10 ms·

Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

402 points by jenkinsj 8y ago

jenkinsj 8y ago
I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment but respect Dr. Wu's option. I'm also interested in the HN community's options.
ohiovr 8y ago
I think we need alternatives to text only communication. If we could judge each other's tones maybe we would chill out a bit.
- ssalazars 8y ago
  I definitely agree with this, however, most people moved away from verbal communication because it's an async process, and it removes any awkwardness from the interaction. Video conferencing is used occasionally. I think text-based communication is here to stay.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Text can work OK between people who know each other well and are familiar with each other's patterns of speech and sense of humor. Not perfect, but generally OK. Much worse between people who aren't so well acquainted. I'm actually in the middle of trying to mediate a disagreement based mainly on two entirely different perceptions of intent in some stuff that was written in an email.
jjrh 8y ago
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.
- thephyber 8y ago
  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 explicitly authorize it. The massive collections of monolith data sets for financials, health/medical, credit history, employment records, taxes, census, etc are far too valuable to not be highly valuable to criminal orgs and/or government entities. Centralization into monolithic organizations will lead to irreversible issues of data non-privacy for a generation or more..
  - saganus 8y ago
    Uhmmm...just thinking out loud here. How feasible do you think it would be to use Mastodon for this? If you have a "Medical Node" as you put it (which I find apt btw), you could share it with your doctor(s) and provide access (maybe using Keybase? Auth0?) for them to either add "their own posts" with the analysis results, their findings, etc, or just to read the relevant data (e.g. for a dentist). Again, just thinking out loud, but they way you put it sounded interesting :)
    - wilde 8y ago
      Does Mastodon have a fax interface? https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american-medical-system-fax-machines-why https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american...
      - HillaryBriss 8y ago
        nice article. "It turns out there are strong economic incentives for doctors to keep patient information to themselves — and even stronger incentives for electronic medical records not to play nicely with each other." "While patients might want one hospital to exchange information with another hospital, those institutions have little incentive to do so. A shared medical record, after all, makes it easier to see a different doctor. A walled garden — where records only get traded within one hospital system — can encourage patients to stick with those providers."
    - ams6110 8y ago
      Doctors make notes by dictation, which is transcribed to patient charts by medical secretaries. So you'd need to authorize those people as well.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Who would develop and market and support this, and who would pay for it?
  - iambateman 8y ago
    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 minute matters? 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.
- Nomentatus 8y ago
  What's stopping this is Facebook's illegal interference with interoperability. Once upon a time railroads and telephone companies had to be forced to allow traffic to cross networks, now it's time for Facebook, etc, to do this. Well past time.
  - nugget 8y ago
    This is why the data portability requirements imposed by GDPR are potentially so significant.
    - dane-pgp 8y ago
      For those who haven't read it, the requirements are here: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ In particular, there is this wording: "In exercising his or her right to data portability pursuant to paragraph 1, the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible." This could, in principle, require Facebook to automatically broadcast your posts to your friends on third party social networks, once a standardised technology for that becomes widely implemented. Fortunately it seems that progress is being made on that: https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/
  - squarefoot 8y ago
    The Internet as we knew it before corporations turned it into the pile of rubbish it is today, was built around open protocols that allowed software from different developers/vendors to talk each other. One could write an email from a Windows client, send it to a Linux server and then read it on a Mac. We just have to get back to the era of interoperability, possibly retaining the good things learned from experience.
- ams6110 8y ago
  So, email then? It's decentralized, federated, and only sends data to the people you address it to (gmail excepted, I guess, at least in the free tier). It's what has always worked for me.
  - zzzeek 8y ago
    it should be email. but you need to build a fabulous UX on top of it that is as simple and instant gratification as Facebook, and you need to do it essentially for free, or with a grant or something, because it will never make a dime.
    - esfandia 8y ago
      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.
      - Slansitartop 8y ago
        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 of a social network, as it gives users more control.
        esfandia 8y ago
        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.
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  I keep seeing the suggestion of 'federation' for soc.media and am not sure understand the use of this word. What are the characteristics of a 'federated system' and how is it immune to the problem of centralization? What are some successful examples?
  - oblio 8y ago
    I’m going to be a bit ironic here and say that email is an example of a federated system. I’m being ironic cause we did end up with a centralized system for email. Not a single center, but a few: Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. Because of abuse (spam, primarily) and because of ease of use. Having an easy to use and safe federated system is discovering-the-theory-of-relativity hard, in my opinion.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
      On the other hand, even a few "centers" are way better than just one, in that that creates competetive pressure. But also, those three are by far not the only ones, there are quite a few more significant email providers across the globe. And also, there are tons of participants who use none of those services. Apart from some individuals running their own servers, lots and lots of companies run their own email infrastructure. > Having an easy to use and safe federated system is discovering-the-theory-of-relativity hard, in my opinion. The important thing is that it's way easier than a safe centralized system.
      - 8bitsrule 8y ago
        I wonder ... do you suppose That's what the Krell told themselves? ( Reference film 'Forbidden Planet' https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049223/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049223/ ... and Murphy's Law.
jamestimmins 8y ago
It's interesting that Tim Wu discussed the cycle of technology starting amongst outsiders and then becoming monopolized in his (phenomenal) book The Master Switch. The cycle always repeats itself by the next new technology coming along, making the prior one less significant. We seem to have accepted that the internet is essentially the final communication tech. Maybe that's true, but it seems improbable. Simply based on his past writing, I'm surprised he isn't advocating for a solution based on the blockchain. I'm not suggesting that's the right answer; I merely find it curious that he didn't apply the same assumptions to the future as he did to his historical analysis.
- jgh 8y ago
  I'm not really sure how blockchain is related to a potential "next" communication technology. Why not AR? Why not lasers n shit?
  - joejerryronnie 8y ago
    Wait for it . . . "Quantum Blockchain" - Boom!
    - koolba 8y ago
      Qubitcoin! [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit
  - jamestimmins 8y ago
