A week or so back another user asked a pretty reasonable question "More and more, it feels like Facebook is a problem that needs solving. How can we solve it?"
Unfortunately the handful of thoughtful responses got lost in the inevitable torrent of "Facebook SUX! Twitter SUX! Internets SUX!" nonsense. You know, the on-line equivalent of saying "I read a book once and it sucked so ALL BOOKS SUX!"
I actually find Twitter really useful and rely on it heavily for some specific information flows. I also use Facebook for family and some close friends that I still want to keep in touch with. I have of course pseudonymized myself enough to keep FB out of my deepest private life.
Still, I'd love an alternative.
So, given that:
- Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms can actually be very useful when used sensibly
- Facebook and Twitter are still essential tools for many millions of people, including a lot of really smart ones.
- Platforms that connect people can be a very positive thing, and can even bring about some kinds of social change
- And given that Facebook is becoming pretty useless, annoying, and evil; and that Twitter is probably heading the same way.
I'm going to ask again, what do we need to create a functional social media platform that avoids the many problems that Facebook has, and that will actually attract a large enough user base to work?
Related Stories
In the wake of the Facebook emotional manipulation scandal [also see earlier story], maybe more ordinary people are starting to think about alternatives to Facebook, and to centralised social media in general.
But what viable decentralised alternatives are out there? It's been four years since Diaspora* launched, and though the open network now has a foundation backing it and claims a million users, there have been few recent stories about how to connect.
Similarly, StatusNet as an alternative to Twitter has been around under various names since 2008, but still seems to remain little known.
Has anyone used these services, and can recommend them or anything similar? Are any open-source, decentralised microblogging and social media services even remotely ready for your parents to switch to?
More and more, it feels like Facebook is a problem that needs solving. How can we solve it?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cockroach on Monday July 07 2014, @02:29PM
If the previous / current attempts at social media have taught us (well, me) anything then it is that centralized communication platforms don't work, at least not in a way that would make me use them. The two platforms that I do currently use for "social interactions" are e-mail and jabber, both of which I can host myself. As long as social networks are run by centralized entities we are always going to have privacy issues and there will always be people who want to turn your personal data into money. Only a decentralized approach could even begin to work.
(Score: 1) by CRCulver on Monday July 07 2014, @03:50PM
Privacy and decentralization is a hard problem. Even if a social media network were based on the interaction of multiple independent servers, only a few nerds are going to run their own servers. Most people are going to turn to a host to manage it all for them. This is how it was done with XMPP: I run my own Jabber server, but everyone else on my contacts list got their account through Google Talk.
Most people don't want to pay for services, so their third-party host is likely to make money through advertising, which means that it will want to sell the content that users provide to others. You know, "If you aren't paying, you aren't the customer, you're the product".
So when a third-party host is standing between you and your social media friends, you can't trust that the content you share will remain limited to your friends' eyes only. There would have to be some kind of strong cryptography involved, which isn't just a programming challenge, but it's also a business one: how are you going to convince third-party hosts to support a social network if they can never bring in subscription money or sell data to other companies?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 07 2014, @05:56PM
> Even if a social media network were based on the interaction of multiple independent servers, only a few nerds are going to run their own servers.
The solution is P2P.
Make the server the client and host it on your phone. Make it smart enough to be low bandwidth on cell, but full-blast on wifi. Social media is naturally clustered - groups of friends who share multiple direct and indirect links so by caching your data on your friend's phones there will be a good chance that multiple copies of your data are available full-blast on wifi even when your phone is turned off.
For commercial-grade accounts (celebrities, etc - basically anyone using the network for commercial purposes) they can pay for dedicated "backing-store" servers in data centers. That could be used as the revenue stream for the company backing it - sort like the way wordpress hosts all kinds of high-bandwidth crap for blogs (even big commercial blogs) or the craigslist model where 99.9% of the traffic is free, ad-free and very light-weight, but a tiny fraction is paid (craigslist charges for job and rental listings in top markets). They've only got about 50 employees but do 50 billion page views per month and are not interested in an IPO or any of that crap.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:19AM
The answer that I have found to work for me would be a device you keep at home that uses your bandwidth there. No hosting fees involved other than the Internet you are already paying for.
Media sharing would be pretty simple if you made it right. In a simple mode (wizard) you can attach up to other storage and review and designate content available for sharing. Advanced mode could allow all sorts of things up iSCSI targets and rsync encrypted backup to S3 or equivalents.
You build your page, your wall, etc. Log in to it remotely to post updates, add pictures you just snapped with your phone, etc.
As for privacy and the encryption, that won't be perfect. It will be decentralized though which means that the NSA can't target a single entity for mass surveillance, and the law cannot simply force a centralized network to hand over plaintext. If the government is not accepted as your friend and designated to view private ACL controlled content, they have to fight the encryption and platform on every single one.
You're better off defending yourself on a Raspberry Pi than trusting Facebook and Twitter. As you said, business concerns alone mean you're not the real customer.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 07 2014, @04:47PM
Agreed, decentralization is the key. I've designed such a system gluing concepts from several sources (PGP, DHT, file systems, etc.), and I've spent almost a year of hard work to implement it. Yet, there are still lots of things to be done. Problem is I'm a Ph.D. student, doing this stuff in my "free time" (my thesis is completely unrelated to this work). In September I'll apply for funding, if my project gets selected then I'll hire people to help me. I'll release it under the AGPLv3 when it is ready.
So, to answer the OP, what do we need to make an alternative? We need people that make their main goal to contribute to society (e.g. Jimmy Wales), not to fill their pockets (e.g Suckerberg). But unfortunately we also need money to support their work. About the problem of attracting new users, I think people that are aware of the centralization problems will educate the others, driving them to a better solution.
(Score: 1) by Lazarus on Monday July 07 2014, @05:19PM
Sure they do. Facebook is tremendously popular. They have an income problem in the transition to mobile, but any new solution is going to have the same problem. I don't think that most people are willing to pay a subscription fee to a social network, even if that means increased privacy.
>at least not in a way that would make me use them.
So they're not for you, but what good would a social network that's just used by geeks do? We already have Soylent to chat on, and we're not going to get our non-geek friends to adopt some new solution just to keep up with us, especially if they have to pay for it.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:56AM
So they're not for you
They're not for anyone that values privacy and doesn't want the NSA knowing what they're up to all the time.
I see people (not just geeks, but everyone) whining and complaining about Facebook and its ads and lack of privacy and letting everyone see everything you post all the time, but they keep on using Facebook just because everyone else they know is using it. It's just like lemmings jumping off a cliff.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday July 07 2014, @02:31PM
If it depends on a corporation or specific individuals then it will get the problems Facebook etc has.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday July 07 2014, @07:09PM
The term "Corporation" included just about EVERYTHING on the internet, beginning with the wires leading into your house, and ending with your correspondent on the other end.
Yet few of these manage to abuse their customers as much as Facebook. Hell even Google only uses your information to push ads without letting the advertisers know about you.
But more to the point, Once you eliminate Corporations and Individuals, doesn't that pretty much leave you delivering written notes to your friends via pigeons?? Seriously, what else is left?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday July 07 2014, @11:20PM
Individuals where other can continue the work and fork. Decentralized structure with P2P.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dbot on Monday July 07 2014, @02:32PM
Rather than a service. It seems the main problem is the centralized nature of these platforms. A publicly documented protocol seems much more flexible, with allowing third party hosting, but that third party could be you.
I'm pretty ignorant about the state-of-the-art. Is diaspora a protocol, an implementation, both? Does it do what you want, albeit poorly (or something)?
Come up with a coherent design document, pass it around, peer-review, implement a few clients/servers, and submit to IETF. How hard could that be? /s
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 07 2014, @04:20PM
"Come up with a coherent design document, pass it around, peer-review, implement a few clients/servers, and submit to IETF. How hard could that be?"
We could call it usenet, or fidonet.
I would like to see a revival of fidonet using p2p mobile mesh network devices. In my infinite spare time. I'm sure big content and the telcos and the NSA would really love that idea LOL. Probably a good way to get my car blown up with me inside it. Someone else should give this implementation idea a try, yeah.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday July 07 2014, @11:36PM
Like most people here, I've been thinking usenet too. But, even though I'm not a FB user myself, I have seen other people's FB screens and I think they would be nonplussed by what looks almost exactly like an email inbox.
Perhaps where the focus should lie, is on a client built on top of usenet that would render the feeds you subscribe to in a manner similar to FB. So instead of seeing an inbox with subject line that you must click to see a cat pic and message -- it would take the content of the post, and display that inline with the other posts the user has received from the people the user wants to get messages from. Privacy would be nonexistent of course because everyone would be downloading everything and just not displaying everyone's posts. PGP would work but it would be awkward because of the duplication involved in sending one message to 10 people (instead of one post, you'd have 10 encrypted with 10 different public keys -- so bandwidth hogging if everyone encrypted plus a means to track such duplicate-but-different-due-to-encryption posts). I don't know. Maybe it isn't such a great solution either.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:46AM
That's what I hate about the current "Web 2.0" trend: everything's a "service" and nobody bothers with protocols because the only goal seems to be "monetization" of the, and that's harder if you build a system without inherent lock-in.
Services die, usually as soon as they stop being profitable to someone, but protocols can live forever, or at least as long as there's still somebody that finds use in it. If Google Reader had been based on a closed design instead of something open and standard (RSS), Google's termination of it would have been far messier than it was, for example. IRC likely wouldn't still be around if it weren't a protocol anybody could implement, too.
What happens when Facebook or Twitter eventually closes shop? Everything's gone and the people that find them genuinely useful as screwed, that's what. Meanwhile, Email, Usenet, IRC, etc. still work.
We need more protocols and fewer closed "services" damn it!
(Score: 3, Informative) by cafebabe on Monday July 07 2014, @02:37PM
I provide an outline specification for this on Mon 30 Jun 2014 [soylentnews.org].
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 07 2014, @04:30PM
That's a pretty good list and "RSS must die so social media can live" might explain the perplexing google idea of destroying Reader. The problem is I spend at least four times as much time in Reader (now newsblur) than in G+ or other "social media", and they as a group of corporations have trouble monetizing RSS/ATOM in general as well as they monetize social media.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:26AM
By using RSS, it creates very low barriers to entry. If you want to read content, you only require a web browser with RSS support. The variety of discussion already available is quite diverse. For example, Craigslist [craigslist.org] and SoylentNews [soylentnews.org]. If you want to write content, you only require an account on livejournal.org or tumblr.com (or facebook.com, if you're desperate [itworld.com]).
If you want to have distributed "friends", albums, a unified timeline and the ability to read and write content in one place without that content being monetized then it would cost the same as having your own instance of Wordpress which is less than $60 per year.
If that's too expensive then enjoy being monetized by Facebook and Twitter (which discontinued RSS support [twitter.com]).
1702845791×2
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday July 07 2014, @02:43PM
Facebook, if you recall, wasn't always the dominant player in social media. Back in the dark days of 2002 or so, MySpace was where it was at, with gajillions of users, Weird Al making jokes about it, and eventually a $580 million buyout.
So, what Facebook did, at first, that got everyone to switch was:
1. Targeted audience. It was originally very specifically aimed at Harvard undergrads, then at the undergraduate population of other colleges and universities. MySpace started by targeting aspiring musicians, so specific demographics might work.
2. No ads of any kind. In fact, there was no obvious revenue stream whatsoever at first.
3. Very limited feature set that built slowly over time.
4. Swearing up and down that personal privacy would be protected.
So what I'd recommend for someone trying to replace Facebook and Twitter is to develop, say, a simple targeted no-ads network for people who know each other in real life. Facebook in particular is exactly where MySpace was when it collapsed, namely trying to cash in as much as possible and only being used because everyone else uses it.
The problems are not technical, but social and business. Diaspora might be a good place to start though.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by lhsi on Monday July 07 2014, @03:03PM
Back in 2006/2007 one of the big features of Facebook compared to MySpace was that on MySpace you had a limit of about 12 photos you could upload, whereas either Facebook didn't have this limit, or it had a much bigger limit (maybe 30? It could have been albums were max of 30 but you could have multiple albums). I think another thing that set it apart from MySpace was that pages weren't really customisable, which was great compared to bright text, glittery backgrounds and autoplaying music of MySpace profiles.
