shorter-form content. I'm tumbling this around to see what I can get out of it. Not sure yet.

ChoHag 10y ago

Yes, initially. Pretty much everything starts off closed. (DNR)

GuiA 10y ago

Brilliant, and eloquently phrases something I've tried to convey to myriad technologists during my time in the valley: "When I was young my father read to me “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” advertising it as a great classic of futuristic science fiction. Unfortunately, I was unimpressed. It didn’t seem “futuristic” at all: it seemed like an archaic fantasy. Why? Certainly it was impressive that an author in 1869 correctly predicted that people would ride in submarines under the sea. But it didn’t seem like an image of the future, or even the past, at all. Why not? Because the person riding around on the submarine under the sea was a Victorian gentleman surrounded by appropriately deferential Victorian servants. Futurists consistently get their stories wrong in a particular way: when they say that technology changes the world, they tell stories of fabulous gadgets that will enable people to do new and exciting things. They completely miss that this is not really what “change” – serious, massive, wrenching, social change - really is. When technology truly enables dreams of change, it doesn’t mean it enables aristocrats to dream about riding around under the sea. What it means is that enables the aristocrat’s butler to dream of not being a butler any more — a dream of freedom not through violence or revolution, but through economic independence. A dream of technological change – really significant technological change – is not a dream of spiffy gadgets, it is a dream of freedom, of social & economic liberation enabled by technology."

13of40 10y ago
Reminds me of the time I dreamed up the web browser back in about 1991 and I was convinced it would be the next big thing for dialing up to BBSs.
enneff 10y ago
That's one of the things that made Philip K. Dick a brilliant futurist author. His tales focused on the social problems of the people in speculative futures.
officemonkey 10y ago
>Because the person riding around on the submarine under the sea was a Victorian gentleman surrounded by appropriately deferential Victorian servants. As someone who actually read Jules Verne (instead of watching the Disney movie or reading a poorly-translated abridgement,) I would not characterize Nemo as a Victorian gentleman. First of all Verne wasn't English, and Nemo isn't a Victorian gentleman, he's a rebel and a terrorist. He doesn't have appropriately deferential Victorian servants, he has fellow freedom fighters. Arronax's servant Consiel is the closest to a "appropriately deferential Victorian servant" but the way he is written, he comes across as a borderline Asperger's Syndrome savant scientist, not at all like Mercury from "Bleak House." I get that people make up stuff to support their thoughts and biases, but calling Jules Verne a Victorian writer is simply incorrect. He's a lot closer to Dumas than Dickens.

guelo 10y ago

Ah yes, the Eric Schmidt-era Google was so seemingly altruistic with so much hacker ethos that all the cynical hackers dared to dream that they would save us. Alas.

7373737373 10y ago

Fundamentals to protocols machine organisation/cooperation/competition device politics physical/virtual social/economic networks scalability online vs offline vertically integrated monopolies transaction costs economies of scale inner vs outer relations resource sharing incentivisation subnetworks as actors digital money mechanism design self organisation automatisation trust risk naming routing identity consensus information surveillance standardisation networked databases decision making homoiconicity software complexity conflicts of interest controlling the narrative benefitting from scarcity/slow(ing) progress monopoly on violence fine grained markets decentralisation deterministic virtual machine property intuition denial of service operating system efficiency inevitability service discovery self optimisation source independence distributed/grid/ambient/swarm/adaptive/edge/fog computing

swagasaurus-rex 10y ago
can anybody tell me what this is?
- Maakuth 10y ago
  Seems like a spam bot to me. I wonder if there's a farm of bots upvoting it - it appears faily high on the thread after all.
  - fwdbureau 10y ago
    This, or it's a comment by Nick Land

krut 10y ago

there seems to be a flaw with rebecca's only example. she seems to imply that google is responsible for the conference tables existence, which is most certainly not true. if anything, Google in this case is responsible for restricting local markets, and directing traffic to foreign ones. Conference tables have always been needed, and have always been made (most often sourced locally), Google didn't create the conference table business, it just helped direct conference table buyers to this one particular site. that seems to be to restricting market freedom, not expanding it.

smogcutter 10y ago
Agreed for that example, especially in light of what Google later became. Pre-Google, what would the custom conference table guy do? Presumably cold-call and place ads in trade papers. Not an insurmountable problem, assuming there's demand. All Google does is in this scenario is put you in front of office managers searching for "conference table". But I think the larger point stands - the real change is in indexing the public internet, making it possible (in theory) for a small player to reach the larger world without the capital investment that would've previously required. Reality is not living up to the early optimism over the so called "long tail", but I believe that only reinforces her point about the dangers of centralizing the internet.
- krut 10y ago
  certainly. centralising is bad, but this article seemed more like a google shill, rather than debate about keeping/making the internet decentralised. i mean, for the majority of it she was talking about google being a white knight.

abysmallyideal 10y ago

One of the key take aways I got from this article is that it is nearly impossible to depair the efficiency of exploitative capitalism of 'physical industry' and the abstraction that is an economic, or generically a bloodless, revolution. It is economically more efficient to centralize the resources but far less robust. SV could disappear tomorrow and a significant amount of the Internet's "revolutionary" capabilities would disappear. This doesn't appeal to SV's narcissistic sell of a special snowflake, but the power they wield in their capacity to damage any progress associated with the growth of the internet. On the other hand, a distributed internet is far more diverse and robust yet the economic costs can be exponentially far more damaging and costly.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
There's nothing efficient about centralizing resources. SFAIK, this always holds except for odd edge cases of truly public { nonrival, nonexcludable } goods.

amelius 10y ago

One question: why don't we see these closed systems in good old telephony?

throwanem 10y ago
Once upon a time, we did: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System
al_chemist 10y ago
It's much more expensive to expand your phone network and network effect between distant physical locations almost does not exist. How much does it cost facebook to handle traffic in India? How much would it cost for american-only phone networt to create and connect new network in India?
- amelius 10y ago
  So if we handwavingly turn the argument around: if Facebook and others had to physically build their own networks, we would have had an open social network :) But now that they can use the internet, the networks become closed. Interesting theory.

EGreg 10y ago

We designed a decentralized platform to power social apps. Precisely to give organizations the power and choice of running their own server and install social apps, the same way they can run Wordpress and install plugins. While regular users have their accounts seamlessly work across all domains, and connect with friends across communities and privacy just works as it should. See it at qbix.com/platform -would love to hear your opinions.