    You're right. I was thinking "blockchain or another in-development technology", but was lazy in my phrasing. Other tech is equally as applicable.
  - Geee 8y ago
    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.
pcunite 8y ago
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.
- TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
  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/ https://beakerbrowser.com/
  - newscracker 8y ago
    I actually tried this a while ago, and found that the audience also had to use Beaker to access the content. That's a huge barrier if current browsers don't support this.
    - omnimus 8y ago
      True but i think that their plan is to get into web standards and have IPFS and DAT in other browsers. Beaker is just first implementation. I believe Firefox people are already doing some work on those protocols. It will be interesting see Googles position on those protocols. Chrome might be huge weapon against those iniciatives. Google can simply kill the whole initiative if they won't support it.
    - staticvar 8y ago
      Beaker uses Dat protocol as opposed to HTTP under the hood. Dat protocol support is coming to Brave browser, probably Firefox next. The P2P web is about to take off.
      - indigodaddy 8y ago
        I like the idea of dat/ipfs/p2p web, however , I'm hesitant to use my personal computer as the "peer" for this sort of thing. Can you just host/peer your ipfs/dat webpages/services/stuff from a Linux VPS/server?
ntnsndr 8y ago
I briefly spoke with Wu some weeks ago about platform cooperativism. I suppose he wasn't impressed. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvxbgq/its-time-for-mark-zuckerberg-to-give-up-control-of-facebook https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvxbgq/its-time-for-mark-...
feelin_googley 8y ago
Prof. Wu makes a couple of assumptions when he gives suggestions for Facebook alternatives or successors. I dont see those suggestions as the most important point of his argument however. I believe the most important point is that there must be competition, that trying to "fix" Facebook will not suffice. Nonetheless, these are the assumptions I see: 1. The software alternatives or successors must be commercial. 2. The software must attract a certain quantity of users to be viable. 3. The software must enable networks comprising large numbers of people, perhaps in the millions or billions. This scale is far greater than the average size of any Facebook users group of friends. Over the years Facebook may have morphed into a "public square" for exercising "Free Speech" but in the beginning as I recall it was not a means to broadcast to other users outside of ones social circle. Its primary utility is arguably still in enabling communication within small groups, not enabling broadcasting to the general public. Wu's assumptions point toward a Zuckerberg-like centrally-managed approach to what I see as historically a locally-managed activity: the human tendency to form small groups. For many years, gamers and others have been writing software to enable small groups to communicate over peer-to-peer networking, without any funding from advertisers. Wu writes, "So what stands in the way of a genuine Facebook alternative? It isn't the technology." Thats exactly right. IMHO.
- guelo 8y ago
  The useful feature that's missing if the network isn't large is being able to easily friend a new person. The extra friction of convincing a new acquaintance to join your social network means that it doesn't happen in a lot of situations.
- eadmund 8y ago
  > This scale is far greater than the average size of any Facebook users group of friends. Yes, but only an individual Facebook user. The problem is that my friends' friends' friends' friends' friends' friends encompass the entire human race: at some point, as I invite people who invite people who invite people, the underlying technology has to be able to support all mankind. Indeed, I suspect that this — not some momentary privacy-failure flash-in-the-pan will be what leads to Facebook's actual downfall. It's ultimately building a proprietary Internet (in the sense of a fabric which connects people), and that's extraordinarily expensive. At the end of the day, the actual Internet is able to do that far more cheaply. I imagine that the replacement for Facebook will be something like email: something under the control of its users, something anyone will be able to add himself to and anyone will be able to block.
nso95 8y ago
It will neither be fixed or replaced
- gaius 8y ago
  But it could be destroyed. I’ll settle for that.
sidcool 8y ago
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 of the risks. It's like a smoking addiction. It's bad but very difficult to give up.
- panarky 8y ago
  > 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 long ago that men abusing women in the workplace was routine and unremarkable. Now it's outrageous and shameful. Things change, slowly at first, and then all at once. People are waking up and it will never be the same for Facebook.
  - sidcool 8y ago
    That is a good point. What baffles me is it took so much evidence from the medical community to convince people about smoking. And many still do it! Adverse effects of technology/social in general wouls be even more difficult to prove. I see technology addicts' rehabilitation centres a reality in near future.
    - herbst 8y ago
      I am pretty certain most of the current younger smokers had a very good idea of the health implications. Anything that changed from a medical perspective since I am smoking is that we know by now that a 'smokers lung' is not actually that and most never get it. Otherwise all the risks are well known for 15+ years. Tldr: I don't think people actually care about dying earlier (or more cruel), at least in countries with working or cheap health care.
vinniejames 8y ago
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) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)
- noobermin 8y ago
  I think people care a lot more today than they used too. The problem is people use facebook because they have to.
  - aaron-lebo 8y ago
    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.
    - hellofunk 8y ago
      > If people really cared about their privacy they wouldn't broadcast their personal lives to millions of people Most FB users certainly do not expect that they are sending out their photos and opinions and chats to millions of people. They have a circle of friends and family that they think are behind a wall called their network, and that circle is usually a few hundred people or less.
      - losvedir 8y ago
        To be clear, that's accurate, right? They're not sending their photos and opinions out to millions of people. As far as I know, this whole Cambridge Analytica thing was about profile data, not messages or photos.
jacinabox 8y ago
A quick research job has revealed that most of the interesting features of facebook, in particular "liking" posts and friend suggestion, are patented by facebook. It would be difficult therefore for a new entrant to copy its features.
- Slansitartop 8y ago
  > A quick research job has revealed that most of the interesting features of facebook, in particular "liking" posts ... are patented by facebook. I find find this hard to believe. Don't competing networks have similar functionality (e.g. "hearting")? What exactly about "liking" has Facebook patented? I'm much more ready to believe "liking" is trademarked, though I'm still skeptical of it, given that it's an everyday word used with its everyday meaning.
  - carlmr 8y ago
    Facebook has likes, Reddit has upvotes and downvotes, I don't know the name on HN or Stackoverflow. Just calling it something different seems to be enough.
yy77 8y ago
If privacy is really a concern, one should live like Jack Reacher, even not use credit card. Current situation is that, we want to happy share and attract attention on facebook. If it did something wrong, let the court sues it.
dreamygeek 8y ago
It's too messed up now anyways. The privacy settings sucked right from the beginning of Facebook. And it just kept getting worse. Guess people are just used to it now just like slaves get used to slavery and can't get out of it.
chx 8y ago
Better will be hard. If you want people to come, you need to build something that Facebook doesn't provide. I have no idea what that will be but I do not think just privacy protection would be enough. By far.
