Comment by gelert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gelert | Hacker News Reader

An interesting interview, it's nice to see a little more substance behind the decision.I also appreciate that the interviewer did ask some of the sterner questions e.g. Facebook throwing money away from it's business

Maybe it's just the years of science fiction talking but I can't help but see this in a dystopian light. I don't want my social world to be created by"Meta". I want to use social media, and the internet more generally, as tools which enrich my life but don't dominate it. Directly opposite to how Zuckerberg pitches "Meta" in this interview.

My experience of the pandemic has taught me the primacy of physical, human, interaction. A VR headset isn't going to bridge that digital void. What's more, the internet is already addictive enough, already threatening those interactions I value. I recently read the short story "The machine stops" by E.M. Forster (available at http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html ), and I can't help but feel Facebook is building towards the dystopia it presents.

I'm deeply uncomfortable with the vast scope of these ambitions. I'm lucky enough to be informed and privileged enough I can choose to ditch these companies but I worry for the many who can't.

Not to worry. Like every other attempt to replace the Internet with a privately owned space for communication, self-expression, and above all content consumption, this one will fail. If it weren't for the inattention to history of today's attention monopolists, we'd really be in trouble.

> every other attempt to replace the Internet with a privately owned space for communication, self-expression, and above all content consumption, this one will fail.

I wish you were right, but looking at Internet traffic on mobile devices [1]:

    * 24% is YouTube.
    * 10% is Facebook.
    * 8% is TikTok.
    * 8% is Instragram.
    * 7% is Facebook video.
    * 6% is Instagram.
    * 5% is Google.
    * 2% is Netflix.

That leaves about 30% for all other Internet traffic, including other large walled gardens like Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc. So something like three quarters of all Internet traffic is in walled gardens now. Privately owned communication spaces are some of the biggest businesses in the world today.

Note that this is mobile data, because it was the first dataset I was able to find easily.

[1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-worlds-most-used-apps-b...

You are right, but Instagram is on there twice.

Nope, one of them is Instragram

Oh right, how could I forget the string-only command line version of Instagram?

Sorry, that's a typo on my part. One is supposed to be Instagram and the other Instagram video.

I don't doubt your overall conclusion that the majority of mindshare is with a couple big apps/sites, but mobile data seems like a very poor metric for this, and it's no surprise that big video and image sites dominate the list. Time spent per app/site seems like a much better metric. I spend a ton of time on HN but I'm sure my overall data transmission would barely equal a couple second video clip.

Man comments like yours really shows how out of touch the typical HN users are.

The reality is that globally, mobile now surpasses desktop in terms of times spent: https://www.perficient.com/insights/research-hub/mobile-vs-d....

And it's about 50/50 for the U.S.

I'm not talking about desktop vs. mobile. I'm talking about counting bytes traversed vs. time spent.

If I spend 10 minutes watching a 5GB video but 5 hours reading an ebook, what do I look like in your stats ? Probably more like a youtube couch potato than a philosopher, which would be misrepresentative.

Is this just app traffic though?

And TikTok at 8% is only 5 years old. The point isn't "everyone uses different stuff" the point is "creating new things outside of the existing framework is possible" and I still think that is very much true.

> something like three quarters of all Internet traffic is in walled gardens now. Privately owned communication spaces are some of the biggest businesses in the world today.

100% of traffic goes to a space owned by someone. The fact that big companies can dominate profits, and still companies like TikTok can rise from no where is crazy.

Just because the internet is not decentralized IRC channels hosted in university dark corner offices doesn't mean that its a true walled garden in the typical sense.

I slack my coworkers, and imessaage my family, and facetime my partner, and discord my gamer friends, and use tiktok for entertainment, and use whatapp for my international friends.

Last week, i used teams for my coworkers and zoom for my family, and signal for my friends and ... and ... and ...

Apps come and go. TikTok is replacing youtube and Disney+ is replacing netflix and signal is (hopefully!) replacing something... While i wish that we actually owned our own servers, knowing that i can quickly change accounts and apps and "gardens" makes it better.

> knowing that i can quickly change accounts and apps and "gardens" makes it better

That's what the app store diversity push / legislation is about to me.

We're in a dangerous place where Apple is hardware locked to a single distribution channel (and its rules) & Android is heavy pushed towards a single distribution channel (and its rules).

It only takes a single round of bad legislation to get from there to "Your phone only runs what we say it can run."

Ironically, China has more diversity in app stores than everywhere else.

> Ironically, China has more diversity in app stores than everywhere else.

Are they all the same 3 apps the government approves of?

> That's what the app store diversity push / legislation is about to me.

I completely agree and hope apple gets pushed around until it opens up the hardware. I don't care (from a practical, non philosophical level) about APIs or federation or interoperable clients as long as i can just try something new. I have yet to find a single person who can talk with me over Matrix but a dozen who prefer signal.

https://www.appinchina.co/market/app-stores/

Or any of the other user count indices.

>TikTok can rise from no where is crazy

Whew! $10 billion in funding and you call that "from no where".

I think GP's point was that $10 billion is not nearly as much as some of the larger competitor of TikTok.

A depressing statistic. But it's by downstream traffic. So it's heavily skewed to video. Also, Google may include Google cloud (video conferencing/video search/image search/mail/pics/video/whatever).

We might be using the wrong metric.

What % of the 20-year old's day goes to YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Netflix?

You can add more traffic to the internet but you can't add more hours to your day.

Once our attention spans are saturated, that's when things get really hard.

Notice how most of these are primarily video and image platforms. Anything which is primarily text, as most of the internet is, would never show up on this scale.

Going by the walled gardens of mobile marketplaces, I don’t think consumers care for freedom of expression, until it hurts their pockets.

They are going to need foveal rendering to achieve the latency/resolution needed. That means they are going to expensive displays and eye tracking, which you might think would add to the price... but eye tracking on that scale is more valuable than any form of advertising information has ever been. It is the gold standard of attention measurement.

You can't even control the location, sequence, or time spent looking at different image content. They will know exactly what you are interested in, how much, and when that changes. They will know what distracts you most, and optimize it (for their customers the advertisers).

In the end I expect these to be given to high value (elite college students) consumers for free so that they can be monetized. Prepare to explain to your future wife why you always have goats in silk stockings on your feed!

Oh, also... compelling Metaverse content?! It will be user created. TikTok to the rescue!

Thinking about your comments on eye tracking combined with the weirdo retina scanning cryptocurrency thing Sam Altman is working on is some fun dystopian nightmare fuel.

I’d like to see a UI that abstracts Wireguard behind contact management UX

If I’m connecting to someone via that app it’s over a Wireguard tunnel. On desktop, let me drag files over, append to a synced message thread (stored in SQLite or something simple)

Open source design focused on beating desktop operating systems when it’s strength was always networking.

All the attention is on building tech for corporations to satisfy political memes. It doesn’t have to be if software people built different software

I’m not really seeing the WireGuard aspect of this. Sounds like TLS would be fine.

You're missing the point. VR is an escape for people whose meatspace social lives are miserable, like computer networks were in the past.

It's also not necessarily competing with meatspace. It's competing with other technologies that connect remote people together where there is no meatspace option. And it's all going to serve the purpose of selling influence over the users.

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