
Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet? - vkb
There have been many, many posts about how toxic advertising and Facebook are (I&#x27;ve written many myself[1][2][3]) for our internet ecosystem today.<p>What projects or companies are you working on to combat filter bubbles, walled gardens, emotional manipulation, and the like, and how can the HN community help you in your goals?<p>[1]http:&#x2F;&#x2F;veekaybee.github.io&#x2F;facebook-is-collecting-this&#x2F;
[2]http:&#x2F;&#x2F;veekaybee.github.io&#x2F;content-is-dead&#x2F;
[3] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;veekaybee.github.io&#x2F;who-is-doing-this-to-my-internet&#x2F;
======
doke01
Make your website of record your website. Make social media platforms and
others (e.g. Google) secondary to that. Don't let Google and Facebook control
how you build your website. I am amazed at companies that take their websites
and subjugate them to their Facebook page. You may gain social attention but
you are handing over control. Never, ever, ever say to contact me go to
facebook.com/xxxx or my email address is xxx@gmail.com. Your site is
yoursite.com and your email is youremail.com. Your login to the sites you
build are email addresses, not tied to social media providers. The closed
internet providers are enhancements to your sites. They do not take the place
of your site. If you follow this philosophy, you are supporting the open
internet. Own your .com. Don't let others own you by taking that from you.

~~~
ewjordan
By making your email something custom instead of @gmail, you're spending some
energy, time, and money to protect against a perceived threat.

I guess my real question is, what exactly is that threat, how damaging is it,
and how likely is it to occur?

By my mental math, I can't really justify spending even a few bucks, or more
expensively, a few hours, protecting against some consequence that I can't
really quantify at any real level of risk.

For business, sure, because there are other benefits to having a custom
domain, but for personal stuff, I don't really see the cost/benefit analysis
making sense. The biggest threat seems to be that the government will have my
data and I'll be advertised at, but having my own domain doesn't help either
way. Am I missing something?

~~~
ben174
You can still host your domain on google apps which is simple and painless.
The key is that you can take your domain with you and move it wherever you
want later on, if you choose to.

~~~
pyre
Exactly this. I'm lucky though in that I signed up when it was Google Apps for
Domains (and free). I've been using it for years without paying (having been
grandfathered in). If I ever decide that I don't want to be on Google anymore,
I can take my domain and move to (e.g.) FastMail without having to go through
the pain of shifting everything over. I don't have to:

* spam everyone I know to use a new email address.

* go through authorship information in any READMEs out there for projects I may contribute to.

* deal with an invalid email address embedded in public commits (ala Github).

* deal with possibly important, time-sensitive emails ending up in a blackhole.

* updating email information for online accounts. Especially for sites that use a combo of email address/password rather than login/password.

* etc...

I only have to pay ~$12/year (or less if I buy years in bulk) to keep the
domain, and I also get the benefit of being able to grant emails on the domain
to other people too.

~~~
Freak_NL
Same here. Having my own domain at least decreases the risk of ever losing
access to my email address. A lot of developers seem to do this.

It's a shame that this is not something the average person can do easily.
Email addresses are by design linked to specific domains.

------
aaronpk
I am a member of the W3C Social Web Working Group
([https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg](https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg)), and
have been organizing IndieWebCamp
([https://indieweb.org/](https://indieweb.org/)) conferences in this space for
the last 7 years. We've been making a lot of progress:

* [https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/](https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/) \- cross-site commenting

* [https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/](https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/) \- API for apps to create posts on various servers

* [https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/](https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/) \- realtime subscriptions to feeds

* More: [https://indieweb.org/specs](https://indieweb.org/specs)

We focus on making sure there are a plurality of implementations and
approaches rather than trying to build a single software solution to solve
everything.

Try commenting on my copy of this post on my website by sending me a
webmention!
[https://aaronparecki.com/2017/06/08/9/indieweb](https://aaronparecki.com/2017/06/08/9/indieweb)

~~~
AndyMcConachie
Who is implementing these? I saw there was an Apache project as a reference
implementation a while ago but it was now abandoned. Is there a new reference
implementation or are there plans for creating one?

~~~
aaronpk
Micropub clients:
[https://indieweb.org/Micropub/Clients](https://indieweb.org/Micropub/Clients)

Micropub servers:
[https://indieweb.org/Micropub/Servers](https://indieweb.org/Micropub/Servers)

Webmention implementations:
[https://indieweb.org/Webmention](https://indieweb.org/Webmention)

More details:
[https://indieweb.org/indieweb_network](https://indieweb.org/indieweb_network)

~~~
AndyMcConachie
Thank you.

------
delegate
There is no going back, this 'battle' was lost a long time ago.

We've tried so hard to make technology ubiquitous and accessible to
_everyone_. We thought that that was a good idea at the time, except we didn't
really understand it entirely.

The consequence of ubiquitous technology is that the _majority_ now has access
to powerful tools to 'express' themselves while being subjected to constant
brainwashing into behaving in predictable ways - purchasing, thinking, liking,
voting, etc.

By 'expressing' themselves, they contribute to a cacophony of content, which
makes it very hard to discern truth from fabrication, leading to confusion,
apathy and insecurity, exactly the sweet spots that advertisers of all kinds
target.

A small minority profits greatly from this system, while the users themselves
are rewarded with a 'virtual self' which is slowly taking over their 'real'
self, making even the idea of losing it scary. This mental trap is very
powerful - just look at the number of 'zombies' on the streets - people
interacting with their phones there and then, disregarding others and their
personal safety..

The remaining 5% who are aware of these issues get to share all the
alternative technological solutions and monetary scraps left over from the big
fishes.

So I don't think there's anything to 'do' about it - just be aware of it and
try to stay away from large crowds.

I respect and applaud the efforts of so many who try to build distributed and
anonymous systems, but I'm very bearish about any of them becoming
'mainstream' for the reasons described above plus this one: most people don't
care about these things.

Those who control these systems are some of the most powerful people in the
world. In time, they will get older and more conservative. Soon they will
venture into politics on a global scale.

Considering the alternatives, maybe that's not the worst thing after all.

~~~
paulddraper
Forgive me if I exaggerate, but you sound a chef who is appalled by the lack
of variety in fruits and vegetables distributed at a shelter.

Billions of people can communicate and learn in ways never before possible.
This is overall A Very Good Thing.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I think it's good on balance, but am also scared about the dangers ahead, and
around us.

I'm sure when the tractor was invented, some bright minds realized this was
going to be the end of small farms, and that some day we'd be eating
manufactured food product out of a tube, having long forgotten the art of
cultivating a rich breadbasket for your family.

They would've been right, of course, we've lost our health and our knowledge
of the earth, somewhat catastrophically.

Which isn't to say we should've skipped the tractor. But just that "it's net
good" won't be the end of the story.

~~~
nextlevelwizard
So... Can I assume you are doing something about this? Like are you going to
buy a farm and start "cultivating rich breadbaskets"? If answer is anything,
but: "Yes" followed by a planned date, then you are just blowing out air. It's
easy to say "hurdur we used to be close to earth and things were so much
better" from your yoga mat using latest MacBook Pro, but unless you are
actually getting up at the crack of dawn to work on fields you have no idea
how much work goes into farming.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Yes. No I won't buy a farm, as distant intentional communities seem to
inevitably stagnate in isolation.

My MacBook is a 2011 MacBook Air.

I think you might be pretty interested in how I see the path back. It won't be
retreading the path we came in on. And things will be very different when we
get there.

~~~
willhslade
Don't be lame with the Facebook tease. Tell us or don't, and for the record, I
am interested.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I think we'll implement the basic functions of capitalism in software, and
learn to use them on a smaller and smaller scale, to the point where you could
issue a bond to buy a burrito and sell your burrito farts, someone else could
buy the bond, the burrito gets eaten, and dividends paid in the span of an
hour.

As that technology diffuses, large corporations will lose their competitive
advantage over individuals, and we'll switch over to voluntary contracts for
all commerce, instead of coercive employment and property regimes. There will
rarely be a time when you think "well, this deal isn't great but I don't have
a lot of other choices". You'll be able to just decompose the deal and bid out
its parts to an effectively infinite network of contractors, and bond it out
in tiny increments. Any business plan which makes sense will be immediately
implementable.

Simultaneous with this, we will also develop softwares for other political
organizations besides capitalism, including communism, monarchism, fascism,
etc, which we will all participate in voluntarily in the same way. Anarcho-
syndicalism will be notable among these, because it is the only one with a
mechanical basis in consent and a morality grounded in self-defense.

In this new regime, where people are no longer dependent on large cultural
institutions for basic sustenance, consent will become a much more valuable
marketing tool. People won't be used to being pushed around, so pull-based
institutions will start to work better. Anarcho-syndicalism will have a
powerful advantage in this market, and people will shift over to using it for
most of their daily transactions. These will have to be mirrored with capital-
based accounting in order to be legal in capitalist states, but the actual
people involved will think less and less in terms of capital. You will come to
my bakery and ask for some bread, and depending on the rules of the syndicate,
I'll give it to you. In the background AIs will note a "sale", a bond if
necessary, and file tax forms, but you and I won't look at them. Anarcho-
syndicalism will be how we make decisions, capitalism will just be an
accounting method required to not be put in jail for illegal distribution of
bread.

Eventually the capital accounting will be ignored for most things, certainly
basic healthcare concerns like housing, food, mental health, maintenance of
sacred lands, etc. The capital contracts will still be used in the
entertainment industry, which will make up the vast majority of GDP. And even
within that industry, corporations will be a minority. Most work will happen
inside small partnerships of 2-10 people who are working directly together,
said partnerships also contracting out to the individuals as sole proprietors.
Full time employment will be extremely rare.

The economics of this are based on the presumption that human health is
inherently valuable, so bonding it is no problem.

