I would love to see Facebook, Twitter, and (much harder but maybe even) YouTube replaced by distributed systems, so they would be more like email, RSS, or the web. You would have many different options for hosts, including self-hosting, and you would subscribe to the feeds you cared about that would be passed around via an open protocol.
You would get the "addresses" of other participants the way you get their email addresses today, and various directories would probably spring up to allow you to put your address on a list of people willing to be found. Your own apps would format your content for the feed and draw from the various feeds to construct your "timelines".
I think that for Facebook and Twitter, the value due to network effects is far more important than the benefits that result from centralization. Everyone wants to go where everyone else is more than they want whatever specific features might require centralization.
> McNamee is particularly outraged by the ease with which a New Zealand terrorist used social media to broadcast his shooting attack on a mosque on March 15. As a result, he says, there may need to be a kill switch to shut down social media in an emergency.
This sounds like moral panic, and not a well thought out argument. I absolutely agree any live streaming of such a despicable event should be targeted for take-down as quick as possible. And we could impose fines, for a lack of serious immediate response.
But really a kill switch? Twitter/facebook/youtube are down for the next hour because there is some objectionable content we don't want you to see...
I mean just the Streissand effect on its own could actually make it that more people go and then watch the video, on some unknown site, which isn't set up/or inclined to remove the video.
Once you step away from it long enough, you won't be missing it at all. I stopped posting anything 2+ years ago and then also stopped consuming content after the elections...
One way to alleviate that is to defriend or unfollow (hide from news feed) those people who are engaging in one-upmanship, if you're not interested in that. If you want to only passively see what people are up to, this is a good way to do that without being audience to virtue-signalling.
I've found that this is a good habit to work on for in-person relationships as well. Curate your company!
I keep off Facebook but my wife is on there. It's distressing how many disaffected, childless early thirties millennials our age we've known committing suicide. It's sad and I don't really know what's going on, but wondering "I wonder what happened to such-and-such" then finding their memorial page is quite jarring and disheartening.
It feels like so many people are desperately lonely, and our digital voyeurism with things like Facebook is NOT making it better.
You would get the "addresses" of other participants the way you get their email addresses today, and various directories would probably spring up to allow you to put your address on a list of people willing to be found. Your own apps would format your content for the feed and draw from the various feeds to construct your "timelines".
I think that for Facebook and Twitter, the value due to network effects is far more important than the benefits that result from centralization. Everyone wants to go where everyone else is more than they want whatever specific features might require centralization.