I'm hoping he provided some rationale about why Microsoft, Google, and Apple should be split up. The way the interview is quoting just a couple sentences, it's hard to tell.
If there's nothing besides the quote below, I'd consider this an extremely weird and weak argument:
> What naturally happens is you end up with one company dominating the field so through history there is no alternative to really coming in and breaking things up. There is a danger of concentration.
Yeah, this specifically is quite the top down approach. The realization to have is that social media/the internet is a tool, and how it's used (or becomes most popularly used) is simply a symptom, a sign, a reflection of the current state of society; yes, if we are reactive and not responsive with reasoning, critical thinking, then propaganda can flourish more easily.
Not using twitter/facebook/google/etc doesn't exempt you from experiencing the negative effect they have on the internet and the world around you, though.
These remarks don't really address the points I was making.
Firstly, if people want to use it, and pay for it, even small charges at mass scale pay off. Something like twitter doesn't cost a lot to run in particular at unit cost.
If they don't, GOTO 10: "the Internet is hamstrung by overreliance on advertising as a revenue model"
I suppose the limitation of use of nuclear weapons stems firmly form public understanding of their dangers (even if the understanding is vague), and thus public disapproval.
One thing to do about the blind engagement machines is to make more people more aware of them. Think about ways people handle hazardous substances. Knowing that a substance is hazardous is the most important bit, to my mind.
If we fundamentally think big tech is bad, splitting them up will make the go much faster and it can get worse. Big companies move slower than smaller more nimble companies. The answer is not splitting up but just make them accountable for KPIs that are good for society.
Thanks for posting this. It's all too often people (like in this article) want to lean on bureaucracy and legislation to fix their problems as opposed to actually doing something about it. Not using Twitter and Facebook has a positive step for my sanity, much like not watching 24 hour cable news was another positive step. I don't need the government to break up CNN or News Corp to solve that problem.
The problem is far broader than that. Other people are still watching cable news or read Facebook 24/7, and what they take away from it guides their actions. When those actions start affecting you, it kinda becomes your problem as well.
When AT&T was a monopoly and you had to rent your phone from them at an outrageous price, you could also walk away. But having to either walk/drive around or send slow mail to communicate was not very efficient. Perfectly doable, mind you, but very inconvenient. Sometimes the cost of walking away is just too steep, so abusing a dominant position becomes very easy and tempting.
I don't think Twitter or Facebook are anywhere close to that threshold. Maybe that's just because I barely use them. But I'm sure some people were also not using phone in the seventies, so I won't conclude based on my individual case.
Walking away from AT&T was hard because of the expense of building a phone transmission network, and (I suppose) because of some patents they held.
Walking away from Twitter is much easier, because multiple global instant or near-instant messaging systems exist, including completely open and user-controlled systems, and even building a new such system is reasonably easy for a group of competent people.
That's looking at it from a purely technical perspective. A 20% better Twitter or Facebook (from a technical perspective) is certainly comparatively easy to do, but would still have an approximate value of nil. The value of Twitter or Facebook is not technical (though running services at this scale is technically very challenging): it comes from the people using it. Building another Facebook, even with marginal improvements, is never going to be enough to make enough people switch.
So is the case for AT&T: even if you could build a network competing with the AT&T one it would still have been a largely useless endeavor, unless you could also force AT&T to be interoperable with your network.
No. That's just more software engineer hand waving to avoid taking responsibility for the way their products have changed the emotional landscape for real people in the last couple of decades.
It's like saying the CIA wasn't trying to destroy communities when they were handing out crack, because "moral people wouldn't have taken it". Every single person building these platforms knew how addictive they were. It was the entire reason these companies were valued from the start. It was the end goal.
Yeah, a junkie can decide not to go find another needle. But if that is your response to the drug epidemic, you then have marginalized people who you've decreed "not worth saving". And I don't like what that has looked like over the last 60 years.
