Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/opinion/facebook-fix-replace.html

by jenkinsj • 8 years ago

402 271 8 years ago

jenkinsj2• 8 years ago

I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment but respect Dr. Wu's option. I'm also interested in the HN community's options.

ohiovr• 8 years ago

I think we need alternatives to text only communication. If we could judge each other's tones maybe we would chill out a bit.

ssalazars• 8 years ago

I definitely agree with this, however, most people moved away from verbal communication because it's an async process, and it removes any awkwardness from the interaction. Video conferencing is used occasionally. I think text-based communication is here to stay.

ams61104• 8 years ago

Text can work OK between people who know each other well and are familiar with each other's patterns of speech and sense of humor. Not perfect, but generally OK.

Much worse between people who aren't so well acquainted. I'm actually in the middle of trying to mediate a disagreement based mainly on two entirely different perceptions of intent in some stuff that was written in an email.

jjrh• 8 years ago

I think in the long run we will use a decentralised/federated system. Privacy concerns aside, it just doesn't make sense to rely on one service or expect one social network to meet everyone's needs/desires.

thephyber• 8 years ago

I think this is exactly how health/medical data should exist. My family should have their own health/medical network node and only my direct healthcare providers should be able to access the data from it and only after I authorize them with a digital signature. Whatever data they generate about my person (or persons in my family) should be owned by me, stored in my family network, and only available to others after I explicitly authorize it.

The massive collections of monolith data sets for financials, health/medical, credit history, employment records, taxes, census, etc are far too valuable to not be highly valuable to criminal orgs and/or government entities. Centralization into monolithic organizations will lead to irreversible issues of data non-privacy for a generation or more..

saganus• 8 years ago

Uhmmm...just thinking out loud here.

How feasible do you think it would be to use Mastodon for this?

If you have a "Medical Node" as you put it (which I find apt btw), you could share it with your doctor(s) and provide access (maybe using Keybase? Auth0?) for them to either add "their own posts" with the analysis results, their findings, etc, or just to read the relevant data (e.g. for a dentist).

Again, just thinking out loud, but they way you put it sounded interesting :)

ams61104• 8 years ago

Who would develop and market and support this, and who would pay for it?

iambateman• 8 years ago

I love this and I want it to be real but it won’t work. Here’s why...

As an individual, I won’t lose my medical records because I have three backups and offsite and whatever. You probably do too.

But how do you remain really decentralized when the system has to work for a 76-year-old who can’t even remember what Google is, much less his password. Will this work in the golden hour after a stroke, when literally every minute matters?

So we would make a medical record “bank”, which is federated sensibly, and require everyone to use it. And eventually we end up with a similar system that we have now.

secstate• 8 years ago

Incidentally, I'm working in healthtech right now and I have looked at this a million different ways, and the first and biggest problem is the quality of the data and trust of the data. You make a big deal about after I explicitly authorize access, but once you've granted access, that's it ... what's to stop the doc from copying some info from your chart?

More relevant, what happens if you lose access to your data? Or it becomes corrupted? Now, because you owned your data, it's only your responsibility. You know who's not going to put up with that? Anyone who can afford to hire someone else (like a doctor) to keep track of their chart for them so that stupid stuff doesn't happen.

Most people don't realize that many of the connected health record problems have already had high quality solutions provided in the form of VistA (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/VistA). It's interface would make a startup designer cry, but medical professionals find it highly effective. Especially the network effect of being able to hand charts off and coordinate care, which would be very difficult in a decentralized health record world.

hvidgaard2• 8 years ago

The average Joe will never manage to do that. So unless the state develop, maintain, and make available free of charge, such a service, it will never happen.

Nomentatus• 8 years ago

What's stopping this is Facebook's illegal interference with interoperability. Once upon a time railroads and telephone companies had to be forced to allow traffic to cross networks, now it's time for Facebook, etc, to do this. Well past time.

nugget• 8 years ago

This is why the data portability requirements imposed by GDPR are potentially so significant.

squarefoot• 8 years ago

The Internet as we knew it before corporations turned it into the pile of rubbish it is today, was built around open protocols that allowed software from different developers/vendors to talk each other. One could write an email from a Windows client, send it to a Linux server and then read it on a Mac. We just have to get back to the era of interoperability, possibly retaining the good things learned from experience.

ams61104• 8 years ago

So, email then? It's decentralized, federated, and only sends data to the people you address it to (gmail excepted, I guess, at least in the free tier).

It's what has always worked for me.

zzzeek3• 8 years ago

it should be email. but you need to build a fabulous UX on top of it that is as simple and instant gratification as Facebook, and you need to do it essentially for free, or with a grant or something, because it will never make a dime.

ivan_ah• 8 years ago

Yes! Email has the best chance to take over.

Links to photos, events, and group chat can all happen using email as transport. Like @esfandia suggested, the social-emails could be tagged as hidden so they are not displayed by your regular email reader.

Here is a old write up of how "events" could work over email: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12671812

Does anyone know if something like this has been tried before? Surely someone has thought of this before...

8bitsrule2• 8 years ago

I keep seeing the suggestion of 'federation' for soc.media and am not sure understand the use of this word. What are the characteristics of a 'federated system' and how is it immune to the problem of centralization? What are some successful examples?

oblio2• 8 years ago

I’m going to be a bit ironic here and say that email is an example of a federated system.

I’m being ironic cause we did end up with a centralized system for email. Not a single center, but a few: Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. Because of abuse (spam, primarily) and because of ease of use.

Having an easy to use and safe federated system is discovering-the-theory-of-relativity hard, in my opinion.

jamestimmins2• 8 years ago

It's interesting that Tim Wu discussed the cycle of technology starting amongst outsiders and then becoming monopolized in his (phenomenal) book The Master Switch. The cycle always repeats itself by the next new technology coming along, making the prior one less significant.

