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Comment by kulkarnic | Hacker News Reader

If you're one of the founders, all I can say is stop doing stupid shit. I don't mean to offend-- finding pictures and clever captioning them is surprisingly addictive, but this really is a step away from social-games' Skinnerian conditioning. In short, it's addictive, not fulfilling.

Diaspora started out wanting to change the world-- creating something addictive may be profitable, but as other commenters say, underwhelming.

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koji isn't a founder, but I am. I can understand why you think that way, but to some degree this is about a bigger problem that we lived through, first hand. That is, people don't know what they data is, so why would they use even the most perfect distributed system over something that provided basically the exact same functionality.

Owning the bits is an important problem that will get solved with time, but unless people feel like they are actually creating and making something of value on social networks, then it will be hard for any system to pull it off, even if it gets all the tech right. Turns out the 'social' in social networks is actually the hard part.

This is our stab at it. Sorry if its not for you :)

I don't know why there are so many comments along the lines of "come on this is meme creation old and boring". But I do think this has value. What's created out of the whole activity(colloborative editing) may or may not be a big thing, but the participation works well and is missing in social networks. So +1. :-)

It's value is completely orthogonal to the idea of a free social network. Making "Fark 2012" is what Diaspora meas to almost anyone I know who was previously excited about it.

The problem is not in low value of memes creation. It may be useful and interesting for someone (and useless and not interesting for others). The problem is in the limited resources of the Diaspora team, which are scattered on another project now, leaving Diaspora underdeveloped. There is some talk that it's really for the sake of Diaspora architectural redesign, which will lead to improving federation and etc, but I'm not convinced yet, since now Makr is positioned as a "service" which drags in support and etc. reducing resources available for Diaspora even more. So you can understand why many people who support the Diaspora project are seriously upset about it.

Hmm. Now i understand the reactions better. But isn't it a little akin to going on to ubuntu/ any linux forum and asking(demanding??) for new features. As far as i can see, they haven't been able to convert the diaspora work into profit-making. So from their view point it does make sense to try something new.

Well, they can probably do whatever they want with new projects, but if they decided to slow down Diaspora development, they had to reach out to the community with explicit statement that they are changing focus now. This never happened, on the contrary D* team said that they aren't dropping D* (however they didn't clarify if they slow down D* development). And it's not about demanding new features - the most core advertised features which were intended for Diaspora from the beginning aren't complete yet.

I'm not sure if they wanted to turn it into "for profit" thing. It's a FOSS project, not a for profit venture. Though the project needs to be sustainable of course.

I'll buy it. Unlike a lot of tech/nerd folk, I actually don't think privacy/data ownership makes people jump platforms. If pictures+captions is the thin end of the wedge, that's great :)

I would argue that it's fundamentally non-Skinnerian. There's no intermittent reward mechanism and it's fundamentally communal. It's fun and it's a little weird, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

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