How do people feel about using Facebook's technology like React in light of all this controversy? Is there any concern that there is cross over between the data harvesting and the engineering behind React etc.?
I'm honestly struggling to figure out what you even think might be the issue here – is it that you think React might be harvesting data from people's projects?
React is an open-source freely-licensed javascript library that you can self-host, so I don't see the problem with it just because it's maintained by Facebook.
Its a JavaScript library used for providing an abstraction over DOM manipulation, and is open source. It doesn't phone home to facebook with your mother's maiden name, and it doesn't have a single line of network code in its source code. Worse that could happen is facebook stops supporting it for some reason and a lot of engineering talent dedicated to it evaporates.
while Cambridge Analytica is clearly a horrible company the idea of gathering data and building some models to better target advertisement to them is something totally normal happening all over the place. And i don't think we can really dismantel the core of online advertising because of one shady company
I remember not thinking much of the whole CA story back when I read about it (few years ago?), but what makes me less certain about this is that they might have vastly more data to work with than I initially thought.
I'm not a data scientist though, so I'd really like to hear why that is/isn't a problem. Basically: assuming one has massive datasets that can be combined, how dangerous can even basic analysis be?
Dynamite is only interesting because it burns very quickly, in an energetic reaction. Things burn all the time, so I don't see why dynamite is all that interesting.
Evaluating something based on its known external traits without discussing the context in which they're used is an incomplete assessment.
It's not that CA is just gathering data and using that data to target ads. That's normal. But they've also been using fake news, spy operations, honeypots, and other tactics in order to manipulate people. They've even boasted about their ability to manufacture sex scandals by sending prostitutes to a political opponent. That goes above and beyond what is "totally normal happening all over the place".
>> I think the idea that Facebook is putting democracy in peril is a bit farfetched.
Why? History has proven at least a few times that he who controls information can control people, and it never ends well. Even if Facebook is not deliberately trying to implant any ideas or spread misinformation and fake news, its platform can be (and has been, demonstrably) used for this purpose.
There's some irony in the fact that the ongoing scandal is about Facebook partially relinquishing control of information to a third-party (in fact, all third parties), and that the implied remedy was for Facebook to keep total control of information to itself.
Any other social media can be abused in roughly the same way. Twitter has its bot problems, and I'm sure given enough popularity mastodon will face the same issues too.
A friend and I in highschool discussed the possibility of governments archiving and recording telephone calls and then using that data to figure out what people's political leanings were to tailor a manchurian candidate. This was years before social media.
Now people gladly give up their data for fame/notoriety.
> We have just realized that democracy and widespread, instant communication are incompatible.
I'd say that's absolutely not true - it's a demonstration that the republic system is broken. He lost the popular vote, yet still won. That's anti-democratic, whilst being pro-republic.
True democracy would still work fine if done pragmatically - have people, when registering to vote, be given a PGP key. Have them send in a cryptographically signed email with their vote - verify that it's from the right person. Maybe package it in a very simple GUI.
Instantly, everything impractical and or wrong about the current "democracy" we have is gone, and actual democracy can start taking place.
Not sure if you forgot the '/s' tag. Please consider how widely PGP is used, and how capable someone in the bottom decile of technical savvy would be of doing that.
I think it is important that our elections use systems that are readily comprehensible to laypeople.
Cryptography is, at its core, easy to explain to the layman. (PBS explained it fairly well on a kids' show a while back, I believe.) A GUI wrapper made to send secure emails isn't a particularly difficult thing for your average user, either.
You could make it as simple as downloading an app, going to get you physically registered, having the govt. official input relevant keys into the app, and then:
Type In Your Preferred Candidate Here: [INPUT BOX]
[SEND BUTTON]
With an automatic reply saying "Thank you for voting!" at the end of it.
Though it is possible to set up a GUI to do that, I don't think it is possible to do it in a way that makes it easy to confirm that the app is really doing what it claims to. You may be able to create a system where experts can verify the integrity, but I don't think you can create a computerized system where average people can independently verify the integrity of the system.
Paper, managed by trusted humans, really shines in this kind of task. Maybe some of the trusted humans will turn out to be dishonest, but it is much harder to commit large scale fraud and then cover it up.
Open-source the application, and have people check the checksums of the .IPAs and .APKs if they want to verify. A simple GUI wrapper for email wouldn't be particularly complicated implementation-wise, so it wouldn't take a security analyst to vet, either.
But the problems we had with the last election weren't caused by fraudulent voting. Everyone voted properly, it's just that another country spent some money convincing us to vote the way that they wanted us to. Even if we moved to a direct democracy system and gave everybody unbreakable crypto, it wouldn't stop them from watching TV and sharing junk on social media.
Remember, Trump lost the popular vote. If we had moved to a direct democracy system, assuming as little changes as you say will, he wouldn't be standing in the White House now.
The reason for crypographically secure voting is to stop any form of election-interference that could happen, because that naturally would be the biggest concern from moving to a digital solution.
Democracy is not in danger, this is exactly what democracy is.
Like it or not but he is quite a telling representative of a big part of the population.
And democracy means majority rules. As simple as that. Consider it in light of 80-20 %% rule.
That's not about democracy per se, that's electoral college/states specifics.
Still democracy in general is exactly "majority rules". In democratic society of 100 people opinion of 51 would be enough to trump and ignore whatever remaining 49 want.
Oh please give it a rest with the “popular vote” crap. Everyone knew the rules, and the very good reasons behind them. And we all know perfectly well that all this CA outrage would be a complete non-story if the other side had used them.
Completely agree. Just another example of people over reacting. The other fun part is people trying to explain how it was okay back in '12, but now it's a tragedy.
There will probably be something else to blame after facebook, until people realize there is an inherent problem with majoritocracy that just cant be solved. As the elites are unlikely to go back to authoritarian regimes, it will probably drag things towards libertarianism.
I'm reposting this comment because I would like to open the discussion up beyond facebook and social media and into the reality that technology has provided marketing with some pretty ridiculous tools. :
I feel like you used to be able to avoid getting swindled by ignoring the swindler, ex. close the door to the saleman, or ignore the gypsy pear salesmen at the market.
Today, marketing is engineered at such a level that it is difficult to acknowledge it's influence. That, and you are constantly bombarded by ads, either explicitly or implicitly.
I don't think I am saying anything novel. I guess I am curious what this means about society and our political systems. People with power and wealth could still be toppled when you exposed them to the truth. How in the fuck does that even come close to happening today? How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of? How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned?
This isn't meant as a rant. I am curious, because to the best i can tell we don't live in a society where voting matters and we have a say in our governance.
Nope, I meant pear - like the fruit. Maybe I got a little carried away and painted a silly picture.
My point is that you can ignore a salesmen and he can't possibly be THAT good that he can swindle everyone. But modern ads, IMO, are designed for high levels of success. Much more difficult to deal with that on a personal level.
Given the sophistication that we just now start to fully realize, adblockers probably dont help that much - i mean they get the obvious stuff out of the way, which is great. But there other forms of tracking (like super cookies), and others we might not even be aware of. The entire combination of what information some companies gather and exchange behind the scene is not that well understood at scale.
They can collect all they like, but if you never see any advertisements, it has little influence over you. I was not commenting on the violation of privacy these bad actors commit through the collection.
It's easy to ignore the ads if you know they are ads. What about sponsered content in movies, music, tv, news, etc? We have seen all of these used. The drive to promote a message to someone goes waay beyond advertising.
This discussion is veering off course. Well made adblocking removes 'native' ads as well. Product placement is irrelevant to my point, as it does not utilize my stolen demographic info to drive marketing decisions. And though you delude yourself into thinking that you are successfully ignoring ads they are still influencing you in subtle ways.
Exactly. Or that innocuous Medium post that just seems like some guy talking, when in fact it is a carefully crafted piece of psychological manipulation.
Lifestyle marketing isn't a new idea. It's part of what made tabacoo successful. But they were making educated guesses on what might work, i.e. the cowboy smoking.
The difference I see is that there is feedback on the ads other than sales and it seems like you could closely tailor ads to specific demographics.
I think the implications are way beyond what you see in your browser and perceive as ads.
Imagine a billboard, you drive and the content changes because your GPS is close to that billboard and stuff like that - real world changes like that will happen, if not already.
There is also the product placement and as Cambridge Analytica describes entire personas and website being made just to target individuals and change their perception and opinions - this can all be automated at scale with current technology.
Why would the reason ads bother you be relevant to my point. I was responding to your point about not being able to use the internet without an adblocker, which is something that's quite easy to do.
Maybe you meant to respond to a different comment thread? You seem to be confused as to the topic of this one.