We seem to have accepted that the internet is essentially the final communication tech. Maybe that's true, but it seems improbable. Simply based on his past writing, I'm surprised he isn't advocating for a solution based on the blockchain.

I'm not suggesting that's the right answer; I merely find it curious that he didn't apply the same assumptions to the future as he did to his historical analysis.

jgh• 8 years ago

I'm not really sure how blockchain is related to a potential "next" communication technology. Why not AR? Why not lasers n shit?

joejerryronnie• 8 years ago

Wait for it . . . "Quantum Blockchain" - Boom!

jamestimmins2• 8 years ago

You're right. I was thinking "blockchain or another in-development technology", but was lazy in my phrasing. Other tech is equally as applicable.

Geee2• 8 years ago

It's possible to create distributed but capitalistic systems with blockchain. Without blockchain most distributed / P2P systems fail because they rely on volunteers to run the system.

arisAlexis• 8 years ago

Talking about a blockchain based social network. a laser based social network doesn't make much sense

michaelmrose• 8 years ago

The internet has come to mean communication between potentially distant actors over a network.

The successor to the internet will be called the internet.

mrweasel2• 8 years ago

Blockchain technology isn't really a viable option for something like social media any more. With the new GDPR rules in Europe and the right to be forgotten, using blockchain just isn't an option, because you can't delete specific parts.

pcunite• 8 years ago

I don't want my stuff in the "cloud", I want it shared from my lawn. My own personal space to where people can access my stuff, that I share, and we can converse over whatever that is ... my own GDPR rules.

TheAceOfHearts2• 8 years ago

Have you seen Beaker [0]? It doesn't require you to setup a complex web server and configure a bunch of stuff, you just run the browser and it'll start sharing your website. It's a move back to a truly decentralized web.

[0] https://beakerbrowser.com/

newscracker2• 8 years ago

I actually tried this a while ago, and found that the audience also had to use Beaker to access the content. That's a huge barrier if current browsers don't support this.

Pamar2• 8 years ago

Didn’t Opera offer something similar in the past? A small “private space” you could optionally share with others (as long as they used Opera too).

I ask because Beaker claims to be “the first and only...”

ntnsndr• 8 years ago

I briefly spoke with Wu some weeks ago about platform cooperativism. I suppose he wasn't impressed.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvxbgq/its-time-for-mark-...

feelin_googley7• 8 years ago

Prof. Wu makes a couple of assumptions when he gives suggestions for Facebook alternatives or successors. I dont see those suggestions as the most important point of his argument however. I believe the most important point is that there must be competition, that trying to "fix" Facebook will not suffice.

Nonetheless, these are the assumptions I see:

1. The software alternatives or successors must be commercial.

2. The software must attract a certain quantity of users to be viable.

3. The software must enable networks comprising large numbers of people, perhaps in the millions or billions.

This scale is far greater than the average size of any Facebook users group of friends.

Over the years Facebook may have morphed into a "public square" for exercising "Free Speech" but in the beginning as I recall it was not a means to broadcast to other users outside of ones social circle.

Its primary utility is arguably still in enabling communication within small groups, not enabling broadcasting to the general public.

Wu's assumptions point toward a Zuckerberg-like centrally-managed approach to what I see as historically a locally-managed activity: the human tendency to form small groups.

For many years, gamers and others have been writing software to enable small groups to communicate over peer-to-peer networking, without any funding from advertisers.

Wu writes, "So what stands in the way of a genuine Facebook alternative? It isn't the technology."

Thats exactly right. IMHO.

guelo• 8 years ago

The useful feature that's missing if the network isn't large is being able to easily friend a new person. The extra friction of convincing a new acquaintance to join your social network means that it doesn't happen in a lot of situations.

eadmund• 8 years ago

This scale is far greater than the average size of any Facebook users group of friends.

Yes, but only an individual Facebook user. The problem is that my friends' friends' friends' friends' friends' friends encompass the entire human race: at some point, as I invite people who invite people who invite people, the underlying technology has to be able to support all mankind.

Indeed, I suspect that this — not some momentary privacy-failure flash-in-the-pan will be what leads to Facebook's actual downfall. It's ultimately building a proprietary Internet (in the sense of a fabric which connects people), and that's extraordinarily expensive. At the end of the day, the actual Internet is able to do that far more cheaply.

I imagine that the replacement for Facebook will be something like email: something under the control of its users, something anyone will be able to add himself to and anyone will be able to block.

indigodaddy2• 8 years ago

Could a viable Facebook competitor be built on a distributed/p2p type network, perhaps something like ipfs and/or mesh networking?

feelin_googley7• 8 years ago

"... the actual internet is able to do that far more cheaply."

"I imagine the replacement for Facebook will be ... something under the control of its users..."

This is what I am trying (poorly) to articulate. I use a very small proof-of-concept application to accomplish something like this; no website, no third party managing a "service". I paid nothing for this application.

Zuckerberg says, "The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can't afford to pay."

Its difficult to understand what he means by "a service that helps connect everyone in the world".

Users already pay for internet access. This internet service is what allows the subscriber to connect to everyone in the world. What he is describing sounds more like a central registry of contact details.

What was the most elusive "starting material" to create a Facebook alternative: the contact and other personal details for most of its users. However this information is, as the world now knows, no longer in the sole possession of Facebook.

For example, 420 million profiles from 2007-2010 were expropriated some 10 years ago. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16724375

Today in response to media pressure, Facebook announced publicly "most" of their users have likely had their account info expropriated. "We believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way."

Moreover, with the recent changes Facebook has made, every user now has the means to easily export her data in a portable format.

As a user, I might look up a contact in the "Facebook directory" (of which there might be many copies in many places) and then choose to communicate with her through a different channel, one that Facebook does not control.

This channel does not need to be managed by a third party seeking to profit from selling advertising. It does not have to appear anything like Facebook or any of it subsidiaries, although it could.

Once the contact and I are in touch there is no reason to involve Facebook or any other ad-supported web company going forward.

nso95• 8 years ago

It will neither be fixed or replaced

gaius2• 8 years ago

But it could be destroyed. I’ll settle for that.

sidcool5• 8 years ago

I tried explaining my 20 year old cousin about FB. Her constant argument was "I don't share anything private on FB". She checks in on FB everywhere she goes. Posts her pics all the time. I could not instill any sense of concern for privacy.

What I could conclude is that the appeal of social is too great to have any caution. Call me a pessimist, but I don't think FB is going anywhere. People will keep using it inspite of the risks. It's like a smoking addiction. It's bad but very difficult to give up.

panarky• 8 years ago

It's like a smoking addiction

It's awesome to watch massive shifts in values and priorities.

Smoking used to be seen as cool, sexy, even healthy. Now it's widely seen as unhealthy and disgusting.

Same thing with high-fructose carbonated beverages.

I remember people using terms like "retarded" and "gyp" without hesitation. Today even people who hate political correctness don't talk like that in public.

It wasn't long ago that men abusing women in the workplace was routine and unremarkable. Now it's outrageous and shameful.

Things change, slowly at first, and then all at once. People are waking up and it will never be the same for Facebook.

sidcool5• 8 years ago

That is a good point. What baffles me is it took so much evidence from the medical community to convince people about smoking. And many still do it! Adverse effects of technology/social in general wouls be even more difficult to prove. I see technology addicts' rehabilitation centres a reality in near future.

mpweiher• 8 years ago

men abusing women in the workplace was routine and unremarkable

When was this?

tzakrajs• 8 years ago

I remember people using terms like "retarded" and "gyp" without hesitation. Today even people who hate political correctness don't talk like that in public.

Wrong wrong wrong. They still do these a lot.

Spellchamp• 8 years ago

What does "gyp" mean? I googled it but I feel like I'm missing something.

mikroskeem• 8 years ago

Her constant argument was "I don't share anything private on FB"

I've heard worse. Plain "I don't care" and "I like that people know what I do all the time".

It's like a smoking addiction

I'd say that tt's more like a drug. Most people seem to seek for an attention (in a comments/likes form).

I know few people who use even PhotoShop-like software to make themselves "more beautiful" to gather more attention; however they don't look even similiar to their pictures.

(it's like drug addicts do weird shit to get their dose of their favourite drug)

gaius2• 8 years ago

I'd say that tt's more like a drug

It is literally like a drug, former FB execs have explained how they trigger dopamine responses in your brain

seanwilson3• 8 years ago

I tried explaining my 20 year old cousin about FB. Her constant argument was "I don't share anything private on FB". She checks in on FB everywhere she goes. Posts her pics all the time. I could not instill any sense of concern for privacy.

If she's happy with this level of privacy though, what's the problem? Maybe she does fully understand the implications but has a different value system to you?

I feel that when people on this site are talking about Facebook, there's this assumption their friends using Facebook are failing to understand what Facebook does in the background and if they could somehow get them to understand their friends would all leave. People can be fully aware of what Facebook is and simply choose a different balance between privacy and convenience to what you prefer.

herbst6• 8 years ago

Usually when I creep these people out by confronting them with personal details of their life (which I simply snapped of public Facebook data) they actually are creeped out.

So while yours is a interesting thought I highly doubt a lot of people Actually understand the full issue.

quanticle• 8 years ago

If she's happy with this level of privacy though, what's the problem?

The problem is that it's not just her privacy she's violating, but the privacy of everyone else, including OP, whose photos get shared by said cousin.

When I got back from a trip I took abroad with my family earlier this year, my friends mentioned that they'd seen the photos that "I" had posted to Facebook. Except... I hadn't posted any photos to Facebook. I have a Facebook account, but I deliberately have a very minimal presence on it. What my friends were seeing was the photos that my mother had posted, and which I had been tagged in. My privacy was violated by someone else's inability to understand Facebook's privacy settings.

sidcool5• 8 years ago

It's that she's unaware of the negative consequences of hyper social media presence. She seems to have become addicted to the 'likes' of FB. Unless there is a cancer like warning for social media, she's unlikely to give it up.

The lure of being more famous than her friends is too much to resist. Not sure if wrong or right. I would like being famous on HN, StackOverflow, tech blogs etc. Perhaps it's similar.

egfx2• 8 years ago

People will use it but only for the necessary stuff, like birthdays and condolences. Facebook as a time wasting medium is dying. And dying spectacularly. In fact the same network effect that made Facebook what it is will work it's way in reverse order.

9080874• 8 years ago

Sending birthday wishes and condolences via Facebook seems more like an insult to me than "necessary stuff". If you give a fuck about someone, you'll make some kind of actual effort for such events.

Doesn't Facebook "remind" people to wish their "friends" a happy birthday? That kind of changes the meaning of those birthday wishes from "these people were thinking about me" to "these people clicked a button because an advertising corporation told them to".

As for condolences, the idea of deaths and other bad events increasing "engagement" (and therefore ad exposure and profit) for Facebook should make all involved feel dirty.

tomcooks3• 8 years ago

Everytime you say, hear or read the word "Facebook" replace it with either "mom and dad" or "the creep". Works great.

akkat• 8 years ago

Except it doesn't. Situation a: Facebook knows what I did last night. Result: I get ads tailored to what I did.

Situation b: Mom and Dad knows what I did last night. Result: I get grounded.

JasonFruit• 8 years ago

Social is an adjective. I will die on this hill.

brandonmenc• 8 years ago

It's like a smoking addiction. It's bad but very difficult to give up.

Social media is socializing now, whether you like it or not, and whether you're along for the ride or not.

In that light, it's strange when people say it's "addicting," like that's a bad thing. It's supposed to be - we're social creatures.