feelin_googley 8y ago
"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-letter-facebook-is-not-free/ https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/letters/2018-04-04...
feelin_googley 8y ago
"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-suspects-300000-australians-had-data-shared-with-cambridge-analytica https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/05/facebook-...
exolymph 8y ago
Normies don't care about privacy enough to stop using Facebook.
heisnotanalien 8y ago
Why can't I just pay for FB a monthly fee and as such they have no need to make money by selling my data or spamming me with crappy ads?
- 6ak74rfy 8y ago
  A usual CPC (cost per click) that an advertiser is willing to pay is somewhere between 50 to 150 cents. Let's say it is 100, and you clicked on 10 ads in a month. So, Facebook earned $10 off you. Now, you should be willing to pay more than that for Facebook to prefer the model you are suggesting. My math above is highly simplistic. For e.g., you'd say you aggressively use an ad blocker and never click on ads. Fair enough, but what about non - tech people unlike us? For e.g., when my dad starting using Facebook at an age of 50+ couple of years, he just tried an unknown plumber through a Facebook ad. Moreover, you'd be willing to pay a monthly subscription, but would all of your friends? So, what I am getting at is that at Facebook scale they'll earn more though ads than through a subscription model.
  - mrweasel 8y ago
    The value you represent to Facebook is also dependent on your location. People in the US are worth the most, around $60 per year: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-are-you-worth-to-facebook https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-... For heavy Facebook users $60 isn't much, but for everyone else it seems a little much.
    - mch82 8y ago
      If they really focused on delivering quality tools for organizing groups I'd pay that. $60 is a bargain compared to MeetUp.com admin fees.
  - mch82 8y ago
    I'm always surprised by how little services charge to remove advertising. YouTube will do it for $9.99/month.
herbst 8y ago
Why even replace it? Pseudo chronological single wall views are simply not a modern way to consume information anymore. Not to mention, which crazy brain even proposed to fix it?
narven 8y ago
Do we really need another crap to replace it? just shut it down.
pi-squared 8y ago
I wonder what is the penetration of these kind of news outside our bubble here at HN, reddit and the like. I'm wondering the rest 2 billion people (which to a first approximation is probably just about everybody) care about this or are willing to care if few of their techie friends leave facebook. Is there some mathematical model + social science that could estimate the network effects of say, every techie person does leave facebook for good - what would happen to the rest? Most of my non-techie friends have heard briefly about "some kind of scandal with facebook" but I cannot possibly appeal to them talking about "privacy" or they are stealing and selling your data - "Oh, everybody does that, you can't not use the Internet".
- keybits 8y ago
  DuckDuckGo did a survey of just over 1,000 random US adults after the Cambridge Analytica story: https://spreadprivacy.com/cambridge-analytica/ https://spreadprivacy.com/cambridge-analytica/
  - skinnymuch 8y ago
    A lot of people might say they are going to do more for privacy or interact with FB and other social media less, but until there’s a proper followup study in day 6 months, I don’t know if I believe all the respondents. I believe that they tried to truthfully answer the questions. But that some of it is reactionary and/or the right thing to say at the time. Maybe I’m wrong though? Thanks for the link of course! Great write up and charts to look through.
p49k 8y ago
Has anyone seen a product that was functional, polished, and enjoyable to use that would be capable of replacing Facebook? I haven't. Diaspora, Mastodon, Ello are the only things that I can think of, and none of them come close to matching the basic functionality and the "it just works" factor of Facebook. Maybe someone should put in some resources to create a polished product and see what happens? It doesn't even have to be some idealistic p2p distributed system or anything like that, just a company who actively works to minimize the data they store and to allow users to control and manage their data effectively.
- haylem 8y ago
  True, I haven't seen another product "match" Facebook. But I also don't see much need for it (entirely), or at the very least for most of its features. The Facebook of ~2007 was about as good as it ever needed to be (minus the pokes). It served its purpose well. It could have used some of the UI polish it got afterwards, but no new feature addition has made any significant change to end users in my view, apart from pushing them towards more extreme sharing. It's a super cool app, and a super cool platform, with unfortunately little actual value to its end users (except if you consider advertisers and users of the tech platform the end users, not the actual Facebook users). Not that I think it's all Facebook's fault: you build something for a certain purpose, and it naturally evolves, and you adapt to what people want, or what you think they want based on some metrics or "need" for growth. And then you get... this.
  - p49k 8y ago
    The biggest feature for me that no one has replicated is the ability to create events with extremely customizable privacy preferences in which you know people will get the invite, even if they’ve changed phone numbers (in other words, some level of contact redundancy).
- alecco 8y ago
  An even bigger problem is making critical mass. Young people are already tired of old Facebook. The problem is Facebook keeps acquiring the competitors gaining ground (WhatsApp/Instagram), and if not possible just ripping off the features. It's grown too big to be upended easily. And they are not stupid. They see the writing on the wall.
supermatt 8y ago
What a naive article! The reality is that we can either have a paid-for walled garden so that bad actors cant leach data, or a decentralised and trust-driven network. It only takes a "friend" using a nefarious client/implementation to send all your data to a 3rd party.
- sgk284 8y ago
  Even a paid-for walled garden is likely not sufficient. Plenty of services you pay for and/or are the customer of still resell your data (see: banks & credit card companies).
jyriand 8y ago
Orkut, please come back.
gvurrdon 8y ago
The only possible thing for which I might need Facebook would be for groups, as some hobbies seem to have almost entirely moved there for event organisation and general discussion. Previously we used to use forums such as phpBB, but setting up one of these involved finding someone able to host the forum software on their server. Tapatalk could be set up to improve the mobile experience, but most users seemed to find that somehow difficult. There was also a constant battle with spam and malware. I'm not sure what would suit - Mastodon and Diaspora don't seem to me to be the right solutions here. Currently, I am making do with being out of the loop and missing things.
vijaybritto 8y ago
"Another “alt-Facebook” could be a nonprofit that uses that status to signal its dedication to better practices, much as nonprofit hospitals and universities do" -> Honestly, I don't think this would be sustainable to function as a social network. At least I don't think it would work in a capitalist society.
- jcadam 8y ago
  I've had the same thought. Charge a small monthly fee in lieu of running ads or selling user data. Might cut down on fake/spam accounts as well. But I don't think it would work (and I'd totally work on something like this if I thought it would). People say they care about privacy, but when you present them with the option of paying $5/mo for a service that respects their privacy or using a "free" service that tracks everything they do and sells that data to anyone who'll pay, they'll almost always opt for the latter. Now, I would certainly pay a monthly fee for a non-user-hostile social network experience. And I would consider the smaller user base a feature, so long as it wasn't too small.