The issue isn’t the ads that bother you. Its the ones that don’t. Everyone thinks of themselves as sceptical people, but we’re only sceptical of things we already don’t believe. The ads that don’t bother you, and the ones you don’t recognize as advertising are working on you just as much as the ones you don’t like.
On the occasions that I have disabled my ad blocker and visited major new sites, I found the ad experience made me greatly question the judgment of the sites editors.
How can I trust the authority of a news site, when I am also seeing clearly deceptive ads playing right next to their content?
Gypsy is considered a slur by some nowadays, probably shouldn't drop that casually anymore. Sorry, I hate language police too, I'm not actually offended just letting you know in case you drop it in a meeting someday.
I'd argue it's still possible to ignore it all, but you need three browser extensions and two mobile apps, a vpn, and probably a few other measures in place to pull it off. I feel like I'm sailing out to war with a well equipped battleship every time I launch my browser.
This is dumb. How did we let technology get so bad? How did we let the web become completely subverted?
Technology is not bad. There are bad people that use it. Generic i know, but these technologies had the potential to provide solutions to some problems we as a world we face.
Nuclear energy could have been proliferated to move to different energy source, instead it is was weaponized and used as a tool of politics. Cool for those guys i guess.
The same goes for big data. We could have collected data on everyone and mined that shit to gain more insight into all sort of things from medical to societal information that you just can't see in studies. We could have learned so much. But instead some smart guys figured out how to use it to convince you that you need a wi-fi crockpot and gerrymander districts in their favor.
Guns made killing people easier, ok. But you can't kill everyone in the world with one gun. Marketing used to be billboards, now it's in your life. The issue I have is that scale of the whole thing.
When the truth is exposed we the people stop using that service. Lets face it US congress in this current form isn't going to do anything about it or pass laws to protect us (the users). So we have to hurt these corps where it hurts, their ad revenue.
I have already deleted my FB account and am encouraging others to do the same.
> People with power and wealth could still be toppled when you exposed them to the truth. How in the fuck does that even come close to happening today?
I have doubts that this happened regularly in the past, usually wealthy/powerful were allowed to be toppled by their enemies. I don't know the details of how Weinstein got toppled after so many years of being protected, but my gut says that the people who were protecting him no longer felt like it was worth it to continue. In revolutions, it's not the people that overthrow the dictator, it's the court/army which allow the people to overthrow the dictator, in order for them to install a new dictator[0].
> How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of?
Become more aware of your vulnerabilities so as to be aware of when you're being exploited. I recommend mindfulness and then making note of when you're being triggered in either a positive or negative way. If you know the enemy and yourself, you need not fear the result of a thousand battles[1].
> How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned?
As these systems become more complex it requires more energy and complexity to maintain the systems, this additional complexity creates a larger attack surface and more internal fragility. Solving these problems requires more energy and complexity, exacerbating the problem and delivering diminishing returns on additional complexity. Systems should to be designed to collapse in a way that minimizes losses of knowledge (especially of why they collapsed) and with mechanisms to recover quickly using the accumulated knowledge to build more robustness into the new system, this would be an anti-fragile system. Centralized, too big to fail, institutions (Facebook, et al) are a major component of fragility in our current systems[2][3][4].
I think you can avoid the marketers and advertisers by learning how they operate, nobody gives away shit for free, so anybody that claims that is either a marketer/advertiser trying to lure you into a bait/switch or is using you as the product (TANSTAAFL). Be flexible and avoid lock-in to any single service/company, always be ready to drop a service when they start acting against your interests or the interests of society as a whole.
Amazingly, I haven't yet read any of Diamond's work, though I think I have this on my bookcase.
I know that Tainter has criticized him some for cherry picking in order to support his presuppositions, specifically regarding his Easter Island ideas. I think he talks about it a little bit on this Omega Tau podcast:
I like his methodology, mainly because of a couple reasons. 1) We don't have that many civilization level societies to study in history, and 2) no society specifically sets out to implode, in fact there is tremendous benefit in not doing so. So even if we only had one collapse to study, we probably should do so and learn as much as we can from it, careful not to put too much value in the 'this time it's different' thing for our own prospects.
I appreicate your thorough response and giving me all these resources to dig through.
I think that in the past you had to be a very intelligent machiavellian-type dude to stay in power and it was a constant struggle. You probably had to be a very good at reading people and understanding their psyche. But there are only so many such guys and they can only manipulate so many people.
I think technology has given people with power and money the ability to automate influence on a much larger scale for cheap. Not that technology is bad. Technology makes hard problems easier. It can make all those things that a smart person had to constantly work on repeatable and consistent. When i think of data mining the last thing on my mind is product ads. I think gerrymandering. I tip my hat to the evil genius that figured out how to draw districts like that. I bet you could get most of that data from people's facebook. Even without that though, using other data you could get. And even if you dont have any digital data available, you can probably be classified based on a few facts. And......your vote is null now.
What I struggle with is the fact that now influence is global and widespread and I can't for the life of me figure out how that gets reigned in. It's kinda mindblowing.
Yeah, technology is basically a lever that increasingly grants larger power multipliers to those with access.
When high leverage technology is more accessible then it becomes a leveler for the playing field. When it's available only to those who already hold power, then it tips things drastically in whatever direction they wish and typically makes things drastically more uneven (though the Gates Foundation and others do apply their power/tech toward leveling sometimes).
I think this is one of the effects that makes our current society more fragile... bad actors (big and small) can create enormous impacts with minimal resource, and because of the nature of the Second Law, it's far easier to destroy than it is to create.
Just look at this data breach, it took enormous effort (relatively) to create a platform to identify, gather and organize all this personal data, yet look at how easily it slipped into the hands of bad actors. Bad press for FB, less trust in social networks, and who else has access to this data set? A small team who also managed to hack something like 23AndMe or another useful dataset with additional information will be able to create an even more powerful dataset with a laptop and some python scripts. Combine that with more advanced CRISPR technology and I don't even know could be possible, it's the stuff of sci-fi thrillers though.
You're absolutely right to be concerned, but I don't think this can be reigned in. The UN isn't in any position to regulate the global network, and the modern economy/society can't afford to create walled national networks, plus policing them would just be another layer of complexity.
I think the best we can do is get ready. All of this complexity will become a drag on economic growth (which requires constant gains to maintain itself, especially in the face of massive deficit spending), which will continue to lead to societal unrest and political instability... AI and robots will exacerbate the complexity and fragility more than they alleviate it and climate change, with the more volatile weather system, will create increasing opportunities for black swans to create enormous set backs.
It's unfortunate, but Russia and China are going to be in a much better position to take advantage of the increasing uncertainty and chaos than the US and EU (dictators are shitty, but much more efficient in uncertain times). I recommend moving to Australia or New Zealand if you're not looking to get caught up.
I like the lever analogy a lot. Mainly because it is scientifically accurate, the longer a lever the less force is required. Archimedes saw the value is this tool in his quote 'Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the Earth with it'.
> though the Gates Foundation and others do apply their power/tech toward leveling sometimes
can you elaborate on this some more?
I like science and technology as much as the next guy and I didn't think I'd say this, but IMO it's contributing to a continually decreasing quality of life. A part of me gets excited with new gadgets, like smartTV and Alexa, and another part of me cringes at it. I kinda get where Ted Kaczynski was coming from when he turned against technology and industry.
> I recommend moving to Australia or New Zealand if you're not looking to get caught up.
Why there?
The Gates Foundation has helped to eradicate polio and has worked on other projects to help alleviate the suffering of those in extreme poverty. Same with the Carter Foundation and guinea worms.
> I like science and technology as much as the next guy and I didn't think I'd say this, but IMO it's contributing to a continually decreasing quality of life.
I get the sentiment, my gut says the same, but in terms of actual progress we're still doing pretty well. I'm in the middle of Pinker's Enlightenment Now and it's hard to argue with his data... however, I do believe he is missing some other effects regarding fragility and complexity that he hasn't addressed (yet).
Every time my phone rings and it's a robot on the other end, pretending to be a human, my world darkens and I also have a brush with Kacynski level thoughts, though.
Australia and New Zealand are just a nice mix of being geographically positioned away from the big flash points of global conflict and having democratically elected governments. NZ also learned a lot about robustness and preparedness from their recent earthquakes.
True, but AI/robots are also complex systems which depend on additional complex systems and have many internal fragilities and external attack surfaces that can be exploited.
The class that controls the robots/AI become the de facto enforcement class, a la the army/police/praetorian guard.
If you say that the AI won't be controlled, then I don't have anything left to say on this subject because it's a rabbit hole I've been down too often lately.
I really hope more people join mastodon or one of the other federated social networks. But it is hard to make the point that it could replace the utility of facebook (especially messenger, events, search)
I think the utility of fb as you describe it is easy to replicate regardless of your social network structure. However, it is difficult to get past the enormous network effect advantage that existing social networks already have. Fb and twitter logos abound in any sports or news broadcast. That’s the hurdle for any up-and-coming social network.
Lacking a very rarefied community capable of self-moderation, like this site has or some specialized reddits and forums, the no-real-name becomes a major drawback. A minority of douche-bags will generate a majority of noise and will come to shape that world in their image.
This is quite visible when browsing Mastodon instances, many of which look like a crossbreed of 4chan with Myspace. Most accounts don't have a real picture. The fact people assumed their real identities, cared about what they said and did, and that you could find real people knowing only their name was one of the key ingredients to the success of early Facebook.
Furthermore, the whole "no data collected" has any value from the perspective of the user only when using real names. Otherwise, I really couldn't care less about data attached to an anonymous account.
The real name policy doesn’t seem to stop duplicate accounts, bots, and spammers on FaceBook or Twitter, it just ensures they have vaguely human names.
That's quite a different issue, is it not? The spam bots come because the social network is successful, as they will come to any other network regardless of real name policy.
What I'm saying is that anonymous accounts will prevent that success in the first place, because of the behavior of non-spam users. At least for a mass market product most regular folk would want to use, like Facebook.
> Furthermore, the whole "no data collected" has any value from the perspective of the user only when using real names.
That might be true for you, but I've more than once had to ditch an old nick because over time I'd let slip enough specifics that identifying me would be (theoretically) possible. It's all a matter of degrees, but 'no data collected' is definitely valuable.
Unfortunately, real and legal are often conflated by people making and supporting these policies. Many of those names may in fact be real even if they don't match your expectations of what a real name looks like.
I can't use my real name on Facebook because I can't get a legal name change. So I don't use Facebook.
Facebook and Google have their tentacles in nearly everything. If you want to get a message out, it's going to intersect with their platforms in some way, even if you're directly criticizing them. AFAIK, there are no purist corners at this time that attract enough eyeballs.
"Tiring and meaningless" eh? As opposed to your meaningful and engaging strawman reply?
Even if it were true that an essay or article couldn't be disseminated effectively without Facebook getting involved at some point, it doesn't mean that readers must be burdened with a popup that asks them to log in to Facebook before viewing.
It seems nearly every single post where someone suggests people delete their Facebook accounts always has some comment pointing out that the NYT, or Medium, or whatever the article was published has a Facebook share widget or something like that.
IMHO, those comments might as well be "First Post!" for all they add.
> it doesn't mean that readers must be burdened with a popup that asks them to log in to Facebook before viewing.
The first step to that world is getting people off Facebook so it's not so ubiquitous that making a request like that seems reasonable.
This comment thread is taking place on site with no (obvious or well known) google or facebook integrations.
Honest question, do you think the same content with same title with a different domain rather than 'medium.com' could not reach similar popularity on HN?
Any comment pointing out hypocrisy is valuable and interesting in my opinion. I prefer to disregard the opinions of hypocrites.
> Any comment pointing out hypocrisy is valuable and interesting in my opinion. I prefer to disregard the opinions of hypocrites.
That's actually a pretty closed minded position. I don't think there's a single person who isn't a hypocrite in some small way, even ascetics living alone in the desert. You'll disregard all of them?
Hypocrisy doesn't logically invalidate anyone's arguments or positions, those need to be evaluated on their own. If they make good points but fail to live up to them, it only demonstrates their own personal moral failings.
But I think it's also a mistake to count "publishing something about deleting Facebook on a website with a Facebook integration" as hypocrisy. Authors usually aren't the ones making implementation decisions of the platforms the publish on, and are probably not even aware of most of them.
> Honest question, do you think the same content with same title with a different domain rather than 'medium.com' could not reach similar popularity on HN?
HN isn't the world.
I think it's a waste of time for an author to make the avoidance of publishing platforms with Facebook integrations a priority. It would be an act of foolish, unpragmatic purism, akin to a lot of the stuff Richard Stallman does. It's more important that they argue persuasively and widely to convince the implementors to avoid such integrations.
If you need to preface a comment with 'IMHO', especially when your HO is just a dressed up and unsubstantiated insult, it's probably an indication that what you're about to say will add zero value to Hacker News.
Dude, you are insufferable. Quit being so pretentious and passive aggressive, and you won't have to nuke your HN account every few months and start fresh.
So I question the sustainability of these platforms? How are they supported when they have sufficient mass? If they aren't gathering data on users and selling ads then how are they generating revenue?
> If they aren't gathering data on users and selling ads then how are they generating revenue?
Maybe they take donations, maybe you run your own instance and pay for the hosting. Not having shareholders that expect profits and growth probably takes a lot of the pressure off, too. All they have to do is not have burdensome costs or break even.
I definitely don't think the current people running it are trying to be the next Zuckerberg. But you do have to have people working full time and pay for server costs, electricity, etc. A distributed system would be interesting, but is that what they are doing? At this point is it purely developers volunteering their time and money (along with donations)? I can't see donations supporting this type of thing at a larger scale.
I'm just wondering how they are getting the capital to scale.
It's decentralized. Larger instances are funded by patreon donations, while smaller ones are usually run by the folks that use the instance.
The decentralized nature helps the network scale.
And yeah, it's an open source project funded by donations. Plenty of those exist, and if it gets big enough, it'll get more contributors and donations.
Decentralized platforms aren't a business. The decentralized model scales remarkably well for a very small cost because there are hundreds (or thousands!) of instances that run at a small scale and communicate with the broader network. Many volunteers run small instances that cost only a few dollars a month to maintain and are often supported by donations from the users of that instance. You can even run your own instance if you want. Even if one instance fails the network as a whole doesn't even feel it. The financial model is totally different and very sustainable, much more so than the proprietary model even.
If I am reading fb history correctly they had a business (apple and party poker ads) even when they were distributed (one server and mysql db per school).
They were never distributed as a business, even if they were distributed as a product or as a tech stack. Mastodon allows unconnected people and organizations to make hugely disparate investments in "connection technology" with potentially very different business models. Server A may require a monthly subscription from each of its clients, Server B may be getting micropayments from 0.001% of its clients, server C may be running completely free just for somebody's close friends. All these financial models can coexist on the same platform.
Some are also small servers run purely for the hell of it; if you keep the user count low it really doesn’t cost much to keep one running. These instances are of course more vulnerable to their owner being hit by a bus or whatever and not having shared their keys with anyone. Less so once account migration lands, and everyone’s gotten off their butts and upgraded their instances to that version.
(My instance, by example, currently has about 150 accounts, closed registration, and costs about twenty bucks a month to run. It’s also a few versions behind because I’ve been busy with other things.)
mastodon.rocks is the saddest story. They had no backups, and lost the database upgrading to the version that would have let its thousands of users back up their own accounts.
Both Mastodon instances I use are run by people working in tech and have limited registration. I doubt it's a huge burden, but I'd help spread a Patreon/Liberapay if they started one.
It's a relative to the RSS model [ETA: or email is maybe a better analogy]. Scaling happens naturally as both more instances show up (scaling out) and individual instances scale up.
Every instance's own business model is often somewhat unique.
My primary instance at this point is on a domain I registered ages ago that I point to a SaaS host that runs and keeps up to date a growing number of small instances. I'm their customer and I expect them to charge me fairly based on my instance usage (CPU, bandwidth, et al) appropriately subsidized by their scale versus if I was booting my own VMs/containers and running it elsewhere.
If the worst happens, I expect I can move my business elsewhere, and given I control my domain itself, I can (use a data backup to bootstrap a new instance somewhere else and just point my domain DNS to the new instance).
There are a variety in business models among instances and the people hosting them.
Reputation! And I don't mean some convoluted algorithmic scoring system.
Most people seem to find out about Mastodon from someone, and that someone suggests the instance they're on. That's why a lot of artists end up on Mastodon.art, for example. So far, the admin has a good reputation for being consistent about updates and keeping the community engaged.
People keep trying to find some technological heuristic to establish trust, like requiring legal names or some kind of scoring system. So far, it's even worse because people encode all their cognitive biases into it and none of the mental models or processes people develop for checking those biases.
An instance could have good reputation and still be malicious in terms of privacy and what is done with your data.
In this sense, trusting a Mastodon instance with your data is the same as trusting a Bitcoin exchange with your money. Bitcoin is decentralized too, that doesn't make Bitcoin exchanges trustworthy.
In the end you have to trust somebody. If you can't trust your instance admin, you can run your own, (even single-user),instance, however that still doesn't protect you from your host provider being malicious etc.
