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Comment by thesuitonym | Hacker News Reader

I can't understand why people are letting this happen. Not Threads blocking the EU, but Threads at all. Everyone--everyone--knows how bad Meta is for privacy, advertising, and election tampering. So many people, especially those in the target demographic of Threads, have left Facebook because either they've witnessed the site get worse and worse overtime, to the point where it lost all utility for them.

Why are we doing this? This is a perfect opportunity for everyone to say no. No, we don't want another privacy invading advertising engine. And yet, everyone is just rolling over and accepting it.

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Depends on what you want. If it's views/likes/etc., you have to go where the people are. And a lot of people are on FB/Insta.

> Why are we doing this? This is a perfect opportunity for everyone to say no. No, we don't want another privacy invading advertising engine. And yet, everyone is just rolling over and accepting it.

Have you considered that your values are different from most peoples'?

I don't think many people are so concerned about the privacy features on their social network. Social networks to some degree are inherently about making private things public. A lot of the backlash Facebook gets from the average person is about their political moderation.

At some point the public has been informed that Facebook uses their data to advertise, and apparently that cost is worth it to them for the products they give. So far no one has really found a good paid model for social networks, and ads that use data are way more profitable, so here we are. Companies aren't a charity, they gotta make money somehow.

I never bought this privacy invasion thing. It just seems like a nice cause to rally behind, but from what I see most people don't care. But yeah, sure, it's nice to focus all emotional power and reduce a complex issue to one stock ticker, so it can be hated or publicly disagreed with in an economical way.

But the law should be the law and our regulations should reflect some sane ground rules of our societies.

You don't have to use it, but calling it a perfect opportunity just seems a bit lazy I guess.

I'm in an "elite coastal city" or whatever but people are conversationally very aware & very disgusted by the state of affairs. It gets brought up socially a good bit, and far outside the tech circles.

But we want to connect & share & use the internet, and these are incredibly easy ways to participate widely with the rest of the planet. Heck yes I love having some Robert Reich in my feed; man is epic, on point. Can I drop him a comment telling him how much he rocks or elaborating a point? Yes I can.

Right now there is no other avenue into the noosphere. I'm all for ActivityPub but the network effect here is immense. This is happening because of Metcalfe's Law, the value of the network is users^2. So there is no alternative. You either give up your privacy & let Facebook/Meta/whomever data mine you, or you stop participating with the planet.

As for the law, I have little hope that we can mete out a just relationship through regulation. EU is trying but just look at Privacy Shield difficulties; making a product which is compliant with all the overlapping & abutting laws across the globe is diabolically difficult. That Threads is saying, yeah, we can't, it's too hard is evidence that more attempts to add more laws, to try to regulate a balance is optimistic. It has the Utopian fragility, the dream that a just society can be produced & synthesized, which maybe it can, but too often there is a naivete about control, and a rigidity & inflexibility which creates brittleness. The law has it's idea of what it wants but it keeps becoming decoupled from whats happening in the world; lawmaking is singular, produces isolated static artifacts, but the world is full of billions of people responding & changing & shifting.

Competition seems like the must to me. Cory Doctorow & EFF were talking about Competitive Compatibility for a big, trying to make it viable to switch across networks & not have to lose all your friends & data to do so. A market & freedom based approach won't immediately or directly resolve the privacy concerns, but I think it would let new things get started that could be viable winning alternatives. Right now we are locked in to unprivate.

> I'm all for ActivityPub

Now I'm confused. I thought your concern was around privacy. ActivityPub is absolutely terrible as far as privacy is concerned.

Meta's platforms can require you to use your real name, give your phone number, and upload "verification selfies"/ID documents.

With federated protocols like ActivityPub (suits Twitter-like software) and Matrix (suits Discord-like software), even if one instance required the above for account sign-ups you'd have the choice to use another - or host your own and be sure that no sneaky tracking is going on.

It's true that ActivityPub doesn't really support private chats like Matrix does, and sites can be misleading about actions being visible to others (e.g: upvotes on Lemmy), but I think a protocol being designed for public-visibility content isn't inherently the same thing as it being bad for privacy.

Different instances can have different security policies too. Some will likely defederate. Many have anti-scraping measures.

One of the most pernicious things about surveillance is how widespread the tracking networks are. Different apps and different sites will embed adware that can often be connected to your account. If your social media account is associated directly with an identity like Meta or Google, it seems almost certain my posting & social media activity will be fed into the centralized adserving systems & potentially be something other adbuyers or infobrokers might acquire.

I was on Twitter to be a public person, with public words given. I still want that capabilitiy. But as @ukv says, having it decoupled & separated from the day-to-day identity I actually use, my private identity, is a critical firewall.

Almost nobody cares about privacy. Do you think those instagram users, who post their face + location, onto the public internet are particularly concerned about meta collecting their data?

I like Threads, and think anything driving the normalization of ActivityPub is good.

Twitter has collapsed in usability for me. I don’t see community notes, when I search something there’s nothing but crypto scams at the top.

Because the alternative is Twitter.

The alternative is mastodon/pleroma/misskey/calkey, etc.

I've tried making do on Mastodon. It's just not as well-made. The federation thing gets in the way, the discoverability of content is hard, one prolific tooter can too easily flood your feed - it's a decade behind Twitter and Threads in terms of usability. Even the basic information density of the web layout is poor.

I'm willing to look past these flaws and stick with the fediverse, but if nobody I want to follow is doing that, there's no point.

I hope Gargron et al can make it happen and beat both Threads and Twitter, but so far they've just been too stubborn (like the search and quote-tweet things) and haven't iterated fast-enough to really compete.

Sure, and the alternative to mac/windows is linux. Which I guess is actually unfair to linux. mastodon/etc are terrible, they will never be used by more than an unimportant minority of people.

Mastodon don't even have a proper search.

Wouldn't the other big tech firms be able to build a Twitter clone? Why am I not hearing about a Google version, or a Microsoft version? You'd think someone inside one of the Trillion dollar firms would have had the idea.

Google bringing back Buzz (the Twitter-alike that was briefly in gmail) would perhaps be the funniest possible outcome of all of this.

Google building a social media product. That will definitely go well this time around.

5th time's a charm.

You can also just not use either.

Hacker News is a fine alternative

HN is in no way an alternative, and that's okay. For the masses that use Twitter, HN is completely uninteresting and completely fails to replace Twitter. HN is too niche, too obscure, too old, and too strict to be a Twitter, and that's what makes it great.

At least Twitter fixed the election tampering problem, and now allows the free flow of information, even if TPBT object to it. Threads will still be as bad as FB in those regards.

Twitter did no such thing, Twitter now personally silences loud dissenters and engages openly in anticompetitive behavior meanwhile doing less moderation than they ever have. Plugging your ears and ignoring it is not "fixing" the election tampering problem.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

Free flow of information, huh?

What do you think Twitter did that Facebook didn’t do?

People (like me) are looking for a Twitter alternative. The alternative need to have a minimum viable product.

Mastodon is 7 years old and still don't have a search or quote feature.

BlueSky is newer, but the app it's totally awful (takes 30 seconds to open here on Android), you can't post videos.

Ironically Meta owns React Native, but Threads is built with native tech, meanwhile BlueSky it's React Native....

Of course - people need to be there too. I use Twitter mainly for news, politics and tech. Most of this is on Threads. Meanwhile on Bluesky and Mastodon, almost none of this is there for me.

On Mastodon you have a bunch of accounts replicating twitter accounts exactly because it lacks greatly these accounts.

As others have pointed out, people don't care about these things. Either at all, or simply not enough for forgo the value they get from social media.

Perhaps the question you're really trying to ask is why people don't place a greater value on these things?

Many people follow celebrities/public figures/politicians who market Threads as the new "Digital Town Square," or themselves like a "curated" space that conforms to their beliefs, and the ability to silence people who deviate too far from their beliefs. Those same aristocrats are not informing their followers of the privacy dangers, because they also benefit from a commoner's privacy loss. Most common people aren't thinking about the potential consequences on the individual or societal level, because the dangers are not marketed at a similar scale and it's not something the average person thinks about without strong external influence.

Turns out many people just don't care that much, or get value out of using a social networking app/site.

People who want to be influencers see this as "the next big thing" and want to gain a following before it is saturated. They missed out on Tiktok/Twitter/Instagram/etc. so this is their path to making it big.

I used to think so too. However, I think the view that “everyone” knows is a distortion. The HN audience knows, but quite a few people in my life (friends, family, coworkers) don’t have a clue.

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