
Are closed social networks inevitable? (2010) - szx
http://danluu.com/open-social-networks/
======
sirclueless
Who is "Rebecca"? I agree with 90% of her statements, and she appears in this
conversation to have further ambitions of continuing with the ideas and
convincing some powerful people, especially Paul Krugman, of their validity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"When I was at Google I hung out "

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

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

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

~~~
abysmallyideal
She is right about one thing, "Silicon Valley", is the worst thing that has
happened to the decentralization and distribution or the powers of the
internet. Their entire motive is centralization and monopolization.

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
cm3
Concerning external links, I'm surprised that big news sites don't seem to
have stable links whereas tech sites like /. do. Go to Wikipedia, and follow a
few referenced links to major news organization websites. You'll find many
dead links. Given that they use complex, professional CMS solutions, I don't
understand why they would break links. It's not like they cannot serve ads for
old articles. Wired's old articles seem to be there but barely so with
sometimes broken img links.

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

But only after consent from your the sender, right?

~~~
test1235
>I'm surprised that big news sites don't seem to have stable links

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

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1537469.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1537469.stm)

~~~
cm3
That's brilliant, and I wouldn't expect anything less from the BBC. They are
technically competent and innovated in the broadcasting space, like a few
other networks did/do. It surely helped that the BBC have (had?) an R&D
department.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
nickpsecurity
The part that jumped out at me was this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
dredmorbius
The risk Facebook runs is in having lost that cachet.

Facebook transitioned from "the cool kids" to "all the kids". They've been
playing a highly defensive game, through pricey acquisitions, of seeing that
they remain "all the kids", though with significant leakage forming.

No single other party has decided to enter into the frey with a decentralised
social networking model (Google could have, didn't, and at this point I'm
suspecting won't, more on that:
[https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/3L3Z5GhJ...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/3L3Z5GhJ5An)).

One thought that's been bubbling up my head is that we still don't fully
understand networks, values, and costs. First it was Sarnoff (V = n), then
Metcalfe (V = n^2), then Tilly-Odlyzko (V = n(log(n))).

I argue that V = n(log(n)) - kn

That is: there's a _decreasing_ value for each additional user, but a
_constant_ cost function. Where log(n) < kn, adding additional users hurts
you.

You also risk a smaller, higher-value network beating you out.

There are a few implications, one of which is that network size is highly
dependent on 'k'. This strikes me as a very general characteristic, common for
pretty much any network-type structure: social networks, phone systems (crank
and sales calls), cities (crime, disease, congestion), computer chips (heat,
noise, defects), and more.

There are also some psychological and perceptual limitations at play. I've
been trying to find what I can on human limits of information consumption.
Several sources (Stephen Wolfram, Walt Mossberg) suggest ~100 - 300 emails/day
is a near upper limit, the NY Times comments moderation desk averages slightly
fewer than 800 comments/day per person. That's about one every 36 seconds,
straight.

I know my own bandwidth for articles, comments, posts, and books is limited,
as well as my capacity for handling longer forms once I've started consuming
shorter-form content.

I'm tumbling this around to see what I can get out of it. Not sure yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
ChoHag
They both manage to produce great things and new features not hinted at in
their spec (ie. An OS and The Internet (kinda; TCP != IP), respectively)
despite having a limited, shared feature set.

~~~
eridius
This is complete nonsense. You may as well say that apples and oranges are a
counterargument, because both can be made into different delicious desserts
even though both are fruits with a lot of similarities.

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

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

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

~~~
jrm415
Perhaps you meant that she is _really_ well articulated (rather than rarely)?

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

~~~
bbcbasic
I took it as she is articulate only on occasion.

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
it was a rarely well articulated appraisal

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

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

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

~~~
qmalzp
Does anyone else think the static design of Wikipedia is a good thing?

~~~
Spakman
I love the static nature of Wikipedia's design.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
spc476
Spam, AOL
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September))
and the high cost of hosting the binary groups are mostly responsible for the
decline of USENET.

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

~~~
ArkyBeagle
I keep forgetting about binaries.

Even if your ISP dropped NNTP, there were still free NNTP servers around, so
I'm less than agreed about that expectation. And the Eternal September was in
1993. Usenet was "viable" well past ten years past that.

I think the best explanation is "new shiny Web" although about... half of the
folks I used to read on Usenet are now on Other Fora and it's nowhere near the
same - it's not a substitute.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've done this with snapchat

Telegram

anything I want at that point in time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
groby_b
The things a social graph gives you - Friends of a Friend, graph overlap,
graph complexity, etc.

All these metrics matter a lot in the social space. We can't get them (with,
see below, a few exceptions like HTML - and boy is having the edges there a
useful thing)

~~~
dredmorbius
So, relationships, essentially.

An article I ran acrosss a few days back pointed out how the _nature_
relationships also matters. It starts off noting that gender is often given as
binary (M/F), when reality can be more complicated (though most of the
complications are a distinct minority case). That's something I ran across
years back looking at healthcare data, where "gender" had in some cases five
values: male, female, indeterminate, other, and unknown.

Relationships, though: "friend", "family", "co-worker", "ex-spouse", "enemy",
...

Any thoughts on capturing something such as this (or of similar complexity) on
a graph? Or references?

I suspect international or inter-corporate relationships might be similar.

~~~
groby_b
There have been attempts:

FOAF:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_\(ontology\))

XFN:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML_Friends_Network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML_Friends_Network)

There's probably more. There's always more standards :)

~~~
dredmorbius
So many to choose from!

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting theory.

------
ChoHag
Yes, initially. Pretty much everything starts off closed.

(DNR)

