If it's over 50% then it's no problem, they can just quit it without fearing network effects. There will be enough users in the new platform.
Switching brand of cigarettes doesn’t protect your lungs.
Here are some thoughts I have:
1) The platform does not have a user-engagement incentive.
2) Personal network sizes are restricted. You can't be "friends" with everyone. Adding friends perhaps comes at some cost or is just strictly capped.
3) Sharing outside your friends network from the platform is not possible. This platform is for sharing with your friends, not the world.
4) Trust in the platform and how it shares your data. The easiest way to trust the server is if everything is E2EE, but we all know that's not trivial. Perhaps the limits in scaling E2EE can work synergistically with (2) and (3)
(1) seems to be the hardest thing here in my mind.
Anybody have thoughts on what could make a social network "healthy"?
Personally? I was thinking about this the other day and how I wish it was more like email - use whatever provider you want or host your own - either way you can post and share with other users.
That's at least one criteria after seeing how so much of the network effects are created by the need to use one platform in order to communicate on that platform.
Then I started thinking about how this would work. Subscribing to the feeds of people you care about, being able to browse and search updates, etc. and in the end I realized I was basically describing RSS with easy publishing tools.
Host your stuff on whatever platform/host/provider you prefer and see fit, but have some common format "calling card" or address that you can use to share your subscription address.
Competition would come in the form of hosting options, reader features, etc. but the conflict would likely result from some providers "innovating" features that only work on their platforms, devices, etc. Sort of like how I can message with anyone with full functionality...unless they're on an iPhone and default to iMessage. Then I'm downgraded to SMS/MMS.
That said, I would still prefer a nonFacebook that still allowed me to follow/converse with people on Facebook, even if it stuck me with the shitty interface when dealing with non-standardized platform "features".
My dream: a federated union of localnets that act like banks and data banks in one. A local facility I can resort to for my financial and computational needs. My email, phone services, VPN, and bank all rolled up nicely into one area. And, of course, it should also keep me anonymous except to the provider. The IT would be a nightmare.
Then you lose to a platform that does. There does need to be a level of incentive for user-engagement. Either that or users will invent one.
> Personal network sizes are restricted. You can't be "friends" with everyone. Adding friends perhaps comes at some cost or is just strictly capped.
Facebook is capped at 5000 connections where a connection is defined as a friend or page like. You can argue whether or not this should be a smaller number, but technically Facebook does have this.
> Sharing outside your friends network from the platform is not possible. This platform is for sharing with your friends, not the world.
What about Friend-of-a-friends? How do two people find out they're both on the platform? Some information has to be publicly available. I think if you stop making "public" an option, users will just find some way to make things more public. Like sharing images via avatar image. Or taking screenshots and passing those among their friends (and their friends share with their friends, etc).
> Trust in the platform and how it shares your data. The easiest way to trust the server is if everything is E2EE, but we all know that's not trivial. Perhaps the limits in scaling E2EE can work synergistically with (2) and (3)
Eh. End to end encryption only matters for information you want to be kept private. And the information isn't being shared between you and me, it's being shared between Facebook and me, then Facebook and you. The problem is that Facebook is the one selling the data. It's the fact that they're the hub.
It's a hard problem all over because in a lot of places, you're fighting human nature.
Maybe a P2P/torrent style system, where all the information is encrypted and your data exists as a hash. To contribute to that hash, you need the private key, to read that hash, you need the public key. Connections are made by swapping public keys with people. You'd need a way to get your own private key from some source if you want to use multiple platforms. But if the private key was stored in some central hub, but encrypted, you could request the encrypted private key and then use your password/phrase to decrypt it on your device.
Just spitballing.
5) limit how many posts / pictures / content you can share per day to avoid information overload. This should make people double thing what they are writing and hopefully more higher quality content.
6) automatically limit time spend for everyone on social media for e.g. 30-60 min per person per day.
7) Different business model than ads.
7 means some sort of paywall. You either collect from the users themselves, or collect from people who want access to those users.
You didn't "add features", you made a wish list.
What's your "solution" for online advertising? Ads that are noticeable but unobtrusive? Now all we got to do is get the nerds down in R&D to make it happen. It's a miracle no one has thought of this before.
Atleast get one with filters?
https://www.quora.com/Is-smoking-unfiltered-cigarettes-signi...
And even if one does exist, most groups of people aren't going to abandon the <50% of those who do want to stay on the platform.
From the article:
> However, more than three in four believe the social network helps them stay connected to their loved ones, with just over 50 per cent saying it is key to sharing information and positive for free expression.
At some point, you have to draw a line at where you take personal responsibility. The utility to those who can use those things I listed above responsibly outweighs the potential danger and plies of those who use "addiction" as their primary argument for bans (aka I have no self-control, so you should not be able to use those things responsibly either).
I am not saying "let's make heroin recreationally legal, just use it responsibly", since both utility and danger are gradients, and for heroin they are of very dubious value. But for something that has no physical addiction component at all, like videogames or facebook, I am sorry, it is on you.
And please, no pedantry with "I get hits of dopamine when I browse my FB feed, so it is a physical addiction too!". This is not what physical addiction means in the context.
The way you talk about addiction, however, makes me think you don't really understand how it works and seemingly view any addiction that isn't physical as invalid and that is not how it works.
Poor assumption. Psychological addictions are just as valid as physical, and I've never claimed otherwise. I just believe that you cannot legislate the sources of psychological addictions like you can with sources of physical ones. Primarily because literally anything can be a source of psychological addiction, depending on the flavor of the month.
Cannabis has a strong psychological addiction component, and yet people tend to conveniently forget about it when it comes to legalizing it recreationally (I am in full support of the legalization btw).
Why? I think we know why, it is because people decided that it is the responsibility of an individual to not abuse something that doesn't have a physical addiction component. But if they end up getting psychologically addicted and need help, then sure, I am all in favor of supporting those people and helping them to get out of the addiction rut they are in.