
We Need More Alternatives to Facebook - mathattack
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604082/we-need-more-alternatives-to-facebook/
======
Nomentatus
Obviously we don't need an alternative very much since we aren't enforcing the
laws about interoperability that have always applied to every other sort of
monopoly, such as railroads - you aren't allowed to have your own rail gauge,
by law, for a reason; others have to be able to take those railcars on their
line, too. Similarly, back in the day Bell was forced to interoperate with
other telephone networks, that wasn't a choice. If other networks could
interoperate transparently with Facebook there would be no shortage of
alternatives. When things get really, really desperate... maybe at long last,
despite our captured legislatures, it's time to apply the normal legal
remedies that were good enough for our great-grandfathers.

~~~
rexpop
Who, if not our "captured legislatures" is to act?

"We don't need an alternative very much" today, perhaps, but I fear this may
be like saying the Titanic had little need for life rafts _when in dry dock_.

~~~
bigbugbag
There are many alternatives around already. The issue is not alternatives, it
is people not using and staying facebook's used.

~~~
Nomentatus
There are always alternatives to networks with monopoly power from the network
effect. Which is why our Great-Grandfathers (the Great-Grandmothers weren't
able to vote, then) passed those laws.

------
pyrophane
We need interconnected networks to succeed again. Remember when the internet
was all about services based on open protocols that could talk to one another?
I do. We've moved away from that in no small part to the fact that it isn't in
the interest of the Facebooks and Googles of the world, who want to BE the
internet rather than just a part of it. Everyone has a closed off messaging
system. Platforms are working harder to bring content into their wall so you
don't ever have to leave to get it.

I'm not sure how to fix this now, as the answers (xmpp, openid, diaspora,
matrix) don't seem to be gaining a huge amount of traction, either because
they are too difficult to use, lack important features, or because most users
don't care.

Either way if we can't figure out a way to bring that spirit of
interconnectedness and decentralization back to the internet I'm afraid that
the situation will continue to deteriorate.

~~~
sharun
The fix is easy.

The root cause is the like/retweet/upvote/view count and the instant
gratification it produces.

The social networks like FB/Twitter/Youtube benefit greatly from all their
users being addicted to these counts. They know this. Its like a drug they
peddle that produces a false high.

So whats the fix?

Rather than giving their users instant feedback and gratification if they just
delay it for a bit or change the signaling(ie replace the numbers with color
gradients,number less charts etc), most of unintended consequences we see of
social networks (like fake news, celeb-worship, attention harvesting, mob
rule, re-enforcing echo chambers of hate/rascism etc) will not disappear but
get more controllable.

Expecting Google and Facebook to do this by themselves is like expecting Wall
Street to self regulate and the NSA to come out with a road map to ending
secret data collection. Its not going to happen.

They have to be strong armed, forced and publicly shamed into it. And that is
going to happen sooner or later whether they like it or not. Because the
consequences are pilling up.

~~~
woah
The fact that people like to get approval from their peers is a sinister
conspiracy? I think it's important for alternative decentralized networks to
incorporate these mechanisms that people enjoy.

~~~
csydas
I think you're somewhat understating the effect of the voting/like feedback.
Even on HN which is fairly neutral to the whole social aspect of a message
board, it's very clear that people take their karma seriously, even with rules
specifically forbidding the meta-comments on down votes/up votes. The praise
system works, it's addictive, and the biggest and largest source of the
feedback is already set up, available, and provides exactly what people need.
They know how to get what they want from it.

To me, it doesn't seem that people are using Facebook for anything but the
feedback loop; for every business, self employed person, or personality using
Facebook to connect to fans, there are dozens of people just looking to get in
on the feed to get a taste of that feedback. Look at announcement posts from
any entity with a large following; the comments on it will get into the tens
of thousands in an hour or two. The comments aren't discussing it, it's people
seeing a vein open up for the feedback, and trying to tap it to get some likes
or feedback. Reddit seems to have the same issue with the top rated posts on
more populated subreddits being nothing but dumb puns that people rush out to
be first with; scroll down far enough, and you'll see the exact same pun
repeated by others who were too slow to post and missed their chance.

Facebook isn't a communication platform really, it's a steady drip of
endorphins as you can repeatedly live out your 15 minutes of fame over and
over again, all while advertisers throw ads at you. Messenger is just a means
to keep you in the platform.

The point of my banal rant is that the idea of alternative networks has been
bandied around since everyone's mom and dad got a facebook account, but every
time it's addressed, it's always about feature parity and improvements instead
of acknowledging that Facebook currently is best situated to feed that need
for acknowledgement. Trying to fight on features, on policy, and so on is
pointless because that's not why people are using Facebook. We saw how Twitter
and Instagram started to steal Facebook users because of a more efficient
means of providing the same feedback for users. Wider audience, less effort,
and Facebook took notice, copying features directly from both platforms.