Sharing things about your life with friends and family is not some horrible drug we need to curb.

sidcool5• 8 years ago

The problem is that FB encourages a popularity contest online. This is not healthy. We are social creatures, but the internet based social does not cater to our social needs. It caters to our dopamine kick needs.

Several studies have proven the ill effects of social network. So you are only partly correct.

vinniejames• 8 years ago

We did replace it, almost 10 years ago. It was called Diaspora[1], no one cared about privacy then. No one really cares about privacy now, at least not enough to do anything about it.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

noobermin2• 8 years ago

I think people care a lot more today than they used too. The problem is people use facebook because they have to.

aaron-lebo• 8 years ago

If people really cared about their privacy they wouldn't broadcast their personal lives to millions of people (see social media). Until that's corrected (how do you get out of that social cycle where you have to market and yell louder than everyone else?), it's going to continue.

People are mad at FB the same way people get mad when they realize they've been in manipulative relationships, but I'm not sure many people really want to accept that they gave into that despite all the warning signs that have been there for years and it's their own actions which enabled FB to be what it is.

Some of the issue is the belief that anyone really needs FB. We've conditioned ourselves into it, but you don't need it any more than you need TV.

obstacle1• 8 years ago

The problem is people use facebook because they have to.

It's remarkable how common this opinion is given its obvious shallowness. Nobody has to use Facebook. What are the consequences of not? You can't chat with your friends or view their selfies or see event listings. Or rather to do these things, you have to make an effort to use some other more private mode of communication like phone or in-person or classifieds or whatever. It's easier to use Facebook than to not.

That is an extremely far cry from "having to" use the service. The problem really is people are lazy, and use Facebook because it saves them time, effort, and energy. In most cases, people care about this saved energy more than they do their privacy.

verylittlemeat• 8 years ago

Man I remember the enthusiasm behind Diaspora like it was yesterday. I can still see in my minds eye that NYTimes article photo of the creators sitting around like they just invented cold fusion or something.

marban• 8 years ago

Allaire ColdFusion wasn't that big either ;)

anc84• 8 years ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html

I looked what they were up to now: Suicide, Snapchat, backerkit.com (crowdfunding related service), unknown.

Joeboy5• 8 years ago

I think the hype was really thrust upon them by the breathless NYT article and the unexpectedly massive donations to their Kickstarter. They did their best to run with it, and were met with limited success and widespread vitriol that was not really deserved.

Jean-Philipe• 8 years ago

Diaspora is actually worse for privacy, because of its distributed nature. Diaspora is about distributed ownership. If you value privacy in a social network, check out https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork

yndoendo• 8 years ago

IPV6 is really needed to create social media distribution with customized privacy. Example, use a smart phone as the actually distributing and access control system. This way a person can instantly block and know who is accessing their content too. End to end encryption communication with content distribution.

Of course this is more into the future when Cellular ISP are better with less strict data caps and better upload speeds along with not having to connection to Apple or Google or Amazon for Voice to Text / Command / Action solutions and smart phones actually have a viable storage capacity.

soapdog2• 8 years ago

Hey I Love Scuttlebutt, I am actually writing a client for it. But I don't think the objective here is privacy. If I follow you on ssb, I will start replicating your feed (unless you block me), and all you post publicly will be in my own HD which I could use to generate some "intelligence". There are no incentives in ssb for those marketing type actions we see on FB and Twitter but we can still mine it. Of course your private communication is private, but the public feed is very public.

tomcooks3• 8 years ago

It was not about privacy, it still isn't about privacy.

It's about usability, and the flocking to Mastodon when there are better options around is the proof of this theory of mine.

jug• 8 years ago

Yes. It's absolutely about four simple steps:

1. Going to a mobile-first website or app.

2. Clicking a link.

3. Typing in your new e-mail and password.

4. Being able to add anyone in the world as friends.

It cannot be about local "hubs" vs the global "public" / federation, being forced to make that distinction would feel like a step backwards for the users. It can be distributed in the back end, but not in the front end.

It also needs to look beautiful.

bamboozled• 8 years ago

Really? I don't think so, it would be good if someone did a study on this though. Most people I know think privacy is important.

I do think people are communicating via other mediums more than before though. It's anecdotal but most of my family and friends just gravitate towards iMessage , Facetime and Telegram to communicate by default now.

Could it be that people don't care about this issue because they care about Facebook anymore? There are alternatives now, people will just use them more and more over time.

jamesrcole• 8 years ago

Most people I know think privacy is important.

The question is, how representative are those people of the population at large?

Joeboy5• 8 years ago

Most people I know think privacy is important.

Of course they do. What sort of person is going to tick the "I don't care about privacy" box? I guess the same kind of person that ticks the "I'm OK with mass extinction" box. Those opinions are not very relevant in the real world.

Sir_Substance• 8 years ago

Diaspora (still!) doesn't do:

1. Chat (It could just integrate a javascript XMPP client and let people use whatever chat server they liked)

2. Event management and invites

When I suggest people leave Facebook, these are the things people complain there are no alternatives to.

jhasse3• 8 years ago

2. Event management and invites

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1359

rebuilder• 8 years ago

#2 is especially galling, as it's actually, to me, the only really compelling service Facebook provides.

dbbk2• 8 years ago

I don't know what it's like in the US, but in the UK pretty much all of university social life is organised via Facebook Events and Groups. There literally is no other option available that people could move to, except for maybe Meetup.com, which would be a poor substitute.

sitepodmatt• 8 years ago

Similar story as app.net, the paid twitter replacement that was cool for 33 seconds, arguably poor naming though on both counts given one suggests something else and the second I have no idea how to pronounce.

chillingeffect• 8 years ago

I just joined yesterday.

It will take some time to wind it up. Even fb took a long time to build before it was relavant.

Nobody cared back then bc they hadn't felt they burn of foreign influence on our election.