This would involve a buttload of people independently deciding they want to run a Mastodon instance and setting one up in a location convenient to themselves and the community they want to serve.
Anyone (or any organization) can self-host their own open source mastodon instance. The way it scales is the same way there are billions of email accounts - federation and an open protocol.
Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg. If a fully featured app or service is free, then you are the product. Collecting and selling user information is pervasive.
I think Mozilla has some weird structure where it's a non-profit foundation that happens fully own a for-profit corporation. I'm not an expert on the topic, though, so maybe that counts? Probably depends on the state where it's incorporated.
The only big PBCs I've ever heard of were hospitals and private colleges. But you are right that the way Mozilla is set up, it is focused more on pushing the technology and mission of the foundation forward rather than on delivering share price increases or dividends to shareholders.
I'm using an unfederated node of Madtodon running on a Raspberry pi with Let's Encrypt certs as a private family social network. Works well and family response has been massively positive.
You can disconnect while staying connected on your own terms.
Convincing - tried it with just my partner first and smoothed out some rough edges. I then sent a group email to extended family that included a brief justification, some screen shots of it in action, a picture of the actual server, and an offer to create an account for them. Transparency, ease of use, and privacy were all important factors.
Most live far away and have griped about various facets of Facebook but felt like it was a necessary evil. This has been a good alternative for daily communication, discussions about weather and children, and so forth. The closest to game support is sharing crossword solving times with a hashtag.
Nope. It's more similar to Twitter (chronological timeline), but without promoted messages / "you may have missed" types of features.
Event Invitations is one of the few uses of FB that I still have. I'm open to alternatives that simplify facilitate threaded discussions between those who were invited, but as with any system convenience is a factor.
Google Calendar does work, yet somehow (and ironically) seems more intrusive than Facebook in that you're communicating directly with emails; the younger the participant, the greater the lack of enthusiasm for emails.
+1 on this. This is one of the things I also haven't been able to find replacement for outside of FB yet.
I guess it might be because it it almost too simple of a problem, to easy so no one makes a solution all can come together on. All an event mostly is is a message thread to which you can pin some information about when and where, right? In that case I would almost say the functionality is probably already there. Just that we have to change how we do things.
well done for the DIY social network and getting your family onboard!
I read the docs on how to get an instance up and running, but couldn't find details on how to "unfederate" it. Would you care to share some details?
Mastodon is cool technology. The problem is Facebook fills a hole that Mastodon does not. Facebook connects people in real life. Folks from varying distances are able to keep up with their friends and family. There's a built-in desire to monitor their conversations. They're rewarded with "reactions". Facebook provides value for a very large group of people.
A relatively small group of people saw a problem with Facebook. Of course they have to have some underlying goal to make money. So they set out to create a federated system anyone can host that doesn't depend on some central company that's just out to make a buck. It's a noble goal, but it solves a problem that most users of Facebook simply don't care about. It doesn't do the thing that Facebook does, so it's a non-starter.
I'd also add that Mastodon is more of a Twitter replacement than a Facebook replacement. Facebook is better at isolating your feed into your group of "friends". Mastodon is more of a river of information from folks you follow (many of whom you will never meet in real life.)
If you want to replace Facebook, first figure out what people value about Facebook and expand on that. You'll need to be better than they are (at least until people determine they're that awful.) Then look at how you can federate it or achieving whatever other goal you have.
I'd also add that Mastodon is more of a Twitter replacement than a Facebook replacement. Facebook is better at isolating your feed into your group of "friends". Mastodon is more of a river of information from folks you follow (many of whom you will never meet in real life.)
I noticed this as well, and it's something I've come across in the past when checking out Facebook alternatives. Most seem to only be a replacement on a superficial level.
"Folks from varying distances are able to keep up with their friends and family" - this is literally the only reason I have a Facebook account.
Most of my family is not very tech-savvy so asking them to use something like Mastodon to see family pictures or whatever is pointless. Even if they did try to use it, all of their other friends and family are on Facebook so asking them to use Mastodon just for me adds one more thing/app to their list that they are probably going to use maybe twice and then just stop.
I really wish there was a good alternative to this but I haven't been able to find anything (yet) :(.
As far as I've seen, this doesn't provide new information, so it just reads to me like "Developer of startup social media platform agrees with bandwagon: please consumers, stop using the product of our biggest competitor"
Perhaps because it's something distinctively different than the typical HN posts of startup X raising 5 trillion series G funding and Musk going to Andromeda in 2003?
Something I can't figure out from Mastodon's website is where and how it uses cryptography.
I fear it might all be plaintext, despite the insanity of doing that in the present post-Snowden world, rather than the appropriate end-to-end combined with point-per-point encryption.
It's not encrypted afaik at all, besides https but that would be up to the host of the instance. Where do you want the encryption to happen and how? Anyone can federate with you.
They're neither "followers-only" nor "private" if there's no encryption.
Even if both me and my followers do run their own Mastodon servers.
This is terrible indeed. How is this any better than twitter? At least, for private tweets and such, they'd need a court order to get the information from twitter.
For the life of me I can't remember where I originally read this quote, but it forever changed my perspective of FB. Paraphrased: "Facebook is 3 things: the wall, the messaging, and an automatically updating rolodex." Many apps fill 1 and/or 2, but nothing satisfies #3. There is no alternative.
For better or for worse: I want to stay in touch with people I've met in the oddest places. In the middle of bumsquash Uruguay, people who had barely ever heard of Europe, but they had Facebook. All of them. The only place on earth where this wasn't true was China, in my experience.
So, no, I won't #deletefacebook. I've stopped using it meaningfully a long time ago, but until something becomes a reliable, multi-decade spanning auto-updating rolodex, I'll have to stay here.
Mastodon will never, ever, not in a billion years fill that gap. And I don't need more alternatives for #1 and #2, so there dies that dream for me.
Honestly, I think this is more a problem of perception than anything else. For one thing, loss aversion makes us think we'll miss things way more than we'll do (see also: FOMO). Losing contact with people mostly involves not thinking about them. If you don't think about them, you don't miss them either. Friends come and go in life, it's natural. And if you did miss them, you'd put in work to keep in touch through other means.
I know because I have a circle of close friends that I only see once or twice a year, but stay in touch with through email. Guess what: it works. And if you migrate, you just email your friends about it.
Similarly, although I don't know if this is generally possible in every country, but I have diligently carried over my first mobile phone number from carrier to carrier. When I moved abroad to Sweden for a few years, I switched to the absolute cheapest minimal carrier to essentially "invest" in keeping that phone identity. This means that people who met me as far back as the late nineties can still reach me on it. Friends that I have made later even know they can rely on this, that this is my "policy". I'm about to leave Sweden for Germany. Still keeping that Dutch phone number. In fact, I'm leaving it with all of my friends here, and use it for all the messaging apps that rely on phone numbers.
And finally, just claim your own bit of internet and get a website. Your friends can search for you.
> Losing contact with people mostly involves not thinking about them. If you don't think about them, you don't miss them either.
This is so far removed from how I interact with the world around me that I have a hard time empathising. I’ll keep it scientific and factual: more than once, I’ve gone back to a place I visited over a decade ago. I went on Facebook, found the person that used to live there, got in touch, and had varying types of “fun”, as humans call it. The crucial point here is that I can’t tell in advance which places, until I decide to go.
I… your suggestion for the future is to “not think about them”? Ehh.. no thank you?
>The crucial point here is that I can’t tell in advance which places, until I decide to go.
You should have the foresight to write down their contact details. You meet a person, exchange contact details. Save it in your phone or cloud or what ever. Is that too hard? Will you run out of storage space if you save contact info for every person you meet? But hey, that requires a moments thought. Am I going to have to contact this person? No, we can't spent working a couple of neurons for that thought. I think people should use their heads more. To exercise fore sight. To actually remember birth dates etc, to plan things with out constantly "updating" on a mobile phone/social media...
> This is so far removed from how I interact with the world around me that I have a hard time empathising.
Maybe. Or maybe you completely misunderstood what I said:
> I… your suggestion for the future is to “not think about them”? Ehh.. no thank you?
I didn't suggest anything of the sort. I claimed that when I lose touch with people, it is because they're not on my mind, and am I not being reminded of them through external means (like Facebook). Per definition you cannot really miss something that is not on your mind, now can you? This isn't a conscious decision, it's just an acceptance of the fact that I cannot know everything, and that everything must pass. If they are on my mind, however, I choose to take action and stay in touch.
So the real reason you can't empathise with me is that you're not understanding me. I am not telling you to not think about friends. I am saying: would you have remembered and missed someone if Facebook hadn't reminded you of their existence? Are you even aware of how many people you have met that you don't remember? Do you miss them? Hint: you don't, again by definition.
