
Ask HN: Why are there no public social networks? - nrvslghtnng
(Not as in &quot;going public&quot;.)<p>Why have we not seen a publicly-operated social network?<p>It strikes me that enabling people to connect with one another is fundamental to most governments as a public service. Cities and states make and fund roadways and public squares and parks. Social networks seem like an approximate digital parallel.<p>Given everything that&#x27;s happened with Facebook and Twitter in the last months, why are there no examples of government-run social networks?<p>(Or, if there are, what are they? How do they work?)<p>edited the title for breadth<p>edit 2: thanks for sounding in! A lot of great answers. To be clear, I didn&#x27;t mean to present this as a leading question. I was curious about the perceived reasons from HN&#x27;s audience.
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roymurdock
You need roads, bridges, water, electricity, and garbage collection to fulfill
basic physiological needs, and also so you can swap menial tasks for higher
level work/spending time with family/enjoying a better standard of living.

Framing in Maslow's pyramid [1]: Many of the goods/services the gov provides
fulfill either level 1 physiological needs or level 2 security needs.

Social networks fulfill level 3 and 4 needs: love/belonging, and esteem.

We aren't yet at the point where we as a society decide we need to dedicate
collective resources (taxes) to level 3 and 4 needs, especially while our
level 2 and 1 services/goods aren't improving at the rate with which they did
in the 20th century, and are in some cases deteriorating/being privatized.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow#/media/File:Mas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow#/media/File:Maslow%27s_Hierarchy_of_Needs.svg)

~~~
douglaswlance
Social networks fulfill all needs.

That is why the ultimate form of punishment in our society is to isolate the
individual from all human contact.

Humans do terribly in an environment without other people.

Why does it matter that the medium is digital?

~~~
zild3d
> Social networks fulfill all needs.

not physiological needs... food, shelter, water, sleep, etc

> That is why the ultimate form of punishment in our society is to isolate the
> individual from all human contact.

it is a severe punishment, but again not as crucial as physiological needs.
most would (and should) choose isolation from human contact for much longer
than isolation from water

> Why does it matter that the medium is digital?

You can't eat it

------
sbjs
All the other answers are great, but I think they're missing the biggest and
most important reason: a social network run by any government entity would
only run on Internet Explorer 6 or Firefox 2, would store your password in
plain text, and would run on 15-year-old un-patched IIS on a few Windows XP
servers stored in the basement of city hall. And it would probably all be
built on top of a deprecated social media Wordpress plugin.

~~~
Balero
The meme that (all) government is terrible at technology is getting tired. It
is not necessarily true that a publicly run system will inevitably be
crap/inefficient/archaic. A good example is the British gov.uk group, who have
made some well thought out, usable and technologically sound systems.

Please stop perpetuating this lie. You can, and should expect better of your
public digital systems. Don't let them use "Public tech must be bad" as an
argument.

~~~
MrEfficiency
What happens in a country 1/5 the size in population and 1/10 the size
economically shouldnt be expected to perform the same on something literally
10x bigger.

You likely are much closer to your political representatives than we are. The
amount of money flowing into your politicians pockets are less.

Here I expect the government contract to be unfavorable to the population at
large. I expect the leading politicians to benefit greatly and the company
contracted to do a subpar job that barely meets specifications.

I trust my local government, but I do not trust the federal government to be
competent.

~~~
clintonb
USDS and 18F are staffed by confident people from industry. The federal
government, when it comes to software, is not as incompetent as you think.

~~~
MrEfficiency
This is literally the problem.

Instead of having a department make software, they are supported from a vastly
superior group of developers that work temporarily with that department.

