I fail to see how anyone "needs" an alternative to Facebook, or Facebook itself. This is not a judgement on those that use it, if it's giving people value then they should continue using it, and judging from their user's numbers it is valuable to at least a portion of the population. That being said, it wasn't around 15 years ago and who knows how long it'll stay around. I'm sure people will handle a world without Facebook just fine once it's out.
The point is that marketplace will never provide the kind of solution society wants. What people want is an easy-to-use way to stay in touch, keep up with and communicate with their friends via the web. What people don't want is to be targeted by advertisers/political campaigns or have their data saved and sold. The market can only take us to the local max of 'you can keep in touch but your data is saved/sold/used', to move to the global max of 'you can keep in touch and your data is safe' we need a solution which isn't tied to profit motive.
Why can't this need be met by a corporation that gets paid for what they are doing?
The size of the problem here is bounded by the amount of money the companies are making invading your privacy. Simple math [1] places it at about $20/year/user for Facebook, who are probably on the upper end of what they can make by doing this. So to incentivize a company not to stay in business via selling your data, that's the bar you have to leap.
That hardly seems a big enough problem that the only solution is to turn over your social network to be run by Donald Trump, who, I feel I must remind many of you, whenever you say "The $GOVERNMENT should...", you really ought to remember that "Donald Trump" is a valid expansion of the term $GOVERNMENT. Or whoever else it is you don't like, it doesn't matter to my argument, I'm just reading the room here.
As a sidebar, if you want to get a sense of the scope of the damage that Facebook is doing to our civilization, consider all the ways in which they manipulate you, the things your friends posted that you wanted to see but didn't, the torrent of ads they have PhDs working overtime to figure out how to hit you with, enrolling you in psychological studies without your consent, embroiling you in family or friend drama that you'd rather not be embroiled in and potentially cutting off contact with people over it, and who knows what fingers on what scales when it comes to what you do and do not see in the news... for TWENTY DOLLARS. Of revenue, not even profit! Talk about your new twist on the banality of evil.
>Why can't this need be met by a corporation that gets paid for what they are doing?
Because you can't serve two masters. For-profit corporations are going to side with profit over privacy when they conflict.
>The size of the problem here is bounded by the amount of money the companies are making invading your privacy. Simple math [1] places it at about $20/year/user for Facebook, who are probably on the upper end of what they can make by doing this. So to incentivize a company not to stay in business via selling your data, that's the bar you have to leap.
That $20 isn't just for costs it's also for profit. How cheaply could Facebook run if it didn't have to return any money to it's shareholders? That's a major case for either a non-profit or a nationalized service.
>whenever you say "The $GOVERNMENT should...", you really ought to remember that "Donald Trump" is a valid expansion of the term $GOVERNMENT.
Well here let's put it like this. When you leave something up to the $MARKET you should remember that 'literally anybody' (including Donald Trump) is a valid expansion of the term $MARKET. With government at least there is some (admittedly meager) level of democratic accountability. How much accountability is there in the market? I think we've seen how these privacy violations play out with Equifax already. Richard Smith, Mark Begor, Mark Zuckerberg these people are just interchangeable names/faces and no matter who you swap in and out of these roles the desires of a corporation in the market place to maintain and increase profitability will weigh on them the same. I prefer a system where these people are directly accountable to the people ie nationalized services, not a system where their accountability is obfuscated and mediated by the market.
You are proposing a black/white dichotomy where I proposed a partnership. Let the corporations provide the services, let the government write the rules of the playing field. Why would you trust the same government that is already not regulating Facebook to do any better if it has to implement something itself?
Neither side, on its own, is sufficient. A system where both sides are doing their job is way better.
Mind you, I have some compassion (for lack of a better word) for the government not regulating Facebook, on the grounds that to a first-order approximation, nobody saw how bad this was going to be in advance. Local commentators may vigorously object to this characterization, to which I'd reply that the concentration of the people who did see it coming (including, least of all, myself) is sky-high here compared to the general public.
>You are proposing a black/white dichotomy where I proposed a partnership. Let the corporations provide the services, let the government write the rules of the playing field. Why would you trust the same government that is already not regulating Facebook to do any better if it has to implement something itself?