And diaspora will have to grow. Even some basic things can improve the on boarding process. For example, uploading my profile was diverted due to a cap on picture upload size of 4.2 MB.

corobo5• 8 years ago

I get flashbacks to scrolling error messages whenever someone mentions Diaspora. Just horrible software to use if it ever had an issue. Great when starting but the maintenance time costs were too high

Nothing to do with not caring about privacy, I really did try to use it. Even had 100 users or so on my open instance.

It was on par with running a public email service. Not my circus.

bsenftner• 8 years ago

They were "selected" because they were likely to fail, gave pithy interviews, and were young and hopeful. Facebook even gave them $50K - that is not competition, that is coddling a child.

wdr1• 8 years ago

In reality, people aren't upset about privacy. They're upset Trump won.

silverbax88• 8 years ago

They're not upset about privacy, they're upset the election was stolen. They didn't care when those of us with experience in election issues brought this up 20 years ago, they didn't care in 2000, they didn't care until suddenly a pretend-billionaire reality star stole an election.

As soon as they can get rid of him, they will go back to not caring, even though it's more dangerous than ever and we've been telling them for decades.

georgeecollins• 8 years ago

It's not fair to say they don't care about privacy when by in large when they are surrendering it they are not aware. The average person has a very low awareness of the long term implications to the loss of privacy and how affect say, their chances of getting a job, or getting the best price for a product. But they will figure it out.

When I read about the Cambridge Analitica story I was kind of shocked anyone was surprised by what they are doing. I have seen companies hoover up data from Facebook in a similar way so I have always understood that under their old ToS any friend could give away your data by participating in an app. It had been like that for a long time (they changed the ToS-- I believe in 2015). That seemed terrible to me, years ago. The fact that it took people so long to be shocked about it just shows that their is going to be a long lag between when these things happen and when popular consciousness catches up with the implications.

md2be• 8 years ago

This is typical NYT writing articles that support its one agenda. if we need to replace something it’s the nyt

komali2• 8 years ago

one agenda

Can you clarify what you believe the New York Times' agenda is, as demonstrated by this opinion piece article, and how "Tim Wu, law professor at Columbia," has been employed to propagate the NYT agenda?

Also, why should the NYT be replaced, and what should it be replaced by?

wink• 8 years ago

There's "I care about privacy" and "I have a bunch reasons to dislike Diaspora, so I won't use it".

Not speaking for everyone, of course - but I know a lot of people who didn't like it for one reason or another.

on_and_off• 8 years ago

No one really cares about privacy now

I spoke with several non-tech people about the facebook fiasco.

The issue is that even a brilliant neurosurgeon does not understand the TOS he has signed with Facebook and what they entail.

Surely, there is some naïveté from people that don't expect facebook to do much with their data, but tech has also failed to teach users about this.

Even self proclaimed privacy champions routinely make you sign dozen of pages of ToS that are updated on a whim.

rmc• 8 years ago

This is why a contract should not be legally binding if it's unclear. I don't mean "clear to a lawyer", but what the common person, spending the standard, common amount of time, with the advice you expect them to have[1], would think of as "clear".

EU Data Protection law (like the GDPR) helps here, requiring informed consent. If you don't understand something, then you're not informed, and it shouldn't be binding.

[1] When (say) signing a form for surgery, the surgon can presume that the person has been advised by a doctor. When buying a house, you can presume a lawyer was involved, etc. When signing a ToS for Facebook, we all know there was no legal advice recieved.

jacinabox• 8 years ago

A quick research job has revealed that most of the interesting features of facebook, in particular "liking" posts and friend suggestion, are patented by facebook. It would be difficult therefore for a new entrant to copy its features.

Slansitartop3• 8 years ago

A quick research job has revealed that most of the interesting features of facebook, in particular "liking" posts ... are patented by facebook.

I find find this hard to believe. Don't competing networks have similar functionality (e.g. "hearting")? What exactly about "liking" has Facebook patented?

I'm much more ready to believe "liking" is trademarked, though I'm still skeptical of it, given that it's an everyday word used with its everyday meaning.

carlmr• 8 years ago

Facebook has likes, Reddit has upvotes and downvotes, I don't know the name on HN or Stackoverflow.

Just calling it something different seems to be enough.

yy77• 8 years ago

If privacy is really a concern, one should live like Jack Reacher, even not use credit card. Current situation is that, we want to happy share and attract attention on facebook. If it did something wrong, let the court sues it.

dreamygeek• 8 years ago

It's too messed up now anyways. The privacy settings sucked right from the beginning of Facebook. And it just kept getting worse. Guess people are just used to it now just like slaves get used to slavery and can't get out of it.

chx• 8 years ago

Better will be hard. If you want people to come, you need to build something that Facebook doesn't provide. I have no idea what that will be but I do not think just privacy protection would be enough. By far.

feelin_googley7• 8 years ago

"Do these hundreds of millions of people who cannot wait to tell the world what they are doing practically minute by minute not realise that anyone with an ounce of brain can find out everything about them just by reading their posts?

As the FBI admitted a while back, Facebook was the best thing that happened to collecting intelligence and saving money (because everything is in the open).

By having "free" access and use of Facebook, these people have made Mark Zuckerberg a multibillionaire."

Source:

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/letters/2018-04-04...

feelin_googley7• 8 years ago

"Australia's privacy commissioner has launched an investigation to determine whether Facebook breached the Australian privacy act.

...

Facebook has admitted 311,127 Australian users are likely among the up to 87 million users worldwide whose data was unknowingly and "improperly" shared with the British political consultancy agency."

Source:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/05/facebook-...

exolymph• 8 years ago

Normies don't care about privacy enough to stop using Facebook.

heisnotanalien• 8 years ago

Why can't I just pay for FB a monthly fee and as such they have no need to make money by selling my data or spamming me with crappy ads?