Maybe its too much to ask, but shouldnt the company providing the software
also employ the talent that is used to make the software?

~~~
dragonwriter
At least part of the original idea for those entities was to serve as a cadre
to improve competence government wide.

Having some experience with why government lacks organizational development
competence (TLDR; short-sighted management with the wrong goals), I don't
think they can do that—they literally are addressing the wrong problem—but the
_idea_ wasn't to be a silo of technical skill.

------
symlock
There are government run (even if by proxy) social networks. The are worse
that Facebook.

[https://vk.com/](https://vk.com/) is government run.

The Chinese "Credit Score" is run by Alibaba and Tencent, which run all the
social networks in China and therefore have access to a vast amount of data
about people’s social ties and activities and what they say. In addition to
measuring your ability to pay, as in the United States, the scores serve as a
measure of political compliance. Among the things that will hurt a citizen’s
score are posting political opinions without prior permission, or posting
information that the regime does not like.

There are plenty more too. Just hope the US doesn't make a government-run
social network.

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_Microft
Not sure why you are being downvoted as this is a very interesting question
indeed.

Social networks tend to kill each other due to network effects as people are
flocking to the most used network since there's the largest value for
everyone. So having multiple networks might not really work well.

It wouldn't have to be several networks though and it doesn't even have to be
your own government running it to provide the value you're looking for (social
networking without users being monetized).

Image for example Twitter being bought by a country with good reputation,
strong privacy laws and sufficient economy to sustain it in the long term.
Iceland with some additional funding from the EU or something like that.

Does not sound too bad, in my opinion.

~~~
nrvslghtnng
International governments are another version of your Iceland example. A UN-
run Twitter?

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pasbesoin
In the '90's, there were -- or something closer to this. E.g. IIRC,
"prairienet", in Illinois -- run, again IIRC, by U of I or some affiliated
organization. Perhaps there was State involvement.

It wasn't a "social network", by today's standards, but you could get a free
account.

The "Internet" received a big boost with an government/academic initiative for
high speed links between universities and perhaps some other, government
locations. Initially, this was to be segregated out for use by academics and
their designated projects and the like. But after a year or two, it was opened
up to the general public.

There's a phrase, "Privatizing the profits and socializing the costs."

This connectivity had a lot of value to users. And private companies succeeded
in inserting themselves and extracting it. Building upon the public investment
that started the whole thing.

This is part of why you don't see public social networks. Similar to how ATT,
Comcast, et al. fight tooth and nail to limit and shut down any public ISP
initiatives. And they have the bigger pocketbooks, as well as legislators in
pocket.

Why are there no public social networks? There are certainly other arguments,
other pieces to that puzzle. But one primary one is, because there is money to
be made.

P.S.
[https://localwiki.org/cu/Prairienet](https://localwiki.org/cu/Prairienet)

------
chrisBob
The biggest challenge I see to starting a government run social network
(assuming US here) is the free speech issue. While Twitter and FB can censor
hate speech, there would be an expensive legal battle over the government
doing the same thing.

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seorphates
I might go so far as to say that our potential for a publicly operated social
network is already here, or right close, but is being severely and
intentionally hampered by ISPs more than anything or anyone else - and by
extension recalcitrant, ignorant or paid-for representation.

Unrestricted symmetrical broadband would be a more than adequate foothold for
robust frameworks that could fulfill the aspirations of one voice among
billions in a truly decentralized fashion as well as provide a true
springboard for thoughts, ideas and actions.

I believe the only role government should have here is ensuring access to the
pipes that are regulated as an unhindered, affordable utility whose content is
regulated only by you.

I also believe there are no words worth censoring. Yes, even nazi fucks. Let
them speak and their words will prosper or fail on their own merit. We can't
treat symptoms or causes if we drive unwanted words into darkness where they
can fester and puss.

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amarant
I think it's a great idea, assuming that you're from a country whose
government you trust won't to spy on you. Other commenters seems not to see
the potential benefit, so I'll spell it out: A government operated social
network would be tax-founded, and thus not have any need for profit.

this, one could argue, enables a social network that doesn't spy on you,
respects privacy and doesn't even have ads!

of course it also comes with the risk of the ruling party spying on you and
engaging in manipulation. depending on where you live, and
how..conspirationally inclined you are, this may or may not be a risk you're
willing to take

I'm not sure that this is the best way to spend them tax-dollars. But the
network itself would certainly be nice though