Think of advertising and how much of it revolves around creating the feeling that you are missing something and that this void needs to be filled, or that you are missing out on something that really, you don't.
> more than once, I’ve gone back to a place I visited over a decade ago. I went on Facebook, found the person that used to live there, got in touch, and had varying types of “fun”, as humans call it.
Real classy implication that I am a robot there.
Look, I do this all the time myself. Tell me where I am stating anything that would suggest I don't. The only part where I disagree with you is the implication that Facebook is the only way to find old friends.
In fact, the opposite is true: putting in the effort to track someone down is immensely gratifying and builds connections in ways that "staying in touch" via seeing each others Facebook timeline isn't. I put effort into staying in touch with the people I love. Very robotic, clearly.
Meanwhile, Facebook creates this false sense of safety, of still being part of a community we don't actually put effort in, because our brains think that popping up on each others Facebook wall a good enough approximation of actual IRL contact to be nearly fooled by it.
> The crucial point here is that I can’t tell in advance which places, until I decide to go.*
I fail to see how this affects anything about your supposed need for Facebook? I know where most of my old friends live. Whenever know I'm going to visit their city, I send them an email, a text message, or even a hand-written letter on occasion.
For me there's a #4: shared interest groups. There is nowhere else online that people in my town are all discussing local matters together, or.. things like the New York Times podcast listeners club, various car groups, etc.
It being an automatically updating rolodex is the issue. Live without this luxury so that people can maintain their freedom to privacy. Keep in mind that even if you don't care about your own freedom to privacy, you using these services removes everyone else's freedom to privacy, even when they have not consented.
For me at least, there is one app that's starting to mitigate #3 (if not specifically "fill" the gap): WhatsApp. Granted, it's also owned by Facebook, so we're almost back at square one, but it's still an interesting case simply because it doesn't fill the gap, but rather works around it. Which gives me a bit more hope that other tools could too.
WhatsApp does two things:
1. Creates a network from your (possibly completely offline) "rolodex" (phone contact list). And augments these contacts with info specific to their ecosystem.
2. Adds discovery. Through groups, I can connect with new contacts. Similar to Facebook's "suggest friend" feature.
My general point here is the an autoupdating rolodex is only required in a closed ecosystem. WhatsApp does do it's level best to close off its ecosystem, but it's a different paradigm to Facebook, and one currently dependent on existing phone numbers, so it ends up a little more open, and for me seems like a nice demo of how hooking into existing networks (people's saved contact lists) can get you pretty far.
Its definitely the latter. Not because there is something inherently bad about staying in touch. It is because you do so despite the knowledge that you are not doing it at zero cost to others who care about their privacy. Analogy: I wish I could just throw all my garbage over into my neighbors premises rather than walk all the way down to the recycle bin. But I don't. I am actually violating their personal space. By using Facebook, you are also violating the privacy of folks who disagree with your view, and this is now open knowledge.
And things don't even out if my neighbors are also doing the same to their neighbors over on the other side (but, but, everyone is on Facebook!). Ultimately, all of us will end up living amidst a pile of stinking garbage, which is an excellent analogy to what is happening with social networks today.
For better or worse, I consider myself a fairly principled person. That is, I’ve chosen to live my life in a way that reflects my convictions.
...
I’ve known that Facebook, the company, doesn’t line up with my politics for a while and have written about (almost 2 years ago) how uncomfortable the site makes me feel.
I've seen some pretty stupid analogies in my time, but the idea that logging onto a web service other people use to broadcast stuff they want to broadcast to the world is "violating their personal space" in a manner akin to covering their lawn in trash is going to take some beating.
I have seen some pretty stupid replies in my time, but a reply espousing the idea that someone who doesn't get the actual analogy will have a pet list of "pretty stupid analogies" is going to take some beating.
Revealing something about you reveals something about everyone around you too. Facebook happens to have the means to correlate all this information, and use it to its advantage.
It's not just looking at what others broadcast. Facebook keeps track of your likes, your navigation patterns, and let others access that. So not only do they know what your friend broadcast, they know who is watching, when, how frequently.
Finally, there's the social pressure. I have been a victim 2 years back: forced to subscribed to Facebook because my orchestra were using it to communicate loads of important information (I have since deleted that account). By watching your friend's broadcast on Facebook, you contribute to, or at least fail to counter, that social pressure.
That said, I reckon you're probably a victim that social pressure as well. I won't throw the first stone.
I've known several people that have changed email addresses several times in the last decade, but their FB profile has been stable and always shown the most current email address.
Some of them are less technically proficient that rely on whomever their current ISP or employer is for email. Some of them are more technically proficient and use changing email addresses as an Inbox Zero technique or as a nuclear option in spam fighting.
I have actually done fine with a cronjob and emails for the last 7 years or so.
Releasing the cronjob whenever I'm finished making it a chrome extension. I suppose this business is a pretty good inducement towards getting done a bit faster.
I'm sorry but I just don't buy that as anything more than an excuse because Facebook is so good inducing an addictive response. People have been staying in touch without the likes of Facebook for far longer than Facebook has existed. My wife's grandmother, for example, has reconnected with people she hasn't seen in 70 years. All without Facebook. Sometimes they call. Sometimes they write. If one is going to be in town where the other lives, they plan ahead to meet up.
It is clearly possible to do without Facebook and the fact that people use the "but how will I stay connected to my friends/how will I know about events" lines so much proves just how good Facebook has gotten at keeping people addicted.
I would encourage you to disable your account and stay off of it for six weeks. I think you'll be surprised at the results.
Wouldn't this (Auto updating rolodex) be something trivial to add to any other platform? On almost every forum one can always click on the username and see post history and a bio. As long as the the fields of interest are included (phone/email/etc) it would serve the same purpose.
As usual its the critical mass problem but facebook has done nothing particularly technologically inovative.
> For the life of me I can't remember where I originally read this quote, but it forever changed my perspective of FB. Paraphrased: "Facebook is 3 things: the wall, the messaging, and an automatically updating rolodex." Many apps fill 1 and/or 2, but nothing satisfies #3. There is no alternative.
Have you considered that maybe there cannot be a facebook replacement that won't suffer the same problems? Deleting facebook isn't a painless thing to do, it requires some sacrifice on your part.
I don't care about events, but I'd like my friends and weak ties to easily be able to keep up with what's going on with me. The only alternatives I can think of is signing them up all for a mailing list, or starting a website/blog. But if I don't want my blog to be public, I'm faced with doing something like setting up a wordpress blog with membership, and asking them all to register and sign in to see my semi-private blog.
Unless there's a free / open-source blog system with a decentralized federated SSO system, where everyone can choose to friend up (probably one-way, not two-way) to follow each other's feeds? I suppose like mastodon, but for long-form or free-form writing?
Critical mass is just one of those things that will be a flaw until it isn't.
Facebook has this "decisive competitive edge" in that the fact that it is seen as the only alternative is what reinforces it being the only alternative. It's good that these other solutions are free and open source because most commercial competition would dry up and fail.
But for these things that bump along and grow slowly in a sustainable way, they might actually approach an inflection point where things will snowball. At least I hope so!
If you're thinking about using Mastodon, the CounterSocial[1] instance is worth considering. It's run by "The Jester"[2][3], who has experience running secure/hardened systems, and who takes more of an active role in countering bad actors.
It's an instance that promotes U.S. hegemony, imperialism and exceptionalism. It's an instance that i.e. brands Iran as hostile, but doesn't acknowledge our hostility towards them etc.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadI'm not sure I understand what you mean here.
I'm not a data scientist though, so I'd really like to hear why that is/isn't a problem. Basically: assuming one has massive datasets that can be combined, how dangerous can even basic analysis be?
Evaluating something based on its known external traits without discussing the context in which they're used is an incomplete assessment.
Why? History has proven at least a few times that he who controls information can control people, and it never ends well. Even if Facebook is not deliberately trying to implant any ideas or spread misinformation and fake news, its platform can be (and has been, demonstrably) used for this purpose.
Any other social media can be abused in roughly the same way. Twitter has its bot problems, and I'm sure given enough popularity mastodon will face the same issues too.
Now people gladly give up their data for fame/notoriety.
I'd say that's absolutely not true - it's a demonstration that the republic system is broken. He lost the popular vote, yet still won. That's anti-democratic, whilst being pro-republic.
True democracy would still work fine if done pragmatically - have people, when registering to vote, be given a PGP key. Have them send in a cryptographically signed email with their vote - verify that it's from the right person. Maybe package it in a very simple GUI.
Instantly, everything impractical and or wrong about the current "democracy" we have is gone, and actual democracy can start taking place.
I think it is important that our elections use systems that are readily comprehensible to laypeople.
