Most people I add because I meet them in read life. Actually, 100% of the people I add on FB after I've met them in real life.
Maybe if there was a good search and easy add mechanism for people I've met, it would fulfill the discovery aspect. I agree with you, it does feel easier to find people on FB.
I'm not sure how to monetize this, but it would add some discovery to rss.
Make it good enough to pay for.
Yep. When it decentralized you can control how strong are the bubble walls and can try different bubbles from time to time.
I'm surprised so few people here have picked up on the fact that "filter bubble" is a rhetorical trick about as obvious as the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" dichotomy.
People like getting good recommendations, and they'll always like them. "Filter bubbles" are here to stay.
First, we are outsourcing recommendations to profit-driven corporations. At best, the recommendations I want to see will be mixed with the ones advertisers want me to see. Revenue expectations of social media companies currently ensure this is a non-trivial issue with no easy middle ground.
Even assuming the recommendations are reasonably good, you still have the problem that these ML-type recommendations require massive datasets and therefore it naturally gravitates towards a winner-take-all situation. Having one giant borg of a recommendation engine is bad.
We are replacing a rich tapestry of individual word-of-mouth and small-scale communication channels with a massive mono-culture. Scalability is worshipped in tech companies (it's great for getting rich!), but it's not a inherently a good thing. In nature we find diversity trumps scalability, and I feel the same way about culture.
That sounds pretty malicious for what basically amounts to attempting to serve you the content and ads you want.
Malicious sounding, indeed.
Basically, serving you the content and ads you want can turn out to be pretty malicious. By doing so, a big company can manipulate and shape your perception. Year by year, data processing is making big companies ever more potent at doing just this. Is it any wonder that it eventually got to a point where we started seeing problems?
1. You connect to friends and you either manually assign or "grow" a bunch of weights to your amount of trust in them and your interest in various topics they might post.
2. You and your friends make posts and assign "topic" metadata to the posts. The value of the system depends on your friends properly assigning metadata to posts. But it makes it easier to filter out extended families' political shitposting (based on trust and negging untagged posts).
3. Your feed is selected based on the weight of your friendship times the weight you base on the interest of the topic. If your best friend posts something about computers and you have positively weighed that topic it would bubble up.
4. Friends-of-friends can transitively receive a proportion of the trust score you have in your friend. Highly trusted friends will make you trust their friends more.
5. Down-votes and upvotes would train your local agent. They could also be fed back to the originator IF votes were signed by trusted encryption keys to prevent your friend from faking his vote count on the "post".
This decentralizes the network out of FB and democratizes the algorithms / system for what and how you want to receive your information.
1. Everyone makes a website.
2. Those websites submit articles to content indexes.
3. Part of your website hosts your own reader client:
3.a The reader subscribes to a set of indexes.
3.b It can also subscribe to individual feeds.
3.c Your client decides how to mix the feeds into displays, eg, you could have several indexes feed into one "feed" and have all of your family feeds in a second "feed".
4. Most of this is actually done via cloud hosting of managed packages, rented.
There's still many strong factors in favor of centralization, but if it's built around interop, then having a few large providers than mesh together is still an improvement and begins a competition to provide better services.
It's what happened with blogs and RSS anyway.
... aaaaaand, there it goes; the spammers already ruined it ;)
Like they did with email. Then you have companies come with robust AI tech and filter the spam, and also give good recommendations. A few of those companies come to dominate the market
... aaaaaand, there it goes; we're back to the situation we have now with Facebook and Google.
The situation for social networks would be strictly better if you could easily migrate accounts between FB, Google, etc and subscribe to feeds from multiple networks.
The situation you're calling out is exactly the point.
That's also my point.
“Discover” hardly ever means, “check out what’s interesting,” usually it’s “check out this targeted ad”
Its also really good for following journal articles in my field. Pubmed has active search RSS, for instance, and every journal pushes their new articles to RSS.
How does one do that? I'm interested.
Shameless plug: Binaries here: https://gitlab.com/somini/go-hnrss/
The thing is though we want to talk about the stories and ask questions. I mean, that’s why we’re all here, right? Comment forums on a million sites don’t work.
In the early days of the web someone had the idea that you should be able to run your own group commentary without the site aurhor’s permission. You’d register for the service and your browser would tell you or show you that there’s a conversation going about this page.
I still feel like we need this.
but instead of following "feeds" you follow people, and it queues up links they've shared on twitter
That last phrase could add a lot of friction.
you could use different clients, some could give you recommendations for events,etc based on your subscriptions if you so choose
That would indeed replace Facebook. However, then you have a chicken and egg problem. Those clients won't be much good unless people provide data by using them, and people won't use them because they don't already have the data to provide good recommendations.
Up until you get to "different clients" you're basically describing classic Google Reader.
It's based on the idea that you'd publish to your personal website either publicly or privately. The private posts can only be read by your friends (who own personal websites themselves and have established a friendship connection using a friend request).
The implementation is just a (not yet standardized) friend ship request REST protocol plus authenticated RSS feeds (using a secret key exchanged by the above process).
Since the whole decentralized social network idea is a chicken-and-egg game, I've constructed the plugin in a way so that it is useful to use by yourself: You can subscribe to RSS feeds, filter feeds with your own rules, and get full-content e-mail notifications for all or selected posts.
The plugin also implements Emoji-Likes on posts and allows recommending posts to your friends. It doesn't have an automatic recommendation engine (yet?).
Actually, there is no need to have this restricted to WordPress since it uses very much established technology, so it could interoperate with any other compatible platform. I just implemented it with WordPress for its ecosystem and that you can use existing mobile apps to read on it and share to it.
Overall the whole endeavor allows you to have your personal social network decentralized, ad- and spam-free since you select who you listen to.
The plugin is already well usable but it only progresses at side-project speed, so help is welcome (not only development work but also trying it out, posting about its features with screenshots/-casts, etc.)!
You can read more about some technical details at https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/03/decentralized-social-ne... and take a look at the presentation: https://alexander.kirk.at/2018/11/08/wordpress-meetup-presen...
I have noticed friends reverting back to RSVP e-mails via Paperless Post Flyer. I'm still not sure if one person in this social group is not on Facebook, causing the change, but it has been a welcome adjustment. If Facebook Events can be replaced by an e-mail approach, I don't see why other products can't follow suit.
So like a rule to push it into your newsletter folder?
For a long time I held onto my account, trying to mute anything part of SJW or communist discourse, but to no avail. Twitter shows you stuff you didn't sign up for anyway, I suppose to maximise engagement.