------
pcarolan
SMS could and should be expanded to include more social primitives within the
protocol. Lately, I find myself using group chats in SMS more than any social
network. Facebook and Twitter have a dis-incentive to do this, but Apple and
Microsoft both make phone operating systems and don't have large social
networks to compete with an open protocol. It is really annoying whenever I
run up against walls like 'You can only have 10 users in 1 group chat ...
unless they're all Apple' situations. The protocol should be device/os
agnostic akin to http => browser. But I'm not seeing a lot of movement in the
SMS protocol as late, just more messaging apps.

~~~
poisonborz
Google-backed RCS standard is trying to address this.

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poisonborz
I keep thinking about this, but no way should this be run by a government. The
tech for it to be peer-to-peer, without any central authority is already there
and would make the best fit. The only - admittedly huge - hurdle is that no
authority means no marketing, no support, integrations, and probably a harder
setup/learning curve. While an organization like EFF could help sustain some
of this, it has no resources to represent or support billions of users. Of
course if the network would be open, smaller businesses could capitalize on
it, taking over these tasks, but this could result in walled gardens and
incompatibility.

Shaking off big corporations from services that should have been always open
and free-for-all is maybe the hardest and most important question of the
Internet for the future. I think an answer can only rise upon the ashes of the
current big players, should that be a scandal, disaster, or else.

------
dumbfounder
I'm assuming you mean available to the general public, run by the government?
There probably are smaller, niche social networks for gov employees to
collaborate. If there aren't there probably should be.

But to answer the assumed question, it's because there is no practical way
they could compete with private companies. Sure, theoretically they could dump
tons of money into developing cool new features, slick UIs, and obtain top
talent. They would also need to spend billions to crush or acquire upcoming
networks to maintain their dominance (Whatsapp, Instagram). Or legislate them
out of existence. In practicality there is no way this would (or should) ever
happen.

~~~
nrvslghtnng
The "they'd never develop great features" argument is an interesting one, as I
think most social networks can contribute most of their success to the network
effect itself. Once that positive feedback loop gets churning, it's hard to
turn it around.

Twitter's a neat counterexample here, I think. On the front-end, at least, the
features released by Twitter in the last few years haven't left me awestruck.
Yet it has become a seemingly self-sustaining space on the internet for public
discourse.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
Think a bit: if we are upset about being constantly observed and spied on by
the ones of Google and Facebook, how much more we would be if it was the
government itself running these services? I can't imagine anyone using them.

------
tobylane
It's not wanted. Nearly every social network out there isn't wanted.

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drivingmenuts
Not a good idea - how would that even be moderated, given that there is
always, always, always going to be pushback from politicians and their
followers (not necessarily constituents) depending on how the social currents
are trending that minute.

Given the constraints of the 1st Amendment in the US, it might not even be
possible to moderate a public social network, which would then quickly devolve
into something resembling the most excessive wet dreams of 4channers
everywhere.

Whatever good might arise would be drowned out by the impulsive emanations of
every 14-year old with a passing whim.

------
tarboreus
A nation state running a social network removes an essential political fig
leaf, mainly that these networks are not affiliated with the government.
Obviously they've been co-opted, but people tend to ignore that in practice.
The government is also technologically slow-moving, which makes it great for
large and essential research projects in basic science (like every major
advance in the 20th century) but not great for consumer-facing and short-term
technological applications in the market.

------
randomdata
The internet, which in many places is supported by government, seems like the
approximate digital parallel of a park. What you choose to do at the park is
up to you.

------
ajeet_dhaliwal
_It strikes me that enabling people to connect with one another is fundamental
to most governments as a public service. Cities and states make and fund
roadways and public squares and parks. Social networks seem like an
approximate digital parallel._

The roadways, public squares and parks are under the direct control or
ownership of the government, the virtual/digital parallel doesn't really
exist.

------
kevinmchugh
The US government recently built a social network but it failed to be adopted,
partially because they weren't building it for USAmericans:
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-
twitt...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-twitter-
zunzuneo-stir-unrest)

------
Endy
I suggest you consider the current situation in China. They have state-run
social network. They use it to keep up their state surveillance and censorship
apparatus. A government run social network is one where you can and will be
indicted for anything you say which is at all against the law, and your
comments will always be in the public record.

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gibsons77
As much as everyone likes to shit on crypto, this is exactly what public
programmable blockchains will be used for.

~~~
haggy
It depends where you plan to leverage blockchains. They have well known limits
around transaction rates and given basic functions such as private-messaging
on social platforms, they have the potential to have a much higher txn rate
than anything else currently using blockchain.

------
wolco
Which government? Worldwide like UN or country level like Peru or some
regional / city wide network?

It is probably the one thing no one asked for but could be done. Would
probably make more sense in areas with limited freedom as a means to control
society.

A non profit would make more sense as they can be seen in a more neutral
light.

------
kodablah
Simply put, the cream rarely rises to the top in the public sector like it
does in the private sector. As much as we bemoan financial incentives for the
bad they incur, they also bring good ("good" in definition of quality, not
morality).

------
bsvalley
So you would rather trust the government instead? They mostly work with
private companies to run their IT stuff so at the end of the day your data
would end up on some private servers anyway.