6ak74rfy• 8 years ago

A usual CPC (cost per click) that an advertiser is willing to pay is somewhere between 50 to 150 cents. Let's say it is 100, and you clicked on 10 ads in a month. So, Facebook earned $10 off you. Now, you should be willing to pay more than that for Facebook to prefer the model you are suggesting.

My math above is highly simplistic. For e.g., you'd say you aggressively use an ad blocker and never click on ads. Fair enough, but what about non - tech people unlike us? For e.g., when my dad starting using Facebook at an age of 50+ couple of years, he just tried an unknown plumber through a Facebook ad. Moreover, you'd be willing to pay a monthly subscription, but would all of your friends?

So, what I am getting at is that at Facebook scale they'll earn more though ads than through a subscription model.

mrweasel2• 8 years ago

The value you represent to Facebook is also dependent on your location. People in the US are worth the most, around $60 per year: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-...

For heavy Facebook users $60 isn't much, but for everyone else it seems a little much.

mch822• 8 years ago

I'm always surprised by how little services charge to remove advertising. YouTube will do it for $9.99/month.

johnchristopher• 8 years ago

Not so fast:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/heres-how-much-youre...
Here's how much Facebook makes per person in each region, extrapolated annually based on the network's third-quarter numbers:
Worldwide: $16.04
US $62.60
Europe: $18.88
Asia-Pacific: $7.56
Rest of World: $4.84

Another metric:

The social network giant, Facebook has a market cap of $227 billion and 1.4 billion users—which makes you worth a whooping $158. https://arkenea.com/blog/big-tech-companies-user-worth/

So for a max. of 10 bucks per month we could get an ad-free, privacy oriented Facebook. With dev. money going to enhance the experience not maximizing revenues of the ad industry.

einr• 8 years ago

Who clicks 10 ads a month? I don't think I've clicked 10 ads in total since getting on the web for the first time in 1997...

icebraining• 8 years ago

My uninformed guesses:

1) Hard to price discriminate. Some people are worth almost nothing to FB, others are worth a lot. The price would either have to be absurdly high (e.g. $500+/y) or they might leave a lot on the table from that very profitable minority.

2) PR hit. People more easily accept that a frivolous luxury is only available to the wealthy, whereas even many people who use FB see privacy as more of a basic need. See: response to "price gougers" selling stuff like ice or water at a premium in disaster areas.

3) Hard to cleaning delineate. It's a social graph, your data is useful to generate data on your friends. Could they use it in that case or not? If they do, will that expose them to a lawsuit?

IshKebab• 8 years ago

This isn't about Facebook selling data. Why does everyone think it is?

herbst6• 8 years ago

Why even replace it? Pseudo chronological single wall views are simply not a modern way to consume information anymore.

Not to mention, which crazy brain even proposed to fix it?

narven• 8 years ago

Do we really need another crap to replace it? just shut it down.

pi-squared• 8 years ago

I wonder what is the penetration of these kind of news outside our bubble here at HN, reddit and the like. I'm wondering the rest 2 billion people (which to a first approximation is probably just about everybody) care about this or are willing to care if few of their techie friends leave facebook. Is there some mathematical model + social science that could estimate the network effects of say, every techie person does leave facebook for good - what would happen to the rest?

Most of my non-techie friends have heard briefly about "some kind of scandal with facebook" but I cannot possibly appeal to them talking about "privacy" or they are stealing and selling your data - "Oh, everybody does that, you can't not use the Internet".

keybits• 8 years ago

DuckDuckGo did a survey of just over 1,000 random US adults after the Cambridge Analytica story: https://spreadprivacy.com/cambridge-analytica/

skinnymuch3• 8 years ago

A lot of people might say they are going to do more for privacy or interact with FB and other social media less, but until there’s a proper followup study in day 6 months, I don’t know if I believe all the respondents. I believe that they tried to truthfully answer the questions. But that some of it is reactionary and/or the right thing to say at the time. Maybe I’m wrong though?

Thanks for the link of course! Great write up and charts to look through.

p49k2• 8 years ago

Has anyone seen a product that was functional, polished, and enjoyable to use that would be capable of replacing Facebook? I haven't. Diaspora, Mastodon, Ello are the only things that I can think of, and none of them come close to matching the basic functionality and the "it just works" factor of Facebook.

Maybe someone should put in some resources to create a polished product and see what happens? It doesn't even have to be some idealistic p2p distributed system or anything like that, just a company who actively works to minimize the data they store and to allow users to control and manage their data effectively.

haylem• 8 years ago

True, I haven't seen another product "match" Facebook.

But I also don't see much need for it (entirely), or at the very least for most of its features.

The Facebook of ~2007 was about as good as it ever needed to be (minus the pokes). It served its purpose well. It could have used some of the UI polish it got afterwards, but no new feature addition has made any significant change to end users in my view, apart from pushing them towards more extreme sharing.

It's a super cool app, and a super cool platform, with unfortunately little actual value to its end users (except if you consider advertisers and users of the tech platform the end users, not the actual Facebook users).

Not that I think it's all Facebook's fault: you build something for a certain purpose, and it naturally evolves, and you adapt to what people want, or what you think they want based on some metrics or "need" for growth. And then you get... this.

p49k2• 8 years ago

The biggest feature for me that no one has replicated is the ability to create events with extremely customizable privacy preferences in which you know people will get the invite, even if they’ve changed phone numbers (in other words, some level of contact redundancy).

alecco• 8 years ago

An even bigger problem is making critical mass.

