50 ms·
Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
- jandrese 7y agoIs that headline damning with faint praise? Mere "thousands" doesn't seem like enough to get critical mass on a social network. For comparison Google+ had something on the order of 300 million users and failed to get traction.
- rbritton 7y agoAnecdotally, Google+ failed for me because I got stuck in an authentication loop for a business page. It wanted to verify the business, but the link to do so always errored out, which made it impossible to ever change the page content beyond what I initially put in. I stopped using both sides of it at that point, and it wouldn’t surprise me if others ran into similar rough edges. In true Google style, there was absolutely no route to support either.
- danielfoster 7y agoRan into a similar issue.
- znpy 7y agoit failed for me because the UI was slow as molasses and the circles functionality, while cool, was not clear in the sense that it was not clear who could see what when "posting to circles"
- workthrowaway 7y agogoogle+ did not fail for me. and many others i know. i enjoyed being part of communities around specific topics. spamming was the only problem i saw. and i just couldn't comprehend that the same company that defeated spams in email couldn't do the same on their social network. someone made a comment earlier about twitter killed vine and now tiktok is being a better vine. maybe someday we will see a social network where the emphasis is on communities and not the self. that's what google+ did better than anything that was out there.
- Tenoke 7y ago>maybe someday we will see a social network where the emphasis is on communities and not the self. that's what google+ did better than anything that was out there. That seems to be filled by irc channels (less now), subreddits and more recently discords.
- dmos62 7y agoAfter a brief recitation of facts it ends on a critical note, on par with the title: > Social media consultant Zoe Cairns said she thought the network would have to grow its numbers quickly in order to prove itself to be a viable alternative to the giants. > "It's going to need a lot of money ploughed into it," she said. > "People are so used to social media being free. I think businesses might pay for it, but people are so used to having news at their fingertips for free."
- organsnyder 7y agoGoogle+ only had that many users because many other Google properties (YouTube being the biggest) were lumped in together. I bet the majority of Google+ "users" weren't even aware that the platform existed.
- vcavallo 7y agoeveryone I knew had a Google+ account and none of them knew it.
- varjag 7y agoRight, it would grab you by YT and wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. Effectively it was also world's largest deanonymization effort. Must have been some hefty internal incentives program at Google, they tried as if their bonus depended on it.
- dbuder 7y agoI remember fighting it and failing, I was like what! I said no a dozen different ways and here is my full name.
- marcoseliziario 7y agoYeah. If you had a google account was more or less impossible not to be on Google+. The thing is that engagement was pathetically low. We used to joke that the best password manager would be to post all your secrets in a google+ posting, because nobody would ever see your post.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoBut that right there is why as a fairly strict free market type, I see the need for government intervention in some tech antitrust situations. If Google+ failed with google immediately signing anyone with a gmail account up for it and pushing it fairly hard with all their channels - how extremely unlikely is it for someone to organically take Facebook’s market share away? Oh no problem, you’ll only need someone with more resources than Google!
- sylens 7y agoThere are dozens of us! Dozens!
- type0 7y agoNo, no, it's already over 9000!
- MBCook 7y agoBut G+ users didn’t choose it (by and large) it just happened TO them. In this case at least the users had agency and actually signed up. Still a small number in the grand scheme, but G+ was a bit of a different beast due to how Google launched it.
- ddxxdd 7y agoThat faint praise will transform into real praise once millions of BBC readers feel compelled to join those thousands already in Wikipedia's version of facebook.
- p1esk 7y agoI don’t feel compelled.
- gamblor956 7y agoJust what I've always wanted. A social network where others can edit my posts, competing reversion bots, and all power concentrated in a few super-users with nothing else to do with their time. What a compelling experience...
- nanomonkey 7y agoFrom my experience on Scuttlebutt and other decentralized/alternative social medias, thousands will try something out just to kick the tires; it's staying, contributing and utilizing the tool for things it wasn't intended for that really matters.
- freehunter 7y agoAnd convincing people to use a service named “scuttle butt”.