I'll admit I am proposing a black/white dichotomy in this instance. I don't do that for all markets but I do in this one. To me a free market is best when we really want the market to race to the bottom quickly and there are few externalities or complicating factors. This is very rare. A regulated market is best when there are complicating factors and externalities but we still want to engage in a race to the bottom. This is very common. Removing the market entirely is best when we don't want to race to the bottom. This is rare. Even though it's rare, I cannot think of a better example than Social Media. Facebook and these other companies have utilized mostly free markets to race to the bottom, we've made 95% of the gains already. Now Facebook is exposing it's users to all sorts of nasty costs that society does not want to bear in order to squeeze out profit. This is not being caused by some one-off feature of the market, it is being caused by the central feature of the market, profit motive. The only way to fix these problems are to remove profit motive. That means either nationalization or non-profit status.
Here's two quotes from a recent Tim Wu interview that I think speak to what I'm trying to say here:
>They're not. But, well, that's the problem. I think there's a sort of intrinsic problem with having for-profit entities with this business model in this position of so much public trust because they're always at the edge because their profitability depends on it.
>Well, if Mark Zuckerberg is telling the truth when he says, what I care about is connecting people to their families and friends, that's a very lofty ambition. If that's what he really wants to do, he can do it. But it doesn't mean he'll be the most profitable company in the world. You know, utilities - which is what Facebook is, a social utility - have never been understood as profit centers before. [...] And there's a reason. The social sphere is a little bit different. And maybe we need to accept that it's not a source of major profit to be in people's personal lives.
I'm with you on the absurdity of asking government to do this. There are very few governments worldwide that have managed to produce tolerable, let alone enjoyable and useful citizen facing software. Let alone the privacy implications for literally communicating through government servers...
That said, I think the argument for a 'paid facebook' breaks down quickly when you realise that as a communications / event planning / promotion tool, it's usefulness is directly tied to its network size. This was true even in the earliest days, but FB cleverly circumvented the difficulty of building a core network by providing it to college campuses, where a hyper real world socially networked group of people were more than willing to try the latest thing. They pulled of the trick of making it both free and exclusive simultaneously, by only allowing 'ivy league' colleges access. Even then initial access was by invite only.
Hence, a paid communication service is only useful if everyone you're trying to communicate with is willing to pay for it. A service like this would be difficult to get off the ground in the first place, without a compelling advantage over 'free' (privacy cost based) services. For most people, privacy and accountability (long term costs) will not be a sufficient advantage. If they were, decentralised social networks like Diaspora would have been a success years ago.
The only way I can see it working is if an existing social network with wide reach offered a paid tier. This is problematic however as, in removing the paid users (presumably their wealthiest demographic) from the advertising pool, they're cutting off their own advertisers potential income stream.
Perhaps a 'freemium' model could work, with paid users having access to enhanced features (perhaps making an event, or sending a group message), allowing the network to grow beyond those willing to pay (especially at the outset). But again, I don't think it could scale, unless one of the existing networks abandoned advertising and switched to this model. Given that even free social networks (even ones launched by Google!) currently find it basically impossible to compete with the scale of Twitter / Facebook.
"That said, I think the argument for a 'paid facebook' breaks down quickly when you realise that as a communications / event planning / promotion tool, it's usefulness is directly tied to its network size."
I generally agree with the business analysis as you gave it, to which I'd propose the idea (in conjunction with my other cousin post) that if the government makes it non-viable to build a business whose business model is based solely around selling private information and serving ads , on the grounds that it is short-term enticing to people but long-term destruction to social capital and cohesion (where government regulation is really in its wheelhouse), we could find out whether social networks are viable at all.
Note I didn't target social networks there; the entire business model needs to be made much more expensive. For once, something regulation can accomplish with ease! I almost don't even care about the nature of the regulations, I just want to see this business model made more expensive. It doesn't even have to be banned, per se, it just needs the bar raised so that the bar for "when is it worth it to abuse trust and exploit our information" is a great deal more than $20/year. (I don't necessarily want to ban it; there is value in certain high-end variations of this theme. The corruption is in the way that modern computing has become so cheap that there is no discretion applied for what is grabbed and what is bought & sold, it's just all grabbed and dispensed freely.)
It is possible they are simply not a viable business. Or, once the easy-yet-culturally-destructive option of doing it by abusing human cognitive limitations and screwing over your customers where they can't perceive it and weigh it properly is regulated away, perhaps someone will find a way of delivering enough value that it is something people will pay for, once the weed of the free option is no longer sucking up all the sunlight. There are, for instance, quite a few long-standing paid forums on the internet; it's not an entirely unviable business model.
One thing I'm not doing here is that I am not implicitly accepting as a goal the idea that Facebook itself, or an entity the size of Facebook, will necessarily exist in the new order. (Nor am I directly accusing anybody of doing that, but it's something I feel is ambient in the discussion.) If it turns out to be simply a non-viable business, so be it. As in my opinion Facebook's net social value is negative, that's still a win. If it turns out to be a viable model, but it doesn't scale up, again, so be it. The possibility that those will be the end outcomes does not justify keeping something as destructive as Facebook around.
My best guess is that no single business could grow to Facebook's size, but that there would likely be a steady state of a lot of little networks of various kinds. And don't just think 25 Facebook clones, but thing Facebook vs. LinkedIn vs. the SomethingAwful forums vs. Reddit; I would expect significant diversity.
> My best guess is that no single business could grow to
Facebook's size, but that there would likely be a steady
state of a lot of little networks of various kinds. And
don't just think 25 Facebook clones, but thing Facebook
vs. LinkedIn vs. the SomethingAwful forums vs. Reddit; I
would expect significant diversity.
We already have this, it's called the web. I'm not being facetious. I miss the days when google drove traffic not to rapidly updated fluff but deep articles and informed posts. I miss the possibility of communicating with a wide audience with a self hosted blog post. I'm not sure it can come back, but maybe the kind of regulations you suggest - in effect taxing the externalities of data harvesting, are worthwhile considering.
Facebook should have been censured long ago for capturing content, and anti-competitively promoting locally hosted (at the expense of off site content).
This is a whole other issue that's being forgotten with the current privacy debate. Silos away from the open web accelerate and even create polarisation. The filter bubble is both unnecessary and harmful, and as or more important to regulate than privacy.
"Only this time, can we have our social network be backed by the Men with Guns? And why not just cut out the middleman and have it run directly by the intelligence agencies?"
Check back in five years and ask the Chinese how that's going. (Although you won't be allowed to, or at least, they won't be allowed to answer honestly without seeing their social status go way down.)
> What people want is an easy-to-use way to stay in touch, keep up with and communicate with their friends via the web.
Some would say that email and text messaging already cover this. It feels like your description is missing a clause such as "without having to actually take the time to otherwise nourish those relationships individually."
Some would say that, others would say that they enjoy seeing and making posts. I don't think that your clause is generous or thoughtful, some people have challenges in their lives that make traditional methods of "nourishing relationships" difficult, why should they be denied a mechanism for developing and continuing friendship?
Of course no one "needs" Facebook. Or a cell phone. Or computers. Or coffee. But they're still of value.
The values of Facebook are varied. I'm a full-time traveler and it's easy to find an English-speaking Facebook group for any country I visit, which is of real value and note something I would otherwise find. Facebook is also useful for sharing photos with friends and family without necessarily sharing them with the world like you used to with Flickr or Smugmug.
Granted, there are other ways of having forums, or photo sharing, or anything else. But that misses the point. For whatever reason, Facebook became the de facto way to do certain things. And if you want to delete facebook, it's nice to have an alternative with some feasibility in reaching a critical mass.
Ahh, but the article didn't say that people need Facebook. They said that we need an alternative to Facebook. That's two different things. If people are going to use Facebook (and it's been shown that people will) and Facebook use is going to cause systematic problems (as it's apparent that it does), we may need an alternative to Facebook that is less problematic. That's a very different statement than the one you're responding to.
Well ever since social media converted the US into the United States of Meme Generators & Consumers, it is not really possible to go back without mass lobotomies.
I indirectly have control over what the government does with the data (as a citizen). If enough citizens don't like what they're doing, it can be stopped. Also, they have no incentive to make money by harming people.
On the other hand, I'm not a board member or shareholder of Facebook, and they have a legal obligation to make money.
As such, I would absolutely use a US Government social media service over Facebook. (Bonus if it were federated with other countries.)
(In reality I'd use neither because Facebook is boring anyway.)
Too easy to access, there is a world of difference between the police taking a warrant to Facebook and some jobsworth in the local council browsing through data to look for potential victims to harass.
It might already be possible for facebook employees to access your information anyway, and if it isn't then a similar system could be set up in a govt run agency. There are many advantages to having a democratic administration run such a system rather than a profit-driven one --- businesses will always, rightly, put profit before privacy. If we decide that privacy is more important then we either have to regulate better, nationalise, or choose not to use the service. The third option doesn't seem to be getting widespread uptake; where young people are moving away from facebook it is not primarily because of privacy concerns.
As a junior Facebook employee, it is extremely difficult to get real user data. It's possible, but there's a purposefully large amount of bureaucracy required to get it. For me, it's usually not working doing and I end up generating my own data anyways.
So you trust the govt to do right by you. What about the next govt? What if UKIP got in power?
