Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually fine that it is not de-centralized. It is true that federated systems are too complicated for practical use. However, to go against Facebook, we need something like Wikipedia, not Facebook by some other guy who pinky promises that he will be good.

This right here kills it for me, and hopefully others too.

"Why is Openbook not a non-profit?

Making Openbook a for-profit was a hard choice to make. We love Wikipedia, the Ghost Foundation, Founders Pledge, Mozilla and many more. However we see the same struggle repeated over and over again. These companies struggle to grow beyond their profitability. These companies struggle to grow to the size and resources needed to compete with for-profit businesses.

When we need to grow exponentially, we need to be able to raise the large amounts of money needed to do so. Therefore we are officially a for-profit company.

But do note that when we do this, we will make sure the people investing in the company will be people with real interest on the platform, its core values of privacy, security, freedom, openness and its humanitarian nature."

NO NO NO NO NO!!! Why do you have to exponentially grow to be useful. Be the right service, and growth comes by that virtue. People love Wikipedia for what it is, not because it "grows exponentially". You're just another guy with good motives until you succumb to investor pressure.

I've been hoping for a Mozilla/Wikimedia like foundation to come up with a modern centralized alternative to Facebook, that just has it in their bylaws that prevents any creepy tracking from being implemented in the first place.

As they say, "False pretence of security is worse than no security because it makes you let your guard down". Don't dilute the community driven foundations by profit driven projects like this, please.

I agree.

I happen to think that Google, FB & such were founded with a solid ethic. I think Google meant "don't be evil" when they said it. But, the questions come later. Will you increase consumer privacy at the expense of CPCs (and value to advertisers). Will you de-fund some of your blue sky R&D to balance reduced yield on advertising.

Wikipedia is the right model. After all this time, they really are still focused on wikipedia's original goal. I am personally very happy that Wikipedia exists.

The way Wikipedia is supposed to scale, is not by making an amazon-scale wikipedia. It's by doing their job well, and being a prototype/inspiration for others to do other jobs. If Wikipedia was a social network, maybe it would not have "scaled" to also be the world's no. 1 news source. Maybe it would not have become a major IM app. That's not a bad thing. We didn't need Facebook to take over news. We could have gotten our news elsewhere. We didn't need facebook to do IM, same reason.

Wikipedia is not a failure because it didn't scale this way, it is a success for that reason. Being not for profit has let them pass on opportunities for land grabs, in a way that for profits would not have resisted.

> FB & such were founded with a solid ethic.

Then you are likely unaware of FB history. Read the first hundred or so results of https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dumb%20fucks

>People love Wikipedia for what it is, not because it "grows exponentially".

That's because Wikipedia is not a social network. A social network is only worthwhile if it gains a critical mass of users such that there are enough friends on it (or sometimes, i.e. Twitter, enough interesting people on it) to make spending time there worthwhile. Massive growth is more important to the survival of a social network than to any other business model.

>Massive growth is more important to the survival of a social network than to any other business model.

Growth is. Massive growth is only relevant if you want to compete on the largest, global scale.

True that a social media network stands to benefit more from network effect than Wikipedia. But, we already have that for-profit social media network with a huge network effect, and are looking for an alternative. I'd appreciate them trying to find better ways to grow fast while providing an alternative to the creepy mess that is Facebook. Building yet another Facebook for a "good" set of investor this time around is not it.

Don't you think it'd be a better idea to use all that engineering prowess to build a fantastic product that people want to use, run it using a non-profit foundation, and make money for the non-profit foundation by doing exactly what they claim to be their plan now - offering enterprise customised solutions?

Saying that you need investor money to grow exponentially because that's the only way our crowd funded social network will work seems unreasonable/ethically unsustainable to me.

Wikipedia is not a social network, but it definitely does get better as more people use it. Users-editors grow together, and wikipedia is a massive collaborative effort. It takes millions to make a wikipedia.

Define "better". On what metrics are you evaluating Wikipedia? Factuality, writing quality, etc? Wikipedia's process has driven away some of the most knowledgeable subject-matter experts into creating rival publications like Scholarpedia, and pre-Wikipedia incumbents like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy remain stronger imho, despite having fewer (but more qualified) editors.

A social network with zero users is worthwhile if I can use it as a blog.

>A social network is only worthwhile if it gains a critical mass of users such that there are enough friends on it (or sometimes, i.e. Twitter, enough interesting people on it) to make spending time there worthwhile. Massive growth is more important to the survival of a social network than to any other business model.

You can have a place that's worth spending time in without needing "massive" growth.

When the Internet first started to become a cultural force it was still sort of a niche thing. Normal people were on it, but the scattered mess of blogs and online bulletin boards were all over the place. You didn't need to have EVERYONE on every board, you just needed the board for your website to have enough cool people on it to build a community. They rarely got much bigger than a few hundred active members.

You can't make decaf coffee by making regular coffee and taking the caffeine out. You have to prepare the coffee beans in a different way. If you want a social network that doesn't repeat the sins of the current social networks.

For Facebook I don't think their revenue model was their original sin, the revenue model became as invasive and problematic as it was because the company was built by a creepy dude who didn't actually value individual privacy or community very much. If you want a social network that's not dehumanizing and doesn't contribute to atomizing individuals you're going to need to focus on more intimate, community focused interactions.

> You're just another guy with good motives until you succumb to investor pressure

This. Always chose “open” by design, never by charity.

Funny thing, the marketing seems very close to what we're used to coming from Facebook. Happy-go-lucky language, bright colors, the "be good" attitude and the founder in the center of the spectacle. This whole thing is just a bad joke.

I've always thought that a novel approach would be a social media company in a cooperative structure - where the employees and users are also part owners and would have a say in some of the decision making, as well as sharing in the profits being generated from the information published by the users.

This is probably a non-trivial thing to do correctly, but after reading The Dictators Handbook I think that the power structure contributes significantly to behavior and think a social network structured more similarly to the Green Bay Packers operate would create a better system than Facebook.

It exists: https://social.coop/about

I don't know how well it works.

I agree with you in general terms, but not on this particular issue. Things that rely on a network effect need to grow exponentially - at least at first, or they will die. The reason people use Facebook is because people use Facebook. The reason people do not use alternatives is because people do not use alternatives.

That said, Facebook at one time also had this problem and I think they solved it extremely well by making access feel like a privilege for you rather than patronage to them, by limiting it to exclusive universities. And then all universities. And then finally, to anybody. Google did the exact same thing with 'gmail beta' when invite codes were a sort of mechanism of making users feel like it was a privilege to get to use their software.

On the other hand, neither Facebook or Google was facing a competitor with billions of monthly active users approaching global market saturation.

I agree that network growth is essential in this case, but burning investor money is not THE solution to this need. There are better solutions to achieve that level of patronage and exposure. They'd have to innovate for such ways though. For example,

Let the early users generate badges that they can list on current social networks so that they can brings their friends in.

Incentivise quality content by directly adding up to one's storage/other limits. Example, if 1000 users like your post, then you get extra MB for your photos or some other benefit.

Let the influential/early users(who bring many of their contacts into the network) have first dibs at new features that makes them feel cool.

or any other marketing strategy that people write books about :-)

>Things that rely on a network effect need to grow exponentially - at least at first, or they will die. The reason people use Facebook is because people use Facebook. The reason people do not use alternatives is because people do not use alternatives.

The question is how much of a network effect do you really need? You can't start wanting to take over the world. It works a lot better to start small, with one niche group or community and work from there. This has been how rival social networks have taken off in the age of Facebook.

Discord targeted gamers, Snapchat targeted hipster teens, Signal targeted political activists, FireChat targeted the music festival scene, etc.

If it works well, the feature sets are generalizable, and your social groups are resistant to cooption into or bullying by neo-nazis and the alt-Right you can grow from there.

There is an obvious model which can be for profit but bakes in user ownership and control: cooperatives.

There is plenty of work being done on this area in online spaces - the platform cooperative movement. I wonder if it a major failure of this movement in terms of visibility that this wasn't their go to model.

Why are federated systems too complicated for practical use?

Look, email doesn't work, that's clear proof. DNS doesn't either and if the whole Internet hadn't been centralized long ago, it would have stopped working in, like, 1982. Or, maybe, they are not being honest and centralized gives them more control, like FB.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com