This is correct: if you see that you're taking part in building something you know (or suspect) is a bad thing, you are responsible if you continue to work on that.
This only reinforces my point: if you think it's a wrong thing, walk away from it. Leave that job at Facebook data science division; there's a number of other well-paid data science jobs.
But I'm not trying to talk about what "they" have done wrong, and could have done differently in the past, or what regulators should be doing. I'm talking about something you and me can do right now, and what is completely within our own power to do.
> Chrome is just another browser, they existed before
That's a weak argument. Email existed before Gmail, web search existed before Google Search, maps even online ones, existed before Google Maps, mobile OSes existed before Android.
> Photos is not exactly innovative
That's what I used to think - another photo sharing/storage thingie. But it has all sorts of crazy machine-learning powered features.[1]
Let's start with the companies that voted for EME DMCA first. I'm sure TBL would be happy to release the list from the secret vote they had for it at the W3C.
Seriously, it's bad optics going around and criticizing everybody else for not holding power accountable when you don't have your own house in order. When it came time to stand up to this power, Tim actively defended their interests. I suppose most people have already forgotten about it, but I never will, and neither will my friends that could go to jail for trying to research the security of binary crap in people's browsers.
Walking away sounds easy on paper, like for gaming addicts. The articles about Facebook from the past come to mind where management was fully aware of the addiction factor, and in fact did everything to encourage people to stay on Facebook longer, including showing them "relevant" content and encouraging likes.
Maybe restrictions, similar to gambling could be put into effect? For instance, clearly stating the business intent of the site, requiring ID, limiting to certain hours,.. its sounds weird but it reflects how underregulated the internet is compared to other areas.
If such addiction is something that can be diagnosed via a reasonably rigorous procedure, then yes, we'll probably have to do something similar to other addictive things: age limits, clear warnings, maybe even independent ongoing testing of the effects. Compare to selling alcohol.
Is the potential risk of addiction related to why alcohol sale is regulated? Most rationales I've seen for preventing sale to minors relate to health effects and immediate intoxication effects (car crashes etc.) instead.
Don't get me wrong, I'd be thrilled if addictive potential was considered primary among reasons to consider regulating something. I'm just not sure it is.
Yes, but is it being used that way ? Everything that I've seen has indicated that service providers use this law to play it both ways: they actively control what users see through algorithms, but then claim that they are (largely) not responsible for the moderation of questionable content. IOW, they are not just a passive distribution point for information, and, in many cases, actively control the flow of information. Doesn't that intrinsically make them a publisher ?
Yes, most hosts have and enforce (though imperfectly) content rules as they would be disincentivized from doing without CDA 230.
> Everything that I've seen has indicated that service providers use this law to play it both ways: they actively control what users see through algorithms, but then claim that they are (largely) not responsible for the moderation of questionable content.
That's not playing it both ways.
> IOW, they are not just a passive distribution point for information, and, in many cases, actively control the flow of information.
Yes, the entire point of CDA 230 is to allow them to actively moderate without becoming strictly liable for all content, since without that allowance they would be disincentivized from moderation. Removing CDA 230 would not encourage active moderation, it would make active moderation a gateway to unmanageable liability.
> Doesn't that intrinsically make them a publisher ?
Yes, without CDA 230 it would, restoring the “if you moderate content at all, you must succeed in capturing every bit of user-submitted illegal content or be fully liable as if you had deliberately originated it yourself” rule that was in place before CDA 230 (with the added challenge that there are more content regulations now than before the CDA was adopted), which is not something that promotes moderation, it promotes either no moderation or no user content hosting at all, leaving moderated hosting for operators outside of US jurisdiction.
I know, right? The only time I encounter Twitter is when others link me to it. I’m okay with that and sometimes I share forward, but I’m not fed a daily stream of tweets. I left google services a few months ago. It was a long weekend of work, but I’m happier than I was before with otherwise no noticeable impact (except the emails that write themselves for you in gmail). I exported all my data from Facebook around the same time but I’m still mulling over how to resolve deleting 10 years of my digital life against my core principle that things I’ve said and done should not be allowed to disappear even if my 30 years future self would look back in disgust.