You could make it as simple as downloading an app, going to get you physically registered, having the govt. official input relevant keys into the app, and then:
Type In Your Preferred Candidate Here: [INPUT BOX]
[SEND BUTTON]
With an automatic reply saying "Thank you for voting!" at the end of it.
Paper, managed by trusted humans, really shines in this kind of task. Maybe some of the trusted humans will turn out to be dishonest, but it is much harder to commit large scale fraud and then cover it up.
The reason for crypographically secure voting is to stop any form of election-interference that could happen, because that naturally would be the biggest concern from moving to a digital solution.
Popular vote totals:
62,984,825: Trump 65,853,516: Clinton
Vote weights, per state, due to the electoral college: https://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-t...
Also of course there are things like gerrymandering and voter suppression to consider. Democracy is a pretty complicated mess.
Still democracy in general is exactly "majority rules". In democratic society of 100 people opinion of 51 would be enough to trump and ignore whatever remaining 49 want.
I feel like you used to be able to avoid getting swindled by ignoring the swindler, ex. close the door to the saleman, or ignore the gypsy pear salesmen at the market.
Today, marketing is engineered at such a level that it is difficult to acknowledge it's influence. That, and you are constantly bombarded by ads, either explicitly or implicitly.
I don't think I am saying anything novel. I guess I am curious what this means about society and our political systems. People with power and wealth could still be toppled when you exposed them to the truth. How in the fuck does that even come close to happening today? How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of? How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned?
This isn't meant as a rant. I am curious, because to the best i can tell we don't live in a society where voting matters and we have a say in our governance.
Did you mean pearl?
My point is that you can ignore a salesmen and he can't possibly be THAT good that he can swindle everyone. But modern ads, IMO, are designed for high levels of success. Much more difficult to deal with that on a personal level.
The difference I see is that there is feedback on the ads other than sales and it seems like you could closely tailor ads to specific demographics.
I think this is the risk we pay by reading the Internet? The filtering implicit in things going viral is a mixed bag.
Imagine a billboard, you drive and the content changes because your GPS is close to that billboard and stuff like that - real world changes like that will happen, if not already.
There is also the product placement and as Cambridge Analytica describes entire personas and website being made just to target individuals and change their perception and opinions - this can all be automated at scale with current technology.
Or your Google self-driving car just happens to pick a route past certain billboards and retailers...
It's actually pretty simple. You just don't visit sites with ads that bother you.
Maybe you meant to respond to a different comment thread? You seem to be confused as to the topic of this one.
How can I trust the authority of a news site, when I am also seeing clearly deceptive ads playing right next to their content?
I don't know that you can. I think we live in a great period of time to be a con man.
yeah look at just about any elections in the past few years, not only the usual suspects like the post-soviet bloc...
I'd argue it's still possible to ignore it all, but you need three browser extensions and two mobile apps, a vpn, and probably a few other measures in place to pull it off. I feel like I'm sailing out to war with a well equipped battleship every time I launch my browser.
This is dumb. How did we let technology get so bad? How did we let the web become completely subverted?
Nuclear energy could have been proliferated to move to different energy source, instead it is was weaponized and used as a tool of politics. Cool for those guys i guess.
The same goes for big data. We could have collected data on everyone and mined that shit to gain more insight into all sort of things from medical to societal information that you just can't see in studies. We could have learned so much. But instead some smart guys figured out how to use it to convince you that you need a wi-fi crockpot and gerrymander districts in their favor.
Guns made killing people easier, ok. But you can't kill everyone in the world with one gun. Marketing used to be billboards, now it's in your life. The issue I have is that scale of the whole thing.
I have already deleted my FB account and am encouraging others to do the same.
I have doubts that this happened regularly in the past, usually wealthy/powerful were allowed to be toppled by their enemies. I don't know the details of how Weinstein got toppled after so many years of being protected, but my gut says that the people who were protecting him no longer felt like it was worth it to continue. In revolutions, it's not the people that overthrow the dictator, it's the court/army which allow the people to overthrow the dictator, in order for them to install a new dictator[0].
> How do you overcome marketing that is engineered to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities you are not even aware of?
Become more aware of your vulnerabilities so as to be aware of when you're being exploited. I recommend mindfulness and then making note of when you're being triggered in either a positive or negative way. If you know the enemy and yourself, you need not fear the result of a thousand battles[1].
> How do we patch our society and governing systems from being pwned?
As these systems become more complex it requires more energy and complexity to maintain the systems, this additional complexity creates a larger attack surface and more internal fragility. Solving these problems requires more energy and complexity, exacerbating the problem and delivering diminishing returns on additional complexity. Systems should to be designed to collapse in a way that minimizes losses of knowledge (especially of why they collapsed) and with mechanisms to recover quickly using the accumulated knowledge to build more robustness into the new system, this would be an anti-fragile system. Centralized, too big to fail, institutions (Facebook, et al) are a major component of fragility in our current systems[2][3][4].
I think you can avoid the marketers and advertisers by learning how they operate, nobody gives away shit for free, so anybody that claims that is either a marketer/advertiser trying to lure you into a bait/switch or is using you as the product (TANSTAAFL). Be flexible and avoid lock-in to any single service/company, always be ready to drop a service when they start acting against your interests or the interests of society as a whole.
[0] CGP Grey, Rules for Rulers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
[1] Sun Tzu, Art of War - https://sites.ualberta.ca/~enoch/Readings/The_Art_Of_War.pdf
[2] Joseph Tainter, Collapse of Complex Societies - http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter.pdf
[3] Nassim Taleb, Antifragile - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile
[4] JP Crutchfield, The Hidden Fragility of Complex Systems - http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/FOCS.pdf
I know that Tainter has criticized him some for cherry picking in order to support his presuppositions, specifically regarding his Easter Island ideas. I think he talks about it a little bit on this Omega Tau podcast:
http://omegataupodcast.net/184-societal-complexity-and-colla...
It's on my personal list still though, get around to it eventually.
I think that in the past you had to be a very intelligent machiavellian-type dude to stay in power and it was a constant struggle. You probably had to be a very good at reading people and understanding their psyche. But there are only so many such guys and they can only manipulate so many people.
I think technology has given people with power and money the ability to automate influence on a much larger scale for cheap. Not that technology is bad. Technology makes hard problems easier. It can make all those things that a smart person had to constantly work on repeatable and consistent. When i think of data mining the last thing on my mind is product ads. I think gerrymandering. I tip my hat to the evil genius that figured out how to draw districts like that. I bet you could get most of that data from people's facebook. Even without that though, using other data you could get. And even if you dont have any digital data available, you can probably be classified based on a few facts. And......your vote is null now.
What I struggle with is the fact that now influence is global and widespread and I can't for the life of me figure out how that gets reigned in. It's kinda mindblowing.
When high leverage technology is more accessible then it becomes a leveler for the playing field. When it's available only to those who already hold power, then it tips things drastically in whatever direction they wish and typically makes things drastically more uneven (though the Gates Foundation and others do apply their power/tech toward leveling sometimes).
I think this is one of the effects that makes our current society more fragile... bad actors (big and small) can create enormous impacts with minimal resource, and because of the nature of the Second Law, it's far easier to destroy than it is to create.
Just look at this data breach, it took enormous effort (relatively) to create a platform to identify, gather and organize all this personal data, yet look at how easily it slipped into the hands of bad actors. Bad press for FB, less trust in social networks, and who else has access to this data set? A small team who also managed to hack something like 23AndMe or another useful dataset with additional information will be able to create an even more powerful dataset with a laptop and some python scripts. Combine that with more advanced CRISPR technology and I don't even know could be possible, it's the stuff of sci-fi thrillers though.
You're absolutely right to be concerned, but I don't think this can be reigned in. The UN isn't in any position to regulate the global network, and the modern economy/society can't afford to create walled national networks, plus policing them would just be another layer of complexity.
I think the best we can do is get ready. All of this complexity will become a drag on economic growth (which requires constant gains to maintain itself, especially in the face of massive deficit spending), which will continue to lead to societal unrest and political instability... AI and robots will exacerbate the complexity and fragility more than they alleviate it and climate change, with the more volatile weather system, will create increasing opportunities for black swans to create enormous set backs.
It's unfortunate, but Russia and China are going to be in a much better position to take advantage of the increasing uncertainty and chaos than the US and EU (dictators are shitty, but much more efficient in uncertain times). I recommend moving to Australia or New Zealand if you're not looking to get caught up.
> though the Gates Foundation and others do apply their power/tech toward leveling sometimes can you elaborate on this some more?
I like science and technology as much as the next guy and I didn't think I'd say this, but IMO it's contributing to a continually decreasing quality of life. A part of me gets excited with new gadgets, like smartTV and Alexa, and another part of me cringes at it. I kinda get where Ted Kaczynski was coming from when he turned against technology and industry.
> I recommend moving to Australia or New Zealand if you're not looking to get caught up. Why there?
> I like science and technology as much as the next guy and I didn't think I'd say this, but IMO it's contributing to a continually decreasing quality of life.
I get the sentiment, my gut says the same, but in terms of actual progress we're still doing pretty well. I'm in the middle of Pinker's Enlightenment Now and it's hard to argue with his data... however, I do believe he is missing some other effects regarding fragility and complexity that he hasn't addressed (yet).
Every time my phone rings and it's a robot on the other end, pretending to be a human, my world darkens and I also have a brush with Kacynski level thoughts, though.
Australia and New Zealand are just a nice mix of being geographically positioned away from the big flash points of global conflict and having democratically elected governments. NZ also learned a lot about robustness and preparedness from their recent earthquakes.
The class that controls the robots/AI become the de facto enforcement class, a la the army/police/praetorian guard.
If you say that the AI won't be controlled, then I don't have anything left to say on this subject because it's a rabbit hole I've been down too often lately.
Lacking a very rarefied community capable of self-moderation, like this site has or some specialized reddits and forums, the no-real-name becomes a major drawback. A minority of douche-bags will generate a majority of noise and will come to shape that world in their image.
This is quite visible when browsing Mastodon instances, many of which look like a crossbreed of 4chan with Myspace. Most accounts don't have a real picture. The fact people assumed their real identities, cared about what they said and did, and that you could find real people knowing only their name was one of the key ingredients to the success of early Facebook.
Furthermore, the whole "no data collected" has any value from the perspective of the user only when using real names. Otherwise, I really couldn't care less about data attached to an anonymous account.
What I'm saying is that anonymous accounts will prevent that success in the first place, because of the behavior of non-spam users. At least for a mass market product most regular folk would want to use, like Facebook.
That might be true for you, but I've more than once had to ditch an old nick because over time I'd let slip enough specifics that identifying me would be (theoretically) possible. It's all a matter of degrees, but 'no data collected' is definitely valuable.
I can't use my real name on Facebook because I can't get a legal name change. So I don't use Facebook.
"You've read over 3 articles this month. Let's make it official. Log in with Facebook or Google."
Facebook and Google have their tentacles in nearly everything. If you want to get a message out, it's going to intersect with their platforms in some way, even if you're directly criticizing them. AFAIK, there are no purist corners at this time that attract enough eyeballs.
Even if it were true that an essay or article couldn't be disseminated effectively without Facebook getting involved at some point, it doesn't mean that readers must be burdened with a popup that asks them to log in to Facebook before viewing.
IMHO, those comments might as well be "First Post!" for all they add.
> it doesn't mean that readers must be burdened with a popup that asks them to log in to Facebook before viewing.
The first step to that world is getting people off Facebook so it's not so ubiquitous that making a request like that seems reasonable.
Honest question, do you think the same content with same title with a different domain rather than 'medium.com' could not reach similar popularity on HN?
Any comment pointing out hypocrisy is valuable and interesting in my opinion. I prefer to disregard the opinions of hypocrites.
That's actually a pretty closed minded position. I don't think there's a single person who isn't a hypocrite in some small way, even ascetics living alone in the desert. You'll disregard all of them?
Hypocrisy doesn't logically invalidate anyone's arguments or positions, those need to be evaluated on their own. If they make good points but fail to live up to them, it only demonstrates their own personal moral failings.
But I think it's also a mistake to count "publishing something about deleting Facebook on a website with a Facebook integration" as hypocrisy. Authors usually aren't the ones making implementation decisions of the platforms the publish on, and are probably not even aware of most of them.
> Honest question, do you think the same content with same title with a different domain rather than 'medium.com' could not reach similar popularity on HN?
HN isn't the world.
I think it's a waste of time for an author to make the avoidance of publishing platforms with Facebook integrations a priority. It would be an act of foolish, unpragmatic purism, akin to a lot of the stuff Richard Stallman does. It's more important that they argue persuasively and widely to convince the implementors to avoid such integrations.
If you need to preface a comment with 'IMHO', especially when your HO is just a dressed up and unsubstantiated insult, it's probably an indication that what you're about to say will add zero value to Hacker News.
Dude, you are insufferable. Quit being so pretentious and passive aggressive, and you won't have to nuke your HN account every few months and start fresh.
Maybe they take donations, maybe you run your own instance and pay for the hosting. Not having shareholders that expect profits and growth probably takes a lot of the pressure off, too. All they have to do is not have burdensome costs or break even.
I'm just wondering how they are getting the capital to scale.
The decentralized nature helps the network scale.
And yeah, it's an open source project funded by donations. Plenty of those exist, and if it gets big enough, it'll get more contributors and donations.
https://www.patreon.com/mastodon
Some are also small servers run purely for the hell of it; if you keep the user count low it really doesn’t cost much to keep one running. These instances are of course more vulnerable to their owner being hit by a bus or whatever and not having shared their keys with anyone. Less so once account migration lands, and everyone’s gotten off their butts and upgraded their instances to that version.
(My instance, by example, currently has about 150 accounts, closed registration, and costs about twenty bucks a month to run. It’s also a few versions behind because I’ve been busy with other things.)
Every instance's own business model is often somewhat unique.
My primary instance at this point is on a domain I registered ages ago that I point to a SaaS host that runs and keeps up to date a growing number of small instances. I'm their customer and I expect them to charge me fairly based on my instance usage (CPU, bandwidth, et al) appropriately subsidized by their scale versus if I was booting my own VMs/containers and running it elsewhere.
If the worst happens, I expect I can move my business elsewhere, and given I control my domain itself, I can (use a data backup to bootstrap a new instance somewhere else and just point my domain DNS to the new instance).
There are a variety in business models among instances and the people hosting them.
Most people seem to find out about Mastodon from someone, and that someone suggests the instance they're on. That's why a lot of artists end up on Mastodon.art, for example. So far, the admin has a good reputation for being consistent about updates and keeping the community engaged.
People keep trying to find some technological heuristic to establish trust, like requiring legal names or some kind of scoring system. So far, it's even worse because people encode all their cognitive biases into it and none of the mental models or processes people develop for checking those biases.
In this sense, trusting a Mastodon instance with your data is the same as trusting a Bitcoin exchange with your money. Bitcoin is decentralized too, that doesn't make Bitcoin exchanges trustworthy.
It’s like mesh networking.
Depends on the business model. Wikipedia, for example, is a non-profit.
You can also theoretically have a public benefit corporation that is structured to protect data privacy, but I don't know of any.
The only big PBCs I've ever heard of were hospitals and private colleges. But you are right that the way Mozilla is set up, it is focused more on pushing the technology and mission of the foundation forward rather than on delivering share price increases or dividends to shareholders.
You can disconnect while staying connected on your own terms.
Convincing - tried it with just my partner first and smoothed out some rough edges. I then sent a group email to extended family that included a brief justification, some screen shots of it in action, a picture of the actual server, and an offer to create an account for them. Transparency, ease of use, and privacy were all important factors.
Most live far away and have griped about various facets of Facebook but felt like it was a necessary evil. This has been a good alternative for daily communication, discussions about weather and children, and so forth. The closest to game support is sharing crossword solving times with a hashtag.
Does Mastodon have anything similar?
Event Invitations is one of the few uses of FB that I still have. I'm open to alternatives that simplify facilitate threaded discussions between those who were invited, but as with any system convenience is a factor.
Google Calendar does work, yet somehow (and ironically) seems more intrusive than Facebook in that you're communicating directly with emails; the younger the participant, the greater the lack of enthusiasm for emails.
A relatively small group of people saw a problem with Facebook. Of course they have to have some underlying goal to make money. So they set out to create a federated system anyone can host that doesn't depend on some central company that's just out to make a buck. It's a noble goal, but it solves a problem that most users of Facebook simply don't care about. It doesn't do the thing that Facebook does, so it's a non-starter.
I'd also add that Mastodon is more of a Twitter replacement than a Facebook replacement. Facebook is better at isolating your feed into your group of "friends". Mastodon is more of a river of information from folks you follow (many of whom you will never meet in real life.)
If you want to replace Facebook, first figure out what people value about Facebook and expand on that. You'll need to be better than they are (at least until people determine they're that awful.) Then look at how you can federate it or achieving whatever other goal you have.
I noticed this as well, and it's something I've come across in the past when checking out Facebook alternatives. Most seem to only be a replacement on a superficial level.
Most of my family is not very tech-savvy so asking them to use something like Mastodon to see family pictures or whatever is pointless. Even if they did try to use it, all of their other friends and family are on Facebook so asking them to use Mastodon just for me adds one more thing/app to their list that they are probably going to use maybe twice and then just stop.
I really wish there was a good alternative to this but I haven't been able to find anything (yet) :(.
I fear it might all be plaintext, despite the insanity of doing that in the present post-Snowden world, rather than the appropriate end-to-end combined with point-per-point encryption.
Even if both me and my followers do run their own Mastodon servers.
This is terrible indeed. How is this any better than twitter? At least, for private tweets and such, they'd need a court order to get the information from twitter.
Twtxt is minimalist but functional: https://github.com/buckket/twtxt
There you go
For better or for worse: I want to stay in touch with people I've met in the oddest places. In the middle of bumsquash Uruguay, people who had barely ever heard of Europe, but they had Facebook. All of them. The only place on earth where this wasn't true was China, in my experience.
So, no, I won't #deletefacebook. I've stopped using it meaningfully a long time ago, but until something becomes a reliable, multi-decade spanning auto-updating rolodex, I'll have to stay here.
Mastodon will never, ever, not in a billion years fill that gap. And I don't need more alternatives for #1 and #2, so there dies that dream for me.
I know because I have a circle of close friends that I only see once or twice a year, but stay in touch with through email. Guess what: it works. And if you migrate, you just email your friends about it.
Similarly, although I don't know if this is generally possible in every country, but I have diligently carried over my first mobile phone number from carrier to carrier. When I moved abroad to Sweden for a few years, I switched to the absolute cheapest minimal carrier to essentially "invest" in keeping that phone identity. This means that people who met me as far back as the late nineties can still reach me on it. Friends that I have made later even know they can rely on this, that this is my "policy". I'm about to leave Sweden for Germany. Still keeping that Dutch phone number. In fact, I'm leaving it with all of my friends here, and use it for all the messaging apps that rely on phone numbers.
And finally, just claim your own bit of internet and get a website. Your friends can search for you.
This is so far removed from how I interact with the world around me that I have a hard time empathising. I’ll keep it scientific and factual: more than once, I’ve gone back to a place I visited over a decade ago. I went on Facebook, found the person that used to live there, got in touch, and had varying types of “fun”, as humans call it. The crucial point here is that I can’t tell in advance which places, until I decide to go.
I… your suggestion for the future is to “not think about them”? Ehh.. no thank you?
You should have the foresight to write down their contact details. You meet a person, exchange contact details. Save it in your phone or cloud or what ever. Is that too hard? Will you run out of storage space if you save contact info for every person you meet? But hey, that requires a moments thought. Am I going to have to contact this person? No, we can't spent working a couple of neurons for that thought. I think people should use their heads more. To exercise fore sight. To actually remember birth dates etc, to plan things with out constantly "updating" on a mobile phone/social media...
I personally dont use Facebook, but youre not actually painting a realistic picture
What if the other person did all these and didn't update facebook? Tough luck. Move on. Right?
Same thing. If they changed email, and didn't keep phone number etc, then they probably don't want you to contact them anyway...
Maybe. Or maybe you completely misunderstood what I said:
> I… your suggestion for the future is to “not think about them”? Ehh.. no thank you?
I didn't suggest anything of the sort. I claimed that when I lose touch with people, it is because they're not on my mind, and am I not being reminded of them through external means (like Facebook). Per definition you cannot really miss something that is not on your mind, now can you? This isn't a conscious decision, it's just an acceptance of the fact that I cannot know everything, and that everything must pass. If they are on my mind, however, I choose to take action and stay in touch.
So the real reason you can't empathise with me is that you're not understanding me. I am not telling you to not think about friends. I am saying: would you have remembered and missed someone if Facebook hadn't reminded you of their existence? Are you even aware of how many people you have met that you don't remember? Do you miss them? Hint: you don't, again by definition.
Think of advertising and how much of it revolves around creating the feeling that you are missing something and that this void needs to be filled, or that you are missing out on something that really, you don't.
> more than once, I’ve gone back to a place I visited over a decade ago. I went on Facebook, found the person that used to live there, got in touch, and had varying types of “fun”, as humans call it.
Real classy implication that I am a robot there.
Look, I do this all the time myself. Tell me where I am stating anything that would suggest I don't. The only part where I disagree with you is the implication that Facebook is the only way to find old friends.
In fact, the opposite is true: putting in the effort to track someone down is immensely gratifying and builds connections in ways that "staying in touch" via seeing each others Facebook timeline isn't. I put effort into staying in touch with the people I love. Very robotic, clearly.
Meanwhile, Facebook creates this false sense of safety, of still being part of a community we don't actually put effort in, because our brains think that popping up on each others Facebook wall a good enough approximation of actual IRL contact to be nearly fooled by it.
> The crucial point here is that I can’t tell in advance which places, until I decide to go.*
I fail to see how this affects anything about your supposed need for Facebook? I know where most of my old friends live. Whenever know I'm going to visit their city, I send them an email, a text message, or even a hand-written letter on occasion.
Whoever writes you back is worth keeping as a contact
When I moved to another city my flatmate threw a secret party at my favourite bar
400 people showed up
After 5 years I still keep in touch with at most 20 of them
With most of them I've been friend since long before that night
For me at least, there is one app that's starting to mitigate #3 (if not specifically "fill" the gap): WhatsApp. Granted, it's also owned by Facebook, so we're almost back at square one, but it's still an interesting case simply because it doesn't fill the gap, but rather works around it. Which gives me a bit more hope that other tools could too.
WhatsApp does two things:
1. Creates a network from your (possibly completely offline) "rolodex" (phone contact list). And augments these contacts with info specific to their ecosystem.
2. Adds discovery. Through groups, I can connect with new contacts. Similar to Facebook's "suggest friend" feature.
My general point here is the an autoupdating rolodex is only required in a closed ecosystem. WhatsApp does do it's level best to close off its ecosystem, but it's a different paradigm to Facebook, and one currently dependent on existing phone numbers, so it ends up a little more open, and for me seems like a nice demo of how hooking into existing networks (people's saved contact lists) can get you pretty far.
Its definitely the latter. Not because there is something inherently bad about staying in touch. It is because you do so despite the knowledge that you are not doing it at zero cost to others who care about their privacy. Analogy: I wish I could just throw all my garbage over into my neighbors premises rather than walk all the way down to the recycle bin. But I don't. I am actually violating their personal space. By using Facebook, you are also violating the privacy of folks who disagree with your view, and this is now open knowledge.
And things don't even out if my neighbors are also doing the same to their neighbors over on the other side (but, but, everyone is on Facebook!). Ultimately, all of us will end up living amidst a pile of stinking garbage, which is an excellent analogy to what is happening with social networks today.
On Leaving Facebook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16640855
It's not just looking at what others broadcast. Facebook keeps track of your likes, your navigation patterns, and let others access that. So not only do they know what your friend broadcast, they know who is watching, when, how frequently.
Finally, there's the social pressure. I have been a victim 2 years back: forced to subscribed to Facebook because my orchestra were using it to communicate loads of important information (I have since deleted that account). By watching your friend's broadcast on Facebook, you contribute to, or at least fail to counter, that social pressure.
That said, I reckon you're probably a victim that social pressure as well. I won't throw the first stone.
Some of them are less technically proficient that rely on whomever their current ISP or employer is for email. Some of them are more technically proficient and use changing email addresses as an Inbox Zero technique or as a nuclear option in spam fighting.
Releasing the cronjob whenever I'm finished making it a chrome extension. I suppose this business is a pretty good inducement towards getting done a bit faster.
It is clearly possible to do without Facebook and the fact that people use the "but how will I stay connected to my friends/how will I know about events" lines so much proves just how good Facebook has gotten at keeping people addicted.
I would encourage you to disable your account and stay off of it for six weeks. I think you'll be surprised at the results.
As usual its the critical mass problem but facebook has done nothing particularly technologically inovative.
Have you considered that maybe there cannot be a facebook replacement that won't suffer the same problems? Deleting facebook isn't a painless thing to do, it requires some sacrifice on your part.
Unless there's a free / open-source blog system with a decentralized federated SSO system, where everyone can choose to friend up (probably one-way, not two-way) to follow each other's feeds? I suppose like mastodon, but for long-form or free-form writing?
Facebook has this "decisive competitive edge" in that the fact that it is seen as the only alternative is what reinforces it being the only alternative. It's good that these other solutions are free and open source because most commercial competition would dry up and fail.
But for these things that bump along and grow slowly in a sustainable way, they might actually approach an inflection point where things will snowball. At least I hope so!
[1] https://counter.social/about [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jester_(hacktivist) [3] https://keybase.io/th3j35t3r
No thanks!