  - jasonkostempski 8y ago
    Does FB make $5 a month off the average user? If not, $5 a year? Regardless of what FB makes, could $5 a year keep a FB clone alive at FBs current volume? Would people even pay that?
    - TrevorAustin 8y ago
      In 2017 FB made $40B in revenue on 2B users.
      - vidanay 8y ago
        So $2 per month per user sounds about right.
    - skinnymuch 8y ago
      App.net failed charging $50 a year. I think they should have tiered or been cheaper. But that’s one datapoint. FB does tens of billions in revenue on 2.1 or 2.2B users worldwide. Far more than $5 a year. I assume a $10 a year social network could break even or even profit. But how many people will really pay? Especially when you scope out to every type of person from every country FB has a hold on.
x0x 8y ago
Are we still talking about Facebook? Does it still exists? O_o
naskwo 8y ago
For photo sharing, I set up www.famipix.com in 2005...
908087 8y ago
I find Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook needs to be the way it is so that "people who can't afford it can have access" pretty repulsive and incredibly sleazy. If people can't afford a few dollars a month, why in the fuck would it be acceptable to expose them to manipulative ads that encourage them to hand over money that Zuckerberg claims they don't have? He tries to paint himself and his company as altruistic, while simultaneously exploiting the hell out of the people he claims to be "helping".
billconan 8y ago
I think my ideal social network would be something like reddit + medium + slack. and it will be for expanding my social network and finding people alike, not for watching daily bullshit from existing friends.
feelin_googley 8y ago
"In 2013, Brandon Copley, the CEO of Giftnix, was threatened with legal action after using the technique to demonstrate how personal information could be easily gathered at scale. "Multiple Facebook profiles were extremely easy to scrape," he explains. In a series of conversations with Facebook security developers Copley explained the issue and was told there was "no security vuln here, even though it does seem like one on first glance." The method of scraping can work in multiple ways but largely relies on feeding Facebook's API a list of phone numbers or email addresses that have been automatically generated. These could also have been obtained from data breaches or leaks of information online. "Just query Facebook as often as possible until they ban your IP for querying too fast, and at that point you just slow down until the queries stop," Copley explained in an email. "I was doing my work purely for research and exposing the vulnerability for Facebook". ... The issue was again raised by researchers in 2015. Reza Moaiandin, who founded cybersecurity company CyberScanner, published a blogpost about the "loophole". he said he was able to gather thousands of users personal information by guessing their mobile numbers. Within this information were details of names, locations, and profile pictures. In response Facebook told him it didn't "consider it a security vulnerability" but had controls in place to stop it being abused. Zuckerberg's most recent statement goes against this, admitting Facebook's efforts to stop malicious actors hadn't worked." Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-news-data-scraping-mark-zuckerburg http://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-news-data-scraping-m... "A few months ago, I discovered a security loophole in Facebook that allows hackers to decrypt and sniff out Facebook user IDs using one of Facebook's APIs in bulk - therefore allowing them to gather millions of users' personal data (name, telephone number, location, images, and more). This post is an attempt to catch Facebook's attention to get this issue fixed. By using a script, an entire country's (I tested with the US, the UK and Canada) possible number combinations can be run through these URLs, and if a number is associated with a Facebook account, it can then be associated with a name and further details (images, and so on). ... For those of you who are wondering why I haven't notified Facebook about the issue, the truth is that I have - back in April (2015). Although I did receive a reply, initially the engineer I was in contact with was unable to reproduce the issue himself, and therefore failed to understand the technical details of how it should be fixed. ... After a couple of months of waiting, I initially thought someone else will look into it and fix it but I heard nothing, so I raised the flag with them again. They finally came back to me and told me that this is not a big issue - they have set limits and I should not worry about this problem. But frankly, I am very worried. ... Comment from reader: Great blog post. I reported an almost identical issue (albeit a different API) to Facebook in January 2014 but faced similar difficulties getting them to recognise the scope for abuse. I was able to lookup contiguous blocks of mobile numbers (in blocks of 5,000 at a time) with no discernible rate-limiting - I could pull them down as fast as my connection could handle (maybe ~50k numbers/min). If you make any headway with Facebook let us know and I will try pinging them again. It was especially worrisome as the number range I tried (NYC) had a hit-rate of about 20%." Source: https://salt.agency/blog/facebook-security-loophole/ https://salt.agency/blog/facebook-security-loophole/
feelin_googley 8y ago
"Poll: Do you trust Facebook? ... THIS MORNING, IT emerged that nearly 45,000 Irish Facebook profiles may have been affected by the giant data breach involving as many as 87 million accounts harvested by UK data intelligence firm Cambridge Analytica. Those 45,000 accounts could have been breached due to just 15 Irish people accessing a questionnaire app, thisisyourdigitallife, which included in its permissions the granting of access to all an individual's friends' profiles." Source: http://www.thejournal.ie/poll-do-you-trust-facebook-3941194-Apr2018/ http://www.thejournal.ie/poll-do-you-trust-facebook-3941194-...
jenkinsj 8y ago
I'm captivated by the phrase "free content (sic) is the creature, the servant and indeed the prostitute of merchandizing". -Walter Lippmann
ravenstine 8y ago
NY Times was among the numerous media companies that slobbered over Facebook for years and gave them free publicity. And now I'm supposed to listen to them when they say to replace Facebook.
feelin_googley 8y ago
"These days, you might get more applause for not being on social media than for reaching a follower milestone in Europe's liberal hubs such as Berlin or Paris. ... The mechanisms used by Cambridge Analytica and the "malicious actors" cited by Facebook appear to have been legal and do not constitute a data hack, but rather a deliberate exploitation of information through tools or loopholes Facebook itself provided in the past. ... At least two foreign governments, Australia and Germany, threatened or launched investigations into the practices on Thursday. ... Meanwhile, in India, where more than a half-million users are estimated to be affected, the allegations have resulted in a governmental request to Facebook and Cambridge Analytica for more detailed information, with a Saturday deadline. Even though India is now Facebook's biggest market - ahead of the United States - no Indian media outlets were able to ask questions in a conference call with CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday. The heavy U.S. focus immediately triggered criticism because privacy advocates are still looking into reports that Cambridge Analytica may have used Facebook data to influence Indian politics, as well. ... German justice minister Katarina Barley already called for an E.U.-wide investigation into the misuse of Facebook's data by Cambridge Analytica and other companies on Thursday. "Facebook has gambled away people's trust," Barley said. ... But in Europe, Germany's justice minister and others already fear that the latest regulations aren't enough." Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/04/05/as-facebook-confronts-tough-questions-on-data-misuse-europe-might-force-real-change/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/04/05...
Antifragile1 8y ago
Libtards still crying over their corrupt hag's loss. Libtard tears, they are tasty.

