I can’t just stand by and watch Mark Zuckerberg destroy the internet
medium.freecodecamp.com
medium.freecodecamp.com
Yes, it will. In fact, it may be the only thing that will help.
Facebook has shown willingness to make unpopular changes if it can get away with it--and it always gets away with it. The fact that an informed and visible critic like the author can't even manage to give it up is a case study in why Facebook can and will keep calling bluffs. Complaints mean nothing if you are giving the site the same eyeball time. Facebook's success is due to the size of its social network. The network effect works both ways, though; if enough people leave then those remaining will have less incentive to stay on board, and the network will unravel inversely to how it was built. Only when the eyeball count starts declining will Facebook take users' wishes seriously.
This is why you can't treat that type of statement as purely factual: so long as you're sharing a world with it, it's of a quine-like type which is always performative to speak, in a way, because how much people believe it on various levels (and thereby decide (or unconsciously "decide") things like "why should I bother to connect to these people when they won't even sign up for a free Facebook account to make it easier for me, since everyone knows that's just what you do") influences how true it is in a much stronger way than is the case for most objective statements.
In light of that, I wonder whether my having said the above is good or bad? Hard to tell.
* A group of my friends who play badminton together organize weekly events only through Facebook. They use "Going/Not going" as a way of knowing how many people are coming.
* One of my friends organizes film nights occasionally. Again, he does it through Facebook. He sets the date differently each time, so that all people can attend at least sometime. There is no info about this outside Facebook and we do not meet in real life otherwise (he is not my coworker and he lives in a different part of town).
Is what you are suggesting really "cut from your life a portion of your friends that synchronize only through Facebook"? Surely it will not lead to a complete isolation for me, but being an introverted person, it will reduce my social life by a significant margin.
With most people on gmail and Google not being much better, IMAP/ActiveSync CalDAV invitations with all the invitees' names and email addresses aren't too satisfying either.
It's feature bloat, but I really hope an E2E event/calendar protocol makes it in to something like Signal or Riot/Matrix. Ideally it would consistently maintain state (e.g. changing place and time), update your calendar, and provide a place for invitees to chat.
There are no examples of that in history.
The reality is that every second you spend on facebook you are dying and the faster you realize that the further into humanity's future you will reach.
It's true that sitting and reading isn't really going to help you live any longer. If you're going to read, however, you should at least get something meaningful out of it.
It may be different for some, but I get much more out of HN than I ever did when I used Facebook.
There are plenty of sources for news and events (I find that Twitter is great for this) and I easily keep up to date with friends and family via a mix of messaging apps.
I've found that turning Facebook into solely a consumption platform has worked really well. I spend maybe 15 minutes per week total skimming my feed for meaningful updates. I will never go back to contributing content to FB. I no longer engage in any discussions, which makes it a lot less annoying and stressful. It's essentially a personal RSS feed in this formulation.
Its true though that I have less (fake) friends now.
I never had a facebook account. I don't have trouble keeping up with family, friends, or work. And I have more free time. And less bullshit memes.
I think I can survive another several decades without facebook.
There are lots of people who check Facebook only occasionally. If everyone does this then it's basically like LinkedIn, not a core part of your life.
I've done this for years. Currently I'm doing the opposite because I wanted to see what that's like.
How about:
1. Go out of your way to support alternative distribution platforms such as the 'indie web', gnusocial, etc. (Whether through use, development, etc. Every bit helps.)
2. Figuring out some kind of movement or legislative action we can take to end free basics, since it's egregious monopoly behavior.
You can stay known to "anyone who happens to be listening," or you can stay intentionally engaged with "those people that you specifically care about." Both ways take very little effort.
Regarding Facebook, it's strange to feel like I'm not missing anything and simultaneously feel like I'm missing something.
That quote from the article really baffled me. Facebook isn't on my phone or computer pestering me. That's because I choose not to use it. The article goes on to worry about the lack of a "disable notifications for good" option. Are people really that helpless? It makes it sound as if there is literally no choice but to use facebook. If facebook is really hurting your quality of life, then stop using it. Or at least uninstall the app.
My thinking is you can present and recombine data in any number of ways and we have the tools to do it, there "just" needs to be some organization. One could even make an ironically named FakeBook that presents a familiar UI on top of a federated system. It could even import FB data dumps. I've lead a couple/few attempts to rally my techie friends to build something like this with limited success, though not since ~2008.
> It used to be really, really good. Now it's just crap. I hope a new competitor shows them what's up.
My last effort was cloning MySpace with open source stuff like XMPP but Facebook got really good during that time frame, kinda sad I didn't keep going now (hindsight). I made an AOL/AIM alternative in VB3 that a bunch of people at my high school were using in 2000 at age 15 when I got my first DSL line, no technical reasons anyone can't come out of left field and overthrow them esp. in 2016.
From parent:
> Are people really that helpless?
But as I've made my way around Silicon Valley, the "VHS vs Beta" anecdote keeps coming to mind as I see marketing dollars behind the proliferation of inferior but wildly popular tech. In my view now this is a war for attention FB is winning, the only way to overthrow FB is to really show people that it's a piece of the worst smelling thing you can imagine. I had a visceral reaction seeing Zuck in a suit, I can't be the only one--not disgust or anything, just that it wasn't a hoodie as his MO previously dictated... could sell the sell-out story to some, now, with deep implications on privacy/freedom of expression/access to "true" information.
If you want to talk to people, talk to them directly.
Just never go on the feed.
Before Facebook and its ilk, part of the definition of "former friends" and "extended family" was that they are categorized as people you rarely communicate with, or not at all.
Before Facebook, you didn't need Facebook to ignore your former friend or to rarely talk to your second cousin on the other side of the continent. Today, you still don't need Facebook for this.
Pretty much the same way people are warning about Google today but get ignored.
Pleas stop using FB and restrict the amount of Google services you use.
That being said, I think tech journalism overstates the amount of control which either Google and Facebook can actually exert over their users.
That's how they win, by being underestimated. Better to overestimate IMHO.
Call me a Cassandra, but I won't be surprised in the next POTUS is Zuck.
The first assertion isn't even remotely true. And the second is just plain silly.
When a company has a monopoly over something, bureaucracy actually works - It slows things down, reduces risks, makes life better for employees and improves moral ethics within the company.
The fact that CEOs are legally bound to maximize profits doesn't make sense when the company already has a monopoly over its industry - The only way they can keep increasing profits is through scorched-earth policies which are damaging to society.
I'm a lot more worried about corporations exerting undue influence on Facebook (which is what's happening now) than the government doing so.
The only country that could feasibly nationalize Facebook is the US (because of it's location), and the word "nationalization" in the US is associated with the drivers for a 35 year cold war. So, how would this work?
If Facebook were a separate intergovernmental organization then, similar to the UN, it could draft a general charter while each member state would control regional provisions. Facebook could remain a publicly traded entity, except shareholders would have limited power.
Another advantage is that it wouldn't need to be nationalized by any one country and whether the CEO/Secretary-General was an American or rotated like the UN wouldn't matter much because their power would also be limited.
More pragmatically, in the world in which we live, under what precedent could such a thing happen? Facebook has a market cap of $350B right now and the controlling interest is held privately. The U.S. is founded on strong property rights and historically nationalization has been used under very dire circumstances.
This is not advocacy, it's mental gymnastics. If you're going to say take away control from shareholders and invest it in some other body; it's hardly more controversial to also take away the asset value from (existing) shareholders also. If you only take away the control portion, the share price is going to implode anyway.
this is, in fact, not a fact. ceo's of corporations are hired to execute their corporate charter.
with that said, many corporations do have provisions in their charters about maximizing returns for shareholders, among other provisions. but not every corporation does, and many have competing provisions in their charters.
particularly over the past ~30 years, an extensive theory of finance has been developed to argue that maximizing profit is the highest and best use of a corporation, but i'm very skeptical of that claim. german corporations for example are designed to consider all three of its constituents: employees, customers and shareholders.
so while i don't disagree with all of your claims about bureaucracies, i'd argue that facebook doesn't have to be turned over to the government to realize the benefits you claim.
What we need are some new and independent physical layers.
And if we're smart, the "smart people" will keep them to themselves for as long as possible. (Something Musk's network won't be able to help with.)
I miss the inquiring, helpful Net of increasing yore. Enough other people do, too, that I haven't given up hope it may find a home somewhere.
Not sure how old you are, but I used to use 300 baud modems. I was pre-internet. I remember then 1997 on irc, then when the masses really woke up to the Internet around 1999-2001.
Anyway, people around that time really had hope for the internet.
Nowadays, well millennials just don't seem to have the same feeling. I figure they are in their bubbles happy to have whatever sandbox they are in keep the status quo and everything else, as long as their wants and needs are met, doesn't matter.
Give it a generation or two and we'll be just like Wall-E. Drones on basic income, with smartphones incorporated to our brains with all the corporations telling us how to live, work and think.
Seriously, this dystopia is not that far away. Just a few key ingredients for this to happen.
- Google seemed to give up the spam war and start just returning only major sites for the top of most results around that time.
- Youtube started to become a way to make money, which was the beginning of the end for it. Google advertising IIRC started to get big on it around that time, too.
- Facebook started to expand beyond college networks and the recently-graduated to grandma and grandpa.
- Google generally started to Be Evil in a real way, fairly consistently.
- Amazon started to get all crapped-up with 3rd party retailers and print-on-demand garbage infecting even their book results, making it worse overall.
The main difference now is that instead of sorting through some small-time spam and ad-junk material to find the good stuff, the whole damn thing, practically, is spam and ad-junk. Local news sites look like click farm ad spam sites from the early 2000s. Ads in google results. Wading through disguised and explicit advertising and self-promotion on Youtube to find anything good. "1 weird trick!" on once-respectable sites. "Buy my (shitty) ebook to learn my secrets!" everywhere. We didn't beat spam—it ate the Web. It is the Web. The weird-but-good still exists but is harder to find. The Web kinda sucks now, unless you like advertising.
I'm pessimistic about it ever getting better. Maybe some new frontier will follow it, and that'll be OK for 1-2 decades before it gets ruined, too.
That hits the mark for me. It feels as though the entire web is one big advertisement for stuff you don't need. It's made people apathetic. They don't even see it though it enters their subconsciouses.
I was pre-web.
Nowadays, well millennials just don't seem to have the same feeling. I figure they are in their bubbles happy to have whatever sandbox they are in keep the status quo and everything else
Also, they think it's right and good that they bully, shout-down, and ban whatever they don't like. After all, it's the way of the online forums, and all that stuff is progressive and advanced, right?
Sneakernetting SEDIT from an employer, a state over to campus tech support, who welcomed it.
Due to my circumstances, I missed most of the BBS phenomenon. But I experienced plenty of "we're in this together" in other venues.
Early Google was magical. Quality, helpful pages and sites at the top of the results.
"Early" Web bulletin boards had "real", de facto (by the general capabilities and sophistication of the time), often helpful anonymity (including for "survivors" of various sorts), and focus all too often missing from today's milieu.
Now -- trying not to sound elitist, but rather just particular -- the noise and banality washes out the quality that was once much more evident and prominent.
The extant Net is lost to the general population and the organizations that seek to control it and exploit it. Fine, for what that is, I guess -- today's television.
But not what I want.
And, free and cooperative communication (even in and supporting lively but intelligent and informative dispute) I also find to be essential to a functioning society. And to those who really move that society forward -- technically and otherwise.
The increasingly gated, panopticon fiber and IP address internet is less and less suited to serving this.
We need other physical layers.
Also, they would provide some needed competition.
Ill bet he hasn't changed his mind about that either even though google is arguably even more dangerous to privacy/freedom of speech and the open web.
One thing that iOS got right from the very beginning is granular, a la carte permissions. While I have Fb installed, it has almost no access -- no gps, no contacts, no notifications. It cannot intrude, I need to consciously start the app to see anything Fb-related. Same with Messenger.
I've recently removed Fb's media access (called "Photos" on iOS) because I noticed it was doing collages of the photos I took previously during the day -- I would like to think they are not uploading any data from my gallery to their servers, but would not put it past them.
Also, the mobile web version is usable, I think they purposefully hold it back to push people to the app, but you can get by. Because I'm not sure if they're scanning my gallery and extracting/communicating metadata back to their C2, I now do picture uploads thru mobile web, that way they do not have permanent access to my media. Would be nice for this to be an app permission, one-time and/or user action-initiated access vs the current permanent access, which includes unrestricted background access.
Another permissions to disable is "Background App Refresh," which if you have notifications disabled there should be no reason to have enabled. They can send a C2 ping which has IP information and who knows what other device profiling which, even with GPS disabled, can still probably give them a lot of information on your whereabouts. Unfortunately, on iOS, the main Fb app is implemented in a tricky way and does not even list itself in the main app permissions list, you need to find some of the permissions individually, and BG App Refresh does not appear to be defeatable. The Messenger app does list itself normally and can have all the perms turned off in one place.
The internet != Facebook
Although for many people internet == Facebook
But that is because for many people Facebook is what they want the internet to be. If people wanted internet to be something else, Facebook would be something else.
The essence of being successful is to give people what they want.
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump are examples of people who understand very, very well what the masses want. Without loosing focus on their own needs ;-)
Really it's only good for checking in on people every now and then, most of the stuff on my timeline is now spam. I know a lot of people feel the same way.
I wouldn't be surprised if the actual engagement on Facebook is a lot lower than we're led to believe.
The lower class (and quasi-illiterate) citizens of this country (US, and probably many other countries) are becoming empowered and vocal members of society at such a rapid pace it is eclipsing our ability as a society to prepare them in such a way that the rest of us can trust that they will take this responsibility seriously.
s/Facebook Events/beer/g
I'm actually disappointed and I thought I'd stopped falling into that trap.
What the actual f*ck
I rely on Feedly to get news and I hope it will not turn up into another Facebook. Even Feedly has it's own lock in as it does not allow us to export read later articles. For long time export option for OPML of subscribed RSS was not available too.
Generations of internet f#cwads, forums with deletions, and heavy-handed moderation has taught the general populace that the other side is stupid, ugly, and deplorable, and that only moderation mechanisms and the shouting of the crowd prevail. Things have gone from the internet as a repository of knowledge, to an unstoppable font of clickbait and fake news.
It's true. We can't have nice things. We, being human beings without social pressures to keep us in check.
Whoa. I'd never made that connection before!
There should be a law stating that a service like Facebook which thrives on public data, should expose all of their data once they reach a critical mass like 10 Million people. Exposing may or may not be without people's consent, but getting the consent of users should not be a problem. This will make sure that a competitor or alternate entity can bootstrap their service with this data. You don't need to stay in facebook to stay in touch with your family. You can stay in your own service and you still will be able to communicate with people on facebook and similar other services.
This will give a level playing field and stop having monopolies of corporations which thrive on user behavioral data.
This idea was suggested by someone in a different form in a similar discussion here in HN, and I think it is terrific and it will solve most of the problems.
It is not even necessary to have the law act when reaching a 10M critical mass. If some service calls itself a social network or related service, then they are bound to submit the data collected by them which is owned by the content user and not the service. Sure, they can operate by declaring themselves not as an social service, but by the time people realizes then there should be a penalty and immediate surrendering of past collected data.
There are few concerns though IF this comes to fruition.
Security:
Right Now, all the FB related stuff are secured by some of the bright minds hired by Facebook. They have the financial muscle to protect the data they collect, even though that money might have flowed some unscrupulous advertising and tracking stuffs. If all the user behavioural data ends up in a central entity/repository, then there should be some neutral agency like UN handling all this data. But on the other hand, hiring highly technical people to safeguard this public information might not be possible financially and logistically. For example, Facebook has its own personal interests to secure the user related data. A common entity might not do as efficiently as it should, and even a small leak will lead to catatostrophic results with all the user information across different services laid bare.
Accessibility:
If all the user information shared across the internet ends up in a single place, then ownership and accessiblity of that data should be more refined and robust. I should have the ability to choose to whom I can share all that information irrespective of where I posted the content. People should be able to grant access to all of their data to be used by people like Facebook, even though the content was originally posted in facebook.
Of course, there is Facebook in between if we have to realize anything remotely like this.