In general, a social network is only as good as the people in it. If there are hardly any people in there, the experience isn't going to be great. For some of the newer ones, it has meant that some of the early adopters are making new friends who are also using this. I have seen this happen a lot on Google+ - people use Facebook for people they know in real life, and have people they have never met in their Google+ circles to follow for [landscape photos|recipes|fitness tips|etc.]. Twitter can be either or I think. Myself I am using twitter mainly to follow some people I know, some people I don't know, and pages/companies/etc.
I think if something new is going to succeed, it needs to be different enough from the "main" players, such that it doesn't include the "bad" stuff that is annoying people, and either a way to connect easily with people they know, or connect to new people with similar interests, depending on what the goal of the social network being created it.
(Score: 1) by My Silly Name on Monday July 07 2014, @04:38PM
Indeed. I think (with, admittedly, no evidence other than anecdotal impressions from people I know) that people are drifting away from Facebook because of either a perceived "creepiness" in their marketing strategies or because of a perceived excessive claim on their time. Both of these are reasons why I don't "do" Facebook at all.
It seems to me that there is only one way to fix either of these issues: simplify your social medium so that it is less dependent on advertising or other revenue, at the same time reducing your hosting costs and the requirement to "monetise" your users. An essential feature of a long-term solution might be a set of rock-solid and unambiguous principles guiding the conduct of your site.
The trouble is, while such an approach might have some appeal to a 50+ curmudgeon like myself, I don't have any solution for selling that to a generation that has become accustomed to the features offered by Facebook, and it certainly won't appeal to present-day entrepreneurs accustomed to thinking of their customers as marketable assets.
I have been told that my attitude stems from not being tech-savvy, but this is simply an assumption that younger generations are accustomed to make. I was among many who helped build the internet that we know today, and a guiding feature of this was to make best use of the technology currently available without introducing unnecessary complications.
(Score: 2) by egcagrac0 on Monday July 07 2014, @04:20PM
How do you monetize that?
Businesses - who typically have the resources to host such endeavours - like to have revenue.
(Score: 1) by Lazarus on Monday July 07 2014, @05:12PM
Who's going to pay for this? I think most people would prefer to have their data exploited, rather than to pay a monthly fee now that they've used to not paying cash for Facebook. And most people definitely don't want to set up their own social servers, though a P2P social app might work. The question remains, what's in it for the people writing the code and running the trackers that the P2P clients initially contact for a list of other clients.
I only use Facebook to reply to my girlfriend because she's a heavy FB user, and don't post my life to a page, so I'm not the typical FB user, but I got over my hate when I realized that they've done more to connect people than anything in history.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Koen on Monday July 07 2014, @08:14PM
Congratulations, you win the Hyperbole of the Century Prize. People were already connected before FB came along.
BTW: nobody has done more to connect people than James Clerk Maxwell. Except perhaps Franz von Taxis.
/. refugees on Usenet: comp.misc [comp.misc]
(Score: 1) by MrNemesis on Monday July 07 2014, @02:44PM
Disclaimer: I'm one of those people who closed their facebook account two years ago and has never seen any utility in twitter, so please add the requisite amount of sodium and/or potassium chloride.
It might be useful for you to go into more details on that one; until you've defined what specific workflows you've created around $tool, it's very difficult for anyone to step in and suggest "ah, I do a similar thing but I use $tool32 in a $config.mk2 fashion". The same goes for much of the rest of the OP.
The key problem is that none of the services you list are decentralised - that much is obvious. Decentralising means you can spin up your own instance of whatever you fancy tinkering with, if it's open source/open standard you might even be able to extend it into new areas by bolting on new functionality. Look at how widespread email became and still is today - there's a billion-and-one different bits of software for handling various chunks of it and it's all freely available enough that anyone can run their own mail server (for better or for worse) if they feel like it. Imagine how it would be if the concept and standards were ratified after the internet became "monetised".
You got so many "XYZ sucks!" responses because, by and large, all XYZ's are controlled by a single entity and the temptation to use XYZ to generate money is too great. Most people react dimly with a shrug if you tell them their data is being compromised, they just want their XYZ for "free".
Well, as above I can't say I'm still aware of what problems facebook has that weren't fundamental to its initial business model in the first place... But if you wanted a non-Facebook facebook, you'd need buy-in from a company/organisation/government to create an open-standard that anyone can implement. Wide support for third-party connections (e.g. SMTP, XMPP, LDAP). This relies on them not seeing everything as dollar signs. Given no dollar signs, you have to rely on word-of-mouth to do your marketing for you, and this usually means it lies forgotten in the doldrums with only a hardcore cadre of users. If you can't get users to flock to your platform willingly, its toast - look at how google has been coercing people into G+ since its inception and they're still unable to draw a sizeable proportion of people away from facebook. Facebook, in the meantime, has become the de-facto windows; it's everywhere, it's common enough, everyone knows it, it's not onerous enough to make most people leave en-masse and it's useful enough to keep most people coming back to it time and again.
In short, given some colossal shift in the internet (perhaps the bubble on online targeted advertising bursting, making many social sites/tools financially untenable), the status quo will remain so for the next five years at least.
Probably not what you wanted to hear, but that's my two pence before I go back to my archaic social media - emails and text messaging.
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:27AM
It might be useful for you to go into more details on that one
I learned early on that with Twitter the secret is to follow less people, not more, and to be really selective. I also tend to periodically drop people that I find have become less interesting, and add some that pique my interest.
If you want specifics, here are the central group of the thirty-one Twitter accounts that I follow:
The common threads? Really good quality use of the medium, very timely reporting of things that I care about, and mostly very low volume of tweets.
I have no idea why anyone would follow Pepsi or WalMart.
Facebook remains for family, and for sharing pictures and video, but as they continue to make it ugly, intrusive, and difficult it feels as if everyone (not just me) is using it less. The idea of Facebook is good. The execution is altogether awful.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Geezer on Monday July 07 2014, @02:45PM
There seems to be an unbroken pattern of disruption and replacement in social media. I guess it started with Usenet, then on to AOL, and now we have Facebook having supplanting MySpace.
