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The real anti-Facebook is good old email (wired.com)
255 points by Alex3917 on Sept 26, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 155 comments



Founder of TinyLetter here. Cool article! Glad TinyLetter is still going strong & a successful acquisition for MailChimp.


I would say mobog was the Facebook killer. Before its time though and when Instagram hit the mark Facebook promptly bought them and later WhatsApp. In Asia, primarily China, the Facebook killer is WeChat which is basically Instagram and WhatsApp.


> In Asia, primarily China, the Facebook killer is WeChat which is basically Instagram and WhatsApp.

And banking.

A huge 'value add' which has caught on is being able to send real-life money with no transaction fees to other people.

And treated in novel ways - 'lucky money' to send friends in your friend circles, paying for a taxi, utility bills, seeing a movie, train and plane tickets, etc.


fuckedcompany.com was a great site.

Wish there was a better archive than the bits saved at archive.org.


There also has been a book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743228626


I moved out of state a couple of years ago, and when I stopped using Facebook, I realized:

1: Facebook never was a good way of keeping in touch with friends and family back home for a number of reasons

2: I needed to be doing a better job of keeping in touch with friends and family back home

My solution was to set up a newsletter. The idea is every 3-4 months I send out a mass email to friends and family describing what I've been up to lately. It's been a huge win for me for a few reasons:

1: Everyone uses email, so I can reach with friends and family who don't use Facebook. I think my grandmother is my biggest newsletter fan, and is always encouraging me to publish more frequently.

2: I'd rather share a well-written email (with lots of links to my self-hosted photo gallery), than a series of short status updates that may or may not be read by people I want to keep in touch with. Also, a lot of the information I share in the newsletter I wouldn't share on Facebook. Not because it's super private or anything, but I'm not going to post a status update that basically says "My living situation is pretty good right now. I'm renting a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and my commute is fantastic!"

3: I never really enjoyed checking Facebook, but I did it out of habit/addiction. Quitting cold turkey has made me a happier person.

The feedback I have gotten has been overwhelmingly positive. I got a number of really good responses to the newsletter in which friends and family provided similar updates. It even inspired a friend of mine to write his own newsletter. These responses were great, and much better than any information I would have gleaned from Facebook.

The biggest downside is that people still try to contact me via Facebook. For the most part, it hasn't been a problem, except for the time I missed an invitation for a week-long hiking trip in Glacier National Park. I should probably cancel my Facebook account, but I'm not ready to do that yet.

Edit: I should add I don't use TinyLetter. I instead send out a mass email via gmail. It has worked well so far, but I don't have a good way of adding subscribers except via word-of-mouth. Maybe I should investigate TinyLetter.


> I'm not going to post a status update that basically says "My living situation is pretty good right now. I'm renting a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and my commute is fantastic!"

Why not? (Genuine question: why would you not share such a thing on fb, but share it with a large group via email?)

> The biggest downside is that people still try to contact me via Facebook.

While they've gotten worse, fb email notifications aren't all that terrible, especially if you don't participate in discussions on popular fb pages (ie: you only get mail about event invites, new messages).

Nice to hear you've been able to stay connected via email. I'd probably've set up a "private" mailman list, especially now thar mailman3 has a half-decent archive/web interface.

Bit strange to hear you complain about signup though... can't people just send you an email? I'd think word-of-mouth/email would be an improvement over fb in your use-case?

Also interesting to hear how different sub-networks on fb can be. Both in terms of "everyone uses email (sadly, not in my circles - at least for non-work stuff), and wrt what you/others share.


I think email works better because people perceive it as a more direct message just to them. If say, you send an email and bcc people on it, they feel like they were sent a direct one-on-one personal message (even if they objectively know it is a newsletter). Status updates on Twitter, Facebook, etc, when it was obvious that they are for multiple people not just a one-to-one message don't produce the same effect. People don't feel like they have to respond because someone else can respond instead.


I think the difference is subtle, but a little different. Status updates on Twitter, Facebook, etc. feel like a part of the service - something that exists on Facebook. By checking your timeline you're only looking at events that exist elsewhere. On the other hand, receiving a mail feels like it came to you. It does not exist as an entity somewhere in the world, it's a message that came to your inbox (and possibly to others in the CC/BCC field).

It's sort of like receiving a letter vs. reading something on a pubic notice board. The former is yours, the latter is in public space.


I think you hit the nail on the head. An email is yours in the sense that once sent to you, the sender cannot 'take it away' or 'modify it' or 'delete it'.

This is different than many other 'communication protocols' out there such as Facebook Posts, Twitter Posts, Slack comments, Shared Docs etc. which all have the notion of an 'owner' who can retract permissions, modify, delete etc. after 'send'. The email analogy would be the sender reaching into your inbox and deleting or modifying your email (ugh!). This is fundamentally what gives email the feel that there is no favored owner. Conversely, every recipient can feel that the email is theirs.

We're launching an email-like service, (https://tmail21.com) in the next couple of weeks. Our premise is to preserve the best aspects of email while fixing or improving on the worst.

We think one of the best aspects of email is the aforementioned 'democratic' (i.e. no favored owner) characteristic.


Reminds me that at one point Heinlein requested that any letter etc he had sent people were to be returned, so he could burn them...


Obviously Heinlein had not encountered Facebook where no random thought is too minor to be broadcast to all your 'friends' :)


I'm thinking of setting up "gateways", like bitlbee, so I can do:

To: facebook#post#friends@localhost

Subject:

Body:

Hey this is a post to Facebook, from email!


Exactly. I think you put it better into words than me.


It's a subtle feeling. I spent like 10 minutes rewriting my comment because it was hard to express it precisely.


Once a newsletter reaches a certain size, it feel less personal than even a Facebook post. But with a small circulation, sure.


I applaud your energy and focus. If I had more energy and focus myself, I would be something, perhaps to keep up with subcultures of interest rather than old friends.

But that said, I think I'm similar to most people in not being easily able to jump to newsletter type activity. The thing is, if I were to do that, it would still be me relating to N other people rather than, say, all those N other people also relating to each other. That might make things even better for me but I don't see how that's an improvement over Facebook.

Facebook has given me a relationship of sorts with 30-40 people who I previously hadn't interacted with for 10 or even twenty years and lets me barely keep up relations with a number of others. That includes people I'd lost contact with BEFORE the Internet even began.

Most people who aren't on Facebook aren't starting newsletters, they're just isolated - maybe one of their friends sends them a newsletter. I would see one in ten people with a newsletter for all ten as not a desirable replacement to eight in ten people having a way to directly relate to each other.

And certainly electronic media produces all sorts of problems for things-like-community, especially face to face community but that's a bigger issue than Facebook in particular.


I'm glad you got good response. I suspect for most people, including me, the treatment would be the same as any other newsletter.


But would you argue that this is a flaw in the model of mail or in the perception and attitude towards emails and newsletters? If it's the latter, well, that's up to each themselves, and would deem mails and newsletters a still-viable way of notifying reliably about updates. While, if there are actual, inherent flaws in the idea of aggregated mails that make you and others dismiss them, another approach might in fact be better. N.B.: There at least seems to be a curious niche where even daily newsletters like thelistserve.com or nowiknow.com have their little space, for whatever that's worth.


I think that's the expectation, as it is with Facebook updates -- that most people who see your post will ignore it, but they will be generally aware of it in case they do feel like reading it.


The "like" may seem kind of petty but it is a way for people to note that they did read what you wrote without them having to draft a reply of some sort. In that sense, "likes" are very useful.


Point 1 is true for me as well. But I take a different approach in doing Point 2.

Since everyone has a gmail account (at least my target audience) and hardly have any activity on G+, I created a G+ community with just the right people and post updates there. These updates automatically send notifications via email to the community members.

The way content is organized and presented in a community is much better than email IMO. Of course everything can be translated to email - comments can be reply with text and likes/+1s can be reply with +1 - but looking back, it is a much better user experience to do this in a community/group rather than email.


But g+ notifications are still crap? Like fb, they don't contain (all) content and can't be interacted with. So you have the option of running the g+ app, and getting alerts for all g+ activity, or need to remember to check g+ in addition to your email. While with a proper mailing list and filtering you can see with a glance how many unread messages you have, and you can priortize based on list (eg: announce vs discuss vs meetup etc)


Newsletter is not connecting your subscribers together - add that and you have good old mailing list. One of my friends created such a mailing list for our circle of friends some time ago but it didn't win with the Facebook.


But getting someone's Facebook is less socially awkward than their email address. You can also remember them easier and communicate with them faster.

Most of the people I met this summer didn't have an American phone number so Facebook (or Whatsapp) was the only way to communicate with them.


> But getting someone's Facebook is less socially awkward than their email address.

Really depends on the setting. Quite a few people I know would be more comfortable sharing a mail address than their Facebook info, even if we ignore the percentage that doesn't even have Facebook.

(For quick messaging contacts the fragmentation of messengers is really annoying. I don't want 4-6 different messengers on my phone just to be prepared to communicate with everybody. It's really time for a push back to federation or at least proper multi-protocol clients)


>> But getting someone's Facebook is less socially awkward than their email address. >Really depends on the setting. Quite a few people I know would be more comfortable sharing a mail address than their Facebook info, even if we ignore the percentage that doesn't even have Facebook.

This is part of what's backwards about Facebook. Sometimes I've had a 5-15min conversation with someone at a bar and they're like, "Do you have Facebook?", and I'm like, "Give me your phone", and I will search for myself and send myself a friend request.

If I exchanged phone numbers or e-mail addresses with this person, it would be really odd IMO to ask the sort of questions to which answers are offered to me by facebook, and by its' algorithm, but _less_ odd to personally contact them IMO. So I'm kind of a wierd voyeur in basically a handful of strangers' lives and fairly rarely actually ever again meet up and do things with various people that seem to be a lot of fun to talk to when I meet them.

I've had a lot of interesting friendship circumstances arise, but also just spend a lot of time wondering who the fuck most of the people are, even on the new facebook. Even the people I decided to carry over, I don't know, it's a semi-random distribution based on how Facebook was already filtering my feed, I think. People I like, but I dunno.

It feels like Facebook has more influence over who I think about than I do at times, and I wonder if it isn't influenced by what relationships tell them things they can advertise based on or something.


Hadn't thought about that aspect, but that's of course right: a random mail address only gives you a way to contact someone, but not other context.

It's great if you have something specific you want to follow up on, otherwise it just gets filed away. Or can be used to give Facebook/Twitter/whatever else information the next day if you want to (after thinking about it). Mail addresses can be more anonymous and easier to dispose in that way, if you have clearly separated ones.


> But getting someone's Facebook is less socially awkward than their email address.

I don't understand why this would be. Would you explain why -for your cohort- this is true?


I don't use FB at all for my work; though my coworkers can obviously look me up. I only use it for family, friends, and try to keep it sanitary. I don't want my coworkers knowing my private life, and Facebook makes it difficult to have discrete sharing amongst different "classes" of friends.


An email address feels more intimate - it's something a romantic partner would have but a friend wouldn't necessarily. And asking someone for an email address is asking them to spend thirty seconds spelling things out (particularly in a bar), and another thirty waiting for you to send them an email to confirm. Facebook is just a question of typing their name, which you already know - often it can autocomplete based on your network - and they get a notification if you've done it right without needing any extra step.


I appreciate the reply, but I was rather interested in estonian's thoughts on the matter.

But, while we're here:

> Facebook is just a question of typing their name...

Many folks in my peer group used an (often oddly-spelled) nym when they created their Facebook account long, long ago. (Also, many folks in my peer group abandoned their FB account long ago, but that's another matter entirely. ;) )

> ...and another thirty [seconds] waiting for you to send them an email to confirm.

They way I've seen this handled is to either show the person how you spelt the email address, or have them wait for the "new email" notification to confirm that you did, indeed spell the address correctly.

Yet another way is to hand your conversation partner a business card.


Your cohort carries business cards? They seem so... old. And wouldn't they have your business email rather than your personal one?


The minority of them do, yes. And they never carry work business cards[0]; these are personal "business" cards. (I guess the name is a bit of a misnomer in this case. ;) )

[0] Doing so would be really, really strange for anyone who wasn't in sales [1] (and even then, it would be a little strange).

[1] Or, I guess, one of the founders of a tiny startup.


I feel like the typing/confirmation issue could be solved by adding a QR code generator to your email app, and having them scan the QR code on your phone to share details.

You already have your phone out, and they probably have to take theirs out to confirm, so it doesn't add anything that doesn't already exist. But this application of QR Codes saves typing in a good way.


Assuming the other person has a QR code reader app and knows how to use it.

And if you want their info vs giving them yours, then they also have to know how to get their address displayed as a code.

Technically no problem, in practice I wouldn't expect it to work.


Facebook used to have this feature but I can't find it anymore. I only found out about it after meeting someone in Tokyo and have never been able to find the feature since which leads me to wonder if it's geofenced.


I don't think email is a good replacement for Facebook. Rather what we need is open (email protocol like) social networks.

The problem with Facebook is that its a monopoly, and closed. What if it were open, such that I can send a friend request from G+ to Facebook. Just like I can easily send an email from yahoo email id to gmail.

This openness, if incorporated, can solve the monopoly problem as well. Plus we don't have to complain of Facebook's AI/ML screwing/controlling our inbox feeds.

All my (various social network) friends' statuses come to my hosted social network (G+/Facebook, or my home built) and my host controls the feed, with its own proprietary rules.

Everybody will be happy. Even Facebook, as there is no more bashing of it. I guess Facebook can and should take the lead towards openness. It will be a brave move, if it happens. But they will earn a lot of respect.


That is what diaspora tried to do. It has not gone well.


Diaspora was written by a bunch of college students who were unqualified to be implementing the security protocols necessary. Given that one of the biggest reasons people want to move off Facebook is security, that's a no-go. The fact that Diaspora failed at implementing this idea doesn't mean that the idea is bad.


Given that one of the biggest reasons people want to move off Facebook is security, that's a no-go

I'm not convinced that anyone apart from readers of Hacker News and Reddit wants to move off Facebook.

Discussions about the problems of FB on HN remind me of 2000s-era Slashdot discussions of why Linux is better than Windows and is poised to takeover the desktop: A popular subject for a tiny, passionate minority that has little relevance relative to the huge number of everyday users out there.

(BTW, I'm not a big FB user and am sympathetic to discussions of its problems, but I'm also aware that apart from a small number of nerds no one cares.)


I'd say it was a no-go because they used privacy and security as their main advertising/fund-raising argument, attracting especially the crowd caring about these things.


"A popular subject for a tiny, passionate minority that has little relevance relative to the huge number of everyday users out there."

Linux did take over Windows. You realize Android is Linux, right? That's 80% of the mobile market right here https://twitter.com/BIIntelligence/status/605748823709859840... And now Microsoft is building Android apps. So that tiny, passionate minority was right ;-)


Linux vs Windows result was that the whole question become pointless, desktop computing was replaced by cloud and mobiles. This will be eventually also fate of FaceBook - we might see no direct FB killer, but something completely different which makes whole class of social networks pointless. Maybe telepathic technology - we could barely guess. Btw, same thing will happen with Google as search engine - generic web search is already less and less relevant, as we do not have "homepages" anymore, relevant stuff is consolidated to few portals which have better direct search. This does not mean that the corporates disappear - if they are well run then they just adopt to new areas.


Along the lines of what I was thinking, a new class. I wonder about Google shrinking too. It has been suggested that autocomplete was a way for Google to hide that the number of searches was flat (not growing) and they changed the definition of a unique search with autocomplete. Of course, people are doing voice searches and YouTube searches now. The game changed.


I've worked on the autocomplete team. It was always primarily a way to shave off some measurable time for users, making searches easier and faster — obviously a direct interest of Google. (There is also a serendipity aspiration — occasionally helping users formulate better searches — but we never knew how to define or measure success in this.)

It did change search statistics but not in way anybody welcomed: all statistical analyses (including the building of the completion corpus itself) became more complicated as you now want to separate the signal of "how many people wanted to search this" from the semi-noise of "how many people chose this from the 5 suggestions at the moment they glanced at the screen". Google "Instant" triggering automatic searches for some completions muddled stuff even more... Nobody would go through that just "to hide" something.


Linux didn't take over Windows: it took over much of the server space and a specific form of it dominated mobile. Windows still dominates the desktop space as the commenter clearly meant. Further, a single company and product line has been holding its own against Android with profits that made Microsoft and IBM look poor.

In the end, all the volunteers and paid programmers combined working on Linux couldn't displace Windows as king. And all kinds of companies working together got Android to 80% of the market with Apple getting 50% of market's profit. I wouldn't be bragging in either of those two niches. Cloud, on the other hand? Slam dunk.


>Apple getting 50% of market's profit

92% has been reported recently

http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-share-of-smartphone-indus...


Wow. That's amazing. Their ability to get people to want over-priced stuff is and often was amazing. I'll give them that.


I could write several books on that subject (yawn) but my larger point is that this technology affects billions of people now. Maybe it wasn't obvious at the time, but Slashdot was a big deal and so is Hacker News. These people have a lot of influence. It's a small world, after all ;-)


Proprietary technology effects billions of people. Proprietary media has more influence than ever and across the globe. Again, proves nothing while distorting the truth of FOSS. The truth is that it was mostly subverted as a free labor tool for proprietary companies with a tiny percentage contributing something back. Totally opposite of the vision Stallman was preaching long ago when I still read his stuff.

They succeeded at getting stuff built, used and so on. Doing it all volunteers, for the right reasons, displacing proprietary, and so on? Total failures. Only zealots pretend otherwise.

It's why I push paid, open-source models (eg dual-licensing) with charter or contract protections to try to get best of both worlds. Both corporate and FOSS propaganda keep telling developers that it's gotta be paid/closed or free/open when many successful projects did paid/open. A profit incentive tied to respecting users freedoms, esp allowing fixes/extensions, could be a powerful motivator in getting OSS all over the place. Even Microsoft might buy into that for Windows eventually if they could ensure similar profit and tie-in to their ecosystem.


I have friends that either didn't join, or moved off facebook - people that are far from the typical hn demographic.


> The fact that Diaspora failed at implementing this idea doesn't mean that the idea is bad.

I don't think the parent meant to imply it's a bad idea; only that Diaspora kind of sucked all the oxygen out of the "social networks done right" room, and now if you want to float an alternative you have to contend with a lot more skepticism than you would have before.


I tend to believe that skepticism is irrelevant when you have a quality product. The Diaspora folks simply didn't have a quality product, and none has yet emerged in that space.


Another reason it failed, they used Ruby--which at the time was a pain in the ass to install. (Would not install on 99.9% of shared hosts and VPS was still a new thing.)

I've said it before, I'm pretty sure it would work if it was built on top of WordPress. I'm sure this idea is in the back of Matt Mullenweg's mind somewhere. Gravatar has profiles now, but where is that going...?

Well, I shouldn't say it failed. I don't know. A few years ago I was out somewhere, can't remember the conversation, but this guy was telling me the Diaspora community is still growing and people are actually using it.


There is BuddyPress - it seems to be still reasonably actively developed


I'm oldschool, thinking Fidonet + bbPress = huge message network. Each node would need a list of usernames to prevent overlap.


Diaspora did a few things wrong.

Two of them were:

* Their federation protocol was (still is?) very poorly documented. This made alternate implementations difficult.

* A user cannot move his data from one Diaspora server to another. (This might have changed in the last six to twelve months, but I doubt it.) This sort of moots the benefit of decentralization; what good is it if I can pick from any one of a sea of hosts, but must stick with that host for the rest of forever, even if they turn evil?


No, diaspora started as a replacement for Facebook: instead of everybody being on Facebook, everybody would be on the same Diaspora node. Federation came much much later.


That's why I think, it takes Facebook (the current monopoly) to do the right thing. If they open the other required things will automatically happen. G+ will become an attractive option once again, for people who like that interface. And HN types will implement their own 'social' protocol, and self host.


While I sympathize with the gist of your sentiments: What's in it for FB? Nobody (outside of an HN-type crowd) wants to self-host anything, nor do they know what that means. The 30 yr old+ folks without any technical knowledge think FB is great and see no reason anything should change. You are basically calling for FB to reduce their monopoly to satisfy 0.01% of their addressable market. I believe the force that will reduce the significance of FB will come from outside of FB (and there is no shortage of people trying and failing to do that).


I wouldn't assume 30+ folks don't care. We have been online since the 90s (at least) and we've seen some bad shit in our lifetime. An interesting survey would be: Are you "creeped out" by Facebook? Try that survey on Facebook (if it doesn't get blocked) and see how that goes ;-)


People might not always agree with you dude and that is okay. Overuse of the wink smiley is patronising.


What's your point? And I've been using the wink smiley for 30 years. You're the first to say something about it.


Fab ook are not gonna do the right thing. They're gonna try to maximize their profits.


the issue of course, is that they conflated protocol with experience.

when someone does this right- the technology will be indistinguishable from Facebook for the typical user.


Hmm do you have any references to stories/explanations what did not go well - anything beyond critical mass (lack thereof) / network effects issues?


I think we need multiple protocols. One for ordinary messages (ok, we have email for that), one for statuses, one for tagging people, one for publishing events, one for indicating which events you are going to, etc.


No, you just need to handle few additional smtp header fields ;-)


The thing about multiplicity is that most people aren't glued to multiple applications. The ideal for someone not putting a lot of effort to computers themselves is to just have a single window where everything of interest comes through. A single application that melds together multiple protocols would nice. But then you're talking something that seems like Facebook to the end-user but has the delivery mode changed.


The important issue is that we might want different identities for every protocol. Right now, lots of people prefer to have different identities on youtube than on gmail.


Instead of segregating identities on services I think a better model would be just a good support for multiple identities (which then can span between services).


But you don't want one service being able to link all those identities together.


Facebook is flexible enough to provide this. You can post updates visible only to a group of people. Problem with Facebook is how people use it. Users tend to have > 500 friends on an average including ones to whom you have never spoken or never want to speak. This would make your timeline pretty irrelevant and uninteresting to you. Why would I care if a colleague in your first job (10 yr ago) went on a trip with his childhood friends.

Take a scrub to your Facebook friends list and you can get a more powerful TinyLetter.

Practically speaking you'd never un-friend people unless they personally bother you. This is why I hardly check my Facebook timeline. All I use is Messenger which is pretty useful to keep in touch with people you want to.

So, the real anti Facebook is Facebook itself with a fresh start.


While I agree "the problem with Facebook is how people use it", that's kind of the point. People are so used to posting tons of minutia on it (and Facebook's ad model is incentivized to keep you aimlessly scrolling down the news feed for as long as possible), that it makes it difficult to just focus on important updates from people you care about. I find it so difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff in facebook, which is a problem I do not have in email (especially with GMail's tabbed interface that auto categorizes my mail).


> You can post updates visible only to a group of people

You can in theory, however in practice I've found it to be very cumbersome. I spent some time in 2011 trying to sort my Facebook 'friends' into groups - people I know from work, from tech meetups, and so on. It was too much work and the groups were too coarse. Facebook's graph search was promising, and I'd love to occasionally share a link (say) my policy-wonk friends will like, but there was no way to pair up graph search and status updates, e.g. share a link with "my friends who like technology policy". And of course, graph search is gone now.

I think Facebook's thinking is that you should just post an update and they'll figure out who'll be most interested in it. But the problem with that is there's no way to know who exactly is reading your status updates.


> So, the real anti Facebook is Facebook itself with a fresh start.

I did actually start a new Facebook account for a lot of these reasons, because it was difficult to scrub the old account and it felt rude to unfriend people, but there were a lot of people I didn't feel very connected to or interested in, or that they probably were interested in me.

I still don't like how they subtly influence who I am thinking of / in contact with / whatever. The algorithm is creepy.


I didn't know that Facebook can send status updates via email to people who are not on Facebook.


It can't, but that's an incredibly niche feature.


[flagged]


I'm not sure what you're getting at. No one ever said that email could do what you say. I certainly didn't. But the parent said "Facebook is flexible enough to provide this" in a response to an article about mailing lists.

And it's true, Facebook could easily provide this. I just have no way of checking whether they do because I'm not on Facebook. It would be a great feature and extremely easy for them to implement. It would also allow them to make money on ads, so why not?


You know you "unsubscribe" from people while remaining friends with them? (or have different circles of people as another poster noted).

Facebook actually makes it easy to avoid uninteresting posts with a small amount of effort.


Actually, I find that Facebook does a pretty darn good job of showing me content from the friends I actually care about (<100 people) out of my 1000+ "friends" on the platform.

In case you want to give it hints, it has nice features like "close friends" (which will pin their posts to the top of your timeline) and unfollowing (for those people you don't want to unfriend but also don't want to see in your timeline).


>Practically speaking you'd never un-friend people unless they personally bother you.

I've started unfriending people the moment they start posting baby photos. My friends list is shrinking fast!

The only people who don't get unfriended are the people I actually like or the people who never post.


Periodic updates to friend and family about what is new in your life has a long tradition behind it. Before email, even, it came in the form of Christmas Letters, including with the Christmas cards. And they absolutely serve a purpose for one-way communication out to people. TinyLetter sounds like it would meet that need nicely.

Of course, it cannot be too frequent. Family members and friends who send out mass updates too often end up being ignored, just like frequent Facebook updates. And that is because it is one-way communication. It is missing the core piece of asking how the recipients of the email have been, and engaging in a one-on-one conversation, even if just a brief one via email. (Posting a note at the end saying, "Please reply to tell me how you are doing." does not count.)

For my own communications, I am not on social media. I call family every week or so. Sunday afternoons are a web of phone calls between us all. For old friends, I send emails periodically, one or twice a year at least. And news gets less frequent as you age. You aren't moving, you have the same job, the kids are 6 months older, but no real news. So sometimes those emails only purpose are to ask the other person how they are doing.

So TinyLetter sounds fine for what it is. But I don't see it as a replacement for anything.


Reading the title I thought the subject was going to be more along the lines of your response, not an ad for a newsletter service. The anti-Facebook is going back to how we communicated on a personal level before there was Facebook. Anything else still seems like a gimmick.


I was saving up this idea, but here's how you could disrupt Facebook. This is already happening, but it could be automated.

In short, automatically DELAY posting to Facebook. Let everybody know at the bottom of all content: This was published first at example.com and released to social media (Facebook) after X hours.

Make Facebook look antiquated like a newspaper. Let everyone know, Facebook is the old news. If you want our latest news, you have to sign up for the email list--you must to go to example.com for the LATEST news.

One way I'm thinking this could work with a WordPress plugin, when the publisher schedules a post, the post would be "locked" from view with a countdown timer. "This content unlocks in 6 hours. To unlock this content now, and to get our content before everyone else, sign up for our email list."

Maybe for really time-sensitive info you could have three tiers. A paid tier (instant release) and a free tier (unlocked 1 hour later) and a social media tier (unlocked 6 hours later.)

Essentially, you're taking advantage of the value of time, automatically. For example, if shampoo is on sale and you're 1 hour late, maybe the shelf is cleared out.

But you don't necessarily need a paid tier, because the publisher is a) getting more traffic to example.com, pulling traffic off Facebook and b) getting more email subscribers.

Publishers do implement this on their own, but I think it would work well as a WordPress plugin or as some kind of paid service if it was slick enough.


I don't know anybody who gets "really time-sensitive" info from Facebook. I can't even think of an example beyond your not terribly good example of a shampoo sale.


In general, if publishers are automatically sharing to Facebook without some kind of delay, people will just stay on Facebook. Also consider the private groups on Facebook, they could be sharing paid subscriptions and who would know?

The idea isn't just about Facebook, but publishing anything to get more subscribers. If your posts are time-sensitive and people can get your info through social media (without delay) then you're probably losing traffic, because people are busy, lazy, whatever--they're often already on Facebook and need a reason to go somewhere else.

Paid subscriptions aren't as common, and I almost deleted that part of my comment, but people do pay for time-sensitive info. As far as the "paid tier" I was thinking out loud, in terms of building a general purpose SAS app for publishers. I haven't nailed down exactly how it would work, to delay posts to social media. Obviously it would need compelling case studies where people increased traffic and subscribers, and revenue. I can think of a couple of markets to start with, but not getting more specific than that.

Another aspect of this is the notifications. I think email notifications are good to start with because they show up on your phone, and if those notifications are customizable and targeted, that's convenient. But I think there's more you could do with notifications, so that people aren't annoyed that they have to go to your website to find the (timely) information they want. If you can do better notifications than social media (more specific, less annoying) then I think people will more likely go to your website vs. consume your content through social media which sends less-useful notifications.


This is a great advert for TinyLetter, would love to know if they approached Wired to get this published and how that process went down.


That's got to be a "sponsored story". At the bottom of the page, there are links to more "Sponsored Stories - Powered by Outbrain".

What is happening, and happened years ago, is that many people stopped using Facebook messaging and went back to email. It's easier to get messages via email on smartphones than to run Facebook's app.


These are two separate concepts. The sponsored stories by outbrain are just your regular old "lose 100 pounds per second" blogspam.

There is another, more benign phenomenon, where a company's PR department writes an article about the company, sends it off to a reporter, and says "Hey, we think you might be interested in publishing this (plus, we already did all the writing for you)" and then the newspaper edits it and publishes it as a regular article.

They see it as a sort of win-win situation. Reporters get an article to publish without any work, and companies get free / cheap PR.


Maybe in your social circles that's true, but everyone I know has started to rely on Messenger for almost all their non-professional communication. It's simultaneously killing both email and SMS.


Here it's WhatsApp. Just about everyone is using it. Many people are using FB Messenger or Threema or whatnot, but WhatsApp is reigning supreme.


Messenger == Facebook Messenger?

Please specify for those of us that don't use it. There's been several apps known as 'Messenger' over the years.


> Messenger == Facebook Messenger?

Yes. At least among my social circle, it's become the go-to messaging platform.


I don't agree with that. The real anti-Facebook is a combination of email and well formatted RSS feeds. Email for actual legitimate notifications and mail, RSS feeds for news and news type bloggy stuff and blogs.


From an external point of view, one doesn't see much difference between email and RSS feeds: both typically end up in your email client. The main visible difference is that with a RSS feed you can retrieve older entries when you subscribe; it's funny how people associate RSS with news when one of its key features is to let you fetch old news. TinyLetter, btw, appears to offer this feature by letting the author resend old letters to new subscribers.

An other difference is that one can reply to an email but not to a RSS feed. Reading the comments here it seems to me it is a key point relevant to TinyLetter versus Twittbook.

TinyLetter is a one-way communication channel. Like a blog with comments disabled. This is to me a major feature for two reasons that are actually one: spam. With comments gone you don't have to deal with spam, trolls, etc. The second reason is "social interaction spam": when feedback is enabled, people may think they have to reply, support, "like", "retweet" etc. Often the reply is void of content.

TinyLetter's key feature is that you are sending a "newsletter", making it clear that no feedback is required, which eliminates the social spam that pervades social networks.


Why not both? I would prefer to have my emails and feeds in one place, just no status updates.


What you need is Microsoft Outlook. Nirvana


How is RSS support in Outlook?


I didn't know it supported RSS, so I tried it. Seems nice enough: https://imgur.com/NdqMcbx


That toolbar tho. Ugh. I assumed he was talking about Outlook.com, not Outlook 2013.


Ribbon is collapsible in all Microsoft applications: Ctrl+F1 or click on the ^ in the right most part of the ribbon.


Does the search folders work for RSS feeds too?


It does. The RSS feed items are treated like emails, so you can choose a feed folder or multiple folders and set up whatever search parameters you want. I set one up to show all articles posted by "ris," and it worked as you'd expect.


What's stopping you? No reason a mail client can't do RSS as well, is there? (I'm pretty sure some do, or at least did.)


Every good mail client does RSS, including T-bird and Outlook - but they don't sync subscriptions and read/unread posts to the cloud, so most power users prefer a Google Reader clone.


Thunderbird supports RSS feed support, though they are kept separate from e-mail, somewhat.


Some do/did, indeed. I personally prefer Feedly, though.


Now, only a year later, Ello is nearly forgotten, filed away with other would-be Facebook killers like the open source Diaspora and the near-dead Google+

The problem with this statement is that there is a vast difference in number of users between Ello and Google+. The latter is far from "forgotten" or "near dead." Every time I hit G+, it's teeming with activity. I can't say that about Ello, which seems to be populated by mustachioed German font designers who love custom bicycles and the music of Kraftwerk.

Now, Google+ has had its issues. It might even be going away or abandonware. And it's a blip on the radar compared to Facebook. But that's different from comparing it to Ello! The "Google+ is dead" meme is just lazy tech reportage.


Shrug. Not my experience. Google+ looks deader than disco here.


I don't see lots of activity, but interesting groups not found elsewhere with regular liveliness still make me peek at G+ from time to time. It's still a weird and non-successful experiment in the sense of the original goal. A kind of Java.


It's going to if you never circle anybody and none of your friends use it.


None of my friends use G+ but it has lots of active communities and there are many people who use it in a twitter-like manner -- posting non-personal items, starting discussions and the like that are crowd pullers (+1s, comments, resharing to other communities).

G+ is a good network, I hope the Facebookers will remain on Facebook and Google will find some way to open it up to outside web to integrate it with its active communities and the wide web - a prime example is the G+ blog comment system. It had potential to be the no 1, but they squandered away the opportunity by limiting it to G+ and Disqus scored there.


My friends did use it. But they don't any more.


The fact is: Google makes billions more in revenue and has billions more users. Google is founded on real technology and algorithms, facebook started by copying and pasting cold fusion code from myspace.


Any source for the cold fusion thing? I thought it was all in PHP.


And the real anti-Twitter is good old websites. https://indiewebcamp.com


I think the biggest barrier to people setting up personal/"open" websites is the exhaustion of the .com namespace. If your name is common or even remotely plausible, it's taken by a squatter. One of the key advantages of a closed, locked-down social networking environment is the ability to have multiple people identified by the same real name, and a relatively less crowded field for screen names (because squatting is less of an issue).


I'm not sure I buy the idea of email as a private alternative to Facebook. To keep your message content private, wouldn't all parties need to be hosting their own servers or using encryption?

There's also the problem of knowing who you're contacting and when. Hiding that would probably take some kind of anonymous remailer program.

Normal people would probably just have a free email account from companies like gmail or yahoo and not use any encryption. Wouldn't services like TinyLetter then be transferring the data from Facebook to other email hosting companies? This takes care of some privacy issues but still doesn't seem to solve all of problems for private communication.


It doesn't sound like it's meant for private social media, it's an alternative to the ultra-public social media that's gotten popular in the last few years. It's about broadcasting yourself, not contacting a small subset of people (hence why you can only publish to the entire set of subscribers). If you need secrecy, then a system billing itself with the term 'newsletters' is probably not for you.

The real benefit, as the article points out, is that the empty room problem is solved. Everyone already has an email address, it's your online identity, and email addresses aren't tied to one provider like a facebook account or a twitter account. If gmail dies, TinyLetter still lives. If TinyLetter dies, there's nothing stopping someone from creating an alternative version that imports old newsletters to reconstruct everything.


Interesting; I was not aware of TinyLetter. Though it doe nothing to address the use of Facebook for interpersonal communication, I guess they're referring to the use of facebook to nurture an audience and reach out to them en masse.

Would folks consider this approach a practical replacement for RSS-like services, to reach out to a broader audience? Since most ("lay")people don't seem interested in going out of their way to subscribe to RSS feeds; seems like they'd be happy to subscribe in a manner where (more!) things will land up in their inbox.


TinyLetter is a really funky thing, and as you say it's more about nurturing an audience. What's special about it is more the way people have adopted it than anything. Like a public corkboard, its size and functionality belies its usefulness to a wide group (the analogy stops there, as these emails are one-way). Most of the TinyLetter emails that I get are just different, like a special recipe almost.

I've been subscribing to tons of RSS feeds for business blogging recently, and while there are similarities, there's just no way I'd accept TinyLetter as a substitute for a feed. First there's the awkward idea of a gigantic email folder hierarchy to store it all. Then there are things like enclosures, a Youtube video, mp3 files, etc. Also, I've noticed that email links (view this in your browser!) tend to rot about 10x as fast and are not indexed by e.g. archive.org. So I dunno, it's just different tech.


We all know what keeps Facebook going. Facebook isn't running on well-paid, well-employed family dudes who want to get in touch with relatives. Nor on intelligent commentators on society and tech. It is kept going by gossipy teenagers who want to snoop on their bff, bored housewives and creepy middle-aged men who want more 'social' interaction than they can possibly manage in the physical world.

Google+ failed because of they didn't give anyone a good reason to move away from Facebook where such networks already existed, and they insisted on lack of anonymity. The intelligent commentators are all on Twitter anyway.

But the demographic of teenagers, bored housewives and creepy middle-aged men on the internet is very large, and they are on the side 24/7. Pretty much everyone else who uses the internet uses it for work and hardly uses Facebook. But they trudge along to Facebook a bunch of other people who of course need to stay in the communication loop.

Email is not going away because no other system is a wide-spread. Slack could come close, if only they took away their silly way of logging in. It was a shame that Gmail is rooted in email. Heck, if Gmail changed their backend to something like Dlack, 50% of internet users would be no longer using email and they wouldn't even know it. I dream of a Slack to Email gateway.


Why feeds? Getting a newsletter is getting a feed, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp are all about getting a feed of endless news. All alternative social networks are the same.

Why "social network" became synonymous of producing and reading news from the life of people?

MySpace and Orkut were not that way. I imagine other social networks from the early 2000's were not that way also.


Livejournal was definitely that way. Did Myspace really not give you updates? I find it hard to believe it was so popular with bands if you couldn't tell your friends/followers/whatever "here's our new track"/"we're playing a gig on x date".


Facebook = AOL 2.0.1. Maybe they'll do a merger more valuable than AOLs merger of $350 billion, maybe not: http://www.fastcompany.com/3046213/verizon-aol

Facebook is what you get when you have a founder that cuts and pastes myspace code to voyeristically spy on girls he can't get while holding a business card that says "I'm CEO bitch" while calling his users "dumb fucks". Worse than the next AOL 2.0.1

The past Prodigy's, Compuserves, AOLs, TheGlobes, geocities, friendsters, myspaces, facebooks have never done very well especially when compared to truly innovative companies like Google which also happens to make billions more and has billions more users.


Google's an exception to almost every rule. And that exception started with their patented Page Rank algorithm. Patents on important stuff forcing users to pony up isn't exceptional, though. So, they can't be used as an example except for what brains + patents + critical tech can earn you.


I quit facebook 2 years ago. I found out that Facebook was just another place on internet for wasting time, not for communication and staying in contact with someone.

Now when I meet someone new, and he's like add me on Facebook, I give them my email and always get that look in return.


My real Facebook is the bar. US Social Networking since White Horse Tavern – Rhode Island – Founded 1673


One expert discovered this new neat social hack: hanging out in person.

Kidding aside, I prophesize that the next really big, impactful American political movement will not have a web page or twitter/facebook account or forums. The internet as a useful tool for outsiders is over.


As it stands, Facebook has a better privacy story than email. Facebook traffic is encrypted straight through to Facebook's servers, and I'm confident that my data is not leaving Facebook. (You can pay Facebook to show ads to specific demographics; you can't actually buy user data.)

Email, on the other hand, is plaintext for most of its journey and available in cleartext to dozens of shady actors (every ISP in the path, sender's provider, recipient's provider). The courts are clear that email is not considered private and not protected by law.

I'd like to see GPG+email become the new Facebook, but I'll take Facebook over email as it stands now easily.


"And on an average day, maybe 51, 52 percent of them open it."

Engagement metrics for my status updates! I knew I was missing out on something.


Facebook lowered the overhead for staying in touch with your friends.

Pretty much every update since the beginning has steadily raised that overhead, and now it's no more efficient than email was at solving the problem.


Facebook replacement, email replacement, Windows replacement, etc etc...we heard about these attempts for a long time and yet they failed. Why?

From the article, is the problem really the technical complexity or the empty rooms? Is it privacy? Or, is there really a problem at all? Of course there is! Just like any other businesses/companies there some people that will always complain!

In the case of TinyLetter, it is NOT a replacement of Facebook. It will NOT be -- far from it. People don't use Facebook just to communicate. Some people use it to advertise, to sell, to communicate (sure), to look for old friends, to pretend to be somebody else, to boast that they are successful, to look for missing people important to them just like this:

http://gary.littlethings.com/gary-bentley-nurse/?utm_source=...

Now, can you do this in a newsletter? Don't think so...


Glad to see pud is still knocking around. Didn't realize he was the TinyLetter guy. FC was one of the best things ever to hit the web. As for E-mail vs. Fb...

It is simply an issue of control: Content, speed, and the Signal-to-Noise ratio. And that goes for both the Sender and the Receiver. Makes e-mail the obvious choice.


Except “good old email” is basically owned by Google now, so there’s small choice in rotten apples.


The difference is that email doesn't depend on Google to exist, and leaving Gmail isn't all that bad. They even support email forwarding, so that you wouldn't loose contact with people that only have your old email: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10957?hl=en


Are you joking or what? I, personally, don't use gmail, that's not the problem. The problem is everyone else does. And have you ever (in last 5 years or so) tried using your personal email server to communicate with them? I'm guessing you have not, because otherwise you would know how painful it is, as Google does everything to make it painful as hell. Large portion of my contact list are gmail users, especially that part of my contact list who I'm not friendly enough with to tolerate continuously ending up in their “Spam” folder. And that's exactly what you do, when you write to gmail from your own private email server — end up in their “Spam” folder, no matter what you do. So if you are ever going to communicate via email with whoever you might call your customer, you are basically forced to use gmail or another large email service which will be whitelisted on other large email services. 2015 is not the year of free Internet.


I have a very different experience, having run my own email server for the past few months with no trouble communicating with many others on Gmail. Is your SMTP server on a blacklist or something?


Ellos is a completely different beast than Facebook. While they're definitely not in the spotlight as much as they were previously, the service is still fundamentally sound, and some pretty amazing content gets uploaded there daily. I have yet to see a listicle.


I check Facebook once in a while and keep getting alerts (via a userscript) that friends of mine have deleted their accounts. On the other hand, the mailing list that my close friends and I created in high school is still keeping us in touch years later.


Man newsletters are making a comeback, but the only one I am subscribed to is Warren Ellis' Oribital Operations. If more newsletters were this well-written, I'd subscribe to them.


I'm still quite fond of both Google+ and Diaspora. The Google+ mobile app is great, but I would go on Diaspora more if it also had a quality mobile app.


I'd like to see Facebook investigated for antitrust violations. If Google can be investigated, Facebook should be more so.


Email isn't point-to-multipoint.

Usenet is.


and IRC!


"Social Media vs. Personal Media"


Maybe what's needed is something that _looks_ superficially like a social media site, but under the hood is just an email system, using the tried-and-true email protocols, maybe with white-lists enabled. Basically, you're not "friending" someone...you're adding him to your white list.


The real anti-Facebook is Sublevel. But I can forgive Wired for not knowing about it.


The new marketing is apparently name-dropping your own site on HN, too.


Just read their About page, can't see how it's significantly different to Facebook or Twitter. It's still a proprietary network with all the Balkanization and opportunities for abuse that implies, isn't it?


[deleted]


I tried Sublevel when it started, but wasn't getting much out of it. I posted a lot, followed a bunch of strangers and tried to have conversations with them.

Eventually I stopped checking it at all and forgot about it.

I think the people on it appreciate the qualities that you mention, but unfortunately those features don't add up to a burgeoning and intriguing social network.

Perhaps Facebook and Twitter are the last massive timeline-oriented social networks and there just isn't anything else innovative to do.


I like it when I can get my favourite username (edward). I signed up. Now what?


2630 lines of code to run Sublevel or posted by users? A small codebase is interesting for nerds. And yea it is snappy.




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