We need a nationalised alternative to Facebook
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
Some would say that email and text messaging already cover this. It feels like your description is missing a clause such as "without having to actually take the time to otherwise nourish those relationships individually."
Phone numbers and emails have worked perfectly fine so far.
What facebook provides is the feeling of staying connected without any of the actual connection.
I'm glad that works for you, some other people have other experiences.
The size of the problem here is bounded by the amount of money the companies are making invading your privacy. Simple math [1] places it at about $20/year/user for Facebook, who are probably on the upper end of what they can make by doing this. So to incentivize a company not to stay in business via selling your data, that's the bar you have to leap.
That hardly seems a big enough problem that the only solution is to turn over your social network to be run by Donald Trump, who, I feel I must remind many of you, whenever you say "The $GOVERNMENT should...", you really ought to remember that "Donald Trump" is a valid expansion of the term $GOVERNMENT. Or whoever else it is you don't like, it doesn't matter to my argument, I'm just reading the room here.
As a sidebar, if you want to get a sense of the scope of the damage that Facebook is doing to our civilization, consider all the ways in which they manipulate you, the things your friends posted that you wanted to see but didn't, the torrent of ads they have PhDs working overtime to figure out how to hit you with, enrolling you in psychological studies without your consent, embroiling you in family or friend drama that you'd rather not be embroiled in and potentially cutting off contact with people over it, and who knows what fingers on what scales when it comes to what you do and do not see in the news... for TWENTY DOLLARS. Of revenue, not even profit! Talk about your new twist on the banality of evil.
Because you can't serve two masters. For-profit corporations are going to side with profit over privacy when they conflict.
>The size of the problem here is bounded by the amount of money the companies are making invading your privacy. Simple math [1] places it at about $20/year/user for Facebook, who are probably on the upper end of what they can make by doing this. So to incentivize a company not to stay in business via selling your data, that's the bar you have to leap.
That $20 isn't just for costs it's also for profit. How cheaply could Facebook run if it didn't have to return any money to it's shareholders? That's a major case for either a non-profit or a nationalized service.
>whenever you say "The $GOVERNMENT should...", you really ought to remember that "Donald Trump" is a valid expansion of the term $GOVERNMENT.
Well here let's put it like this. When you leave something up to the $MARKET you should remember that 'literally anybody' (including Donald Trump) is a valid expansion of the term $MARKET. With government at least there is some (admittedly meager) level of democratic accountability. How much accountability is there in the market? I think we've seen how these privacy violations play out with Equifax already. Richard Smith, Mark Begor, Mark Zuckerberg these people are just interchangeable names/faces and no matter who you swap in and out of these roles the desires of a corporation in the market place to maintain and increase profitability will weigh on them the same. I prefer a system where these people are directly accountable to the people ie nationalized services, not a system where their accountability is obfuscated and mediated by the market.
You are proposing a black/white dichotomy where I proposed a partnership. Let the corporations provide the services, let the government write the rules of the playing field. Why would you trust the same government that is already not regulating Facebook to do any better if it has to implement something itself?
Neither side, on its own, is sufficient. A system where both sides are doing their job is way better.
Mind you, I have some compassion (for lack of a better word) for the government not regulating Facebook, on the grounds that to a first-order approximation, nobody saw how bad this was going to be in advance. Local commentators may vigorously object to this characterization, to which I'd reply that the concentration of the people who did see it coming (including, least of all, myself) is sky-high here compared to the general public.
I'll admit I am proposing a black/white dichotomy in this instance. I don't do that for all markets but I do in this one. To me a free market is best when we really want the market to race to the bottom quickly and there are few externalities or complicating factors. This is very rare. A regulated market is best when there are complicating factors and externalities but we still want to engage in a race to the bottom. This is very common. Removing the market entirely is best when we don't want to race to the bottom. This is rare. Even though it's rare, I cannot think of a better example than Social Media. Facebook and these other companies have utilized mostly free markets to race to the bottom, we've made 95% of the gains already. Now Facebook is exposing it's users to all sorts of nasty costs that society does not want to bear in order to squeeze out profit. This is not being caused by some one-off feature of the market, it is being caused by the central feature of the market, profit motive. The only way to fix these problems are to remove profit motive. That means either nationalization or non-profit status.
Here's two quotes from a recent Tim Wu interview that I think speak to what I'm trying to say here:
>They're not. But, well, that's the problem. I think there's a sort of intrinsic problem with having for-profit entities with this business model in this position of so much public trust because they're always at the edge because their profitability depends on it.
>Well, if Mark Zuckerberg is telling the truth when he says, what I care about is connecting people to their families and friends, that's a very lofty ambition. If that's what he really wants to do, he can do it. But it doesn't mean he'll be the most profitable company in the world. You know, utilities - which is what Facebook is, a social utility - have never been understood as profit centers before. [...] And there's a reason. The social sphere is a little bit different. And maybe we need to accept that it's not a source of major profit to be in people's personal lives.
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/27/597221954/facebook-previously...
That said, I think the argument for a 'paid facebook' breaks down quickly when you realise that as a communications / event planning / promotion tool, it's usefulness is directly tied to its network size. This was true even in the earliest days, but FB cleverly circumvented the difficulty of building a core network by providing it to college campuses, where a hyper real world socially networked group of people were more than willing to try the latest thing. They pulled of the trick of making it both free and exclusive simultaneously, by only allowing 'ivy league' colleges access. Even then initial access was by invite only.
Hence, a paid communication service is only useful if everyone you're trying to communicate with is willing to pay for it. A service like this would be difficult to get off the ground in the first place, without a compelling advantage over 'free' (privacy cost based) services. For most people, privacy and accountability (long term costs) will not be a sufficient advantage. If they were, decentralised social networks like Diaspora would have been a success years ago.
The only way I can see it working is if an existing social network with wide reach offered a paid tier. This is problematic however as, in removing the paid users (presumably their wealthiest demographic) from the advertising pool, they're cutting off their own advertisers potential income stream.
Perhaps a 'freemium' model could work, with paid users having access to enhanced features (perhaps making an event, or sending a group message), allowing the network to grow beyond those willing to pay (especially at the outset). But again, I don't think it could scale, unless one of the existing networks abandoned advertising and switched to this model. Given that even free social networks (even ones launched by Google!) currently find it basically impossible to compete with the scale of Twitter / Facebook.
I generally agree with the business analysis as you gave it, to which I'd propose the idea (in conjunction with my other cousin post) that if the government makes it non-viable to build a business whose business model is based solely around selling private information and serving ads , on the grounds that it is short-term enticing to people but long-term destruction to social capital and cohesion (where government regulation is really in its wheelhouse), we could find out whether social networks are viable at all.
Note I didn't target social networks there; the entire business model needs to be made much more expensive. For once, something regulation can accomplish with ease! I almost don't even care about the nature of the regulations, I just want to see this business model made more expensive. It doesn't even have to be banned, per se, it just needs the bar raised so that the bar for "when is it worth it to abuse trust and exploit our information" is a great deal more than $20/year. (I don't necessarily want to ban it; there is value in certain high-end variations of this theme. The corruption is in the way that modern computing has become so cheap that there is no discretion applied for what is grabbed and what is bought & sold, it's just all grabbed and dispensed freely.)
It is possible they are simply not a viable business. Or, once the easy-yet-culturally-destructive option of doing it by abusing human cognitive limitations and screwing over your customers where they can't perceive it and weigh it properly is regulated away, perhaps someone will find a way of delivering enough value that it is something people will pay for, once the weed of the free option is no longer sucking up all the sunlight. There are, for instance, quite a few long-standing paid forums on the internet; it's not an entirely unviable business model.
One thing I'm not doing here is that I am not implicitly accepting as a goal the idea that Facebook itself, or an entity the size of Facebook, will necessarily exist in the new order. (Nor am I directly accusing anybody of doing that, but it's something I feel is ambient in the discussion.) If it turns out to be simply a non-viable business, so be it. As in my opinion Facebook's net social value is negative, that's still a win. If it turns out to be a viable model, but it doesn't scale up, again, so be it. The possibility that those will be the end outcomes does not justify keeping something as destructive as Facebook around.
My best guess is that no single business could grow to Facebook's size, but that there would likely be a steady state of a lot of little networks of various kinds. And don't just think 25 Facebook clones, but thing Facebook vs. LinkedIn vs. the SomethingAwful forums vs. Reddit; I would expect significant diversity.
We already have this, it's called the web. I'm not being facetious. I miss the days when google drove traffic not to rapidly updated fluff but deep articles and informed posts. I miss the possibility of communicating with a wide audience with a self hosted blog post. I'm not sure it can come back, but maybe the kind of regulations you suggest - in effect taxing the externalities of data harvesting, are worthwhile considering.
Facebook should have been censured long ago for capturing content, and anti-competitively promoting locally hosted (at the expense of off site content).
This is a whole other issue that's being forgotten with the current privacy debate. Silos away from the open web accelerate and even create polarisation. The filter bubble is both unnecessary and harmful, and as or more important to regulate than privacy.
Check back in five years and ask the Chinese how that's going. (Although you won't be allowed to, or at least, they won't be allowed to answer honestly without seeing their social status go way down.)
The values of Facebook are varied. I'm a full-time traveler and it's easy to find an English-speaking Facebook group for any country I visit, which is of real value and note something I would otherwise find. Facebook is also useful for sharing photos with friends and family without necessarily sharing them with the world like you used to with Flickr or Smugmug.
Granted, there are other ways of having forums, or photo sharing, or anything else. But that misses the point. For whatever reason, Facebook became the de facto way to do certain things. And if you want to delete facebook, it's nice to have an alternative with some feasibility in reaching a critical mass.
Honestly I think this information is actually too dangerous for anyone to have - companies or govts. I'd like to see this kind of level of information gathering made illegal.
On the other hand, I'm not a board member or shareholder of Facebook, and they have a legal obligation to make money.
As such, I would absolutely use a US Government social media service over Facebook. (Bonus if it were federated with other countries.)
(In reality I'd use neither because Facebook is boring anyway.)
Their job should be to protect data, not collect it.
edit: BBC taking the "Social" part of "Social Networking" too literally.
Your email would become the decrentralized, encrypted medium for exchange and broadcast. You could use IMAP to leverage it as your datastore on multiple devices.
You could more easily schedule message delivery and times too. The most complicated thing about it would be setting up a simple enough onboarding process.
It wouldn’t be efficient, but it doesn’t really need to be.
If as part of the on boarding process you could provide instructions to move those messages out of the main view and into a folder so they didn't clutter up the rest of the email too.
It probably makes more sense as an open source project. There's not much of a profit model for decentralized social networking where you can't inject ads that people didn't want to see.
Here's some more info on it: https://diasporafoundation.org/about#privacy
I'm on it, and I donate to (or pay for) a pod so I'm not anti-Diaspora by any means, but it just seems incorrect to promote it as a solution to Facebook's privacy issues.
Out of curiosity, what would be your ideal for good privacy on a social media site? What aspects would it need?
I don't have an answer to your question. Broadcasting information while also wanting to keep it private is, as you say, a tricky problem.
Britain already has a rapidly growing problem with censorship and restricted speech. This would just be a more direct way for the government to control what you can express and see online.
The authoritarians continue their march.
Within 20 years, it'll be the rare nation that doesn't have something equivalent to the Chinese firewall heavily controlling what their people do online. Nations with freedom online equivalent to what existed from ~1995-2015 across most of the developed world, will be the exception.
Plus how could a journalist suggest a nationalised alternative that would stop at UK's border, instead of a global one connecting people from all countries? It's extremely short sighted and closed minded.
Setting some ground rules for what can and can't be collected and shared from people is way more effective than having the government enter that rat race.
Over, and over, again.
What is Facebook but a fancy web host and RSS feed in one? First, it is a web host. It lets everyone make a free website (their Wall). Second, it gives everyone an RSS reader (their News Feed).
My point is, I think we already have the protocols. What the ordinary user lacks is the software. Actually what they also lack is the hardware. Everyone, technical or not, wants their own website. They always have. But most people are at the mercy of some company providing a server. After all, to run a website, you need a computer that's always on, always connected. I propose we use the user's phone. I'm sure I'm not the first to think of that.
So what we need is an easy-to-use webserver that users install on their phones. They don't have to build their website on their phone. It's just hosted there. They could build it on their laptop and push it to their phone.
Then you also make a nice RSS reader that users also install, and they subscribe to each other's websites.
Profit! I mean, not profit, happiness!
Also, this would be a battery killer.
- At the beginning I remember it was super hard not to check FB
- So I just stopped posting first
- Then I realized that it significantly helped to avoid FB in the morning
- Later, I installed the Chrome Extension Eradicator which lets the FB feed disappear; I never used a FB mobile app
- More and more I could stay away from FB the entire day just checking it in the evening
- Still for 1 or 2 years it was kind of tempting to check FB even if it was in the evening
Now, I rarely use FB anymore, maybe once a week or even less and if I see all the same people posting non-stop self-adulations and all the likers liking every little thing because xy posted it, I command-w FB faster than I opened it. I pity those posting people, too lonely, too little attention, on a desperate hunt for some friends on a addictive Skinner Box network.
TBH it was a bit like quitting smoking: initially super, super hard and when looking back FB's feed feels just useless.
Why do we need an alternative or FB at all?
Secondly, the mere premise that we "need" a Facebook, or alternative, is inherently flawed.
Probably echoing the rest of the comments in here at this point, but my 2 cents fwiw.
If it's federated, that helps completion even further.
To me, the biggest utility of FB that would make such a project worthwhile is the pure network aspect of it; there are very few people in my life who aren't on Facebook.
If that's what we're looking to nationalize, does this just become a national ID card debate for the Internet era?
Facebook's current shitshow is a market failure. Market failures can be addressed through nationalization. Ergo, Facebook should be nationalized.
It's not something I agree with, but that's the thought process distilled.
The problem is authoritarian control. Swapping out corporate authoritarianism with government authoritarianism solves zero problems, especially given that they already constantly collude to entrench each other’s power.
Stop feeding it. FB is simply doing what inevitably happens when power and knowledge is concentrated into one place.
A private company is a dictatorship of secrecy. Monopolistic systems are best handled by democratic governments for this reason.
In practice, democracy is driven by populism and histerical news cycles, while beurocracy doesn't feel any pressure from the public whatsoever and is usually occupied with entrenching into occupied political territory. Companies are much more accountable to their shareholders than governments are to their citizens.
(And open source so we could all know for sure this was the case)
If you're going to make the mistake of giving that kind of information to some entity, at least either pick your own companies or government, or an ally.
Propaganda, trite.
This all-or-nothing thinking is pathological. Democratic systems are better than non-democratic systems in monopolistic cases.