The cycle is one of introducing something easy and useful, and then exploiting the crap out of it until people are ready to jump on the next thing that promises functionality and a minimum of bullshit.
Facebook could have broken the mold, but they didn't. It's only a matter of time till the Next Killer App comes along.
(Score: 1) by My Silly Name on Monday July 07 2014, @04:54PM
I know!
We can send each other messages written with fountain-pens or goose quills on cellulose-fibre "paper" or on tanned animal skins. That way, we can be assured that our message is coming across undiluted by extraneous advertising content, and we are no longer subject to the ill1ter8 ba5tard5 who for some reason seem to assure us that 140 characters are sufficient for any message intended to be read by a chimpanzee.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday July 07 2014, @10:28PM
Buy the new WiFi-enabled fountain pen which can order new ink automatically! (Only original, DRM-protected ink is accepted. Oh, and the built-in acceleration sensors are not for spying on what you write, honestly!)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Monday July 07 2014, @02:47PM
Facebook's IPO valuation was criticised as inflated as they hadn't proved they could monetise their services sufficiently to justify it. As one would expect, they've been increasingly aggressive in their pursuit of per-user ad exposure for some time now, allowing advertisers and PR companies access to more and more usage statistics, personal data and content placement. The practical upshot for the user is that the ratio between social interaction and advertising exposure is changing for the worse, causing a steady decrease in user satisfaction.
EG: Felix Baumgartner's [wikipedia.org] edge-of-space sky dive [google.co.uk] was streamed live by 7.5million people and Red Bull Stratos has picked up 932k+ likes on Facebook to date. All very cool, but there's a PR company in London (where I did some contract work and heard this story straight from the horse's mouth) that was paid by Red Bull to inflate the number of user likes as much as possible. Why? Because every like of a specific event like is another personal Facebook feed that the sponsor of that event Red Bull can expose their branding through that never expires.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Monday July 07 2014, @02:59PM
also, tl;dr
Don't you hate that? Why the hell would anyone give a damn that someone else is so intellectually lazy that they can't be bothered reading more than 10 words at a time, and yet so narcissistic as to think that the rest of the world actually cares.
However to be honest, most of facebook and twitter DOES suck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 07 2014, @03:08PM
Social Media Platforms have created a new bridge and interactive experience for Johhny Citizen And The Masses for consuming the traditional media industries such as TV and Newspapers. Who am I to pass judgement ....overall they seem to be enjoying this new frontier, and the IT industry is doing their bit providing everybody with cool tools and frameworks to make things happen. Good luck to the lot of them I say.
Having said that, I'm not into any of this; I don't watch TV except on rare occasions; I don't own any mobile devices; I like being alone and anonymous and uncontactable as much as possible; I use a fully wired desktop computer and I like bare-bones operating systems and old-style interfaces such as seen on Windows 2000 and Firefox 3.x and simple HTML pages with no snooping functions........The social media group are slowly sucking the life out of the way I enjoy things.
I wish there was a way that me and the social media group could happily co-exist without impeding on each other. I like underground shit. I like minimalism. I like to hack and crack things for fun. I want to know essential truths such as why the Mona Lisa must now be burnt and erased from history just because its artist was found to be a paedophile (hypothetically speaking).
(Score: 1) by hendrikboom on Monday July 07 2014, @03:21PM
Maybe a good start would be to document and debug Diaspora.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday July 07 2014, @03:38PM
Doesn't Diaspora [wikipedia.org] need a server running on your personal computer continuously? If so that's likely to make it hard for a lot of users.
(Score: 1) by hendrikboom on Monday July 07 2014, @11:26PM
I don't think so. A Diaspora 'pod' needs to be running like that, but there may be many users accessing a pod. So each user doesn't need to have Diaspora up 24/7 on her own machine.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday July 07 2014, @11:38PM
But then you need permission to connect to the POD?
(Score: 1) by hendrikboom on Monday July 07 2014, @11:55PM
Quite likely. I don't actually know. If I were to set up a Diaspora node on my server, I'd like to have some kind of control on resource usage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:11PM
I don't think so. I gave it a quick go one day a few years back I connected to some Euro-pod (I'm US based) no problems. I *think* (I could be very wrong) that it's sort of ish like email. You can use a pod that your buddy or 3rd party sets up, but if you don't like what they are doing you can always go to another provider or spin your own pod up. I'm also pretty sure all the pods can communicate w/ each other unless you set up a private pod.
Again, I used it for 1 day, 2-3 years ago. Might be worth looking in to again just to see where they've ended up.
(Score: 1) by hendrikboom on Monday July 07 2014, @11:39PM
In fact, if we wanted it, SN could run a Diaspora pod and we could all use it.
That is, once Diaspora is finally debugged and sufficienly secure.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by RaffArundel on Monday July 07 2014, @04:12PM
Why?
So we have Diaspora, and even if it worked as planned, it is targeted at the same audience who is generally screaming "F'book SUX" for reasons beyond privacy/control. Even if it had feature-parity, how does Appalbarry get the same level of support from the much smaller and fragmented group driving Diaspora? Rhetorical question in this case, I haven't used Diaspora but a few people I know who have, had nothing nice to say about it.
I vaguely remember that last conversation, but this article is a more direct question - what "problem" are you actually trying to solve? What are you willing to give up to solve those problems? My facebook account exists so I can have a developer key, there is nothing on it. My social network is mostly face-to-face with the phone filling in for my relatives. So I really don't know what the problem you are trying to solve.
Here are some trade-offs I can think of:
- Privacy vs. Building Social Connections
- Central Authority vs. Community Controlled
- Single Platform, Feature Rich vs. Diverse Platforms, Fragmented Support
- Popularity with one audience (grandma) vs. another (tech savvy)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 07 2014, @03:29PM
> "More and more, it feels like Facebook is a problem that needs solving. How can we solve it?"
You might want to tighten up your question some and ask the Magic 8-Ball again later.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 07 2014, @04:53PM
Indeed. It is amusing, in a sad sort of a way, that he doesn't really like the answer he got last time so he thought that maybe he might try again now for a different answer. What was Bill Clinton's classic definition of insanity? Trying something over and over again and expecting a different result?
Move along, nothing to see here....
(Score: 2) by lennier on Monday July 07 2014, @10:16PM
"> "More and more, it feels like Facebook is a problem that needs solving. How can we solve it?"
You might want to tighten up your question some and ask the Magic 8-Ball again later."
Since I was the original poster who asked that question a few days ago (though I'm not the one who's asking it again this time, let me try to rephrase it.
I really like the _experience_ of Facebook. I like that I can see updates of what my non-geek friends are doing. I like that I can access it from any web browser. I like that it encourages conversations and that any piece of posted content can be open for comments. I like that it provides a single seamless social graph.
What I _dislike_ - and actively fear - is that all these updates are being funnelled through an opaque, over-extended, for-profit corporation with a dodgy history, which takes upon itself to not just harvest personal info and insert ads into the stream (I can deal with both of those) but actively block posts. At this point it's broken the fundamental social contract with the user: to provide a basic core minimum level of service. After #FacebookExperiment, there now is no minimum expectation of service; I have no guarantee that Facebook might not randomly just decide to quarantine me entirely from my friends for some study or other, or because they don't like my politics, or for any reason. And I'd have no recourse at all, because it's in the terms of service that they don't have to deliver anything.
I also dislike that I can't search my newsfeed for posts (to find the ones I missed), I can't dump my own posts and save them, and I can't reliably delete my posts in bulk.
The thing is that Facebook and Twitter have demonstrated a model of content distribution that works really well, and that our current open technology set doesn't seem to provide.
* Email is fundamentally point-to-point; there's no built-in concept of 'publish' and 'subscribe'. We have to bolt these on using third-party list servers, which are cranky and tedious to operate and require owning a server.
* Blogs allow curating your own collection of posts, as well as comment threads, but don't cope well with identity management; commenting on someone else's blog is a pain if it's not hosted on a huge blog site (eg Blogspot, Wordpress.com) where you already have an ID. Setting up your own blog is also a big initial barrier to entry (though not so bad on a hosted megasite). Blogs are also susceptible to spam and security issues.
* Wikis are great for collaborative editing of encyclopedia type information, but really bad at handling comment threads
* Posting meeting events is universally awful anywhere except Facebook - even doing it on blogs requires incompatible third-party plugins . Again, it's a really simple piece of data (time, date, location, invitees) which *should* be simple to post... but we don't have any concept - yet - of 'a way of posting a piece of use-agnostic data'.
* Photo hosting... yes, you can do it on Wordpress, now, but for a while you had to put them on dedicated hosting sites like Flickr or pay enormous bandwidth fees.
One of the problems I see is that our two basic Internet platforms - email and web - don't actually provide the fundamental building blocks that we need to build the experiences we want, and haven't since the early 90s. Neither 'sending messages' nor 'reading static documents' translates exactly into the publish-subscribe microcontent model that Facebook and Twitter are demonstrating. The 'static HTML web' hasn't actually been a thing since the invention of CGI, and then Javascript; but we still insist on using a document-based model just as a user interface to proprietary web frameworks running vastly different models underneath. It would be nice to have a protocol that is based around something more like:
* Hello, I am *Identity X* and I can prove my identity to you. I may be a person or a robot, it doesn't matter. Just that I am a trusted information source. Some DNS-like entity is in charge of allocating toplevel names.
* Here is a piece of arbitrarily sized structured data, perhaps in the form of a JSON object
* I have published this data by giving it an identifier inside my own curated data space, which is itself a (say) JSON object. It's seamlesso objects all the way down!
* Now I can subscribe to anyone else's data space and import whatever bits of data they have
* So when you look at one of my pieces of data, you might actually be stitching together data from anywhere around the web; it gets cached at every node in the Net, so you only transfer data from the closest server to you
* Some computation may occur at any point because some of these pieces of data may be queries or programs. Doesn't matter, if they get evaluated once we can cache the result. The fabric of the Net can take care of that part.
* Now anyone can post anything from any device at any time to any data space, and anyone else can browse anything from any device at any time from any data space, and they don't have to hard code anything like server names
* There would be a way to subscribe to content which can change in realtime; if a source changes, all content which accesses it also changes.
Basically it would be like the Web, but 1) posting would be by design on an equal footing to reading - but each person could only post to their own namespace under their control 2) the unit of data transfer would be much smaller than an HTML document, more like a JSON object 3) it would be dynamic, not static, and would remove the need for complex scripting languages over static objects.
The old or well-read may recognise the outlines of Ted Nelson's Xanadu here. Also Hypercard, spreadsheets, Content Centric Networking, Functional Reactive Programming, Smalltalk. Eventually, the bits are going to come together.... I'd like to think. But we need to keep reminding ourselves that the Web page model isn't the final shape of the Net, by a long shot.
Google Wave came very close to implementing this! But was cancelled even before it launched. Still, the code's out there in open source, IIRC.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 07 2014, @11:29PM
Hi, I'm the one who wrote this: http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=2768&cid=65325 [soylentnews.org]
It is nice to find someone who describes pretty well what I feel about the status quo in social networks. What I've designed deals with all of the requirements you've written and some more. Coincidentally, I use JSON in several parts of the system---calendar events, wiki pages, blog posts, comments, etc., are all stored as JSON, pretty easy to handle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @04:09PM
The Magic-8 Ball thanks you for a very thoughtful clarification of the question!
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday July 08 2014, @06:48PM
42
(caps filter oddly enough)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Jaruzel on Monday July 07 2014, @03:59PM
I can't see Facebook toppling anytime soon. People are creatures of habit, and will only change 'brands' when something obviously better comes along. Right now there is nothing better than Facebook. To be Facebook beating you have to have at least:
.
Even if you can get past #1, the rest require a lot of coders, time, effort, and money to GET RIGHT. If you do think of something that everyone needs, but Facebook doesn't have, Facebook will implement it 5 minutes after you did and make it work 100% better - they simply have all the monkey-coders in world working for them.