Honestly I think this information is actually too dangerous for anyone to have - companies or govts. I'd like to see this kind of level of information gathering made illegal.
I don't 'trust' them blindly, but if information gathering is necessary for such a service to exist, then I think it's better if the service is provided by a democratic agency than a private company. Nobody is forced to use it.
Honestly, in a perfect world it might make sense. The fact that often there is more trust in private, profit-driven corporations over governments which are meant to represent the public and their interests is definitely something that needs to be considered.
I’ve always wondered about creating an equivalent to Facebook as a desktop and mobile app, that connected to your email account. Adding a friend would just be inputting their email address and connecting would involve a PGP exchange in the background.
Your email would become the decrentralized, encrypted medium for exchange and broadcast. You could use IMAP to leverage it as your datastore on multiple devices.
You could more easily schedule message delivery and times too. The most complicated thing about it would be setting up a simple enough onboarding process.
It wouldn’t be efficient, but it doesn’t really need to be.
Just make it easy for everyone to create their own mailing list. Then you could subscribe to friends, and get updates from them, plus participate in discussions with their other friends. "Muting" a friend would be up to the controls in your desired email client. "Unfriending" is simply unsubscribing.
I've been dreaming about this a lot lately, but there's definitely some roadblocks for the average person. They don't want to clutter up their existing email, and they will drag their feet to getting a new email address just for social networking. People also like the idea that they can actually delete their posts, even if it's illusory, which they can't do to any meaningful extent with email. With ActivityPub, I think a lot of potential developers don't want to bother with email because it's not the future. It is still a great idea in general, though. I would totally build it or sign up for it if enough people I knew were willing to do it. The problem is I wouldn't want that form of social networking just to connect with people who are smart enough to use it.
True, but at the same time deleting a post only matters because new people can see it that may not have initially. With this, only people who the message was sent to would see it anyway.
If as part of the on boarding process you could provide instructions to move those messages out of the main view and into a folder so they didn't clutter up the rest of the email too.
It probably makes more sense as an open source project. There's not much of a profit model for decentralized social networking where you can't inject ads that people didn't want to see.
I feel like that when it comes to social media, decentralized is really the answer. I'm not sure I could trust many big corps (maybe Wikimedia). Mastodon and Diaspora fill these needs, perhaps what they need is better marketing and improved UX (specially for Diaspora).
Does Diaspora actually provide better privacy than Facebook? It removes the need to trust a centralized entity, but it seems to me that it largely replaces it with the need to trust a multitude of distributed entities. At least if we're talking about stuff like clandestinely sharing data about people's friends with third parties.
It's tricky to deal with privacy and social networks. After all, even if you control your own Diaspora server, someone can still follow you and get your content. Unless you block them, I suppose. In the aspect of social media, privacy means owning your data, and both of those platforms offer the option to do that by running your own instance. If you run your own Diaspora instance, you can delete all your data and walk away from it. Also, you technically don't need to allow for federation, if you don't want to.
Honestly this reads a bit like a PR-speak way of saying that Diaspora indeed doesn't really provide better privacy than Facebook.
I'm on it, and I donate to (or pay for) a pod so I'm not anti-Diaspora by any means, but it just seems incorrect to promote it as a solution to Facebook's privacy issues.
I actually said right away how it's tricky to achieve privacy with a social network. However, to me, owning your data is a big step towards it. I have nothing to do with Diaspora, I'm not on it and don't donate.
Out of curiosity, what would be your ideal for good privacy on a social media site? What aspects would it need?
I'm not really sure what "owning your data" means here, in practice. If you're sharing it with other people / pods the best you can meaningfully say is that you own a copy of your data, as does anybody you share it with. In terms of privacy, I don't really see how this is better than Facebook.
I don't have an answer to your question. Broadcasting information while also wanting to keep it private is, as you say, a tricky problem.
Why wait for the corporate platforms to get around to aggressively restricting your speech on their services, when you can go right to being limited by the head censor.
Britain already has a rapidly growing problem with censorship and restricted speech. This would just be a more direct way for the government to control what you can express and see online.
The authoritarians continue their march.
Within 20 years, it'll be the rare nation that doesn't have something equivalent to the Chinese firewall heavily controlling what their people do online. Nations with freedom online equivalent to what existed from ~1995-2015 across most of the developed world, will be the exception.
Just when you thought the UK couldn’t get any closer to 1984, they wheel out a doozy like this. This is coming from the country where you can literally end up in jail for shitposting on Twitter.
a journalist whose salary is paid for by advertisers, a journalist working for a concurrent of Facebook (in terms of ad revenue), a journalist who's probably complaining how internet 2.0 has killed his profession, how Social Media has killed Traditional Media, etc...
Plus how could a journalist suggest a nationalised alternative that would stop at UK's border, instead of a global one connecting people from all countries? It's extremely short sighted and closed minded.
The utility of Facebook is it's raw messaging and information sharing capacity. These exist in a thousand ways in different apps from Twitter to Diaspora to Signal. People use Facebook not because of the raw utility - it is winning a competition for people's attention that is going to be an endless battle.
Setting some ground rules for what can and can't be collected and shared from people is way more effective than having the government enter that rat race.
In my view, the problem isn't the platform, it's the people using it. Until people are widely educated to give a damn about their own personal information, they will continue to flock to the next free Social Platform over and over again until some scandal, that they don't really care about or understand, now makes that platform 'uncool', and then they will all register for the next 'cool' platform.
What is Facebook but a fancy web host and RSS feed in one? First, it is a web host. It lets everyone make a free website (their Wall). Second, it gives everyone an RSS reader (their News Feed).
My point is, I think we already have the protocols. What the ordinary user lacks is the software. Actually what they also lack is the hardware. Everyone, technical or not, wants their own website. They always have. But most people are at the mercy of some company providing a server. After all, to run a website, you need a computer that's always on, always connected. I propose we use the user's phone. I'm sure I'm not the first to think of that.
So what we need is an easy-to-use webserver that users install on their phones. They don't have to build their website on their phone. It's just hosted there. They could build it on their laptop and push it to their phone.
Then you also make a nice RSS reader that users also install, and they subscribe to each other's websites.
Three years ago I forced myself to reduce my FB usage.
- At the beginning I remember it was super hard not to check FB
- So I just stopped posting first
- Then I realized that it significantly helped to avoid FB in the morning
- Later, I installed the Chrome Extension Eradicator which lets the FB feed disappear; I never used a FB mobile app
- More and more I could stay away from FB the entire day just checking it in the evening
- Still for 1 or 2 years it was kind of tempting to check FB even if it was in the evening
Now, I rarely use FB anymore, maybe once a week or even less and if I see all the same people posting non-stop self-adulations and all the likers liking every little thing because xy posted it, I command-w FB faster than I opened it. I pity those posting people, too lonely, too little attention, on a desperate hunt for some friends on a addictive Skinner Box network.
TBH it was a bit like quitting smoking: initially super, super hard and when looking back FB's feed feels just useless.
Maybe I didn't read the article closely, but...what feature of Facebook makes nationalization necessary? Do we need a FB-like platform "of, by, and for the people" for...ads? News distribution? Sharing news? Connecting people? Classifieds?
To me, the biggest utility of FB that would make such a project worthwhile is the pure network aspect of it; there are very few people in my life who aren't on Facebook.
If that's what we're looking to nationalize, does this just become a national ID card debate for the Internet era?
If it was a public open network then maybe, I wouldn't use it to share things between friends though or messaging. Could be based around posting of public events like a billboard/invitation feature (the tool i use most on fb), and maybe a twitter like status feature too. I wouldn't share images unless random gifs and memes or anything too personal/controversial. It wouldn't be a full network more like a public information service. There was talk of bbc doing something like that.
No, we need a user-owned, democratically-controlled version of Facebook, with correspondingly enshrined “rights.”
The problem is authoritarian control. Swapping out corporate authoritarianism with government authoritarianism solves zero problems, especially given that they already constantly collude to entrench each other’s power.
FB is not a problem. Handing over information blindly to an entity which centralizes and consolidates it's 'power' over you is. FB can only do as much as we 'feed' it.
Stop feeding it. FB is simply doing what inevitably happens when power and knowledge is concentrated into one place.
Yes, because the government has such a spectacular record for protecting privacy and NOT spying on its citizens. Of course, Facebook cannot come into your home with guns if they think something your doing is wrong, so governments have that to their advantage...
So, all the problems we have because of Facebook's de facto monopoly status will be solved by a government-backed monopoly. Because a faceless government beurocracy is so much better than a corporate beurocracy.
In practice, democracy is driven by populism and histerical news cycles, while beurocracy doesn't feel any pressure from the public whatsoever and is usually occupied with entrenching into occupied political territory. Companies are much more accountable to their shareholders than governments are to their citizens.
Based out of Russia - the nation that just attacked the British with a nerve agent.
If you're going to make the mistake of giving that kind of information to some entity, at least either pick your own companies or government, or an ally.
