Are closed social networks inevitable? (2010)

by szx • 10 years ago

170 88 10 years ago

maaaats• 10 years ago

Not the same definition as discussed here, but: All my social networking among friends is "closed". I almost never post publicly, everything happens in closed groups on facebook, in a group chat, in a Slack for a group of friends/coworkers/organization, Snapchats where you're either in or you're out etc.

gaxun3• 10 years ago

My "social network" is the internet. I can control where my domain resolves and I can serve content over HTTP and handle email via SMTP.

Anyone can link to my site from whatever social network they use.

I may or may not be able to link to everyone else, though. So far, I have no external links on my site. They're too likely to be broken in a year or three. If I get email related to my site, I often post it to the site.

I hope I can continue to interoperate with other people like this. I have tried a couple other social networks like Hacker News and Twitter, but if they disappeared or acted in a way I didn't like, I could abandon them without much loss.

Do I have any reason to be scared that my current setup might become "closed" in the future? Not trying to be paranoid, just wondering.

cm32• 10 years ago

Concerning external links, I'm surprised that big news sites don't seem to have stable links whereas tech sites like /. do. Go to Wikipedia, and follow a few referenced links to major news organization websites. You'll find many dead links. Given that they use complex, professional CMS solutions, I don't understand why they would break links. It's not like they cannot serve ads for old articles. Wired's old articles seem to be there but barely so with sometimes broken img links.

If I get email related to my site, I often post it to the site.

But only after consent from your the sender, right?

gaxun3• 10 years ago

Just to be clear up front, my site is actively trying to be a demonstration of the ideas I outlined in the above post, in addition to being an actual site. It's still a work in progress and I'm letting it evolve piece by piece. There are many unanswered questions.

But only after consent from your the sender, right?

I'm struggling to decide the right way to handle this. So far, if the message is substantial and I want to reply for follow-up, I also ask directly for permission. If it is a small message or I otherwise don't end up with consent, I'll remove any personally identifying information and/or paraphrase the message. You can see this in action at [0].

I'd love to know where most people think the proper line is. I usually consider direct email to be a rather private communication channel.

[0] https://www.gaxun.net/commentary/knuth-challenge/comments/

ChoHag5• 10 years ago

Have you ever maintained one of their CMS solutions? "Professional" has many meanings...

test1235• 10 years ago

I'm surprised that big news sites don't seem to have stable links

BBC is an exception to this - the way they publish their news pages means they have articles going back over a decade (with the original styling)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1537469.stm

drcode• 10 years ago

Yes, gaxun, you are living the dream and using the internet like it was originally intended- However, very few people can live your "extreme" lifestyle, it's cumbersome, enforces significant constraints, and requires significant technical knowledge.

You are one of the few people right now using the internet in a decentralized fashion- I hope that the recent advances around cryptography, mesh nets and blockchain systems will soon make it practical for more people to join your ranks!

gaxun3• 10 years ago

You can also call me a hypocrite. My MX records point to Google and my A record points to gitlab.com's GitLab Pages.

I'm actually not brave enough to open a few public ports on a server I own and manage and drive traffic there. It's a mix between "scared" and "it only took an hour to set up the entire thing the easy way."

But I can sleep soundly knowing that if any of the providers I'm currently using become incompatible, I can move things very quickly to a new location.

sharemywin• 10 years ago

won't somebody just come along and put a pretty front end on cryptography, mesh nets and blockchain systems and hook it up to advertising and make even more money because their costs went down because of the mesh network.

platz• 10 years ago

Good on you - now just convince a billion other people to do the same and we should be alright.

A bunker does nothing to help avoid the war itself.

tdkl• 10 years ago

How can we expect for humanity to explore space, if the majority is "nannied" from comprehending technology ?

begriffs• 10 years ago

Nice, that's the spirit! I recently wrote an article about this concept, https://begriffs.com/posts/2016-07-08-returning-original-soc...

rsync2• 10 years ago

"Do I have any reason to be scared that my current setup might become "closed" in the future? Not trying to be paranoid, just wondering."

Yes, a little bit, I think ... specifically with regard to running your own email server.

I have run my own personal email server for about 20 years and rsync.net and Oh By have their own email servers as well.

What I have noticed is that gmail (and AOL) consistently classifies my email as spam even though my configuration and spam scores are flawless. I am on 10+ year verified clean IPs, I have everything (DKIM/DMARC/SPF) configured ... and email to new addresses very, very often (although not always) goes to their spam folders.

Google/AOL/MSN/whomever are incentivized to not support private email servers.

If you have personnel and resources dedicated to making this work (as a medium/large business might) then you can keep up with this wack-a-mole email issue. If you do this on your own it becomes very expensive in terms of time and frustration.

Personally, I will not give up self-providing my own email[1] but in answer to your question, there is a lot of pushback against running your own SMTP.

[1] In fact, it is my ambition to begin self-providing my own dialtone ... providing my own VOIP service, etc.

eridius3• 10 years ago

I only read the start of this, but already there's 2 big problems with the idea of a collectively-owned social graph:

1. I may want to have different social graphs on different networks. Facebook for friends and family, LinkedIn for work, Google Plus for hell if I know, etc. Not only would I probably want different graphs for the different networks, I'd also explicitly want to avoid having those networks know about the social connections I have outside of it (e.g. I don't want to just tell LinkedIn to ignore my family, I specifically don't want it to have access to that info in the first place).

2. The social graph isn't the only component of the network effect. Even if we had a collectively-owned social graph, all of the content that you produce or consume is limited to a single social network. So even if Google Plus could see my entire Facebook social graph, anything I post on Facebook would not be on Google Plus (and vice versa). So the network effect is still strong, because everybody would still have to gravitate to the same social network in order to see each others' posts.

The only way this really works is if we have a federated social network, where all federated networks share the same social graph and have access to all the content. But while federation works for a messaging platform, it doesn't really work all that well for a social network because it also means all networks have to have the same feature set, and that's hugely restrictive. If Facebook was federated with Google Plus, Facebook couldn't introduce any new features since Google Plus doesn't have them. Or Google Plus couldn't introduce its Circles concept because Facebook doesn't (didn't?) have that.

mjevans2• 10 years ago

I agree, I too only read the first part to get a 'flavor' for the discussion and the viewpoints of those in it.

The speakers are trying to convey too much nuanced information at once for each point, and the text is presented in a small annoyingly dense format.

More editorial structure to make it easy to scan for the main points, and read through their related details as necessary would be required for me to have an interest in ingesting the content.

That isn't to say 'make it bite sized', that's saying "Give it structure, organization, and consolidate like things together".

mjevans2• 10 years ago

The circles aspect of Google+ is intended to function as an end user controlled version of segregating your data to only the contacts you want to see.

The problem, for end users, seems to have largely been the classic: Security is Difficult issue.

ChoHag5• 10 years ago

all networks have to have the same feature set, and that's hugely restrictive.

The ideas of microkernels and, well, TCP, suggest otherwise.

eridius3• 10 years ago

I don't follow. What do microkernels and TCP have anything at all to do with federated social networks?

sparkzilla2• 10 years ago

MySpace appeared to be a big winner too. Facebook's time will come.

wizardforhire• 10 years ago

... and not a moment too soon.

bluedino• 10 years ago

I hear this but I'm not sure something will replace MySpace as violently as facebook did. Nothing says they can't come along even though competitors come and go. People still buy things on eBay and craigslist, people still shop on Amazon, people still search with Google.

sparkzilla2• 10 years ago

The big Internet brands have various levels of vulnerabilities/opportunities for competitors. Google search is weakening day by day. Wikipedia's design and software is static. Facebook can't decide whether it's a social network or a news network. Amazon and Ebay are vulnerable to niche competitors. Change is coming, and when it does it's usually unexpected.

tsunamifury• 10 years ago

We already have an open graph, its the Internet Protocol and associated addresses. All other experiences that are delivered over IP are just sub-protocols with attached UX that is preferable for the users.

groby_b4• 10 years ago

It's probably worth pointing out that a graph consists of nodes and edges. The Internet (protocol(s)) standardized building & discovering nodes, but they are not standardizing edge discovery. And they only cover a very ephemeral mode of edge building.

That is what the social graph is about - making it possible to describe and discover the edges.

dredmorbius5• 10 years ago

What would you hope to have / expect to find for edge discovery? Any examples?

What types of edges might you want to have that existing models don't support?

cowardlydragon• 10 years ago

ummm, href?

sirclueless3• 10 years ago

Who is "Rebecca"? I agree with 90% of her statements, and she appears in this conversation to have further ambitions of continuing with the ideas and convincing some powerful people, especially Paul Krugman, of their validity.

Did she ever succeed? Did she write her thoughts in a more digestible format and make those writings public? Does she have further commentary on her thesis on the capitalist or non-capitalist tendencies of modern software companies, or on other topics?

Mostly I'd just love to read more of her writing, if it exists.

Edit: I believe she is Rebecca Frankel, according to http://danluu.com/programming-blogs/#rebecca-frankel. Still interested in any pointers to more of her writing if it exists.

jimminy• 10 years ago

I would assume it is Rebecca Frankel as well. I looked for a connection to Piaw and he had blogged about her during the period this conversation had taken place.

sirclueless3• 10 years ago

Yes, she is a truly excellent writer.

I went digging into a Buzz post about the Boston startup scene that Piaw referenced, and could only find a crufty unstyled version in the Internet Archive. If you can forgive the formatting, it's still excellent reading: https://web.archive.org/web/20100613173203/http://www.google...

nickpsecurity6• 10 years ago

Many of her comments are very interesting and I'd probably like to read more on other subjects. That said, she almost shills for Google even if she doesn't intend to. This jumped out when she pointed out that Microsoft's strategy was to profit off of "artificial scarcity" while Google's was not. Bullshit haha! It's called PageRank: the patented, artificially-scarce algorithm that made them the multi-billion dollar company worth discussing. That plus them going public told me they'd shift toward evil for the financial, "greater good." Which is evil in surveillance and software empires more often than it is good. We see them pulling stuff with Chrome and Android that wouldn't have gotten them celebration in the early days.

Another is the part about people paying ad words for freedom or stuff they couldn't otherwise get. The fact that Google's system can reach more people and more cleverly than before is certainly a benefit. There were alternatives, though, like listing your product in online stores, Buy It Now on eBay with a link to a store, or mass marketing after buying listings of leads. Similarly take less staff than traditional marketing at big firms. The online ecosystem for ads also involves lots of fraud with estimates showing it is a good percentage of ad expenses. So, Google is actually yet another middleman in this sense that tries to lock you into their set of benefits and problems. They also try to shift the benefits toward themselves a bit more over time like any business. So, they're just middlemen with a bent toward lock-in rather than purveyors of freedom.

So, aside from the Google comments, other stuff was pretty interesting. Lots of historical and economic tie-ins to her analyses.

EDIT to add: I'm only through around half the post. It's pretty huge haha.

"When I was at Google I hung out "

She also apparently worked at Google. Explains the bias. :)

sirclueless3• 10 years ago

I suspect, though I have no way of knowing, that she has been thoroughly disabused of any Google-exceptionalism she may have harbored at one point. Remember this was from 2010. Google Reader was 3 years from being discontinued, Google's motto was still "Don't be evil," Buzz was an experiment that people still took seriously. The rose-colored glasses were firmly affixed to many intelligent faces, and it's hard to fault her for hoping something was intrinsically different about the company and its culture.

I'm very curious whether she still thinks and hopes the same things about Google that she did then.

wutbrodo2• 10 years ago

This jumped out when she pointed out that Microsoft's strategy was to profit off of "artificial scarcity" while Google's was not. Bullshit haha! It's called PageRank: the patented, artificially-scarce algorithm that made them the multi-billion dollar company worth discussing.

I'm not following your extension of artificial scarcity to Google. Do you mean that because PageRank isn't public, it's artificially scarce? That doesn't seem to hold water....there's no anti-user conspiracy theory required to understand why PageRank is private, but rather the fact that it would rapidly render Google Search pretty useless, due to the strong financial incentive for publishers to "teach to the test". A federated Facebook with public APIs would add to user surplus/utility, while a system based on a public PageRank would rapidly degenerate into a measure of how good a website is at matching PageRank, which would waste a ton of resources _and_ make search quality much worse (again, destroying user utility).

Maybe you've misunderstood what artificial scarcity and rent-seeking mean. She's talking about it in the widely-used economic sense of "scarcity that's imposed solely to extract rents, inferior to an alternative method which would increase net utility". A federated Facebook and open-API Windows both fit this neatly[1], and a public-PageRank Google doesn't even come close.

[1] One could make the argument that Facebook needs to be closed for reasons that benefit the user, but I've never heard any compelling arguments for that.

szx• 10 years ago

From TFA: "Lessig told me I had to write an account that fit in five pages in order to hope to be heard, to which I reacted with some despair. I can’t! There is more than five pages worth of complexity to this problem! If I try to reduce beyond a certain point I burn the sauce. You are watching me struggle in public with this problem."

cloudjacker• 10 years ago

“The Social Graph” and its associated apps should be like the internet, distributed and not confined to one company’s servers.

It is like this though. Any one of us can re-create our social graph in a heartbeat on any of these services at any point in time by importing our contacts and letting the network present us with our associations at the moment in time we want it to.

I've done this with linkedin, having zero presence there until the moment I wanted to network in a new area.

I've done this with snapchat

anything I want at that point in time

there is no need for continued presence on any one of them since you can come and go as you please with new profiles and reconnecting to existing associates.

laksjd• 10 years ago

That's a great concept: The fact that a list of {name, email, mobilephone number} allows you to effectively re-create your own network wherever you want is pretty cool.

I read the open/closed in the article as less about that and more about the fact that e.g. I can't push a twitter post to Facebook without Facebook specifically putting that function into Facebook. I also can't combine the comment streams from Twitter and Facebook. That's the kind of openness that I thought the article was referencing.

zubat• 10 years ago

Answers to this question tend to get philosophical very quickly. The literal act of sending a message is democratized to the extent that we share protocols like English, UTF-8 or SMTP across our systems. But the social value of the message is oft contextual, creating an infinite number of spaces for socialization. You can have the same group of people in same room and yet send them on a radically different conversation by priming them to focus on something new.

Hence I think it is beyond the power of a company to monopolize the social sphere in Orwellian fashion, but monitoring, nudging, and creating an atmosphere - those things happen in any coffeehouse or bar. Small towns are known more for lack of privacy than the opposite.

In the past week I "returned" to Facebook after years of effective silence on it. The impulse was relationship-based, as many of these things are, but I had to decide on a method of engagement and decided that I was going to treat FB as a direct extension of Twitter, which I've kept up with - just tweet as usual but follow a second thread. I used to want to keep them separate to have parallel lives, but since I abandoned FB that "life" was already dead and I have learned a way of public living on Twitter that I am comfortable with.

Fortunately there is enough linkage between the two that this is straightforward. They have presented a tool that adapts to my preference, rather than an imposition or decorum. This, I think, is the direction that social software is moving towards inexorably - to separate or merge bodies, accounts, and personas as needed, across systems, according to various models of seeing the world.

ArkyBeagle3• 10 years ago

Usenet was pretty much utterly anarchic. It faded. I'm still not completely sure why - the people who got off of it can't really say. Perhaps it's as simple as port blockers on corporate networks and people going around corporate networks with phones.

spc476• 10 years ago

Spam, AOL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September) and the high cost of hosting the binary groups are mostly responsible for the decline of USENET.

I know I slowly stopped reading it as the spam and new customs (top posting, not trimming posts) crept slowly in, and most of the action switched to web forums (because of shiny HTML and what not).

forgotpwtomain2• 10 years ago

Potentially this could have been titled: 'Technology, Freedom, Economics and Scarcity'. Rebecca is rarely well articulated, her arguments are innovative, nuanced and delightful to read; to which the closed social network issue seems merely as an aside.

jrm415• 10 years ago

Perhaps you meant that she is _really_ well articulated (rather than rarely)?

forgotpwtomain2• 10 years ago

No, I meant _rarely_ as in it is rare to find a person so well articulated in their argument.

nickpsecurity6• 10 years ago

The part that jumped out at me was this:

Piaw: "The magic trick that Facebook pulled off was getting the typical user to provide and upload all his/her personal information. It’s incredibly hard to do that: Amazon couldn’t do it, and neither could Google. I don’t think it’s one of those things that’s technically difficult, but the social engineering required to do that demands critical mass. That’s why I think that Facebook is (still) under-valued."

Rob: "@Piaw - it was an accident of history I think. When Facebook started, they required a student ID to join. This made a culture of “real names” that stuck, and that no one else has been able to replicate."

I added the emphasis. I think this exchange is significant in thinking about an open and better replacement. Why hasn't popped into my head.

dredmorbius5• 10 years ago

Facebook also grew, specifically, on the appeal of Harvard / Ivy Leage / Selective University association. Part of the reason for being on the network was to 1) show who you were and 2) associate with a high-affinity social cohort.

I've been pointing this out for years, recently ran across another source, at Unz, who makes the same observation.

nickpsecurity6• 10 years ago

That's another good point. I couldn't be sure if it was fiction or accurate but The Social Network movie kept referencing the exclusivity of the clubs that everyone wanted. He was moving that experience online. So, being the cool thing plus your list being exclusive and in your control could definitely be a driver. Each of these are individually motivating for users.

ChoHag5• 10 years ago

Yes, initially. Pretty much everything starts off closed.

(DNR)

GuiA• 10 years ago

Brilliant, and eloquently phrases something I've tried to convey to myriad technologists during my time in the valley:

"When I was young my father read to me “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” advertising it as a great classic of futuristic science fiction. Unfortunately, I was unimpressed. It didn’t seem “futuristic” at all: it seemed like an archaic fantasy. Why? Certainly it was impressive that an author in 1869 correctly predicted that people would ride in submarines under the sea. But it didn’t seem like an image of the future, or even the past, at all. Why not? Because the person riding around on the submarine under the sea was a Victorian gentleman surrounded by appropriately deferential Victorian servants.

Futurists consistently get their stories wrong in a particular way: when they say that technology changes the world, they tell stories of fabulous gadgets that will enable people to do new and exciting things. They completely miss that this is not really what “change” – serious, massive, wrenching, social change - really is. When technology truly enables dreams of change, it doesn’t mean it enables aristocrats to dream about riding around under the sea. What it means is that enables the aristocrat’s butler to dream of not being a butler any more — a dream of freedom not through violence or revolution, but through economic independence. A dream of technological change – really significant technological change – is not a dream of spiffy gadgets, it is a dream of freedom, of social & economic liberation enabled by technology."

13of40• 10 years ago

Reminds me of the time I dreamed up the web browser back in about 1991 and I was convinced it would be the next big thing for dialing up to BBSs.

enneff• 10 years ago

That's one of the things that made Philip K. Dick a brilliant futurist author. His tales focused on the social problems of the people in speculative futures.

officemonkey• 10 years ago

Because the person riding around on the submarine under the sea was a Victorian gentleman surrounded by appropriately deferential Victorian servants.

As someone who actually read Jules Verne (instead of watching the Disney movie or reading a poorly-translated abridgement,) I would not characterize Nemo as a Victorian gentleman.

First of all Verne wasn't English, and Nemo isn't a Victorian gentleman, he's a rebel and a terrorist. He doesn't have appropriately deferential Victorian servants, he has fellow freedom fighters.

Arronax's servant Consiel is the closest to a "appropriately deferential Victorian servant" but the way he is written, he comes across as a borderline Asperger's Syndrome savant scientist, not at all like Mercury from "Bleak House."

I get that people make up stuff to support their thoughts and biases, but calling Jules Verne a Victorian writer is simply incorrect. He's a lot closer to Dumas than Dickens.

guelo• 10 years ago

Ah yes, the Eric Schmidt-era Google was so seemingly altruistic with so much hacker ethos that all the cynical hackers dared to dream that they would save us. Alas.

krut2• 10 years ago

there seems to be a flaw with rebecca's only example. she seems to imply that google is responsible for the conference tables existence, which is most certainly not true. if anything, Google in this case is responsible for restricting local markets, and directing traffic to foreign ones. Conference tables have always been needed, and have always been made (most often sourced locally), Google didn't create the conference table business, it just helped direct conference table buyers to this one particular site. that seems to be to restricting market freedom, not expanding it.

smogcutter• 10 years ago

Agreed for that example, especially in light of what Google later became. Pre-Google, what would the custom conference table guy do? Presumably cold-call and place ads in trade papers. Not an insurmountable problem, assuming there's demand. All Google does is in this scenario is put you in front of office managers searching for "conference table".

But I think the larger point stands - the real change is in indexing the public internet, making it possible (in theory) for a small player to reach the larger world without the capital investment that would've previously required.

Reality is not living up to the early optimism over the so called "long tail", but I believe that only reinforces her point about the dangers of centralizing the internet.

krut2• 10 years ago

certainly. centralising is bad, but this article seemed more like a google shill, rather than debate about keeping/making the internet decentralised. i mean, for the majority of it she was talking about google being a white knight.

abysmallyideal2• 10 years ago

One of the key take aways I got from this article is that it is nearly impossible to depair the efficiency of exploitative capitalism of 'physical industry' and the abstraction that is an economic, or generically a bloodless, revolution.

It is economically more efficient to centralize the resources but far less robust. SV could disappear tomorrow and a significant amount of the Internet's "revolutionary" capabilities would disappear. This doesn't appeal to SV's narcissistic sell of a special snowflake, but the power they wield in their capacity to damage any progress associated with the growth of the internet.

On the other hand, a distributed internet is far more diverse and robust yet the economic costs can be exponentially far more damaging and costly.

ArkyBeagle3• 10 years ago

There's nothing efficient about centralizing resources. SFAIK, this always holds except for odd edge cases of truly public { nonrival, nonexcludable } goods.

amelius2• 10 years ago

One question: why don't we see these closed systems in good old telephony?

throwanem2• 10 years ago

Once upon a time, we did: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System

al_chemist• 10 years ago

It's much more expensive to expand your phone network and network effect between distant physical locations almost does not exist.

How much does it cost facebook to handle traffic in India? How much would it cost for american-only phone networt to create and connect new network in India?

amelius2• 10 years ago

So if we handwavingly turn the argument around: if Facebook and others had to physically build their own networks, we would have had an open social network :)

But now that they can use the internet, the networks become closed.

Interesting theory.

EGreg• 10 years ago

We designed a decentralized platform to power social apps. Precisely to give organizations the power and choice of running their own server and install social apps, the same way they can run Wordpress and install plugins. While regular users have their accounts seamlessly work across all domains, and connect with friends across communities and privacy just works as it should.

See it at qbix.com/platform -would love to hear your opinions.

Are closed social networks inevitable? (2010)

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