Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
What Reddit and similar sites bring to the table is a single pool of authenticated users. Once a user is logged into Reddit, posting on different subreddits is frictionless. Even with oauth and the like, it is hard to replicate that with a distributed set of sites.
1. Easy sharing: Subreddits, which are an easy location to share interesting information about a common topic. Creating your own website is an order of magnitude harder, especially if you want to allow anyone on the internet to post to it
2. Discoverability: You can easily discover subreddits information related to your interests. Reddit's ability to aggregate the various information sources and present options that users find interesting is the biggest reason lurkers&voters (90% of it's users) keep returning.
Much of this is true on Reddit too, except mods seeing your IP address, but most of the important info is consistently in the subreddit sidebar.
But can your grandmother do this ... or just the common person?
- Self-hosted mostly-static sites
- Open protocol
- Own domain
- Own site is portal for aggregated views
- Extensions (Install events, chat, ...)
- Rust (minimal RAM)...newsgroups...
> and anyone can start one and run it as they please.
Users would be free to explore a huge network while admins and creators would truly own their own little domain.
The names are rather unique, mostly made out of a string of personal names like "Watson, Sherlock & Lestrade Accountants LLC" or of geographical locations "Central Dartmoor Accounting LLC". Such accounting companies are small businesses with around 5-10 employees and mostly local clients. Their real world competition is the other handful of local accounting companies in the rural areas they are in. However, with few exceptions, I had to go to page 3 or even 4 on Google to find the companies' own website because page 1 and 2 were cluttered with ads for other accountants or accounting applications, and, to my surprise, for different SEO optimized collections of company data on accountants.
I used to think that it was just hotel and restaurant websites you have to find on page 3 buried below Bookings, Tripadvisor, Expedia and the like. But even something as mundane as accountants now have to fight SEO websites to get some attention.
Maybe Usenet would be more of a headache than it's worth, but it seems perfect for what you're describing.
Usenet still exists. Outside very small pools, it's dead, or a spam wasteland.
Peter da Silva, an early heavy user (the first and fourth most prolific poster one month in the late 1980s / early 1990s, according to a reply he made to me at G+), created, and still runs, Usenet II. Which is also a wasteland.
The client-independence is a benefit only up to a certain degree. Consistent characterset (8-bit ASCII largely), no binaries / multimedia (uuencoded excepted), and consistent forms of address and reply (mostly), kept things sane.
But even between the tin/rtin and emacs newsreader camp, quoting styles differed. I don't recall if it was @gumby or others (and I'm positive one case was someone else, involved in xemacs development), but even one emacs-variant style of reply-quoting turned disruptive when trying to nest multiple levels deep.
("Doc, it hurts when I do this." "Don't do that then.")
These aren't insurmountable obstacles. But they are obstacles to be mounted. On which deciding is likely the hardest part.
It's also very slow. And the posting format is very hard to follow sometimes, especially when you get people that don't do hard line breaks (or the other way around, depending on the program you're using) or have funny ideas about quoting.
Also, the lack of moderation seems to create a very wild-west style of conversation, where apparently rational people can start spewing really hardcore invective at the drop of a hat.
Edit: I suspect something like this probably existed. It seems straightforward and obvious enough that I'd bet it did exist, but couldn't get much usage in a world where spam wasn't quite as bad, numbers of users were smaller, and people were already shifting to HTML based platforms.
I'd argue its a usenet/irc hybrid.
Isn't this basically what Disqus was trying to do? There were a lot of these. I think moderation ended up being a huge problem that none solved.
> Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content
I've had the opposite experience. I only started browsing reddit after advertisers forced them to purge the most toxic users/content from the site. I think it's reddit's right to do either -- purge or not purge -- but I'm not interested in the old reddit.
The redesign is bad, but I'm not really a power user, so it's not a deal-breaker for me. You can always just use old.reddit.com anyway, right?
Reddit, as a site, is built around you having to subscribe to things to see it on your front page.
Are you saying that opinions you disagree with (toxic) merely existing invisibly prevents you from using a platform? Because if that's not the case you were never forced to interact with those subs unless you explicitly sought them out. The one exception would be /r/all, but again the default is your "home" page so you'd never see that content.
The locus has shifted, though. Early Reddit was decidely techy, it's now exceedingly popular/memey. There were and are many cesspits. As well as numerous dead or stagnent fora, several of which I can lay claim to myself.
