Roger McNamee: “Facebook Is Terrible for America”

I would love to see Facebook, Twitter, and (much harder but maybe even) YouTube replaced by distributed systems, so they would be more like email, RSS, or the web. You would have many different options for hosts, including self-hosting, and you would subscribe to the feeds you cared about that would be passed around via an open protocol.

You would get the "addresses" of other participants the way you get their email addresses today, and various directories would probably spring up to allow you to put your address on a list of people willing to be found. Your own apps would format your content for the feed and draw from the various feeds to construct your "timelines".

I think that for Facebook and Twitter, the value due to network effects is far more important than the benefits that result from centralization. Everyone wants to go where everyone else is more than they want whatever specific features might require centralization.

> McNamee is particularly outraged by the ease with which a New Zealand terrorist used social media to broadcast his shooting attack on a mosque on March 15. As a result, he says, there may need to be a kill switch to shut down social media in an emergency.

This sounds like moral panic, and not a well thought out argument. I absolutely agree any live streaming of such a despicable event should be targeted for take-down as quick as possible. And we could impose fines, for a lack of serious immediate response.

But really a kill switch? Twitter/facebook/youtube are down for the next hour because there is some objectionable content we don't want you to see...

I mean just the Streissand effect on its own could actually make it that more people go and then watch the video, on some unknown site, which isn't set up/or inclined to remove the video.

Its really easy to not have a Facebook account, especially now that most realize how horrible it is for society.

I use Facebook. I can't help myself, it lets me see what people are up to, especially those that live far away.

But it's a swamp of virtue-signalling, one-upmanship, and best-foot-forward deceptions. It's like high school all over again, except more so.

I wish it weren't available.