Young people are already tired of old Facebook. The problem is Facebook keeps acquiring the competitors gaining ground (WhatsApp/Instagram), and if not possible just ripping off the features. It's grown too big to be upended easily. And they are not stupid. They see the writing on the wall.

skinnymuch3• 8 years ago

Don’t a decent portion of people sign up to FB once they finish high school/begin college or after they finish college (or are around that age). FB would obviously want every age signing up, but having young people sign up eventually doesn’t seem so bad either.

brylie• 8 years ago

The closest open-source, distributed option I know of is Friendica;

https://friendi.ca/

Of course, there is room for improvement in the Friendica UX, but it still seems like a viable option for federated social network. The Friendica devs seem to strive for interoperability with other networks and support open standards for the social Internet.

pnutjam2• 8 years ago

Try this one. It's the most user friendly I've seen: https://mewe.com

dhimes2• 8 years ago

OK- just signed up

ytjohn• 8 years ago

I'm planning to setup Hubzilla as a forum/wiki for my local radio group and local tech community. Hubzilla might not have everything right (I would prefer the scuttlebut/patchwork approach), but it definitely checks most boxes for me. The key one being Nomadic identity - they can export everything they've ever posted and upload it to another server. This is really crucial (not for my club, but for other groups). Hubzilla also federates with ostatus, diospara, gnusoc, frendica, mastadon, and others.

Hubzilla only has a few thousand users. In a social media world, that's a rounding error. So my thought is that people should setup Hubzilla for a targeted group. Get an active community of dozens or possibly hundreds of people, and if they like the platform, encourage them to invite other people and start additional communities. Or find communities through the federation.

https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project

https://medium.com/we-distribute/the-do-everything-system-an...

supermatt• 8 years ago

What a naive article!

The reality is that we can either have a paid-for walled garden so that bad actors cant leach data, or a decentralised and trust-driven network.

It only takes a "friend" using a nefarious client/implementation to send all your data to a 3rd party.

sgk284• 8 years ago

Even a paid-for walled garden is likely not sufficient. Plenty of services you pay for and/or are the customer of still resell your data (see: banks & credit card companies).

jyriand• 8 years ago

Orkut, please come back.

gvurrdon• 8 years ago

The only possible thing for which I might need Facebook would be for groups, as some hobbies seem to have almost entirely moved there for event organisation and general discussion.

Previously we used to use forums such as phpBB, but setting up one of these involved finding someone able to host the forum software on their server. Tapatalk could be set up to improve the mobile experience, but most users seemed to find that somehow difficult. There was also a constant battle with spam and malware.

I'm not sure what would suit - Mastodon and Diaspora don't seem to me to be the right solutions here. Currently, I am making do with being out of the loop and missing things.

vijaybritto2• 8 years ago

"Another “alt-Facebook” could be a nonprofit that uses that status to signal its dedication to better practices, much as nonprofit hospitals and universities do" -> Honestly, I don't think this would be sustainable to function as a social network. At least I don't think it would work in a capitalist society.

jcadam2• 8 years ago

I've had the same thought. Charge a small monthly fee in lieu of running ads or selling user data. Might cut down on fake/spam accounts as well.

But I don't think it would work (and I'd totally work on something like this if I thought it would). People say they care about privacy, but when you present them with the option of paying $5/mo for a service that respects their privacy or using a "free" service that tracks everything they do and sells that data to anyone who'll pay, they'll almost always opt for the latter.

Now, I would certainly pay a monthly fee for a non-user-hostile social network experience. And I would consider the smaller user base a feature, so long as it wasn't too small.

jasonkostempski• 8 years ago

Does FB make $5 a month off the average user? If not, $5 a year? Regardless of what FB makes, could $5 a year keep a FB clone alive at FBs current volume? Would people even pay that?

bachmeier• 8 years ago

$60/year to post about taking the kids to visit Grandma is pretty steep for most users.

petepete• 8 years ago

The reason Friends Reunited failed (at least here in the UK) was definitely that any payment was too big a barrier. Most people just don't care. They didn't before CA, they don't now.

I use FB as I attend various gatherings that organise there, but I no longer contribute much, and am phasing it out.

mawburn• 8 years ago

The whole point of a social network is to connect with friends. If it was a paid service, nobody would be on it.

Considering that every other startup has wanted to build "Facebook/MySpace/Twitter BUT FOR XXXX" for the last decade, I guarantee what you want is out there (or has existed at some point), but nobody is on it and nobody has heard of it, because it costs money and nobody is going to pay money for a social network that's empty. I personally wouldn't pay money for a social network that's not empty, either... and I'm sure a lot of people share my sentiment.

vijaybritto2• 8 years ago

Yes, exactly! Also developers still thinking in dollars need to understand the rest of the world seriously! The income levels all around the world are very less in the developing countries. This is a significant factor. If I'm earning only 100$/month I would definitely not pay a cent for a service that promises 'privacy'. I need to survive first and if I'm able to do stuff for free I'm definitely using it. Those people are least bothered about privacy.

An anecdote from a recent experience: I'm in India and there is the Aadhar project which assigns unique id to every citizen. There is a big privacy debate about it in the cities regarding privacy issues as the govt is forcing everyone to link our assets and tax numbers to it. People in the villages have no idea about it and there were pamphlets of Aadhar numbers being used as tissue papers in a local snack shops. But they all have a Facebook account for sure.

People don't understand understand privacy when they just want to survive.

TACIXAT• 8 years ago

I feel 5 dollars is expensive for a monthly. Servers are pretty cheap, storage is pretty cheap. There is no realistic way to pay a few pennies per month though. Maybe 5 dollars yearly. If it's a not for profit then they just need to operate slightly above cost.

gukov• 8 years ago

Most people will follow others, and if everyone's paying $5 they'll gladly pay it too. It's getting that critical mass of paying users is what's hard. I wonder if it's viable to have government subsidize somehow...

reitanqild• 8 years ago

I was very happy to pay USD 1 a year for WhatsApp.

I think they were already profitable by te time they sold out.

There's also other monetization options:

API access for businesses.

Premium accounts.

Etc.

And FTR: I'd gladly paid 10 times as much as WhatsApp charged if that was the price- as long as they didn't sell out to my enemies.

gnud• 8 years ago

I think some sort of freemium would be the way to go. Photos/videos expire unless you pay, limited space for photos/videos unless you pay, limited group size, limited amount of events/month, integrated ticket sales, branding oppts. for business pages.

naskwo• 8 years ago

For photo sharing, I set up www.famipix.com in 2005...

9080874• 8 years ago

I find Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook needs to be the way it is so that "people who can't afford it can have access" pretty repulsive and incredibly sleazy.

If people can't afford a few dollars a month, why in the fuck would it be acceptable to expose them to manipulative ads that encourage them to hand over money that Zuckerberg claims they don't have? He tries to paint himself and his company as altruistic, while simultaneously exploiting the hell out of the people he claims to be "helping".

billconan• 8 years ago

I think my ideal social network would be something like reddit + medium + slack.

and it will be for expanding my social network and finding people alike, not for watching daily bullshit from existing friends.

feelin_googley7• 8 years ago

"In 2013, Brandon Copley, the CEO of Giftnix, was threatened with legal action after using the technique to demonstrate how personal information could be easily gathered at scale.

"Multiple Facebook profiles were extremely easy to scrape," he explains. In a series of conversations with Facebook security developers Copley explained the issue and was told there was "no security vuln here, even though it does seem like one on first glance."

The method of scraping can work in multiple ways but largely relies on feeding Facebook's API a list of phone numbers or email addresses that have been automatically generated. These could also have been obtained from data breaches or leaks of information online.

"Just query Facebook as often as possible until they ban your IP for querying too fast, and at that point you just slow down until the queries stop," Copley explained in an email. "I was doing my work purely for research and exposing the vulnerability for Facebook".

...

The issue was again raised by researchers in 2015.

Reza Moaiandin, who founded cybersecurity company CyberScanner, published a blogpost about the "loophole". he said he was able to gather thousands of users personal information by guessing their mobile numbers. Within this information were details of names, locations, and profile pictures.

In response Facebook told him it didn't "consider it a security vulnerability" but had controls in place to stop it being abused. Zuckerberg's most recent statement goes against this, admitting Facebook's efforts to stop malicious actors hadn't worked."

Source:

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-news-data-scraping-m...

"A few months ago, I discovered a security loophole in Facebook that allows hackers to decrypt and sniff out Facebook user IDs using one of Facebook's APIs in bulk - therefore allowing them to gather millions of users' personal data (name, telephone number, location, images, and more). This post is an attempt to catch Facebook's attention to get this issue fixed.

By using a script, an entire country's (I tested with the US, the UK and Canada) possible number combinations can be run through these URLs, and if a number is associated with a Facebook account, it can then be associated with a name and further details (images, and so on).

...

For those of you who are wondering why I haven't notified Facebook about the issue, the truth is that I have - back in April (2015).

Although I did receive a reply, initially the engineer I was in contact with was unable to reproduce the issue himself, and therefore failed to understand the technical details of how it should be fixed.

...

After a couple of months of waiting, I initially thought someone else will look into it and fix it but I heard nothing, so I raised the flag with them again. They finally came back to me and told me that this is not a big issue - they have set limits and I should not worry about this problem. But frankly, I am very worried.

...

Comment from reader:

Great blog post. I reported an almost identical issue (albeit a different API) to Facebook in January 2014 but faced similar difficulties getting them to recognise the scope for abuse. I was able to lookup contiguous blocks of mobile numbers (in blocks of 5,000 at a time) with no discernible rate-limiting - I could pull them down as fast as my connection could handle (maybe ~50k numbers/min).

If you make any headway with Facebook let us know and I will try pinging them again. It was especially worrisome as the number range I tried (NYC) had a hit-rate of about 20%."

Source:

https://salt.agency/blog/facebook-security-loophole/

feelin_googley7• 8 years ago

"Poll: Do you trust Facebook?

...

THIS MORNING, IT emerged that nearly 45,000 Irish Facebook profiles may have been affected by the giant data breach involving as many as 87 million accounts harvested by UK data intelligence firm Cambridge Analytica.

Those 45,000 accounts could have been breached due to just 15 Irish people accessing a questionnaire app, thisisyourdigitallife, which included in its permissions the granting of access to all an individual's friends' profiles."

Source:

http://www.thejournal.ie/poll-do-you-trust-facebook-3941194-...

jenkinsj2• 8 years ago

I'm captivated by the phrase "free content (sic) is the creature, the servant and indeed the prostitute of merchandizing". -Walter Lippmann

ravenstine• 8 years ago

NY Times was among the numerous media companies that slobbered over Facebook for years and gave them free publicity. And now I'm supposed to listen to them when they say to replace Facebook.

feelin_googley7• 8 years ago

"These days, you might get more applause for not being on social media than for reaching a follower milestone in Europe's liberal hubs such as Berlin or Paris.

...

The mechanisms used by Cambridge Analytica and the "malicious actors" cited by Facebook appear to have been legal and do not constitute a data hack, but rather a deliberate exploitation of information through tools or loopholes Facebook itself provided in the past.

...

At least two foreign governments, Australia and Germany, threatened or launched investigations into the practices on Thursday.

...

Meanwhile, in India, where more than a half-million users are estimated to be affected, the allegations have resulted in a governmental request to Facebook and Cambridge Analytica for more detailed information, with a Saturday deadline.

Even though India is now Facebook's biggest market - ahead of the United States - no Indian media outlets were able to ask questions in a conference call with CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday.

The heavy U.S. focus immediately triggered criticism because privacy advocates are still looking into reports that Cambridge Analytica may have used Facebook data to influence Indian politics, as well.

...

German justice minister Katarina Barley already called for an E.U.-wide investigation into the misuse of Facebook's data by Cambridge Analytica and other companies on Thursday.

"Facebook has gambled away people's trust," Barley said.

...

But in Europe, Germany's justice minister and others already fear that the latest regulations aren't enough."

Source:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/04/05...

Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It

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