I don't think so. As far as I can tell, Disqus is not decentralized at all. It's basically the same as Facebook comments but from a different company.
How would this be prevented in a decentralized system? Spammers would join the network, create thousands of bots, and upvote all their spam.
The upvote system is also basically useless on reddit these days, the site is way too big to enforce any kind of etiquette and people gladly upvote empty one-line quips while they'll bury anybody expressing any form of vaguely dissenting opinion. It's frankly toxic.
At least good old blog spam is easy to identify and ignore.
There are a few topics I care about where you have both big subreddits and also dedicated "old school" forums on third-party websites. The forums are always more interesting and in-depth in my experience, when the subreddits are just a litany of karma-whoring picture posts and low effort so-called "memes".
(Disclosure: I’m the creator of Aether, happy to answer any questions)
That does cover much of the market... but leaves out Linux, MacOS, and mobile.
Even HN has just the right balance that makes this place have some of the best threads on the internet.
I think the answer has to do with the user's voice and a sense of ownership:
1. Even if spam accounts sign up, their comments and posts rarely get to the top of the algorithm because user's have a voice in the matter (downvote low quality content, and upvote other higher quality content).
2. There is a sense of ownership on the part of the mods... people who are generally passionate about the area of interest in which they moderate. There have been a number of cases over the years where moderators were acting in bad faith and the users have voiced their concerns to the Admins, who frequently remove mods or even whole subs that are operating against the benefit of the community.
Also if you look at r/all or r/popular right now it’s only images. I remember a time where it was mostly text.
I hate to be that guy, but it did become worse and worse.
Based purely on anecdotal evidence, I would say that Reddit would be far better off if it relegated "moderators" to "janitors" to remove illegal content, and auditing who is removing what regularly, and leaving the "quality" and discoverability of the legal content to be derived from the upvote/downvote system they first relied on.
It's a link aggregator based on ActivityPub, the federation protocol used by Mastodon and company.
I am closing to a 1.0 release, at which point I want it to be completely integrated in the global ActivityPub network and would be interactable with from most of the other platforms. (Basically if you have another valid fediverse account, you will be able to post/interact with littr instances)
There are also several other projects in various states of compatibility and featurefullness that are working on the same idea. On the top of my head there's:
- Prismo: https://prismo.xyz/
- Lemmy: https://dev.lemmy.ml/
I look at mastodon instances and any non-moderated ones is white-supremacist shit.
I'm not sure if the average consumer wants to see that.
Of course, it's still smaller than Twitter for example so we'll see how it goes when it grows larger, but right now it's working, in my opinion.
https://memberapp.github.io/#topic?type=all&start=0&limit=25...
I've opened a new thread for discussion if you have any questions on it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21551843
The code looks clean and is based on the old Reddit code and UI.
https://www.talkyard.io (I'm developing it) — and if you scroll down, you'll notice it adds some improvements on HackerNews and Reddit:
Also one site meant it is easily affected by big power.
---
I've specced out a decentralized reddit alternative a little bit, but have too many side projects. Someone please take this and build it. Let me know if you try, would love to spectate and advise on development.
The key is there shouldn't be a globally consistent front page. Sorting should be done on an individual basis. Upvotes boost signal signal to peers and downvotes squelch. By propagating content scores transitively through the network proportionally to trust scores, users can moderate their own feeds by voting and managing their friend list.
Users have a peer list, containing a list of server/users on it. Each peer has a user-managed 'trust weighting'. Each user has a list of "good content" (ideally hash identified for content addressability), with each item having a score based on that user's votes and votes from peers, weighted by that users trust in that peer.
Periodically, your server contacts all of your peers, and asks them for their good content list. The scores from peers are multiplied by your own trust weight for that peer, and you build a personal "good content" list that merges the lists from each of your peers together (and drops insufficient scores).
You are presented with a score-descending-sorted page of content. Whenever you upvote something, it increases your score weight for that content as well as the trust weight for each peer who sent you the recommendation, and vice versa for downvotes. Votes are transmitted to peers as a crypto signature of the content hash, but when retransmitted to peer-of-peer, they only see the intermediary's aggregated and trust weighted merged scores.
The specifics of the algorithms on how you calculate and adjust weights can be configurable by each individual user, the protocol only cares that peers are able to produce some kind of score list.
Dividing content into topics is a bit trickier, could just label content with tags. I think it may be preferable for each user to have multiple topic focused 'personalities' that are basically distinct user accounts with unique peer lists and votes. In that way, I could follow Dave-gardening without having to follow Dave-sports.