> when it didn't turn out the way he originally envisaged
Sure but who cares if that is the case? And he didn't imagine and invent the modern web nor did he even popularize it or put much effort into making it what is is today.
By his statements I take it that he is jealous that he feels that he has not played a bigger role in what happened after his 'invention' (which was based on a great deal of work prior to his involvement). Many of us used the arpanet in the 70's not to mention the US Government's involvement. Honestly (and nobody will agree I am sure) if there was no conflict with Russia the Internet would not exist (most likely).
And I am not seeing what he had a vision for any more than solving some simple issue he saw which was:
> Instead, it was hard work, the experience of working in computer science and an attempt to overcome the frustrations of trying to share information with colleagues and students
That is not the web today or even close to it and for that matter it wasn't the web even in 2000 or 1998.
Same one as you. I can email my entire family just as easily as I could tweet them and with fewer restrictions.
Since you have directed this in an uncivil course:
In what reality do you live where "email is to twitter as postal mail is to telephone" is a true statement?
>You couldn't use any technology without paying the Microsoft tax.
You could use Mac or Linux. Except you wouldn't be able to interoperate with everyone else. This is precisely the situation with Facebook/Twitter.
>You don't want to use Google? Type in www.bing.com.
Their monopoly isn't on the user side, but on the provider side. If you want your web content to be discoverable, you have to play by Google's rules. If they announce that all websites have to add dancing elephants to their pages to be discoverable, most of the web will soon have dancing elephants. This kind of power can easily be used to discourage competition by creating high barrier of entry for indexing.
> You could use Mac or Linux. Except you wouldn't be able to interoperate with everyone else. This is precisely the situation with Facebook/Twitter.
Still, to this day, Microsoft owns over 80% of the desktop market. Microsoft's dominance weaned not because they lost the desktop market but because the desktop stopped being the place where all the content was. This why Microsoft cares more about services and Azure instead of just pimping Windows.
> Their monopoly isn't on the user side, but on the provider side. If you want your web content to be discoverable, you have to play by Google's rules.
And if Google does something egregious, or uses their monopoly in a manner that prevents anyone from challenging it, then let's break up Google. But Google hasn't done anything like that, so your hypothetical is meaningless.
US antitrust doesn't exist to prevent monopolies or "promote competition" like the EU - it exists to prevent inefficient monopolies from using their monopoly to prevent a more efficient alternative from existing.
Google and Facebook, regardless of what people think about their influence, are offer damn good products. You might not like them, "elites" might not like their influence, but they aren't using their monopolies to harm their competitors. They just offer very important services that are high quality. That is everyone's problem with them. It's completely transparent and US regulators are smart to ignore this.
> Big companies add huge value to all our wellbeing. 1000 companies with a revenue of ten million dollars can afford to spend little to nothing on research, while one company with a revenue of ten billion dollars can spend a lot.
There's a lot of space between companies with 10 million dollars in revenue and ones with 10-100 billion where lots of R&D can happen.
Smaller companies can be very good at new product development, and are probably better at supporting those products once they catch on and become established. The really far-out R&D is probably better handled by university research labs than by big-company monopolies and semi-monopolies, which then will spin off small product development companies.
> How many startups comes up with new medicines, for example?
> A crucial part of the allure: Pint-size ventures are driving pharma innovation. The majority of drugs approved in recent years originated at smaller outfits—64% of them last year, according to HBM Partners, a health care investing firm.
Same with governments and the attempts at state capitalism you're referring to. Everything always is good unless it's bad, the question is how easily can it be constrained when it goes bad (and monitored for the signs of it going bad).
