Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable
twitter.com
twitter.com
I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the dominant one: the Internet would bring a "democratization of information" where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world. Really cool new services came online frequently. I still remember the first time I used Google, and at the time I was blown away by how good it was ("like magic!" I said) because the results were so much better than other search engines of the time.
But these days, the older I get the more and more I feel like tech is having a negative impact on both society at large and me personally. In the 90s we all thought the Internet would lead to a decentralization of power, but literally the exact opposite happened. Sure, telcos sucked, but there were tons of them spread across all corners of the globe. Now there is 1 single megacorp that a sizable portion of humanity depends on for phone/text communication.
It just makes me sad. Sure, there are pluses to tech I'm ignoring here, but I just think that how reality turned out so 180 from the expectations of the late 90s is what really hurts.
China's system seems terrible. The whole of Africa seems like a corrupt system. The EU seems mostly woke, and I'm not sure I particularly want that. Canada seems to have bought a first class ticket on the Progressivist crazy train from what I've been hearing. What's left? Not much, by the looks of it. Singapore, maybe?
Can you please elaborate more on that? I thought US is going more woke and France in the EU is pushing back on wokeism.
Senators and other politicians would have bbq on Saturday at each other’s place. It appears that this no longer happens.
We generally consider transparency in politics a good thing, especially because it may reduce corruption. But it comes with significant downsides. Only very resilient personalities are able to ignore the psychopathic monkey cesspool that is the political Twitter. The rest will submit to Moloch.
(Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch" are a good read; I was lucky enough to meet the author two days ago at a meetup in Prague.)
Then don't visit twitter and post on an obscure nntp newsgroup instead.
Maybe it is a bad idea and a NNTP newsgroup would be better. Should be tried.
Don't go for the 15$ bare-bones options. Buy one of the 50-100$ kits so you have at least some basic antennas and necessary cables.
Those "sheep" (i.e. people who aren't crypto-nerds) are the people I mainly want to communicate with.
> Modern tech has also brought us strong open source tools. We have stronger encryption in any linux distro than any army had in the 90s. We have communication pathways (Tor) that defeat censorship. I can send an email today, encrypted then sent via Tor, that no government can censor, read or even detect that I have sent.
And those pathways are almost never used, except by people who have an unusual interest in the pathways themselves and people who want to use them to do ignoble and illegal things.
Also, those technologies aren't as powerful as you think they are. Any major government that cares to detect and block them can, and if they want to find out what you sent they can always hack your endpoint or beat you until you tell them. China is the proof of concept for that.
I used signal this morning to talk to a team of 100+ people on a big project. I sent an encrypted email to my parents last night. A month ago I used Tor to bypass a hotel's silly DNS block on "Torrentfreak.com". My laptop is running a linux distro that I downloaded as a torrent. These are all everyday non-cryptonerd activities that leverage very powerful security products.
If you were looking for everyday things lots of people do that make use of powerful security technology, Whatsapp's e2e encryption or https would be much better examples I guess; people actually use these en masse and can do so all by themselves, without support or nagging by experienced hardcore nerds.
When it comes to all the toxic things that social media can bring, I think we're slowly learning about them as a society, and maybe that's a good thing? Maybe we can develop healthier forms of social media.
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me, but I think reddit is basically the anti-twitter, and is a lot less toxic as a result. On twitter you have a one-to-many broadcast system where one person can have hundreds of thousands and even millions of followers that basically encourages flamewars, short inflammatory comments. On reddit, you can get high karma, but everyone basically has an equal shot at writing a popular post, and negative comments tend to get downvoted. Clearly, some patterns lead to more or less toxic and hateful interactions. We should study and learn from them, and use that knowledge to design better social media platforms.
Honestly you just described reddit, too, except of course for the follower count—but the point is that reddit doesn’t have to have that many participants in a discussion thread for it to reach a level of toxicity same as Twitter.
Sure, social media did make information more accessible, but the vision of the internet before Web 2.0 was that it’ll democratize information without the trade off that comes with social media today—because that trade off is exactly what we hated then about the status quo.
Sounds like "let's develop a healthier form of crack" to me.
I think OP's really onto something here.
Maybe something to reset the brain chemical state in such way that tolerance and addiction could not come up. It surely must be possible in some way.
He ended up finding a handful of papers scattered across the last decades where people had come to the same realisation, but nothing came of it. Now, it's very possible there was something wrong with the idea. He did synthesise the molecule and we both took it, but not for long enough to really assess - even in a Shulgin-like way - whether it was addictive. But he ended up suspecting that the reason nothing came of it is that a non-addictive drug is simply not profitable, and is dominated, in the game-theory sense, by addictive drugs which bring consistent and greater revenue streams.
Also, apropos of:
> reset the brain chemical state in such way that tolerance and addiction could not come up
You may want to look into ibogaine. It doesn't give you both the high and the 'resetting the brain' functions - it only does the latter - but it's a very interesting case in that it has a very successful track record in resetting addiction. Though research is hampered by the fact that its cardiotoxic properties have killed a bunch of people who didn't do proper ECGs etc to check for heart abnormalities before taking it.
By healthy I would mean physically non addictive and without any negative long term effects. If you used it right it would just give you euphoria, motivation, stimulation and potentially nootropic effects?
But how would something like work? It's the substance's ability to cause euphoria that makes it addictive. You cannot have one without the other. Addiction occurs when one loses the ability to regulate their dopamine-driven activity, causing something akin to an infinite loop. Adderall is basically legal meth, and it's easily the most abused medication in the US.
There's 2 addictions, physical and psychological. Psychological, could yes still happen of course even if you restored the balance of dopamine and other relevant chemicals, but in theory you could at least get rid of withdrawals if you were able to manipulate those chemicals. We don't have a way to do that, and may be we won't have, and maybe we'll invent something completely different first that would make something like this or drugs completely obsolete. But just in theory.
I highly recommend reading the Molecule of More, which does an incredible job of explaining the brain chemistry behind addiction in an accessible way.
It was just that people turned out to value less truth less, than being told they were right. You can fault the engineers who built this for it, but then you are faulting them for thinking too highly of people.
Now if I could just shake my HN addiction...
Not a terribly subtle bit of commentary itself, but it was a humorous reference to something most of us had experienced. In person, there are reactions to see. The other person/people's humanity is on direct display and most of us have at least some degree of innate empathy that keeps us from being a complete asshole all the time. And even those who don't mind (or relish) being an asshole have to worry about repercussions.
In contrast, if I read something I disagree with, it's a lot easier for me to just fire off a smartass reply without the effect that socialization has on me to consider how appropriate the comment is or what effects it might have. I'm just countering some words that I don't like with some other words I do like.
Large-scale social media just turns into the comment section for the entire internet.
My filter list consist basically of football and religious proselytism, two topics I never want to read about.
During the last world cup, or last euro cup or some event like that I had to filter about 10 groups, and the thing is, it works. I never get any football content in my feed any more.
Well, that's my argument against a communist society. It was designed only for perfectly altruistic people, and that's a kind of people I have never found anywhere. If we want something that actually works, we need something designed for the people that actually exist.
It's the same with the Internet. Once the spammers got the gist of it, it has been a constant struggle between spammers and anti-spam people. We have reached some form of equilibrium, but anytime a new person connects, it's a brand-new learning about avoiding potentially bad stuff. It can be very expensive learning.
All of this was possible before the internet.
Sure, and before the invention of the telephone and telegraph you could just write someone a letter, and before the invention of the printing press you could just hire a scribe. Before the automobile you could just ride a horse. Before the cotton gin, just put some slaves in a field. Nothing is new under the sun.
Having all of this information available at one's fingertips and having the ability to communicate and publish globally, and practically for free, has been revolutionary in and of itself.
Finally, I would argue that more, easily accessible information is not necessarily better information.
If you genuinely believe it was, i suppose you're just incredibly unaware of how gated information was before the internet.
The poster said "easily accessible". The wealth of knowledge and information i have at my fingertips today was before hidden behind public libraries I'd have to plan a trip to, in courses i would have to attend, in the brains of experts i would have to interview in person, i would generally have to dedicate years of my life in order to match what I can today learn in a matter of days just because of the difficult process of sorting through the information and finding what I'm looking for.
Sure, some online information may be “more accessible” but is it necessarily better information?
That entirely depends where you are. The big frontpage-able/default subreddits are strongly moderated (with at least some pressure on the mods to behave), but other subreddits have ended up as self-reinforcing cesspools, especially when moderators collude to ban any opposing viewpoint (as happens with r/conservative). And then you have the subreddits that were explicitly created for toxic purposes (e.g. T_D, c..ntown, fatpeoplehate, and a boatload of others listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...).
Of course, this completely depends on where you are on both Twitter and Reddit. There are bad and toxic parts of Reddit, and there are good and wholesome parts of twitter.
The one main difference though that's useful to compare between the two is that a post escaping the original audience, with the context collapse and everything else that brings, is a foundational feature of Twitter. It's a lot harder for that to happen on Reddit.
What general principles can we learn from HN that can be applied elsewhere? Does HN self-select its audience? No profit motive? Great moderation? (Thanks Dang!)
There are profit motives and Y Combinator is being transparent on this. From the FAQ [1]:
> Another kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or comments. They begin part-way down and fall steadily. Only one is on the front page at a time. The rest are listed at jobs.
>
> What's the relationship between YC and HN?
> Y Combinator owns and funds HN. The HN team is editorially independent.
> HN gives three features to YC: job ads (see above) and startup launches get placed on the front page, and YC founder names are displayed to other YC alumni in orange.
But HN seems incentivized to keep the level of quality high and to not interfere too much with content beyond moderation, or people would leave. So it leaves us with good quality contents and discussions.
HN's incentives are well-aligned with serving its users best, and this is probably partly what makes it a good place.
- dang’s moderation and example
- no images
- no intentional sub-cultures
- smaller audience
- topical
- charmingly ugly
- a generally invested community that appreciates this is a special outcome
The interesting thing to me is that Slashdot shares many of these attributes, has a relatively sophisticated moderation feature and is a cesspool. It feels like a ship adrift in the Caribbean and the fourth generation of rats born on the vessel are at war.
The primary difference IMHO is dang. Anytime I think about the overall quality of HN, his efforts bubble to the surface of my mind as the primary causal factor.
It helps that something like HN can be easily duplicated, so there will probably always be a space like HN where interesting and civil discussions happen.
I certainly agree that dang's moderation is excellent and contributes to the uniqueness of HN. But "+5 Funny" on Slashdot was a big driver in the other direction, rewarding the endless hot grits and Cowboy Neal humour, which usually drowned out more sophisticated comments.
Which reminds me of another HN feature that I think is material to its ability to sustain its culture:
- Private vote counts
Also, niche tech subreddits tend to have great sources of information, even if some tend to become echo chambers over time.
Anyway I too learned from the web and it has benefited me a lot.
I run a few social sites, nothing as major as Facebook, and this is something I struggle with daily. The problem isn't the tech, it's the people.
They post disinfo? So you put up a little warning saying this is wrong, they get upset and scream censorship, you push too hard and they just go to another platform.
People like being upset, they like having drama.