It won't be just incorporating it, it will be ensuring that it's a better,
faster, more efficient system for giving that gratification.

~~~
Buttons840
I haven't used Facebook but I've seen the "Like" buttons all over the place?
Is there no mechanism for negative feedback? If I post something ignorant and
offensive is the only possible outcome positive feedback from Likes?

~~~
majewsky
Since last year, there are multiple "reactions" to choose from, "like" being
one of them: [https://www.wired.com/2016/02/facebook-reactions-totally-
red...](https://www.wired.com/2016/02/facebook-reactions-totally-redesigned-
like-button/)

But there is still no "dislike". The closest thing would be "sad" or "angry".
And of course, it still has the same problem as "like": When someone presses
"like" on coverage of the terrorist attack, does that mean that they liked the
terrorist attack, or the particular way it was covered by the media?

~~~
niftich
The real purpose of multiple reactions is to help train their sentiment
analysis models with human input. Amidst some noise like people who always
click a particular one like 'love', or the posts that hijack the reactions as
a multi-option poll (click 'like' for A, 'love' for B, 'haha' for C), a good
amount of people pick an appropriately genuine reaction in response.

This helps their automated sentiment analysis systems to classify content, and
also helps surface a particular balance of content to you that Facebook deems
appropriate (e.g. not posts that are likely to make you sad or angry at the
top of the fold).

The reason negative reactions are absent is because they don't want to pit
people against each other. Everyone can have their own corner of the sandbox,
and despite the common derision of today's 'filter bubble', I don't think when
they plan on serving advertisements to billions of very different people with
pre-existing allegiances, opinions, and beliefs, they could realistically
afford to do otherwise.

~~~
bigbugbag
I would not be surprised if this was part of a follow-up to the infamous mood
experiment where they manipulated facebook's useds moods through timeline
tinkering.

------
dbg31415
To me, Facebook was cool when I was in college... when it first came out. Was
nice to link up with people I had classes with the previous semester but
didn't see much any more, look up cute girls from lectures, and learn stupid
details like my friend Joe was into the same bands I was.

But... it instantly lost all appeal once my parents and grandparents joined. I
used it for a bit to keep up with friends after college, but then I decided I
would de-friend anyone I hadn't actually spoken with in the last year... or
didn't expect to ever really talk with again in the future. I did that every
year for a few years... and eventually just shut down my account. For me,
noise exceeded signal. Every time I got an alert it was some fake friend
wanting to connect or share something I didn't care about.

I keep in touch with friends I care about with text messages, and we have our
own Slack channels... and that's good. The absolute last thing any of us want
is this super-public, broadcasted-bullshit, boast-fest full of people we don't
really care about. Some girl I thought was cute when I was in college...
there's no reason I need to know when she has kids or what she is up to 15
years later... superficial friendships are just a time sink that take away
from real friendships.

Anyway yeah, 5+ years Facebook-free and no regrets on that. I like Snapchat
(saying this as a nearly-40-year-old) because, like natural conversation, it's
not some crapy thing that comes back to haunt you. Say what you want, and it's
gone. (But... yeah, I HATE that it's stored on some server somewhere for the
government or advertisers to use to track me.)

Slack groups work really well for me and a few of my groups of friends.
Because we know they are exclusive, and won't spam us, we actually value them.
When someone has a message for the entire group... "I got engaged / married /
had a kid / new job / moving to Singapore..." whatever... it's just
information, not someone trying to milk fake internet points from strangers.

Focus on real friends, focus on communication that mimics real life... you say
things... and they're gone. Imagine if some asshole was walking around with a
tape recorder and recording every conversation you had... that's how I see
Facebook / Google+... The whole concept of these networks just makes me
cringe.

~~~
ErikAugust
Agreed.

People that were in college in the 00s and used Facebook totally understand
that the original value proposition.

Facebook was actually an elitist social network - an experience not only
devoid of parents, grandparents, but people who didn't go to college. And
early on, people who didn't go to moderately "important" colleges. No
"importantcollegehere.edu" email address - no Facebook account. You could use
MySpace.

Facebook kept people out - it's mission was definitely not to "connect
everyone in the world" (or whatever). And there wasn't a news feed. An obvious
use case was gathering intel on classmates you found attractive.

Through thousands of small mutations, Facebook has evolved into what it is
today. And people that think Facebook is true to its roots are wrong.
Completely wrong.