GP: I’m convinced this is how people with poor email management skills feel. It’s how I felt until I stepped up my filter, unsubscribe, and delete game and really developed a strategy for managing my inbox. It’s not heavyweight but the goal is to reduce your inbox to a task/todo list of sorts—only the things you need to worry about. Might be a direct inquiry or a notification about an upcoming sale, etc. Eventually you get to a point where you realize that _everything_ uses email. The internet _is_ email. It’s just really easy to end up being bombarded by so much of it that it feels useless.
This is the part that I don't understand. Facebook, in the grand scheme of things, is still an incredibly new development for people. Most users (at least those who abide by the age limit) have spent most of their lives not being on Facebook. What grand utility does Facebook provide that makes it so difficult to stop using it? I cancelled my Facebook account a few years ago and the only time I ever even thought about it was when I'd try to sign in to services (like Spotify) that were linked to my account at one time and it got reactivated through that. I'd have to login and cancel the account again.
What is it about Facebook that has suddenly and inexplicably turned it into a necessity for people when they lived for so long without it? It's not like a cell phone or other technology that has massive utility. Most people don't even communicate via Facebook (from what I hear). They just post divisive nonsense.
Facebook (along with Google, Amazon, EBay, AirBnB, Stripe, etc.) get their strength from the long tail. I had deleted it off my phone and logged out on desktop, but then I heard (via email from my sister, who heard it on Facebook) that my aunt was in a coma and my cousin was posting updates on Facebook. That was enough to bring me back. And my cousin posts updates on FB because it's by far the easiest way to distribute news to everyone who cares without worrying if you're forgetting someone.
I'd assume a lot of casual FB usage is similar. There's 90% outrage posts, political stuff, memes, ads, chain letters, people sharing glamor shots of their vacations - and 10% pics of the grandkids, reconnecting with long-lost friends, networking into chance opportunities, and birth/wedding/death announcements that you wouldn't otherwise see. Missing out on the good 10% is a sufficiently large incentive that people put up with the bad 90%.
I'd argue that communication via email can work just as well as FB. It's a little harder to "opt in" to updates, but with spam filters and other email features, it seems like it can be a lot less noise to have to filter through. But this is coming from someone who doesn't use FB.
It works on a small scale with a group of people who regularly communicate with each other. That's how I organize most of my social events - e-mail a bunch of friends and say "Hey, wanna get together on Saturday?"
It fails when groups are larger or more loosely attached. In my cousin's case - my dad was one of 10 brothers and sisters (many with their own spouses), I have 16 cousins on that side (again with spouses), 3 half-cousins, 10 cousins-once-removed, 1 cousin-twice-removed, and there's a tendency for at least one person to feel offended if they don't get the news when everybody else gets the news. It's somewhat understandable that my cousin would want a broadcast medium rather than trying to remember all that.
Or as another example - a friend of mine died recently, and I found out through FB. I hadn't been in touch with her for several years, since before she got married, I'd never met her husband, and he certainly didn't have my e-mail. Still, I appreciated knowing, and passed on that info to other mutual friends, who also appreciated knowing. That's the long-tail; in my parents' generation, they might've found out at some reunion 30 years in the future, long after the funeral has passed and people are done sharing memories & photos.
The problem that Facebook solves is finding a way to contact someone when all you know is their name. If you don't have a phone number, address, or email but you know First and Last (or even First - if you have related friends), then Facebook still works to get in touch. Whereas phone books for personal numbers aren't really a thing. Facebook is that phone book.
It's not so much utility as it is addiction. A lot of the popular platforms are implemented to take advantage random reinforcement / variable reward schedules, social approval, ego validation, etc.
> What grand utility does Facebook provide that makes it so difficult to stop using it?
For example, all your friends might be on it, and organise events via it. Then, if you don't use FB, you don't find out about events you might have wanted to go to.
This is the power of network effects, whiuch causes monopolies. The monopolies would be broken up if social networks had to use open protocols to allow interoperability.
