Hacker News Reader

Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

.. which is terrible. Apps like these (including Facebook) are breaking the Internet.

Now it's up to the social network to decide how resources are located (what standards?), who can access them, and for how long, etc.

Saw a good video in your Facebook timeline ? Good luck finding it again after you refresh the page.

It's a pity how 'the crowd' is now dictating the direction in which technology evolves. By trying to please the users at all times, we the tech people have now created these golden cages for users - in which their identities are commodified and sold to the highest bidder.

This is not the Internet we once dreamed about and 'social media' apps like these are getting it further and further for that vision every day.

View on HN

As much as I dislike Facebook saying that they break the Internet is a bit of an overstretch. The Internet isn’t a static thing, a set of rules carved on stone that has to remain like that for an eternity. It’s an evolving medium constantly reinventing itself. And the ultimate ruler is users themselves.

Facebook isn’t in the business of creating content that’s why they don’t care that much with discoverability of posts. They’re in the business of connecting people and finding their needs and habits.

Why is it a pity that users (aka the crowd) is dictating how a technology should be used? It happens all the time. The iPhone wasn’t build with third party apps in mind, it was the demand of users that allowed that to happen. Twitter was invented as an sms service. Coca Cola was meant to be pharmaceutical product for stomach upset.

This is exactly the Internet we once dreamed about. A widespread communication network with no central command where everyone and their dog can participate.

I agree. It is an evolving medium which is reinventing itself. But saying that users are the ultimate ruler is not entirely accurate, to put it lightly.

Technically, the ultimate ruler is the one (who controls the person) who can produce the private keys or passwords for the 'core systems'.

When most of your personal information, friends, your communication and organisation tools are behind one single account, that account now becomes very valuable.

If someone then decides to deny you access to your account - for whatever reason - you're practically excluded from the platform where everyone else is.. A digital outcast.

This is very different from the 'widespread communication network with no central command where everyone and their dog can participate'.

True, this system might be more convenient for users and advertisers right now, but in the long term this can have strange repercussions, like companies totally 'owning' people's lives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAesMQ6VtK8

you probably defended Bell's monopoly in the past? If not, you are being very inconsistent now.

The iPhone wasn’t build with third party apps in mind, it was the demand of users that allowed that to happen.

Note though that before Apple allowed third-party apps, they took time to invent the concept and technology of the "app store" which allows then to strictly regulate all apps by their own (often arbitrary) standards.

This is exactly the Internet we once dreamed about. A widespread communication network with no central command where everyone and their dog can participate.

No one would complain if that were the case. But we do have central commands. Not a single one, but a handful of them. With the network controlled liked this, the huge participation rate could actually result in the opposite of the original vision of the internet: Not a network that allows people to grow and become more free but a network that enfoces conformity and enhances suppression. I think China's Sesame Credit system is a good example of that direction.

This development is backwards, it reverses everything what is great about the Internet and made it such superior and successful. Instead of a network of networks where everyone can freely share information and talk to anybody, even directly via standardized protocols it's going back to heavily centralized systems, to the last bit controlled by a a small set of commercial entities which even do not see the user as a customer. WeChat is a dystopia which is not unlikely to become also true in the rest of the wold. No matter how nicely your cage is decorated, it's still a cage.

What's outside this "cage" that consumers want?

freedom

As a thought experiment, imagine a bird cage that gets larger as a bird approaches its sides. Even if you put a bird that migrates in this cage, eventually the cage would reach some max size where cage size > maximum flight range of the bird.

If the cage is so large that the bird doesn't try to escape it, does the bird care that it's in a cage? Is there really a difference between the cage and freedom?

You can't get the average person to use other products by promising something like "freedom", there needs to be something concrete outside the cage to get them to leave it. Products like WeChat are like this imaginary cage, growing to encompass everything that the users want. From the point of view of the user it might as well not be a cage, because there's nothing left outside of it for them besides a benefit they haven't (not yet) seen value in.

If you really want them to leave one monolithic service for a smattering of smaller ones there needs to be a seriously compelling reason that each of the smaller ones bring to the table, "freedom" isn't going to cut it

>does the bird care that it's in a cage?

Yes. Because the bird ultimately has no control over the cage, cannot be assured of the motives of those who do, and knows its true freedom is always subject to the whims of the same.

But again, the average consumer isn't that concerned with those issues, because unlike this imaginary bird, the consumers could leave the cage anytime they wanted in theory. They've accepted a trade of control and privacy, for ease and convenience, and I don't know that it's not a choice they shouldn't make until someone can find a way to balance the two.

People already experience the cage. Plenty of my friends don't want to run the FB messenger app and give it permissions on their phones, but FB forces people to use the app on mobile and disables the function on the website.

Same deal with third party chat apps. I have to install 3-4 separate apps to talk to different people because everyone's using a separate app and there's no integration between them, they don't speak the same protocol. And I would much rather not have WhatsApp but if I deleted it I'd have to leave a few group chats.

So don't use it? I'm not sure how your comments reflect on WeChat; it's not like stores are insisting on you paying through the app, or that businesses are forcing you to use WeChat to contact them. It's an added convenience, and it seems people like that.

> So don't use it?

That's an old argument which totally ignores the network effect.

The original argument, and your reply, is also based on ignoring stuff - namely that people are using and liking these apps & services. The network effect that WeChat has is because it is popular.

Would you prefer I use the other old argument, which is 'so build your own app then'? Equally frustrating and annoying, yet at the same time is probably the only other way to fight these walled garden apps. Short of banning popular apps & services that you disapprove of, I'm not sure what else there is to do...

> The original argument, and your reply, is also based on ignoring stuff - namely that people are using and liking these apps & services. The network effect that WeChat has is because it is popular.