402 points by jenkinsj 8y ago

I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment but respect Dr. Wu's option. I'm also interested in the HN community's options.

ohiovr 8y ago

I think we need alternatives to text only communication. If we could judge each other's tones maybe we would chill out a bit.

ssalazars 8y ago
I definitely agree with this, however, most people moved away from verbal communication because it's an async process, and it removes any awkwardness from the interaction. Video conferencing is used occasionally. I think text-based communication is here to stay.
ams6110 8y ago
Text can work OK between people who know each other well and are familiar with each other's patterns of speech and sense of humor. Not perfect, but generally OK. Much worse between people who aren't so well acquainted. I'm actually in the middle of trying to mediate a disagreement based mainly on two entirely different perceptions of intent in some stuff that was written in an email.

jjrh 8y ago

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.

thephyber 8y ago
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 explicitly authorize it. The massive collections of monolith data sets for financials, health/medical, credit history, employment records, taxes, census, etc are far too valuable to not be highly valuable to criminal orgs and/or government entities. Centralization into monolithic organizations will lead to irreversible issues of data non-privacy for a generation or more..
- saganus 8y ago
  Uhmmm...just thinking out loud here. How feasible do you think it would be to use Mastodon for this? If you have a "Medical Node" as you put it (which I find apt btw), you could share it with your doctor(s) and provide access (maybe using Keybase? Auth0?) for them to either add "their own posts" with the analysis results, their findings, etc, or just to read the relevant data (e.g. for a dentist). Again, just thinking out loud, but they way you put it sounded interesting :)
  - wilde 8y ago
    Does Mastodon have a fax interface? https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american-medical-system-fax-machines-why https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american...
    - HillaryBriss 8y ago
      nice article. "It turns out there are strong economic incentives for doctors to keep patient information to themselves — and even stronger incentives for electronic medical records not to play nicely with each other." "While patients might want one hospital to exchange information with another hospital, those institutions have little incentive to do so. A shared medical record, after all, makes it easier to see a different doctor. A walled garden — where records only get traded within one hospital system — can encourage patients to stick with those providers."
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Doctors make notes by dictation, which is transcribed to patient charts by medical secretaries. So you'd need to authorize those people as well.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Who would develop and market and support this, and who would pay for it?
- iambateman 8y ago
  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 minute matters? 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.
Nomentatus 8y ago
What's stopping this is Facebook's illegal interference with interoperability. Once upon a time railroads and telephone companies had to be forced to allow traffic to cross networks, now it's time for Facebook, etc, to do this. Well past time.
- nugget 8y ago
  This is why the data portability requirements imposed by GDPR are potentially so significant.
  - dane-pgp 8y ago
    For those who haven't read it, the requirements are here: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ In particular, there is this wording: "In exercising his or her right to data portability pursuant to paragraph 1, the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible." This could, in principle, require Facebook to automatically broadcast your posts to your friends on third party social networks, once a standardised technology for that becomes widely implemented. Fortunately it seems that progress is being made on that: https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/
- squarefoot 8y ago
  The Internet as we knew it before corporations turned it into the pile of rubbish it is today, was built around open protocols that allowed software from different developers/vendors to talk each other. One could write an email from a Windows client, send it to a Linux server and then read it on a Mac. We just have to get back to the era of interoperability, possibly retaining the good things learned from experience.
ams6110 8y ago
So, email then? It's decentralized, federated, and only sends data to the people you address it to (gmail excepted, I guess, at least in the free tier). It's what has always worked for me.
- zzzeek 8y ago
  it should be email. but you need to build a fabulous UX on top of it that is as simple and instant gratification as Facebook, and you need to do it essentially for free, or with a grant or something, because it will never make a dime.
  - esfandia 8y ago
    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.
    - Slansitartop 8y ago
      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 of a social network, as it gives users more control.
      - esfandia 8y ago
        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.
8bitsrule 8y ago
I keep seeing the suggestion of 'federation' for soc.media and am not sure understand the use of this word. What are the characteristics of a 'federated system' and how is it immune to the problem of centralization? What are some successful examples?
- oblio 8y ago
  I’m going to be a bit ironic here and say that email is an example of a federated system. I’m being ironic cause we did end up with a centralized system for email. Not a single center, but a few: Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. Because of abuse (spam, primarily) and because of ease of use. Having an easy to use and safe federated system is discovering-the-theory-of-relativity hard, in my opinion.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
    On the other hand, even a few "centers" are way better than just one, in that that creates competetive pressure. But also, those three are by far not the only ones, there are quite a few more significant email providers across the globe. And also, there are tons of participants who use none of those services. Apart from some individuals running their own servers, lots and lots of companies run their own email infrastructure. > Having an easy to use and safe federated system is discovering-the-theory-of-relativity hard, in my opinion. The important thing is that it's way easier than a safe centralized system.
    - 8bitsrule 8y ago
      I wonder ... do you suppose That's what the Krell told themselves? ( Reference film 'Forbidden Planet' https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049223/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049223/ ... and Murphy's Law.

jamestimmins 8y ago

It's interesting that Tim Wu discussed the cycle of technology starting amongst outsiders and then becoming monopolized in his (phenomenal) book The Master Switch. The cycle always repeats itself by the next new technology coming along, making the prior one less significant. We seem to have accepted that the internet is essentially the final communication tech. Maybe that's true, but it seems improbable. Simply based on his past writing, I'm surprised he isn't advocating for a solution based on the blockchain. I'm not suggesting that's the right answer; I merely find it curious that he didn't apply the same assumptions to the future as he did to his historical analysis.

jgh 8y ago
I'm not really sure how blockchain is related to a potential "next" communication technology. Why not AR? Why not lasers n shit?
- joejerryronnie 8y ago
  Wait for it . . . "Quantum Blockchain" - Boom!
  - koolba 8y ago
    Qubitcoin! [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit
- jamestimmins 8y ago
  You're right. I was thinking "blockchain or another in-development technology", but was lazy in my phrasing. Other tech is equally as applicable.
- Geee 8y ago
  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.

pcunite 8y ago

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.

TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
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/ https://beakerbrowser.com/
- newscracker 8y ago
  I actually tried this a while ago, and found that the audience also had to use Beaker to access the content. That's a huge barrier if current browsers don't support this.
  - omnimus 8y ago
    True but i think that their plan is to get into web standards and have IPFS and DAT in other browsers. Beaker is just first implementation. I believe Firefox people are already doing some work on those protocols. It will be interesting see Googles position on those protocols. Chrome might be huge weapon against those iniciatives. Google can simply kill the whole initiative if they won't support it.
  - staticvar 8y ago
    Beaker uses Dat protocol as opposed to HTTP under the hood. Dat protocol support is coming to Brave browser, probably Firefox next. The P2P web is about to take off.
    - indigodaddy 8y ago
      I like the idea of dat/ipfs/p2p web, however , I'm hesitant to use my personal computer as the "peer" for this sort of thing. Can you just host/peer your ipfs/dat webpages/services/stuff from a Linux VPS/server?

ntnsndr 8y ago

I briefly spoke with Wu some weeks ago about platform cooperativism. I suppose he wasn't impressed. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvxbgq/its-time-for-mark-zuckerberg-to-give-up-control-of-facebook https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvxbgq/its-time-for-mark-...

feelin_googley 8y ago

Prof. Wu makes a couple of assumptions when he gives suggestions for Facebook alternatives or successors. I dont see those suggestions as the most important point of his argument however. I believe the most important point is that there must be competition, that trying to "fix" Facebook will not suffice. Nonetheless, these are the assumptions I see: 1. The software alternatives or successors must be commercial. 2. The software must attract a certain quantity of users to be viable. 3. The software must enable networks comprising large numbers of people, perhaps in the millions or billions. This scale is far greater than the average size of any Facebook users group of friends. Over the years Facebook may have morphed into a "public square" for exercising "Free Speech" but in the beginning as I recall it was not a means to broadcast to other users outside of ones social circle. Its primary utility is arguably still in enabling communication within small groups, not enabling broadcasting to the general public. Wu's assumptions point toward a Zuckerberg-like centrally-managed approach to what I see as historically a locally-managed activity: the human tendency to form small groups. For many years, gamers and others have been writing software to enable small groups to communicate over peer-to-peer networking, without any funding from advertisers. Wu writes, "So what stands in the way of a genuine Facebook alternative? It isn't the technology." Thats exactly right. IMHO.

guelo 8y ago
The useful feature that's missing if the network isn't large is being able to easily friend a new person. The extra friction of convincing a new acquaintance to join your social network means that it doesn't happen in a lot of situations.
eadmund 8y ago
> This scale is far greater than the average size of any Facebook users group of friends. Yes, but only an individual Facebook user. The problem is that my friends' friends' friends' friends' friends' friends encompass the entire human race: at some point, as I invite people who invite people who invite people, the underlying technology has to be able to support all mankind. Indeed, I suspect that this — not some momentary privacy-failure flash-in-the-pan will be what leads to Facebook's actual downfall. It's ultimately building a proprietary Internet (in the sense of a fabric which connects people), and that's extraordinarily expensive. At the end of the day, the actual Internet is able to do that far more cheaply. I imagine that the replacement for Facebook will be something like email: something under the control of its users, something anyone will be able to add himself to and anyone will be able to block.

nso95 8y ago

It will neither be fixed or replaced

gaius 8y ago
But it could be destroyed. I’ll settle for that.

sidcool 8y ago

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 of the risks. It's like a smoking addiction. It's bad but very difficult to give up.

panarky 8y ago
> 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 long ago that men abusing women in the workplace was routine and unremarkable. Now it's outrageous and shameful. Things change, slowly at first, and then all at once. People are waking up and it will never be the same for Facebook.
- sidcool 8y ago
  That is a good point. What baffles me is it took so much evidence from the medical community to convince people about smoking. And many still do it! Adverse effects of technology/social in general wouls be even more difficult to prove. I see technology addicts' rehabilitation centres a reality in near future.
  - herbst 8y ago
    I am pretty certain most of the current younger smokers had a very good idea of the health implications. Anything that changed from a medical perspective since I am smoking is that we know by now that a 'smokers lung' is not actually that and most never get it. Otherwise all the risks are well known for 15+ years. Tldr: I don't think people actually care about dying earlier (or more cruel), at least in countries with working or cheap health care.

vinniejames 8y ago

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) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

noobermin 8y ago
I think people care a lot more today than they used too. The problem is people use facebook because they have to.
- aaron-lebo 8y ago
  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.
  - hellofunk 8y ago
    > If people really cared about their privacy they wouldn't broadcast their personal lives to millions of people Most FB users certainly do not expect that they are sending out their photos and opinions and chats to millions of people. They have a circle of friends and family that they think are behind a wall called their network, and that circle is usually a few hundred people or less.
    - losvedir 8y ago
      To be clear, that's accurate, right? They're not sending their photos and opinions out to millions of people. As far as I know, this whole Cambridge Analytica thing was about profile data, not messages or photos.

jacinabox 8y ago

A quick research job has revealed that most of the interesting features of facebook, in particular "liking" posts and friend suggestion, are patented by facebook. It would be difficult therefore for a new entrant to copy its features.

Slansitartop 8y ago
> A quick research job has revealed that most of the interesting features of facebook, in particular "liking" posts ... are patented by facebook. I find find this hard to believe. Don't competing networks have similar functionality (e.g. "hearting")? What exactly about "liking" has Facebook patented? I'm much more ready to believe "liking" is trademarked, though I'm still skeptical of it, given that it's an everyday word used with its everyday meaning.
- carlmr 8y ago
  Facebook has likes, Reddit has upvotes and downvotes, I don't know the name on HN or Stackoverflow. Just calling it something different seems to be enough.

yy77 8y ago

If privacy is really a concern, one should live like Jack Reacher, even not use credit card. Current situation is that, we want to happy share and attract attention on facebook. If it did something wrong, let the court sues it.

dreamygeek 8y ago

It's too messed up now anyways. The privacy settings sucked right from the beginning of Facebook. And it just kept getting worse. Guess people are just used to it now just like slaves get used to slavery and can't get out of it.

chx 8y ago

Better will be hard. If you want people to come, you need to build something that Facebook doesn't provide. I have no idea what that will be but I do not think just privacy protection would be enough. By far.

feelin_googley 8y ago

"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-letter-facebook-is-not-free/ https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/letters/2018-04-04...

feelin_googley 8y ago

"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-suspects-300000-australians-had-data-shared-with-cambridge-analytica https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/05/facebook-...

exolymph 8y ago

Normies don't care about privacy enough to stop using Facebook.

heisnotanalien 8y ago

Why can't I just pay for FB a monthly fee and as such they have no need to make money by selling my data or spamming me with crappy ads?