- tossAfterUsing 7y agoannecdotally, my attention isn't usually held for long by people who are unwilling to engage with a service because of it's weird name... https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/
- freehunter 7y agoAnd that’s fine for you. But it’s not fine for the service. Technically anyone can use the dating service Christian Mingle. But you might not find a lot of atheists or Jewish people on there, simply because of the name and the implication of the people who would use a service with that name.
- type0 7y agoWhat do you mean "Scuttle Butt" is a perfect name for a dating service, "Christian Minglë" is also awesome name, I hope someone start a service like that /s
- kick 7y agoIt's not a "service." They owe you nothing, and they don't need you to use it for them to keep using it. Especially given you aren't the target audience, all that really happens is you become a waste of bandwidth for anyone hosting a public peer.
- 7y ago
- enitihas 7y agoMere thousands are nowhere enough, but even Facebook also should have a very small number of high revenue customers. As long as this new network can draw a good enough amount of those users, they will be fine and will also impact Facebook's bottom line.
- dawg- 7y ago>Mere "thousands" doesn't seem like enough to get critical mass on a social network. It's kind of like running for president of the United States and bragging that you got "hundreds" of votes.
- Barrin92 7y agoI don't think the purpose here is to be the proverbial president of the US but to simply have a community of people who are willing to chip some money in and who want healthier discourse. If you're going to blow up to the size of facebook you're just going to suffer from the very same problems. More diversity and more competition and more alternatives is what this is supposed to be part of. I think the point here is to build an ecosystem of saner social networks, not the next Franken-network.
- beat 7y agoBut will it suffer from the problem of monetizing user data? That seems to be the big thing it's designed to avoid.
- capableweb 7y agoHow many users do you think HN has? No matter how many, I think I would call HN mostly a success (currently/temporary?). Seems that to have a good social network, it's less about quantity of content and more about quality. Most of Twitter is shit, but it contains some average content too, and a small amount of gold nuggets. HN feels to have much better signal/noise ratio and judging by myself and others who hang around here, it's way better here than what other "critical mass" social networks have.
- rafiki6 7y agoI think the key difference is HN doesn't need to make money
- capableweb 7y agoSure, we all choose our incentives. Facebook chose to follow money.
- Uehreka 7y agoI don’t think it makes sense to compare HN to other social networks. It wasn’t started as a business that would need to turn a profit, it was started as a side project by a rich guy (Paul Graham) who wanted to see what smart people thought about things. If HN fails to ever hit 1M users, PG (or Sam Altman) isn’t going to shut it down or cut off its funding, and neither he nor Y Combinator are expecting or relying on it to generate revenue. It continues to exist after over a decade because the Y Combinator folks find the content and discussion interesting. And hey, that’s all well and good. I’m glad that HN sticks around when a more profit-driven site would’ve failed years ago. But it’s important to note that what works for HN likely wouldn’t work for anyone else.
- ForHackernews 7y ago> The platform says it will never sell user data and relies on "the generosity of individual donors" rather than ads. Sounds like this isn't envisioned as a profit-making business, either. I'd happily donate some money to have a place my friends and family can easily hang out online that isn't trying to sell us to anything.
- a0zU 7y agoGoogle+ users only had to make a gmail account to be signed up for Google+, the amount of people actually actively using Google+ was far lower than 300 million.
- rgbrenner 7y agoThat's because Google tried to be the network for everyone. There are a lot of people.. several billion, and if that's your market, then 300m doesn't cut it. (They also forced it onto everyone.. there was little community there.) On the other hand, being the social network for a smaller audience is very do-able. Even Facebook started locally at Zuckerbergs college, then expanded to other colleges, before eventually opening up. Being the social network for a single school only requires a few thousand people.. then you're the social network everyone (in that school) wants to be on to discuss events relevant to the school... and you've created your foothold. Google was never interested in a creating a foothold in a small niche. They said "We're google.. basic marketing rules don't apply" and they learned they were wrong.
- Kye 7y agoSomehow I doubt they learned the lesson it should have taught them.
