How do we stop Meta in 2024? We fix the information loop
fromjason.xyz
fromjason.xyz
Between Facebook's (and its users) ageing out, Instagram quickly turning into yestermonth's TikTok, and Threads going nowhere, it has never been this easy to avoid Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg. Happy 2024!
Zuck is not building a common infrastructure for social media. Just like he's not pivoting to owning the metaverse (lol) and we won't be his virtual tenants.
As for the Data Transfer Project or Data Transfer Initiative, we already have a common, portable data format for social media. It's screenshots of tweets. Yeah, it's a crappy format but the users have spoken.
Congrats on their generation. They deeply convinced me that democracy is one of the worst systems.
Democracy has its problems like any other system with imperfect components, but that doesn't mean it isn't the best system we've discovered.
If we're not using empirical data to rank these systems, I'm not sure what else we could use to gain any confidence.
"Democracy" has been implemented in various forms, one of which is what the US has, where some people have less representation than others, e.g. senate, house seats, electoral college.
What they are expressing is not that we should not have democracy either.
Democracy has been historically unstable except for all the cases that it has been.
The house has achieved lots last session!
The people don't get what they want, e.g. republicans blocking things that were voted BY THE PEOPLE on the ballot.
There's of course all the gerrymandering as well, further preventing people from being adequately represented, and of course, let us not forget all the effort spent on making it harder to vote in the first place.
My point is simply that you can use and list you want that ranks countries in the order of most/least democratic and you'll find the citizens of the most democratic countries are consistently doing much better than those in the least democratic, which is evidence that democracy is far from the worst system.
I agree. I don't disagree with that, at all. I am, however, expressing that there ought to be limits to "democracy". Just as we have a lower bound, there need to be limits to ensure that younger people are not left to clean up the mess of a system they couldn't even participate in.
Besides that, the US (and all countries) have a lot going on that isn't just their voting systems. I.e. capitalisism, regulations or lack thereof, other existing power structures etc
This world has a bunch of scary problems, but I really feel (and I think the evidence shows) that we need more representation to solve them, not less!
I'm not trying to sell anyone on a "everything is rosy" outlook, but I think its important to question whether the problem is democracy itself. I.e.:
- Do you think democracy is bad because it's not representative enough? That sounds like you think the problem is that we need our systems to be more democratic?
- Do you think democracy is bad because democratic countries have huge political problems? What makes you assume democracy is the cause of those problems? Most democratic countries are also capitalist, religous, have laws, etc. Are those things bad too?
Don't get me wrong, its important to point out how our systems aren't working for us. But taking a blanket "democracy is bad" attitude is probably going to lead to the things your disenfranchised with becoming much much worse.
Democracy means the people have the power. The electoral and representative system most countries have in place in more or less the same way is a rough first stab at that.
That is the issue. My country is riddled by old person, who do not give a single fuck about the future beyond their own grave.
That doesn't make it true. In any case, I believe democracy is desired. I don't believe it's achieved in very meaningful ways with this model of representative democracy most countries implement.
Are you really that naive? Democracy is majority(mob) rule, driven by the organizations or groups that know how to manipulate the mob (Public).
The Majority doesn't represent the people, they're only the people that convinced themselves they are more right then the rest of the people and have risen into their own positions of power and feed off of their own delusions of grandeur.
Unfortunately though, it contributed to convert them from being normal people to get them "out of the closet" with radical right-wing crazy ideas.
They don't trust "regular media" because it is best to consume videos from randos recording from their cars, with "the real truth".
I gave up really trying to explain... so mostly talk about mild topics. No politics, no contentious issues or anything.
I used to be active in a corner of the science Twitter, but it started dying long before the takeover. Algorithmic recommendations killed it. When a platform starts prioritizing recommendations over explicit user choices, it also prioritizes influencers over people with something interesting to say.
Edit: Not excited about it, just facts.
You seem to be conflating your own use of and preference for X with some kind of overall victory for X over its competitors.
Why is Threads dead? Because the people you follow don't use it? In the second half of 2023, Threads gained significant users/downloads/traffic and X... went the other way.
It's easy for you to ignore Meta, yes. It is even easier for Meta to be ignored by you. You disregard the rather salient fact that Meta has 3 billion daily users of its products, and growing. Its 2023Q3 profit was $11.6 billion, double that of the previous year.
To me that's kind of the point of Mastodon actually. It's not a 24/7 engagement machine. I scroll down a bit, and I'm already looking at posts from December 5.
But what's in between is pretty much that I wanted to see, and it doesn't try to raise my blood pressure in an effort to keep me watching ads and angrily firing off messages at people.
Of course it's going to look unimpressive stats-wise compared to Twitter, but to me that's the very point. I don't want infinite crap. I want less, but good.
Hate to break it to you but Twitter hasn't recovered. It's still a financial dumpster fire and the dumpster is rolling down a steep hill toward bankruptcy.
The reality is that Horizon Worlds is a joke (maximum 20 players in a world and you trade players for geometry, a 20 player world is much smaller than an 8 player world.) Horizon Worlds doesn't let you import images, video or sound.
A VR world has to fit everything you can see in a headset. A really big game like Asgard's Wrath 2 (absolutely amazing) is like an open world game which is full of hidden loading screens and it's quite expensive to develop if you want it to feel open.
By not letting you load those kind of resources HW keeps the size of the world under control, plus it disappears pornography, copyright violations and a whole lot of trouble. It kills HW for me because I want to make content based on photography and visual art, and kills it for commercial users because McDonald's just has to put a Coca-Cola logo on the side of the cup.
The MQ3 is basically an Android phone you wear on your face and the mainstream way to deliver apps for it is the same as a mobile phone. Unlike Apple, you can sideload, in fact you can sideload many ordinary phone apps, such as the Tailscale client or the Denon HEOS client and they usually work. It's not less any open an environment than mobile.
On top of that you can create webpages with WebXR that appear in VR at the touch of the button and this framework
you can make worlds that are browsable on phone, tablet and desktop but that you can enter with a VR headset. (Makes me think of a few kids TV shows where the characters can jump into books) These are compatible across a range of devices such as the Hololens 2, PCVR headsets, and even the Apple Vision Pro.
Google and Microsoft provide plenty of models for half-baked efforts that end in failure (every time a B2B startup gets bought by Google the competitors have a meeting of their salespeople the next day and say... "YOU'RE ON COMMISSION, YOU'RE GOING TO GET RICH!") Facebook is the one big tech company that is seriously investing in a new platform and they deserve some credit for it, whereas all the rest of them are so wrapped up in "business theater" and "technology theater" that nobody realizes Google hasn't made anything since they bought YouTube.
In physical infrastructure, they're spending ~$40 billion over 2 years on hardware without a specific goal or product in mind.
On the product front, maybe Threads will be something different from Twitter/X and Instagram. I still fail to see how it's not an and-me-too, undifferentiated product.
I agree that H.W. is a joke. VR is an unconquered category for 50+ years, like flying cars, probably because there is no "there" there and it's not useful or better to enough people on its own. It could be useful for limited, tailored solutions like virtual building walkthroughs, construction, architecture, engineering, air traffic control, and occasional gaming but I don't see everyone wanting non-AR VR. Rich AR with some VR aspects would be much more useful, such as glasses or contacts that can provide overlays of information while moving in the physical world. Virtually visiting the physical or virtual worlds is an add-on but not a useful category by itself.
Oculus allows for running a VR game like Fallout 4 VR on a PC with GPU acceleration, but then presenting it on a device like a Oculus Quest Pro over WiFi. The linking is a PITA and failure-prone. Honestly, most of the Oculus software feels like an incomplete, alpha-stage product with a shiny UI over it. Even the Oculus Quest Pro hardware reeked of nasty VOCs straight out of the box. The other things are capable VR headsets are expensive, bulky, battery limited, and insufficiently multipurpose.
Overarching problems with Meta, Google, and Apple is they suffer from the pathologies and encumbrances of publicly-traded businesses with corporate red-tape, certain they want to stay relevant, profit today, kill off good products arbitrarily, risk-aversion, imagination calcification, and cluelessness about what will be The Next Big Thing™. Their loss is the gain of cleverer teams to bring the future by executing on what big companies will not or cannot do.
The reason Meta/FB is failing is because they're motivated by $$ and fear. Because they don't own a platform like Apple, Google, MS they want their own pie too. Which platform that is, they don't so much care which is why they can say it's VR one day, then AI the next. And because they don't care, they'll be as successful as anything Google does that isn't search/ad related. If they're very lucky they'll find their GCP.
The strength of Google and Facebook is that they have advertising platforms based on two-sided markets that are almost impossible to replicate.
Google's draw to get people to participate is evergreen: you're always going to want to search the world's knowledge and be entertained by video content. Even if Google fails to develop the next destination site, that site is likely to depend on Google for advertising, and Google's advertising project is quite fungible and can be applied to any site.
Facebook's draw is a particular activity that is less stable, that has a different "two-sidedness" to it. Small communities are interesting to their members because they are unusual in composition, for instance, young or LGBT friendly. When the community gets bigger it gets mainstream: today your grandmother is on Facebook and it's a good way for young people to share messages with her, not such a good place to share messages you don't want your grandmother to see. The "cool" people will move on and those left behind are "uncool".
They haven't really "failed" yet but they're absolutely terrified that there's going to be something cool someday that they can't buy or replicate in a way that Google isn't.
My experience with something similar was getting hired at a tech company that was doing well. Their image appeared like a succeeding startup, but they were making bank, and with that their top priority was not upsetting the cash cow. It took over a year while I was there to release updates to the webapp more than a few times per month. This is why innovation happens elsewhere.
Really? I dropped Twitter and have been on Threads since it opened, and afaict, it's gaining momentum, while Twitter becomes the new Truth Social.
Threads does have a different set of problems (instagram influencers showing up in your feed, for example), but mostly I just read people I'm directly following so it's not much of an issue. Perhaps eternal September hasn't arrived for it yet, but thus far I greatly prefer it.
Facebook is more alive than ever. If you need to do something in the real world it's the only game in town. It's like a mix of Linkedin, Indeed, eBay and Magzter with the added convenience that there are billions of groups pertaining to the thing that you want to do.
I love it because it's actionable, nonpolitical and nonthoughtleader-ish, just a bunch of people doing stuff together.
I like Facebook now much better compared to when it came out, my social media diet is Facebook + reddit + HN
> If you need to do something in the real world it's the only game in town
All sorts of groups about garage sales, garage bands, garage everything really , and again from there straight to FB marketplace
All sorts of groups for help wanted where you can find babysitters in your area, people who'd cut your grass in exchange for cash, independent plumbers, independent everything really.
Gym equipement, sparring partners for combat sports, buddies to go biking/mountainbiking/climbing/kitesurfing together for company and higher safety.
And on and on and on.
1. Once upon a time™, everyone was subject to the same mainstream broadcast of information by news, TV, and radio and the equivalent of church gossip and stoop chatter from their immediate neighborhood. That's no longer the case. Instead, there is endless bifurcation of perspectives leading to disconnected anomie by hyper-connectedness and information overload. As such, there is no desirable simple solution to online solidarity, community, connectedness, and suppression of bots other than by an undesirable totalitarian state doing away with technology or eliminating all other platforms except a single one, then only permitting real identities that can be verified. The larger solution for humanity is public, semi-private, and private commons free from the yoke of megacorp pseudo-"free" privacy exploitation, placing a thumb on the scale of issues, influence peddling, censorship, selective hate and outrage magnification, and digital mass persuasion causing tectonic shifts in sentiment (beyond manufactured consent, it's engineered consent for mostly profit reasons). The means of this is by a well-run, usable, non-addictive-but-useful nonprofit funded by micropayments pushing aside commercial social networks by optimize beneficial, decent interactions, solidarity, local community connections, and discovery of the real world. (Yes, semi-utopian as a laudable goal to strive for without being the only consideration.)
2. With the rise and evolution of the internet, there was a silent shift of the burdens of intellectual and moral courage, risk-taking, and effort onto a few influencers and creators that belies the prevalence of learned helplessness, isolation, and feelings of powerlessness (increased anomie). Commenting on works, even this, is by its nature, pseudo participation that isn't creation beyond a squeak into the maelstrom. Creation and effort means action in the physical world of humans and material, and works beyond commenting. One modern sociological barrier to this is the expectation of credit or approval for work. Instead, it requires individual discipline and attitude for collective betterment regardless of approbation or complaint lacking constructive feedback: a. "Be the change you seek [by assuming no one else will be the first]." and b. "Just do it™", create art, or writing one's thoughts independent of approval or disapproval.
Like every sane person, I hate this reality, but I'm also fascinated by the pragmatic work that has still gone into alleviating the worst aspects of it— specifically platform-level support in iOS for recognizing text in images and making that text selectable and searchable.
Theres this segment of, lets say highly online people, that think meta is about to die. But whatsapp, facebook and instagram are very heavily used by normal people.
Can you clarify please?
I've heard this before from crypto boosters.
Shorting doesn't work that way: you cannot hold a short forever just because you think something is a scam. In order to short anything, you need to borrow it first, and that comes with recurring fees. The profit margins on most short plays are thin enough that holding a short for longer than a week or two would eat up fees. So just because you know something is a scam or about to collapse is useless for profitably shorting it - you also need to know when exactly that bubble is going to burst or you will lose lots of money.
Meanwhile, the market is full of people high on hype, loading up on the stock, and frustrating any attempt at a profitable short. Even when a short play is perfectly warranted (e.g. GameStop late 2020), people might barrel into the stock you're shorting just to fuck you. It's not enough for there to be bad news about a stock, it has to be salient to the investor class to get them to sell.
So no, shorting is not a way to "put your money where your mouth is".
We choose where we put our time. Obviously it's harder for teens etc, but we still have agency in this. I installed an app called clearspace that makes instagram annoying to open. It's killed it for me. Using it less has shown me how little value it was delivereing me.
So, how does this reconcile? The author is too deep in social, they're not seeing the forest for the trees. The problem isn't some minute one about which social platform matters, the problem is that they're bad products 90% of the time, with the occasional gleams of brilliance that keep us hooked.
I get the same value out of checking instagram for 5 min a day that I did when I didn't have the chastity belt app and could check it continuously. This is a problem for Zuck. And Musk.
AI could read instgram for me and summarise, and my utility would increase even further.
Disaster awaits a person whose habits become lucrative for someone else.
At the same time, the distribution of Meta users by country is interesting. The top 5 countries for Meta are (with some variance among Funkbook, Insipigram, Wartsapp):
* India
* USA
* Indonesia
* Brazil
* Mexico
And you start understanding that algorithms are playing against you, they are made to keep you scrolling. Not to deliver the most relevant stuff in shortest time
To boycott Facebook is to boycott people who rely on it. Quite evil at scale, from my perspective.
A better solution is to use these services with discernment; e.g. engage with them to the limited extent to need to RSVP an event or sell something out of your garage.
All of the competitors you've mentioned are orders of magnitude smaller.
Think less Facebook, more e-mail.
What did I just read? Stop using their products, it is simple. Your plan will fail because it involves being mad at something you're still addicted to, and hoping that fixes it.
Hyper-local social network: Qocial.com
NextDoor?
Personal blogs were killed with the arrival of social networks. Enthusiasts still blog, which is great, I'm just saying it doesn't move any needles. The typical information consumer is on their phone, has 1 or 2 social media apps, and checks their feed with minimal effort to optimize it, largely relying on algorithms, which is the entire reason people keep coming back.
The typical user of HN will be different, but the point is that you're the exception.
Mastodon is similar to the personal blog situation. A charming attempt, but nothing more. It's a delusion to think that it will fundamentally change the nature of social networks.
It's an enthusiast network of misfits. 80% is left-wing Twitter refugees. Federation is broken (it can't even sync likes or replies), there's constant moderation wars, and the ever-present danger of your account, your followers and all your content getting lost. The network can't scale because bills sky-rocket at the first sign of popularity and that doesn't even include the fact that most social media is video content these days.
If you like Mastodon, good for you. But stop with the delusions.