In this way capitalism will "die", still existing but no longer being a
central conduit of resources and power.

------
bhhaskin
I think the solution is pretty simple. Keep building things. Make person
websites and build communities. Don't host everything on major hosting
providers like Google or Amazon. Don't rely on Facebook or Google for login or
integrations. They only have so much power because we let them. It's more
often than not the easier solution. Use tools like GPG, IRC, Email and
encourage your friends and family to do the same.

The internet hasn't changed, we have, and the only way to take the internet
back is if we change ourselves back.

~~~
bogomipz
>"Don't rely on Facebook or Google for login or integrations."

I think this is a really important point. When I see services that give me a
choice of either 1)logging in with Google or 2) logging in with FB, I don't do
either. I simply elect to not use that service.

~~~
monk_e_boy
For me and my students -- we always use a google login. With 35 students all
using 4 or 5 online services each with a login....

There is no way we can keep control of all those separate login details. There
needs to be a central control over login.

Sure, login details are pretty old skool bonkers.

I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion, but in the real world where I have to
hand a class of 35 students over to another teacher and they need to have
confidence that all 35 can log in and complete the lesson.

Repeat this across all classes and all years. That's a lot of users.

~~~
Spivak
Either everyone is crazy or I am -- does a site that's used by less than 100
users really need to outsource their auth?

If you're part of a school don't you have student accounts in some central
place like LDAP/AD/IdM?

~~~
s73ver
Well, for one, they're much better at it than most of us. For two, on mobile,
people hate typing in logins. So at least offering an integrated one can
provide a huge uptick in usability.

------
Arathorn
Building matrix.org as a decentralised & e2e encrypted comms alternative.

The filter bubble problem is particularly relevant for us because it's
critical for an open network to let users filter out abusive content (whether
that's spam, stuff they find offensive, or just a topic they don't care
about)... but doing that in a way which doesn't result in creating a profiling
db or creating bubbles and echo chambers. The problem is one of letting users
curate their own filters (including blending in others' filters), whilst
keeping the data as privacy protecting as possible. It's a fun problem, but on
our medium-term radar.

------
sam_goody
Use Firefox. Develop on Firefox, and then adjust for Chrome if needed.
Encourage friends to use FF. Google tracks every domain you visit and how long
you visit it even with all the adblockers in the world (under the pretext that
you might be searching for the domain instead of going there). You have no
idea how much data they are collecting on every minute of your use (the local
license in my non-U.S. version has some weird clauses, don't know about the
U.S.) and all that info is damaging. FF is now faster than Chrome on every
metric, so you don't lose anything for yourself or your users when they switch
(though it is wise to make a new profile if you have a old version) If they
are not targeted as the main platform, they will be gone. By keeping another
browser alive, Google cannot force all of their crazy ideas and dreams in the
guise of forwarding the internet. Develop for FF, encourage its use, and that
definitely will help you and the free internet.

~~~
jitbit
How about an alternative Chormium-based browser (which is not Chrome)? Anyone
tried this?

~~~
Johan-bjareholt
Chromium also has phone-home functionality, you could try Opera though.

------
jgaa
Me? I don't use Facebook. I consider Google evil and harmful and avoid them.
On my phone I run my own apps, and apps from F-Droid - I don't even register
with Google. I have a shit-list of companies I will never work for (Oracle,
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon and every Government entity anywhere in the
world). I browse the net from VM's with specific purposes (one for HN). I use
Tor for most browsing, including reading news. If I have to provide data
somewhere, I make sure it's incorrect. I host my own content on my own
servers, or on rented VM's (not AWS). I host my personal home-page on a VM
hosted by a pro freedom of speech NGO, that will go to great measures to keep
it on-line, no matter what. I hosted my own content long before Facebook was
even a sexist rating site for stolen pictures of pretty girls. I will host it
long after Facebook is history and mostly forgotten :) The internet is only
closed for those who choose convenience before freedom.

~~~
staticelf
That sounds incredible time consuming and very frustrating. How do you manage
to stay so hostile against everything around you?

Do you never wake up and just feel depressed about the state of things? Ever
wanted to just say fuck it and create a facebook account?

~~~
ctrlc-root
I'm not the person you replied to but I can tell you what my perspective is. I
haven't implemented all the measures he mentions yet but I'm working towards
all of them and more. It is time consuming but it doesn't feel frustrating. It
gives me the peace of mind that I still own my life and am not dependent on
companies like Google or Amazon to live the life I want to live. I do
occasionally feel depressed about the state of things but there's not much I
can do about it on a grand scale so I tend to just focus on myself and those
around me. I did have a Facebook account for about 6 months in high school
before I deleted it and I've never felt the urge to re-activate it (afaik
accounts are never permanently deleted).

In my opinion it all comes down to putting your money (and time, effort,
convenience or lack of it, etc) where your mouth is. I don't like Google,
Amazon, or Facebook's policies and practices so I choose not to participate.
That most people around me are subsidizing their lives (free storage, free
email, 2-day shipping, easy home automation, etc) in exchange for their
privacy and independence doesn't really factor into my own decision. I do try
and raise awareness and encourage others to take similar steps but ultimately
they need to make the decision for themselves of they won't commit to it.

~~~
matonias
> That most people around me are subsidizing their lives (free storage, free
> email, 2-day shipping, easy home automation, etc) in exchange for their
> privacy and independence doesn't really factor into my own decision.

This is exactly what I am thinking and doing all the time. I have one problem
however, that is, convincing my friends. How do I do this? Any idea?

~~~
matthberg
I also struggle with this stage, yet I think it comes to three steps: 1)
Inform them why they should move away from these things (send them blog posts
[of which there are plenty], practical examples, personal experience) 2) Tell
them that a solution is to move away from these services 3) Provide
alternatives (this is the hardest one for me to come up with ideas for, it's a
crucial step yet in my opinion the hardest)

------
sillysaurus3
What I'm getting from this thread is that we're sort of fucked. The only way
to stop Facebook and Google was to become them before they had a chance to.
That way you'd presumably be more benevolent. Maybe that's true for Facebook,
but it's still hard to imagine for Google.

I think the bigger problem is cross-generational power. YC itself is somewhat
terrifying in this regard, but that's a different topic. In regards to Google
and FB, even if we like Google now, we probably won't like the Google 60 years
from now. But what is there to do?

Google stopped Microsoft by making Microsoft irrelevant, in the "Microsoft is
Dead" sense: Nobody is afraid of them anymore. But people fear Google and FB.
Imagine a Microsoft competitor to your startup vs a Google or FB competitor.

This could be a lack of imagination, but it's very difficult to imagine some
new company making Google or FB irrelevant in the same way they made their
predecessors irrelevant. Think of oil fields. At one point, before oil fields
were monopolized, I've heard the ecosystem seemed pretty similar to Silicon
Valley circa 2008. Everybody seemed to be able to get a slice of the action,
and while it took determination and luck to get involved, it was possible.

Now the oil industry is on lockdown. Imagine asking "What are we doing about
Exxon Mobil?" or Walmart. You can't do a damn thing, and there's no shame in
admitting that.

As defeatist as it is, we may want to start thinking about ways of riding out
the next 40 years in a productive fashion. It's more beneficial to say: Ok,
Facebook, Google, and the closed internet are here to stay. Now what?

For example, if you're _really_ set on doing something about it, one of the
most effective things you could do is try to join the companies and shape them
yourself.

~~~
ptr_void
Software is easy to copy and replace. There's little, if any, monopolization
of software technology resources. Software doesn't require huge
investment/over-head like oil industry. I don't think FB/Google/etc. provide
much of anything (or of high value like oil) that is not already replaceable
by million other alternatives. One of their key business model is selling ads
spaces, but adblocks are also on the rise.

I wouldn't bet too highly on those services.

~~~
hibikir
Every few days we have an article here in HN about a relatively big company,
and people throw the classic comment that they don't understand how they need
hundreds/thousands of programmers to do what they do, when the prototype of
their website can be done by 2 people over a weekend. What you are doing is
just a slightly more complex version of this, but the answer is still the
same, scale.

Software is easier to copy and replace than many other things, but make no
mistake: The amount of engineering done at the largest software companies is
massive, and has gone way past the point of being easy to replicate. Let's
talk someone smaller, like Twitter. Building a Twitter for 100 people is
trivial. Scaling it to work well for serious volumes, building all the pieces
that make it have actual revenue, and not be just a giant money pit, and all
the effort required to build the userbase itself is just enormous. When we go
past Twitter, and we think Facebook and Google, serious disruption of their
core businesses is really, really hard, because every single user they have is
an efficiency you don't.

In practice, every large software company today is running a whole lot of
machine learning under the hood. Whether it's figuring out which ads to send
you, just get you to stay on the site longer, or just have great fraud
protection, the difference in data matters. Imagine your machine learning
model is trying to sell ads. How much of a disadvantage are you in vs a
company that is the user's default search engine, and has analytics hooks in
the websites that your target person is on 75% of the time? What if they also
have their text messages, know their friends, and their friends' purchases?
You can have much better algorithms, but they have such an insane data
advantage that you have to be orders of magnitude better to even compete with
them!

So I'd definitely bet highly on those services, because they've spent years
building moats. That doesn't mean they are unbeatable: We all remember the
time when Microsoft and IBM looked unbeatable, and we all know what happened,
but I don't think anyone without massive funding and a completely new, must
have product has a prayer of entering their space and not be swallowed whole.

~~~
alphydan
Here's an idea: A team of coders in a basement combine lots of AI discoveries
done by others (Think merging orthogonal approaches like Numenta + Google
Brain + Vicarious + etc). With it, they crack the neo-cortex algorithm (or a
rough approximation). It learns outdoors (cameras, actuators), indoors
(talking), on the internet, in libraries, on wikipedia, etc. It becomes
actually useful. Not: "OK, google set an alarm.", but: "Hey Peter, I'm really
stuck with this problem, can you find a solution on SO. Oh, and send flower to
my Aunt, you know ... the one who likes pink".

If it was freely available I could see a massive migration of users abandoning
google. Who needs google in such a context?

\-- far fetched, yes. But it is a scenario where the breakthrough is
algorithmic rather than Huge-data based. The learning can then happens slowly
(2 years undercover from that basement?), and emerge as a powerful
intelligence and company.

~~~
p1esk
Yeah, maybe, but the coders able to "combine lots of AI discoveries done by
others", as well as those who make those discoveries, are likely to work for
Google/FB/MS/IBM/Apple/Amazon/etc already (or want to work there).

A group like OpenAI also has a good chance to make a breakthrough, but you can
hardly call them "a team of coders in a basement".

It's unlikely that any a single company (even a large one) will have any
significant advantage, because the research everyone does is highly public
(everyone tries to publish asap). The research right now is at the stage where
people are still looking which way to go, so as soon as someone stumbles upon
a promising direction, everyone will jump on it (e.g. AlexNet success in
2012).

~~~
alphydan
The same could have been said of Brin and Page. Why were they not working for
yahoo improving their search algorithm? Some people will have the hunger and
drive to disrupt the incumbent.

------
vdnkh
I believe it's more effective to focus on a "small business" approach to
decentralizing the web, where we focus on smaller companies providing
services, rather than a "tin foil" approach where we encrypt and decentralize
everything into tiny islands. I work for a video player company and while we
aren't a platform like Youtube, we indirectly compete with them for ad dollars
(along with Facebook). Something like 90% of ad dollars go towards them
already. Most publishers do not like them. I think it's a lot easier to
decentralize the internet by having the websites that 99% of users visit
powered by smaller internet businesses rather than AmaGooFaceSoft.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I agree. I moved to FastMail for stronger privacy behavior and good quality
service. But it's not the level of like... ProtonMail. But I'm patronizing a
great company with great customer service that treats me like an adult.

Note that while I'm happy to deal with smaller businesses, and happy to spend
money on them, I am still pretty wary of advertising-based businesses. It is a
slippery slope of doom, and I think it's ideal to try and stay off of it.

~~~
bogomipz
>"But it's not the level of like... ProtonMail"

Can you elaborate on this? Are there some privacy issues with Fast Mail that
don't exist with ProtonMail?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
FastMail chooses not to mine your data (even for spam filtering, they only
optionally collect emails you permanently delete from the spam folder).
They're a paid service, with no advertising. And they have a very strong
privacy policy.

ProtonMail encrypts your email storage in an end-to-end manner for client
access and storage. (Obviously, unencrypted mail sent to or from other servers
could be intercepted.) But their goal is essentially to be mathematically
unable to view your email. Of course there are tradeoffs, things like IMAP
don't work (without some sort of relay), for example.

Essentially, FastMail makes a point to not violate your privacy, ProtonMail
tries to make it so it _can 't_ violate your privacy. I lean towards FastMail
because it's 'good enough' on privacy, and has a lot of powerful features, but
if you're looking to run afoul of state intelligence agencies, you might wanna
lean for the latter.

~~~
bogomipz
>"ProtonMail encrypts your email storage in an end-to-end manner for client
access and storage."

Is this just TLS + block level encryption like LUKS? If so I would be
surprised if FastMail wasn't offering the same. But maybe Proton is offering
something else at the client level? It was my impression that the big
differentiator was Proton Mail's infrastructure was all co-located in
Switzerland.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
From my understanding, there is no way for ProtonMail's operators to decrypt
your mail storage, it requires your own private key. Whereas FastMail is not
much different from Gmail in terms of "company's access", except it's privacy
policy prohibits it from using it for anything but customer service on
request.

~~~
bogomipz
I see, thank for the clarification.

------
gobengo
* W3C Social Web Working Group - [https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg](https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg)

* ActivityStreams 2.0 - [https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/)

* ActivityPub - [https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/)

* [https://distbin.com](https://distbin.com) \- My implementation of the above. Who wants to federate?

------
mbrock
I'm a resident in a "neighborhood activist collective" and I made a self-
hosted web site for the house. Now it's expanding into a web app that's a tool
for the organization (planning, etc). It's also being set up for similar
houses in the same city, and we plan to make it into a kind of federated
small-scale "social network" built around our own principles and premises.

Another aspect of the project comes from a "house terminal" that I set up
here, basically an offline Raspberry Pi running GNU/Linux and a custom
chat/guestbook program that runs as a "kiosk". This terminal will morph into a
kind of in-house only access to the federated network with real time
communications etc.

~~~
mxuribe
Are there opportunities to cross-pollinate your efforts with GNU social? Sort
of best-of-both-federated-worlds? See
[https://gnu.io/social/](https://gnu.io/social/)

------
rglover
Keep a personal website (avoid Medium, et. al.)

The internet is only closed if we keep acting like it is. The protocol is the
same. Go build stuff.

[http://ryanglover.net](http://ryanglover.net)

~~~
lnalx
Nowadays, it's difficult to be read and to be visible to a large audience and
gain followers without a platform like Medium. You can read unknown author and
discover new topics. Unfortunately you still inside the Medium bubble showing
you a lot more famous article than other.

You are more likely to spread your ideas about open internet in a public place
like Medium than the faraway countryside like your website.

------
pascalxus
I've seen a lot of good comments on this page, but we really need to start
looking at the problem from a customer's point of view.

Why should the end user care about this problem?

Have you heard your non-entreprenuer/engineer friends or others online
complain about this problem?

If the answer to above two questions is Negative, then the problem/pain point
simply is not large enough to fix.

And, as a potential success case to model our strategy off of, we should be
looking towards DuckDuckGo, they've written some good material on how to do
it.

~~~
krupan
It's getting there. Facebook is now a monopoly and is not improving their
service in ways that benefit the users, they have no need to. They are only
working to keep you locked in and to serve those who actually pay the bills,
advertisers.

~~~
nextlevelwizard
You didn't actually answer the question(s).

So what if Facebook as stagnated with user features? Why should your average
Joe care? It's already serving their purposes, most if not all of their
friends and relatives are on the platform. Again why is this bad for the end
user?

------
Tharkun
My biggest gripe with the "modern internet" is e-mail. MS and Google dominate
the e-mail scene, and they are making it ever more unpleasant to run your own
mailserver. They will frequently blackhole mails, without bounces, warnings or
any recourse.

I'm not sure what can be done about that, but it's certainly becoming an up
hill battle.

~~~
Fezzik
I try and get everyone I know to use (and pay for) Fastmail. It has a great
interface. Great calendar. Awesome spam filter. Etc... It costs $30/year to
send messages around the globe. That seems like a steal to me.

Ultimately, email clients are services that have maintenance and development
costs - if you're not paying for it, someone is selling your information to
fund the service.

~~~
cedex12
What's the advantage of fastmail compared to, for instance, the free iirc 5
mail addresses that gandi offers you when registering a domain name:
[https://www.gandi.net/domain](https://www.gandi.net/domain) ?

~~~
Fezzik
I have not explored what Gandi offers, but I can tell you Fastmail has a very
user-friendly & intuitive interface for email, calendar, contact management,
etc... a la Gmail many years ago. If not better. The $30/year includes all
these services. And, I would think, since email is Fastmails bread and butter,
it gets all the attention, as opposed to being an add-on/additional item that
may not be top priority for a company.

And, to be clear, I have no stake in Fastmail, nor do I work for them, I am
just enamored with their product. I wish I would have made the switch years
ago.

------
ianopolous
I'm betting on (and contributing to) IPFS [1]. Some friends and I are working
on Peergos [2], which is built on top of IPFS to replace dropbox, email and
facebook with a P2P secure and private alternative.

[1] [https://ipfs.io](https://ipfs.io)

[2] [https://peergos.org](https://peergos.org)

~~~
dyukqu
The e-mail sign-up button doesn't work properly on the Peergos page. It shows
"Page Not Found" error: [https://peergos.org/Thank-
you.html](https://peergos.org/Thank-you.html)

~~~
ianopolous
Thank you for pointing that out. I think we lost the page in the recent
website remake. I'll reinstate it. In the meantime the sign up is still
working. (I was wondering why people were signing up multiple times with the
same email, now it's clear).

------
VvR-Ox
Thank you for starting this interesting debate.

I have a slice of hope still that we (the whole community, dev's just like
users who need to use services) can "make the world a better place".

The proble I currently see is that: 1\. We are too few ATM 2\. Facebook,
Google, Apple,... already nested into the minds of many people, even the one's
who claim to "think different" 3\. There has to be something: \- big \- useful
\- attractive \- free of costs

to use instead of their sh*tty services and you somehow need to convince
"Jenna to take here FB profile and also their friends with her to the new
place in town".

The same goes for other services like WhatsApp, searching with G., buying on
A. etc.

How will we be strong enough (against companies with billions of $$ and the
brightest minds in tech cause they wanna earn 120k/yr) to put something up
that can not only withstand them but convince all the zombies?

How will you get those zombies moving? The most of the ppl. not even reads
news anymore and if they do they just believe what they see & hear. There is
no discussion, if someone is pissed she/he is right. There is no science for
someone who doesn't even know the value of a scientific method. We are royally
screwed and there has to be A BIG UNITING OF ALL ACTIVISTS under one flag.

If we go on like this with every hackin' Joe trying to construct his own
facebook clone then we will just die like the rest.

~~~
fivestar
Think: FTP, TELNET, IP. You know, protocols. The open things the Internet was
originally based upon.

~~~
s73ver
Those protocols were superseded for a reason.

------
daveid
Mastodon is a federated, open-source social network based on open web
protocols

[https://joinmastodon.org](https://joinmastodon.org)
[https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon)
[https://mastodon.social](https://mastodon.social)

------
amatus
I'm working on GNUnet[1]. It needs a lot of help.

[1] [https://gnunet.org](https://gnunet.org)

~~~
msutherl
I'm having trouble finding information about what GNUnet is on the website. Is
there an overview somewhere?

~~~
amatus
The website is one of the things we need help with. If you want something more
detailed than the About GNUnet paragraph there's the key concepts[2] and user
handbook[1].

[1] [https://gnunet.org/user-handbook](https://gnunet.org/user-handbook) [2]
[https://gnunet.org/concepts](https://gnunet.org/concepts)

------
macawfish
We need local bookmarking and indexing tools that can become primary to
search. You have no idea how many times I end up searching the same thing over
and over again. I'm using the search engine as a bookmarking tool. If there
were more streamlined, humane, well designed local bookmarking tools, that
wouldn't be an issue.

As a matter of fact, the fact that the browser by default sends everything I
type into that bar up to some 3rd party, whether I've pressed enter or not, is
pretty scandalous. It's not necessary.

I want local copies of pages that are important to me, for offline viewing,
and I want to be able to bookmark specific parts of them in annotated,
searchable, useful ways. I want to be able to share these. I want to be able
to upvote and downvote their relevance as I use them again and again. I want
human readable formats for storing these things. I want them on my filesystem,
but not in a bunch of jumbled, strangely named files hidden deep somewhere on
the computer. And I want to be able to share them peer to peer.

Remember the good old days, when people had WWW hyperlink indices? It's 2017
and centralized search/social platforms have all but destroyed the artform of
digital curation. It is an artform that deep learning will clumsily fumble
again and again. This website is a perfect example of how powerful human
curation can be. The articles are curated and annotated collectively by human
beings. The protocols and the web standards are more or less masterfully
designed. We have unlimited programming languages.

I want to subscribe to notable peoples public web-bibliographies. I want them
available in formats that are interoperable with my web browsers bookmarking
and annotation tools.

~~~
vvvkkk
What can you say about this beta:
[https://bubblehunt.com](https://bubblehunt.com)? Bubblehunt is the search
platform, where you can get free and personal search engine for your bookmarks
and other information that you think is interesting.

------
gwicks56
Be interested in what HN thinks of Maidsafe, Storj etc. Basically
decentralised versions of the internet or the cloud based around blockchain
technology.

Storj for example is an order of magnitude cheaper than AWS, uses peoples
spare hard drive space, encrypts everything and back it up using peer to peer
tech.

I am currently pretty comfortable as an Android dev, but I am wondering if I
should start learning everything I can about blockchain tech in order to help
on projects such as these?

~~~
tobydownton
I came here to see if anyone would mention blockchain technology (which I
personally believe is an important part of the solution). Yes, there are the
DApps you've already mentioned, but I think the following might be as
important in addressing the concern raised:

uPort: Self-Sovereign Identity
([https://www.uport.me/](https://www.uport.me/))

Userfeeds - Content Ranking System (userfeeds.io/)

Status - Messaging Platform ([https://status.im/](https://status.im/))

Brave - Browser ([https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/))

~~~
avarun
Has Brave gotten any traction among users?

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
Personally I quite like the iOS app. The browser seemed slow on my arch Linux
laptop.

------
tunesmith
I think the general incentive we've been seeing is the incentive towards
faster and thoughtless opinion-sharing. Reactive (in the bad way) behavior is
incentivized, and thoughtful behavior is discouraged, because by then people
have moved on to the next thing.

So I'd generally like to see more effort put into making it easier for people
to engage in more thoughtful ways.

This can also be applied to advertising. I'm trying to avoid chips, but if
they're in front of me I'll eat a handful. So then the internet thinks, "This
guy wants more chips!" So if advertising were more about my long-term values
rather than my short-term behavior, then it'd be more valuable.

Anyway, it's pretty hard on social media to share deeper analysis and
arguments and thoughts. I get that medium was sort of an effort in this
direction, counter to twitter, but that's really just blogging with some extra
algorithms thrown in. Need something else.

~~~
intended
No it cant.

You miss the critical purpose served by more emotional hind brain thinking -
its easier to repeat and get predictable responses to.

Think of this as much older hackers using new tools to do better at their
subject - their subject being the hacking of human brains.

\---

A simple way to test the effectiveness of your proposal is to see how forums
perform. The more complex a topic, the fewer participants and the fewer posts.

People don't want to engage in complex topics, unless they fulfill certain
selection criteria.

You can't make people consume more complex information - unless you remove all
other mental food options from the table in the first place.

It is very much like making children eat broccoli. Except the children are
grown adults, and are being bombarded by companies selling them thought sugar
because it generates click revenue.

There is no market solution to this - there may not even be a regulatory
solution to this.

The best I can expect is a legal challenge, but who would the injured parties
be, and what would be the injury?

~~~
tunesmith
Your point about forums assumes that forums encompass the full gamut of how
people can communicate. "There is decreasing participation for complex topics
in forums, therefore people don't want to engage in complex topics." But that
doesn't account for the possibility that the form of forums themselves are the
problem. With a new kind of forum, perhaps people would engage more in deeper
arguments. At the least, lack of participation in _other_ forms of forums
wouldn't disprove that.

~~~
intended
There's no new kind of forum. Because there's no new kind of human.
Communication only for complex ideas requires time and energy to be expended.

People would rather have cheap and easy consumable info and move on. The drive
is to be able to respond faster, not respond better. Unless it's an area where
people have a specific need to understand the subject, they will rarely read
complex topics.

And people regularly fail that too - take a look at success rates on MOOCs, a
small percentage of self driven applicants actually finish the course.

It's a human brain problem, not a tech problem. The problem is people and
those who know how to manipulate them.

Remember that any new form of forum which manages to make people learn complex
topics could just as easil make them learn falsehoods or propaganda.

------
warmfuzzykitten
Most of this thread seems to interpret "we" as referring to people who think
Facebook and Google are problems. If the "we" refers to internet users as a
whole, then the answer is clearly that we like Facebook and Google very much
and are using them more and more because they are best for doing what we
actually want to do - talk to our far-flung friends and find answers to
questions.

~~~
intended
So my question to people who point this out is -

If this is inevitable, and this is best for "WE"/"OUR" needs - then does it
just make more sense to accept it and strive to be in charge of the process
instead?

Is it now OK, to just accept that people will be manipulated by those who know
the method to do so? And apply to those firms?

\----

Yes - If people turn out to be harder to model, it may be harder to corral
people and ideas. The model and assumptions in the larger discussion being
held in this topic will be logged as hyerbole and we will move on.

Yet - its clear that people DO have some obvious levers, essentially the human
hind brain is an easy target to throw emotionally laden messages at. The
brains react and then oppose whatever target they are provided.

------
austenallred
Honestly? I'm not doing a damn thing. Forgive me for this, but the internet
has been a walled garden for some time now, and the vast majority of humans
just don't care. I haven't seen anything that's going to change that. The
Internet requires a login, and your privacy being dead is a foregone
conclusion.

It's easy to trash Facebook, but clearly it provides an insane amount of
utility, and people aren't willing to stop using it because of others saying
that en masse that is bad for a hypothetical Internet they never really took
part in anyway.

IMO the focus should be getting the government to keep its hands off of it.
That's not only more possible, but infinitely more important than not letting
Facebook try to show us the right ads.

~~~
intended
You will likely have to _get_ Governments around the world more selectively
involved in it.

As systems, governments are playing catch up in many areas, while leading in
areas we don't want them to have power.

For example - governments should have already put out rules against skinner
box games, the most popular kind on Facebook and the rest of the net.

Governments made rules against things like subliminal messaging - because it
targeted and manipulated human choice at a subconcious level.

We wont be able to protect ourselves against corporations, unless we have
coordinated action. The mechanism for this is always going to end up being
political.

------
doublerebel
I'm working on a project to separate data from presentation. Too much data is
overly wrapped with presentation (e.g. HTML) so we are forced into using a
certain display method (popular commercial web browser).

A related problem is that human readable data is often unnecessarily encoded
into binary machine data. If we weren't wasting so much space on presentation,
we could have just served the human-readable data.

In this future I think it will be considered ridiculous that you had to load
an entire webpage full of unrelated images and icons just to read an article
or weather report.

This concept will be huge for AR. In AR extra unnecessary information and
uncontrollable presentation is beyond annoying, it actually makes users angry
and uncomfortable.

Look out for Optik.io .

~~~
dragonwriter
> Too much data is overly wrapped with presentation (HTML)

The design of HTML5 and associated web tech separates semantics (HTML) from
presentation (notionally CSS, but this bleeds over into JS) and behavior (JS).

~~~
doublerebel
HTML does a fine job with semantics but the reality is that most of it is used
for presentation. HTML says what text is but not what it means, so reading a
plain unrendered HTML document is a rough experience that doesn't add much
usefulness for humans.

The vast majority of internet data can be relayed through something as simple
and readable as markdown and/or YAML, and still convey enough useful
semantics.

------
mundo
Here's a thought I've been turning over for a little while now.

It occurs to me that all extant social media apps have, at a high level,
exactly the same requirements:

1\. Allow users to upload some data to cloud storage 2\. Make that data
discoverable to certain other users 3\. Show everyone ads

Whether FB, Twitter, etc were to be dislodged by another app that is
essentially the same app is not terribly interesting. So let's look at which
of these reqs are amenable to change:

a. "ads" \- No one actually wants them, so get rid of them b. "Cloud storage"
\- Lots of people would rather own their data, so switch this to "the user's
own server."

That sounds pretty compelling. I don't hate FB, but I'd sure rather switch to
something that allows me to own my own data, and share pics of the kids with
Nana without having to run them through Facegoog's billion-dollar snooping
engine. However, there are two big hurdles:

i. Most people don't have a server on which to host it ii. Most people won't
pay for it, so someone would have to write it and make it really easy to use,
for free

...and by a lucky cooincidence, both of those objections have the same answer:
Amazon. Most people don't have a server? Amazon will rent you one. Who would
develop a self-hosted FB clone for free? Amazon, to get people to rent
servers.

Just a thought...

~~~
TulliusCicero
You're kidding yourself if you think people actually want to run their own
server for the purposes of social networking.

~~~
ellius
I do wonder though if you could create a compelling product that would keep
the customer from ever knowing they "own" a server. I've thought about a
service where I effectively would run one big "load balancer" front end that
would route a customer's traffic entirely to prefab cloud servers that I would
spin up & configure via tools like Terraform and Ansible on the back end. I
wanted to load those mainly with privacy tools--things like Pi-Hole, encrypted
DNS, etc. I don't see why I couldn't say "hey in addition to this you get an
app portal" that is effectively providing a standardized social media app. So
for a regular price you get privacy, ad blocking, and a social media / cloud
storage app that doesn't spy on you. It seems doable.

~~~
warkdarrior
If users do not see a visible distinction between your app portal and
Facebook, why would they pay you instead of using FB for free? Is it enough to
claim privacy in order to make a sale? I really doubt it.

~~~
mundo
You could be right, but it isn't that far-fetched. Consider:

* A lot of users would be in the pennies-per-month level, charged by standard Amazon usage prices

* Owning your own data is a big deal - it's not uncommon for people to pay for backups, which would essentially be an included service

* It's not unreasonable to imagine a company of Amazon's size and competence doing a very good job of this, and including novel features that FB/IG/etc can't match

* It could also be a loss-leader to get people to own servers for other purposes, e.g. hosting a vanity domain

------
thejohnhenry
One harsh truth that must be swallowed before we (the Hacker News community)
makes progress on this problem:

We live in the land of Startups. All good technology innovation we're used to
over the last 20 years has come from the Startup/VC world, when the internet
was fresh and nobody knew what would work. Over the coming decades, we'll need
vehicles for technology innovation that go beyond the "take over the world &
prayer" model, assuming that silicon valley's vehicle of ultragrowth monoliths
will eventually align with civic values. They won't.

To illustrate this, let's say you want to improve some problem with
Facebook/Google/etc. To even _begin_ , you need $50 million and a minimum of
3-5 years building a userbase. By then, you have payroll, growth obligations,
& investor pressure & are forced to monetize, usually in a way that
compromises longer-term values.

We can solve this with smarter internet infrastructure. If you could share
social graphs between applications, for instance, you eliminate an incredible
amount of overhead in developing and experimenting with new social
applications. There's a number of great initiatives trying versions of this
(IPFS, Urbit, Blockstack -- I'm tracking a number of popular ones over at
[http://decentralize.tech](http://decentralize.tech)).

The community needs more organization and more funding around these problems,
especially in the field of developing new business models that work for
software that don't involve selling out user priorities to global ad networks.
I'm in San Francisco and working on this problem full-time if anyone wants to
meet up and discuss solutions; Email's in profile.

------
a1exyz
I believe that the internet is powerful because it connects us to people
rather than content. My dream is for our portal into the internet (currently
google or Facebook) to become a search engine for people. I am interested in
x. This person is the top authority on x. Here is a chat window. You can ask
it questions that his/her bot will answer at first (to save this person from
being spammed). However, eventually if you ask the right person, he/she will
be interested enough to join in the conversation.

What am I doing about this? Nothing yet, but I have been thinking about this
recently.

~~~
austenallred
Honestly what you just described is pretty much Facebook.

~~~
AznHisoka
more like Twitter. Hard to meet strangers on FB.

------
beefman
It's too late. The culture of free exchange that existed on the usenet, over
e-mail, and on the early web died circa 2013.

It's tempting to blame Google and Facebook, and they definitely converted a
lot of public value into private value. But I suspect it's mainly down to
self-selection bias of internet early-adopters. I call the present state of
affairs "eternal October".

~~~
pikachuaintcool
Why do you say 2013?

~~~
beefman
That's the year Google killed Reader, and all the mailing lists I'd been on
since the '90s spontaneously moved to Facebook. I think it was also the year
mobile really took off

[http://tumblr.jackdawresearch.com/post/136750883723/digestin...](http://tumblr.jackdawresearch.com/post/136750883723/digesting-
apples-new-app-store-numbers)

(The last two charts are trailing-year, which better show the derivative than
the more typical cumulative charts)

~~~
pikachuaintcool
Hm. Personally I thought it was around 2010, when Facebook chat replaced AIM.
And the iPhone 4 came out.

~~~
beefman
The decline was definitely underway. 2010 is also the year Duke dropped
usenet. But the blogosphere was still going strong and mailing list traffic
was still strong. Facebook group versions of many mailing lists and private
forums existed but discussions were high-quality and didn't cannibalize the
parent forums much. Forum/list traffic collapsed in 2013 and meaningful
Facebook group discussions followed about a year later.

~~~
pikachuaintcool
Ah I see. There are still some good forums that exist (I won't link them cuz I
don't want HN crossover). IRC is still going strong too.

------
turblety
The UK government is working on it's own Internet [1]. It's going to really
take off and be the next big thing!! No encryption too, so it's nice and safe
from all those terrorists. Can't wait!!

[1] [http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/new...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/news/theresa-may-internet-conservatives-government-a7744176.html)

~~~
trendia
That's really cool! Does that mean that my bank records will be sent in
plaintext over those series of tubes?

~~~
danso
Brings to mind the series of tubes that powered the information system in
1984's Oceania, and how antiquated the mindset that envisioned that system,
with its memory holes that could eradicate past information forever.

That said, even if today's distributed system prevents a gatekeeper from
having sole veto on information, today's filter bubbles and chaos of viral
disinformation campaigns can be such a barrier against truth that perhaps they
can be considered, for all practical purposes, a type of modern day memory
hole.

------
stretchwithme
Just because there are closed houses in the US doesn't mean I can't travel
from coast to coast. Or build my own house with whatever rules I want.

If, instead, I had no freedom to build a house at all or the rules were
dictated to me by others, I would be less free. And poorer.

------
SeaDude
Have you ever warwalked or wardrove your neighborhood? What is the # of AP's /
mile? Think of all that NAT not being used.

Where are the specs for the Outernet Protocol: a NAT to NAT DNS system that
doesnt rely on gatekeepers/ISP access. Use the 198.162.xxx.xxx addresses on
all of our existing routers for neighborhood scale networking. Build trust by
proximity by allowing only known neighbors to connect. Could be very
interesting. Especially when Joe mirrors Wikipedia and Samantha mirrors
Archive.org and Jan has a realtime mirror of some good Reddit feeds.

Automate the mirroring the internet. Scrape every last bit, in real time,
without the ads and crap. Make it available to those trusted folks in your
proximity.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I like the ambition, but it's limited to regional effects at best.

~~~
znpy
Actually, there once was something somewhat similar to what you're describing:
netsukuku - [http://netsukuku.freaknet.org](http://netsukuku.freaknet.org)

------
teekert
I play with IPFS, use Linux, use Mastodon, use Nextcloud in my basement with
davdroid. I use FB only in the browser I don't use in (both on mobile and
laptop I reserve Chrome for these things). I avoid where possible Whatsapp and
use Signal. I have a mailserver with a local (Dutch) company with my own
domain. I publish anything on my self hosted Drupal instances. Is it more time
consuming and more difficult? Yes! But also more fun. I like the term slow
computing: [https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/slow-
comp...](https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/slow-computing)

------
dmschulman
Would any solution be tangible for the type of user who is attracted to
Favebook? That is, would there be any solution which a non-technical user
would flock to? Would it meet their needs and abilities in a meaningful way?

------
mikegerwitz
Talk to others. More importantly, learn _how_ to talk to others. Know your
audience. Learn what examples turn people on and off---what gets their
attention vs. what sounds like a parent lecturing to their child. You don't
want to put people on the defensive. Learn how to relate it to them. Learn how
to make them _understand_ the problem and why it's important---otherwise they
won't care, or if they do, it'll be short-lived.

Speak at events/conferences. Speaking generally to a broad audience with broad
information and hard-hitting references not only gets the message out, but
also makes it more difficult to make someone feel targeted, like you might
one-on-one or in a small group.

I target two groups: technical people who can actually do something about it
and teach others (but might not care or be aware of the issues), and average
users and groups who might know or not care. Talking to your family and
friends (and spouse) helps gain great insight on what people are thinking
without quickly ending the conversation if it makes them uncomfortable. As
does HN. ;)

Talk to groups you _know_ will be hostile to you. Learn common rebuttals.
Learn how to respond to them. And harden yourself with relentless attacks on
your facts and opinions.

Offering practical alternatives is difficult. Even if you can, people want to
socialize where others socialize---I'm not going to get my friends all on GNU
Social or Mastodon (or the fediverse in general) for example. Work security
and privacy into their current practices the best you can understanding that
compromise is _essential_. Maybe they can transition further in the long-term
as they get used to certain ideas.

I encounter similar issues (and get a lot of practice with it) with free
software activism---getting people to care about and understand software
freedom is far more of a difficult battle than getting someone to care and
understand about privacy and security issues.

For those looking for some resources to get them started:

[https://mikegerwitz.com/projects/sapsf/plain/sapsf.bib](https://mikegerwitz.com/projects/sapsf/plain/sapsf.bib)
[https://mikegerwitz.com/talks/sapsf.pdf](https://mikegerwitz.com/talks/sapsf.pdf)

And this is an _excellent_ resource:

[http://crackedlabs.org/en/networksofcontrol](http://crackedlabs.org/en/networksofcontrol)

------
NotUsingLinux
Most comments here are quite pessimistic.

Matrix.org is a start.

On a much much broader scale the Web 3.0 will be build on Blockchains, the so
called Fat protocols will surpass the Web 2.0 or eventually merge.

[https://www.usv.com/blog/fat-protocols](https://www.usv.com/blog/fat-
protocols)

Ethereum will build up a considerable part of the ecosystem, with Dapps like
status.im

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Je7yErjEVt4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Je7yErjEVt4)

------
elihu
We need better tools, so that ordinary people can setup their own blogs,
websites, email servers, forums, and whatever else they want without being an
expert on systems administration or security. They should be able to deploy a
system and be confident that it will keep working without intervention for
decades. We're not there now, largely because of security vulnerabilities.

We need it to be easier to write secure applications. We need to eradicate
undefined behavior from our software stacks. Rust is a good step in this
direction. We need well-thought-out APIs that are hard to misuse.

I think we also need a better search engine, and tools to filter news. Tools
that detect clickbait, overzealous advertisements, and other forms of low-
quality content and push them to the bottom of the rankings, and also punish
sites that link to low-quality content.

We need email to be more user-friendly than it is; maybe we need a new
protocol that's simpler and consistent with how email (and Facebook/linkedIn
mail) is used in 2017. Setting up an email server should be easy, and the
settings should be secure by default.

We need tools to identify credible information sources, possibly by analyzing
if a given information source is vouched for by someone we already trust.
Flooding comment sections and forums with fake comments is an easy way to
manipulate the public and create an illusion of consensus or a made-up
controversy, but it's a little harder to be fooled if you have automated tools
to filter out people that aren't connected to anyone you know by some kind of
chain of recommendations.

------
nolanl
I contribute to Mastodon, an open-source federated social network based on the
OStatus set of W3C standards. Most of my work has been on making the web
frontend faster, trying to add the kind of fit-and-finish that proprietary
apps like Twitter and Facebook have.

------
svilen_dobrev
Maybe should try on another level alltogether. Here something from 6y ago. (i
even posted it here then but with near-zero attention).

A (personal) system that keeps your own notions (and versions of) and
crosslinks them to each another, with translators to/from other persons/entity
notions (and subsets - think i/o facades/faces).

Like the tags u put on your images. And how u would explain them to somebody
else. And take some of their images (i.e. of same event) with their tags. And
tag them yourself. maybe in time.

[http://www.svilendobrev.com/rabota/notionery/](http://www.svilendobrev.com/rabota/notionery/)
[http://www.svilendobrev.com/rabota/notionery/1.html](http://www.svilendobrev.com/rabota/notionery/1.html)

it's rough sketch, may live on top of any p2p technology. Back then noone
could be bothered about "why would i put another layer around myself". Now
maybe the awareness is better, i don't know. (contacts in profile or that
site) have fun

------
lalalander
I am of the opinion that Facebook and Google will continue to be relevant
simply because of the perceived value in working for these companies. There
was a recent top news on HN about a programmer who self-learned and applied to
Google. The line "Feeling more confident, he set his sights high. He began to
wonder if he might be able to work at Google" made me realise that as long as
people look up to Google as a pinnacle of software engineering (or if pinnacle
is too much of a hyperbole, at least I admit that Google has high software
engineering standards), there will always be an influx of good engineering
talent to these companies. I feel that one way to combat their grip on the
Internet would be to change the mindsets of these programmers, and to change
the narrative that all good engineers should work at Google et all. Without a
constant stream of programmers willing to work for these companies, the
quality of their offerings should decrease, hopefully to a point where the
average Joe would start to look for alternatives.

~~~
5_minutes
More simple would be: as long as the wage and perks are awesome, google will
attract talent

------
spenrose
I argue that "the Internet" has become a category error:

[http://www.sampenrose.net/civilization-absorbs-
technology/](http://www.sampenrose.net/civilization-absorbs-technology/)

There is just civilization, which the Internet used to be meaningfully
separate from but is no longer.

------
mythrwy
Maybe Google and Facebook shouldn't be lumped together.

Google (however big they are) provides a lot of value to my world at least.
Just for search alone. Sure, there are other search engines but none nearly as
good. Making it easy to find relevant information is of huge benefit and
really does "change the world". I consider this enhancing.

Facebook is like the owner of a seedy bar. Preying on people's need to
socialize and serving rotgut. Profiting from degradation rather than
enhancement. (IMOP).

People should stop drinking rotgut. That's the way to stop Facebook. Rotgut is
cheap anyway. You can even make your own in the basement. But if you want to
stop Google you need to build a better search engine. Best of luck with that
(seriously, I'd use it, no loyalty but so far Google has some truly useful
products).

------
lallysingh
Should we add github to that list?

~~~
akerro
and netflix

~~~
bogomipz
I am curious why you are suggesting Netflix? The filter bubble created by the
recommendation system? It seems like they are relying on original content more
and more. Or maybe you mean because of the centralization of it? Is there a
decentralized and legal alternative?

~~~
dandelion_lover
[http://stallman.org/netflix.html](http://stallman.org/netflix.html)

~~~
bogomipz
The meat of this is really anti-DRM and while I agree with that sentiment
completely I am failing to see how this relates to the centralization trend or
filter bubbles that are the topic of this discussion.

~~~
dandelion_lover
Are you aware of usable alternatives to Netflix? (I am not). This is the
problem I guess...

~~~
bogomipz
Useable? What do you mean? Bit Torrent, iTunes, Amazon are all "useable."
Netflix is hardly the only game in town.

------
NoGravitas
A little late to the party on this but:

1\. I have quit Facebook, minimizing Twitter use, and am using Mastodon[0] for
my social networking fix. My existing Facebook friends aren't on it, but the
people I'm "meeting" are very nice. Will be blogging about it soon.

2\. I am re-launching my long-idle blog, but this time supporting indieweb[1]
standards for identity. This way, I have a central identity on the web across
social networking sites, that I control.

[0]: [https://joinmastodon.org/](https://joinmastodon.org/) [1]:
[https://indieweb.org/](https://indieweb.org/)

------
quelsolaar
Im re-engineering the internet ([http://unravel.org](http://unravel.org)).
There are many more who are trying. If enough of us try, someone will sucseed.

------
unityByFreedom
Is this some sort of attempt to claim Facebook and Google are somehow worse
than Ajit Pai's FCC?

I'm specifically objecting to the phrase "closed internet". It _sounds_ like
the opposite of net neutrality, but in reality, any privacy options within
Facebook and Google have been user-driven.

The focus should be on removing Pai. Regarding Facebook and Google, you can
simply choose to not use them if you wish.

You only have one choice for broadband, and Pai wants to extend ISPs'
monopolies. Let's not let that happen without a fight.

------
jewbacca
At least Google and Twitter have data takeout.

I recently discovered that, on Reddit, anything beyond your more recent 1000
posts/comments/upvotes is totally irrecoverable to you, even via scraping.

~~~
avarun
Wait, really?

~~~
jewbacca
Yeah. This was pretty upsetting to discover. I had been blindly using my
reddit upvote history as a supplementary personal log of sorts, for many
years. And most of that's now just gone.

Thank god I haven't made over 1000 comments or posts with any one account.

The data's all still in the database, but due to their caching setup, only the
last 1000 of anything is publicly indexed. While everything's technically
reachable, it's all deep web. To recover something private like upvoted or
saved posts, we're talking heat-death-of-the-universe, through a full-table-
scan squeezed through brute-forcing a search box, while authenticated, with
rate limits.

------
shea256
In my view a big way to fix these problems is to allow for multiple clients to
compete on the same underlying social network protocols. Semi-decentralized
(federated) social networks like Mastodon have done great work here. Even
better would be completely decentralized equivalents of Twitter, Facebook,
etc. There are several impressive projects working on enabling these
decentralized apps. One such project is IPFS. Another is one I'm working on
called Blockstack.

------
pascalxus
Walled Gardens - Do consumers really feel that it's a big enough problem? As
for filter bubbles, a consumer need only visit another news site, right?

I hope I'm wrong about this.

~~~
prodmerc
Consumers don't care, they'll start caring when their last dollar is squeezed
out of them and they start wondering why is their life so shit. At which
point, it will be too late.

~~~
rexpop
Is there another way?

------
bounded
What would it take for a new social network to take users off facebook in
2017?

~~~
juliangoldsmith
The real problem would be network effects. Nobody uses a new social network,
because nobody they know uses it.

To get people off of Facebook, you'd have to find a way around that.

~~~
dhimes
Yep. You need a niche. Like yik yak, but not.

------
dontchooseanick
That's extreme for most but :

1\. I don't talk to Google and Facebook - I mean, really, litteraly
[http://sling.migniot.com/index.html?filter=no_.*sh](http://sling.migniot.com/index.html?filter=no_.*sh)

2\. A decade without Google Search and DuckDuckgo instead - sometimes I have
to use !g at work

3\. I have rooted phones _without_ a Google account - but I know no single
other person who does it

And the corrolaries :

\- I get a _lot_ less ads for free

\- I have to talk again to Google from time to time, for captcha purposes

\- I have real-life friends who call me - like in "phone-call", they know I
have no Fb, no Insta', no Pinter', no Google, no Snap'

\- From Google and Fb's standpoints I'm like a blackhole: I don't leave
intentional traces, opinions, preferences _but_ I'm as traceable as a dead
pixel on a uniform background.

I left this comment because I feel like a Unicorn : I do this nearly as a
hobby and to prove that "It's still possible" \- but it takes a BC in computer
science and constant fighting :

Nobody does that

------
jeeshan
To foresee the perils of a closed internet, look at healthcare.

Instead of using open standards, most of our medical data is trapped in
proprietary vendor systems that are at best antiquated.

Patients are unable to move their data easily, doctors and hospitals have to
pay huge sums to access their own data. The vendors extract massive rents but
were all left in the dark and our health suffers

------
c_r_w
Seems like the first thing we need is organization. Even if the effort is
spent on diversified efforts, having an organization of like-minded people
agreeing on overall objectives and prioritizing would probably be the starting
point. Is that organization SocialWG? Something else? I have no idea, but I
would be open to participate.

~~~
rexpop
Whichever team invents the best co-governing system will win, no? So the
organization that arises naturally from ActivityPub, Mastodon, ActivityPub,
etc. will provide the activation energy. The question is: can ANY of these
solutions compete against private, financial incentives?

------
Raphmedia
> What projects or companies are you working on to combat filter bubbles,
> walled gardens, emotional manipulation,

I walled it myself by making a small social network for close friends.

Sure, it's probably a big bubble but at least I don't emotionally manipulate
my friends by showing them ads or changing the order of their posts.

------
fusion_cow
We're running a nonprofit online conversation service, Lyra. It's a space for
online conversation which respects language and attention, provides powerful
tools to control audiences and news feeds, and doesn't take investment or ad
revenue. We're already sustainable!

www.hellolyra.com

------
lifebeyondfife
Echo Chamber Club exists to inform people with progressive views, alternative
viewpoints on stories they wouldn't normally encounter within their own social
media circle.

[https://echochamber.club/](https://echochamber.club/)

------
dkarapetyan
In some sense open and federated information networks go against the grain.
Popularity of Facebook is a pretty strong indicator that all the things
techies worry about are irrelevant to the general public.

Most walled gardens are built for convenience of consumption whereas most
federated networks seem to assume a more active and informed participant. The
kinds of features you'd build for one group are at odds with what you'd build
for the other one.

Then again Brave seems to be tackling the problem from the right angle. I hope
their model takes off and people start incorporating similar ideas into other
open networks that respects the network participants instead of just treating
them as passive consumers.

------
hedora
I use this to block surveillance, and bypass the big content aggregators.
Think of it as full-text reader view for RSS feeds that don't support such
things:

[http://fivefilters.org/content-only/](http://fivefilters.org/content-only/)

Increasingly, I get my news from non-profits that do original research, or
technolgists that are the primary source of the stories I read. They don't use
advertising to fund their work, which eliminates the moral dilemmas around
stealing content vs supporting our corporate surveillance state.

Also, RSS is the opposite of a walled garden.

------
marcosdumay
I was writing an email extension for private communication, and easier sharing
and organization of things¹... But then there was an epidemics of first
instance judges blocking private messaging systems on my country.

I'm currently waiting for our supreme court to decide if judges have that
power before I spend more time on it (or not). Maybe I'll have my answer next
week.

1 - [https://sealgram.com/blog/yep-im-rewriting-
email.html](https://sealgram.com/blog/yep-im-rewriting-email.html)

------
pdfernhout
I've been working towards a distributed social semantic desktop in my spare
time. My latest experiment along those lines:
[https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip7](https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip7)

Related concept video from a few years ago: "Twirlip Civic Sensemaking Project
Overview"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mRy4sGK7xk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mRy4sGK7xk)

Wish I had more time to work on it.

------
zitterbewegung
I'm working on a manifesto and a set of blog posts to influence people that
use closed internet services to think differently about it. What I believe we
need to do to fight this is to make people care about who we give our data to
and have organizations share their machine learning models so that we can have
a more secure and open web. One of the ways we can do this is to allow people
to execute machine learning models so that everyone can restrict it to the
data that they own

------
adamnemecek
I actually think that in the long run internet will become more open and
here's why.

Why do both Facebook and Google exist? They exist to manage servers. Why do we
need servers? Because your personal computer/phone might not be able to handle
all that much traffic and might not have dem five nines. How much traffic does
it need to handle? What if your phone could handle all the traffic the
entirety of humanity could generate? The need for these companies would go
away.

~~~
davidjnelson
sounds like the plot of the show silicon valley this season ;-)

------
EGreg
Here is what I have been doing:

[https://qbix.com/platform](https://qbix.com/platform)

A wordpress-like open source platform that communities can install and have
their own facebook.

A platform that allows developers to release apps that communties can install.
Or turn their existing app into one.

An auth protocol that works with everything else out there and lets people
manage their identities across the web, and link up with their friends from
their private address books.

And more.

------
realcr
I'm working on freedomlayer.org. It is a research project for finding out
solutions to various questions:

\- Distributed and secure routing, specifically in mesh networks.

\- Creation of scalable economy of digital goods (Storage, computation power
and networking) between computers.

I believe that these will provide a foundation to build things like
distributed email.

Currently freedomlayer contains mostly research documents, though I plan to
implement some of it in the near future.

------
pvnick
By slowly withdrawing from the internet entirely. Cancelled my facebook and
twitter accounts; the variety of websites I visit has dwindled to just a
handful; I use a blackberry and will likely go to a flip-phone when I can find
a decent cheap one (recommendations welcome). I read more books now.

"filter bubbles, walled gardens, emotional manipulation" are things I no
longer think about

------
p1k
It's not much but I work on decentralized comment software in my sparetime.

[0]
[https://pik.github.io/Interlocutor/blog/](https://pik.github.io/Interlocutor/blog/)

[1] [https://github.com/pik/Interlocutor](https://github.com/pik/Interlocutor)

------
amelius
In my view, algorithms that deal with user data (our social data) should be
designed by universities and perhaps government agencies, like in the old days
of the internet.

The role that big companies can play (we still need them) is supply hardware,
and perhaps subordinate software libraries, also like in the old days.

------
Kiro
You're hosting your stuff on Github so you are part of the problem. Fix that
before you start talking.

~~~
nsebban
Came to post this.

I have nothing against Github, but I wish developers knew better :/

------
amelius
I think the developer community should distance itself more from big companies
that act badly.

One way to do this could be for open source authors to introduce a section in
the README file expressing the wish that the software will not be used in ways
the user is not aware of, such as user-tracking.

------
motiw
I am experimenting with a new approach to preventing manipulation and biases
in feeds. We use an algorithm to randomly crowdsource people to rate articles
on their topical relevance and usefulness. Results at postwaves are still
preliminary but encouraging.

------
krausejj
Keep using email and open messaging formats, ideally tied to an ID you own.
How many people actually have their own website? Probably a minority. Everyone
has an email address. If this gets subsumed by FB Messenger, Slack, and Snap,
we lose the open web.

------
jamesmishra
The rest of the Internet didn't disappear. If anything, Facebook and Google
are tools to drive traffic to your own corner of the Internet.

I don't really believe social media filter bubbles exist, relative to the
bubbles of the past. Even the most isolated Facebook user is more enlightened
than my parents were during their childhoods in India.

Emotional manipulation was probably worse when the United States only had 3 TV
networks. Before that, "yellow journalism" helped lead the US into the
Spanish-American war.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#Spanish.E2.8...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#Spanish.E2.80.93American_War)

Of course, we should still work to do better than the status quo, but I enjoy
being able to develop a following on social media and/or purchase ads for
whatever distributed Internet ideal I want to create.

~~~
intended
Lordy no.

I've been watching emotional manipulation in India and around the world for
decades now. Its always been among my top concerns, and its definitively
become worse. I'd argue its a lot worse on all axes, but if you want a
singular reasons - targeting has now all encompassing. Its on all the time, it
knows where you are, who you know, what you like, in a dramatic way.

Also - you have a third confounding variable in your data. Parents in India
from that era were not as educated as counterparts in the west.

The west went through its periods of darkness, where the average person was
not educated, and when religious institutions dominated the scene.

They had decades to over come this, generally following the Enlightenment.

India too will hopefully struggle with these same issues. But the new medium
for ideas is more dangerous than the one which came before - for ideas
themselves.

In a slower news cycle there is also time to reflect. The lack of being always
connected, meant that the transfer of memetic force was always broken up.

Emotion is the lever by which most of the world is moved. Whatsapp forwards
come at any time, can contain any content and will be accepted by the receiver
often without reflection.

The world has iterated, and for the worse.

------
grizzles
The UI bit is really important. To do it well would be to make a pixel perfect
open source clone of Facebook that works over a distributed protocol like
scuttlebot. theacebook.org is the closest ui attempt that I've seen.

------
perfunctory
I ignore facebook entirely, use duckduckgo for search, and pay for journalism.

------
throw2bit
First world country problems. In India, we dont really care. And China
ofcourse. So half of the world dont care and I dont think India and China has
any penetration or audience for these services.

~~~
prodmerc
Most people everywhere don't care, really.

------
foxhop
I'm blogging on my own domain whenever I get the chance.

Also bootstrapping [https://www.remarkbox.com](https://www.remarkbox.com)

------
bluetwo
These are problems but they ignore the bigger threats. Once ISPs get into
selling your history and other reports and net neutrality is killed, we are
all toast.

------
slyzmud
I think there is something even worse than walled gardens and those are the
closed platforms apple, Google and Amazon are creating.

One thing is creating websites where they control the content users can see.
But the web is still "open", even if facebook bans my content I can still
create another website and share it with everybody (probably nobody will ever
see it, but that's another problem). The real problem is the new tendency of
app stores (Apple Store, Google play, Alexa skills...) If
Google/Facebook/Amazon decide to block my content, I have no way to reach
other users.

------
awinter-py
for better or for worse, advertising (or some kind of information) is
necessary for running a business.

Web ads are working less well than in the past, but they still work. The
companies that have a high-visibility 'start page' (news orgs in 1990, yahoo
in 1997, G & FB today) are going to have a lot of power.

Create a compelling start page, get 30% of the world to use it once a day, and
your problem will have been solved.

------
asselinpaul
[https://status.im/](https://status.im/) is doing something interesting in
this space too.

------
z3t4
I'm making a decentralized app that makes it easier to tell your friends what
you had for dinner, then posting it on Facebook.

~~~
Danihan
You're covering input, but what about output?

------
toomim
I'm convinced of something surprising -- that walled gardens are actually the
result of limitations in ... HTTP! And to prove it, I've implemented a
replacement for HTTP called Statebus that adds power to HTTP and breaks down
walled gardens: [https://stateb.us](https://stateb.us) Check it out!

Statebus makes web programming wayyyy easier, and opens up the _insides_ of
websites -- you can go to any page, hit a hotkey, and edit the code live to
add a feature, or incorporate state from a different site, or re-use the state
or code from somewhere else, just as easily as you use your own site's state
and code! Because it puts the insides of sites onto the web protocol itself.
In Statebus, every piece of state has a URL! And you can synchronize with it
as easily as <a href="state://..."> today!

This breaks up walled gardens like Facebook! Today, we have monopolies at the
level of _websites_ , because each different website is implemented with a
different proprietary stack of web gunk -- MVC server frameworks, reactive
view frameworks, networking frameworks, babel, webpack, and -- YUCK! Statebus
replaces all this gunk with the web protocol itself -- the statebus protocol
-- which opens the state, and itself automatically synchronizes all this state
together!

Statebus transforms HTTP from State _Transfer_ to _Synchronization_ :

    
    
        HTTP:     Hypertext *Transfer* Protocol
        REST:     REpresentational State *Transfer*
        Statebus: State *Synchronization* Protocol
    

It turns out that all web frameworks are really just _state synchronization_
libraries, and we only need them because HTTP doesn't know how to synchronize!
By adding synchronization to the web protocol itself, we eliminate the need
for all these frameworks, and put all the _internal state_ of a website onto
the web protocol itself, making it open for other websites to use!

Statebus makes websites wayyy easier to program, and this means that the
_easiest_ way to program websites is now the most _open_ way. This changes the
economics of the web, and is going to break up the walled garden monopolies
that have arisen around websites -- just like the web itself broke up the AOL
walled garden in 1995!

Remember AOL? It provided a lot of the same features as the web -- shopping,
chat rooms, forums -- but then was outcompeted by the open web around 1995!
Why? Because programmers found it was _easier_ to put their content online
with HTTP and HTML than by convincing CEO Steve Case to add their content to
AOL's garden! In the same way, Statebus is going to make it easier to build
social content than by going through Facebook's walled garden! The future will
be a diverse, realtime, synchronous symphony of social state!

You can find technical docs here: [https://github.com/invisible-
college/statebus/](https://github.com/invisible-college/statebus/) And a demo
video here: [https://stateb.us](https://stateb.us)

------
dcow
urbit.org

------
american-desi
Why isn't there an open sourced version of google and facebook similar to what
ubuntu is to os x and windows alternatives.

------
pmoriarty
Don't work at these companies. Don't give them your business. Spread the word
about their unethical practices.

------
hxn
Would it help if more people would have a personal website?

Or would that just put the power into the hands of whoever runs the DNS system

~~~
ocdtrekkie
It would definitely help. Use things like RSS feed features so that people can
subscribe to updates from your personal site/blog.

DNS is (relatively/-ish) decentralized, and isn't AFAIK, heavily used for data
collection. And you can't exactly show ads via DNS.

------
tripu
Not enough. We techies have a moral duty to choose wisely, and to educate
users.

------
jgon
The biggest thing you can, in my humble opinion, is to make choices predicated
on a long term view instead of what is most convenient for you, in the next
five minutes. It doesn't require you to code up some sort of amazing app, or
dedicate your free time to open source, although both of those are great.

I liken it to the attitude people are starting to take with regard to other
aspects of their lives, such as food and materialism. When I go to the store I
know that I can save a few dollars by buying the absolute bargain basement
produce, flown in from south america, taken from high intensity factory farms,
or packaged up and made mostly out of HFCS. Or I could see what I can buy from
local producers and from farms that prioritize ethically raising animals. It
means my eggs cost 3 bucks more, and I can't have kiwi fruits in February. But
wanting kiwi fruits right this minute, even though it is February in a
northern latitude is the exact sort of attitude I am speaking of.

So how can you put this into practice? Well a few people have already made
similar suggestions so some of this will be duplicating their suggestions, but
I still think it is worth saying.

1) Use your own email. I personally like Fastmail. For $50CAD/year I get a
great service. I know that I am paying for a service and am not the product.
They are doing good work with the open email protocols that exist, and working
to produce new open standards for the future.

2) Use Firefox. Do we really want to give a dominant majority marketshare in
the browser market to a browser made by a company that makes 90% of its money
through advertising to you? This isn't even some sort of rant about google
being "evil", it's just a common sense decision. It wasn't a good idea back in
the day to give dominant marketshare to a company who incentives were aligned
against the web and towards desktop single platform applications, and it won't
be a good idea to give that sort of power to company that is beholden to
shareholders and makes it money through tracking and gathering data on users.

3) Delete your facebook account. I don't have a fallback here, but honestly I
don't think you need one. Between messenging apps, smartphones, email and
other communication tools, you will be able to stay in touch with people you
care about. Facebook is not irreplaceable and I say that as someone who was in
University when Facebook blew up. I am still happily communicating with all of
those people.

4) In general, think about your purchasing decisions and who they empower and
what the long term gain is. Shopping at the new walmart in your town may save
you money for a year or two until they have devastated the local economy and
have no incentive to keep prices low. Even if they do, your local area is made
worse by the unemployment they cause, and the underemployment they provide.
Same thing with Amazon. Are you saving yourself a dollar today to wonder where
the retail jobs that helped underpin your community went in a few years? Are
you doing all your searches through google when you could maybe do them
through Duck Duck Go, or Bing, or just anything that slightly breaks the
monopoly that Google has on search?

All of this is stuff that Richard Stallman has been saying for years, and
people keep being surprised that he is "correct", but it's usually pretty easy
to see that he is just taking a longer term view of things, and understanding
that just because an organization acts decently when they are not in a
position of power doesn't mean anything about how they will act once they are
on top.

In summary, try to think longer term about your decisions, instead of
prioritizing immediate convenience, and paltry economic savings, especially
when we, as privileged engineers and developers, have the ability and monetary
flexibility to do so.

~~~
bowlich
Been slowly weaning myself off Google's products.

Switched my default search engine to Startpage. I still end up on Google for
half of my searches -- particularly if I need to get a map to a business --
but it helps that I now have to consciously type in the name of a Google
product before I make use of it. It's like treating an addiction.

------
metaphorm
Take the like/+1/retweet/etc. buttons off your website.

------
cyberpip
email contact may be too important for everyone to be running their own mail
server, at least with the solutions I'm familiar with?

------
intended
Heres a question - what are the kids using?

------
a_imho
Install a content blocker in disagreement?

------
bellajbadr
we are developing alternatives based on decentrlized and fair platforms like
the blockchain

------
daraosn
Brendan Eich, the inventor of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla, launched
this recently:
[https://www.basicattentiontoken.org/index.html](https://www.basicattentiontoken.org/index.html)

It's a token for advertisement that rewards the user, to be used at Brave
browser: [https://brave.com](https://brave.com)
[https://github.com/brave](https://github.com/brave)

~~~
tmccrmck
I love the idea but if we can't get 70% of the population to use ad blockers,
what chance do we have of people moving over to a new, unheard of browser?

People switched to Chrome because Google told you it was a better experience
every time you made a search. I don't see how people of my parents generation
(60s) will ever hear about Brave.

~~~
BrendanEich
The BAT is for more apps, Brave is just first.

Do your parents like paying half their data plan ($23/month in the US) to load
tracking scripts and ads? See [https://medium.com/@robleathern/carriers-are-
making-more-fro...](https://medium.com/@robleathern/carriers-are-making-more-
from-mobile-ads-than-publishers-are-d5d3c0827b39). Brave is 3-7x faster on top
news/media sites than Chrome on Android.

All this and more is discussed at
[https://basicattentiontoken.org/](https://basicattentiontoken.org/).

How do small faster browsers get big? Marketing. To counter, big browsers have
to block by default and none will (Apple comes closest and is our best ally).
They're all beholden.

------
s73ver
With regards to advertising, what are you doing to offer a realistic
alternative to getting content creators paid online? Paywalls work, but people
hate them (go into the comments of any article from the WSJ or such on here).
The automatic tipping things offer very little friction, but hardly anyone
uses them. So what's your answer?

~~~
ptr_void
What if we don't pay them at all? I don't think we'd miss out on too much. It
might even make things better, getting rid of professons like 'youtuber' and
article writers who'se main goal is to distribute ads with poor quality
content and clickbaits. People interested in sharing what they know will still
do it. Wikipedia exists without writers getting paid.

Walled garden can still exists, if people value them, they will buy to get
content, nothing wrong with this. If people aren't willing to buy to get
content, it will then be a hint that the content isn't worth the money.

~~~
s73ver
"What if we don't pay them at all?"

What if your employer didn't pay you? I'm sorry, but this idea that one
shouldn't be allowed to make money being a "youtuber" or anything else just
because you don't like it doesn't hold water.

~~~
ptr_void
I didn't mean to offend you if you are a content creator or want some content
creator to be funded. I just don't think it's much of a technology issue. It's
a signal that the content isn't worth the money where walled garden doesn't
work.

Also, I think you've misread my comment - I can't see any association between
your reply and my comment.

~~~
ptr_void
I meant to say paid-walled-garden, maybe that was the confusion.