6ak74rfy 8y ago
A usual CPC (cost per click) that an advertiser is willing to pay is somewhere between 50 to 150 cents. Let's say it is 100, and you clicked on 10 ads in a month. So, Facebook earned $10 off you. Now, you should be willing to pay more than that for Facebook to prefer the model you are suggesting. My math above is highly simplistic. For e.g., you'd say you aggressively use an ad blocker and never click on ads. Fair enough, but what about non - tech people unlike us? For e.g., when my dad starting using Facebook at an age of 50+ couple of years, he just tried an unknown plumber through a Facebook ad. Moreover, you'd be willing to pay a monthly subscription, but would all of your friends? So, what I am getting at is that at Facebook scale they'll earn more though ads than through a subscription model.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  The value you represent to Facebook is also dependent on your location. People in the US are worth the most, around $60 per year: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-are-you-worth-to-facebook https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-... For heavy Facebook users $60 isn't much, but for everyone else it seems a little much.
  - mch82 8y ago
    If they really focused on delivering quality tools for organizing groups I'd pay that. $60 is a bargain compared to MeetUp.com admin fees.
- mch82 8y ago
  I'm always surprised by how little services charge to remove advertising. YouTube will do it for $9.99/month.

herbst 8y ago

Why even replace it? Pseudo chronological single wall views are simply not a modern way to consume information anymore. Not to mention, which crazy brain even proposed to fix it?

narven 8y ago

Do we really need another crap to replace it? just shut it down.

pi-squared 8y ago

I wonder what is the penetration of these kind of news outside our bubble here at HN, reddit and the like. I'm wondering the rest 2 billion people (which to a first approximation is probably just about everybody) care about this or are willing to care if few of their techie friends leave facebook. Is there some mathematical model + social science that could estimate the network effects of say, every techie person does leave facebook for good - what would happen to the rest? Most of my non-techie friends have heard briefly about "some kind of scandal with facebook" but I cannot possibly appeal to them talking about "privacy" or they are stealing and selling your data - "Oh, everybody does that, you can't not use the Internet".

keybits 8y ago
DuckDuckGo did a survey of just over 1,000 random US adults after the Cambridge Analytica story: https://spreadprivacy.com/cambridge-analytica/ https://spreadprivacy.com/cambridge-analytica/
- skinnymuch 8y ago
  A lot of people might say they are going to do more for privacy or interact with FB and other social media less, but until there’s a proper followup study in day 6 months, I don’t know if I believe all the respondents. I believe that they tried to truthfully answer the questions. But that some of it is reactionary and/or the right thing to say at the time. Maybe I’m wrong though? Thanks for the link of course! Great write up and charts to look through.

p49k 8y ago

Has anyone seen a product that was functional, polished, and enjoyable to use that would be capable of replacing Facebook? I haven't. Diaspora, Mastodon, Ello are the only things that I can think of, and none of them come close to matching the basic functionality and the "it just works" factor of Facebook. Maybe someone should put in some resources to create a polished product and see what happens? It doesn't even have to be some idealistic p2p distributed system or anything like that, just a company who actively works to minimize the data they store and to allow users to control and manage their data effectively.

haylem 8y ago
True, I haven't seen another product "match" Facebook. But I also don't see much need for it (entirely), or at the very least for most of its features. The Facebook of ~2007 was about as good as it ever needed to be (minus the pokes). It served its purpose well. It could have used some of the UI polish it got afterwards, but no new feature addition has made any significant change to end users in my view, apart from pushing them towards more extreme sharing. It's a super cool app, and a super cool platform, with unfortunately little actual value to its end users (except if you consider advertisers and users of the tech platform the end users, not the actual Facebook users). Not that I think it's all Facebook's fault: you build something for a certain purpose, and it naturally evolves, and you adapt to what people want, or what you think they want based on some metrics or "need" for growth. And then you get... this.
- p49k 8y ago
  The biggest feature for me that no one has replicated is the ability to create events with extremely customizable privacy preferences in which you know people will get the invite, even if they’ve changed phone numbers (in other words, some level of contact redundancy).
alecco 8y ago
An even bigger problem is making critical mass. Young people are already tired of old Facebook. The problem is Facebook keeps acquiring the competitors gaining ground (WhatsApp/Instagram), and if not possible just ripping off the features. It's grown too big to be upended easily. And they are not stupid. They see the writing on the wall.

supermatt 8y ago

What a naive article! The reality is that we can either have a paid-for walled garden so that bad actors cant leach data, or a decentralised and trust-driven network. It only takes a "friend" using a nefarious client/implementation to send all your data to a 3rd party.

sgk284 8y ago
Even a paid-for walled garden is likely not sufficient. Plenty of services you pay for and/or are the customer of still resell your data (see: banks & credit card companies).

jyriand 8y ago

Orkut, please come back.

gvurrdon 8y ago

The only possible thing for which I might need Facebook would be for groups, as some hobbies seem to have almost entirely moved there for event organisation and general discussion. Previously we used to use forums such as phpBB, but setting up one of these involved finding someone able to host the forum software on their server. Tapatalk could be set up to improve the mobile experience, but most users seemed to find that somehow difficult. There was also a constant battle with spam and malware. I'm not sure what would suit - Mastodon and Diaspora don't seem to me to be the right solutions here. Currently, I am making do with being out of the loop and missing things.

vijaybritto 8y ago

"Another “alt-Facebook” could be a nonprofit that uses that status to signal its dedication to better practices, much as nonprofit hospitals and universities do" -> Honestly, I don't think this would be sustainable to function as a social network. At least I don't think it would work in a capitalist society.

jcadam 8y ago
I've had the same thought. Charge a small monthly fee in lieu of running ads or selling user data. Might cut down on fake/spam accounts as well. But I don't think it would work (and I'd totally work on something like this if I thought it would). People say they care about privacy, but when you present them with the option of paying $5/mo for a service that respects their privacy or using a "free" service that tracks everything they do and sells that data to anyone who'll pay, they'll almost always opt for the latter. Now, I would certainly pay a monthly fee for a non-user-hostile social network experience. And I would consider the smaller user base a feature, so long as it wasn't too small.
- jasonkostempski 8y ago
  Does FB make $5 a month off the average user? If not, $5 a year? Regardless of what FB makes, could $5 a year keep a FB clone alive at FBs current volume? Would people even pay that?
  - TrevorAustin 8y ago
    In 2017 FB made $40B in revenue on 2B users.
    - vidanay 8y ago
      So $2 per month per user sounds about right.
  - skinnymuch 8y ago
    App.net failed charging $50 a year. I think they should have tiered or been cheaper. But that’s one datapoint. FB does tens of billions in revenue on 2.1 or 2.2B users worldwide. Far more than $5 a year. I assume a $10 a year social network could break even or even profit. But how many people will really pay? Especially when you scope out to every type of person from every country FB has a hold on.

x0x 8y ago

Are we still talking about Facebook? Does it still exists? O_o

naskwo 8y ago

For photo sharing, I set up www.famipix.com in 2005...