- gnode 7y ago> doesn't seem like enough to get critical mass on a social network. I'm not sure it matters for this social network. It's positioning as a news-based platform doesn't require people you know personally to use the site in order for it to have value. Perhaps conversely, too many people on a social network may be detrimental to these aims, as ever more narrow-minded echo chambers or factions can achieve critical mass.
- xchaotic 7y agoThe size of the network didn’t doom Google+. It was the product management
- mc3 7y agoAnd Facebook had something like a college dorm, and did get traction.
- mgbmtl 7y agoNot to dive into semantics, I guess it's more of a Reddit rival? Meaning that I would be happy if it can be a fairly good news aggregator, and it doesn't need a huge critical mass. Facebook is for baby pictures of friends, angry old relatives and instant messenger for people that you want to keep at a certain distance :-)
- hyperbovine 7y agoReddit certainly rivals Facebook for my attention.
- bencollier49 7y agoReddit with Wikipedia-style moderation does not appeal to me.
- cc-d 7y agoObligatory plug for https://ieddit.com/ https://ieddit.com/ - there is quite a bit of ideological overlap in terms of what is trying to be achieved and why.
- oarabbus_ 7y agoThousands! Thousands of users, I say!
- vcavallo 7y agohundreds of thousands at the moment
- vcavallo 7y agojoined! come on in https://wt.social/gi/vinney-cavallo/work/yu97 https://wt.social/gi/vinney-cavallo/work/yu97
- plibither8 7y agoWow, this just spammed my entire friend list and added a bunch of "friends" without any prompt.
- vcavallo 7y agoI had/have no idea how this works yet.
- jermaustin1 7y agoI can't see this as a Facebook rival. From my understanding, this is a social news site with fact checking. I use Facebook to post pictures of my vacations for my family, and get updates on my nieces and nephews since I moved from Houston, TX to NYC 5 years ago. Until someone replaces that aspect in a way that works while still enabling my family to do their memes and quizzes, and all that crap I avoid, there will be no "rival". I HATE Facebook, but I can't get rid of it without losing access to my family.
- konstantinentia 7y agoI similarly relocated away from family. Turns out that if they know you don't use Facebook they will go out of their way to update you directly. Just believe that you are worth it, and my friend, you are.
- lm28469 7y agoThat, plus if they don't update you personally and all you get from them is passively watching their facebook feed I have bad news for you. I'd take a bi yearly call from my grandma over the daily shitposts of any member of my family that I haven't talked to in 10 years.
- dobleboble 7y agoMaybe think about calling your grandma more often, before it's too late.
- gk1 7y agoSame here. Going off FB just gives me a reason to call my friends and family, and for them to call me.
- drugsupplychain 7y agoAgreed! ^ My entire family lives pretty far away, but I facetime with them a lot more often since I got off FB.
- deleted 7y ago
- grezql 7y agoJust signed up, I hope this really takes off. I think the design needs a proper face lift, then again the first version of FB wasnt a really eye candy either. I hope in future they implement messaging system and events.
- pfrench42 7y agoI'm still considering signing up. I would do it in a heartbeat if, with my subscription, I could "gift" a subscription to a couple people of my choosing
- gtirloni 7y agoI'm really happy to see a social network that makes costs clear and allow me to pay for its services in exchange for not having my data sold. It probably won't grow to hundreds of millions of users but that's fine. Closer connections with people that care are much more interesting.
- schnable 7y ago"Thousands"
- shujito 7y agoselects are best
- dna_polymerase 7y ago> The platform says it will never sell user data and relies on "the generosity of individual donors" rather than ads. Yay, so yearly half-site banners at the top of the page asking for an individual contribution while sitting on a multi-million dollar stack of money? Nice. Facebook is done! \s
- DeusExMachina 7y agoEven though this specific platform does not appeal to me, I'm glad to see the market produce alternatives to Facebook and Twitter. Another notable mention is Thinkspot [1], the platform created by Jordan Peterson and others. Sure, as others point these are not "direct" competitors to the existing platforms, but I don't think they need to be. You can't beat Facebook at making Facebook. In my opinion, if anything can chip away at the power of large players are platforms with different ideas and rules. [1]: https://www.ts.today https://www.ts.today
- tekkk 7y agoWell can't say I'm not curious, but €90 a year is a lot of money. To pay that for just another service for procrastination? Maybe I'll pass. Although I definitely support the idea.
- behringer 7y agoAlso, on the surface, it looks like a replacement for reddit/HN than a fb replacement. Am I missing something?
- aiscapehumanity 7y agoProcrastinating is a weird word to use?
- znpy 7y agoit's the old saying: "if you're not paying for using a product or you're not being paid to use a product, that means that you're the product". Deciding to pass on a service that asks you money to offer you a service is completely fine, as long as you don't later complain about "privacy issues" and "massive surveillance".
- bilbo0s 7y agoWell, in fairness, you're not gonna be free from mass surveillance by signing up for WT social. You might not need to worry about people selling your data, provided none of your connections adds a privacy destroying app in the future? But yeah, everyone will still be subject to the government showing up and going through your data if they deem it necessary. I'm not sure that can be helped? If there's an ironclad way to do that, I haven't seen it done.
- osobo 7y agoBut I'd like to sample or at least see the bloody service before I pay for it. Right now I'm hitting a paywall telling me I'm x0.000 in line and "Oh, we want your money". I'm not triggered to commit.
- buboard 7y ago> that means that you're the product paying in kind is still a valid form of payment
- neilobremski 7y ago> The platform says it will never sell user data and relies on "the generosity of individual donors" rather than ads I'd prefer "The platform says it will never sell user data and relies on paying customers rather than ads"
- nomight 7y agoWhile I like the idea, there are other, better "alternative" social media platforms out there. Mastodon[1] being a good example (even if it's more a Twitter than a Facebook): open, federated, free (as in beer and freedom). [1] https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/
- Apocryphon 7y agoWill they also offer an alternative to Facebook login? Because it’s not just the social network itself that’s all-pervasive on the internet, and locks you into its network.
- type0 7y agoThey need to provide tribute-hailing buttons on other websites otherwise it won't become pervasive enough.
- DebtDeflation 7y agoI signed up, was waitlisted (number 180-thousand something on the list), sent out a couple of invites to friends with the url it generates, as soon as one of them accepted, it gave me access. So I guess if you don't want to pay the $13/month, you can avoid it by getting a friend to join.
- gaius_baltar 7y agoWhy spam a friend for this? Just grab the URL and create another dummy account. Social media sites are data-vampires, not entities deserving any kind of respect.
- corobo 7y agoI didn’t even share it, just loaded my own share link and it let me in
- electricviolet 7y agoThere are thousands of us! Thousands!
- bonoboTP 7y agoWhat a horrible name. How do I even pronounce it? "Double-u-tee social"? Doesn't quite roll off the tongue, especially for non-native English speakers.
- john-radio 7y agodubtee social
- kick 7y ago"WikiTribune Social" or "W.T. Social."
- Izkata 7y agoI kinda thought it might be a play on WTF, so, "what the social".
- z3t4 7y agoWhite Trash Social. Although that wouldnt be politically correct.
- fizilicious 7y agoA bit tangent, but as a non-native English speaker, I always get frustrated that single W is pronounced "double you" and single Y is "why". In my non-native English tongue I would pronounced the name as something like "Weh-Teh Social"
- 113 7y ago
- EGreg 7y agoThousands? This is 2019
- ofrzeta 7y agoIt's 160.000
- a_band 7y ago"Thousands flock"...
- to-too-two 7y agoHaven’t heard a single thing about this social network aside from the name associated with it.
- emptybottle 7y agoTo all the people poking fun at "thousands"... You have to start somewhere, and I'm sure you'd be tickled pink to see thousands of new users signing up for your app...
- metalliqaz 7y agoI agree with everything you said, but I still think "thousands" is way too low for newsworthiness. Social networks need a critical mass before they are good for anything. Surely that number has to be in the millions, right?
