
Facebook is unfixable. We need a nonprofit, public-spirited replacement - jrepinc
https://boingboing.net/2018/04/06/utterly-zucked.html
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tCfD
Getting the critical mass of public spirit necessary to sustain any self-
correcting decentralized trust system is going to run smack into the
individual tendency to optimize one's commitment of personal resources toward
their own personal objectives.

Asking people, or even tricking them through hype, to voluntarily deleverage
themselves (through agreeing to a set of voluntarily sharing constraints
encoded as rules in a 'trustless' network protocol, ie blockchain) will never
work at global scale, until a global scale referendum of some sort addresses
and settles very basic questions about what we prioritize and value as a
civilization. Such as "are centralized systems of governance so hopelessly
broken that the only remedy is to devolve trust back to individuals, which has
the side effect of settling them with ascertain decision cost premium that
they have hitherto instinctively tried to optimize away by outsourcing it to
specialized custodial agents?" "Are people really willing to pay a
decentralization premium that isn't subsidized by a hype and speculation
casino game?"

Until this discussion occurs (and I'm not holding my breath), every nominally
'flat' system of governance that is sold as a solution to centralized control
will merely serve the opposite goal, by obfuscating its underlying informally
centralized hierarchy of leverage and influence.

~~~
tCfD
Edit to my above comment, since my client doesn't seem to allow previewing or
editing unfortunately....

'side effect of settling them with ascertain' should be 'side effect of
saddling them with a certain'

Also I think the original articles proposal of a non-profit solution is Noble
but the bigger facility for moral hazard is lack of transparency, and lack of
transparency is as much a problem of compressing complexity so that the
information made transparent is digestible to most of the users in a
reasonable amount of time, without introducing biases through that compression
which skew the interpretation of the information. There's a lot of information
about how the power in society is conducted through structures of influence,
but making this information accessible to people so that they can avoid or
associate with portions of it as freely as possible is a basket of paradoxical
UX and ethical snakes to untangle.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
The article makes a mistake in comparing Wikipedia to Facebook.

Wikipedia has roughly 100M daily unique devices which access it.
[https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/reportcard/#daily...](https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/reportcard/#daily-
unique-devices)

Wikipedia had roughly 140K users who performed an action in the last month.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics)

Facebook had 1.4 billion daily active users
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-
global-d...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-dau/)

That is over 2 orders of magnitude difference in logged in users, and 1 order
of magnitude in daily visitors.

Add to that the fact that Facebook has much more dynamic content compared to
the mostly static content of Wikipedia.

I don't think managing something on the scale of Facebook is something
Wikipedia Foundation would be remotely close to being able to do.

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wlesieutre
Ello comes to mind, they’re incorporated as a public benefit corporation and
the charter prohibits them from selling ads or user data.

It’s turned into mostly an artist colony and I have no idea if they’re making
money.

[https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ello-becomes-a-
publ...](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ello-becomes-a-public-
benefit-corporation-and-legally-vows-to-forever-remain-ad-free-founders-and-
investors-sign-charter-376792333.html)

------
mankash666
Many open source, non-profit, social media sites exist. one of the reasons
for-profit sites thrive is due to their profit incentive that ends up making
them more engaging

~~~
penglish1
Too engaging is part of the problem, of course. A public park or beach might
arguably less engaging than the commercially driven next season of that show
on Netflix. Doesn't mean that there shouldn't be thriving parks/beachs.

Or.. that there cannot be thriving parks and beachs. There provably are. There
are also lousy ones overrun with trash that no one likes or uses.

So the issue would seem to be - how best do we make the open source, public
funded options more like the parks and beaches that everyone uses, and less
like the ones that people hate...without a profit motive.

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drharby
I mean, facebook didnt exist at some point so, no we don't need it.

~~~
jogjayr
Wish I could upvote more than once. There are plenty of digital alternatives
for keeping in touch, organizing events and meetings, and sharing pictures
with friends and family, that don't require having a Facebook account. The
type of in-touch-keeping that FB facilitates is superficial, ephemeral, and
essentially meaningless.

Broadcasting events in your life, and passively consuming others' broadcasts
in turn, is in no way a real relationship - it's just a really in-depth look
into the lives of strangers, no different from reading a celebrity mag.

------
hw
Instagram would've killed it if it didn't get bought by Facebook. The days are
gone where you need a social network to keep track of your friends. Messaging
apps (Messenger, Whatsapp) are making a comeback (remember when ICQ and AIM
was cool before social networks took over).

We don't need a social network. Kids don't need to get poisoned by a social
network to the point where they think liking someone's post or stalking
someone on Facebook is socializing. Worse of all, people don't understand the
amount of personal information they 'leak' to Facebook by just sharing their
photos, where they've been or where they are when they post.

As for a nonprofit public-spirited replacement, there's no guarantee either
that your data will be protected. Facebook, a multi billion corporation, while
is in the middle of a privacy and data leak problem, is likely more capable in
protecting data than a nonprofit given the amount of resources at FB's
disposal.

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robgibbons
We already have GNU Social, Mastodon, or any of the half-dozen other
federated, free/open-source offerings. One major problem is in resisting
Facebook's existing network effect. It's a difficult proposition to simply
replace a multi-billion user network.

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JohnClark1337
Build something that the kids love, and that is enticing to their parents, and
eventually they drag granny and grandpa into it kicking and screaming, and
then we have everyone on a new platform.

And then the kids get bored and leave, and the parents start to dwindle, and
you're left with granny and grandpa and their all-caps rants until they get
dragged off to the next platform.

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8bitsrule
Maybe the FidoNet model was on the right track. With modern speeds and
encryption, no terminal nodes (deliver fully-encrypted to next node, erase) a
zillion possible pathways (route as randomly zig-zaggy as needed) to take
between source and sink.

Not perfect, but gotta beat one S.O.B. grunting and rubbing his hands gother.

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yuhong
I just posted the final version of the Google/DoubleClick essay:
[http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/2018/04/google-doubleclick-
moz...](http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/2018/04/google-doubleclick-mozilla-
essay-final.html)

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gravis7777
Well go ahead and start it. I just don't want public funds paying for it. Good
luck to you!

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anoncoward7780
queue the "it can't be done" crowd. And the "just stop using your -carefully
crafted for you- addiction machine" crowd.

