Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)
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.
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.
To run with the simile, maybe some people remain in abusive relationships because of a reasonable fear that leaving will have consequences that are worse than staying.
It's remarkable how common this opinion is given its obvious shallowness. Nobody has to use Facebook. What are the consequences of not? You can't chat with your friends or view their selfies or see event listings. Or rather to do these things, you have to make an effort to use some other more private mode of communication like phone or in-person or classifieds or whatever. It's easier to use Facebook than to not.
That is an extremely far cry from "having to" use the service. The problem really is people are lazy, and use Facebook because it saves them time, effort, and energy. In most cases, people care about this saved energy more than they do their privacy.
I didn't mean that using facebook is a requirement for life and I'm not sure why your first inclination is to read others' comments that way.
Many people's friends communicate primarily via Facebook, and you can't just get around that by using phones and emails. People have discussions, invite people to events and post important life updates on Facebook. Often the primary communication mechanism for an organisation or even a local business will be Facebook. And they often won't re-circulate all that information via email just for the benefit of people who don't use it.
And yet people insist on trivialising these costs, and blaming individuals for this massive invasion of privacy because they chose not to incur these costs, rather than questioning the circumstances that have led to people feeling forced to make such a choice.
Do you really think the people who are having their privacy violated explicitly chose that trade off because they're "lazy"? Or do you think, presented with a choice between signing up to a seemingly innocuous helpful website, or encroaching social isolation as their friends start using it, they chose the former?
So to get gigs, I had to make a Facebook account. Granted, I tried to put as little as possible on it.
Until very recently, a few friends had me trapped their too. They couldn't pay their phone bill. So no texts or calls. Would just steal wifi from some store, use Facebook messenger. I harassed them to get email, IRC, anything else. But they couldn't be bothered to learn those things.
I know this sounds like the stupidest thing ever. It reminds me of people taking out payday loans or going to check cashing places, because they're too poor to go to the bank.
Anyway, two of them finally got phone numbers, so Facebook is deleted now.
I looked what they were up to now: Suicide, Snapchat, backerkit.com (crowdfunding related service), unknown.
Of course this is more into the future when Cellular ISP are better with less strict data caps and better upload speeds along with not having to connection to Apple or Google or Amazon for Voice to Text / Command / Action solutions and smart phones actually have a viable storage capacity.
You could send a private message to a group of (7 or fewer) friends and then only they could open it.
I just have this feeling that people sometimes talk about SSB as if it is like "private by default" and thats not really the case, public feed is quite public (and I don't think that is bad).
I for example considered using private messages to myself as a diary. I know they will remain private.
It's about usability, and the flocking to Mastodon when there are better options around is the proof of this theory of mine.
1. Going to a mobile-first website or app.
2. Clicking a link.
3. Typing in your new e-mail and password.
4. Being able to add anyone in the world as friends.
It cannot be about local "hubs" vs the global "public" / federation, being forced to make that distinction would feel like a step backwards for the users. It can be distributed in the back end, but not in the front end.
It also needs to look beautiful.
How do you stay logged in if there's no cookies?
It also looks like they try to do too much. Cure-alls cure nothing (thanks for the quip, Sawbones podcast!)
"We don’t track you personally and we never sell your personal data. Here is what we track: we track how users use our site in general so that we can make it better. We are monitoring traffic, usage activity, site performance, and we use general analytic tools so that we can improve your experience. We do not associate any of this data with you personally. We never sell or share your personally identifiable information unless required to do so by law."
I'm going to give it a try but for the sole reason Tim Berners-Lee is an advisor[1] and seems to still vouch for it[2] 3 years on
[1] https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/590726480696573952
[2] https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/976553383564840962
As for putting session IDs in URLs I would not advise that in any way, that's one unsanitized href away from Google being logged in as and indexing your user's private account data if done badly and a nasty bout of session fixation if done less badly. More information here: https://security.stackexchange.com/a/14094
In my mind, when I read HN comments, I assume all the people who post here know what I know and more but then there's a post that comes along that reminds me of the sheer gulf of knowledge that can exist even between people on such a speicalized site as this one.
If you want to build a reddit, you'll never end up with a facebook, that's just reality, the target demo is completely different.
Certainly anecdotal evidence, and I'm inclined to believe the largest user base may still match your description, but personally I feel like you're describing 4chan, not Reddit.
Go compare a reddit technology thread to a youtube comment section. Big difference in writing quality, avg length of post, use of source and data, etc.
You probably outgrew their age demo and realized that smart 18 year olds are still dumbasses.
While I think this is generally a valid point, I also suspect there's quite a bit of When in Rome effect in play. Uninformed r/Technology posters may step their game up to match the consensus style, while informed Youtube users may feel a bit of pressure to dress down.
(1) Everyone's identity is their email.
(2) The person whose email you're typing in has already signed in to the service (or meta-service if it's a federation), and agrees to communicate with you.
If you squint just right, this exact thing already exists; it's called email, and adding to friends means adding to a mail list.
I wonder why there were no (known to me) attempts to actually use the email infrastructure (fast, reliable, ubiquitous, near zero-cost) to distribute social network updates. It could use a custom pretty frontend app that makes posting or reading updates easier than e.g. gmail.
(As a bonus point, the actual emails can be reasonably human-friendly, as an extra archive of all of your updates.)
It's not necessarily fast, delivery may take only 1 second but I've also had email take days until it was delivered successfully.
Reliability is meh, it has some resilience to services being offline for a bit, so I'll give you that.
The near-zero cost is also not quite true. It's only true if you sell your data to the provider of your choice, gmail or yahoo or AOL. If you want privacy on email, you'll have to pay for it, otherwise you pay by other means first.
There is a chat app that uses email to function, it also features encryption but IIRC the userbase is very small and last i tried it for testing, it did quite spam my inbox.
I do think people are communicating via other mediums more than before though. It's anecdotal but most of my family and friends just gravitate towards iMessage , Facetime and Telegram to communicate by default now.
Could it be that people don't care about this issue because they care about Facebook anymore? There are alternatives now, people will just use them more and more over time.
The question is, how representative are those people of the population at large?
Another question is whether people truly understand their privacy exposure? They know FB has some information on them because they submit it, but they don't know how much info in total (sites visited, location tracking, etc), how that data is combined/used, who has access to it, etc.
And, they assume that whatever FB is doing with their data must be OK/legal because laws.
I think that's what we saw with reactions to these recent revelations. When an inkling of the real privacy exposure surfaced, people freaked.
Of course they do. What sort of person is going to tick the "I don't care about privacy" box? I guess the same kind of person that ticks the "I'm OK with mass extinction" box. Those opinions are not very relevant in the real world.
1. Chat (It could just integrate a javascript XMPP client and let people use whatever chat server they liked)
2. Event management and invites
When I suggest people leave Facebook, these are the things people complain there are no alternatives to.
It will take some time to wind it up. Even fb took a long time to build before it was relavant.
Nobody cared back then bc they hadn't felt they burn of foreign influence on our election.
And diaspora will have to grow. Even some basic things can improve the on boarding process. For example, uploading my profile was diverted due to a cap on picture upload size of 4.2 MB.
Nothing to do with not caring about privacy, I really did try to use it. Even had 100 users or so on my open instance.
It was on par with running a public email service. Not my circus.
In reality, people aren't upset about privacy. They're upset Trump won.
As soon as they can get rid of him, they will go back to not caring, even though it's more dangerous than ever and we've been telling them for decades.
When I read about the Cambridge Analitica story I was kind of shocked anyone was surprised by what they are doing. I have seen companies hoover up data from Facebook in a similar way so I have always understood that under their old ToS any friend could give away your data by participating in an app. It had been like that for a long time (they changed the ToS-- I believe in 2015). That seemed terrible to me, years ago. The fact that it took people so long to be shocked about it just shows that their is going to be a long lag between when these things happen and when popular consciousness catches up with the implications.
Can you clarify what you believe the New York Times' agenda is, as demonstrated by this opinion piece article, and how "Tim Wu, law professor at Columbia," has been employed to propagate the NYT agenda?
Also, why should the NYT be replaced, and what should it be replaced by?
Not speaking for everyone, of course - but I know a lot of people who didn't like it for one reason or another.
I spoke with several non-tech people about the facebook fiasco.
The issue is that even a brilliant neurosurgeon does not understand the TOS he has signed with Facebook and what they entail.
Surely, there is some naïveté from people that don't expect facebook to do much with their data, but tech has also failed to teach users about this.
Even self proclaimed privacy champions routinely make you sign dozen of pages of ToS that are updated on a whim.
EU Data Protection law (like the GDPR) helps here, requiring informed consent. If you don't understand something, then you're not informed, and it shouldn't be binding.
[1] When (say) signing a form for surgery, the surgon can presume that the person has been advised by a doctor. When buying a house, you can presume a lawyer was involved, etc. When signing a ToS for Facebook, we all know there was no legal advice recieved.
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.
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.
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.
That isn't really the issue, smokers have been aware of the negative consequences for quite a while. Many are okay with it due to the relief the smoking brings them from stress and other issues, it's a trade-off. Just like alcohol ain't that healthy for you but many people still chose to drink it.
But on the other hand you have massive companies who've spent decades and billions of $ in making tobacco as addictive, and easy to smoke, as possible. So once the customers are hooked it's extremely difficult for them to kick the habit and even when they manage to kick it, many will still get cravings for years, if not decades, to come.
Which could be explained by this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/11/schizophrenia-no-smoki...
But I would bet that it's much larger.
When was this?
But covertly? It’s happening even now, all over the world.
Wrong wrong wrong. They still do these a lot.
Seriously though, kids used it all the time when I was growing up — I didn't even know "gyp" was derogatory until I was perhaps in my 30's. If I had to guess, young me would have suspected it was spelled "jip" anyway.
We told Pollack jokes too and I didn't even know it meant someone from Poland.
I was not very cosmopolitan as a kid.
It's a slur against the Roma (gypsies).
I've heard worse. Plain "I don't care" and "I like that people know what I do all the time".
> It's like a smoking addiction
I'd say that tt's more like a drug. Most people seem to seek for an attention (in a comments/likes form).
I know few people who use even PhotoShop-like software to make themselves "more beautiful" to gather more attention; however they don't look even similiar to their pictures.
(it's like drug addicts do weird shit to get their dose of their favourite drug)
It is literally like a drug, former FB execs have explained how they trigger dopamine responses in your brain
If she's happy with this level of privacy though, what's the problem? Maybe she does fully understand the implications but has a different value system to you?
I feel that when people on this site are talking about Facebook, there's this assumption their friends using Facebook are failing to understand what Facebook does in the background and if they could somehow get them to understand their friends would all leave. People can be fully aware of what Facebook is and simply choose a different balance between privacy and convenience to what you prefer.
So while yours is a interesting thought I highly doubt a lot of people Actually understand the full issue.
So without a direct social graph, specialised interest groups, more direct connections, more 'privacy' at least in terms of how public the data is available.
Found his Facebook. He didn't have any family listed, for privacy. Friends list wasn't visible either. However his dad and sister, both easily identifiable as such, I found since they had both liked the same profile picture a few years ago, and I could view their relationship (handy trick, go to someones user account, add ?and= followed by the user ID of another user and you can view relationships between anyone). Saw that they had a few mutual friends, <10. Found two which fit the criteria for possibly being my boss's mum. Searched both names in the electoral register and got rough locations. One of them lived in the same city my boss had listed as his birthplace, and co-habited with the person I previously identified as his dad. She was using her maiden name on Facebook (there goes security questions). I paid £1-2 for the full address.
For the next week or so I sent him random bits of information about his mum whenever he made a bad "your mum" joke at me (if it was good I didn't particularly care). Previous addresses, streetview screenshot of her house etc. Despite streetview blurring her car's license plate, I could see what make/model/colour it was, which was enough to find the license plate by skimming through photos posted on various sites which let you search by location. So I sent him MOT and road tax reminders too. It was fairly easy to find what schools she had gone to, previous marriages, a company she had started etc. He stopped making "your mum" jokes after a week.
Bear in mind: this was someone who worked in computer security and was actively privacy conscious, and within an hour I had enough information that I could have probably stolen his identity.
We had a overly 'social' secretary which didn't understand privacy implications until she met our team :) we pointed out every joint, cheap vodka bottle, or even slightly awkward things found in mirror selfies until she started to really rethink her privacy.
Or there is a old social network many people in my country kept for the email. They encouraged to write or at least post poems. Lot of awkward lines to be found there to make some heads red.
The problem is that it's not just her privacy she's violating, but the privacy of everyone else, including OP, whose photos get shared by said cousin.
When I got back from a trip I took abroad with my family earlier this year, my friends mentioned that they'd seen the photos that "I" had posted to Facebook. Except... I hadn't posted any photos to Facebook. I have a Facebook account, but I deliberately have a very minimal presence on it. What my friends were seeing was the photos that my mother had posted, and which I had been tagged in. My privacy was violated by someone else's inability to understand Facebook's privacy settings.
Asymptomatic carrier.
An asymptomatic carrier is one who exhibits no symptoms of the illness but is carrier who can infect others. I don't believe that is the right analogy here.
With herd immunity you have a group with a large rate of participation, which effectively immunizes those that haven't been.
Facebook is the opposite in that you may not be "infected" but if everyone around you is "infected" you might as well be, because Facebook will piece together your information based on what your friends make available.
Plague almost starts to sound like a better analogy...
If Facebook didn't exist, people would still show photos to people in other ways. If someone takes your photo they're more than likely going to show it to somebody so I would assume a low level of privacy by default.
And how should I do that if I don't have a Facebook account? How do I tell Facebook to not steal my phone number and texts from phones of my friends?
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/fact-check-your-call-an...
"Call and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android. ... This feature does not collect the content of your calls or text messages"
Your friend has a copy and can do whatever they want with them, including share them with Facebook, the NSA/FBI/police, their friends, or anyone else they want to.
If you don't want them shared with Facebook, don't give the people who are sharing them with Facebook a copy.
I suspect this is not the issue or what the parent means by privacy.
Rather, they probably mean specifically that they don't want their metadata enriched photos being made available, without their explicit knowledge or consent, to Facebook the company (and therefore also indirectly to any number of other companies / advertisers).
If Facebook didn't exist, people certainly wouldn't do that! That's purely an unavoidable side effect of Facebook's current business model.
That does protect you to some level. But throw in machine learning with image processing and simple metadata extraction and while your friends might not see the photo, Facebook can potentially figure out if you're in the photo whether or not you've been tagged, where the photo was taken, what camera the photo was taken with, what mood you're in, who's with you, what clothes you're wearing etc etc. And then they'll sell that data without ever telling you.
I have a bigger issue with that happening than I have issues with friends seeing photos I may not have wanted to posted myself, to be honest.
Ironically, it was your OWN inability to understand Facebook's privacy settings.
Go to Settings -> Click " Timeline and Tagging Settings" -> Edit " Who can add things to my timeline? " section : " Review posts that friends tag you in before they appear on your Timeline?" make " Enabled "
There, you will never be tagged in another photo or post, and you now have a review process for anyone who attempts those things, so you can manually up or down those things.
Keeping people from tagging you is pretty close, though.
The lure of being more famous than her friends is too much to resist. Not sure if wrong or right. I would like being famous on HN, StackOverflow, tech blogs etc. Perhaps it's similar.
Doesn't Facebook "remind" people to wish their "friends" a happy birthday? That kind of changes the meaning of those birthday wishes from "these people were thinking about me" to "these people clicked a button because an advertising corporation told them to".
As for condolences, the idea of deaths and other bad events increasing "engagement" (and therefore ad exposure and profit) for Facebook should make all involved feel dirty.
Situation b: Mom and Dad knows what I did last night. Result: I get grounded.
Social media is socializing now, whether you like it or not, and whether you're along for the ride or not.
In that light, it's strange when people say it's "addicting," like that's a bad thing. It's supposed to be - we're social creatures.
Sharing things about your life with friends and family is not some horrible drug we need to curb.
Several studies have proven the ill effects of social network. So you are only partly correct.
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.
People need to be working on simple to use platforms, everything else is secondary (including scaling and featureset). Max effort needs to be towards onboarding, wizards, easy walkthroughs, etc. It's a goal in a project I'm doing and I urge others to prioritize similarly.
The successor to the internet will be called the internet.
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..
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 :)
https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american...
"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."
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.
Except accessing your encrypted records require the presentation a doctor's key and your key, which might be a standardized health card with a chip. So not entirely similar to what we have now, it could be considerably safer.
If my card is lost or broken? The system you describe seems clearly at less risk of inappropriate disclosure. Whether it's safer is perhaps another question.
cf. the difference between "fail safe" and "fail secure", in a slightly different context
More relevant, what happens if you lose access to your data? Or it becomes corrupted? Now, because you owned your data, it's only your responsibility. You know who's not going to put up with that? Anyone who can afford to hire someone else (like a doctor) to keep track of their chart for them so that stupid stuff doesn't happen.
Most people don't realize that many of the connected health record problems have already had high quality solutions provided in the form of VistA (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/VistA). It's interface would make a startup designer cry, but medical professionals find it highly effective. Especially the network effect of being able to hand charts off and coordinate care, which would be very difficult in a decentralized health record world.
On the other hand, with old fashioned paper journals, you could get all copies and store them yourself. If you lose them they're gone too. If there was a cryptographic construct where the access of data would require a public action, i.e. "to assemble the key to decrypt this data, I need to broadcast this to the world", then I can think of a number of good ways to store things with a robust accountability feature.
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:
It's what has always worked for me.
I feel like reasonably effective retro-active deletion is an important feature of a social network, as it gives users more control.
No, there are middle grounds, such as a decentralized/local authorities. E.g. you send a hyperlink to the message on your server, rather than the message itself. Theoretically, you've still ceded control to the receiver, but practically, in most cases, you haven't.
Links to photos, events, and group chat can all happen using email as transport. Like @esfandia suggested, the social-emails could be tagged as hidden so they are not displayed by your regular email reader.
Here is a old write up of how "events" could work over email: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12671812
Does anyone know if something like this has been tried before? Surely someone has thought of this before...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, there is room for improvement in the Friendica UX, but it still seems like a viable option for federated social network. The Friendica devs seem to strive for interoperability with other networks and support open standards for the social Internet.
Hubzilla only has a few thousand users. In a social media world, that's a rounding error. So my thought is that people should setup Hubzilla for a targeted group. Get an active community of dozens or possibly hundreds of people, and if they like the platform, encourage them to invite other people and start additional communities. Or find communities through the federation.
https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project
https://medium.com/we-distribute/the-do-everything-system-an...
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.
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.
I made a $100 phone call to a girl I met on vacation in 1990.
I use FB as I attend various gatherings that organise there, but I no longer contribute much, and am phasing it out.
Considering that every other startup has wanted to build "Facebook/MySpace/Twitter BUT FOR XXXX" for the last decade, I guarantee what you want is out there (or has existed at some point), but nobody is on it and nobody has heard of it, because it costs money and nobody is going to pay money for a social network that's empty. I personally wouldn't pay money for a social network that's not empty, either... and I'm sure a lot of people share my sentiment.
An anecdote from a recent experience: I'm in India and there is the Aadhar project which assigns unique id to every citizen. There is a big privacy debate about it in the cities regarding privacy issues as the govt is forcing everyone to link our assets and tax numbers to it. People in the villages have no idea about it and there were pamphlets of Aadhar numbers being used as tissue papers in a local snack shops. But they all have a Facebook account for sure.
People don't understand understand privacy when they just want to survive.
I think they were already profitable by te time they sold out.
There's also other monetization options:
API access for businesses.
Premium accounts.
Etc.
And FTR: I'd gladly paid 10 times as much as WhatsApp charged if that was the price- as long as they didn't sell out to my enemies.
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.
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.
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".
Thanks for the link of course! Great write up and charts to look through.
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".
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.
For heavy Facebook users $60 isn't much, but for everyone else it seems a little much.
> https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/heres-how-much-youre...
> Here's how much Facebook makes per person in each region, extrapolated annually based on the network's third-quarter numbers:
> Worldwide: $16.04
> US $62.60
> Europe: $18.88
> Asia-Pacific: $7.56
> Rest of World: $4.84
Another metric:
> The social network giant, Facebook has a market cap of $227 billion and 1.4 billion users—which makes you worth a whooping $158. https://arkenea.com/blog/big-tech-companies-user-worth/
So for a max. of 10 bucks per month we could get an ad-free, privacy oriented Facebook. With dev. money going to enhance the experience not maximizing revenues of the ad industry.
1) Hard to price discriminate. Some people are worth almost nothing to FB, others are worth a lot. The price would either have to be absurdly high (e.g. $500+/y) or they might leave a lot on the table from that very profitable minority.
2) PR hit. People more easily accept that a frivolous luxury is only available to the wealthy, whereas even many people who use FB see privacy as more of a basic need. See: response to "price gougers" selling stuff like ice or water at a premium in disaster areas.
3) Hard to cleaning delineate. It's a social graph, your data is useful to generate data on your friends. Could they use it in that case or not? If they do, will that expose them to a lawsuit?
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvxbgq/its-time-for-mark-...
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.
Not to mention, which crazy brain even proposed to fix it?
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.
Just calling it something different seems to be enough.
and it will be for expanding my social network and finding people alike, not for watching daily bullshit from existing friends.
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.
Can you just host/peer your ipfs/dat webpages/services/stuff from a Linux VPS/server?
They're also writing specs and working on adding support to Brave [2], or so says the third footnote on that article. Brave also has ongoing work to support IPFS [3].
Long-term, I'm hoping browsers will improve support for registering new protocols through extensions.
[0] https://pfrazee.hashbase.io/blog/announcing-dathttpd
[2] https://pfrazee.hashbase.io/blog/universal-publishing-and-th...
I ask because Beaker claims to be “the first and only...”
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.
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.
The big problem is how to fund a social network that doesn't rely on selling it's users data, IMO.
1. Different use case: trying it out it reminded me more of a Slack/IRC/bulletin board than anything else.
2. Different framing: it uses a public square (Twitter) framing (follow, follower, channel) instead of a personal relationships framing (friends, groups, etc).
3. Too complex for casual users: this is kind of ironic because Scuttlebutt is modeled after real life interactions but in a way it ends being too complex with pubs (public and private), long and cryptic user IDs, etc.
These are some reasons but there are more. Happy to discuss them.
"I imagine the replacement for Facebook will be ... something under the control of its users..."
This is what I am trying (poorly) to articulate. I use a very small proof-of-concept application to accomplish something like this; no website, no third party managing a "service". I paid nothing for this application.
Zuckerberg says, "The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can't afford to pay."
Its difficult to understand what he means by "a service that helps connect everyone in the world".
Users already pay for internet access. This internet service is what allows the subscriber to connect to everyone in the world. What he is describing sounds more like a central registry of contact details.
What was the most elusive "starting material" to create a Facebook alternative: the contact and other personal details for most of its users. However this information is, as the world now knows, no longer in the sole possession of Facebook.
For example, 420 million profiles from 2007-2010 were expropriated some 10 years ago. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16724375
Today in response to media pressure, Facebook announced publicly "most" of their users have likely had their account info expropriated. "We believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way."
Moreover, with the recent changes Facebook has made, every user now has the means to easily export her data in a portable format.
As a user, I might look up a contact in the "Facebook directory" (of which there might be many copies in many places) and then choose to communicate with her through a different channel, one that Facebook does not control.
This channel does not need to be managed by a third party seeking to profit from selling advertising. It does not have to appear anything like Facebook or any of it subsidiaries, although it could.
Once the contact and I are in touch there is no reason to involve Facebook or any other ad-supported web company going forward.
...
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-...
...
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 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...
...
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-...
"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-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: