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Comment by nchuhoai | Hacker News Reader

I know we had this discussion a lot, but I can't be the only one to find this trend a little disturbing.

I seriously admired (and still do) the Diaspora guys for tackling probably the hardest problem there is, replacing facebook with a distributed alternative. And things have probably been a lot tougher than any of us can imagine.

However, how do you go from the ambitious Facebook-Killer to an quickmeme/pinterest mashup, especially from the godfather YC? I know all the big things start small somewhere, but something just doesnt feel right to me. There must be some secret sauce that only pg et al. know.

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I'm noticing many problems with your perspective, and since I'm in a good mood this morning I'm going to try and help force-puke the cool aid out of you.

> I seriously admired (and still do) the Diaspora guys for tackling probably the hardest problem there is

Its a trivial problem compared to what SpaceX, Solum, and tons of others are tackling.

> However, how do you go from the ambitious Facebook-Killer to an quickmeme/pinterest mashup

This sentence is a great example of cognitive dissonance. The reality is, it is easy to go from one to the other because they are pretty much the same thing: People get to share stuff with each other on a web interface.

> especially from the godfather YC

> There must be some secret sauce that only pg et al. know

PG invests in dumb shit. YC invests in dumb shit. All the time. Their business model is not "invest in the best ideas in the world" its "invest in people who have the potential to make billion dollar companies".

Furthermore, PG has stated this in his essays, and there is ample evidence in the many startups they have invested in throughout the years.

So, I hope I've helped push you through the social-web-center-of-the-universe and YC-the-creator stage.

I've been there, and its nice to move on.

I love how this is what you have to say when you're in a good mood...

Facebook is a powerful societal force at this point, and successfully disrupting it with a distributed, non-corporate-controlled service would make a big difference for individual choice. See what I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4389118

I get your frustration with the constant stream of Blathrs and idiot.lys — most of these trendy social sites are never going to amount to anything. But what Diaspora originally set out to do was and is important.

> Facebook is a powerful societal force at this point, and successfully disrupting it with a distributed, non-corporate-controlled service would make a big difference for individual choice.

What individual choices would it make a big difference for?

> I get your frustration with the constant stream of Blathrs and idiot.lys

I'm not frustrated.

> But what Diaspora originally set out to do was and is important.

I didn't say otherwise.

> What individual choices would it make a big difference for?

As I said in the linked post: choosing not to use Facebook is currently a high-cost/impractical choice for many people. That means we're almost obliged to accept how they use our data.

You called Diaspora's original aims "a trivial problem". That sounds like the opposite of "important" to me.

I called Diaspora's original aim trivial compared to the aims of SpaceX.

Well, that seems like apples and oranges to me. Space exploration may (or may not) end up being important to human race's survival super-long-term, but breaking Facebook's monopoly, replacing it with services that offer clear, honest privacy settings, would help a lot of people now. There's no reason we can't have both SpaceX and a Diaspora-like project — important in different ways to different groups of people.

>What individual choices would it make a big difference for?

Control your own data, for ex. when it's deleted it's really gone (except for whom you already shared with,) not just hidden until it's sold to somebody or hacked.

Not necessarily being forced into changing user interface ala Timeline, or any of the other dozen times it's happened, just to fit some corporate goal.

Sharing pictures or stories or groups with friends without violating the lowest common denominator social norms enforced by a corporate terms of service, and thereby being banned from the service for life.

Probably a more free "application" ecosystem whose selection criteria isn't #1 does this make Facebook, Inc. money or cost it money.

Just to offer a counterpoint. If you focus on Facebook's original audience from when they started getting big in ~2005 (college kids) and check out how today's college kids use Facebook, a lot of screentime is being spent sending jokes back and forth.

I remember visiting a college sophomore when I was a senior in HS and FB was still restricted to college students. He and his friends were all making joke groups[1] and inviting everyone.