> Can you imagine using WhatsApp to chat to your friends on Reddit or share photos from Flickr to Facebook and still see likes and comments? That’s the power of open protocols.
It could, but if you rely on being sent a calendar invite you'll miss the event, because people aren't sending calendar invites, because everyone is on Facebook, because people aren't sending calendar invites, because everyone is on Facebook. This is the network effect, as the parent post was saying.
One thing that I have been discovering recently: Discussion groups. Back in the day it was Usenet, of course, and there are still websites that host niche forums. But it seems I am now running into weird new interests where the major discussion is happening on a facebook group. I go months without logging into facebook, but this seems to be what's drawing me back in.
To most of my family in the Philippines, from children to elders, they only started using the internet heavily when Facebook was available (cell phones and decent data coverage were big enablers of that though).
Facebook provides clear utility to a society that has had no decent online method of replicating their group/communal way of sharing experiences before. Do they _need_ to share their experiences or communicate through Facebook? No, but it’s an obvious extension of what they’ve already been doing.
FWIW the issues I see with Facebook here in the west—fake news and divisive nonsense specifically—are exacerbated there, so definitely a double-edged sword.
I agree it could be a slippery slope but we are nowhere near it today. A published work copyright expires 70 years after the author dies, or something similar. That would probably apply to a blog post. 70 years post death is pretty reasonable. Not sure what a reasonable number for a network would be, but I think "forever" is excessive in the other direction.
179 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadIf there's nothing besides the quote below, I'd consider this an extremely weird and weak argument:
> What naturally happens is you end up with one company dominating the field so through history there is no alternative to really coming in and breaking things up. There is a danger of concentration.
I'd suspect that "loads," in fact the majority, of twitter users would not pay anything out of their own pocket to use it.
Firstly, if people want to use it, and pay for it, even small charges at mass scale pay off. Something like twitter doesn't cost a lot to run in particular at unit cost.
If they don't, GOTO 10: "the Internet is hamstrung by overreliance on advertising as a revenue model"
How else do you monetise your service?
One thing to do about the blind engagement machines is to make more people more aware of them. Think about ways people handle hazardous substances. Knowing that a substance is hazardous is the most important bit, to my mind.
The power to move away is already in the people's hands. You can do it at any moment, without a governmental mandate.
The point is to use this power. But first people have to recognize their power, and learn to use it a bit.
I don't think Twitter or Facebook are anywhere close to that threshold. Maybe that's just because I barely use them. But I'm sure some people were also not using phone in the seventies, so I won't conclude based on my individual case.
Walking away from Twitter is much easier, because multiple global instant or near-instant messaging systems exist, including completely open and user-controlled systems, and even building a new such system is reasonably easy for a group of competent people.
So is the case for AT&T: even if you could build a network competing with the AT&T one it would still have been a largely useless endeavor, unless you could also force AT&T to be interoperable with your network.
It's like saying the CIA wasn't trying to destroy communities when they were handing out crack, because "moral people wouldn't have taken it". Every single person building these platforms knew how addictive they were. It was the entire reason these companies were valued from the start. It was the end goal.
Yeah, a junkie can decide not to go find another needle. But if that is your response to the drug epidemic, you then have marginalized people who you've decreed "not worth saving". And I don't like what that has looked like over the last 60 years.
This only reinforces my point: if you think it's a wrong thing, walk away from it. Leave that job at Facebook data science division; there's a number of other well-paid data science jobs.
But I'm not trying to talk about what "they" have done wrong, and could have done differently in the past, or what regulators should be doing. I'm talking about something you and me can do right now, and what is completely within our own power to do.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/t...
That's a weak argument. Email existed before Gmail, web search existed before Google Search, maps even online ones, existed before Google Maps, mobile OSes existed before Android.
> Photos is not exactly innovative
That's what I used to think - another photo sharing/storage thingie. But it has all sorts of crazy machine-learning powered features.[1]
1. https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/0324/How-Google-Ph...
