Google lives off the open web. Two out of four of its main products depend on the open web:
1. Search - the less of an open web, the less is searchable by Google. Facebook is a classic example.
2. AdWords/AdSense - Facebook, CNN, BBC don't need it. They have their own networks, and they 're big enough to offer a "take it or leave it" approach.
(The only two main products not relying on Open Web is Google Cloud and Android).
Google actually had everything set up, a social network (blogger), a wall (reader), IM (Google Voice, email).
But they decided that FB is taking over. What did they do? They made "their own FB". Which solved no one's problems. Google+ had nothing over FB (except for circles, which FB promptly copied), and killed their old social apps.
Now their running around as a chicken without a head.
well yes, I would be excited to see everyone simultaneously realize they won't get an ROI on their adspend.
But that isn't the sentiment right now. Discoverability is really bad and one of the only solutions people can come up with are creepy targeted advertisements
The fact that, even after applying all this technology and know-how, the ROI on ad spend is a black box with no meaningful metrics, and the spending vectors are based on sentiment tells me that advertising is not a safe long term foundation for revenue. At some point, someone is going to have to prove that the money is well spent.
"I think if we could manage to analyze that expenditure of money we would find that a vast percentage of it, probably one-half, is entirely wasted." - Robert Ogden, 1898.
I don't disagree with your comment, but wouldn't you agree that the last thirty years have introduced an unprecedented technology environment for tracking ROI on advertising? It seems clear that a lack of incentives, not abilities, is what keeps this racket afloat. For that reason, I'm not so certain that it will be allowed to continue forever. Once advertisers get a taste of real ROI metrics, they'll drop the hand-waving platforms overnight. Biggest market opportunity of our age?
Mathematically I don't know if it is possible to eliminate all returns from ad spend market wide. Then again, negative interest rates should have been impossible.
Every trend I see points to greater ad reach. AR + automated transportation means the web expands from your phone to your surrounding. Regulatory intervention could just firewall behavioral targeting and e-commerce in to existing platforms, making Google, Facebook, and Amazon far more powerful.
That's a great point. Google should want the blogosphere to exist as a matter of competitive advantage. The higher ups in Google need to listen to this. They can still bring the blog back, and make the internet great again!
I really would not like google to make internet great again, please. My opinion they actually already make it worse. I hope people stop using these corporations and found better and more people friendly services. Freedom of speech cannot be decided by Google.
a blog is a webbed personal log with comments and the core functionality fb offers is just that, a simple to set up homepage? Blogs have a blogroll instead of a friendlist, does that make a big difference? Seriously asking, I don't use the latter.
That's the idea here. If all your friends had blogs, they could easily create/ share content there the way they do on FB now. You could follow them in Google Reader, or any other RSS reader. Moreover, you could add content from news sites, most of which still offer RSS feeds.
True, that is not really covered in this scenario. Except Blogger gives you an option of whether or not to list your blog on search engines. I have a privat blog from before the FB era that is not listed, and does not show up on Google searches for my name. Although of course, I would not put any confidential information on there.
Well, of course it should allow my friends to search my blogs
. Just not the rest of the world.
But I guess that if Blogger would be "open", so that other search engines could also index those blogs, then this whole scenario would not work (malignant search engines could expose everything to everybody). So my suspicion is that it would actually be quite hard (or at least require more research) to make an "open" version of facebook.
To me, Twitter benefits from being public discourse and an open forum for replies. On the other side of the coin, Facebook benefits from being a private forum (as most people use it).
Solutions that don't facilitate these use cases aren't going to be successful. Understand why people chose the services they did (discounting network effect) and then try and build something to compete.
And what if what you really wanted to share was a photo, or a comment, or an article from NYT or Vogue, and not a long piece of writing? Isn't that what most of Facebook is used for?
On Facebook, one at least has some protection against outsiders searching for their name and finding one's "silly" (careless) postings. If all posts were open, no such protection would exist. I think this could be a real barrier for widespread adoption of this approach.
More and more people are self selecting into facebook and the advertisers follow. Google could fight it, but they would probably lose. There is an order of magnitude more people capable and willing to use fb and twitter compared to blogger.
I think that most of the people that are on facebook now were not "on the internet" at all ten years ago. Maybe as consumers, but not as content producers.
One could of course argue the value added by a typical facebook post, but let's not pretend that tens of millions of people were setting up blogs to keep their grandparents updated with pictures of their grandchildren.
Blogs are still here, I follow many of them and RSS is alive and kicking. Most people that had blogs before and produced long-form content are still there. The only problem is that the advertising well might go dry.
As I pointed out in other comments, something like FB can never be truly open for the simple reason that most people really don't want their posts to be searchable by everybody. Facebook is Facebook because you can post silly things on it without worrying if some future employer could find them if they wanted to. Sometimes an information silo can actually be a good thing, I suppose. But perhaps more research into federated social networks could take away this concern.
Theoretically, Google could let you "hide" certain posts if you're not logged in.
The thing that killed blogs as they are is that they're too serious. When signing up you need a title, subtitle, and input is optimized for long essays. Facebook is optimized for sign up, write your name, find friends, and post pictures, videos and sometimes text.
Really, if Google+ was Blogger Basic where you sign up, put AdWords, post pics, and it could have taken off.
Interesting comments but you seem to have an outdated view of the company. Google is an incredible advertising machine that is far from running around "without a head."
They have an immense amount of data, easily matching and beating Facebook, with control at every layer including Android, Chrome, Google Analytics, Maps, Gmail and more, while also running the adtech infrastructure for 90% of the web. Publishers like CNN are not big enough to have their own networks and are constantly fighting a losing battle where Google is controlling ever more of the adtech supply chain. Even NYTimes runs Google's ad stack.
Sites today are really only left with custom executions using their production talents which is seen in the rise of sponsored/branded content, and Google is already making inroads there.
Search will always exist and always be massive, just as the open web will always exist and continues to grow. There will not be a consolidation into a single walled-garden, what you're seeing with Facebook is just another cycle that was repeated in the past with AOL and others. And search is still one of the best performing channels and will continue to get a majority of ad dollars online.
Google is also ramping up their Cloud Platform and have already overtaken AWS in some areas. Cloud computing stands to be an even bigger revenue source than their entire current ad business so they are well poised for the future.
I wouldn't underestimate this company anytime soon. They might have missed social (although not as much as you think, see Youtube) but there is plenty of opportunity out there.
So you need to pre-approve posts? It seems like this would only increase the "echo chamber" factor for the audience, since they'll only see whatever opinions the author chooses to present in the comments section. I also don't see how this reduces abusive posts or work for the author. The author still has to read each post to review it, meaning they'll still see the abusive posts even if they don't approve them. And the most viewed authors will receive far too many responses to sift through. If you get 2000 comments, then chances are you won't view them all.
So when the problem right now seems to be that people aren't being exposed to diverse viewpoints, I don't think something like this would necessarily help.
I also don't necessarily think that giving Twitter our public history is bad. I suppose you need an alternative if you want the things you type to be forgettable, but I'm not sure that represents very many Twitter users. If you are using Twitter, surely you intend to let people know how you stand now and how you stood in the past? There isn't really a pretense of privacy with Twitter, and I don't think there ever has been. It serves a completely different purpose from something like Facebook, where there is a greater expectation that access to your data will be limited.
The idea of a blog-based social media network already exists; it's called Tumblr. I think Tumblr is much closer to meeting the needs of the Author, so maybe that is a better model to start from. Users have more control of their content there, from length of messages and mixing content to basic formatting.
Pre-emptive apology for longpost - not all of it is aimed at you!
This is the first time I've seen Tumblr mentioned in overarching discussion of "what are we going to do about Facebook and Twitter?" that HN (and others) have been having recently.
OP's two main concerns about Twitter both stem from the fact that it's a centralized system belonging to one company:
1) It's a single point of failure; everything is lost if Twitter goes bankrupt.
2) Twitter holds and (more visibly, recently) is exercising supreme veto power over who gets to use their product and what they use it for. (Note: opinions diverge here; some think Twitter isn't effective enough at identifying and curtailing abuse; others think Twitter is censoring free speech. Both are possible because of centralization, both are bad.)
Tumblr is still centralized and thus solves neither of these concerns, but you are aware of that; you cited it as a possible model, not as a drop-in solution. But real, federated blogging already exists - OP is using Wordpress, not Blogspot, Ghost, etc. (Hey, you can even self host Wordpress! or Jekyll, Hexo, etc.)
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, basic tools exist for federated blog networking and discovery - RSS, blog rolls, search engines. Like OP, I think there is significant margin for improvement in the UX of those tools.
Tumblr's barrier to entry is almost nil - username, password, bam - but WP's free hosted option honestly isn't far behind. That kind of setup would work for average users. If it had good network/discovery tooling built into the platform using open standards, it'd be on par with Tumblr.
But on top of that, a user banned from free WP hosting has the option of buying shared hosting pre-installed with WP from another provider and still being able to participate. It goes down a continuum of ease-of-setup vs. degree of control through VPS to a machine in the basement.
"But why would you want people who get banned that much to still be able to publish?" People get bullied off Tumblr not infrequently through malicious mass reporting. The automatic thresholds are not that hard to trip; the people that suffer are the ones that have developed a following but are not "famous".
I've seen a webcomic artist disappear from Tumblr because they drew a panel of character A calling character B a virgin insultingly. A fan discussion developed over whether B was canon asexual. The artist contributed and said they weren't. This set off a whole bloc of users who started calling the artist heteronormative and a lot of other things, and they eventually mass reported the artist's accounts and got them banned.
Of course there are support channels to rectify this sort of thing, but the process, from what I've seen, is usually painful and slow and not guaranteed to be successful. If the artist gets their account(s) back (which the one in my story did), they now publish in fear of offending that one portion of their fandom, which both dampens their motivation to publish (usually not high for internet artists) and can result in work that panders to the disruptive fans, to the displeasure of the others who were enjoying the artist's original work. If the artist doesn't get their account back (refused by staff or too much trouble), they often lose irreplaceable artwork and history (though shame on them for not doing local backups). If they choose to open a new account, they have have to rebuild their fandom from scratch and PMs to whoever they have non-Tumblr connections with, or they will be found by the troublemakers again and basically be in the same situation as if the account was reopened except still missing all the archives. If both seem like too much trouble, they fold and are never heard from again.
Anyway, this kind of thing has happened to too many people that I was interested in who used Tumblr, which is what, three or so? Enough that it seems like a problem.
I would like to replace twitter with something else who do not supress my opinions, hide my posts, delete my account, give my details and geo positions to NSA... oh too many reasons to skip twitter really. I really hate these censorship business companies. Freedom of speech in internet today seems to be decied by Facebook, Google and Twitter. All these corporations have long history of violating peoples privacy and hiding peoples opinions. Im very happy that people start to find / develop alternatives. Dear Twitter, your censorship and agenda is wrong and you should be shutted down!
If the difference between Twitter's speech limits and Gab's is that the latter allows Nazis and harassment, I think you'll find most prefer "less" free speech.
Does Twitter have no right to freedom of speech, when there are alternatives to it? If they don't want to be associated with white nationalists, then why should they allow themselves to be?
It doesn't have to be a 'Nazi symbol' for self professed Nazis and white nationalists to identify with it. Check out the mentions of any prominent Jewish person on twitter, it's a cesspool of Pepe frogs telling them to get in ovens or whatever other idiocy they've come up with today.
Case in point, David Duke saying "you can't zog the frog":
This is categorically false. People who love and want to defend free speech go there. If you want to continue living in a bubble world, stay on Twitter.
On the contrary, we should support Twitter more after their recent laudable efforts in banning neo-Nazi accounts. There is no freedom to spout hate speech on someone else's platform.
I'm not sure it's "neo-nazi sympathisers" as much as "oblivious young white male libertarians who don't realise the bubble they live in." Admittedly they do tend to sound the same when it comes to "censorship" but I think the distinction helps.
Expecting a tolerant person to be blindly tolerant (of anything) is an adolescent argument. Tolerance is not a binary state, and has never meant a binary state.
I'm a huge fan of blogs, agree with the author in general, but think he's defining "something much better" in a way that doesn't make sense to the average person.
Twitter is at least easy enough for the average person or even dopey + clueless non-technical celebrity to add to their phone, search, and use normally.
Blogs give infinitely more customization options, and in theory are easy to setup, but in practice are still a lot more work and harder to setup. All of their advantages are for nothing when it takes a lot more work to setup compared to a Twitter account for the average person.
Regardless, Twitter is done for. They're trying in vain to achieve an impossible politically correct goal (all of their new safe spaces features to eliminate trolling and name calling) rather than actually innovating or coming up with a business model that can sustain them.
Now I'm imagining all the viral tweets I've seen lately containing fake news, and how much help pre-approval would be in stopping the inconvenient replies containing Snopes links. More control is a tool that cuts both ways.
- hashtags (big aggregators are needed that can answer hashtag queries). Similarly, proposing new tweeters to follow, etc.
- receiving messages. This needs more than RSS, which is only a pull mechanism. It needs both push and pull.
Then there are social problems.
I don't know how far diaspora and OStatus/GNU Social have come. I think diaspora is more concentrated on building a software platform than on protocols (which if so I think is the wrong approach).
OStatus, i.e. thinking of communication protocols, is the right way to go. However it's very very difficult to agree not only on a common protocol, but also on data formats (what's a tweet, what is an album, etc.)
At the end of the day users just don't care about decentralization. They do care about:
* The network of users present on the app
* Quality of the mobile and desktop clients
* Ability to have success promoting their own voice/ content
Decentralization kills innovation in the underlying protocol. (see email for a nice example of common standards holding things back). It also creates a situation were nobody can effectively monetize the platform. Which makes it hard to create a competitive product.
Sure, open standards work well for many things, don't think it will ever catch on for social networks though.
I'm not sure if I want innovation in the underlying protocol. A protocol should be exactly that, underlying.
What ideas do you have for innovation? The only problem with email that I can think of is the lack of end-to-end encryption. But that's a social, not technical problem.
Another thing that they care about way more than we recognize, is
"the latest trend among tech nerds"
Focusing on the Everyman is essential if your criteria for value is a consumer mindshare natural-monopoly (and an exit for VCs) within five years.
The next five years will probably have less of those companies than the last five, and (if the tone of newspapers are anything to go by) ordinary people are becoming distrustful of large monopolistic companies.
Now seems like a good time to hack on what we want. I can't think of a better time for a new, open, social network.
A multi-protocol solution is sorely needed. One that combines mesh networking, internet, QR, audio encoding, even USB dead drops (https://deaddrops.com/).
"Why?", you may ask. Because around the world transparency and accountability is under attack. The many dangers of anarchic information (there are many) are mitigated by the many dangers of repression and influence operations globally.
The back and forth fight between the two is healthy.
Do you know of anyone who's combining one or more of these, in app form, for this purpose?
I have made an "audio encoder" (https://github.com/quiet) and I've given some thought to how you might make a mesh tweet network on top of it, but real world constraints are hard.
> A multi-protocol solution is sorely needed. One that combines mesh networking, internet, QR, audio encoding, even USB dead drops (https://deaddrops.com/).
Add APRS and regular ham radio.
I'm only half-joking, it would be pretty cool to have something like that! :).
I've heard some really interesting things about the LoRa packet radio protocol. Runs in ISM bands (433/868/915 MHz), low-power, excellent range (2 km urban, 20+ km LOS).
The problem with blogs is: they lack private, instant communication channels.
Blogs may be better if you're e.g. a politician, philosopher or anyone who wants to distribute long-form content - but they're unusable if you like to engage in personal conversation.
I surely would not have found my last girlfriends without Twitter, just saying... it has unique advantages over FB, blogs, mail, Tinder and anything else out there.
In the coming weeks, I will be running a little experiment by trying to post even my short, previously twitter-only blurbs to this blog. I will have to cross-tweet these, but at least the primary source will be right here in my own database.
So basically the blogger plans to start adding tweet-length blog posts, and otherwise will continue using both Wordpress and Twitter as they're intended to be used.
1. Nobody except your echo chamber cares about using a distributed or user controlled system. In fact, the vast majority of users will actively avoid such a system.
2. RSS is great, we've just launched this little open source project
https://github.com/getstream/winds
But by no means does RSS replace Twitter. RSS will never become mainstream like Twitter has (to some extent)
3. The author has a point about the various issues with Twitter's usability.
Harder to set up. With centralized systems, all you need is the URL and you can get the magic social-stuffy box on any device you have.
(TBH a centralized service actually feels better, too, because you know it's the service and not some random collection of pieces held together by agreement and duct tape. Partitioning problems are pain enough with centralized services at scale, but they're worse with decentralized ones.)
Also, the promise that it's safe because you can check the source is really lost when, you know, you can't actually check the source for lack of time, skill or trust in the chain of trust.
I've never understood why P2P always goes for the end users.. in most cases it doesn't work for exactly the reasons you mention -- harder to set up, etc. (For some reason bittorrent became the exception that proves the rule.)
However, I think there must be something between true user-to-user P2P and completely centralised systems. Why not something like Twitter or Facebook but where lots of different people can set up servers, and accept users? The servers could exchange information and act like a "single" service with a standard protocol, and users would not need to set up a thing, only choose which server to use, but otherwise the experience would be more or less identical, with access to the same information and profiles, all cached and mirrored. (I call this myself a "federated P2P system", not sure if that's a good term.) Of course such a system would need some crypto support to ensure that data is not easily spoofed and man-in-the-middle modified, but different servers could offer different ways of curating news feeds, etc., and some competition on the front-end where all competitors have access to the same decentralised back-end data would be just fantastic.
I think one example of this was OpenID, which seems to have failed unfortunately. I always thought it was a cool idea. But it seems that people need more than just a common protocol, they really need a common entity to adhere to, they need to be able to say "I'm on X" and for everyone to know what that means and how to find them. And a single company with a single domain seems to provide that.
Unfortunately being open protocol and open source and all that, while well-intentioned, is simply no replacement for a really good marketing department.
About the only two successful federated communication systems I know of are phone network and e-mail. It doesn't matter who you pay your phone bill to, nor where your e-mail address is hosted, you are globally reachable. There might be something insightful in how those two systems started and what keeps them being relevant.
> Unfortunately being open protocol and open source and all that, while well-intentioned, is simply no replacement for a really good marketing department.
Indeed. And you can't fund a good marketing department if you don't resort to m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶e̶x̶t̶o̶r̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶a̶c̶t̶i̶c̶s̶ vendor lock-in and similar strategies. It's something that, by the way, I see as a direct cause of why so much products are utter shit nowadays - because marketing has much, much better ROI than actually making something useful.
>>About the only two successful federated communication systems I know of are phone network and e-mail.
And they were both developed by governments/universities with no profit motive. That should tell us everything we need to know regarding how to go about creating the next ubiquitous federated/distributed system.
IRC, usenet? Even email is usually implemented that way: few end users run their own SMTP servers in the basement.
They have one thing in common: nobody is polishing the brand, nobody is A/B-optimizing addictive properties, there is no startup success story in which users can feel included, rooting for their network of choice.
Oh, and changing a federated system not only requires unanimous decision, it requires unanimous investment. Did the protocols i mentioned feel a bit dated? Might be because of that.
I purposefully didn't mention IRC in a parallel comment because I don't see how it is federated. You always connect to a particular server and stay within its bounds; you don't get the shared space handled by multiple servers that are abstracted away. Or simpler, you say "I'm hanging out on channel #x on freenode", or "on QuakeNet", not "on IRC".
The isolation level you speak of is between networks, not between servers. This distinction might seem a little arbitrary since no centralized system of relevance is running on a single server either, but the key difference is still there: in the larger irc networks, the different nodes that form it are run by different organizations.
Splits are a possibility in any federated system and in systems with nonhierarchical, unique naming, any merge requires some amount of namespace violence proportional to the duration of the split.
What's the benefit of winds over other projects? Let me know, i'm looking for a native RSS experience to be honest. Although I love feedly, I'm tired of the fact that it doesn't have a mute feature.
No, it was designed to replace SMS. Hence the character limit.
And blogger is easy enough to use. Heck, my computer illiterate grandma was using it before she passed.
The problem is that blogging takes time and effort, and the vast majority of people have no interest in it. The only thing they want to do is share their fleeting thoughts and/or tidbits they have found elsewhere. Which they can do easily on their smartphones. Blogging though, not so much.
> blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people
But isn't this fixable? What about a service with a twitter-like UX, but where following people just subscribes to their announced rss-feeds. User profiles would be, at least under the hood, a list of user's own blogs (and the service would also provide twitter-like publishing) and followed rss feeds. You'd have the advantage of supporting most pre-existing blogs, but could also provide a great user friendly experience.
You'd also get twitter-like outages as 10k people all try to fetch the RSS from $semifamous at the same time. Or you get people burning their mobile data trying to fetch 2k RSS feeds multiple times per day. Or [any one of umpteen other problems people don't consider when proposing this solution].
A big issue with federated or, going even further, P2P alternatives to centralized platforms seems to be monetization. It's not so long ago that everyone seemed to be wondering if FB could turn a profit on their platform. What can an open, decentralized system do for revenue? Donations? Commercial tech support for node operators? It must pale in comparison with FB's advertising revenue.
This means a decentralized system can't beat a centralized one at marketing. Even with large resources, beating an established competitor is hard, but when the competitor has, and will always have, a huge edge in funds they can throw at user attraction, the problem seems insurmountable.
I agree, but I think a federated platform would look more like email. Very little advertising, mostly given away for free.
With a federated platform, that's possible because no single company is shouldering the entire cost. And users would migrate to the cheapest provider since they wouldn't be tied to any particular provider.
What does Facebook offer for all that money that is necessary, though? That is, why is monetization such a big deal for a communications platform? A marketing competition? There's no inherent need to participate in that.
A communications platform is useless if its user base is small; who will you communicate with? People have some limit on the amount of different communication platforms they can participate in simultaneously. The number one way to get more people on your communications platform is to have lots of people on it already; the number two way is convincing people to use it (that is, marketing).
Monetization is a big deal because communications service for 1.7B people is expensive, and Facebook is actually a very efficient system compared to regular telecom.
A centralized communications service for 1.7B people is expensive. Not that decentralized or federated services would be cheap, but the costs would be dispersed.
> Nobody except your echo chamber cares about using a distributed or user controlled system.
This is a straw man. Even people championing user controlled systems know that 99% of users would sell their soul to the devil for ease of use, or a UI with nicer colors.
Aye. Like television before them, people can consume twitter- and instagram- and facebook-borne content without engaging executive functions of the brain. Sadly this characteristic seems essential for truly mass appeal.
Forcing people to consider any aspects of federation will be an instant barrier to adoption that reduces the appeal by an order of magnitude, at least, and prevent any such service reaching critical mass.
He is correct in that distributed and user controlled are not highlight features of a successful product. This is something a lot of developers never seem to learn. It is the product that will succeed or fail despite what technology underpins it.
He is correct in that distributed and user controlled are not highlight features of a successful product. This is something a lot of developers never seem to learn. It is the product that will succeed or fail despite what technology underpins it.
Your project looks awesome. If you can package it into a standalone app, I'm sold. There's certain things I want in my browser and certain things I want to manage in a separate app.
I am getting tired of people seemingly ignorantly repeating "echo chamber" and using it every time someone mentions Twitter. Systems like Twitter provide great ways for disseminating information -- there is nothing inherent about these systems that makes them "echo chambers" and they're definitely not worse in that aspect than mass media or other social networks like Facebook. So stfu and approach the discussion constructively.
This is what the folks at https://tent.io were trying to do: create a messaging protocol that was decentralized (like email).
The problem is that it's hard to compete with momentum. People use Twitter because it's where all their friends, followers, and interesting people to follow are.
If you're going to create an alternative, it has to be able to hit critical mass.
Don't forget the free (?) advertising media gives them. Well media is who using it in the first place of course, but it's strange twitter is not able to leverage that to go more mainstream.
It's an echo chamber for journalists and activists. Normal people don't use twitter either, they use fb, instagram, snapchat.
Over the last few years there have been many open projects trying to displace the big names in social media, but none of them seem to have even taken baby steps into fulfilling their goals in becoming a widespread open standard. On the other hand siloed services, such as Slack, pop up out of nowhere and take the tech world by storm.
What is the solution here, because it just seems to be getting worse? I don't want all my data to be controlled by a single company, on the other hand I don't want to like like a hermit in a cave.
Free, open source projects generally suck at good UX and gaining momentum, and I'm not sure either of those is a solvable problem. Well sometimes you can fix it if there's a major corporate backer willing to fund a bunch of full-time devs, but that's not really consistently reproducible.
What if the corporate structure reserved ownership shares for the users, and/or per-impression ad revenue went directly to the content creators. Some way to keep control distributed instead of centralized, that is baked into the company charter from day 1.
I don't think that would really solve anything. You can go out and buy shares in Alphabet if you want, but if (without the funds of say Warren Buffet) you think that's going to stop them selling your data to advertisers, good luck.
I meant something where the content creators are the owners from day 1, and are always the owners, like a co-op. Then any profits left over after infrastructure costs get paid as a dividend proportional to the audience size of the content creators or the ad revenue they generate.
Somehow removing the middle man that is Alphabet, Twitter, facebook while still providing the infrastructure.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadGoogle lives off the open web. Two out of four of its main products depend on the open web:
1. Search - the less of an open web, the less is searchable by Google. Facebook is a classic example. 2. AdWords/AdSense - Facebook, CNN, BBC don't need it. They have their own networks, and they 're big enough to offer a "take it or leave it" approach.
(The only two main products not relying on Open Web is Google Cloud and Android).
Google actually had everything set up, a social network (blogger), a wall (reader), IM (Google Voice, email).
But they decided that FB is taking over. What did they do? They made "their own FB". Which solved no one's problems. Google+ had nothing over FB (except for circles, which FB promptly copied), and killed their old social apps.
Now their running around as a chicken without a head.
And a massive stampede of advertisers and small businesses blowing their whole marketing spend on said chicken
No worries
That's what newspaper execs said in the 90s
But that isn't the sentiment right now. Discoverability is really bad and one of the only solutions people can come up with are creepy targeted advertisements
Yet it's still going, more than a century later.
In the absence of alternatives, marketing money goes to advertising.
Every trend I see points to greater ad reach. AR + automated transportation means the web expands from your phone to your surrounding. Regulatory intervention could just firewall behavioral targeting and e-commerce in to existing platforms, making Google, Facebook, and Amazon far more powerful.
lol u srs? j/k <3
But I guess that if Blogger would be "open", so that other search engines could also index those blogs, then this whole scenario would not work (malignant search engines could expose everything to everybody). So my suspicion is that it would actually be quite hard (or at least require more research) to make an "open" version of facebook.
To me, Twitter benefits from being public discourse and an open forum for replies. On the other side of the coin, Facebook benefits from being a private forum (as most people use it).
Solutions that don't facilitate these use cases aren't going to be successful. Understand why people chose the services they did (discounting network effect) and then try and build something to compete.
Everyone was on blogs ten years ago. Had Google kept up their product, people wouldn't need to leave.
One could of course argue the value added by a typical facebook post, but let's not pretend that tens of millions of people were setting up blogs to keep their grandparents updated with pictures of their grandchildren.
Blogs are still here, I follow many of them and RSS is alive and kicking. Most people that had blogs before and produced long-form content are still there. The only problem is that the advertising well might go dry.
The thing that killed blogs as they are is that they're too serious. When signing up you need a title, subtitle, and input is optimized for long essays. Facebook is optimized for sign up, write your name, find friends, and post pictures, videos and sometimes text.
Really, if Google+ was Blogger Basic where you sign up, put AdWords, post pics, and it could have taken off.
They have an immense amount of data, easily matching and beating Facebook, with control at every layer including Android, Chrome, Google Analytics, Maps, Gmail and more, while also running the adtech infrastructure for 90% of the web. Publishers like CNN are not big enough to have their own networks and are constantly fighting a losing battle where Google is controlling ever more of the adtech supply chain. Even NYTimes runs Google's ad stack.
Sites today are really only left with custom executions using their production talents which is seen in the rise of sponsored/branded content, and Google is already making inroads there.
Search will always exist and always be massive, just as the open web will always exist and continues to grow. There will not be a consolidation into a single walled-garden, what you're seeing with Facebook is just another cycle that was repeated in the past with AOL and others. And search is still one of the best performing channels and will continue to get a majority of ad dollars online.
Google is also ramping up their Cloud Platform and have already overtaken AWS in some areas. Cloud computing stands to be an even bigger revenue source than their entire current ad business so they are well poised for the future.
I wouldn't underestimate this company anytime soon. They might have missed social (although not as much as you think, see Youtube) but there is plenty of opportunity out there.
So when the problem right now seems to be that people aren't being exposed to diverse viewpoints, I don't think something like this would necessarily help.
I also don't necessarily think that giving Twitter our public history is bad. I suppose you need an alternative if you want the things you type to be forgettable, but I'm not sure that represents very many Twitter users. If you are using Twitter, surely you intend to let people know how you stand now and how you stood in the past? There isn't really a pretense of privacy with Twitter, and I don't think there ever has been. It serves a completely different purpose from something like Facebook, where there is a greater expectation that access to your data will be limited.
The idea of a blog-based social media network already exists; it's called Tumblr. I think Tumblr is much closer to meeting the needs of the Author, so maybe that is a better model to start from. Users have more control of their content there, from length of messages and mixing content to basic formatting.
This is the first time I've seen Tumblr mentioned in overarching discussion of "what are we going to do about Facebook and Twitter?" that HN (and others) have been having recently.
OP's two main concerns about Twitter both stem from the fact that it's a centralized system belonging to one company:
1) It's a single point of failure; everything is lost if Twitter goes bankrupt.
2) Twitter holds and (more visibly, recently) is exercising supreme veto power over who gets to use their product and what they use it for. (Note: opinions diverge here; some think Twitter isn't effective enough at identifying and curtailing abuse; others think Twitter is censoring free speech. Both are possible because of centralization, both are bad.)
Tumblr is still centralized and thus solves neither of these concerns, but you are aware of that; you cited it as a possible model, not as a drop-in solution. But real, federated blogging already exists - OP is using Wordpress, not Blogspot, Ghost, etc. (Hey, you can even self host Wordpress! or Jekyll, Hexo, etc.)
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, basic tools exist for federated blog networking and discovery - RSS, blog rolls, search engines. Like OP, I think there is significant margin for improvement in the UX of those tools.
Tumblr's barrier to entry is almost nil - username, password, bam - but WP's free hosted option honestly isn't far behind. That kind of setup would work for average users. If it had good network/discovery tooling built into the platform using open standards, it'd be on par with Tumblr.
But on top of that, a user banned from free WP hosting has the option of buying shared hosting pre-installed with WP from another provider and still being able to participate. It goes down a continuum of ease-of-setup vs. degree of control through VPS to a machine in the basement.
"But why would you want people who get banned that much to still be able to publish?" People get bullied off Tumblr not infrequently through malicious mass reporting. The automatic thresholds are not that hard to trip; the people that suffer are the ones that have developed a following but are not "famous".
I've seen a webcomic artist disappear from Tumblr because they drew a panel of character A calling character B a virgin insultingly. A fan discussion developed over whether B was canon asexual. The artist contributed and said they weren't. This set off a whole bloc of users who started calling the artist heteronormative and a lot of other things, and they eventually mass reported the artist's accounts and got them banned.
Of course there are support channels to rectify this sort of thing, but the process, from what I've seen, is usually painful and slow and not guaranteed to be successful. If the artist gets their account(s) back (which the one in my story did), they now publish in fear of offending that one portion of their fandom, which both dampens their motivation to publish (usually not high for internet artists) and can result in work that panders to the disruptive fans, to the displeasure of the others who were enjoying the artist's original work. If the artist doesn't get their account back (refused by staff or too much trouble), they often lose irreplaceable artwork and history (though shame on them for not doing local backups). If they choose to open a new account, they have have to rebuild their fandom from scratch and PMs to whoever they have non-Tumblr connections with, or they will be found by the troublemakers again and basically be in the same situation as if the account was reopened except still missing all the archives. If both seem like too much trouble, they fold and are never heard from again.
Anyway, this kind of thing has happened to too many people that I was interested in who used Tumblr, which is what, three or so? Enough that it seems like a problem.
- - - -
- @RealJamesWoods
Federated XMPP?
There's already an alternative available, and it's growing: https://gab.ai
It doesn't solve the problem of giving your data to a company, but it's a hell of a lot more open and inclusive than any other platform.
https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/
Case in point, David Duke saying "you can't zog the frog":
https://mobile.twitter.com/DrDavidDuke/status/77773964892367...
ZOG = anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that the Jews secretly run most countries behind the scenes.
Don't agree? You must be a Nazi! A child's argument.
http://beforeitsnews.com/politics/2016/11/twitter-verifies-m...
Yes, Twitter is not perfect from business perspective, but users should not care.
Twitter is also not perfect from users' perspective, but it works and people use it. That is enough.
Mention of twitter is skyrocketing (election driven).
http://searchreddit.net/?relevance&direction=desc&view=analy...
Twitter rules in sports and politics..
http://searchreddit.net/?relevance&direction=desc&view=analy...
Twitter is at least easy enough for the average person or even dopey + clueless non-technical celebrity to add to their phone, search, and use normally.
Blogs give infinitely more customization options, and in theory are easy to setup, but in practice are still a lot more work and harder to setup. All of their advantages are for nothing when it takes a lot more work to setup compared to a Twitter account for the average person.
Regardless, Twitter is done for. They're trying in vain to achieve an impossible politically correct goal (all of their new safe spaces features to eliminate trolling and name calling) rather than actually innovating or coming up with a business model that can sustain them.
- hashtags (big aggregators are needed that can answer hashtag queries). Similarly, proposing new tweeters to follow, etc.
- receiving messages. This needs more than RSS, which is only a pull mechanism. It needs both push and pull.
Then there are social problems.
I don't know how far diaspora and OStatus/GNU Social have come. I think diaspora is more concentrated on building a software platform than on protocols (which if so I think is the wrong approach).
OStatus, i.e. thinking of communication protocols, is the right way to go. However it's very very difficult to agree not only on a common protocol, but also on data formats (what's a tweet, what is an album, etc.)
* The network of users present on the app * Quality of the mobile and desktop clients * Ability to have success promoting their own voice/ content
Decentralization kills innovation in the underlying protocol. (see email for a nice example of common standards holding things back). It also creates a situation were nobody can effectively monetize the platform. Which makes it hard to create a competitive product.
Sure, open standards work well for many things, don't think it will ever catch on for social networks though.
What ideas do you have for innovation? The only problem with email that I can think of is the lack of end-to-end encryption. But that's a social, not technical problem.
"the latest trend among tech nerds"
Focusing on the Everyman is essential if your criteria for value is a consumer mindshare natural-monopoly (and an exit for VCs) within five years.
The next five years will probably have less of those companies than the last five, and (if the tone of newspapers are anything to go by) ordinary people are becoming distrustful of large monopolistic companies.
Now seems like a good time to hack on what we want. I can't think of a better time for a new, open, social network.
"Why?", you may ask. Because around the world transparency and accountability is under attack. The many dangers of anarchic information (there are many) are mitigated by the many dangers of repression and influence operations globally.
The back and forth fight between the two is healthy.
I have made an "audio encoder" (https://github.com/quiet) and I've given some thought to how you might make a mesh tweet network on top of it, but real world constraints are hard.
Add APRS and regular ham radio.
I'm only half-joking, it would be pretty cool to have something like that! :).
Blogs may be better if you're e.g. a politician, philosopher or anyone who wants to distribute long-form content - but they're unusable if you like to engage in personal conversation.
I surely would not have found my last girlfriends without Twitter, just saying... it has unique advantages over FB, blogs, mail, Tinder and anything else out there.
So basically the blogger plans to start adding tweet-length blog posts, and otherwise will continue using both Wordpress and Twitter as they're intended to be used.
2. RSS is great, we've just launched this little open source project https://github.com/getstream/winds But by no means does RSS replace Twitter. RSS will never become mainstream like Twitter has (to some extent)
3. The author has a point about the various issues with Twitter's usability.
Why is this?
(TBH a centralized service actually feels better, too, because you know it's the service and not some random collection of pieces held together by agreement and duct tape. Partitioning problems are pain enough with centralized services at scale, but they're worse with decentralized ones.)
However, I think there must be something between true user-to-user P2P and completely centralised systems. Why not something like Twitter or Facebook but where lots of different people can set up servers, and accept users? The servers could exchange information and act like a "single" service with a standard protocol, and users would not need to set up a thing, only choose which server to use, but otherwise the experience would be more or less identical, with access to the same information and profiles, all cached and mirrored. (I call this myself a "federated P2P system", not sure if that's a good term.) Of course such a system would need some crypto support to ensure that data is not easily spoofed and man-in-the-middle modified, but different servers could offer different ways of curating news feeds, etc., and some competition on the front-end where all competitors have access to the same decentralised back-end data would be just fantastic.
I think one example of this was OpenID, which seems to have failed unfortunately. I always thought it was a cool idea. But it seems that people need more than just a common protocol, they really need a common entity to adhere to, they need to be able to say "I'm on X" and for everyone to know what that means and how to find them. And a single company with a single domain seems to provide that.
Unfortunately being open protocol and open source and all that, while well-intentioned, is simply no replacement for a really good marketing department.
> Unfortunately being open protocol and open source and all that, while well-intentioned, is simply no replacement for a really good marketing department.
Indeed. And you can't fund a good marketing department if you don't resort to m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶e̶x̶t̶o̶r̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶a̶c̶t̶i̶c̶s̶ vendor lock-in and similar strategies. It's something that, by the way, I see as a direct cause of why so much products are utter shit nowadays - because marketing has much, much better ROI than actually making something useful.
And they were both developed by governments/universities with no profit motive. That should tell us everything we need to know regarding how to go about creating the next ubiquitous federated/distributed system.
They have one thing in common: nobody is polishing the brand, nobody is A/B-optimizing addictive properties, there is no startup success story in which users can feel included, rooting for their network of choice.
Oh, and changing a federated system not only requires unanimous decision, it requires unanimous investment. Did the protocols i mentioned feel a bit dated? Might be because of that.
As for the rest of your comment, I agree.
Splits are a possibility in any federated system and in systems with nonhierarchical, unique naming, any merge requires some amount of namespace violence proportional to the duration of the split.
Twitter was designed to replace blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people.
Check me if I'm wrong, but isn't that ahistorical? Maybe it had that effect. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that that was the intent, though.
No, it was designed to replace SMS. Hence the character limit.
And blogger is easy enough to use. Heck, my computer illiterate grandma was using it before she passed.
The problem is that blogging takes time and effort, and the vast majority of people have no interest in it. The only thing they want to do is share their fleeting thoughts and/or tidbits they have found elsewhere. Which they can do easily on their smartphones. Blogging though, not so much.
No, it was a group messaging app which used SMS as the transmission method. Hence the character limit.
But isn't this fixable? What about a service with a twitter-like UX, but where following people just subscribes to their announced rss-feeds. User profiles would be, at least under the hood, a list of user's own blogs (and the service would also provide twitter-like publishing) and followed rss feeds. You'd have the advantage of supporting most pre-existing blogs, but could also provide a great user friendly experience.
But like you say, the fact is not enough people cared.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbs348/diaspora-the-per...
This means a decentralized system can't beat a centralized one at marketing. Even with large resources, beating an established competitor is hard, but when the competitor has, and will always have, a huge edge in funds they can throw at user attraction, the problem seems insurmountable.
With a federated platform, that's possible because no single company is shouldering the entire cost. And users would migrate to the cheapest provider since they wouldn't be tied to any particular provider.
This is a straw man. Even people championing user controlled systems know that 99% of users would sell their soul to the devil for ease of use, or a UI with nicer colors.
Forcing people to consider any aspects of federation will be an instant barrier to adoption that reduces the appeal by an order of magnitude, at least, and prevent any such service reaching critical mass.
The problem is that it's hard to compete with momentum. People use Twitter because it's where all their friends, followers, and interesting people to follow are.
If you're going to create an alternative, it has to be able to hit critical mass.
It's an echo chamber for journalists and activists. Normal people don't use twitter either, they use fb, instagram, snapchat.
What is the solution here, because it just seems to be getting worse? I don't want all my data to be controlled by a single company, on the other hand I don't want to like like a hermit in a cave.
Follow Dave Winer and absorb the lessons he has/is solving ~ http://scripting.com/2016/11/19/fasterScriptingcomHomePage.h...
Somehow removing the middle man that is Alphabet, Twitter, facebook while still providing the infrastructure.