Honestly, I think that if a company is aiming for the social brass ring, gunning for Facebook, the best thing they could do is become 20 year olds' favorite way to joke around with each other online. High school kids are all too happy to follow whatever college kids are doing, and these young audiences are much more likely to break out of their established surfing habits than adults are. Imgur.com is the backbone of the teenage social web.

[1] For example: http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-Will-Go-Slightly-Out-of-My-W...

I appreciate your thoughts. Makr actually comes out of a lot of learnings of building something really hard. At some level we realized that even the most perfect centralized system only solves part of the problem. People won't use it just because its decentralized, or built on open standards/software, except the people who already understand the intrinsic value of such things.

We feel like people need to feel like they have investment in the stuff they create. It is kinda like when Betty Crocker re-jigged instant cake mix in the 50s to add eggs, and then people felt like they were cooking with love™. We hope that Makr gets people to be creative, and thus care more about the stuff they have online.

It a different direction than the distributed bits problem (and D* continues to exist to solve this problem), but making people care about their stuff online might actually be a harder one in practice.

All of these bullshit attempts to legitimize your idea aside - if you're really sticking to your mission of making this work, you should work on not making your text captions look so lazy. It honestly looks like someone screencapping Pinterest posts and writing text captions over them in MSPaint.

thanks, we will work on improving our captions!

"Just" being able to freely place them, choosing alignment (left, center, right, justify?), various fonts, selectable font color and maybe even an outline color and width (you can simulate that with a bunch of text-shadows) would go a long way :)

The fridge thingy could also do with several fonts, but I actually quite like it as is. Though here a selectable background and font color would also be nice, or the option to put the caption above the image.

Happy coding!

Don't do this. Pick good defaults. Options are for nerds, simplicity is for real people.

How do good defaults and options exclude each other?

Also, we're talking about creativity here: you cannot be very creative without a toolbox and some options. And frankly, I think you're grossly underestimating "real people" (and good user interfaces).

It's hard to rage against you when you respond so nicely!

This is a general lesson: whenever someone criticizes something you've built, be extremely polite and you'll deflate their ill-conceived anger at you. Several times I've received angry emails about a (free) web site I run, like "your site is sh*t", or "I give you a D", and I look for whatever's legitimate about their complaints. If there's nothing worth doing based on their complaints, then I just thank them for their feedback and say I'm sorry it didn't do what they wanted. None of those people has ever written me a second time.

So bravo to mbs348 for ignoring mikemarotti's use of "bullshit" and "lazy" and just getting out of his comments that you could improve your captions.

I appreciate that you don't discount me as a hater.

That being said, it does feel quite off your core mission. What is your indication/evidence that people care more about ownership about the stuff they create than their actual identity online?

Actually, I don't think its far from our core mission at all. I'll give people credit that its not entirely obvious, but our core mission has always been "give people ownership over their data". Along the way, we got associated with a set of tools that help us do that, but at our core, that is the problem we wanted to solve all along. We have worked long and hard to trying to crack that nut. After working on the 'bits' side of the problem, we saw again and again that people don't know what it really means to own your data. Even people who claim to know have wildly different definitions, and many self defined advocates of the cause have radically different and sometimes even conflicting notions of what that means.

We started D* because wanted to make a the internet a place we didn't have to worry about all the bullshit that comes with doing stuff we feel comes naturally. While media ran with us being serious business™, we wanted to scratch and itch and make the world a better place. So in the interest of making progress, we are solving something we think is a total blocker to ANY network that is trying to focus on the contrary. If you look at Makr and just see a meme generator, then I guess you are missing the point and the power of what it could be, which is a simple way to let people create things together, which builds off of what came before, but lets them be unique and original at the same time. If that makes sense to you, great!

If it doesn't, your going to have to excuse us because our work here is not finished :)

(Also worth nothing, the features in Makr started INSIDE D, and we got (good) advice to let it blossom and spin it out into its own thing, as lots of people in the d community like D* the way it is. )

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