Seriously, it's bad optics going around and criticizing everybody else for not holding power accountable when you don't have your own house in order. When it came time to stand up to this power, Tim actively defended their interests. I suppose most people have already forgotten about it, but I never will, and neither will my friends that could go to jail for trying to research the security of binary crap in people's browsers.
Maybe restrictions, similar to gambling could be put into effect? For instance, clearly stating the business intent of the site, requiring ID, limiting to certain hours,.. its sounds weird but it reflects how underregulated the internet is compared to other areas.
Most social sites already impose age limitations.
Is the potential risk of addiction related to why alcohol sale is regulated? Most rationales I've seen for preventing sale to minors relate to health effects and immediate intoxication effects (car crashes etc.) instead.
Don't get me wrong, I'd be thrilled if addictive potential was considered primary among reasons to consider regulating something. I'm just not sure it is.
Yes, most hosts have and enforce (though imperfectly) content rules as they would be disincentivized from doing without CDA 230.
> Everything that I've seen has indicated that service providers use this law to play it both ways: they actively control what users see through algorithms, but then claim that they are (largely) not responsible for the moderation of questionable content.
That's not playing it both ways.
> IOW, they are not just a passive distribution point for information, and, in many cases, actively control the flow of information.
Yes, the entire point of CDA 230 is to allow them to actively moderate without becoming strictly liable for all content, since without that allowance they would be disincentivized from moderation. Removing CDA 230 would not encourage active moderation, it would make active moderation a gateway to unmanageable liability.
> Doesn't that intrinsically make them a publisher ?
Yes, without CDA 230 it would, restoring the “if you moderate content at all, you must succeed in capturing every bit of user-submitted illegal content or be fully liable as if you had deliberately originated it yourself” rule that was in place before CDA 230 (with the added challenge that there are more content regulations now than before the CDA was adopted), which is not something that promotes moderation, it promotes either no moderation or no user content hosting at all, leaving moderated hosting for operators outside of US jurisdiction.
Here is, perhaps, a better version of what I'm trying to say:
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_comments/2...
Edit: the section re: 230 is towards the end.
Frontline just covered some of this with respect to FB, also.
It would. A $1 ad-free option would see nowhere close to 50% adoption though.
Hence 'entertainment', right?
> when it didn't turn out the way he originally envisaged
Sure but who cares if that is the case? And he didn't imagine and invent the modern web nor did he even popularize it or put much effort into making it what is is today.
By his statements I take it that he is jealous that he feels that he has not played a bigger role in what happened after his 'invention' (which was based on a great deal of work prior to his involvement). Many of us used the arpanet in the 70's not to mention the US Government's involvement. Honestly (and nobody will agree I am sure) if there was no conflict with Russia the Internet would not exist (most likely).
And I am not seeing what he had a vision for any more than solving some simple issue he saw which was:
> Instead, it was hard work, the experience of working in computer science and an attempt to overcome the frustrations of trying to share information with colleagues and students
That is not the web today or even close to it and for that matter it wasn't the web even in 2000 or 1998.
Since you have directed this in an uncivil course: In what reality do you live where "email is to twitter as postal mail is to telephone" is a true statement?
You could use Mac or Linux. Except you wouldn't be able to interoperate with everyone else. This is precisely the situation with Facebook/Twitter.
>You don't want to use Google? Type in www.bing.com.
Their monopoly isn't on the user side, but on the provider side. If you want your web content to be discoverable, you have to play by Google's rules. If they announce that all websites have to add dancing elephants to their pages to be discoverable, most of the web will soon have dancing elephants. This kind of power can easily be used to discourage competition by creating high barrier of entry for indexing.
Still, to this day, Microsoft owns over 80% of the desktop market. Microsoft's dominance weaned not because they lost the desktop market but because the desktop stopped being the place where all the content was. This why Microsoft cares more about services and Azure instead of just pimping Windows.
> Their monopoly isn't on the user side, but on the provider side. If you want your web content to be discoverable, you have to play by Google's rules.