I have no answers, but I do think a friends-only feed, where you have to expressly opt-in to see posts works best, combined with easy discoverability (hashtags, interest channels and pages etc)
I understand where you're coming from. I'm increasingly the least-tech focused of my family/social circle, despite being the most heavily involved in the tech industry. In fact, I think my lack of bullishness in tech is due to the fact that I've been in the tech industry for 40 years. I know where the downsides lie.
However, don't let the current reality get you down. One thing that being in this industry has taught me is that nothing is completely fixed and permanent. To wit, the global monopolist who benefited the most from the network-effect lock-in used to be IBM. Then it was Microsoft. Now it's Facebook. In time, this too will change.
What wont change is the need for level-headed 'grey-beards' and those others who have lived sufficiently long in the tech space to have accumulated some level of wisdom, which they can then share with those that follow.
Why does there have to be a global monopolist though? I wonder if we ever will end up in that decentralised dream.
I was surrounded with shady people, learned the darkest of the dark of humanity very young and never had any utopia: people are monsters, women are always men, help is never truly free etc. Im not sure how it was before the internet, but clearly I never had a view of it as an utopia: it s a jungle.
Facebook and opinion sharing network in general are not very important: if people could be Nazi in 1940, Im not sure why you think it's different or even facebooks fault: they simply reflect what we are.
And nobody want decentralization of power really. People want power centralized closer to them.
For one, I think the internet became better and cleaner with time. Or it s me who get trapped a lot less.
If it makes you feel any better, it's not exactly just about the internet or what we modern folk consider contemporary technology. The question of societal transformation to a place where technical knowledge (in a broad sense) has become a requirement for basic living and the side effects or unintended consequences that it entails have been on the minds of philosophers since the industrial revolution. People have notice that the reliance on "machine" is going to change their world similarly to how the internet changed our 80s and 90s world.
Two very interesting things I'd recommend reading for a different way of framing this issue (but from the same perspective) that's been helpful for me. Both by Jacques Ellul. First is "Technological Society" 1954, and second is "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes" 1962. The second one might not seem related, but it is.
Upto you to get out of that space now and then. Go watch the communities where kids are developing games, unity, webgl, godot, twitch streamers, VR/AR etc etc. That same energy and excitement of the blog and website era still exists.
That creativity still exists but now no one makes a site about their favourite things. Now it's pretty much always a play to get fame and fortune. If someone likes a show they have to "review" it to demonstrate their superior opinion that's worth subscribing to. If someone likes a game they start a channel where they play it live to an audience. If someone makes a game it's to try and make money through Steam Greenlight or Kickstarter. Even the creative coding scene seems to have shifted to trying to sell NFTs rather than just being about making cool looking things with math.
The passion to make things is still there but the motivation has changed from the joy of sharing what you like making to trying to make money, and that has changed things quite considerably. I think it's had a chilling effect on what people are willing to share.
You mean centralized proprietary platforms where they get monetized doing this.
I get that the rich have gotten richer and corporations have gotten bigger, but in so many ways their power has decreased. We live in a world in which the most important force in modern American society is freaking 4Chan (QAnon). The billionaire class has lost the thread on how to control this. They try to put the squeeze on the Facebooks and Youtubes of the world, but that seems to have little effect on the spread of very insane but incredibly meaningful movements.
I some times wonder if the mistake we all made was thinking decentralizing things was a good idea.
That said, the classical internet is still there, it just isn't as buzzing as social media. I really appreciate that.
One thing that adds to this feeling for me, is that any device I own that has an OS, unless that OS is Linux, feels distinctly hostile. I can't own a handheld computer that's not trying to enmesh me in an "ecosystem" of some sort, curate my options without my consent, do god-knows-what in the background, brick itself on a timer, and the list goes on.
It's even worse with laptops and desktops, unless I'm willing to devote big chunks of my dwindling free time to making a hobbyist OS (which, to be fair, is a breath of fresh air when it works) behave.
When even the terminals to our increasingly-hostile internet are themselves hostile, it makes me dream of just walking away from it all that much more.
The problem is that once something is free there's no going back. You'll never be able to compete with free. Free is the new antitrust. The only players that will be able to survive and thrive in this model are the ones with the most data and the most socially exploitative techniques.
Lots of us are happy to pay for nice things like operating systems that don't use this model but there aren't enough of us to adequately fund such projects. We're just not a big enough market share.
The first example I thought of was when I was younger and wanted internet access. I didn't pay for dialup as long as I could figure out a free option. Our library had some free system you could dial into and I figured out a way to make reasonable use of that. Then when I moved, I used some of those Juno and Netzero type services for a while.
But once I had the option to pay for cable internet, I just went straight for it. The experience was an order of magnitude better, and there was simply no way to hustle a roughly equivalent free option out there. But looking back, I don't know if I would've considered a free, ad-based cable provider if it existed back when I was a broke young dude pinching pennies wherever I could.
Then again, nowadays, I would pay a bit extra to ensure my cable internet provider did not read, prioritize, or otherwise mess with my data if that was an option. But I doubt many others would choose to do that if it was extra charge for nebulous benefits.
In a related thought that'll probably be when the next big internet wave happens - spaceships and colonies offline-first until a data sync drone flies by
Designing for offline is designing for cool
Local monopolies rather than a global one.
What if there was a global, international messaging system available to everyone with a phone, that strove for five-nines reliability? And wasn't funded by advertising? And didn't deplatform anyone(+)?
Oh wait it's called SMS and everyone hates it, largely for good reasons. The internet has a lot of problems but it disrupted the telcos by being far cheaper despite using the same infrastructure while offering more capability.
Perhaps too little too late since everyone now uses messaging apps for practically no cost.
The pay-per-message model has simply no place here.
There are countries were SMS is actually local to the carrier, and they don't route user messages out of their bounds. In the olden days it was fun asking people where they contract their phone to decide wether to mail them or message them.
Some countries have horrible reliability for SMSes, I think India is a famous one. Trying to do user auth over SMS becomes a nightmare.
Then the issues if you cross borders, where you'll be enjoying both countries SMS idiosyncrasies on top of the round trip costs.
Then carriers won't open SMS to non voice SIMs, even if they get an access to the network. But you'll need to meet specific criteria to get a voice enabled SIM.
All in all, it's a tried and true protocol in limited setups, but not something to hold as a global gold standard (I think there sadly is no global standard to hold on a pedestal...we can hope we make one in the future)
The point is that this was never true. Well for me as a person with strong technical background it used to be true. But for many "regular" people not so. And when the usability and difficulty was lowered for the others, it was no longer feasible to self-publish websites.
I do still have high hopes for IPFS and Matrix
Not out of necessity. It's not as if any one corporation controls the internet and has a monopoly on mobile communication the way JP Morgan used to control the railroads. Plenty of options to text and communicate other than through Facebook exist. People are dependent on one specific app because they choose to be, not because they have to be.
And "sizable portion of humanity" is overstating it. For the vast majority of humans, this was a non-event, or at worst, a slight annoyance.
And I would encourage you to think about the long-term implications of monopolies. Specifically when it comes to inequality, inefficiency, and opportunities for innovation. The negative externalities go far beyond “a slight annoyance”.
And Facebook isn't the one and only social network, or means of communication over the internet. They don't own the infrastructure, and throttle all other sites into uselessness. They don't manufacture all of the mobile phones so that they only use Facebook.
>It was the fastest and easiest way to move goods and people so that’s what people “chose” to use.
Facebook is not significantly faster or easier in this regard than other solutions. A few years ago someone made an app that just texted "yo" and it got a million dollar valuation. An app that sends texts over the internet isn't rocket science.
>That’s what a monopoly is.
And clearly what Facebook isn't. Thank you for making my case so strongly.
> The negative externalities go far beyond “a slight annoyance”.
Not when it comes to the simple matter of being able to communicate with people on the internet. If losing Facebook means you in essence lose communication with the outside world, that isn't because Facebook controls all world communication, it's because you chose to center your entire life around a single application.
This was a non-event for most people. If Facebook had the stranglehold on global communication that many claim it does, the entire Western world, if not much of the entire world, would have come to a screeching halt.
At least we have Library Genesis and Sci-Hub, which fit the vision of "tech utopia". It would have been great if there's more stuff like that (I left out the vibrant open source landscape, because it also sort of existed in the 90s, in a (way) smaller scale though.)
I was in the same framing of age and schooling as you describe, and in an affluent area as well; perhaps the difference between your technology classes and mine was that mine were not "ham radio oriented".
Not that I'm disinterested.
I completely disagree.
Corporate power changed, and sure, companies like Google and Facebook probably hold more power globally than companies in a single country.
But, individuals have gotten more power also. People can be more informed, and affect more change than they could previously, which is both a good and bad thing.
Manipulated.
Thanks for making me feel depressed right in the morning.
1) Economies of scale for machinery (in this case, computers, routers, etc.) Nowadays, Facebook and Google are laying their intercontinental fiber optic cables. Apple and Amazon are developing their own silicon. Decentralized can't compete with that.
2) Economies of scale for user networks. In Monthly Average Users we trust. Maybe a Mastodon instance works out for a small group of like-minded tech-literate friends. Realistically, small platforms just can't compete without growing into large platforms. Even in the naturally-decentralized blog space, medium and substack dominate.
...hey Carl, substack and tiktok are new upstarts, how did they compete with centralized giants?
3) Economies of scale for attention. Advertisements these days are pretty compelling. UI is important for online platforms to get mass adoption. Both of these things need capital to build out, and benefit tremendously from scale.
Add these things up and there's no surprise the masses gravitate towards centralized services, especially since they've figured out a business model that's free and "just works" for the non-technical user.
Technical platform decentralization is hard for technical reasons and the Internet may indeed contain a bias against it, but physical decentralization (telework, geographic diaspora) is a decentralization prediction I see starting to happen.
Physical decentralization was underway before COVID. The pandemic just accelerated the trend by years.
It’s funny how obvious it is with hindsight, that there could be downsides to this
Maybe the mistake was thinking that the Internet would either be centralized or decentralized, that one model would win in the end. The large organizations never gave up, but the small networks didn't either. There's no meaningful end to depth of the current Internet, and the decentralized part is larger than ever. Even Gopher space has continued to slowly grow. Maybe the only thing we lack is curiosity, and that's easy to rediscover.
The inaccessibility to WhatsApp completely brings life to a standstill for a lot of people across the world. Isn’t that more of a failure on the part of the governments, people and companies that exist there? How is a app that needs access to internet somehow a bigger necessity than the basic function of the device the app was installed in: Calls and texts?
Shouldn’t we focus on making those services accessible and affordable? Instead of demanding Facebook be responsible for everything?
This. If calls and international calls were acessible, whatsapp wouldnt exist
Whatsapp offers a whole lot more: read receipts, group chats, images and video, voice notes, location sharing, a web client (albeit a quite limited one), and it has a generally pretty good UX/UI (much better than Androids stock messaging app). Regardless of the economics, on a technical level calling/texting isn't competitive with Whatsapp.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
There seems to be only lukewarm support for it from all parties involved. (Apple isn't even bothering to do much/anything, so that's a huge installed base where nothing is happening.)
RCS was an awful compromise in order to pander to the telcos. Being a simple data service avoids a lot of the problems introduced by cellular infrastructure. We can expect all of the same functionality/robustness/compatibility issues of SMS/MMS.