Zuckerberg may be an arse, but he knows business, and keeping ahead of the competition is how you keep your business thriving.
So, unless something from massively left-field hits people and gains momentum SO fast that Facebook can't react, it's here to stay for quite some time yet.
Diaspora is a great Facebook clone and the closest alternative in features, but for the end user it doesn't offer anything new over Facebook - so why should people switch?
So it's great and all discussing what a perfect social media platform should be, but in the end you need a damn special carrot on the end of that stick to get people to use it, and a social media platform without any people, isn't really that social...
-Jar
NB. I don't use Twitter, and dislike Facebook, but trying to usurp either is like tilting at windmills.
This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.
(Score: 2) by kebes on Monday July 07 2014, @04:48PM
I think young people, in particular, are most apt to jump to a new platform: they will be less invested in the status quo, and there will be a 'cool' factor in terms of going with something new (as opposed to something that your mom and dad use regularly). School-age kids may well jump to new platforms simply because they are not blocked at school (whereas the obvious candidates like Facebook will be). Apparently many teenage kids actually use the comments sections of random blogs as a way to communicate with each other (since Facebook is blocked, but innocuous blogs are not). So if you want a new platform to take off, my guess is that targeting the youth is a viable strategy.
From the point of view of the post's question, however, the network effects are truly problematic. The useful features that are mentioned are things like 'getting the word out', or 'keeping track of organizations I care about', or 'hearing the opinions of important/smart people'. But all of those things only work when everyone is using the same network. In principle a distributed solution (i.e. a protocol) can work in this regard. But it's too late: Facebook and Twitter have already gobbled up mindshare, making it extremely difficult to get people to consider alternatives.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I hope it happens. But despite the history of social networks dying and being replaced, the current leaders are deeply entrenched; replacing them is going to be much harder than it's been in the past. I agree that the only way it will happen is that a new social network, rather than simply reproducing all the features of current social networks (items 2-12 on your list), will only gain traction because it offers something truly different that nobody else is offering (different enough that just jamming it into existing sites won't work well). It's hard to guess what that 'something' will be...
(Score: 2) by tomtomtom on Monday July 07 2014, @05:52PM
I disagree about network effects being the main problem. There are two reasons for this. First, because there is nothing stopping you using *both* Facebook and whatever it's replacement is to be. Secondly, because you are trying to (partially) replicate an already existing network (your real-life friends), not connect strangers with strangers. eBay is, I think, the best example of the opposite case for both of these points - you can only practically want to list your widget for sale on one site, and you want one which has lots of potential buyers who you don't know on it.
You don't need "all of your friends" to be on a new platform for it to be worth joining. You just need "enough" friends (probably only a handful is enough). Make it really easy to sign up and auto-add your existing friends and half the battle is won. But you DO need a reason to use it to communicate with them there instead of via Facebook or email. The proof of this is that there are actually many social networks which have sprung up, successfully, since Facebook became (relatively) mass market.
I think the lesson of the successes is that you need a "killer feature". If you want to move into the space Facebook occupies, it can't be one which only applies to (or is defined by being) more niche communities. The obvious features (at least to me, and obviously excluding better information privacy) then amount to improvements over Facebook's UI. Mainly for me these are problems of scale, which means that fixing them on a new network isn't really a selling point (because early adopters won't encounter them). For example, filtering out stuff that is in my way more effectively would be useful - e.g. killing all buzzfeed links, or rate-limiting posts from certain people in a smart way (one a day but make it the most-commented on, or whatever). Whatever you come up with probably also needs to be something that Facebook won't replicate (because it's somehow detrimental to their business model) otherwise you could expect them to do that quite quickly.
You also need to have NO negative consequences of using your new network. I think this is also a potential reason why I think Google+ has failed (so far) to gain wider acceptance. Rightly or wrongly, I suspect people are actually worried about giving too much "power" to Google, and particularly about connecting their Gmail accounts with their Google+ accounts. People probably also worry that it appears to be a one-way transition and that they will lose features they like, or gain unpleasant side effects. Things like Google Now actually scare a lot of people who don't like that their phone magically learned they are at work when in a certain location. Ironically I think people actually trust Google less than Facebook in that respect so if your starting point is being privacy-friendly you do have a good head start over a lot of competition.
(Score: 3) by lennier on Monday July 07 2014, @10:31PM
"I think this is also a potential reason why I think Google+ has failed (so far) to gain wider acceptance. Rightly or wrongly, I suspect people are actually worried about giving too much "power" to Google, and particularly about connecting their Gmail accounts with their Google+ accounts."
Yep. That's exactly why I haven't used Google+, despite having both Google and Facebook accounts. I simply don't want to give Google that much power over me; it's bad enough that Google knows my searches and Facebook knows my friends, but both together? Um, no.
Delenda est Beta
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 07 2014, @11:19PM
While I am 100% in agreement with you about Google overlording. I disagree that it has been a significant barrier to google+ popularity. I think they are just unlucky. So much of this stuff is the result of the stars lining up just right - a good enough solution with the right momentum at the same time that a market vacuum opens up plus the ability to simply not fuck up too badly. Once the ball gets rolling, network effect means you can start fucking up and it won't hurt you that much until the stars line up again and someone else is prepared to takes advantage.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Monday July 07 2014, @07:11PM
I couldn't venture to predict the magnitude of the effect, but if one were a teenager they might not be so enamored to be a heavy user of something their parents, grandparents, and other assorted "old" people use. That's the demographic that will abandon it for something else. As Yogi Berra said, "Nobody goes there any more; it's too crowded."
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Monday July 07 2014, @10:58PM
Those same arguments were true about MySpace a decade ago, and for Friendster before that. One other thing about social media lock-in and network effects is that they're weaker than the network effects enjoyed by other systems. While you must in general use only Windows or Linux or OS X, nothing stops you from using, say, Facebook, Google+, and Diaspora all at once. If one of the them gives a compelling advantage over the others, you'll find yourself using it more than the others. I remember when Friendster was the king of the hill: they stumbled when they couldn't get their systems to scale fast enough for their increasing popularity, which was what allowed Myspace to take their throne. And in turn Myspace was supplanted by Facebook as their user experience worsened due to increasing pressure to monetize and put ever more intrusive advertisement. This is arguably what is happening to Facebook today.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 07 2014, @04:09PM
What does "use social media" mean and how do you disrupt the market?
"use" has varied over time quite a bit. For reasons beyond the scope of this post I used FB intensely in '09 or whatever a long time ago and then completely stopped and recently restarted with the same people and the change is immense. The same people have pretty much stopped posting other than the exhibitionist types who will never stop. Now what little exists is all about photo sharing, relevant text is semi-rare. Its much more about being spammed by brands than human interaction now, with intense outside pressure to sign up for spamming from your local restaurant or whatever. I see gameSpam has nearly disappeared from my feed with few exceptions. This can't be good news for Zynga. A competitor could apparently do anything as long as it allows "friends".
"social" has varied a bit, see use above. I don't really see socializing in the traditional sense on FB anymore. Brand or self marketing. The deepest part of this shallow rain puddle seems to be Halmark level commentary WRT birthdays and holidays; if you wouldn't see it in a halmark card people aren't posting it. I think the dating services are really eating FB's lunch with the singles and I have no idea where married people socialize. Its a serious competitor to Halmark gift cards, but not... anything else. A competitor could be launched that focuses on socializing.
"media" has become corporate to consumer mass marketing on FB. Its just another TV commercial, but on the phone. I don't find this interesting or appealing. Another way to look at this is the form of media has changed in what limited person to person contact still exists, in that nobody posts text or has back and forth conversations beyond the "hows the weather" level anymore, all posts must be related to a pix. And I assure you that merely issuing cameras does not turn the average luser into a pro documentary photographer, so most of the pix utterly suck. There used to be a popular trope on TV etc where a party would be ruined when someone tried to whip out the slide projector to show their latest vacation trip to the worlds largest ball of tinfoil in Kansas, a real groaner. This is what FB is becoming. They could try new media, maybe video clips (whoops someone else there) or ... I donno.
To some extent this is like asking about the peer to peer communications network of cars, which in the 70s was a CB radio in over 1 in 10 cars (higher in some areas). Well, sad to say, there was no tomorrow and there isn't a peer to peer car communications network anymore unless you count texting / talking while driving which is often illegal anyway. This might very well be the future of social media / facebook... there just isn't one. Welcome our new member facebook to the livejournal / myspace / second life graveyard...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 07 2014, @04:18PM
Oh another "social" aspect maybe disruption fodder:
"Social" still means meatspace friends and famous people and brands. Hobbies and interests, where are you?
Anything deeper than a rain puddle or oriented toward interests hasn't quite achieved the killer app yet, or at least hasn't achieved the marketing dominance FB has in its area of meatspace friends.
G+ tries with hobby communities. FB groups are a belly laugh. Yahoo god help them won't die and their groups are still going strong. Reddit is popular for hobbies and the closest thing to a killer app, although its really just GUIed and tarted up slightly less intelligent Usenet. 4chan surprisingly has some interesting discussions in the saner areas although its almost the epitome of anti-social media in that its all anon and no friending and the closest thing they have to facebook pokes is I guess SWATting people. stack exchange is too full of groupthink and deletionist scum to seriously be in the running. So no one has the dominant platform although reddit seems close to a social media platform I'd be interested in.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Tramii on Monday July 07 2014, @04:35PM
If you want to use Facebook/Twitter/whatever then go ahead. No one is stopping you. I agree there is some worth there, but the tradeoffs are too costly for myself. I really don't see how Facebook and Twitter are "essential". The OP linked to William Gibson's Twitter feed, but it appears to be a random collection of re-tweets and pointless stories. Nothing really useful or essential. I mean, if you find it entertaining that's great, but I am not missing out on anything important by ignoring it. What is really funny is that you admit "that Facebook is becoming pretty useless, annoying, and evil; and that Twitter is probably heading the same way". I say they are already there.
The solution is simple. STOP using them. The alternatives are obvious, but require more work and thus not for the lazy:
No it's not as simple or as integrated as Facebook, but that's the point. How can you be shocked there are privacy issues when you WILLINGLY centralize all your personal information with one company? They key is to spread it all around and to give yourself the ability to switch between companies that are acting in bad faith. If you cellular company is acting up, switch to another carrier. If you blog host is doing something unethical, switch to another or better yet, host it yourself!
I dumped Facebook and Twitter years ago and haven't looked back since. Sure, it's more work but it's worth it. I control my own data, and I don't allow companies to use me as a guinea pig in their weird psychological experiments. There are no free lunches. Think about it. If you want a service that's free and easy-to-use, then it's gonna cost you something else...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 07 2014, @04:37PM
Its interesting that most of the suggestions for how to topple existing social media giants involves a complete reimplementation plus a bit more, whereas the way historical social media giants has always been toppled involves just one or two killer features.
Pix sharing doesn't suck. Even grannie can figure out how to sign up. You have to attend an ivy league college or have a friend there or get an invite (I got an invite). You can follow other people with one click instead of figuring out their RSS feeds. It works on SMS phones. You can customize your page infinitely. Infinitely customizable pages suck, so you can't customize pages.
Usenet didn't disappear from internet users consciousness because a truly enormous and all encompassing usenet client was invented that then added a SMS gateway. Or that then added easy photo sharing. Or that then added... anything.
It seems very rare for a paradigm change to begin with "lets make something even more complicated than the current winner". With the possible exception of EMACS.
So plans that begin with "first, we clone facebook" are probably not going to be successful.
(Score: 1) by hendrikboom on Monday July 07 2014, @04:59PM
Usenet is still alive, although there's too much spam. And yes, it is useful for things other than porn. That said, my main use of usenet isn't the classical big six feeds themselves, but gmane relaying existing mailing lists, such as debian-users, using the usenet protocols. There's very little spam there.
By analogy, when there *is* free software to run a social network, it can be still be appropriated by small groups and used for effective communication. Sometimes it grows.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 07 2014, @05:13PM
"it can be still be appropriated by small groups and used for effective communication."
Yes there's also the difference between the software, and the network. Many a time over the past 1/4 century I've tried to explain that there's nothing in cnews or inn that requires connecting to "the usenet network" so if usenet is a spammy hell, abandon it (the network not INN or cnews or UUCP or ..), fork the network itself, and carry on. Perhaps with somewhat more aggressive cancelbots or admins who actually care about removal of spammers, or a few other features.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 07 2014, @04:43PM
Another meta observation which I think is hilarious is "Time for an Adult Conversation"
That's because the kids have already abandoned FB because mom and auntie are there, and they do all their socializing on snapchat or ... something else donno what because I'm not a kid. But I know my kids who are a bit young basically don't use FB, at least not like adults do. Its kind of the "linkedin" more formal version of networking for the kids.
I've read this described as the "graying of facebook" as the teens abandon and the senior citizens flood in.
This will probably have some impact on rollout of a Neo-facebook. You could try to break the trend of only having teens in the rollout, which is new territory so it'll either be insanely successful or a miserable crash and burn, or if you stay boringly BAU, you have to find a reason why kids would like your new network, and kids might not be very smart but they are very picky and highly trendy and fashion oriented which is going to make it a headache beyond all the technical discussions.
(Score: 1) by DNied on Monday July 07 2014, @04:49PM
by not using it.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday July 07 2014, @04:54PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by DNied on Monday July 07 2014, @04:58PM
Correction: "I don't need faux friends in order to be cool".
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday July 07 2014, @05:30PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 07 2014, @06:48PM
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 07 2014, @05:01PM
"More and more, it feels like Facebook is a problem that needs solving."
Final meta commentary for me is, that in two stories, still no consensus what the problem is. Mostly anecdotes, things that would be bad if they were true, things that are bad, things no one cares about that are bad, whatever.
In the spirit of standards are so awesome I couldn't resist creating a few more, in the spirit of consensus is great so I'll throw out some ideas to agree on:
First on who owns who, or what:
Privacy and socializing are core competencies for humans and you cant expect success with them in an outsourcing project, especially in a monopoly market.
In the spirit that bad money always chases good money out of a market, that marketplaces always become more corrupt over time:
Useless traffic chases out good traffic so eventually all feeds approach pure spam and overall utility inevitably drops to zero. This is also Yogi Berra, nobody goes there no more because its too busy, or whatever he said.
Or you could go all human nature and philosophical, and unfortunately overly verbose:
Nietzsche wrote something like "Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups" (well he wrote something like it in German anyway). And this has been restated a zillion times. So it is both true that an opinion on world wide near universal social media is little more than commentary on the wisdom of crowds, and also true that as a social network increases in size its sanity and intelligence must approach zero because that's whats always happened historically in every other group of humans and no one has a plausible hack to work around it.
(Score: 2) by elgrantrolo on Monday July 07 2014, @07:11PM
Right now I'm stalling for time. I disabled the facebook app platform and this way I get the newsfeed about what my friends are up to, minus a number of annoyances. Add ad-block and it's pretty much a normal web page with pictures. They can sell my profile details to whoever they like, and I guess that's what matters to FB. On my mobile phone, the FB app (made by Microsoft...) doesn't carry ads and to be honest, for me the main annoyance right now is that so many people just post on FB links to those websites that carry photos, gifs and videos. That's what I call time wasting.
At some point, some or all of these countermeasures will be blocked and although I'll miss it, I will drop off that network and get in touch with people in some other way.
Maybe this is an opportunity for Firefox or someone forking ffx: a browser that keeps FB thinking it's looking at real user profile data. Call that browser "Shiny metal ass" for extra likes.
(Score: 1) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday July 07 2014, @07:55PM
Didn't we just go through this? Social networks are for two kinds of people:
(1) Self-promoters. Authors, celebrities, media personalities, public speakers - anyone who wants to get other people's attention uses social media.
(2) People with nothing better to do.
Anyone who is not a self-promoter who has anything better to do isn't using social media in any serious way. These people are the ones you seem to be going after, but they don't care about social media. It's not important to them. They're too busy doing stuff.
If you want to build something better than Facebook/Twitter/etc, you need to cater to these audiences.
#1 is tough because they want to reach people, and your new network won't have anybody - look at how badly Google+ has failed, then try to do better than Google with its deep pockets and captive audience (even forcing it on people failed).
As far as I'm concerned, #2 is a pointless audience even if you could reach them. They flood social media sites with links to pictures, random political opinion echo links, pictures of their kids, and so on. Who cares where this stuff is hosted?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 07 2014, @08:23PM
> Didn't we just go through this?
Yes we did, right there in the summary. He basically told idiots like you to shut the fuck up. No one wants to hear your masturbatory pontifications on your own superiority. You've added nothing to the discussion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @07:47AM
Go back to twatbook, moron. There's a targeted ad waiting to enrich your eyeballs...
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday July 07 2014, @10:19PM
Yes and the "social media is for only two sorts of douchebags" argument was shot down then, too. Maybe the blind hatred of all things that require 'friends' isn't serving you too well anymore.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 07 2014, @10:49PM
Then, also:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @07:59AM
The very first step is to stop using them, cold turkey. Especially if people you know use them.
if you don't think there is a problem, read up e.g. https://stallman.org/facebook [stallman.org]
(Score: 1) by novak on Thursday September 04 2014, @05:59AM
http://betabeat.com/2011/12/in-which-eben-moglen-like-legit-yells-at-me-for-being-on-facebook/ [betabeat.com]
This is a great story about the problems of facebook. In it, a journalist is documenting some of the unethical uses of facebook data, and asks if there shouldn't be laws preventing that sort of thing. Eben Moglen throws it right back at him. There's no one to pass the blame on to- we are the ones who made facebook massively popular, knowing that they were a for profit company, but hoping that they would be restrained. Now everything we do is analyzed, monetized, and sold to the highest bidder.
It's a terrible thing that people can't flip out about this without being labeled as anti-social conspiracy freaks. We all know what facebook does with data, and it's wrong. To know and not raise concern is the real crime.
Facebook and twitter are useful. Giving someone committed to making money by selling any info they have access to is sad and it makes me sad that so many people choose ease of talking to friends over not selling data on friends.
novak