908087 8y ago

I find Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook needs to be the way it is so that "people who can't afford it can have access" pretty repulsive and incredibly sleazy. If people can't afford a few dollars a month, why in the fuck would it be acceptable to expose them to manipulative ads that encourage them to hand over money that Zuckerberg claims they don't have? He tries to paint himself and his company as altruistic, while simultaneously exploiting the hell out of the people he claims to be "helping".

billconan 8y ago

I think my ideal social network would be something like reddit + medium + slack. and it will be for expanding my social network and finding people alike, not for watching daily bullshit from existing friends.

feelin_googley 8y ago

"In 2013, Brandon Copley, the CEO of Giftnix, was threatened with legal action after using the technique to demonstrate how personal information could be easily gathered at scale. "Multiple Facebook profiles were extremely easy to scrape," he explains. In a series of conversations with Facebook security developers Copley explained the issue and was told there was "no security vuln here, even though it does seem like one on first glance." The method of scraping can work in multiple ways but largely relies on feeding Facebook's API a list of phone numbers or email addresses that have been automatically generated. These could also have been obtained from data breaches or leaks of information online. "Just query Facebook as often as possible until they ban your IP for querying too fast, and at that point you just slow down until the queries stop," Copley explained in an email. "I was doing my work purely for research and exposing the vulnerability for Facebook". ... The issue was again raised by researchers in 2015. Reza Moaiandin, who founded cybersecurity company CyberScanner, published a blogpost about the "loophole". he said he was able to gather thousands of users personal information by guessing their mobile numbers. Within this information were details of names, locations, and profile pictures. In response Facebook told him it didn't "consider it a security vulnerability" but had controls in place to stop it being abused. Zuckerberg's most recent statement goes against this, admitting Facebook's efforts to stop malicious actors hadn't worked." Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-news-data-scraping-mark-zuckerburg http://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-news-data-scraping-m... "A few months ago, I discovered a security loophole in Facebook that allows hackers to decrypt and sniff out Facebook user IDs using one of Facebook's APIs in bulk - therefore allowing them to gather millions of users' personal data (name, telephone number, location, images, and more). This post is an attempt to catch Facebook's attention to get this issue fixed. By using a script, an entire country's (I tested with the US, the UK and Canada) possible number combinations can be run through these URLs, and if a number is associated with a Facebook account, it can then be associated with a name and further details (images, and so on). ... For those of you who are wondering why I haven't notified Facebook about the issue, the truth is that I have - back in April (2015). Although I did receive a reply, initially the engineer I was in contact with was unable to reproduce the issue himself, and therefore failed to understand the technical details of how it should be fixed. ... After a couple of months of waiting, I initially thought someone else will look into it and fix it but I heard nothing, so I raised the flag with them again. They finally came back to me and told me that this is not a big issue - they have set limits and I should not worry about this problem. But frankly, I am very worried. ... Comment from reader: Great blog post. I reported an almost identical issue (albeit a different API) to Facebook in January 2014 but faced similar difficulties getting them to recognise the scope for abuse. I was able to lookup contiguous blocks of mobile numbers (in blocks of 5,000 at a time) with no discernible rate-limiting - I could pull them down as fast as my connection could handle (maybe ~50k numbers/min). If you make any headway with Facebook let us know and I will try pinging them again. It was especially worrisome as the number range I tried (NYC) had a hit-rate of about 20%." Source: https://salt.agency/blog/facebook-security-loophole/ https://salt.agency/blog/facebook-security-loophole/

feelin_googley 8y ago

"Poll: Do you trust Facebook? ... THIS MORNING, IT emerged that nearly 45,000 Irish Facebook profiles may have been affected by the giant data breach involving as many as 87 million accounts harvested by UK data intelligence firm Cambridge Analytica. Those 45,000 accounts could have been breached due to just 15 Irish people accessing a questionnaire app, thisisyourdigitallife, which included in its permissions the granting of access to all an individual's friends' profiles." Source: http://www.thejournal.ie/poll-do-you-trust-facebook-3941194-Apr2018/ http://www.thejournal.ie/poll-do-you-trust-facebook-3941194-...

jenkinsj 8y ago

I'm captivated by the phrase "free content (sic) is the creature, the servant and indeed the prostitute of merchandizing". -Walter Lippmann

ravenstine 8y ago

NY Times was among the numerous media companies that slobbered over Facebook for years and gave them free publicity. And now I'm supposed to listen to them when they say to replace Facebook.

feelin_googley 8y ago

"These days, you might get more applause for not being on social media than for reaching a follower milestone in Europe's liberal hubs such as Berlin or Paris. ... The mechanisms used by Cambridge Analytica and the "malicious actors" cited by Facebook appear to have been legal and do not constitute a data hack, but rather a deliberate exploitation of information through tools or loopholes Facebook itself provided in the past. ... At least two foreign governments, Australia and Germany, threatened or launched investigations into the practices on Thursday. ... Meanwhile, in India, where more than a half-million users are estimated to be affected, the allegations have resulted in a governmental request to Facebook and Cambridge Analytica for more detailed information, with a Saturday deadline. Even though India is now Facebook's biggest market - ahead of the United States - no Indian media outlets were able to ask questions in a conference call with CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday. The heavy U.S. focus immediately triggered criticism because privacy advocates are still looking into reports that Cambridge Analytica may have used Facebook data to influence Indian politics, as well. ... German justice minister Katarina Barley already called for an E.U.-wide investigation into the misuse of Facebook's data by Cambridge Analytica and other companies on Thursday. "Facebook has gambled away people's trust," Barley said. ... But in Europe, Germany's justice minister and others already fear that the latest regulations aren't enough." Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/04/05/as-facebook-confronts-tough-questions-on-data-misuse-europe-might-force-real-change/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/04/05...

Antifragile1 8y ago

Libtards still crying over their corrupt hag's loss. Libtard tears, they are tasty.