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Tell HN: Social media strike proposed for July 4-5 by Wikipedia co-founder

310 points by lsanger ↗ HN
"Humanity has been contemptuously used by vast digital empires," says my new "Declaration of Digital Independence" (https://larrysanger.org/2019/06/declaration-of-digital-indep...), which you can sign. So I'm calling a massive social media strike (https://larrysanger.org/2019/06/social-media-strike/) for July 4-5 to raise awareness of the possibility of decentralizing social media, which in my experience is wildly popular whenever proposed.

Read the FAQ (https://larrysanger.org/2019/06/faq-about-the-project-to-dec...) and use some collected resources (https://larrysanger.org/2019/06/socialmediastrike-resources/) to learn and spread the word far and wide. Look for lots of news about this soon. And get ready! Maybe we can make a long-held geek dream finally come true.

146 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] thread
kodz4
This is great. Celebs need to be on boarded more than Geeks. Getting an Obama or Kim Kardashian to show support would have major global impact. A cascade would start.
rohan1024
The problem is celebs are perfectly happy with current state of social media. Unless they see problems, they might not get onboard.

It's only the people who have been through some mess in there life because of social media know how bad is social media.

kodz4
As with the 2008 financial collapse, triggering a cascade requires just finding the weakness in just a few who are ready to burn out.
mkbkn
Kim Kardashian's business thrives on "media" and social media. Why would she be on it?
kodz4
Cause maybe she is tired of the routine. Has made enough money and is watching the effect its having on kids. There are thousands of reasons, because there are so many different unintended effects social media has.
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luckylion
> Cause maybe she is tired of the routine. Has made enough money and is watching the effect its having on kids.

Yeah, maybe Zuckerberg is tired of the routine as well and both of them don't want more money and more power.

But probably not.

ikeyany
Not just her business, her identity. Their whole family is based on being a brand.
hiccuphippo
One reason would be that her media business is controlled by a corporation that could ban her without notice at any moment and without reason. A decentralized network would allow her more control.
robjan
It would also be harder for her to build an audience and make money from it in the first place.
Nextgrid
The corporations are also making so much money off her content that banning her would be a disaster.
[dead] justanobody
One way to do this is to tell feminists that men are superior to women as they are more disciplined and likely to go on a much needed social media strike for much longer because they don't quite have the same need for approval and attention from others. And then sit back and watch the fun. :-)
llukas
Cascade of what? I expect only cascade of posts on {facebook, twitter, you name it} happening.

FB will happily put adverts between posts in that "cascade" ;)

buboard
Nah, the geeks need to go there first. The rest always follows. But i think there are not enough geeks in decentraland
Nextgrid
Maybe even geeks can be pragmatic and understand the limitations of the alternative social networks and choose not to bother? I’m in that camp personally.
jsilence
Keanu Reeves should got on the #fediverse. Cyberpunk77 hordes would fill the Mastodons.
adamlangsner
I love this. Ironically, a great way to spread the word is via social media.
growtofill
That’s the point. Advertise the hazards of smoking in the places where people smoke.
murat124
By smoking it.
growtofill
Otherwise you are subjective to survivorship bias: if people were silently quitting social media the ones who remain wouldn’t be aware there’s anything wrong with those social media.
murat124
I agree but the ones who remain don't care.
azangru
Using the smoking analogy, this passage from the article:

> We’re going to flex our collective muscles and demand that giant, manipulative corporations give us back control over our data, privacy, and user experience.

sounds as if smokers demanded of tobacco companies for two days that they cut the amount of carcinogens in cigarette smoke (and maybe stop putting nicotine in their cigarettes as well) - and then resumed smoking after 2 days. It comes off as weak, pathetic and insincere.

tickerticker
Is HN a form of social media?
edejong
Thanks for that question tickerticker. Upvoted you so you get extra status. Let’s see what lsanger might reply later?
webgoat
I'd say yes, considering that most of the content is random dialogue among other posters. Also the lax policy on acceptable content makes HN look as clickbait as reddit most of the time.
MegaButts
> Also the lax policy on acceptable content makes HN look as clickbait as reddit most of the time.