~~~
js8
That's a false dichotomy - in many countries, there are public institutions
that are (somewhat) independent on the government. (In Czech Republic, we have
universities, radio and TV station that are run like that.)

It could also be a cooperative, or a non-profit.. there are many models.

~~~
bsvalley
I think the problem is slightly more complex for a large-scale social network.
When we look at the cost of running something like facebook, we're looking at
hiring an army of expensive developers (someone has to build that platform and
maintain it), buying or renting an army of expensive servers to make sure it's
up and running 24/7, designers so people can actually use it, extra offices in
order to host everyone, etc. It seems to be a money issue as well as an
organizational issue.

The scenario we'd be looking at would be a small internal network for a
university or a small organization. I believe any government could handle such
a thing. For something like facebook we're looking at a lot of money and a
bunch of skilled people. Not sure that's in line with governments...

------
sigfubar
Because governments are generally incapable of delivering large software
projects. Because any such facility provided by a government will be
automatically labeled untrustworthy due to real or imagined involvement by
four-letter agencies or their international equivalents. Because there are
good reasons not to waste public funds on whimsical projects; funds that could
and should be used to actually improve living conditions, energy security,
healthcare, and so on. The list of real wrongs to be righted is too long to
recite here.

------
paulpauper
Social networks are global. public goods are local or national. Would the
rules that apply to non-citizens or non-locals apply to outsiders?

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eof
The government doesn't need to run one. They just slurp up data from the ones
we sign unto voluntarily.

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jenscow
The Internet?

------
Alex3917
What advantage is there of a government-run social network over one run by a
co-op?

------
dredmorbius
Interesting question, and one that opens up numerous areas of history,
communications, community, control, freedom, and public vs. private operation.

In the United States, the postal service from its beginning was publicly
operated, and served specifically to distribute timely information and general
knowledge in the form of discounted rates for newspapers, magazines, and
books, as well as providing personal correspondence and parcel delivery. It
also established principles of privacy to correspondents.

This was in contrast to various earlier systems, either privately operated or,
frequently, operated as part of royal intelligence services.

With the emergence of telephony and broadcast technologies, there were
numerous national debates throughout the worrld over public vs. private
operation, with many countries opting for primarily public systems. The U.S.
chose instead, generally, a regulated private approach.

There are a few histories of these developments, though fewer than you might
think. University of Illinois media scholar Roberrt W. McChesney has several
books on the topic.

Several countries leveraged their national telecoms systems to create early
computer networks, most notably France's Minitel. In the US, the early
DARPANET, ARPANET, and Internet were largely public operations, though through
a mixed-control operator network, including the Department of Defence, RAND,
SRI, the National Science Foundation, and numerous universities, themselves a
mix of public and private.

The Internet itself gradually transitioned from research to commercial use
between 1985 and 1995, in a not particularly structured manner. See for
example: [https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-
paper...](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-
papers/fall95-papers/vincent-culture.html)

There remain elements of government involvement and access to both Net
infrastructure and firms, including investments in several significant firms
(notably Google and Facebook), as well as intercept capabilities through
network operators, engineered device and protocol weaknesses, CA compromises,
and both law-based and extralegal means, fairly trivially confirmed through a
few moments research. (EFF and _The Intercept_ document much of this.)

At the same time, there are countries which do substantively operate or
participate in social networks either directly or through public-private
enterprises, notably Russia and China.

And much of the objective of networking the world has been accomplished
through largely private operators.

In short: they could, some do, there's a great deal of history, and the
present regime arose likely in significant part as national governments and
agencies thought they were seeing their needs met through the cooptable
efforts of others.

~~~
nrvslghtnng
Thanks for the thorough reporting!

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fimdomeio
that's what public gardens should be for :)

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petraeus
corruption would exist on day 1 and day 3545

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abtinf
NSA.

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SublimeWarior
Because Facebook is free and taxes aren't.

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richjdsmith
Have you ever used a government website?

With the exception on gov.uk, they are all god-awful. I suspect lack of talent
within the government is one major reason.

~~~
rootusrootus
I think a more likely answer is a lot of successful lobbying by large crappy
software companies. See also Oracle.