For this example I'm using 1 user per server for simplicity, though not required. All users could be on same server, which is probably best for MVP to avoid implementing p2p networking stuff until validated.
Ex.
Alice follows Bob with weight of 0.5, Dave with 0.1
Bob scores content A as 0.8, B as 0.2
Dave scored content A as 0.4, B as 0.9
Alice downloads both lists.
Alice score content A as avg(0.8 * 0.5, 0.4 * 0.1) = 0.22
Alice scores content B as avg(0.2 * 0.5, 0.9 * 0.1) = 0.095
Content A gets sorted higher than B.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21011645 (previous discussion)
* Netflix here starts at $2.8 for the cheapest (mobile only, single screen) plan and has its highest plan (4K, four screens) at $11.2 a month. Netflix is considered so expensive that account sharing among a few people is quite common.
* Amazon Prime (with two day shipping plus Prime Video and Prime Music) costs about $14 a year.
* A print newspaper subscription of any major national newspaper would cost about $2.8 or even a lot lesser per month.
* An Audible subscription (one free credit a month) costs $2.8 a month, with lower prices on audiobooks and discounts on them.
* Some premium news publications cost about $30-$45 a year.
I'm not saying that this is similar to Netflix or Amazon or a national newspaper, but it's more about how the more popular as well as niche/premium services have priced themselves and how people perceive value. Comparatively, this $12.99/month or $100/year social network focused on news seems like it's meant for some sections of first world inhabitants. It could've probably done better with a currency adjusted or purchasing power parity specific rate. For example, Cloudflare WARP+ costs about $0.97 a month (compared to $4.99 a month in the US).
Having talked about the pricing, the UI doesn't look great either. I saw a list of groups to choose from and the page looked like it was built more than a decade ago. It ought to look like a modern website (with more bells and whistles) if it wants to command more than premium rates. Even Facebook's site, which I think looks outdated, cluttered and ugly, looks better in comparison.
The membership fees almost pay for themselves just in preventing me from going into the store and impulse buying something on a shelf once a month.
As far as Amazon Prime, I have to believe the price of shipping is built into the products, and the membership is for other psychological and behavior control reasons.
Is part of this social network price the same thing. A cost to make it exclusive, acts as a bit of a spam filter. Then after having sunk money into it, you feel the need to make it worthwhile. I never think "ive been watching too much prime I better get my value out of netflix this month" but a communication tool might be different.
Based on observing Prime members I feel most people would be much better off without the subscription.
[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2018-19_Report
You MUST have localized pricing for these types of apps. We're going to cut our pricing for India, and basically all developing nations.
Students too... if you have a university email we'll give you a discount on top of your normal region-specific discounts.
It's a fools errand otherwise. These users will just NOT convert.
That's the cost to jump the waitlist, not the ongoing price for what will be (he hopes) the majority of users. Back when Facebook was Ivy-league only, there were TONS of students I knew who would have paid to get access. As it gets less exclusive the price will come down or become free
That's fairly country-dependant - I actually sent some feedback to Cloudflare expressing my disappointment with their pricing - it's currently 5.30 USD in my country with 20% lower purchasing power than the USA.
EDIT: I logged out and back in and it looks like it let me in without paying...
And they need volume to make it work. So this pricing seems like a big mistake to me.
Yeah, not a big fan of this. You could buy very nice cloud hosting for $12.99 a month, and run your own instance of a federated social network like Mastodon.
Google+, now's your time to shine!
How can he expect to create a platform of honest people if he is dishonest from the point of account creation?
This is not the way to do it.
If they were just to give accounts out free immediately they would be inundated and the servers might not be able to cope.
This allows them to grow the service organically with paying subscribers supporting the "freeloaders".
Hope that clears it up.
Perfect great!
Imagine it’s intentional and a pretty effective way of doing business
Now lets just critique why it isn’t a luxury brand
I can easily afford this product myself but I don’t want to pay for a social network if a portion of my friends/contacts are priced out.
I think if someone were to make facebook in it's first ~2 years and keep it very basic it we would be good to go. The only features you need are: a profile picture, a wall, chat, and events.
In other words - a photo of yourself, a way of publicly messaging, a way of privately messaging, and a way to coordinate social events.
What else do you need for a 'social network?'
I would pay $1/mo for that. The simpler the better.
Text only twitter would be interesting since you can curate your own slice of the community pretty easily, as a bonus it'd be fast.
I found Twitter and Facebook to be frustratingly unusable after they removed their chronological feeds in favor of feeds that prioritize ads and engagement.
Critical mass is obviously the barrier to building something like this but I’m inclined to agree that charging $1/month and $10 a year should be able to turn a healthy profit.
I do kind of wonder if the public is even aware of the problem, though. Anyone I’ve spoken to outside the industry seems to genuinely believe that folks with different opinions to them are stupid (rather than sorted into a different branch of Facebook/Google’s great graph of knowledge for their daily programming).
Mass adoption. The user base is the valuable aspect, everything else can be easily recreated.
Didn't WhatsApp used to be $1 a year before Facebook bought them and it was a very successful pricing model?
$1 a year for a website is very feasible for both parties assuming it's some Western society.
But Twitter's use case is different - it is nice to have a place to check for quick updates from federal governments to our local post office and everyone in between, including thought leaders and such.
What is the solution?
A system that using a unique ID I can contact anyone else in the world, the two methods are voice or message. :)
Dalton Caldwell currently chief of admissions at YC, tried exactly this at App.net a couple of years ago.
It's a side project of mine at the moment, so it's quite basic, but I'd love it if you checked it out.
Also, many of today's recent non-FB social network successes (Whatsapp, etc) were launched before the general perception of social networking, and internet services in general, became increasingly skeptical. Outside of tech, or people with very narrow interest verticals not served by mainstream social networks, I don't know anyone who is looking for yet another generic social network.
Curiously, if true, this plays both the the detriment and benefit of established social networks: their primary, most profitable users are not likely to flee, but they are also likely to be less engaged.
At this point, I'd like to preserve that network of friends independent of facebook and most of those folks feel similarly. In that sense, there is at least some demand for a social network that isn't evil.
For these "greenfield" users, there is no need to convince their friends to leave their existing social media platform, because there is none.
Every day, middle schoolers get smartphones for the first time, and the majority of them probably aren't going to make Facebook accounts, but rather Instagram/Snapchat/TikTok, etc.
Right — people don't go actively seeking a generic alternative to something they already have. They do although, hear about new services that do something different. Similar to TikTok, or Instagram, it will hit on a niche interest and expand from there. The current market leaders will ignore it long enough (opportunity not big enough) that by the time they see it as a threat, it's too late.
I don't think WT:Social is doing that right now though, so not sure what their plan is to combat what you're talking about.
There is zero chance this policy survives having a million+ users intact.
I have my doubts that'll work for a social network. Good luck to them, but I'll have probably forgotten I signed up by the time they next send me an email.
Side note you seem to be able to bypass the signup queue by visiting your own friend share link.
This wiki model is not the solution.
Watching WikiTribune flounder in its early days left me feeling disillusioned. It quickly began to seem like a project lacking clear product vision (or else a team that could execute on such a vision). I eventually gave up waiting for the service to become useful as a daily news source and wrote it off.
Glancing at WikiTribune now, it seems like wt.social is a pivot for the service (https://www.wikitribune.com/wt/news/article/101868/). I hope it turns out well, because I strongly believe that the service Jimmy Wales initially described as WikiTribune is a good idea and something the internet needs. But, I think I'll wait on the sidelines this time around before getting too invested in the idea.
I would say it's the most important resource on the internet, beyond actual infrastructure like DNS.
> Watching WikiTribune flounder in its early days left me feeling disillusioned. It quickly began to seem like a project lacking clear product vision (or else a team that could execute on such a vision). I eventually gave up waiting for the service to become useful as a daily news source and wrote it off.
Me too - I donated in total about £200 since WikiTribune launched, and hoped with Jimmy Wales behind it that it could really take off. I like this pivot though, and believe the whole community-sourced content idea is better suited to a social media type site rather than a heavily hacked WordPress blog.
Major stories broken down to factual info and direct quotes with each item a tile with the source indicated a link to their version of the story.
I could catch up on a dozen major stories in minutes and track them as updates were pulled in as top level tiles with the new information and again link out to the source.
Clean, accessible, felt very unbiased without any spin just data and events as reported, but no commercial value so floundered.
well, it was bought out by Sinclair in 2015 and that's about as biased as shadow owners can be. The original incarnation was incredible.
I also think social + news will just lead to you getting stuck in a bubble of news content your social group agrees with.
When did social networks become epicenters for sharing and arguing news and politics? Someone make a paid social network that forbids news and politics and you'll have my attention.
If I were serious about building some kind of social network at this point and thought it would need a revenue stream to be sustainable, I'd try to:
- find not just a niche but functionality that differentiates it from existing services in some way (if your service can be described as "Facebook for X," you've already lost, because the Facebook for all values of X already exists and is called "Facebook")
- build on open protocols, IndieWeb style (including ActivityPub, although the first point suggests the service better not be "Mastodon for X," either)
- if it makes sense, have a free tier that gives people some clue what they're signing up for, although not so much that it discourages them from actually, you know, signing up
- charge a low enough rate that signing up doesn't feel like a huge commitment: say, $2 a month or $16 a year
I'm surprised nobody has tried the low-cost route yet. Yes, I get it, those rates aren't going to be bringing you VC money and bazillion-dollar unicorn growth, but a relatively small number of paying users could create a sustainable, even profitable, small business for a few employees.
Which one is actually free? You're paying by sharing your life with them to sell for other purposes. Your purchases, search history, private conversations, even bedroom talk are all ongoing amortized payments for that puppy.
You could rent the box or buy outright with money to develop paid for by a premium on the box or by the rent wherein even a modest rent would outstrip the cost of buying like a cable box.
What we need is a cloud platform that allows people to deploy code to computers on their home network, or any cloud, or any data center... one that encourages and assists with cloud native design and aims to reduce load rather than hope you architect incorrectly and happily charge for the waste.
Perhaps I’m being naive, but it feels like a tooling problem, not a social or political or economic one. Anyways, I’ve quit my job at Stripe and just finished YCS19 with the goal of closing the gap between Facebook/Mastadon, Medium/yourBlog, Minecraft.com and a docker image...
And you’re totally correct about renting home server “boxes” too - except most house holds already have plenty of compute and connectivity - it’s just that installing / managing server software is completely out of reach to most people (and some developers!). It doesn’t need to be grandmas running router software - just the family nerd able to create on the internet again - and reliable enough software you’d actually invite grandma to signup!
Here's the twist: the company (presumably a non-profit or social purpose corp) would also offer the ability to buy your box, at which point they mail it to you; when you plug it in, your existing data is copied to it and you begin to self-host instead.
This makes it easy to sign up for and try out, while also offering a path toward self-hosting, once you decide you like it and don't want to keep paying the monthly fee.
This is something that the SoLiD (Social Linked Data) initiative, based on web and linked-data standards, is expressly built to support; your "box" would implement what the initiative calls a Personal Online Datastore, or POD. Though "federated" third-party hosting of such datastores is also allowed for, of course.
My thoughts at the time, which I said "EDIT ADD Had a quick look for `related` interests and see that he is CIO of Everipedia, which is decentralizing encyclopedia writing from an article in March: https://www.wired.com/story/larry-sanger-declaration-of-digi.... But I'd not cry foul even if they did produce their own decentralised social media platform; Kinda hope they do actually. Competition does have its upsides."
The article says that it's not free and there's membership fee. I'm not against that, but it doesn't say that anywhere on the front page. Presumably they tell you that after you've submitted the form containing your personal information. Kind of shady.
Facebook is popular because it is free, it is easy, it is convenient. Old people, kids, a large proportion of the population has no understanding of how they get all this for free. And most of them don't care. They interact with ads just like it's any other content in their feed. They are happy they get something with so many features without having to pay for it.
Social networks that advertise privacy or no ads have limited appeal because the only group that really cares about this is (maybe) teenagers, and younger adults who are in touch with privacy politics.
- https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1192160194693718017
- https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1192635476726947840
Who will determine what a bad actor is and what criteria will be used. We have already seen the effect of people banned from sites for political and religious views, so do we really need another site that will just do the same?
If you are OK with banning Nazis from a platform, then you’ve accepted the premise that certain bad actors should be removed, and now you’re in a debate about where the line should be drawn.
> We will foster an environment where bad actors are removed because it is right, not because it suddenly affects our bottom-line.
But what constitutes a bad actor?
I wonder if they'll refund fees paid.
I might try it, if they accept Bitcoin. Which I doubt they do. But I don't even see a payment link at https://wt.social/
Maybe you must try creating an account first.
Now I will log out and probably never think to log back in again.
(I know this might sound like I'm shallowly dismissing it, but this is just my honest experience as a random casual internet person. I hope they can make this more appealing and succeed, especially since I support any attempt at toppling proprietary monopolies).
Just mentioning for curiosity's sake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(Wikimedia_Fo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/S...
I have serious doubts of this particular endeavor's success with statements like these:
"The business model of social-media companies, of pure advertising, is problematic," Wales told the publication.
"It turns out the huge winner is low-quality content," he added.
Merit or not, the whole "if it's free you're the product" thinking hasn't really sunk in with people outside of heavy tech.
So while this might make sense to you and me, I can see 13USD being a tough sell for the average user. Which is a deathblow to something that inherently requires critical momentum.
I can/want to host my own data.
> We will empower you to make your own choices about what content you are served
I decide myself what sites I visit. Although in recent years I mostly use HN for discovery.
There is only one problem though: Web authorization/id. When I publish family photos I don't want the whole world to see, only our relatives. I've setup basic HTTP auth and sent out username+password to all relatives.
That however doesn't scale! And it's impractical. What we need is a public/private key that is generated by the browser, and which can be shared between many devices. You can have many keys, one for work, one for personal business, another one for gaming or what not, as many identities/keys as you want.
When you visit a web page that wants to know your identity, like any websites that right now asks for a username/password. You get a dialog asking if you want to identify on that website, and what meta-data the website request and what you info you want to give it. Kinda like installing an app on Android or iPhone where you need to confirm the app permissions. Upon accepting the identify request, you pick an appropriate ID, then your browser sends the public key to the web server, and answers a challenge to make sure you are the owner of that ID. No more username/passwords to remember.
As for me who is a content hoster, I simply chose from a GUI, depending on what server/app i'm using, which group or individual id/public key I want to give access. If an unknown id/key authenticates, depending on what server/app I'm using, I get a notification, asking me to add that ID/key to contacts or what not. Kinda like with social messenger apps.
At this day and age, we need something better then usernames and passwords!
Bitcoin maybe?
Join the subwiki called "Riffing" if you're into MST3K or Rifftrax. :)
So you are right, if Reddit is so central to our lives, why do we have such a hard time taking it down? Is it because we are so used to having it there that it's just not something we can imagine not having?
No. I know a lot of us want to take it down. But the good thing about reddit is that it can be taken down. That's why it is one of the most interesting internet communities. It doesn't really have a "community" in the true sense of the word. But in reality, it has communities. And it doesn't matter how big or small those communities are; that's how the site functions. Reddit can be taken down and Reddit will be back with a new identity and a new identity will be created. We don't have to worry about it.
So we have a choice.
[20] - tpo.com
[10] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Operator
I feel that one way to solve both the ownership over data problems and minimize server costs is to use some sort of P2P system where all posts, images, videos, etc are hosted locally. This could be through a browser extension when on a computer, within local storage on mobile apps, etc.
When a user pulls up their feed, it would be directly pulling posts from the locally hosted accounts of those they follow, similar to torrenting. With the bulk of data center costs offloaded to P2P, the remaining server costs could run on donations, similar to how Wikipedia does now.
I'm not sure if a social network like this currently exists, or if I'm missing some potential problems with the concept. Thoughts?
1. Obviously almost nobody is going to be prepared to pay that, and
2. He wouldn't be talking about it not making a profit and having bare-bones staff if every one of a predicted 50-500 million users was going to paying that amount, just to run a social network, because he'd need an army of staff just shoveling money of the window to avoid making a profit on those figures.
So it must be that it's donation based, but then again how does a monthly donation to jump a waiting list work? Do you go outside and rejoin the queue if you stop donating?
The article is all very confused, and obviously the site itself doesn't help matters.
It's not always fair, and certainly does not always bring the best content to light, but it's a lot better than a purely level playing field of equals, where a fool's opinion is weighted exactly against that of a great philosopher.
Charging for access is problematic, however. People have been trained to expect free stuff, and unfortunately it's not clear the value proposition of Wales' offering. To avoid seeing ads? To have vastly better content? To be a superior UX? He has a pretty tough row to hoe.
Maybe not as high as Netflix, because there would be no need for such heavy bandwidth use, but definitely yearly/monthly subscriptions.
I don't use social media myself but I hear from family members and friends how fun it is to connect with far away relatives and of course organize and attend various social groups.
But I'm skeptical as to whether wt.social will work with the big players still out there serving a majority of users.
"As long as there will be men there will be those that are wicked. As long as the good man restrains his behavior he will always lose to the wicked man. "... this is not an exact quote. Just paraphrasing.
This is why all these strategies will fail in regards to Facebook.
They just flat out play dirty... VERY dirty.
The reason why bought Whatsapp is that they were paying users directly to spy on their phones and found that Whatsapp had a massive user adoption.
Unless you're prepared to go evil there's no way to win against this.
This... from the Wikipedia guy? Oh boy, I'm not convinced.
First I've heard of this, and there's no pricing (or really any) information on the website. Anyone have experience?
>It costs $12.99 a month or $100 a year in the US, or €12 a month or €90 a year in Europe. It's £10 and £80 in the UK.
> He doesn't expect the social network to be profitable
I'd expect it to be more profitable than facebook at this price
[1]https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-fac...
But maybe I should sign up anyway, just to help it along...
If I want to share news, I do it via group chat. I think this is common.
For those who want social news in their particular ideological bubble, there's reddit. For those who want a news reader, there are many news apps. And for those who want to interact with strangers, there's Twitter.
I'd love to support this, but I just can't think of a use-case for my life.
Why would I want to use this?
So, there's one use case.
And for that reason the "quietly launched" thing here kinds of defeats the point of any Facebook rival for me.
Reddit is a big social network with many specialized groups.
The (sparse) descriptions of wt.social sound more like a variant of Reddit than anything else.
But the presentation is horrible.
I would much rather pay for online services like email, news and content than to sell info about myself through ads to private companies.
Useful services: Email Protonmail,fastmail
Online video Peertube
Paying for social media.
Paying for newspapers online, this is so they do not have to sell their platform and independence to ads.
> https://createsub/?url=/wt/emacs/&failed=This%20SubWiki%20al....
At scale, nowhere near $12.99 / month is needed.
When you make it expensive, otoh, it feels exclusive. After some reputation is built you can somewhat lower the price and perhaps many people are thrilled that they can join a very exclusive club.
whether this works out remains to be seen. success in this area is hardly likely but I doubt pricing is the determining factor.
I don't need to think "Is my cousins boyfriend on Facebook?" you just know they are.
Without that assurance, you'll end up with two invites for a function, and that is more work for little gain.
"I'm a mog - half man, half dog. I'm my own best friend."
What I really want is the early internet back again. I want some blogs to read, that are witty, intelligent and erudite. I want a feed reader that will let me know when they update. I want a news source that is likewise witty, erudite, intelligent and sceptical (the foremost asset of any journalist should be scepticism).
I think I'll just go and find a bunch of blogs to follow. And start my own again. F$ck Facebook.
https://wt.social/recentchanges
Mostly nothing interesting, people testing the system out. The whole site feels like a post-dotcom-boom experience... a slightly styled Craigslist.
The endless unresearched opinion on Facebook drives me mad. But unless you only want to have friends who are rich enough to agree with you, this is dead in the water.
The people who enjoy fake news won't sign up for this. They'll stick with a network where they have "freedom of speech". They won't vanish, and they won't get any better educated. It's not as if you can make the urge to spread fake news vanish. Your racist cousin still exists, and he's still eagerly seeking out and re-posting obviously fake stories from outside what he dubs the "mainstream media" -- he won't suddenly come to his senses, and he certainly won't pay for the privilege.
I think a better approach, if you want to use social media at all, is to tell people "I won't be friends with people who believe hateful BS." That's the only thing that might help: force them to choose between their friends and their desire to reinforce their group identity. Going to a different site might achieve that, but you don't need to spend money and you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Just use the existing tools.
> Since all content on the platform can be edited or deleted by other users, he believes there's a good incentive for good behavior by users.
Minimum salary where I live is about 400usd/mo, and it's asking me for 12usd/mo. I predict not that many people from my country will join any time soon.
Yeah, not for me. Maybe journalists or news professionals can be interested, but it better has to bring value.
I don't know anyone who says: I want a social media company to help combat the fake news I see.
Having more flexibility on who sees what, more privacy in group conversations, ways to 'downvote' things not just 'like/love' (lop sided incentives), etc... those are things I've wanted from FB/Twitter/Instagram and I've heard other people want.
It seems he is solving a problem no one wants a solution for. For all the media hype, I'm personally not convinced social media companies should be the arbitrators of what is fake news or not. I'll give Jimmy the benefit of doubt that his version of censorship will be the best, he has proven it with wikipedia. But I'm not sure censorship, even good ones, are what we need.
For those who aren't anti-censorship, then you get the disagreement on what type of censorship we should focus on. In the US, it seems one side favors censoring the far left (as has happened historically with things like communism) and others choose censoring the far right as the priority (a more modern approach). I dislike both sides (extremes tend to be unhealthy) but as a free speech advocate, I want them to have their platform, as twisted and unhealthy as it is. The strength of good ideas should be such that they don't fear bad ones.
How much does facebook make per user per month?
Why would I pay $13/month for news I can get for free without useless "social" features and data collection?
What I won't pay for is multiple subscriptions to several prominent newspapers I'm interested in, that are linked everywhere, especially here. If WT:Social can provide content from all the biggest mastheads with one convenient subscription, I'm in.
What he’s trying to do is admirable but doesn’t make a lot of sense.
(And yes, I realize that it’s partly the censorship here that steers people away from politics and keeps it social, but I don’t think that’s all of it)
I don’t see why a social network should also build in first class features for sharing and commenting on news. What’s the old adage about discussing politics and religion? Why should it even be POSSIBLE for me to argue with some nazi I don’t know in the comments section of an article my grandma shared with my uncle? Seriously, wtf?
If you want a site purpose-built for discussing news as it goes viral, Reddit is fine for that.
Interesting things about Wechat’s feed:
- It’s not what you see when you open the app. Instead, the app opens to your messages. This is huge.
- It’s strictly chronological. Yep.
- Each time I open it, the 5th post is always an ad, and it’s labeled as such.
- It’s trivially easy to restrict most people from seeing only the last week, or month, or six months of your posts. People you’re not friends with can’t see your posts BY DEFAULT.
- When your friends post, you can only see comments and likes from your own friends. (it's easier to notice unexpected connections, which could be an upside or a downside depending on your situation)
- If you want to re-share something, there’s no button for that: you have to open the page, copy the link, and post it again. This is obviously intended to make the censors’ jobs easier, but adding friction also cuts down on low effort sharing.
How it’s otherwise different from Facebook:
- There’s no such thing as viral posts. Sure, the same link might get shared in thousands of private groups, but the discussion isn’t shared. I think this is a feature, not a bug. Again, there are plenty of websites specifically for discussing news with strangers as it goes viral.
- It’s mobile-first (basically, mobile only). You can’t see the feed on PC, so if you want to write an angry tirade about f-ing Yankees fans on your friend’s post, you’re gonna get sore thumbs. Again, adding friction means less trash makes it on the network.
- Everyone has it hooked up to payment, so splitting the bill at the end of dinner is trivial. There’s even a feature for sending a bill to a group with N people that splits it N ways and shows who has and hasn’t paid.
- (Probably some other stuff, but I basically stopped using Facebook 7 years ago when I moved to China, partly because my parents and old friends are on there sharing news stories I'd rather not know their stance on)
Even aside from the censorship, Wechat isn’t perfect — its interface hasn’t changed in the 7 years I’ve been using it, so stupid stuff like pinning contacts or putting groups in a separate tab or even goddamn EVENTS aren’t things you can do in the app.
But as a social network, it’s got most of the value while being way less problematic than Facebook.
Is anybody worrying how much Wikipedia pages are hiding researchers results ?
Oh, please. I would rather use good ol' VK before these CIA books
Got an example you'd like to cite? Tried searching on my own, couldn't find anything off hand.
1. It won't happen.
2. More importantly: imagine it happens. Who would actually make a switch?
I mean, really, who chooses to use FB, because he likes FB? I don't think I know a single example. For the last year or so it even (finally!) became trendy among non-techy people to hate FB, but so what? People stay because their social circles stay. In fact, it's been quite a while since I don't actually feel pressured to use FB by induviduals, but rather the stuff like climbing club using FB as a platform to announce events and gather groups to go camping and stuff.
WT:Social might become of use as a very niche social network for news, but no way it can be seriously viewed as FB's rival. And even if they could, they are fighting for the yesterday's market, meanwhile Facebook builds the future, where their helpless users will willingly spend their lives in Oculus helmets socializing with their FB "friends" on VR beaches. Or whatever.
I could go on forever but the point is it doesn't even get the basics right. If you're interested in how one builds a successful social network check Nikita's tweets (sold TBH to Facebook 2 years ago for $100M) https://twitter.com/nikitabier
Facebook was for college students, not teens.
But otherwise, yeah, if the plan is to capture a significant audience, this is a horrible attempt wrt to UI and messaging.