You really think HN has a comparable amount of clickbait to reddit?

shearskill
Strong disagree on that. Reddit has bots and a massive troll population, neither is present in such a way that affects user experience.
dang
Does that mean we get a day off?
pvg
A silent suffering, and intense;

The rock, the vulture, and the chain,

All that the proud can feel of pain,

The agony they do not show,

The suffocating sense of woe

Think that's a no.

drivingmenuts
Sure, but you’ll need to file double the outraged Instagrams on the day after to make up for it.
reshie
i would say yes. so are blogs,forums,chats,etc. networking itself is social in a form. media is perhaps key.

media definition "(Communications & Information) the means of communication that reach large numbers of people, such as television, newspapers, and radio"

and internet i would say and i would say broadcasting not necessarily interacting. now social is the means of people interacting with other so anything with like comments would fall into social media but pure social would be like chat. social media would be very forum in function but can of course be more distinct like face book though it may fall more under a social paradigm.

johnchristopher
Some have argued it is on the basis that it's online and people are writing stuff.

In the absence of any useful definitions I'd say it's not because few here seem attached to the name of people commenting.

Personally, you all have the same face, the same voice and are one and the same person.

Way too many people to feel anything social about it to me.

danboarder
I would define online forums, newsgroups, and IRC/IM chat as predecessors to the current generation of social media, which are focused on the individual profile.

On social media you follow people, while on forums you follow topics.

From that understanding, I think HN is more of a forum, which is an online media format that predates what we define today as social media. (but it certainly similar to varying degrees, as are online media venues like Reddit).

yoz-y
> On social media you follow people, while on forums you follow topics.

This is a very good summary, thank you.

How about Reddit? It does have a few “celebrities” but in general it is about topics.

PavlovsCat
To me, a forum is about topics and people can discuss them at their own leisure, bumping them in the process. In contrast slashdot, reddit, HN are more like "what topics are currently on", and if only few people are interested in a topic and visit the site apart from each other, no story they are interested in will make it to the front page, and they can't even discuss it "slowly, sometimes", like they could on a forum with a search function.

On reddit you at least get informed of replies to your comments, but discussions older than X are automatically closed, so that's not enough use to shift the balance for me.. I remember when a topic being locked felt like something rather grave, where either mods or users fucked up - now it's built-in. And sometimes discussion even gets substituted with clicking buttons.. which is also not about the topics, but another form of using outside force (something other than words) on words.

zrobotics
I don't think you are entirely wrong, but IME bumping an old forum thread will, more often than not, result in other members getting annoyed at necroing a thread. And while discussion does somewhat get replaced with like buttons, I have seen entirely too many "+1" posts on forums; people want to do something to show they like/agree with a poster even when they have nothing constructive to add.

Although on this site, I don't think I'm alone in only downvoting posts that are flamebait or factually incorrect, rather than opinions I disagree with. There is a bit of an echo chamber effect here, but it is nowhere near as bad as Slashdot or most forums get.

PavlovsCat
> IME bumping an old forum thread will, more often than not, result in other members getting annoyed at necroing a thread

Well, not in mine, in serious forums. Sure, gamer forums, and what have you.

> I have seen entirely too many "+1" posts on forums; people want to do something to show they like/agree with a poster even when they have nothing constructive to add.

They don't actually take away though, not like people downvoting, because they can't show something being incorrect, does, which I see happen all the time.

espeed
Yes. HN is a form of social media -- it's a social media exemplar -- the exception that proves it's possible to have an open system for high-quality public discourse, even if such a system is hard to establish and even harder to maintain.

Paul Graham has said, "he hopes to avoid the Eternal September that results in the general decline of intelligent discourse within a community" [1]. Hacker News launched 12 years ago in 2007, it's a testament to Graham, the moderators, the algorithms behind it, and the community members that HN has been able to keep its system for high quality intelligent discourse from devolving over time.

If HN doesn't resemble most other social media systems -- so much so that people have to ask -- this is why. Establishing such a system is hard to do, and even harder to maintain. So far HN has been an exception, not the rule.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News

F-0X
Strong disagree. HN is not a social media. Because we do not use it for social purposes. This site has no concept of user relationships, and it does not encourage you to use real/identifying information about yourself to use it. It is centred on topics and discussion - sites like this, Reddit, and other forums can develop social networks, but this is a byproduct and not the intent, which I think is the single most important factor. HN's purpose is not to keep you in touch with your friends or community, thus it is not a social media.
NeedMoreTea
It seems to have the key components. An ephemeral timeline and new posts page, user submitted stories and content, and the like/upvote.

It's not a social network though. There's no concept of friends. Twitter is part way between the two. It barely groks user relationships - you subscribe to someone to see their stuff in your feed and that's about as far as it goes.

doute
Yes, very much so and it is also apparent by the content. You also don't have to have formal network to have a social network. The significant part is whether something behaves differently in the context of the network. Which I think one could clearly say about hacker news.
espeed
Where are you getting your definition for social media?

Wikipedia defines social media as [1]:

  Social media are interactive computer-mediated technologies 
  that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, 
  ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via 
  virtual communities and networks.
I don't know if there's an "official" agreed upon definition somewhere, but I do know this: The definition of what social media is and what it will become is not yet known -- it will continue to evolve as the Internet evolves and as our understanding evolves closer to true -- but at its core, I would say social media is technology that enables bidirectional public communication among people whereas mass media [2] enables unidirectional public communication -- one to many broadcasts to people -- with no direct feedback loop.

The Internet provided the foundational infrastructure and was the prerequisite layer that made social media interaction possible. What we do with social media -- how we use it, build upon it, and optimize for it -- is yet to be determined.

For example, who would have envisioned the mobile phone as we use it today when the telephone was invented. Phones aren't just used for phone calls anymore. The iPhone changed that, but the iPhone couldn't exist in its present form until the foundation for the Internet infrastructure was laid. Today our vision of the Internet is not what it was when it was invented. It continues to evolve, as does its uses and definition. Social media will be like that too -- it's part of the next layer to build upon, and we're still learning what that is -- its definition is still being formed, and its optimal form is still to come.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media

z3phyr
By this definition, the internet itself is a social media?
sbmthakur
Do you mean the World Wide Web? The Internet also consists of devices like routers.
z3phyr
More than WWW. There is a lot of content on the on the internet not served by hypertext markup in a web browser.
dTal
Moreover, it's impossible to use HN to keep in touch with friends in meaningful ways - you can't send private messages on HN. There are people I've otherwise lost touch with, who turn up on HN from time to time. What am I gonna do, hijack a thread to say hi?
espeed
People say hi on HN all the time, esp when they see someone they know comment on a thread.
6d6b73
And what's open about HN?
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craftyguy
> open system

"Hacker" "news" is not an open system. The source code, AFAIK, is proprietary, and the FAQ even states that votes are not counted 1:1, which implies "algorithms" and other hand-wavy stuff.

For an actual open social media system, where moderator actions and source code are public for all to review, see https://lobste.rs.

buboard
I believe it is, it is a medium of influence, and social dynamics are often present. It's just so much smaller than the megaphones of FB & twitter.
swebs
You're talking to people, aren't you?
changoplatanero
This reminds me of the campaign to get people to give up shopping on the day after thanksgiving. Not gonna happen.
pishpash
Because of game theory and money is involved and enough people have been coopted.
klez
It seems to me all of that applies (in different ways, I would concede) to social media as well.
bartimus
The only way this is going to move forward is through open standards. Something something webfinger, mail 2.0 and trusted recipients.
anonytrary
Social media is hard to define so participants are more likely to cheat. Should be an internet strike which is "as simple as" going camping without your phones/computers for 2 days, which honestly would be great practice for a newly decentralized world.
camdenlock
Eh? There already are decentralized social networks available to use. This doesn’t add up.

And as others have pointed out, what networks are eligible for this forced decentralization process? Should some networks be allowed to be centralized? Which ones, if so?

Let’s not be too hasty.

r3bl
> Eh? There already are decentralized social networks available to use. This doesn’t add up.

I agree. They've always existed in one form or the other, it's just that nobody gave a fuck. Mastodon kinda changed that by attracting about half a million monthly users. A tiny, tiny number for a social network, but a gigantic number for a decentralized social network.

This website is good for the overview of the "fediverse" (collection of social media services talking together via open protocols): https://the-federation.info/

Hell, name a social network, and I can name at least one attempt at decentralizing it: Twitter (Mastodon, Pleroma), Instagram (PixelFed, Anfora), reddit (Lemmy), YouTube (PeerTube), SoundCloud (Funkwhale), Medium (Write.as) etc. An obvious one that I haven't listed is Facebook, but that thing has so many features that a viable alternative heavily depends on which Facebook features you actually use.

I see nothing wrong with this strike, but I don't see how spreading awareness helps if you don't point to the most obvious solution available.

0x8BADF00D
It never held any power over me. I was always skeptical of it from the start. That’s why it is hard to imagine something like a social media strike. For many of us it has no power over our minds.
LMYahooTFY
This seems problematic if you consider yourselves unaffected thus uninvested.
buboard
Doesn't HN count as social media?
welly
It's a forum.
buboard
with karma. and a lot of groupthink. surely it doesnt compare to the dross u see on facebook, but HN , reddit and twitter are on a similar level of socialmedia-ness to me
bubblewrap
There are already options for decentralized social media. So clearly the majority of people is not in favor of using them, or they would simply do so (without a strike).

Therefore, this is about a minority trying to force the majority of people to adapt to their preferences.

I can not sympathize with such a cause, even though I personally would prefer decentralized solutions.

It reminds me of the town that voted to ban Amazon - when they could just have shopped locally to begin with. Weird, really.

gilcardenas
I think you're oversimplifying people.

Lots of people want to lose weight while also loving the taste of delicious food that makes them gain weight. Same with smoking, drinking, recycling, etc.

It really comes down to the cost on people to do something.

If your building didn't provide a recycling bin, you probably wouldn't take the trouble to take all your recycling to a recycling facility.

If none of your friends used social media, chances are you wouldn't either.

bubblewrap
Decentralized Social Media already exists, like the recycling bins at our apartment complex.

The problem is the network effect. But then who are the protestors protesting to? They should protest to their friends to switch over to decentralized SM. Maybe they are just not important enough to have their friends follow them to better services?

Instead of going on a strike, why not evangelize those solutions to your friends?

As for losing weight: it is true that sometimes people like to have their hands forced. It is called an Ulysses contract, from Ulysses tying himself to the mast so that he couldn't jump into the sea to follow the sirens.

Calling for the government in the case of Social Media seems way overblown, though. There are no health issues involved like with unhealthy food. And for unhealthy food, people make those choices by buying smaller packages or using different shops. Arguably not really a case for government intervention, either.

yoz-y
I feel that even if everybody who cared went on strike, the difference in daily visitors would probably be in the error margin.

I think most people who really care have already left the centralised social media or scaled it down to the point that a non-strike day is an exception.

I do not disagree with the message, but I seriously doubt that this will have any effect.

kickscondor
I think there could be some useful purposes for everyone outside of social media: unifying those people, helping them find each other, mobilizing them to take community measures. I think it's safe to say that at this point we're not looking for another social network to replace Facebook or another search engine to replace Google - we need to start finding ways to work decentralized but still come together -this is going to come out sounding silly, but - on the Internet's behalf.

This could be good. Stuff like #deletefacebook was interesting, but it didn't help people find alternatives. I like that a 'strike' implies group action together toward some kind of progress.

Nextgrid
One big issue is that there’s nothing decentralised that currently exists that can rival the quality & user experience of mainstream social networks, and decentralisation comes with its own problems (I personally think the problem with mainstream social media is its ad-based business model and not centralisation).

Mastodon (which seems to be the biggest alternative being proposed) is still a joke, even the name and branding sounds awful IMO. And who in their right mind thought calling a post a “toot” (https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/toot) was a good idea.

Besides the branding, decentralisation comes with its own issues like the lack of network-wide content moderation and agreement on what content is acceptable. There are solutions (more like hacks) around this where instance admins can choose not to federate with instances they don’t like the policies of, but it then causes problems for end-users where they can’t communicate with their peers on those banned instances despite all of them being on Mastodon. Good luck explaining to a non-technical person why they can’t talk to/see the posts of certain people despite them all being on Mastodon, and the solution is to spend time choosing an instance with policies you agree with and making sure your friends are on it or on a similar instance that’s not banned by yours, and then hoping the instances stay online without any kind of funding (there’s also no knowledge of whether they would scale to the size of mainstream social networks).

The solution IMO is not Mastodon or any of these fringe social networks. The main problem is the lack of an ethical business model in mainstream social media. The solution would be to vote with your wallets and fund a better Facebook alternative - it could even show the current social networks that there’s profit to be made treating their users with respect and make the situation better for everyone else too.

doute
> The solution IMO is not Mastodon or any of these fringe social networks. The main problem is the lack of an ethical business model in mainstream social media.

That is certainly a problem and something should be addressed. But I don't think it is the root cause. The real tragedy is the lack of understanding that reality happens between the mainstream and the fringe.

Most of the technology we like was created in the second half of the 20th century. We have been standing on the shoulders of giant and eventually the giants got old and were replaced by self-serving large tech companies. But since most people are making money, or get things for free, we don't want to recognize that we are their servants. There is no longer any urgency to create something different, because being different means missing out.

The reason you have to go to esoteric solutions when talking about something like decentralization is because the Internet is no longer built for it. From authentication, to networks and even the state of ip addresses is less than great. That you can avoid these problem by going to the fringe likely comes from the idea that hackers still have influence. We think that if something doesn't work it can't be our own fault, it most be some conspiracy or inherent limitation, rather a lack in our own understanding and ability to organize.

> Besides the branding, decentralisation comes with its own issues like the lack of network-wide content moderation and agreement on what content is acceptable.

Decentralization built on individualism rarely works. Because it leaves the unorganized powerless. It has to be built upon common features used by different cliques were the participants have choice. Maybe most importantly there has to be separation between the platform and the activity.

Nextgrid
> because the Internet is no longer built for it

I’d say the Internet is no longer optimised for it because the use-case is no longer possible for the majority of people.

You can’t run a server on a phone due to power constraints and yet more and more people are using phones as their only computing device.

doute
That is part of it. But the important point is that it is not inherent. There nothing saying that you can't be protocols for that. It is just beyond what the Internet was design for many years ago, and the de facto Internet today include proprietary infrastructure run by large tech companies. But it is generally even worse then that because today smart phone don't have external ip addresses so you can't connect to them even after the initial centralized wake up. So it is an absolute regression as well.
Nextgrid
Mobile networks are moving towards IPv6 now, so phones are uniquely addressable again. Making them reachable from outside (if they aren’t already) is a trivial problem to solve should there be demand for it.

But I don’t see any major use-case for that - the main issue of battery life remains for any significant usage, and frankly I wouldn’t want to have something running in the background that would deplete my battery in an hour because someone happened to connect and watch a video hosted on it.

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r3bl
I agree with you all the way until the middle of your third paragraph.

You're not gonna suggest Mastodon to someone, you're gonna point to a specific community (probably the same one you're a member of). Only one set of rules you need to worry about. Federation? You don't have to pay attention to it at all. It's a nice feature to have for sure, but it only becomes relevant once you don't have people to follow inside of your own instance. By recommending an instance, you're recommending a community, not the software behind that community.

There have been plenty of attempts of taking Facebook's crown (both VC-funded and user-funded), and they've all failed spectacularly. The reason for that is simple: people don't want a global network. Facebook was the first and last one to succeed. Nobody wants to be on the same network as their parents, so they indeed decentralize: they decentralize in group chats, Facebook groups, Discord servers, Slack servers, Twitter communities, Discourse instances, Mastodon instances, forums like HN, subreddits etc. Facebook and Google+ failed immediately simply by having a real-name policy. That's okay if you want to communicate with people around you, but terrible if you want to truly express yourself to a bunch of strangers. The younger you are, the bigger the odds that you belong in the latter. Nothing wrong with communicating with people around you, but that's not the group that drives your numbers up drastically.

Mastodon surely can't be the new Facebook simply because that's not what it aims to become. It aims to become the software of choice for the communities. The easier you make it to jump on board (and the less personal data you need to provide in order to do so), the bigger the odds that you'll be the home for a community.

Nextgrid
I am not sure that being a global network is a problem.

Instagram is a global network and seems to be doing fine (although the quality of the content has now declined).

Personally, a global network is what I want. I already have the solutions you mention (group chats, Slack/Discord instances, forums, etc) for specific communities. What’s missing is something like Facebook or Instagram where everyone is on it and I can just “add” them and get updates about them every so often.

If anything, the per-community problem is already solved thanks to Discourse, Slack/Discord, Reddit, group chats, etc. But a global network is what’s missing.

r3bl
You don't jump from nothing to a global network. You host tangentially-related communities in the middle. The more of them you host, the bigger your overall numbers are.

Instagram succeeded for that same reason: profiles set to private, no real name policy, people can't look you up in a search bar. It was easier to group up in small communities. The less that's the case, the crappier the content. Instagram was ruined the moment Facebook accounts were attached to Instagram accounts — it's just dying slowly, the same way Facebook is dying slowly.

The next "global" platform is going to be Discord. It started as a place to host gaming communities. People were subscribed to a few gaming communities, so it already made sense for them to join more communities that are available on the platform. Right now, it's no longer the place exclusively for gaming. Every subreddit has one, every Patreon supporter is a member of some secret one. It'll outlast both Instagram and Facebook for one reason only: no personal info what so ever. People can't find out anything about you by clicking on your username: not your real name, not your contact info, not even a list of other communities you are a part of. You join a community by being invited to one.

jakear
To me, Discord is just a partial implementation of Slack. What does it have that Slack doesn’t?
r3bl
Feature-wise, pretty much nothing, it's just targeting a different set of users. Slack started as a solution for companies and pretty much stayed there, Discord started as a solution for gamers and expanded from there.

Slack is Discord for adults, but adults are never the ones who make or break social media. It's younger people who tend to be more invested in the platform they use. It's not a rational choice (nor was Facebook for my generation), but it got kickstarted out of necessity (as a substitute to the limited chat options within games) and right now, it's the convenience that drives it further. Why switch over when, unlike Facebook or Slack, everyone you know is already using Discord?

AJ007
So basically what we need is Discord/Slack, but as an open protocol.

The entire concept of having a gigantic centralized social network on top of a gigantic decentralized communication platform (the internet) seems like a bit of an anti-pattern to me. Email, Usenet, and IRC seem to have never gotten the successors they deserved. Centralized, closed, and operates by a for-profit organization does not count.

As a side note I’m surprised there isn’t more mention of message boards here. Their peak seems to have been 2001-2010 and then their importance faded. One can discuss the shortcomings of phpBB and vBulletin at length, but their basic function seemed to have worked extremely well.

jammygit
Anecdotally, most of my irl friends don’t or else barely use Facebook at this point. Lots of profiles with no pictures posted in 5 years
themacguffinman
On the contrary, I think you don't jump from nothing to tangentially-related communities. The reason why niche community subreddits are so successful is because reddit itself is a global, central network that congregates users all on its own with its popular default subs. You have it the wrong way round: niche communities benefit from a global platform that funnels users to them, niche subreddits do not drive the success of the global platform in the first place (although it may enhance it).

Discord and Mastodon could never be as successful as subreddits for this reason. It's pretty difficult to establish a niche community by setting up shop next to other niche communities, niches are full of passionate people who don't spread their passion across niches thinly. You want a global platform like reddit to expose your community to the masses to unlock the niches within it.

kickscondor
> One big issue is that there’s nothing decentralised that currently exists that can rival the quality & user experience of mainstream social networks.

The Web at large is the decentralized network. And, anyway, part of the reason the ‘quality’ isn’t there (and this is arguable, I wouldn’t call social media a ‘quality’ experience) is due to the fact that we are spending our time and resources there. If that time was spent on the Web, it would improve.

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preommr
> unifying those people, helping them find each other,

So a social media platform for people that don't like current social media platforms?

kickscondor
Not at all - I participate in the Indieweb and TiddlyWiki communities (and others) outside of social media. Plain old WWW works well - just need to continue building tools to expand it.
tapanjk
To my mind, what matters here is that there is a viable option for all those who care. This may not shut down the the big social media, and I do not think that is the goal here. What matters is that there are alternatives that let users own (and keep) their content.
cryptozeus
You are underestimating the annoyance of social media. People want to quit it but at this point they are too attached. I think this will be big.
Kiro
And I'm pretty sure you're overestimating it. The only people I ever hear expressing a desire to quit are inside this tiny tech circle.
hadsed
It doesn't have to reach its end game goal immediately. It's an iterative process of slowly gathering people together, showing others that there are at least some people who care, technologists seeing the demand and creating products, rinse and repeat. Until one day you hit the phase transition point and then boom... Change.
jdoliner
The social media strike, as organized on Hacker News, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I honestly don't think people have much interest in striking these days if they can't post it on social media, but maybe this will have legs. It's a little telling though that this really can't be organized any other way besides social media these days, and I suspect there will be a lot of people throughout those 2 days checking in on social media to see how it's going.
kickscondor
This is already happening to some degree - like I wonder what percentage of Twitter messaging is now complaining about Twitter. Yes, this could just generate some small increase in traffic for the day - but that's an acceptable short-term concession if it means the centralized social networks could go away in the long-term.
nikhildahake
I created Timelines - a social network that allows people to own their data.

Timelines stores your data in a specific folder on your Google Drive which is sandboxed from all your other data on Google drive.

Check it out!

https://www.timelines.co

stonogo
You own your data by uploading it directly to Google servers?
nikhildahake
It is in a sand boxed environment on Google drive. This is more of a proof of concept. I could potentially develop this further by:

1)Giving the user an option of where they would want to store the data e.g. S3, box, dropbox etc. 2)Encrypt the data before sending it to google servers.

jsilence
Not sure whether this is sarcasm.
nikhildahake
Why would this be sarcasm? I don't understand.
mxuribe
I'm encouraged by your effort (anyone working on stuff to help decentralize people's data is always GREAT in my mind). However, if you really want to empower people to own their own data, you may want to consider data repository target platforms like NextCloud, and other platforms like it. That way, from soup to nuts, they have control over their data. Good luck and cheers with your project!
icebraining
A few suggestions:

- The target market will probably want details: does the data go through your servers unencrypted? Is it store unencrypted? People who care where the data is stored usually have common worries, you should answer them.

- Who are you? If you're asking me to put my life on your site, the least you can do is tell me who you are. Maybe you can use it as a showcase of your product, if you can make a public Timeline as a sort of bio.

- Signing up is annoying and people won't do it if they aren't hooked by your introduction. Show them how it works - screenshots and videos are okay, a demo with fake data is better.

- If I need a Google account anyway, why do I have to come up with a password? Just let me signup with Google. You can let people add other login mechanisms later, if they wish.

- I don't want to sign up now, but I may be interested in how it evolves. Give me some way of following it: newsletter, RSS feed, Twitter account, etc.

--

Good luck!

nikhildahake
These are really good suggestions. I'll keep them in mind. Thanks!
quickthrower2
I'll see your Social Media strike and raise you an Internet strike.
braindead_in
I fully support it. Hopefully it will not become a social media event and lead to more consumption.
negamax
Why not do a no Internet day? Will be easier to communicate that. Give people a taste of normal life. They will automatically quit on social media. Like every Sunday no Internet day.
iliketosleep
That actually would have been a great idea, in hindsight. I have seen far to many people who suffer from intense anxiety if they have no internet or device access, even if it's just for a few hours. It's like a form of addiction. A day away from the Internet each week would condition people to be able to survive without it.
greendestiny_re
I just spent seven days with only a limited data plan. I felt like time slowed down to a crawl and I was able to do much more than on a regular day with the internet.
cameronbrown
I've cut down to a 2GB plan for this reason. Initially I was just switching networks but I stuck with it because of how much better I felt. Being more data conscious made me realise how much time I was wasting. I used to consume 2-3 times more data and now I don't even hit my cap anymore.
icebraining
The point of the strike is to promote another kind of social media, not protesting against it all. A No Internet day could still be done, but conflating the two would miss the point.
Karrot_Kream
I feel like most folks haven't read either link. The strike calls for striking against traditional, centralized social media, _not_ other social media (such as the Fediverse).
buboard
Probably they should edit the title to mention this fact, it is easy to misunderstand it
tastroder
Where's the difference? Nobody (tm) is using the latter anyway.

The best example of something decentralised, that is/was actually used, in the linked FAQ seems to be RSS/Atom. In the age of medium, aggregators like iTunes/Spotify and whatnot, that doesn't seem like something that's on a rising slope either. Despite the Twitter conversation in there I'd be hard pressed to see any incentive for this type of corporation to embrace openness when their current alternative is more lucrative.

Even if this strike gains momentum in the tech-savvy niche it's unlikely to even be noticed by regular users or even the non-tech influencers those people follow. It lacks an immediately actionable goal and common incentive. Another open standard, another decentralised social $X, that's not something that drives a critical mass away from any of these platforms. The platforms also have enough money to just buy up new players and continue their current paradigm.

I like the rules put forward by that decentralisation manifesto, I'm just not sure the general public cares or can care. A general user today likely didn't experience the internet as a set of communities. The experience is, imho, one of commercial interests that drives the masses, which drowns any visible incentive a regular user might gain from the technical approach this movement suggests.

3xblah
Interesting how he chose the word "strike", commonly used to refer to workers, as if to imply users are working for Facebook or Twitter.

Every time a user submits something to them, it is arguable she is doing work for those companies. The companies do not produce content, yet they depend on it in order to draw traffic. What they provide is a centralised distribution channel. They rely on users to do the work of producing/submitting content.

SamuelAdams
That's one of the amazing things about social media. It has the largest unpaid workforce in history - bigger even than the slave trade. Companies aren't getting billions of dollars in stock valuations because of their 50 or so really smart employees: they're getting billions because of their user's data, and their users willingness to continuously cultivate and update that data.

That's what makes Facebook data so valuable: it's up to date and it's very detailed, all thanks to the billions of people who contribute to it.

ekianjo
What would you achieve with a 2 days strike anyway? The idea is so ridiculous in itself it's not even worth writing about.
buboard
The goal is to promote decentralized media, not to get people off of them.
buboard
This is laudable as a way to draw attention to the decentralized media. This is not the typical "social media is bad for you get away". Of course i very much doubt it will work. The best way to make decentralized systems work, is to kick a lot of smart people outside corporate media. Smart people will improve the decentralized platforms and influence others to use them. It will be sort of like what happened with the birth of Bitcoin.

I think we should be asking for swift regulation and more censorship on corporate media. It is the kind of thing that really puts off smart people, and will push those early adopters to use the decentranet.

Is there a reddit-like decentralized alternative?

amelius
Perhaps an idea to make a substitute profile pic that people can use to show they are in.

By the way, July 4-5 (before the weekend) seems unfortunate timing because many people will want to check for events.

RickJWagner
social media strike on July 4th?

I'm betting Facebook has a huge spike. The people I know on Facebook:

- Aren't going to know about the strike

- Won't be able to resist posting gratuitous food-fest pics

will_brown
Here is a suggestion for the strike as well...launch a decentralized anti-libra coin.
keithtom
It’s called DAI by makerDAO
gtfratteus
Is not email and SMS already a decentralized form of social media?

I doubt the existence of decentralized social media would mean the end of centralized social media. How do you build a video sharing platform that's anywhere near as full-featured as Youtube without centralization?