~~~
dbg31415
> No "importantcollegehere.edu" email address - no Facebook account. You could
> use MySpace.

Yeah... you get it. (=

I don't know that it was our goal to be elitist... but certainly it helped
that we knew it was a small group of people who had access to what we posted
online. It felt safe.

And even after it expanded to other colleges, it still felt like a college
thing. Many colleges still put out paper "face books" and so we had that
connection.

But once we graduated and realized it was suddenly for everyone, and all of
our posts that we made to a small group were now visible to everyone... ugh it
was just such a turn off.

Seeing a parent or grandparent commenting on a status update or photo we
shared from a party, "Oh shit, my mom can see this stuff?! How do I delete
it?!"

I bet there's some market for a school-wide system that only lets you
communicate with people who would have been on campus the same time you
were... so like pick 3-4 years in either direction. Try and mimic the first
Facebook rollout...

But I don't know, if anyone had the magic solution they'd have built it by
now... personally -- as I said in the previous post -- this shit just all
makes me cringe now. I can't even look at someone's Facebook feed without
losing respect for everyone involved. It's all so smug and self-promotion of
crap. "I'm going to say something, and all my friends will like it to affirm
they are my friends!" Just creepy.

~~~
type0
> It's all so smug and self-promotion of crap. "I'm going to say something,
> and all my friends will like it to affirm they are my friends!" Just creepy.

It's because FB rides the wave of recent narcissist epidemic, also it's good
for gossips and bullying - closed groups you're not invited to can talk shit
behind your back.

------
grewil2
Mastodon seems like a promising alternative. From the description: "Mastodon
is a free, open-source social network. A decentralized alternative to
commercial platforms, it avoids the risks of a single company monopolizing
your communication. Pick a server that you trust — whichever you choose, you
can interact with everyone else. Anyone can run their own Mastodon instance
and participate in the social network seamlessly."

[https://mastodon.social/about](https://mastodon.social/about)

~~~
jug
I tried to sign up using both a hotmail.com and gmail.com mail address but
it's saying both are invalid and turning the text field to red. _shrug_ I've
confirmed I'm actually on the sign up page and not the login page.

~~~
novia
"Due to exceptionally high traffic, registrations on this instance are closed
until quality of service can be assured for existing users." Maybe try again
later?

------
dangerousbeans
[https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/) is worth having a
look at

Built on a secure peer to peer replicating database which doesn't mind being
incomplete - you just get the bit of it you need from your friends + their
friends

Has a version of github running on it:
[https://git.scuttlebot.io/](https://git.scuttlebot.io/)

And a kinda soundcloud clone
[https://github.com/mmckegg/ferment](https://github.com/mmckegg/ferment)

------
kolinko
Worth noting that Reddit might become a competition to Facebook in a year or
so.

They recently introduced a trial of followable users, that you can subscribe
to, just like you subscribe to subreddits.

It's de facto the same mechanism that Facebook has with user walls.

Once they roll it out to everyone, Reddit will be quite similar, sans the real
name policy.

~~~
dehue
I can't see how reddit can possibly become competition for Facebook, they work
on two completely different levels and cater to different circles of people.
Facebook is about following your real life friends, local events, brands and
interacting with people that you know. Reddit is a pseudo anonymous forum
where people interact within communities based on interests and topics and
reach out to as many people as possible. Even with the introduction of
profiles, reddit can't exactly replace Facebook since Facebook is tied to your
real life identity, your actual friends and family rather than random Internet
people and that aspect of it is what makes it popular and hard to get away
from. Even if some functions of them overlap, I just don't see how they could
directly compete with one another.

You are likely not going to post photos of your family dinner to Reddit
because that would be extremely boring to anyone not within your family or
friends circle. On the other hand, it wouldn't make much sense to post a link
to a blog post on a complicated programming or science topic to Facebook and
expect to get much discussion on it unless you happen to be friends with lots
of people knowledgeable on that topic. They are two different platforms with
different purposes. Unless one or the other drastically changes their entire
interface and function, I doubt one will compete with the other any time soon.

------
davesque
Whatever we need, I've come to feel that Facebook is broken on a fundamental
level in that it does not accomplish its implicit goal of connecting people.
Interactions between Facebook users are comically if not dangerously (as we've
now seen) vacuous.

------
peterwwillis
This isn't an argument for social media alternatives, this is an argument for
ethical journalism to become popular again. We need non-social media.

~~~
isostatic
We do. But that costs money, and the only things that seem to be working are
clickbait, fake news, and government sponsored outlets. A future of RT, Press
TV, infowars, taboos, and if we're lucky al-jazzera

~~~
bigbugbag
That's because those media are engaged in fast competition race towards the
bottom.

Let's get rid of surveillance capitalism and tracking/targeting in advertising
and this whole conundrum will solve itself.

------
paulcole
The alternative is to not use Facebook.

~~~
colmvp
I think the problem is that it's becoming harder and hard not to use a
Facebook related product. Along with the social network, you have the IM app,
Instagram, Whatsapp, and potentially VR.

As much as I dislike FB (I uninstalled it from my app and have used the social
network in many months), it's much harder for me to convince friends to switch
over to another chat program, or to publish my shitty photos on another
another platform with an actual audience of friends.

~~~
ymse
It's easier to convince them if you don't have Facebook to begin with. Then it
can't be used as an excuse. Nearly all my close friends and family have
Signal.

As for shitty photos... they can see them on the TV when they visit :)

I have considered making a pseudonym account just for Tinder though (hi
ladies!)...but greeting people with "my name isn't _actually_ Johnny Depp"
does not sound like the best opener either.

~~~
Markoff
i use only signal and Skype lite, sharing photos with family in Google photos,
not sure why would i need social network for that

------
memracom
The thing about all these scoring systems like FAcebook "likes" is that there
is no way to know that they mean what they say. People do not click "like"
because they like your post or they like you. It means a lot of different
things to different people so when you add them all up it is like adding
apples to oranges to grapes to footballs to dustmites.

Plus there are hordes of people trying to game the system and millions of
dollars being spent on that. How can anyone take this thing seriously?

------
rdxm
the best thing that could happen for us as a culture and really as a species,
is for FB to disappear off the planet. does little beyond lowering IQ's of
broader society.

------
norea-armozel
In a way, I think social networks as currently designed as a mistake since it
requires a centralized authority to share the content and verify our
identities. Compare that to hosting your own content on a VPS where you're in
charge of what you do and share on it. The problem comes from how do you
connect people to together? How do you build a social search that links people
based on what they share? In a way, I've always hoped Google would've been the
one to get clued in and realize that they didn't need to make a social network
but a social search index which would connect people based on that active
sharing on websites. Obviously, there's no money to be had in such a search
index so I have to wonder if it has to be something done on a voluntary basis
like Debian or any other FOSS project.

------
dandelion_lover
[https://prism-break.org/en/all/#social-networks](https://prism-
break.org/en/all/#social-networks)

Even more? I guess the problem is somewhere else...

~~~
bigbugbag
Now we have a new kind of those that uses blockchain technology and
cryptocurrency such as steemit.

------
davidg11
Part of why Facebook paid such eye-popping sums for Instagram and Whatsapp is
any network that gains critical mass poses a real threat, that monopoly is not
as ironclad as it seems.

~~~
bigbugbag
Isn't that business as usual ? microsoft, google, etc. have been doing this
for decades. Either they buy before it gets popular and they kill it or they
buy it once popular and they exploit it. Some of those are even made for the
sole purpose of being bought by a big player with lots of money, youtube comes
to mind.

But not everybody is a sellout and when snapchat refused to be bought,
facebook tried to pull a google and release a similar service/software to
compete and starve the insolent, but they failed hard and nobody knows what
facebook poke is. Though facebook still has its monopoly and snapchat is not
really threatening that.

But table turns, and they turn fast. For facebook who has no inherent value
other that a lot of registered useds locked in, if those people started
migrating to the new thing in town, facebook could be the new myspace in no
time. This could not happen to apple or amazon who have inherent value, to
google who sells ads outside its own websites, and microsoft well I don't
understand how they made it so far, probably because they could bleed money by
millions for years without even noticing it.

------
satai
We need more alternatives to FB but be hardly can get more relevant
alternatives to FB...

~~~
bigbugbag
We already have plenty of alternatives, what we need is all those to be
interoperable between them.

~~~
satai
Emphasis on the word "relevant".

------
exabrial
"need" is a strong word, but variety and choice would be nice.

~~~
bigbugbag
Variety and choice we already have and it is useless unless each component of
this variety can communicate with the others.

A multitude of walled gardens is no solution, it's just spreading the problem
on a larger surface. What we need is to tear down the walls and build bridges
instead.

------
ThomPete
There are literally thousands of alternatives to Facebook so that's hardly the
problem.

------
XJOKOLAT
No, we need

1) transferable data and history. 2) user accounts/networks/friends which can
interface

Then social networks become actual utilities instead of the branded "utility"
walled-garden bullshit Facebook is currently branded as.

Sure, that's their strength. But unless they give that up, we'll continue down
this stagnant, monopolist path.

Time to break Facebook up or open it to the web ... remember that? The open
web?