And if Google does something egregious, or uses their monopoly in a manner that prevents anyone from challenging it, then let's break up Google. But Google hasn't done anything like that, so your hypothetical is meaningless.
US antitrust doesn't exist to prevent monopolies or "promote competition" like the EU - it exists to prevent inefficient monopolies from using their monopoly to prevent a more efficient alternative from existing.
Google and Facebook, regardless of what people think about their influence, are offer damn good products. You might not like them, "elites" might not like their influence, but they aren't using their monopolies to harm their competitors. They just offer very important services that are high quality. That is everyone's problem with them. It's completely transparent and US regulators are smart to ignore this.
There's a lot of space between companies with 10 million dollars in revenue and ones with 10-100 billion where lots of R&D can happen.
Smaller companies can be very good at new product development, and are probably better at supporting those products once they catch on and become established. The really far-out R&D is probably better handled by university research labs than by big-company monopolies and semi-monopolies, which then will spin off small product development companies.
> How many startups comes up with new medicines, for example?
Seems like quite a lot, actually:
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20180509/BLOGS11/180...
http://fortune.com/2016/05/13/big-pharma-biotech-startups/:
> A crucial part of the allure: Pint-size ventures are driving pharma innovation. The majority of drugs approved in recent years originated at smaller outfits—64% of them last year, according to HBM Partners, a health care investing firm.
What is it about Facebook that has suddenly and inexplicably turned it into a necessity for people when they lived for so long without it? It's not like a cell phone or other technology that has massive utility. Most people don't even communicate via Facebook (from what I hear). They just post divisive nonsense.
I'd assume a lot of casual FB usage is similar. There's 90% outrage posts, political stuff, memes, ads, chain letters, people sharing glamor shots of their vacations - and 10% pics of the grandkids, reconnecting with long-lost friends, networking into chance opportunities, and birth/wedding/death announcements that you wouldn't otherwise see. Missing out on the good 10% is a sufficiently large incentive that people put up with the bad 90%.
It fails when groups are larger or more loosely attached. In my cousin's case - my dad was one of 10 brothers and sisters (many with their own spouses), I have 16 cousins on that side (again with spouses), 3 half-cousins, 10 cousins-once-removed, 1 cousin-twice-removed, and there's a tendency for at least one person to feel offended if they don't get the news when everybody else gets the news. It's somewhat understandable that my cousin would want a broadcast medium rather than trying to remember all that.
Or as another example - a friend of mine died recently, and I found out through FB. I hadn't been in touch with her for several years, since before she got married, I'd never met her husband, and he certainly didn't have my e-mail. Still, I appreciated knowing, and passed on that info to other mutual friends, who also appreciated knowing. That's the long-tail; in my parents' generation, they might've found out at some reunion 30 years in the future, long after the funeral has passed and people are done sharing memories & photos.
One huge problem is that you can't add people's emails with just their name. Another problem is that there's no concept of accepting a friend request.
Sure you can get around it but why bother?
For example, all your friends might be on it, and organise events via it. Then, if you don't use FB, you don't find out about events you might have wanted to go to.
This is the power of network effects, whiuch causes monopolies. The monopolies would be broken up if social networks had to use open protocols to allow interoperability.
As Irina Bolychevsky and James Moulding put it ( https://newsocialist.org.uk/do-we-really-need-a-statebook/ ):
> Can you imagine using WhatsApp to chat to your friends on Reddit or share photos from Flickr to Facebook and still see likes and comments? That’s the power of open protocols.
Facebook provides clear utility to a society that has had no decent online method of replicating their group/communal way of sharing experiences before. Do they _need_ to share their experiences or communicate through Facebook? No, but it’s an obvious extension of what they’ve already been doing.
FWIW the issues I see with Facebook here in the west—fake news and divisive nonsense specifically—are exacerbated there, so definitely a double-edged sword.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthly...