Ask HN: Why are there no public social networks?
(Not as in "going public".)
Why have we not seen a publicly-operated social network?
It strikes me that enabling people to connect with one another is fundamental to most governments as a public service. Cities and states make and fund roadways and public squares and parks. Social networks seem like an approximate digital parallel.
Given everything that's happened with Facebook and Twitter in the last months, why are there no examples of government-run social networks?
(Or, if there are, what are they? How do they work?)
edited the title for breadth
edit 2: thanks for sounding in! A lot of great answers. To be clear, I didn't mean to present this as a leading question. I was curious about the perceived reasons from HN's audience.
68 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadThe roadways, public squares and parks are under the direct control or ownership of the government, the virtual/digital parallel doesn't really exist.
Framing in Maslow's pyramid [1]: Many of the goods/services the gov provides fulfill either level 1 physiological needs or level 2 security needs.
Social networks fulfill level 3 and 4 needs: love/belonging, and esteem.
We aren't yet at the point where we as a society decide we need to dedicate collective resources (taxes) to level 3 and 4 needs, especially while our level 2 and 1 services/goods aren't improving at the rate with which they did in the 20th century, and are in some cases deteriorating/being privatized.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow#/media/File:Mas...
That is why the ultimate form of punishment in our society is to isolate the individual from all human contact.
Humans do terribly in an environment without other people.
Why does it matter that the medium is digital?
not physiological needs... food, shelter, water, sleep, etc
> That is why the ultimate form of punishment in our society is to isolate the individual from all human contact.
it is a severe punishment, but again not as crucial as physiological needs. most would (and should) choose isolation from human contact for much longer than isolation from water
> Why does it matter that the medium is digital?
You can't eat it
I would've thought the ultimate form of punishment is execution. If you were talking about life in prison however, I think the reason is to keep the other people safe, not to inflict psychological pain on the convicted.
I think also the motivation for (advertising) profit is what is driving the innovation on the other side.
https://www.livehouseautomation.com.au/blogs/news/75760388-w...
We've been doing those things for a few generations now, but they haven't led to public newspapers. I don't know why we would expect them to lead to public electronic social networks.
Shaking off big corporations from services that should have been always open and free-for-all is maybe the hardest and most important question of the Internet for the future. I think an answer can only rise upon the ashes of the current big players, should that be a scandal, disaster, or else.
this, one could argue, enables a social network that doesn't spy on you, respects privacy and doesn't even have ads!
of course it also comes with the risk of the ruling party spying on you and engaging in manipulation. depending on where you live, and how..conspirationally inclined you are, this may or may not be a risk you're willing to take
I'm not sure that this is the best way to spend them tax-dollars. But the network itself would certainly be nice though
It is probably the one thing no one asked for but could be done. Would probably make more sense in areas with limited freedom as a means to control society.
A non profit would make more sense as they can be seen in a more neutral light.
Please stop perpetuating this lie. You can, and should expect better of your public digital systems. Don't let them use "Public tech must be bad" as an argument.
You likely are much closer to your political representatives than we are. The amount of money flowing into your politicians pockets are less.
Here I expect the government contract to be unfavorable to the population at large. I expect the leading politicians to benefit greatly and the company contracted to do a subpar job that barely meets specifications.
I trust my local government, but I do not trust the federal government to be competent.
Instead of having a department make software, they are supported from a vastly superior group of developers that work temporarily with that department.
Maybe its too much to ask, but shouldnt the company providing the software also employ the talent that is used to make the software?
Having some experience with why government lacks organizational development competence (TLDR; short-sighted management with the wrong goals), I don't think they can do that—they literally are addressing the wrong problem—but the idea wasn't to be a silo of technical skill.
Comparing like for like in size and budget, shouldn't the larger states, eg Texas and California have good state level systems. And then the slightly small, but still well funded ones (such as Florida and New York) should have better systems?? I'm assuming that there is a lower limit for the system quality/population size trade off, where it stops being beneficial.
There are also some parts of the US government that have pretty good systems as far as I'm aware, in the military and security.
"The amount of money flowing into your politicians pockets are less." This is absolutely true, the amount of corruption in US politics is astounding.
I disagree that just being bigger leads to worse technology and systems. There are numerous, different reasons they are bad, and this is not directly linked to the size.
There are good examples of government IT infrastructure done right (e.g. https://e-estonia.com), but the economics is stacked against them in many ways.
It doesn't have to be bad, but it almost always is.
Can't call a spade a spade because of the minuscule amount of times it might be a shovel. I suppose when making the comment GP made, they have to put an asterisk to say "most" lest the first comment immediately point out that there are exceptions.
"Hey most public stuff is crap, this is bad" - Fine by me. "Don't make that public, it'll be bad because public stuff is bad" - Not fine. Also it implies the inverse, that private is always good, or at least better.
Good is good. Better is better. Private can be good, and is best for most things. Public can be good, and is best for some things.
I think the only reasonable answer here is to require the public entity making/maintaining such a system organically grow the system as a private company would. That is difficult to do with a public coffer because, while altruistic motivation may exist individually, as a whole waste will often take hold. Oddly enough, unlike the private sector, the only way to do this without large amounts of public waste is to not grow employee-wise.
Kind of a tangent, but in summary, take a small, focused set of devs, build a the system with features you want, and resist the urge to grow the feature count (beyond reason) and only grow the maintenance employee count, not the development employee count. And don't politicize it (however one does that).
And obviously wrong, when you consider the origins of the computer, the internet and the WWW.
With the exception on gov.uk, they are all god-awful. I suspect lack of talent within the government is one major reason.
Social networks tend to kill each other due to network effects as people are flocking to the most used network since there's the largest value for everyone. So having multiple networks might not really work well.
It wouldn't have to be several networks though and it doesn't even have to be your own government running it to provide the value you're looking for (social networking without users being monetized).
Image for example Twitter being bought by a country with good reputation, strong privacy laws and sufficient economy to sustain it in the long term. Iceland with some additional funding from the EU or something like that.
Does not sound too bad, in my opinion.
But to answer the assumed question, it's because there is no practical way they could compete with private companies. Sure, theoretically they could dump tons of money into developing cool new features, slick UIs, and obtain top talent. They would also need to spend billions to crush or acquire upcoming networks to maintain their dominance (Whatsapp, Instagram). Or legislate them out of existence. In practicality there is no way this would (or should) ever happen.
Twitter's a neat counterexample here, I think. On the front-end, at least, the features released by Twitter in the last few years haven't left me awestruck. Yet it has become a seemingly self-sustaining space on the internet for public discourse.
https://vk.com/ is government run.
The Chinese "Credit Score" is run by Alibaba and Tencent, which run all the social networks in China and therefore have access to a vast amount of data about people’s social ties and activities and what they say. In addition to measuring your ability to pay, as in the United States, the scores serve as a measure of political compliance. Among the things that will hurt a citizen’s score are posting political opinions without prior permission, or posting information that the regime does not like.
There are plenty more too. Just hope the US doesn't make a government-run social network.
In the United States, the postal service from its beginning was publicly operated, and served specifically to distribute timely information and general knowledge in the form of discounted rates for newspapers, magazines, and books, as well as providing personal correspondence and parcel delivery. It also established principles of privacy to correspondents.
This was in contrast to various earlier systems, either privately operated or, frequently, operated as part of royal intelligence services.
With the emergence of telephony and broadcast technologies, there were numerous national debates throughout the worrld over public vs. private operation, with many countries opting for primarily public systems. The U.S. chose instead, generally, a regulated private approach.
There are a few histories of these developments, though fewer than you might think. University of Illinois media scholar Roberrt W. McChesney has several books on the topic.
Several countries leveraged their national telecoms systems to create early computer networks, most notably France's Minitel. In the US, the early DARPANET, ARPANET, and Internet were largely public operations, though through a mixed-control operator network, including the Department of Defence, RAND, SRI, the National Science Foundation, and numerous universities, themselves a mix of public and private.
The Internet itself gradually transitioned from research to commercial use between 1985 and 1995, in a not particularly structured manner. See for example: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-paper...
There remain elements of government involvement and access to both Net infrastructure and firms, including investments in several significant firms (notably Google and Facebook), as well as intercept capabilities through network operators, engineered device and protocol weaknesses, CA compromises, and both law-based and extralegal means, fairly trivially confirmed through a few moments research. (EFF and The Intercept document much of this.)
At the same time, there are countries which do substantively operate or participate in social networks either directly or through public-private enterprises, notably Russia and China.
And much of the objective of networking the world has been accomplished through largely private operators.
In short: they could, some do, there's a great deal of history, and the present regime arose likely in significant part as national governments and agencies thought they were seeing their needs met through the cooptable efforts of others.
It could also be a cooperative, or a non-profit.. there are many models.
The scenario we'd be looking at would be a small internal network for a university or a small organization. I believe any government could handle such a thing. For something like facebook we're looking at a lot of money and a bunch of skilled people. Not sure that's in line with governments...