And those who don't like it or discover the downsides later (let alone that some downsides may are added later) have to bite the dust because they are locked in.

So persuade all your friends not to use it?

I only agree in theory.

In practice, many small businesses in my area only have a Facebook homepage now (and no other website). Many friends and colleagues solely organise get togethers (farewells, engagement parties, birthdays) on Facebook. There have been quite a few web services I would have tried around the place, but they only supported 'Log in with Facebook' or 'Log in with Google+' or similar.

Luckily I have an understanding peer group, who will send me a message outside of Facebook to let me know when stuff is going on. Of course to them I'm spoken of as "... oh hiisukun doesn't use Facebook because of some weird nerd reasons ..."

Not everyone is so lucky as me, and more importantly - there are certainly enough alternatives that I don't -really- miss that particular social network. But if I was in China on WeChat, would I feel the same way?

As a facebook avoider myself, I feel your pain! But I am happy with staying away from it, the choice is always there to sign up or not. I find it strange though that people think that these messaging apps are too large and their ecosystems are becoming too powerful, and yet at the same time there seem to be far too many different messaging platforms.

Well...They are that many platforms because the dominant ones are so obviously powerful and lucrative.

I generally try to avoid these services, but it's impossible to not use some of them, because of their monopolistic position.

I have to use Facebook sometimes because people use it to organise events, concerts and other things which are now inaccessible to me unless I use Facebook. Which is terrible.

These services are bad because they are popular and successful and because they try to offer more and more services on top of the 'social' aspect.

>it seems people like that

That's exactly my point. By catering to what the masses 'like', we're slowly closing the door to the 'free Internet', replacing it with a hegemony of "social" networks, owned by big corps.

And people don't just 'like' that - otherwise companies wouldn't have sales and marketing and advertising departments.

They're unwitting players in complex games of chess between these companies and their value to these companies is the tendency to accept subliminal suggestions and then act on those suggestions when they make purchasing decisions. Also called advertising.

I'm in a similar position to you in regards to facebook. My strategy is to use custom CSS to remove the elements of the site that only serve to distract me (newsfeed, etc.). I still get notifications for events, chat, etc. so it works out alright.

Are there example open-source stylesheets to accomplish this filtering?

Many of the user styles (e.g. for Stylish) are purely cosmetic[1], but you can see what elements they're matching on and roll your own.

1: https://userstyles.org/styles/browse/facebook

If tech people dream about a product that real people have no desire to use, is it really the consumers' fault for "liking the wrong things", or is it the inventors' fault for dreaming about a product that doesn't meet people's needs?

Assuming that the rest of the world is wrong because it's moving in a direction you personally disagree with doesn't make you courageous or visionary, it makes you Principal Skinner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik

OTOH, is it always true that "the masses" do what's best for the individuals that comprise the masses, even when measured by their own standards?

If so, I'd imagine we'd have no use for a word like visionary.

Reminds me of the famous quote from Henry Ford, that if he'd asked the people what they wanted, they'd have answered "faster horses".

Just because the masses want the wrong thing doesn't mean that your different thing is better. The way I see the difference is that, after saying that, Ford gave them automobiles. He didn't fail to sell people ferret-poop rockets and then blame them for wanting faster horses.

Well, you'd originally asked whether it's the customer or inventor's "fault" and pretty much suggested that it was the inventor's. I was, merely indicating that it can go either way, depending on the scenario.

But, yeah, if you further qualify it by saying that the inventor was trying to sell ferret-poop rockets, then that marks a scenario that's pretty clear-cut.

It's no further than my initial statement, it was just clarifying how your quote applied to the situation. The inventor is the one at fault if they envision a product people don't want. That's all. Maybe you can blame their marketing team too.

Your point doesn't really make any logical sense. It requires an intense envy for experiencing "everything" that simply isn't universal.

That your emotional reasoning leads you to believe that people are being controlled by social networks doesn't make your point any stronger, either.

You can't use Didi's black car (Uber-like) service without wechat/wepay.

You can pay in cash for Didi.

Only taxi, not for private cars.

At least Facebook tries to support every platform (web, ios, windows, android, etc.). IMO, the bigger problem is all google services (android, chromeos, sometimes ios) and apple services (ios only).

There really should be some standards that specified how chat bubbles can have the same set of functionality as FB Messenger, WeChat, Kik, Google's Allo and others. It's becoming more common to have "interactive" chat messages with buttons inside, or messages that makes buttons appear somewhere on the bottoms of the screen.

It would be better if communication technology with more than (say) 1M users would be forced to obey open standards. This is the case for telephony, so why not enforce it for social media as well?

Would be an appropriate measure but I do not have too much hope at the moment for such a clear political move. Later there may come a point where it's too late.

This seems to be a good task for the EFF, https://www.eff.org/

Agree that wechat and the like are going against the grain of the open nature of internet, but one positive side effect of wechat is that it will force many service and content to develop simple web apps instead of mobile apps, because it is the only way to exist there inside.

Most mobile apps need to die and be replaced by web apps, then wechat will die too, or become a mobile os, which is the same.

I don't know if that's actually a good thing. In general, I prefer native apps (real apps) to web apps; in particular, I trust an open-source application I compiled myself far more than I do some random website.

Unfortunately, I trust the random website more than I do a closed-source, 'free' mobile app.

So it's a bit of a pickle.

Long-long term, I'd like to see more free software on mobile devices, and more simple HTML web apps.

People are developing Wechat apps exclusively for use inside Wechat, and using Wechat-specific APIs. There's no chance whatsoever of the built-for-Wechat app ecosystem somehow killing Wechat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com