Assuming an increase in the adoption of the technology, users will still mainly use OTT services.
WhatsApp Business is a saint in comparison to the Wild West of telcos.
This does not seem to an a comment informed about how the network works
VoLTE is better quality audio than what's app, it gracefully works in large crowds and countryside instead of degrading into individual sylabiles the way whats app does. Latency is 10x lower. There is no central server that cam fail like it did last week. Calling is an intrinsic, optimised part of the mobile network, replacing it at a higher layer will always be inferior.
Its the economics that moves the needly, my mom would have neber installed an app to get all the other fluff like read reciepts
Maybe your mom doesn't care about the "fluff", but your mom isn't the person in society that sets the standard for apps that intrinsically require a network effect, and the people that do set such a standard, do care about what you dismiss as fluff.
Quick poll among my friends, 15% care about read reciepts but 100% care about money.
My mom is about the median age of a what's app user, who are these magical people that set the standard more than she does? Based on what evidence do you believe their preferences are different to her's?
I would not dare try to call an international number via ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile outside of Canada/Mexico, because I would expect to pay at least $10 for the call if not more.
I do not know where one would get $0.01 per minute international calls from the US, but it is most likely not as easy as an app on your smartphone.
Realistically the only reason any of us would switch is lower latency calls to people that have shitty WiFi. That's an shrinking market.
Doesn't the network get at least the fee for the internet connection?
In some countries this process is happening faster than in others.
Entire economies have been built on the principle that the price of a call or message is 0 and you only pay for data used (if any). That is the future that is coming, even for the US, but it might take a few more decades there.
Edit:// in my phone I even have a internet only SIM, without number attached.
Paying for the internet is not a consideration since people will be paying for the internet anyway.
You mean an app like Google Voice, or one of the many other SIP/VOIP apps out there? I use Localphone as my home SIP provider, and they have an app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/localphone-international-calls...
There are tons of ways to make cheap calls from your phone -- when I used to travel internationally a lot, I set up my Android phone dialer with my SIP provider, then I could make and receive calls from the default phone dialer.
But now I don't even bother, I just call home via a video call using Hangouts/Meet or Zoom and use my local SIM to make a local call.
1. I hear this narrative a lot. is there more to this? I find it hard to believe that the government gave phone providers/ISPs $$$ no strings attached.
2. giving $$$ to companies to expand their infrastructure make sense to increase accessibility, but doesn't to make it more affordable. they'll charge what the market can bear, and a few hundred million in government funding isn't going to change that, unless there are strings attached (see above). otherwise we'll end up getting better coverage/speeds, but it will still cost roughly the same.
The major providers are notorious for not upgrading their infrastructure. The bizarre decision to "punish" centurylink by giving them $91 million is par for the course.
The absurd definition of broadband used by government means centurylink got $91 million and all they had to do was keep up with dsl capabilities. You'd hope that much money would get fiber to the home to a few communities, but nah.
The terms of the settlement are bizarre, but there does appear to be strings attached to the money, contrary to what you claimed.
>CenturyLink will receive more than $91 million over the next six years to deploy 10 megabit-per-second download and 1 megabit-per-second upload broadband to 33,000 high-cost rural locations in Montana.
DSL is capable of the specs in the requirements. Centurylink has done basically nothing but maintain status quo and upgraded minimal copper and dsl connections. Wibaux montana can get satellite or dsl. Centurylink pocketed the cash and called it good.
Wolf Point has a similar situation. Montana is about to see about 300 million in federal funding and big ISPs are lobbying to slurp it up, and guess what they'll do with it? Probably bonuses for regional execs, and some marketing to make the local yokels think something has been accomplished.
right, because the terms of the funding seems to be that they bring access to new homes, not upgrade existing lines to faster connections. is this just a disconnect between what the public was expecting (ie. "dsl gets upgraded to fiber!") versus what was actually required (ie. "more people get dsl!")?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/11/big-telcos-slam-...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/comca...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/06/monticello-appea...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/most-...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/lawsuit-comcast-...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/isps-reminded-to...
with all due respect, your links don't seem to be relevant. I skimmed the first few and none of them look related to the question of "did the government give phone providers/ISPs money with no strings attached?"
>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/11/big-telcos-slam-...
appears to mainly talk about unbundling rather than whether strings are attached to government grants/subsidies. at the end there's discussion about them wanting to receive grants similar to south korea, but doesn't say anything about the actual terms of the money that was given.
>https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/comca...
talks about how bad broadband coverage is, but nothing about the conditions attached to government funding
>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/06/monticello-appea...
talks about municipal ISP, not about government funding
>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/isps-reminded-to...
Comes close but seems to be isolated to a single entity, whereas everybody seems to think all the major players are doing it. Is AT&T taking the money and not spending it on broadband, in contravention of the terms of the grant? If so, was there an investigation substantiating this? Or was it simply a case of people expecting them to spend it on gigabit fiber but instead they spent it on copper lines for rural residents?
They're only relevant insofar as "ISPs bad", not to the original question of what conditions are attached to the funding.
>the isps took billions and didn't expand municipal wifi when promised nor did they lower costs for calls.
1. sources for these "promises"?
2. what type of promises where these? contractual obligations, or optimistic statements on press releases?
Is that what's happening though? Are there a bunch of strings attached but the FCC isn't bothering enforcing them? If so, can you substantiate this? At least from the batch of links from the parent post, the only requirement seems to be "needs to be spent on building infrastructure", not that we get gigabit fiber or whatever.
But let's be real here, Facebook is also marketing WA as a better alternative to sms, mail etc.
So if Facebook wants to position WA as critical communications infrastructure, they should maintain it as such.
The US gov obviously had and likely has access to the WhatsApp infrastructure
Like, do we expect the government to take WhatsApp away from Facebook and then create government contracts for companies like Oracle to maintain the infrastructure? So we’re back to square one but with the bureaucratic mess of the government involved?
The answer to all of this is very rarely “break it apart and give it to the government.” It might work for utilities and public works, but do we seriously believe that apps - the interfaces of the utilities - need to be regulated? I don’t get these arguments, and I see them everywhere.
I don't get the distinction you're drawing? These apps are very directly akin to utilities like mail (usually government-run) or phone (usually semi-privatized but heavily regulated), and they're natural monopolies for which market competition can't be expected to work well.
Whatsapp is just an app. It just happens to be a popular one and people chose to use it. That's it. Just like ICQ, MSN Messenger, etc.
Hard disagree. In some countries, WA is used by the government for communication between them and citizens. And it is also deeply ingrained into the private economy for communication.
I'm making the assumption here that Facebook likes that the above happens and that their IM app is the "chosen one". But usage like that also gives Facebook the obligation to make sure WA works.
Last time I checked everything but private use was against their TOS. Other than that this sounds like a horrible situation the government should be blamed for.
The uptime of Comcast where I live is definitely an order of magnitude lower than any large internet site. I have no other options for high speed internet, which doesn't seem to be a particularly bad deal for Comcast...
These are also usually the people close to government or in it unfortunately.
Putting a little more maturity into their SOP isn’t the worst thing.
How often Facebook really breaks? I've had a much higher number of electricity blackouts and internet outages in the last decade than Facebook going down. Basically I don't even recall Facebook ever going down for that long, or breaking in any other way.
If you want to be taken serious as a messenger app, you need to align your corporate culture and processes to reflect that.
No one is saying to break up Facebook and give it to the government. The idea is to break up Facebook because they've been buying competitors instead of trying to compete. It is an attempt to make the market more competitive.
That seems like your own interpretation of the tweet. The author says in a later tweet that they think Whatsapp should be treated as a utility. That seems to suggest they do want Whatsapp to be handed to the government.
Comcast/AT&T etc are not utilities, nor are they classified as such.
Or phone calls. There are tons of telcos and they are interoperable.
* Have at least 2 or 3 mobile networks; if 1 fails, people can still dial 112 (911) over the remaining one(s)
* If banks break down, you can still withdraw up to €xyz from an ATM during the emergency
* Even if all mail isn't delivered on all days, letters from the government or letters announcing someone died are still delivered
* If a city is "serviced" by two highways they can't both be closed at the same time
* Etc.
In some countries, governments (or utilities etc.) use WhatsApp in critical processes and communication. So just like the things above, WA should be considered in these contingency plans. Stuff like:
* WhatsApp cannot be the only contact info agencies have - they need at least a backup contact method
* Facebook should announce maintenance activities to WA to these governments in a standardized fashion
* Facebook has to commit to keeping (the main functionality of) WA free of charge
* Etc.
If Facebook doesn't want to commit to stuff like that - fine, but then the consequence should be that WA is no longer considered a valid tool for critical communication, as Facebook then clearly sees it as a "hobby app" that can go down for hours without real consequence.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Arguably the regulation of "classic" telephony services is what lead to the innovations of Whatsapp and everything else.
Same doesn’t apply to WA.
Likewise, when Whatsapp goes down I can still talk to people on iMessage or Discord or SMS.
I’m talking about 911 being reachable, or about government communication with its citizens etc.
For these bigger use cases, there are contingency plans. For example, 911 will remain reachable via other carriers for you even when your carrier goes down.
For some governments, WA is in the critical path for these use cases. And you can’t route around WA as it’s one product by one company who is the sole maintainer of it.
Critical emergency services still have the plain old telephone services to use, no?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/21/20974692/valentines-day-...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/06/o2-customer...
In my experience, it makes it less reliable, since that service will no longer have to compete with anybody else.
I would think it would be more like how AT&T was broken up into all the baby bells. Take WhatsApp, break it apart into 100 companies that must interoperate and see what happens.
I use Signal as much as possible, but here in Brazil it seems WhatsApp/Facebook has some deal with all the cellular operators by which the a) give customers "unlimited WhatsApp usage" that doesn't count against their 3 or 5 GB/month internet usage quotas, and b) give WhatsApp traffic preference when their networks are congested, meaning that sometimes Signal messages don't get delivered immediately but WhatsApp messages do. Really.
The "unlimited WhatsApp usage" as part of a basic plan alone means that Signal doesn't have a chance. Most people hit their quota limits during a typical month, and that means no more Signal messages/calls.
I'm sure it's similar in many other countries.
Friends don't ask friends to submit to Facebook surveillance.
Given your refusal, would you think that, for that person in your family, you would fit the description of "someone who can't spend 2 minutes to install a free [..] messaging app to maintain a social or personal connection"?
Would you think that that person in your family would be presumably better off without you?
Facebook does a lot of network peering though, and has PoPs in Brazil, so there's some potential that Signal goes over transit and WhatsApp goes over peering, but peering is not (or was not, when I was there) a requirement for zero rating. I think AWS may peer in Brazil as well?
WhatsApp likely works better than Signal on congested networks because of the protocol design, timeout length, and DNS fallbacks. These are things Signal could improve on. If your network is so congested that packets are delayed 30-60 seconds and DNS always times out, I expect WhatsApp to still work, but not a whole lot else. That's solvable for other services, but it takes time and determination and accepting the use case as valid and important. Of course, all that and WhatsApp was still inaccessible for a significant amount of time today.
I'd like to use irc as a messaging platform, but almost noone uses it anymore. If all your friends and family use only whatsapp, you have no choice.
Good thing is that there are choices.
Bad thing about the good thing is that there are too many and we're stretching thin.
Serious question, what do you suggest the general population should use? Something that still works on a 5-year old Android phone with no software updates in the last 2-3 years (at least), all free of charge.
Every high-functioning society is built on a foundation of sensible and fair regulation. Over the past 30 years, we've seen a rise in truly transformative web technologies, and mostly we've left it up to the market to see what would happen. And what has happened has not been universally good. When will we decide it's time to regulate these tech firms?
That said, I'm utterly alarmed by calls such as this to "regulate" Facebook. We really want to legitimize f*cking Facebook like that by nationalizing / turning it into a utility? Then we'll be stuck with it for-goddamn-ever
Let's stick to principles, enforce existing (or write effective) anti-monopoly, consumer- and data- protection laws.
And, I'm fine with taking the karma hit if even one person hears this: You. Yes, you, reading this. Stop bitching about Facebook and delete your account. We as a society can neither build nor evaluate anything better while you, and yes, I mean you, you specifically, reading this, use Facebook. Especially when you rationalize it by reference to the fact that everyone else is on it. Kick that crutch out from under yourself and learn how to keep in touch with friends, family and that cute barista without compromise. Delete your account.
Thank you for listening.
imho its the freaking business model that is the core of the problem. everything else (monopoly, poor regulation, dark patterns etc) are things the world has seen before, again and again
but we have never (in recent times) seen such amoral political and market endorsement of what is essentially a dehumanizing societal regression: they treat their (largely unsuspecting and ignorant or captive) human users as classifiable, data minable, bidable data objects. Nothing good will ever come out of that. This is a practice that simply has to be tarnished as contravening basic (digital) human rights and incompatible with any society that has any pretense to cohesion and fairness.
NB: they are neither the first nor the only ones following this heinous business model but their are its single most effective promulgator
The govt is attempting to regulate Facebook by breaking it up, not by centralizing it. Facebook is guaranteed to maintain its market share if it can continue to buy and operate competitors.
There are a lot of power outages in the world by companies that are regulated, sometimes even state-owned.
I think you’re assuming these empty moralizing statements aren’t just made for the clicks…
It would have been a well put snarky tweet if that were the intent.
>I think you’re assuming these empty moralizing statements aren’t just made for the clicks…
I am guilty of not immediately considering people who write these things as attention seeking virtue signaling consensus wanting idiots; I may as well be the idiot failing to understand what they're saying.
Or for a basic summary: Cloudflare is interoperable, and the damage done by a CF outage may be widespread but it's limited to CF customers. Whatsapp isn't interoperable and an outage effectively shuts off wireless/internet communications for a sizable chunk of the earth's population. It certainly shouldn't be that way.
There are probably other ways you could combat this instead of just breaking up FB - for example some telcos give special deals to Facebook and Whatsapp so they're cheaper than competitors, and they're already often cheaper than SMS. You could fix that. But centralization can be fought directly on US soil by breaking the company up, while fixing those issues I mentioned has to be done legally on a country by country basis.
> Whatsapp isn't interoperable and an outage effectively shuts off wireless/internet communications for a sizable chunk of the earth's population. It certainly shouldn't be that way.
I agree with this. However, I completely disagree that we should "break down and regulate Facebook". We already have gazillion alternatives. And it's up to governments and people themselves to use them. This accident is a great reminder that people should have an alternative.
Although, given the tech landscape today, that's not a great 1:1 example anyway.
If anything is vulnerable to cascading, domino, effects, it is electric grids: interconnected networks, even at an intercontinental level.
The 2011 Southwest blackout was caused by a substation in Arizona, and took down power in large parts of California and Tijuana (another international one, fun).
There was apparently one in 2019 in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay that was started by a transmission line in Argentina.
Not super common, but more common than you'd think, power grids are very interconnected and weird.
Hardly a new idea, and I know such things exist in embryonic form, but it really seems like the only future I would want with regards to these technologies. Obviously the barriers to this are immense, how would you get Facebook to let go of its walled garden? This will kill a lot of businesses.
I'm not saying it's likely to happen but I still think we must strive for something like this. It wouldn't stop profitable products from being built but they would be equivalent to email clients. Obviously far less profitable than owning that user and their data. The social good that would come from this though would be immense.
The Tweet is a good reminder how Facebook is a utility and more than a 'fun' app.
It's nonsense to then go it needs regulation due to this outage. It's obviously unintentional, and as you point out, outages are rare and it would be unlikely any government would have less.
It's like no one here has ever run a server and understands how hard not having down time is, so has to bike shed ohhhhh Facebook bad because of some other incident. HN really has a low technical knowledge base.
The point ideologically is that society should not be so dependent on one private company. Government is regulated by the people and serves the public interest. Facebook serves only itself and profit.
Government intervention, so the theory goes, could mandate a market or set of chat protocols that prevents a single operator from dominating the chat sphere via network effects or by technical operation.
2. Facebook purchased WhatsApp to remove competition and options from its users.
And more https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/04/facebook-...
Whatsapp was not built by Facebook, it was purchased.
> and no one has any right to stop them from doing it.
FB can of course do whatever it wants to do. The powers that be can also do whatever they want to FB.
WhatsApp cannot be pointed to another network, it’s total vendor lock-in. Today happened at a non-critical time. If this happened during a hurricane, or any other disaster, the critical nature would be exposed.
Right now we’re just amused, but the implications are real. Facebook has way more accountability in all of this than just, as Zuckerberg said ‘Senator, we sell ads’.
Not going to happen without legislation. Maybe not even with it.
Industrial standardization was driven by the US Army around and after the time of the Civil War. The Army wanted rifle parts to be replaceable by any spare of the same type, not only those from the same batch as the gun.
There is no large single buyer with "social" apps, and the incentives for vendors are to try to lock in their customers.
Additionally, only one of many service proviers would be seriously affected if a service goes down.
matrix.org
Edit: Just realized there's RCS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
[0] https://www.androidauthority.com/green-bubble-phenomenon-102...
Servers cost money to run--equipment, bandwidth, power are all a thing. The only viable way anyone has found to pay for that is ads. So, here we are.
You pay for the product or you are the product.
Oh i did not know that car parts could be used interchangeably from one brand to another. So nice to learn new things on HN every day.
I disagree, tech has had periods of exactly this. Open protocols and APIs meant that you could write against almost any app or service that used them and switch them out and replace them.
In the early to mid 2000's, this was the case for a lot of things in the tech world, especially when it came to communication and messaging. It's only recently that we've gone removed those open protocols and APIs in favor of proprietary systems and silos.
That spirit is still alive today in some open source software.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
Highly inconvenient for someone without Facebook looking to visit the territory.
I understand why so many companies and services are piggybacking on Facebook/WhatsApp, but they should always have a fallback, in case their single third-party service goes down.
In the name of what and why? Free markets? How is a total monopoly a free market. Modernity? How is this neofeudalism / neocolonialism in any shape and form progress?
Hopefully the 600+ journalists that just released the pandora papers (documenting the widespread deceit and corruption of worldwide elites) will also cast some light into how we came to be in this deplorable state (who benefited, who signed of, who didn't ask any question)
And then there's this: I have no idea about other countries, but over here in Russia, instant messaging got somehow consolidated over time. I used to have to run ICQ (as qip), Mail.Ru agent, Skype, and VKontakte (in a web browser) to be able to talk to everyone. Now Telegram and VKontakte cover 99% of my IM use. Some people do use WhatsApp, but not in my circles, thankfully. Some people have managed to delete their VK accounts without inconveniencing themselves and others much, but I'm not able to do that. Overall, the more users a social app has, the harder it becomes to switch away from it. Also — those old IM services only had one-to-one chats, but all the current ones have group chats, which make switching immensely harder. Can't imagine myself switching away from Telegram in the future for example.
I could understand the same argument about FB Messenger, I do occasionally talk to people I have no contacts except Messenger. But we also talk once a month or so, a few hours of outage isn't a huge deal, is it?
To stay connected with your contacts, we recommend you inform them about your new phone number before changing phone numbers and ask them to make any necessary changes in their phones’ address books.
[1] https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/account-and-profile/about-c...
but to emphasize, imagine having other addictive stuff unavailable, like coffee
Relying on WhatsApp for anything important (like your business) is madness, and I hope this serves as your wake-up call that giving the US government and a giant US ad network veto power over your basic personal and professional communications is not a good choice.
It's madness.
Silently caving and giving your data to Facebook perpetuates the status quo.
They will offer alternatives if a few percent of people simply refuse to agree to the Facebook TOS.
My oldest friend is in a foreign country and has no support network. He left his job yesterday and was overall having a terrible day. He desperately needed me to call him, and WhatsApp has been our primary contact medium since he left the US.
Fast forward to this morning and literally in between “I’ll call you in a few minutes” while I was finishing up morning stuff, WhatsApp suddenly switched to “Connecting…”.
Error messages that appeared were generally along the lines of “you aren’t connected to the internet” although clearly I was.
Meanwhile I was completely separated from my buddy who needed someone to talk to. Until news popped up that FB was having issues I had no idea what was happening.
Personally this reflects poorly on WhatsApp’s design. The error messages don’t make sense and are inconsistent. Clearly their devs aren’t testing for this situation.
More alarmingly, it initially looked like chat was working during the outage. I haven’t confirmed this yet, but I sent sent multiple chat messages that locally appeared to go through while the video/audio connect options were hidden by the “Connecting…” text.
Luckily email still works and I was able to get confirmation my friend was ok, and we had a good lengthy conversation a few hours ago once FB systems came back up.
The latter is much more constructive, purely technical, and instead of levelling field as a one-off actually lays down the foundation required for a heterogenous social tech landscape.
Meanwhile, the breaking down is political, and does not address the underlying mechanics that will keep producing these quasi-monopolies.
I lost years of texting and image history, and just decided there was no reason to use WhatsApp if they can’t keep my history (possibly the most important part of texting including the images!)
Then it goes down because things happen.
And you want to break down and regulate the innovator? I don't understand how that could be the answer. If there's a surefire way to turn a useful service into one that never improves again, this is it.
At some point, it's your own fault for relying on $megacorp_product instead of adopting an alternative.
Why not think about diversifying your own communications instead, there are plenty of options available.
WhatsApp was the only thing that really mattered, and for that there are decent alternatives.
I guess you can at least sense "what if facebook went offline?" if just by employee fubar, or if say the government shut them down China-style (or US probably ought to).
There are other means of communication that people can fallback to. Your smartphone can still make calls and send SMS.
Good luck
But let's be realistic, the copper required to connect homes to each other required a massive public works effort. Facebook turned on a server and ran some PHP to stalk college women. Big difference.
I'm not old enough to remember firsthand, but I believe rotary phones (in the US) are generally from the era when the phone company was a monopoly and strictly controlled what was plugged into their lines. So I think it may be technically correct to call them a (part of a) utility and not just an interface.
I have several messaging apps on my phone, and maybe that's just how it is for now.
Along with banking and check-cashing, making the USPS into the generic hub of "dealing with money and communications with the goal of public service, not profit" would be amazing.