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My feeling is the problem with the link between humans and computers is that the people funding things like Facebook and other high-profit digital services are applying an economic model which may have worked in an age before computers, but is completely absurd when it meets computers. Let's think of Facebook for a second as a "public meeting space", like a dog park. How many dog parks do you know valued at hundreds of billions of dollars?

You could run a social media platform instead as a service for users funded by donations, in the vein of Wikipedia. This way you don't need to convince most people to pay. You only need a small passionate few who keep the service going for everyone else. I think the business model would generally incentivize much more user-friendly operational decisions than an ad-sponsored approach does. And since this is a digital service, the operational cost can be scaled proportionally to the donations received.

The Guardian have switched to this model and it seems to at least be showing the promise of working. I live in London and subscribe to the paper at the weekends, primarily because the physical thing is a good product and a nice thing to read at weekends - particularly the review and longform arts stuff - but also as a way to support an organisation I think is doing valuable work.

> The Guardian have switched to this model and it seems to at least be showing the promise of working.

Not exactly. While it is possible to become a Guardian 'supporter', and contribute financially in exchange for ad-free browsing after you identify yourself by logging in, you are not free from tracking by third-party ad companies as you browse their site.

The parent comment you are responding to said "I think the business model would generally incentivize much more user-friendly operational decisions than an ad-sponsored approach does." and while this gives you a superficially cleaner browsing experience, ad companies continue to track you as you browse the Guardian's website, harvesting data which can be used to manipulate you elsewhere on the web.

The Guardian could choose to disable all third-party trackers for logged-in paying supporters, but they do not. For privacy conscious readers, the only way to achieve what you want is to install an ad-blocker and a browser extension such as Privacy Badger. Contributing to the paper provides little or no privacy benefit, though it's always a good idea to support quality journalism, so if you do it, do it for that reason alone.

For those that are digital subscribers and wish to suggest exactly this turning off of 3rd party tracking for logged-in users, this looks like the most relevant email address: membershipsupport@theguardian.com

Be sure to include your subscriber/membership number in that email, which you can find in your profile https://profile.theguardian.com/

Hmm, I might be missing something here. To me it appears as there's nothing really novel about getting the weekend newspapers delivered to your house on a subscription basis. One arranges delivery and subscription with the local newsagent and a paperboy delivers it. (The terms we still use even encode that model: newsagent paperboy)

Perhaps it's a return to tried and tested model rather than a switch to a new one?

Some sort of enhancement for paying would probably help as well. IIRC Livejournal used to offer custom homepage themes, extra user avatars etc. for anyone who paid for the service. Yet, the basic functionality was available for anyone.

How much do you think a company would have been valued that let you create a meeting space for people with very little work, communicate it almost instantaneously to everyone you wanted invited, and to have the meeting space focused on any subject you liked - not just dog parks.

I believe Facebook is overvalued, but comparison to the value of a dog park is not exactly fair either.

You make a fair point. Facebook does provide a lot more functionality for users than the comparison gives them credit for.

What I was trying to convey was that a social network doesn't necessarily need to move the mountains of money that Facebook does. Diaspora* is an example of a free open source social network platform. Of course it still cost people a lot of time and money to build and host it, but nowhere near Facebook levels.

I also think the business model of running specifically a social network as a profitable business is likely to lead to "perverse incentives". Making a profit isn't necessarily opposed to helping people connect (e.g. OKCupid's business model of being free to all but selling advantages to power users), but it takes both the willingness to align your business model with your users' interests and the fortitude to stick to that approach even though other approaches could be more profitable.

> I believe Facebook is overvalued, but comparison to the value of a dog park is not exactly fair either.

One is a great place do be if it wasn't for all piles of steaming crap left around by irresponsible users.

The other is somewhere to exercise your dog

Given the general state of the "content" people put on Facebook, I'd say the dog park comparison is a good one.. but not quite in the way the parent post meant it.

Replace 'a dog park' with 'most dog parks' and valuation starts to make a little more sense.

I think in that analogy you're looking at something like Diaspora*: distributed and independently-managed public meeting places. Which is monetarily valued much lower because it's designed to be a social tool for users, not to be a money machine. But the value it can theoretically provide to users in connecting them with other people is similar.

He basically identifies 3 free related issues coming to a nexus with FB. First is that free and monopoly (in the Pete Thiel sense) are related. A lot of the FB problems are problems of concentrated scale.

Second is the advertising business model. There as side effects to this three-way market. In any casefb as business works because they are such a monopoly.

Third is political influence, which I think is at the centre of FB's current heat, not data security. People become presidents on FB, revolutions happen on FB. This gives extra importance to the first two.

FB had been in denial about the politics issue, I suspect they still don't fully grasp it. They're not a neutral platform. They actually built in certain biases via their "optimization" for "engagement". In any case, since people like to argue politics on FB, it's a great advertiaing platform for politics.

I think they will not like the answer to the last problem. Its either an editorial approach, recognizing their position as a publication or trying to get rid of politics.

>FB had been in denial about the politics issue, I suspect they still don't fully grasp it. They're not a neutral platform.

They grasp it. They've been running research studies on elections[1], politics, and "emotional contagions"[2] since at least 2010.

[1]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-a-facebook...

[2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebo...

> Our world is being changed.

What do we use the internet for? Communication, media, business, government. Most of these work on the internet exactly how they work in the non-Internet world. The only difference is the setting.

Media? We get it for free or for a small payment, both on the net, and IRL. Commerce? We still pay for things with our credit cards, the product catalogs and stores are just digital now. Public services? I apply for a change of address online and not at the DMV's satellite office. Chatting? Group text rather than party lines.

Now, social media certainly has changed people's bubbles. They're now tighter and larger, and reinforce biases and create false information to a much greater degree. But it's not like this wasn't already happening with FOX News, and before that with newspapers and journals dedicated to fringe groups.

I think the biggest problem we face is the world becoming more convenient and insular. Rather than have to pay for a local worker to produce some good for me, it gets churned through a global trade network to squeeze its price down to pennies and exploit the people and environment of the world to do so. And I would never know it unless someone went to great lengths to tell me so. Rather than read a newspaper, we look for what drivel has been retweeted by our friends. It's just "easy" to consume harmful products and information.

So what do you do when convenience is a problem? Give up convenience?

The world is changed by people. I'm not sure the current rage against Facebook is being organically sustained. What I mean there is that there is currently a [completely justified] media frenzy against Facebook, but what will happen when the media moves onto the next click-worthy topic? I'm guessing this will be as forgotten as Equifax.

In order for the world to change people need to be genuinely, independently, and individually upset at the behavior here. Here, I think this [1] Onion article is a good example of when satire meets reality: "American People Admit Having Facebook Data Stolen Kind Of Worth It To Watch That Little Fucker Squirm". Factor in the political aspect, and I do think that probably sums up the situation pretty well. By the political aspect, I mean to say that I think a lot of the outrage is also geared again not around the behavior itself, but who that behavior may have benefited.

The issue is that if people are not upset at the behavior itself and in a vacuum, then nothing will change. And I really don't think they are. Facebook was revealed to be literally conducting psychological experiments on users without their consent, making their feed more negative or more positive just to see what would happen, and when the next shiny news bit came along - nobody cared anymore.

That all said, I completely and absolutely hope I'm wrong. But I do not think I am.

[1] - https://www.theonion.com/american-people-admit-having-facebo...

Brad seems to be invoking Paulo Freire. Whether he is conscious of Freire’s work or not

The themes of yesterday conflict with the themes of tomorrow as society exists in a period of transition

Freire referred to it as an epoch where new themes have the chance to take over

My guess is we’ll end up in the same spot: rich elites pushing their theme of “insure my wealth and power” while the majority do the actual work