The Decline and Fall of the Zuckerberg Empire
nymag.com
nymag.com
Strawman. The article's writer can do better than view Facebook as a one trick pony. It is an internet behemoth. Instagram aside, there is so much media sharing on WhatsApp alone that it might blow away most of the other internet properties away. WhatsApp with VoIP now has the mobile network operators by their balls. No one is logging out of that, by far.
> Some empires fall because they’re invaded from the outside or rot from within. Zuckerberg’s could be the first in history to collapse simply because its citizens logged out.
Couldn't be further from the truth. People might get dis-interested in Facebook, over time... but existence of Facebook is more than folks just logging out.
I stopped using Facebook (though still use Instagram and Whatsapp) and my life is much the same as it was before.
And here's the secret - I'm not even loyal to Instagram or Whatsapp, more to the network.
If friends fall off Facebook, then there's even less reason to go. In fact, Instagram has entirely replaced it for me.
And if Photos on iOS had a public sharing feature, I'd probably just use that, and then fall off Instagram too.
It kinda does. You can make an album public and it generates a link that you can share.
Not to mention their open source projects; we use fb prophet a lot for our ML
And even my mother has installed Threema on her phone because a friend of her asked for it. This tells you something. It is hard to come up with another social network like facebook. But a chatting client on the phone? The tide can change very fast there.
Threema gets used more in Europe than in the states. But even a US buddy recently suggested we switch to threema. It is closed source but claims to offer more privacy.
People use Whatsapp because that's what everyone else uses. I would prefer Signal but no one I know uses it.
Everyone I know uses Whatsapp.
So I use Whatsapp.
Nobody I know uses WhatsApp. So I don’t use WhatsApp.
See how that works?
The anecdote is supposed to show why one can't just write their own app. It doesn't work that way.
Consider that you're a distant outlier.
You just naturally remember, like you would remember where your friends live. I guess if you are constantly dealing with "contacts" rather then friends it would get confusing.
I use
1. WeChat
2. WhatsApp
3. Threema
4. Frozenchat, a Jabber client with OTR support
Don't have signal yet.
Ah, and I can "chat" via Text message too :-)
2. global leader right now
3. as compromised as whatsapp,has data compliance with multiple countries
4. no name fork of a no name
2. correct
3. Multiple countries? You would need a court order from Switzerland. I am not even sure they can access your messages if they wanted to.
4. Irrelevant because it is a client to an open protocol. Which client you use does not matter. I just named mine.
Yes, it actually is that difficult to program. To scale to WhatsApp's level, you can't just base all your message-delivery off a Kafka cluster and be done with it. Amazon Chime still hasn't been deployed outside of us-east-1 and seems nowhere close to a global deployment.
The engineering effort to provide low-latency communications, at geographic and user scale, is very much non-trivial.
Interesting - when did you last evaluate / buy a phone based on voice quality capabilities?
A very large percentage of the country never makes international calls.
Google is the next company that will come under heavy scrutiny. They are aggressively trying to circumvent ad-blockers with their recent usage of semi-random domains.
You can’t abuse ordinary people’s privacy and shove ads in people’s face for too long time.
I also use this list to temporarily add HN when I want to focus. This setup works well for me.
Some of my family members and friends use WhatsApp and that's something I regret (tiny bit) not using. But I don't miss Facebook, Instagram, etc. at all.
[1] https://pi-hole.net/ [2] https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...
The GDPR is certainly making people more aware of what privacy means, and I think that’s a good thing, but it’s also came into existence because the people asked for it. It’s not really a new thing, in the public sector we’ve had stricter regulations for many years, but we’ve had them individually, and we’ve had the because people voted for them. The EU simply gathered all these things as a centralised ruleset, that also happens to apply to the private sector.
Slowly more and more people are waking up to find that they have and want the power to make demands on how their data flows. And I think a lot of American tech companies are having a hard time to adapt.
There is an old saying, that the US typically has good governments that are not trusted by its people and terrible companies which are trusted. Well, the EU is the exact opposite of that, and I think it’s hard to be Facebook in a world where people genuinely don’t want their photos used for facial recognition software that will eventually be used for evil, have their feeds flooded by probaganda or see their data used to overturn democracy itself.
Facebook isn’t really struggling yet though. But they’ve basically become like climate change, everyone knows they have to quit eating social media to save the planet, but knowing is easier than doing.
Facebook hasn’t done a single thing to help themselves though, so the comparison to Augustus, who did indeed build an empire and who was so popular that many historians consider him the root of the emperor cult, is a little ridiculous.
"social media hurts democracy"
The arab spring (supported and brought to a tipping point by messages spread on social media) was not only possible in northern africa or in some arab countries (Libya, Egypt, Syria,...) Social media has introduced a new dimension into our western societies. Political will was for decades built by discussion in small groups but more importantly by a small group of media (newspapers, magazines, tv channels). These news channels had some commonly shared values, operated within those values.
Now we have "news" spreading publicly on Twitter, on Facebook or in closed groups of Facebook or other social media. And these "news" are not fact-checked by any authority anymore.
If I was a rogue actor I would weep for joy because of the possibilities that social media created to manipulate the masses.
So yes, I strongly believe that social media is hurting our democracies massively. And Facebook has a major role in this.
In this context, the "rogue actor" is the Macedonian kid writing about the activities of Kenyan Muslim Obama for abcnews.info
Information like this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Infektion
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-d...
National politics is not something you walk into with mere “common sense”, neither is law nor military power nor economics nor international relations nor civil engineering, yet we all have Opinions about these things which we are encouraged to share via democracy.
It’s really easy to convince a crowd with appeals to fallacies of common sense or logic — in the case of Brexit, for example, I’ve seen people argue that the EU is simultaneously evil for not providing Greece with enough of a bail out, and also evil for asking rich countries like the UK to pay more money than it receives from the EU (which it does to help poor countries like Greece).
Such fallacies even affect people with degrees from Cambridge University, it’s not merely something we can blame on poor education and pretend we’re immune to.
it's perfectly consistent if you realise the EU and the Eurozone are not the same thing and have different competing interests
Try that one on and tell me how reasoned or moral it sounds.
What if it is "social media uncovers a critical flaw in democracy"?
Yes. Because when the ministry of truth is in charge, things are so much better. /s
The problem is that "fact checkers" are some of the most biased people around.
https://www.thecut.com/2018/06/new-yorker-fact-checker-ice-t...
I'm always amazed that people will rant about "big brother" one moment and then appeal to an authority figure the next. You think Trump should decide what "truth" is? Is that your argument?
> These news channels had some commonly shared values, operated within those values.
What values? Is the iraq war that value? The NYTimes was created by a banker. The WashingtonPost was created by a racist pro-south democrat. What is this "common value" you are speaking of?
> So yes, I strongly believe that social media is hurting our democracies massively.
In what way? 10 years ago, it was the right wing bigots whining about social media because it got obama elected. Now it's the left wing bigots whining.
This isn't about bias in reporting, whether it's an issue or not. It's about complete bullshit made up wholecloth and targeted at paranoid old people who aren't used to reading news with a critical eye.
The actual New York Times story is here.[1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-...
This is not deeply interesting.