- gfodor 7y agoThe metric relevant for social network sustainable growth seem unlikely to be total user count. It’s probably a mixture of metrics around inter-connectivity and rate of adjacent edge growth.
- appstorelottery 7y agoThat number is multiplied by the social cred of Wikipedia. Right?
- johannes1234321 7y agoThe "critical" mass however doesn't refer to absolute numbers. A million users with no relation to each other don't make it work. A few thousand with a tight network relationship cn make a busy place.
- rvz 7y agoWell, Twitter was seen as a failure in 2009 compared to Facebook at the time. What constitutes to mass adoption is if several so-called 'influencers' try it out and if they make more money on the platform than both Twitter/Facebook and if the social network allows advertisers on there too. Then the millions of users will follow suit. Its that simple and it is has worked for Snap and it is working for TikTok. If there is no gain or incentive for the famous users or the so called 'influencers', then the 'millions of users' will stay where the famous users are.
- 7y ago
- anotheryou 7y agothat you have to pay is a misconception, you don't. I just still don't quite grasp the concept. Ad-free (cool for privacy) and everybody can edit everything?
- joeblau 7y agoThis reminds me of "There are dozens of us... DOZENS"[1]. While I am happy that people are diversifying their social network choice, 160k is a rounding error to Facebook. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKie-vgUGdI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKie-vgUGdI
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 7y agoDo they fact check the hair loss ads or only the news? Can I get in line earlier for not being from California?
- phkahler 7y agoI dont want to see 3rd party stuff my friends share. I want to see my friends content.
- caiocaiocaio 7y agoAnother Facebook killer? 4329847328943298th time's the charm!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- CrankyBear 7y agoJimmy Wales or Mark Zuckerman... this is not exactly a situation where's one clearly more trust worthy than the other.
- supjeff 7y agoAside from the fact that wales' software is supposed to be free and open source and thus will not require its users to trust the founder as much as they are forced to with fb, how is Wales not more trustworthy than Zuck? One guy has a string of abuses and apologies spanning almost two decades as the founder, CEO and majority shareholder of a company that helped the Russian gov't steal the 2016 election and helped bring back eradicated diseases, and the other created a non-profit encyclopedia and gave away the source code?
- behringer 7y agoNot only that, but he managed to navigate his army of editors to weed out fake/pseudo scientific entries. He's the fake news anti-hero.
- kingkawn 7y agoIt does not need to beat facebook at its own game. Merely establish a digital public space that has its own culture, and in time, that culture spreads out into the world, whether the world joins the site itself or not. Hackernews is an example of such a place too.
- tomaszs 7y agoI see there is a bar telling the service is under heavy load. You can join using this link: https://wt.social/gi/tomasz-smykowski/work/buwn https://wt.social/gi/tomasz-smykowski/work/buwn I have created some groups for software developers
- fortran77 7y agoI tried it. Despite it trying not to spread "misinformation" it really isn't that much better. And I'm getting barraged by "friend requests" from Russian Women just like any other social network. What would be nice is if people paid for Journalism again. They major newspapers and news magazines should figure out how to have a common payment system that lets you subscribe in one place to nearly everything, with a consistent interface between them.
- Kye 7y agoSomeone sent one as soon as I got in and there's no way to reject. Now there's a big "pending requests" box on every page and an easy to misclick Accept button.
- a13n 7y agoSlow news day I guess
- vikiomega9 7y agoDo they talk about why we need to log-in?
- joegahona 7y agoDoes this mean 160,000 registered? Or 160,000 entered their cc info and are paying? Way different metrics, obviously.
- xchaotic 7y agoThe pricing to me seems horribly expensive especially as they are fighting a competitor that is ‘free’ and has way better network effects?
- laxd 7y agoI'd like a non-evil social network, but there is already too many "only £10 a month" for the sake of arranging my pixels in amusing ways.
- icotyl 7y agoI think there’s an uptick at the moment of paid online services. We’re getting four models: 1. Free commercial services supported by advertising. 2. Ad-free commercial services supported by subscriptions. 3. Open-source distributed services. Arguably there’s a fourth category: free, ad-free commercial services supported by VC money to grow until reaches critical mass and pivots into a paid/advertising model. The second option caters to a smaller crowd who are willing to pay for a better experience, but a “smaller crowd” defies conventional wisdom about social network effects. It’s an interesting experiment though. There are now dozens of news aggregators, streaming media services, gaming platforms, etc., competing for our monthly disposable income, so it may be a tough sell. The NYT covered the shift towards subscription services recently: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/13/magazine/internet-premium.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/13/magazine/inte...
- empressplay 7y agoIf it was a traditional company I'd agree, but it's a not-for-profit that also runs Wikipedia so I see it as a donation toward that. WT.social is just a perk.
- kalado 7y agoYeah, way to expensive. A "pay-what-you-want" model with a minium of 2$-4$ a month would be much more successfull, I feel.
- falcor84 7y agoWhile 160,000 is a very small number compared to Facebook's user base, it's two orders of magnitude more than what the "thousands"in the title made me imagine. A more generous title would have used something like "a sixth of a million".
- thrownaway954 7y agoI agree. The title should have said "more than half a million people". then it would have sounded better.
- jonathathan 7y agoIt's not true though..? 160k is not more than half a million
- g4d 7y agoMaybe the above was sarcasm?
- hinkley 7y agoSomeone else in the thread is implying it’s closer to 190k. At any rate we are now into “hundreds of thousands”.
- epx 7y ago241693 right now.
- ummonk 7y agoYeah. Thousands is nothing. Hundreds of thousands on the other hand is a strong start (though it will remain to be seen how many of those 160k users remain on there).
- amelius 7y agoNow if only someone would periodically copy all interesting events from Facebook to that platform ...
- buboard 7y agoI 'm not sure this is the kind of project that JW should be spending his social creds/capital on.
- wnevets 7y agoI signed up but thats it.
- nikolay 7y agoThis is so far from being a rival, I won't even comment further!
- foobarbecue 7y agoHow does this relate to wikinews?
- war1025 7y agoI just signed up, which it seems hasn't actually granted me access, even though the initial page it took me to did look like I had access? I don't really get it. I think something people maybe aren't taking into account is that this doesn't need to be a "Facebook killer". People with Facebook also use any number of social media sites. It could just as easily be something like a Reddit substitute since it seems to be somewhat "groups" oriented. Also, from what I can see, it isn't pay-to-play like some people have suggested. Rather, it seems to be exactly what I've seen multiple people advocate for: Pay for preferential service. I'll keep an eye on it at least. Why not.
- robbyking 7y agoI'm curious if people are sick of Facebook or sick of social media in general. My only Facebook friends are people I'm actually friends with, and I mute the more obnoxious members of my family. Because of this my FB experience seemed to be a lot nicer than what most people experience, but in the end it just felt like a waste of time.
- anewguy9000 7y agocan i just say that the "news" on the wikipedia homepage should be renamed "disasters and deaths". what is with their weird bent for what makes it to the homepage?
- hcarvalhoalves 7y agoGood, but I think the "Facebook" model is dead by now. I've listened to a podcast recently about how the younger generation (00's onwards) don't even use social networks the way they're designed anymore. They keep multiple accounts/personas, they post ephemeral content, delete content, etc. It's a lot more about self-expression (Snapchat, TikTok) than having an online presence of your real-life self (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc). In a sense, they're undermining the monopolising network effects by creating many disconnected sub-graphs. It's been eye opening.
- seizeheures 7y agoI’d be interested in listening to that podcast, what’s it called?
- hcarvalhoalves 7y agoIt's a famous Brazilian podcast, unfortunately there's no transcript, but here's the link: https://www.b9.com.br/shows/braincast/geracao-z/ https://www.b9.com.br/shows/braincast/geracao-z/ They had a teenager as guest and the talk dynamic was good, with a lot of Q&A. Since I don't usually interact w/ teenagers I was completely blind to how they were using the web today.
- mportela 7y agoWow, I didn't know B9 had released an episode on this matter. Thanks for pointing it out!
- copperx 7y agoSo, basically, they're rebelling against Facebook's "real name" initiative that completely changed the internet. I never thought using your real name on the internet was going to catch on. I was terribly mistaken.
- underwater 7y agoBut is that because the world has actually changed, of because they are young? Teens have always been counterculture and rejected the status quo. The real question is whether Facebook will be compelling to them when they grow up.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- OrgNet 7y agoI signed up but the cost is way too high so I won't be using it... like 10 times too high?
- bamboozled 7y agoI’ve learned to live a happy life without social media (mostly), I’d never go back to anything that resembled Facebook. I moved on and I’m happy for it. I enjoy some Instagram and Snap, that’s it. I’m bored with them too though.
- MiroF 7y agoAlmost everyone young has switched from FB to IG. I don't think you can claim that is a life "without social media."
- LeoPanthera 7y agoTwo of the largest social networks is not "a life without social media".
- bamboozled 7y agoFair point. I guess what I was trying to say is that they're different formats and they encourage different types of engagement. What I meant is, I don't miss the type of experience that Facebook provided at all. Instagram feels more like entertainment and the engagement seems more "trivial" to me. I can passively consume or participate in if I have nothing better to do, else I don't miss it. Facebook started to turn into a boring chore for me.
- MiroF 7y agoYes, but the problem with FB that Wales is trying to solve is the incentive structure created by advertising and the associated data privacy issues. Usage of IG leaves that dynamic essentially intact.
- bamboozled 7y agoYup, I don't really have an issue with the advertisement model as is with IG because it's been a fantastic incentive for me not to look at it :) However, Wales' mission is noble and I hope he does well!
- ian0 7y agoNov 15th: 80,000 users Nov 17th: 160,000 users Nov 18th: 200,000 users https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1196571429099200512 https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1196571429099200512
- Kye 7y agoI made an account and am on a waiting list. It wants me to invite people to bump myself up in the queue. Or pay. The site looks very 2000s PHP CMS. I'm not sure what it is. I searched for a topic I'm interested in, something came up, and I clicked...and it bumped me back to the main page where it shows my place in the list. Why would I invite people or pay money for something if I have no idea what I'm getting?
- zepearl 7y ago> It is positioning itself as a "news focused" place, and says members will be able to edit "misleading" headlines. Upcoming "Battle of Edits"? And why edit only "headlines", and "misleading" compared to what?
- rightisleft 7y agoUnpopular Opinion: the core problem with facebook or any social network is the people inhabiting it. I dont think simply offering an alternative with X removed and Y enhanced will solve the problem. Its like the old saying "no matter where you go, there you are..."
- mark_l_watson 7y agoI have been using WT.social yesterday and today and I generally like it. I just read a linked article about a meeting on a train, quite good. My user name is mark-watson2 I used GNU Social for a long while but when the host of my instance shut it down I didn’t create an account on another server instance. I liked the decentralized nature of GNU Social, but I think WT.social has more chance of getting traction.
- NoPicklez 7y agoI worry that it doesn't take long at all to question the accuracy of information on any platform. And given that this platforms value proposition is accurate information, that proposition can be easily tarnished or diminished.
- ofrzeta 7y agoThe name is unfortunate and I wish they would spend more time on thinking about a proper name. It has to work in spoken conversation such as "are you on Facebook?", "I am using Whatsapp". "We can connect on WT:Social", not so much. Is it supposed to be pronounced "double you tee social"?
- corobo 7y ago“Flock to” might be a bit much. I’ve registered there in case it takes off, but I’ve not used it even half as much as a social network might want
- upofadown 7y agoIt doesn't sound like this actually federates with anything else. So how is this not just another pointless silo?
- mikorym 7y ago> It doesn't sound like this actually federates with anything else. I think it's for the people who consider that a feature.
- 8bitsrule 7y agoTwo days after that article it's 275K. Needs work, but the basics are there. Fly!