I personally preferred the tweet because I can’t read the article. Also, the tweets are personal statements (which seemed relevant to me), not just a link to the article (only mentioned in the last tweet of the thread).
That's a thought provoking way to put it. Part of the problem is however that only internal employees fully understand the destruction that was going on.
It's always funny to see how defensive people get about criticism. More that likely this 'fix' for social media will either fail or just end up being another social media platform with the aim of attracting engagement and selling user data / screen time for ad space.
Anyone with a critical view of these organizations has seen exactly the extent of the harm. The endless news releases should be an adequate trail to follow.
People, at large, have chosen to ignore all the unbelievable actions so they can continue to stalk others online -cough cough- I mean, keep in touch with grandma.
To be purposefully blunt, nobody cares. I'm sure there are good, nice people at Facebook. But the reason they're all able to enjoy insane salaries and perks is because Facebook's business is to keep their users hooked on their platforms as much as possible, track their users as much as possible, and then sell this information.
I mean, kudos to you I guess for "caring deeply" about communications tools and social networks, but none of that can change the incentives inherent in Facebook's business model.
Facebook doesn't sell the information. It uses the information to improve the experience for their users, to prevent abuse of their services, and to allow advertisers to do more specific targeting with their campaigns.
You are correct, I should have used clearer language, but by "sell the information" I meant that they monetized the information to make money selling ads.
But let's stop with the idea that somehow Facebook's data Hoover is somehow a benefit. Facebook could very easily get rid of all the problems they have on their site which require minimal data collection, but it would also cost them many billions of dollars, so they won't do it.
Users consented in giving their information to a third party and then were betrayed by that third party misusing using the data.
Personally I believe there in a big difference between a company giving your data to another company behind your back and doing so after you have approved it first.
I mean if you move the goal posts then sure but the argument was about if the activity occurred which it does.
---
FB has never claimed (in court) that CA violated any agreements they had with them. The only comments they've made are PR speak to obscure the fact that CA acted within the rules (hence why FB needed to update the rules). The only court cases that arose are against FB* for sharing data with CA they shouldn't've.
Per-FB's policy there are only a few things worth talking about.
> (7) If you use any partner services, make them sign a contract to protect any information you obtained from us, limit their use of that information, and keep it confidential.
> (9) Don't sell, license, or purchase any data obtained from us or our services.
> (10) Don't transfer any data that you receive from us (including anonymous, aggregate, or derived data) to any ad network, data broker or other advertising or monetization-related service.
7 - This is my understand as to what happened. CA didn't turn around and release this data.
9 - Doesn't apply as nobody claims Kogan sold the data to CA.
10 - Doesn't apply as CA isn't these things.
* Technically the FTC did also against CA but it was literally _just_ because CA also recorded the User's FB ID [2].
It doesn’t matter how much you care about those if your business model is still just to stoke extremism. If I come across someone that has Fb on their resume I’m going to be considering the period of their tenure in my assessment of their character.
Maybe the thing you should be taking away from Facebook in their resume, is that they're no longer working there. There's nothing to be gained from crapping on ex-Facebook employees that doesn't seem to boil down to ego-stroking and making sure people know how high your moral horse is.
No, I'm going to look at the period of their tenure - if they made the choice to go to Fb when it was well clear what it was, that's on them - if they started before and then left once it became clear that would be a positive.
All in all, if you choose to work for a shitty company, or doing shitty things, you should assume people will use that as part of their opinion of you.
I do not get how that becomes any extremism of any kind - that's just standard outcome of reading someone's resume?
I don't say this to pile on, but I've spent years telling head hunters from FB (among others) that my ethics are not for sale. I've made less money and operated at smaller scales as a result.
If it helps, a lot of the replies you are getting to this is just another "vocal minority on HN" effect. Which is not representative of the reality at all.
In real life, people use tiktok, people use facebook, people use snapchat, and the only thing that other people worth their salt will get from seeing that you used to work at FB is "hm, they must at least be a somewhat decent dev with solid understanding of the area they worked on".
The people who are the loudest in their condemnation of you, purely due to your former employment at fb, aren't the ones you are likely to ever cross paths with in any meaningful way in the first place. And that's a good thing.
People are annoyed at the holier than thou BS given in instances like this or that Netflix doc. People who are keeping the millions made from social media and purporting to now be doing benevolent work. Most don’t care if you just worked for FB and aren’t saying silly stuff.
Social needs to change.
The engagement model of current social sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc only brings out the worst in people.
This will be even amplified once there are crypto payments coming into the equation.
Might be a naive view, but I believe in community enforced rules through DAO ownership because these structures have some potential to encourage free speech within a normative environment that discourages hate speech and spam.
The DAO model is more the ownership and governance portion where you own a portion of the forum and thus are incentivized to participate in it's success.
>The DAO model is more the ownership and governance portion where you own a portion of the forum and thus are incentivized to participate in it's success.
How is that any better than hosting your own forum and federating with others of your choice?
If I'm running my own forum, I (obviously) have a stake in the success of my own forum.
If my goal is to profit from running a forum, that can also be done in a decentralized, federated fashion without DAOs too.
As someone else pointed out[0], DAOs don't really add any real value in this case.
>If my goal is to profit from running a forum, that can also be done in a decentralized, federated fashion without DAOs too.
Yes, that is likely true. I think DAOs are interesting because they make partial ownership by the users of the forum easier. Personally, I don't care about decentralization or federation. I ran a Mastodon and DeSo node for a while and I am not sure if it actually adds anything to user experience or actually solves a real-world problem.
What interest me in the "organization" of the DAO is where it allows people that share a common interest build something together without incorporating a business and distributing shares.
Do I need a DAO or run a forum or website (VPS or otherwise) for any of this? Realistically, I could phone a number of friends to meet up regularly for beers and discuss football.
But I think the development path could be
Friends doing a meetup locally -> International friends that want to meet -> International friends that want to build something together and earn by doing so.
I think the problem that a DAO solves is to get people together that share a common interest and provides an efficient way to ensure proper governance and compliance.
Will the world continue without DAOs. Yes for sure. Could DAOs develop in ways for communities (clubs, teams, political parties, etc) to govern themselves, maybe. Still I think its worthwhile to think into this direction. I am currently hoping to get funds from Cardano's Fund8. And the voting process is completely organized by the community of Cardano users through a supported wallet. And I think from a fund-raising perspective, this is really efficient since it crowd-validates your idea and provides a transparent way forward.
>I think the problem that a DAO solves is to get people together that share a common interest and provides an efficient way to ensure proper governance and compliance.
I don't know. I think DAOs are a poor replacement for adhering to Wheaton's Law[0] and not interacting with those that don't.
Especially since DAOs would exclude a great number of people who could positively contribute to a forum/interest group.
Perhaps some changes are needed, but Facebook certainly doesn't bring out the worst in me or my friends. Most of what I see is rather banal or mildly entertaining. The user experience depends entirely on which people, pages, and groups you choose to follow.
And DAO ownership isn't going to fix anything. It's a silly concept, a solution in search of a problem.
I would agree that a DAO wouldn't change your user experience the slightest.
What interest me is that they sit on the intersection of crowd-financing, community building, and incentivized collaboration (i.e., users could earn money by participating on platforms and get actively involved by providing work and/or liquidity).
There was an initial hype in 2018 around DAOs but that felt a lot like a communist pipe dream. The current iteration is potentially changing corporate finance. So for me it's worthwhile to look into it.
The problem that I see is that for a venture builder crowd financing sucks. In addition to building your business you still need to find a group of people that give you money. So theoretically, for DAOs the incentives are clearer aligned. And in case of non-custodial staking crowd-funding models like ISPOs there is no transfer of funds hence, the investment risk is reduced to a market risk and an opportunity cost portion.
It reads as very self-serving for these folks to create a business model that is clearly economically unsustainable and fueled only by venture capital, then sell their company to Facebook for billions of dollars -- and then to pretend like they're shocked that Facebook wants to make their money back.
Of course they do. You knew that. We all knew that. And you still sold your business anyway. That's fine -- good job -- we're happy for you -- but don't act holier-than-though now that you're rich and bored. And don't start a new company backed by venture pretending you're not hoping to do it all over again.
WhatsApp was making decent money and not burning VC money at all when we sold to FB. this was in 2014. There is no such thing as clearly economically unsustainable. It is just harder.
Would the WhatsApp business model of 2014 be able to afford the vital features nowadays of voice calls, video calls, large files, etc? Do you really believe that WhatsApp would have been able to get that 1 dollar from emerging markets as well, which have a tougher time performing online transactions?
The way WhatsApp used to make money was through a subscription model. It cost $1 to download and then $1 a year going forward. Facebook eventually removed the $1 fee and made WhatsApp a free service,
I paid that Dollar!
WhatsApp had 600M users. A dozen million people paying the $1 per year is many people. In the multiple threads about WhatsApp and the $1 charge, most people never paid anything. Looking at the revenue and everything, doesn’t seem like enough were paying.
Knowing Apple, I expect that one dollar installation fee being pushed into their coffers, either directly (because the App Store is pay to play) or indirectly (because they force you to use Apple hardware to develop and push stuff onto the App Store)
The problem really starts when you take in venture capital, not when a possible exit is on the table.
Whatsapp was making money, but was that enough for the VCs? Even if it was not burning currently, it might have burned it in the past, so if the VCs trigger the clauses to ask their money back, you might not be able to give the money to them, ending up bankrupt. Plus, VCs might have a majority on the board. They see nothing but money, so they will push for the option that results in the highest payout for them, even if it is immoral, and even if that means using their powers to kick out the founders.
VCs look for businesses that 10x their investment in a very short time frame, and use that money to finance their many more failed ones. What might be a solid business in the wild is something they cull.
What you're saying applies to the majority of VC-backed companies, but none of your concerns applied to WhatsApp's situation.
WhatsApp was (is?) famously lean. They essentially never needed to spend a cent of VC money, even though they took on two rounds.
I think the story goes that when they took on a Series B, one of the cofounders sent a screenshot to Sequoia (repeat, sole investor) of the untouched bank account containing their Series A. Or maybe it was a screenshot of the Series B heading into the acquisition, I forget which.
It helps with hiring as a signal effect; if sequoia thinks the company you’re thinking joining is a worthwhile investment of they’re capital, they’re more likely a worthwhile investment of your career.
The spare capital is good insurance against risks that might make fundraising in the future difficult. For example, needing to invest in PR/marketing, because an entrenched company with more resources released a competing product. Or legal fees, if you get sued for one thing or another.
It’s also genuinely useful to have experienced investors on your board or in your intimate network, to ask for fiduciary-bound advice when waging your own battles. You typically “pay” for this service by raising money. I think this one is generally underrated by people who view the VC relationship as strictly transactional. Running a high visibility young company is incredibly stressful and it’s valuable to have people at the table who have seen it before.
I imagine this last reason is probably the main one for WhatsApp’s choice.
In the article, it states that the “loss” is an accounting loss attributed to stock compensation, not a cash flow loss. It states that they had positive operating revenues the year over year.
If I pay you 1000 shares that I think are worth $1, I count it as a $1 expense, even though I’ve lost zero “dollars”. If that equity grows to be worth $10mm, at the end of the year I need to report a $10mm expense in stock compensation. This doesn’t mean I’m $10mm poorer, it means I’m 1000 shares poorer and the valuation has changed. You’ve already “paid” for the loss with the shares.
The reason you report it in dollars is because one can theoretically sell those shares to obtain money to feed the business, so it’s important for investors to know if you’re burning through a lucrative pool of equity.
It has no direct impact on cash liquidity, operating margin, or cash flow. I think many commenters in this thread missed that distinction. There’s a huge difference between reporting a loss and running out of money.
You can see the source directly, rather than the article [1].
The gist of the misunderstanding is that there are many more things that register as "expenses" when calculating net loss without burning your cash pile. Stock compensation just happens to be the biggest one.
They had $10.21mm in revenue in 2013 and $3.82mm in 2012. [page 4]
$9.94mm net cash used in 2013. $3.5mm in 2012. [page 6]
Not sure why you would be dishonest about this when it's easily verifiable to be false[1]. Even ignoring the meager revenues with 600M(!) users, WhatsApp had no way to realistically meet their equity obligations without a fat exit. And then, FB wanted to make their money back (duh).
I’m not sure how this meme got started. I think it was something like WhatsApp may have been profitable in its first year when it was barely started but that doesn’t appear to be true either. Whatsapp was always a money pit, even if that meant losing 7 or 8 figures a year vs some startups burning 9 figures a year (there would have been less of this 8 years ago too, before the tech stock explosion).
Their take, that WhatsApp has been ruined, is weird to me as a regular user of WhatsApp who has been using it for what must be a decade at this point. I don’t have a single complaint about it, and I’ve never heard a complaint about it outside of anti-Facebook sentiment in tech circles, and while we can certainly begrudge Facebook’s behaviour in a lot of ways, it seems absurd to suggest that Facebook have somehow ruined the user experience of WhatsApp — it’s one of the most consistent apps I’ve ever used, and continued growth surely demonstrates that.
Internationally, whatsapp has been a big (or bigger) source of bullying, mobs, and disinformation in group chats - with even less visibility or moderation capacity/capabilities.
They make it sounds so magnanimous that they are using a different tactic to exploit users for profit. If the motive is profit, the motive is not healthy conversations. It may end up being less bad than Facebook by coincidence but it's not an exercise in civil discourse.
The thread is a yawn. I can feel no moral force, no genuine passion from it. Even if you ignore how he cashed out and suspend disbelief for the sake of a good rant, it's still boring.
I'd say go wipe your tears with a wad of Benjamins, but I'm not convinced there are any tears being shed to begin with.
> shocked that Facebook wants to make their money back.
Haha. So true. As if all these people in the heart of the money spinning and raking machine that is SV were so naive and cheery eyed, that they just didn't see what all the "deals" were.
They didn't know that FB has a fiduciary duty to explain its spending? They didn't know that Zuck wants to increase the share price and market cap of FB?
Did they really think that paying 1$ for downloading WA was a good enough revenue stream?
Did they really think that Zuck was such a fool to actually allow that "No Ads..." bullshit paper really run?
He waited for a couple of years, mining user data, then when people mostly forgot about it, went in for the kill.
Decentralization solves nothing. It removes blame by by removing leadership but it makes problems harder to address. You absolutely need governance. Combination of centralized and community. The inhibitor to quality discourse is the profit motive. So long as your business generates profit by attracting phalanxes of lunatics to either look at ads or pay fees you'll have an incentive to let them have free reign.
Assigning responsibility and addressing problems. If there's toxic or illegal content, then it can be removed from a node but not the network. You'll just end up with forks for different subgroups. Back to the old days of thousands of individual forums (which, in fact, still exist). That's a fine thing unto itself, but it's not going to be a Better Twitter. It's just something else. It can be successful on it's own the way cryptocurrency has been, but cryptocurrency also hasn't come close to meeting any of its original goals.
I guess it comes down to the goal of the social media platform. If its goal is to enable social sharing and conversations between people who choose to associate with one another, then decentralization is fine because people can simply choose to subscribe / unsubscribe. As we've seen with the centralized platforms, the definition of 'toxic' is highly subject to the rules of whoever happens to be in charge and illegal depends on the country in question.
I don't see what problem decentralization actually solves. If you want fragmented special-interest communities of like-minded people, that's been easy to do for years. Listservs, subreddits, phpBB forums, newsgroups. Something like Twitter is about global reach. A place that a notable person like Barack Obama can message 100M at once and even interact with them in a controllable way. All sorts of niches and interests and personal connections can happen at once. And when the platform becomes unusable in one way or another, there's an authority that can be appealed to and they'll make a decision that best serves the platform. In a decentralized world, when there's disagreements factions just part ways. The authority problem is really just that the decision-making right now is generally skewed towards what will maximize revenue.
In that version of social media, with the aim of global reach, then yes, centralization is baked in, unless federation really takes off.
But then you will always come back to the problems that come with centralization: special interests, surveillance, censorship, doxxing / cancel culture, and platform bias. I'm sure many more of these platforms will spring up but that certainly won't fix Twitter. Centralized social media is probably unfix-able, these issues are just part of the whole package.
Ah no. Those 100 posts you see on your feed are not random. For your statement to be true, it would assume that social networks do not use algorithms to pick what you see.
The unfortunate truth is that fights creates audience engagement which drives up user retention and thus stock prices. Financial analyst look at how much time a user spents on each platform to issue a price forecast.
How does any of this apply to WhatsApp? It isn't social media, it is a messaging app. And as far as anyone who actually uses it is concerned, it works just as well now as it did before the acquisition. If not better, given it finally has a migration story between devices, no matter how imperfect it is.
I literally cannot think of a single thing, when it comes to WhatsApp specifically, that got worse.
The data gathered from WhatsApp is used to fuel backend algorithms and help Facebook sell your (and your networks) information and preferences to advertisers.
It didn't get worse because you can't see it. The value of Whatsapp is in the metadata. Not the UI/ UX.
A bank used to keep your personal financial information as private. Now post-acquisition, the bank starts selling your personal financial information to insurance companies. To you, as an account holder, you don't know the difference because its all hidden away from you.
Maybe you don't care because the bank hasn't increased your fees, but other people you don't know can now buy your data and target you. Here's how data brokers work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA
You seem to think that there's something really inherently evil in customer data. As if this hasn't been something that businesses have done since the dawn of business.
> As if this hasn't been something that businesses have done since the dawn of business.
What!? Can you tell me an example of how businessmen sold customer data in the Victorian times? Unless, your definition of the 'dawn of business' is limited to this century or your lifetime?
There is nothing inherently evil with data, it's what these today's businesses do with it and at this scale. There has never been a platform with over 1 billion users' data for sale. This has only happened in the last 20 years.
You don't seem to have a very good understanding of the topic you are commenting on. In both your original and this comment, you make incorrect and face-value assumptions of how things work.
I believe that it not only increases engagement, but also increases likelihood to click ads and buy things. People seem to like to shop as a distraction / coping mechanism.
I have no evidence of this but I have thought quite a bit about why social networks angering push content the way they do.
Yes, it's correlated. YouTube ads are a great example. The more you use the platform, the more likely you will see an ad. At the end of the day, these companies maximizes profits for shareholders. Users are a means to do so. Advertisers are the true customers.
There’s a popular narrative that social media companies use algorithms that intentionally favor divisive content. WhatsApp is a useful illustration of how that narrative might be wrong.
The WhatsApp algorithm can be described as: “show the chat with the most recent reply at the top, then show the most recent reply at the bottom if the user clicks on that chat”.
Suppose the Twitter algorithm was: “show the tweet with the highest count recent replies at the top of the feed, then show the most recent reply at the bottom if the user clicks on that tweet”
That is a pretty natural way to design a social media service that wants to host the global discourse. And that algorithm would inherently promote tweets that provoke a lot of responses. It would take a strong thumb on the scale to make it not be full of divisive content (the major social media companies publicly claim to be attempting this).
WhatsApp is a useful datapoint here because we know the feed is chronological, yet there are a ton of news stories about how the app is rife with divisive content and misinformation, just like Twitter and Facebook.
That’s a pretty reasonable ask, I believe both Facebook and Twitter give heavy boosts to content from friends.
TikTok, on the other hand, doesn’t show you anything from your friends and just tries to show you what will keep you watching. It seems to work well for them.
That's not true. Whatsapp is a data harvesting platform for your social connections. They match it with their existing Facebook profiles/ shadow profiles to know what your political affiliations, race, gender, age are. With a big enough data set, they can infer a lot about you.
How much you chat with your friend tells me how close you are and how similar your politics and shopping habits are. Add that with your location data from your IP address (contrary to popular belief, you don't need to turn on location permission to know).
Whatsapp is the perfect power-up for platforms like Facebook. With your Whatsapp connections and Facebook profile combined, your data becomes even more valuable to advertisers. Why do you think Google and Facebook keeps on asking for your phone number?
> There’s a popular narrative that social media companies use algorithms that intentionally favor divisive content. WhatsApp is a useful illustration of how that narrative might be wrong.
You are making the argument that Whatsapp doesn't use algorithms to favor divisive content, therefore, it doesn't have malicious use. My argument is that Whatsapp still contributes to the data harvesting of Facebook because it is used maliciously to invade your privacy. It's just in a different form and just as bad. You are not looking at the whole picture and only a tiny slice.
True. A whole generation of users has been accustomed to finding their folk on social media.
Whatever SM comes about, they are going to do the same.
Also, the one and only business model, of any SM, is keeping people on the app, and you don't do that by providing counter points / arguments against their world view. You do that by matching them with people who think like them.
Any social media will devolve into cesspools of group think that often ends up being bad for society.
Just look at Whatsapp. It has no ads feed, no subscription fees and yet, it has innumerable groups that do spreading of all sorts of conspiracy rumor mongering.
WA is not even getting like minded people together. They are doing it themselves.
The next wave of SM will be similar. But, even more crass and materialistic. It will not bring people together. It will bring groups together that will fight ever more aggressively with other groups, drawing strength from numbers.
And human nature, with its fickle tendencies, will enable the dumbest and gullible to form the largest groups.
>Gates says Elon Musk could make misinformation worse.
Gates knows about how to make the world a better place. Everyone should read his op-ed that he wrote for the Communist Party in the People’s Daily, Chinese state media. He talks about how China has liberated hundreds of millions of people and has "achieved miracles beyond the reach of any other country over the past several decades".
It's true though. Modern day China looks nothing like the 80s. The speed at which they eradicated poverty is unprecedented.
Of course if you expect Beijing or Shanghai to be as free, safe and clean as Zurich, Amsterdam or Copenhagen then you'll be disappointed...then again not even NYC, LA, London manage to reach such peaks in all the 3 aforementioned fundamentals
That's why , like everything there is a leaderboard in which you compete against others, as well as yourself from the past.
China is still behind when matched against the West, but nobody improved over their past self as much as them.
I grew up in the Mainland, it is much worse now freedom and equality wise than ever in my lifetime. Of course some foreigners only see the skyscrapers and not the concentration camps. It was the same sort of materialistic thinking that lead them to outsource everything in the first place.
If we talk about degeneration, we can also talk about Westerners parroting a totalitarian regime's talking points. It was the party that starved the people and it was the party that "saved" them. Amazing job. Meanwhile no one starved in free China (RoC) and the GDP per capita is still multiple times higher there. But I never see any of you guys talk about the supposed Taiwan miracle. It obviously don't work for that sort of propaganda.
It was rich elites like Gates, Munger & co who enabled the CCP, made them rich and created the system as it exists today - a perfect dystopian nightmare. It now comes back to bite you in the ass, many simply have not realized it yet. Just like they had no problem doing business with Russia right up to the war.
Here's a bit of Gates mental diarrhea from 12 years ago:
>But today his reinvention suffered something of a setback when he played down China's attempts to stifle dissent on the internet as "very limited".
Today Bing remains the only American search engine that isn't blocked in China, because they censor like no tomorrow. Even 'be evil' Google is less evil than Bill Gates, this guy has all the money but no morals whatsoever. He's the last person in a position to lecture anyone on misinformation, his company is part of the worst misinformation network on the planet - the CCP intranet aka inside the GFW, where over a billion people are trapped viewing what is increasingly aggressive totalitarian propaganda.
Doesn’t Bill Gates barely own Microsoft? Like the GitHub founders combined own or used to own as much as him I think. At least it was in the same ball park.
Not sure what he has to do with Bing. Something that only came into existence 13 years ago.
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People regularly talk about Taiwan’s success. Can you show any one objecting to that? It would be difficult for people to always bring up other Asian success stories: Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan vs China.
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I don’t even like Gates or any other billionaires. Your anger appears to be misdirected and too focused on specific things.
This is as pretentious as saying you need poison to counteract poison. The fix for social media is NOT another app- you need to realise if that has any ROI for your social interaction. Most users doom-scroll or track/stalk others and "pseudo-react" as just extensions of lab-rat experiments for minor dopamine hits and hooked to digital drugs.
Atropine is the standard antidote to several nerve gases and pesticides. It is itself quite toxic, as are the standard antidotes to atropine overdose.
Analogies often fall apart when examined literally, but I do think there's a role for software to play in mitigating the harms of social media. This is almost certainly not that software, but I like online one-to-many and many-to-many communication with people I actually know, and miss what Facebook provided when most of what it showed me was original content from my friends and family.
I hate to be that guy but there are ton of reasons this is doomed from the start.
First, getting people to pay any money is such a massive barrier to entry that it limits your audience by orders of magnitude. WhatsApp (pre-FB) is a rare outlier. Likely the only reason this worked is there simply weren't any other messaging apps for many of their platforms at the time and SMS prices were still outrageously high. none of that is true anymore.
Second, just the name ("HalloApp"). I mean the fact that it's "Hallo" not "Hello" tells you a lot. This is developed on a budget. It's also too close to "WhatsApp" so (combined with the subscription) it just smacks of former WA engineers trying to create WA 2.0. 2.0s almost never succeed (MariaDB being a rare exception).
Third, it's not really clear to me what the messaging model here is from just reading this. How is this going to be different from the user's perspective compared to WA, Messenger or whatever?
Fourth, any new platform that is similar to another is simply going to be a haven for those that are banned on the original platform or who otherwise feel they proselytize whatever whacko positions they hold. This is not the basis for a healthy platform.
Lastly, people. The dirty secret of social media is that the core problem is people. On anonymous online spaces people are hateful and vindictive. They believe crazy shit and want everyone to know about it.
>Fourth, any new platform that is similar to another is simply going to be a haven for those that are banned on the original platform or who otherwise feel they proselytize whatever whacko positions they hold. This is not the basis for a healthy platform.
wait, you think people get banned for wrongthink on whatsapp? lmao
Often you'll have a relatively niche game like PUBG that validates a concept (battle royales) which is then done in a more polished way by a second-mover (Fortnite, WOW, TF2, CSGO, StarCraft 1, Unreal Tournament, etc) with commensurately greater success.
They asked me for 0.99€ forever, but they never suspended my account. This is true of everybody I know, but I am aware that some people had to pay. I am not sure of the criteria that they used to choose those who had to pay.
I knew early adopters who had to pay end the end of their trial period. Ultimately they were not successful at charging people for social network participation because they needed everyone they could get.
In my case, WA would show me a message to the effect after some specific period, I had to pay but when that period passed, nothing happened. So in effect, I never paid anything as a android user.
> Lastly, people. The dirty secret of social media is that the core problem is people. On anonymous online spaces people are hateful and vindictive. They believe crazy shit and want everyone to know about it.
This is simply not true.
"According to the researchers, results from a major social media platform over a period of three years “show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals."
All you have to do is look at twitter. The toxicity of blue-check mark people and the hideous cancel culture and attacks by non-anonymous individuals against non-anonymous individuals. When your identity is open to everyone, you have more stake in an argument/belief/cause/etc and it incentivizes you to be more extreme and toxic because your identity/social standing/group/etc is at stake.
You are not a nobody. You are a 'hiker, fishmen, who makes under 50k has a wife three kids lives in Salt Lake City, 28 who loves walking dead and works at ibm who went to this mall at this time". You are not a random data point in a sea. You are many datapoints connecting you in a map of people, time and space.
> Users who violate the rules must talk to a “conflict coordinator” and read documents about why their behavior was problematic before they can post again. These moves are intended to “lay a foundation for users and set a different expectation” for how users should behave online, Ms. Austin said.
There are lots of great ideas about how to tame problematic online behaviour.
But in the end I've only see one working well and at scale - here at HN, @dang's courteous yet determined interventions. As luck would have it, I noticed a new one this morning, classic dang:
Dang is great most of the time but effectively ends up pushing a "centrist" semi liberal view point.
I do not envy what dang does. It's a hard job. But at the end of the day these positions end up effectively enforcing the middle ground logical fallacy.
From what I've seen and noticed myself, exposure and engaging with different arguments in good faith (e.g. able to switch sides and argue for the other side in as convincing a way, as one might do in a debate club) tends to either move people towards the center or makes them agnostic to any solution. At least in political questions, or questions of "ought" as opposed to "is".
> I do not envy what dang does. It's a hard job. But at the end of the day these positions end up effectively enforcing the middle ground logical fallacy.
Dang has personally dinged me a few times -- maybe I'd disagree with a few, but the guy seems alright. Sometimes I troll and don't get caught, sometimes I'm being honest but dang dings me.
I dunno', but this is by far the best forum on the modern web. Of all fallacies, the "middle ground fallacy" seems to me to be the best.
The middle ground "fallacy" as used by most people in reference to social media moderation is usually a strawman. Often pushed by the exact types of people responsible for social media being the divisive cesspool that it is.
dang's job sucks, but him pushing for moderation (as in moderate behavior regardless of opinion being expressed) is exactly what makes HN enjoyable even in threads where I don't necessarily agree with the consensus.
Liking moderate behavior is because you're a moderate. Which is basically my point.
You didn't explain how it's a fallacy rather than just state it is. The middle ground might be right in some stuff, it might also be extremely damaging in others.
In my experience, when people cite the middle ground fallacy, it's because they're so radicalized that they believe that to a self-described centrist, the ideal compromise between genocide and no genocide is half a genocide, which is obviously a complete strawman. I've only ever seen it used in bad faith arguments of that sort, thus my previous comment.
In my opinion that sort of ever more absurd "if you're not with us you're against us" type thinking is what has turned social media into such a cesspool, and by enforcing a sort of moderate state, that sort of person gets pushed away, making the space more tolerable for healthier minds.
Eg. with abortion it's almost impossible to have a civil, nuanced debate on social media because the extremes of both sides have cemented themselves into (fairly hypocritical) positions that paint everyone who isn't fully with them as an enemy, even though there's a lot of room for reasonable compromise and healthy debate on the effects and tradeoffs of specifics of related policy.
I mean the example you give is actually great. The idea that everything should be a debate is kinda how things get pushed to really weird areas.
Most Americans would argue (and there's data to back this up) that abortion shouldn't even be something that we need to have a nuanced discussion about. The idea of nuanced discussion for everything is how stuff get pushed into harmful and extremist views.
The idea of "nuanced discussion" doesn't really work when the outcome of one side of the nuanced discussion is the subjugation of a whole class of people.
America went through "nuanced discussion" about the "Japanese problem". It went through "nuanced discussion" about civil rights. Most of this ended up either literally fucking over a group of innocent people, or delaying action that should've been taken decades prior.
The idea that a "nuanced discussion" is the way to go is exactly what that fallacy is talking about. Basically you can't have people's rights and lives talked about as if one side of the discussion has the right to take that away from them.
Think about how long it took us to legalize gay marriage. The only thing that got the ball really rolling was stonewall.
Or think about the Vietnam War. Extremists helped end it.
How about climate change? Do we have a nuanced discussion between the older population who is going to be dead by the time this becomes a problem, or do we listen to the climate extemists who are generally younger and the ones who are going to get fucked by this?
Anyway, middle ground politics is a dead area and not something that always works. The people who like it are generally the people who are fine with the status quo. So of course you're going to see angry view points (who most of the time have all the right to be angry) as a cesspool.
I agree with you. In the interest of cohesion and to avoid conflict, every new user who posts their point of view and isn't a centrist-leaning-to-the-left progressive ends up banned in the end. Even if the new user is polite and well-meaning, after so many years the community is completely full of centrist progressives and every post that goes against that is a trigger for a flame war - in the interest of avoiding conflict it's easier to ban the new guy than it is to warn everybody involved.
Absolutely correct. Their moderation idea quoted here sounds horrible, as in 'we'll take you to room 101 for re-education' horrible. You just point users to the moderation/conduct guidelines and ban them if they continue to offend.
Human moderation against clearly set community expectations for behaviour is the only effective way. And if things are going to get too spicy, do the same as always and ban religious/political discussion altogether.
The reason we have such massive issues with Twitter/FB/etc is becuase they essentially said they were gigantic open public spaces with no moderation guidelines at all, then started enforcing arbitrary 'moderation' based on political or cultural biases, including banning content instead of bad behaviour (which it seems a lot of people out there - including the WSJ staffer writing the article - have a really hard time understanding the difference between).
HalloApp will avoid the problem by having the 50 user group limit, but how long until they get the 'feature request' to allow bigger and bigger groups? It also sounds almost exactly like Facebook groups, so what's new there aside paying for it?
I would be cautious with this platform being created from ex-Twitter employees, they will continue to implement 'misinformation' policies that police content rather than behaviour, but time will tell.
It's interesting to see it all come round again to basically the forums of old: Specific interest groups, smaller scale, moderation to suit. Who knew that worked...
And all silcon valley wants to do away with this type of work in the name of HumanOps. Highly educated professionals as typically hired by tech do not want to moderate for money and so they and their employers use machine learning for such "drudge work". Moderation is triggering and traumatic and abuse reports can cause psychological harm to the worker dealing with it. This is literally what all of silicon valley believes. In real life, therapists have to go to their own therapists regularly so there is some precedent!
That they don't see the army of Reddit moderators as an indicator that things can scale is a sign.
I suspect it's about an under valued skill in people.
Personally I'm in favour of the semi-anonymous freenode channel ops who are encouraged to be hidden at least until required and image board "janitors". Basically moderators shouldn't be idolized or be given unique powers or made to stand out as a special power user but it should be seen as a kind of service. Humble moderation.
IMO The current moderation model centres around moderating the things people communicate so as not to offend others. And results in attempts at keeping all communications in the sphere ‘pure’.
Social media however has grown far beyond what I think the original inventors intended at the time of creation. couple that with a multitude of legal jurisdictions and levels of sensitivity I fee we can no longer keep the environment clean to so many different standards and must instead switch to a model which is more akin to defaulting to being exposed to nothing and choosing over time to be exposed to some categories of potentially offensive things.
I did have a stab at this and fee it needs refining for sure. Wether this is a valid attempt or not, I think the worry that the current moderation model isn’t adequate is grounded in reality.
> There are lots of great ideas about how to tame problematic online behaviour.
Isn't that what all the censoring europeans, chinese, russians, saudis, israelis, etc all say? All censors are trying to target "problematic" behavior.
Your comment is no different than what every tyrannical or oppressive regime espouses. The biggest problem with social media and internet is that it is transnational. Countries and people that value censorship really shouldn't have a say in american social media. I believe they should develop their own social media.
I no longer ascribe to the idea that everyone should have free speech. I believe we should have free speech in america and you should have whatever you want in your own country and own social media. The problem with american social media is that it is trying to appease everyone and as a result, it becomes a race to the lowest common denominator.
> Countries and people that value censorship really shouldn't have a say in american social media. I believe they should develop their own social media.
If American social media chooses to be global (it does!), then putting up with the rules of the countries it chooses to operate in is part of the game.
On the one hand, I think the things they are changing sound like things that should be changed: limited group sizes rather than a public broadcast, and subscription-based rather than ad-based. Guarantee data confidentiality and you've got a neat platform I still wouldn't use.
On the other hand, we know how this story goes: they either fail outright, or they succeed and scale up, slowly adding more and more features people request in order to create more growth, until eventually they look like the platforms they started as a reaction against.
Because Facebook, et al. didn't randomly arrive at the combination of qualities that makes them destructive, they got there by giving people what they asked for. Until you change what people ask for, you're either going to keep creating Facebooks, or get driven out of business by Facebook. Replace Facebook with the social media platform of your choice.
Can it ever be fixed? IMO the incentive structure is such that the users are always the product to be farmed, be it now or when the board composition changes in a few years.
How to fix social media: ignore the losers who are on it all day and aren’t there to promote their thing. Charge the people who are there to promote their thing.
They’re on the right track but seeking VC money is the wrong direction. Their ad-free, non-exploitive vision might hold for a time but when the investors come knocking for their orders of magnitude return, those ideals will be the first to go.
i want new social media to target teens/young people with some novel trendy feature, way i see new social media will only take off cz it is trendy to use and old people are not there and slowly everyone/old people starts to use.
FB -> Insta -> Snap/jikjok or whatever
It would be nice if that company later sneaked like better privacy, open protocol / interoperability with activity-pub or whatever. i mean people won't use a social media cz it respects privacy etc.
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[ 6.9 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadAnyone with a critical view of these organizations has seen exactly the extent of the harm. The endless news releases should be an adequate trail to follow.
People, at large, have chosen to ignore all the unbelievable actions so they can continue to stalk others online -cough cough- I mean, keep in touch with grandma.
I mean, kudos to you I guess for "caring deeply" about communications tools and social networks, but none of that can change the incentives inherent in Facebook's business model.
You are correct, I should have used clearer language, but by "sell the information" I meant that they monetized the information to make money selling ads.
But let's stop with the idea that somehow Facebook's data Hoover is somehow a benefit. Facebook could very easily get rid of all the problems they have on their site which require minimal data collection, but it would also cost them many billions of dollars, so they won't do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Data_scand...
Personally I believe there in a big difference between a company giving your data to another company behind your back and doing so after you have approved it first.
---
FB has never claimed (in court) that CA violated any agreements they had with them. The only comments they've made are PR speak to obscure the fact that CA acted within the rules (hence why FB needed to update the rules). The only court cases that arose are against FB* for sharing data with CA they shouldn't've.
Per-FB's policy there are only a few things worth talking about. > (7) If you use any partner services, make them sign a contract to protect any information you obtained from us, limit their use of that information, and keep it confidential. > (9) Don't sell, license, or purchase any data obtained from us or our services. > (10) Don't transfer any data that you receive from us (including anonymous, aggregate, or derived data) to any ad network, data broker or other advertising or monetization-related service.
7 - This is my understand as to what happened. CA didn't turn around and release this data.
9 - Doesn't apply as nobody claims Kogan sold the data to CA.
10 - Doesn't apply as CA isn't these things.
* Technically the FTC did also against CA but it was literally _just_ because CA also recorded the User's FB ID [2].
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180329131546/https://developer... [2]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/12/...
Maybe the thing you should be taking away from Facebook in their resume, is that they're no longer working there. There's nothing to be gained from crapping on ex-Facebook employees that doesn't seem to boil down to ego-stroking and making sure people know how high your moral horse is.
All in all, if you choose to work for a shitty company, or doing shitty things, you should assume people will use that as part of their opinion of you.
I do not get how that becomes any extremism of any kind - that's just standard outcome of reading someone's resume?
Everyone makes their own choices.
In real life, people use tiktok, people use facebook, people use snapchat, and the only thing that other people worth their salt will get from seeing that you used to work at FB is "hm, they must at least be a somewhat decent dev with solid understanding of the area they worked on".
The people who are the loudest in their condemnation of you, purely due to your former employment at fb, aren't the ones you are likely to ever cross paths with in any meaningful way in the first place. And that's a good thing.
How is that any better than hosting your own forum and federating with others of your choice?
If I'm running my own forum, I (obviously) have a stake in the success of my own forum.
If my goal is to profit from running a forum, that can also be done in a decentralized, federated fashion without DAOs too.
As someone else pointed out[0], DAOs don't really add any real value in this case.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268355
I
Yes, that is likely true. I think DAOs are interesting because they make partial ownership by the users of the forum easier. Personally, I don't care about decentralization or federation. I ran a Mastodon and DeSo node for a while and I am not sure if it actually adds anything to user experience or actually solves a real-world problem.
What interest me in the "organization" of the DAO is where it allows people that share a common interest build something together without incorporating a business and distributing shares.
Do I need a DAO or run a forum or website (VPS or otherwise) for any of this? Realistically, I could phone a number of friends to meet up regularly for beers and discuss football.
But I think the development path could be Friends doing a meetup locally -> International friends that want to meet -> International friends that want to build something together and earn by doing so.
I think the problem that a DAO solves is to get people together that share a common interest and provides an efficient way to ensure proper governance and compliance.
Will the world continue without DAOs. Yes for sure. Could DAOs develop in ways for communities (clubs, teams, political parties, etc) to govern themselves, maybe. Still I think its worthwhile to think into this direction. I am currently hoping to get funds from Cardano's Fund8. And the voting process is completely organized by the community of Cardano users through a supported wallet. And I think from a fund-raising perspective, this is really efficient since it crowd-validates your idea and provides a transparent way forward.
I don't know. I think DAOs are a poor replacement for adhering to Wheaton's Law[0] and not interacting with those that don't.
Especially since DAOs would exclude a great number of people who could positively contribute to a forum/interest group.
[0] http://www.wheatonslaw.com/
And DAO ownership isn't going to fix anything. It's a silly concept, a solution in search of a problem.
Fool me once...
It reads as very self-serving for these folks to create a business model that is clearly economically unsustainable and fueled only by venture capital, then sell their company to Facebook for billions of dollars -- and then to pretend like they're shocked that Facebook wants to make their money back.
Of course they do. You knew that. We all knew that. And you still sold your business anyway. That's fine -- good job -- we're happy for you -- but don't act holier-than-though now that you're rich and bored. And don't start a new company backed by venture pretending you're not hoping to do it all over again.
EDIT: looks like it was $1 on IOS and free everywhere else: https://venturebeat.com/2012/12/03/facebook-whatsapp-talks/
Whatsapp was making money, but was that enough for the VCs? Even if it was not burning currently, it might have burned it in the past, so if the VCs trigger the clauses to ask their money back, you might not be able to give the money to them, ending up bankrupt. Plus, VCs might have a majority on the board. They see nothing but money, so they will push for the option that results in the highest payout for them, even if it is immoral, and even if that means using their powers to kick out the founders.
VCs look for businesses that 10x their investment in a very short time frame, and use that money to finance their many more failed ones. What might be a solid business in the wild is something they cull.
WhatsApp was (is?) famously lean. They essentially never needed to spend a cent of VC money, even though they took on two rounds.
I think the story goes that when they took on a Series B, one of the cofounders sent a screenshot to Sequoia (repeat, sole investor) of the untouched bank account containing their Series A. Or maybe it was a screenshot of the Series B heading into the acquisition, I forget which.
It helps with hiring as a signal effect; if sequoia thinks the company you’re thinking joining is a worthwhile investment of they’re capital, they’re more likely a worthwhile investment of your career.
The spare capital is good insurance against risks that might make fundraising in the future difficult. For example, needing to invest in PR/marketing, because an entrenched company with more resources released a competing product. Or legal fees, if you get sued for one thing or another.
It’s also genuinely useful to have experienced investors on your board or in your intimate network, to ask for fiduciary-bound advice when waging your own battles. You typically “pay” for this service by raising money. I think this one is generally underrated by people who view the VC relationship as strictly transactional. Running a high visibility young company is incredibly stressful and it’s valuable to have people at the table who have seen it before.
I imagine this last reason is probably the main one for WhatsApp’s choice.
If I pay you 1000 shares that I think are worth $1, I count it as a $1 expense, even though I’ve lost zero “dollars”. If that equity grows to be worth $10mm, at the end of the year I need to report a $10mm expense in stock compensation. This doesn’t mean I’m $10mm poorer, it means I’m 1000 shares poorer and the valuation has changed. You’ve already “paid” for the loss with the shares.
The reason you report it in dollars is because one can theoretically sell those shares to obtain money to feed the business, so it’s important for investors to know if you’re burning through a lucrative pool of equity.
It has no direct impact on cash liquidity, operating margin, or cash flow. I think many commenters in this thread missed that distinction. There’s a huge difference between reporting a loss and running out of money.
My number still stands. Or if looking at net cash, it was never enough to cover all expenses.
The gist of the misunderstanding is that there are many more things that register as "expenses" when calculating net loss without burning your cash pile. Stock compensation just happens to be the biggest one.
They had $10.21mm in revenue in 2013 and $3.82mm in 2012. [page 4]
$9.94mm net cash used in 2013. $3.5mm in 2012. [page 6]
[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20141031201145/http://investor.fb...
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/28/whatsapp-revenue/
Also nice that they are building out product catalogs. In the developing world sometimes it is difficult to get a list of products with prices.
https://blog.whatsapp.com/introducing-catalogs-for-small-bus...
I'd say go wipe your tears with a wad of Benjamins, but I'm not convinced there are any tears being shed to begin with.
Haha. So true. As if all these people in the heart of the money spinning and raking machine that is SV were so naive and cheery eyed, that they just didn't see what all the "deals" were.
They didn't know that FB has a fiduciary duty to explain its spending? They didn't know that Zuck wants to increase the share price and market cap of FB?
Did they really think that paying 1$ for downloading WA was a good enough revenue stream?
Did they really think that Zuck was such a fool to actually allow that "No Ads..." bullshit paper really run?
He waited for a couple of years, mining user data, then when people mostly forgot about it, went in for the kill.
But then you will always come back to the problems that come with centralization: special interests, surveillance, censorship, doxxing / cancel culture, and platform bias. I'm sure many more of these platforms will spring up but that certainly won't fix Twitter. Centralized social media is probably unfix-able, these issues are just part of the whole package.
Please, be better.
The unfortunate truth is that fights creates audience engagement which drives up user retention and thus stock prices. Financial analyst look at how much time a user spents on each platform to issue a price forecast.
I literally cannot think of a single thing, when it comes to WhatsApp specifically, that got worse.
The data gathered from WhatsApp is used to fuel backend algorithms and help Facebook sell your (and your networks) information and preferences to advertisers.
A bank used to keep your personal financial information as private. Now post-acquisition, the bank starts selling your personal financial information to insurance companies. To you, as an account holder, you don't know the difference because its all hidden away from you.
Maybe you don't care because the bank hasn't increased your fees, but other people you don't know can now buy your data and target you. Here's how data brokers work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA
What!? Can you tell me an example of how businessmen sold customer data in the Victorian times? Unless, your definition of the 'dawn of business' is limited to this century or your lifetime?
There is nothing inherently evil with data, it's what these today's businesses do with it and at this scale. There has never been a platform with over 1 billion users' data for sale. This has only happened in the last 20 years.
You don't seem to have a very good understanding of the topic you are commenting on. In both your original and this comment, you make incorrect and face-value assumptions of how things work.
I have no evidence of this but I have thought quite a bit about why social networks angering push content the way they do.
The WhatsApp algorithm can be described as: “show the chat with the most recent reply at the top, then show the most recent reply at the bottom if the user clicks on that chat”.
Suppose the Twitter algorithm was: “show the tweet with the highest count recent replies at the top of the feed, then show the most recent reply at the bottom if the user clicks on that tweet”
That is a pretty natural way to design a social media service that wants to host the global discourse. And that algorithm would inherently promote tweets that provoke a lot of responses. It would take a strong thumb on the scale to make it not be full of divisive content (the major social media companies publicly claim to be attempting this).
WhatsApp is a useful datapoint here because we know the feed is chronological, yet there are a ton of news stories about how the app is rife with divisive content and misinformation, just like Twitter and Facebook.
The most recent is probably not what I would want to see. Close family, friends, social circles first than influencers after.
TikTok, on the other hand, doesn’t show you anything from your friends and just tries to show you what will keep you watching. It seems to work well for them.
How much you chat with your friend tells me how close you are and how similar your politics and shopping habits are. Add that with your location data from your IP address (contrary to popular belief, you don't need to turn on location permission to know).
Whatsapp is the perfect power-up for platforms like Facebook. With your Whatsapp connections and Facebook profile combined, your data becomes even more valuable to advertisers. Why do you think Google and Facebook keeps on asking for your phone number?
You are making the argument that Whatsapp doesn't use algorithms to favor divisive content, therefore, it doesn't have malicious use. My argument is that Whatsapp still contributes to the data harvesting of Facebook because it is used maliciously to invade your privacy. It's just in a different form and just as bad. You are not looking at the whole picture and only a tiny slice.
Whatever SM comes about, they are going to do the same.
Also, the one and only business model, of any SM, is keeping people on the app, and you don't do that by providing counter points / arguments against their world view. You do that by matching them with people who think like them.
Any social media will devolve into cesspools of group think that often ends up being bad for society.
Just look at Whatsapp. It has no ads feed, no subscription fees and yet, it has innumerable groups that do spreading of all sorts of conspiracy rumor mongering. WA is not even getting like minded people together. They are doing it themselves.
The next wave of SM will be similar. But, even more crass and materialistic. It will not bring people together. It will bring groups together that will fight ever more aggressively with other groups, drawing strength from numbers.
And human nature, with its fickle tendencies, will enable the dumbest and gullible to form the largest groups.
They just took a fat chunk of investment, what's their business model to show a return?
Gates knows about how to make the world a better place. Everyone should read his op-ed that he wrote for the Communist Party in the People’s Daily, Chinese state media. He talks about how China has liberated hundreds of millions of people and has "achieved miracles beyond the reach of any other country over the past several decades".
Of course if you expect Beijing or Shanghai to be as free, safe and clean as Zurich, Amsterdam or Copenhagen then you'll be disappointed...then again not even NYC, LA, London manage to reach such peaks in all the 3 aforementioned fundamentals
That's why , like everything there is a leaderboard in which you compete against others, as well as yourself from the past.
China is still behind when matched against the West, but nobody improved over their past self as much as them.
If we talk about degeneration, we can also talk about Westerners parroting a totalitarian regime's talking points. It was the party that starved the people and it was the party that "saved" them. Amazing job. Meanwhile no one starved in free China (RoC) and the GDP per capita is still multiple times higher there. But I never see any of you guys talk about the supposed Taiwan miracle. It obviously don't work for that sort of propaganda.
It was rich elites like Gates, Munger & co who enabled the CCP, made them rich and created the system as it exists today - a perfect dystopian nightmare. It now comes back to bite you in the ass, many simply have not realized it yet. Just like they had no problem doing business with Russia right up to the war.
Here's a bit of Gates mental diarrhea from 12 years ago:
>But today his reinvention suffered something of a setback when he played down China's attempts to stifle dissent on the internet as "very limited".
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/25/bill-gate...
Today Bing remains the only American search engine that isn't blocked in China, because they censor like no tomorrow. Even 'be evil' Google is less evil than Bill Gates, this guy has all the money but no morals whatsoever. He's the last person in a position to lecture anyone on misinformation, his company is part of the worst misinformation network on the planet - the CCP intranet aka inside the GFW, where over a billion people are trapped viewing what is increasingly aggressive totalitarian propaganda.
Not sure what he has to do with Bing. Something that only came into existence 13 years ago.
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People regularly talk about Taiwan’s success. Can you show any one objecting to that? It would be difficult for people to always bring up other Asian success stories: Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan vs China.
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I don’t even like Gates or any other billionaires. Your anger appears to be misdirected and too focused on specific things.
Atropine is the standard antidote to several nerve gases and pesticides. It is itself quite toxic, as are the standard antidotes to atropine overdose.
Analogies often fall apart when examined literally, but I do think there's a role for software to play in mitigating the harms of social media. This is almost certainly not that software, but I like online one-to-many and many-to-many communication with people I actually know, and miss what Facebook provided when most of what it showed me was original content from my friends and family.
First, getting people to pay any money is such a massive barrier to entry that it limits your audience by orders of magnitude. WhatsApp (pre-FB) is a rare outlier. Likely the only reason this worked is there simply weren't any other messaging apps for many of their platforms at the time and SMS prices were still outrageously high. none of that is true anymore.
Second, just the name ("HalloApp"). I mean the fact that it's "Hallo" not "Hello" tells you a lot. This is developed on a budget. It's also too close to "WhatsApp" so (combined with the subscription) it just smacks of former WA engineers trying to create WA 2.0. 2.0s almost never succeed (MariaDB being a rare exception).
Third, it's not really clear to me what the messaging model here is from just reading this. How is this going to be different from the user's perspective compared to WA, Messenger or whatever?
Fourth, any new platform that is similar to another is simply going to be a haven for those that are banned on the original platform or who otherwise feel they proselytize whatever whacko positions they hold. This is not the basis for a healthy platform.
Lastly, people. The dirty secret of social media is that the core problem is people. On anonymous online spaces people are hateful and vindictive. They believe crazy shit and want everyone to know about it.
wait, you think people get banned for wrongthink on whatsapp? lmao
Video games? DotA?
Often you'll have a relatively niche game like PUBG that validates a concept (battle royales) which is then done in a more polished way by a second-mover (Fortnite, WOW, TF2, CSGO, StarCraft 1, Unreal Tournament, etc) with commensurately greater success.
Wait, what? Could you elaborate? How do you go from "Hallo" to low budget?
This is simply not true.
"According to the researchers, results from a major social media platform over a period of three years “show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals."
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/why-ending-anonymity-wou...
All you have to do is look at twitter. The toxicity of blue-check mark people and the hideous cancel culture and attacks by non-anonymous individuals against non-anonymous individuals. When your identity is open to everyone, you have more stake in an argument/belief/cause/etc and it incentivizes you to be more extreme and toxic because your identity/social standing/group/etc is at stake.
lol nah thanks.
There are lots of great ideas about how to tame problematic online behaviour.
But in the end I've only see one working well and at scale - here at HN, @dang's courteous yet determined interventions. As luck would have it, I noticed a new one this morning, classic dang:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31265977
Perhaps there is literally no tech. that can do as good a job as a motivated savvy human.
I do not envy what dang does. It's a hard job. But at the end of the day these positions end up effectively enforcing the middle ground logical fallacy.
Dang has personally dinged me a few times -- maybe I'd disagree with a few, but the guy seems alright. Sometimes I troll and don't get caught, sometimes I'm being honest but dang dings me.
I dunno', but this is by far the best forum on the modern web. Of all fallacies, the "middle ground fallacy" seems to me to be the best.
dang's job sucks, but him pushing for moderation (as in moderate behavior regardless of opinion being expressed) is exactly what makes HN enjoyable even in threads where I don't necessarily agree with the consensus.
You didn't explain how it's a fallacy rather than just state it is. The middle ground might be right in some stuff, it might also be extremely damaging in others.
I'm sure you can think of examples for that.
In my opinion that sort of ever more absurd "if you're not with us you're against us" type thinking is what has turned social media into such a cesspool, and by enforcing a sort of moderate state, that sort of person gets pushed away, making the space more tolerable for healthier minds.
Eg. with abortion it's almost impossible to have a civil, nuanced debate on social media because the extremes of both sides have cemented themselves into (fairly hypocritical) positions that paint everyone who isn't fully with them as an enemy, even though there's a lot of room for reasonable compromise and healthy debate on the effects and tradeoffs of specifics of related policy.
Most Americans would argue (and there's data to back this up) that abortion shouldn't even be something that we need to have a nuanced discussion about. The idea of nuanced discussion for everything is how stuff get pushed into harmful and extremist views.
The idea of "nuanced discussion" doesn't really work when the outcome of one side of the nuanced discussion is the subjugation of a whole class of people.
America went through "nuanced discussion" about the "Japanese problem". It went through "nuanced discussion" about civil rights. Most of this ended up either literally fucking over a group of innocent people, or delaying action that should've been taken decades prior.
The idea that a "nuanced discussion" is the way to go is exactly what that fallacy is talking about. Basically you can't have people's rights and lives talked about as if one side of the discussion has the right to take that away from them.
Think about how long it took us to legalize gay marriage. The only thing that got the ball really rolling was stonewall.
Or think about the Vietnam War. Extremists helped end it.
How about climate change? Do we have a nuanced discussion between the older population who is going to be dead by the time this becomes a problem, or do we listen to the climate extemists who are generally younger and the ones who are going to get fucked by this?
Anyway, middle ground politics is a dead area and not something that always works. The people who like it are generally the people who are fine with the status quo. So of course you're going to see angry view points (who most of the time have all the right to be angry) as a cesspool.
Human moderation against clearly set community expectations for behaviour is the only effective way. And if things are going to get too spicy, do the same as always and ban religious/political discussion altogether.
The reason we have such massive issues with Twitter/FB/etc is becuase they essentially said they were gigantic open public spaces with no moderation guidelines at all, then started enforcing arbitrary 'moderation' based on political or cultural biases, including banning content instead of bad behaviour (which it seems a lot of people out there - including the WSJ staffer writing the article - have a really hard time understanding the difference between).
HalloApp will avoid the problem by having the 50 user group limit, but how long until they get the 'feature request' to allow bigger and bigger groups? It also sounds almost exactly like Facebook groups, so what's new there aside paying for it?
I would be cautious with this platform being created from ex-Twitter employees, they will continue to implement 'misinformation' policies that police content rather than behaviour, but time will tell.
It's interesting to see it all come round again to basically the forums of old: Specific interest groups, smaller scale, moderation to suit. Who knew that worked...
That they don't see the army of Reddit moderators as an indicator that things can scale is a sign.
I suspect it's about an under valued skill in people.
Personally I'm in favour of the semi-anonymous freenode channel ops who are encouraged to be hidden at least until required and image board "janitors". Basically moderators shouldn't be idolized or be given unique powers or made to stand out as a special power user but it should be seen as a kind of service. Humble moderation.
Social media however has grown far beyond what I think the original inventors intended at the time of creation. couple that with a multitude of legal jurisdictions and levels of sensitivity I fee we can no longer keep the environment clean to so many different standards and must instead switch to a model which is more akin to defaulting to being exposed to nothing and choosing over time to be exposed to some categories of potentially offensive things.
I did have a stab at this and fee it needs refining for sure. Wether this is a valid attempt or not, I think the worry that the current moderation model isn’t adequate is grounded in reality.
https://gist.github.com/TheMightyLlama/bb77a05d3dde4da251142...
Typing from phone. Sorry.
Isn't that what all the censoring europeans, chinese, russians, saudis, israelis, etc all say? All censors are trying to target "problematic" behavior.
Your comment is no different than what every tyrannical or oppressive regime espouses. The biggest problem with social media and internet is that it is transnational. Countries and people that value censorship really shouldn't have a say in american social media. I believe they should develop their own social media.
I no longer ascribe to the idea that everyone should have free speech. I believe we should have free speech in america and you should have whatever you want in your own country and own social media. The problem with american social media is that it is trying to appease everyone and as a result, it becomes a race to the lowest common denominator.
If American social media chooses to be global (it does!), then putting up with the rules of the countries it chooses to operate in is part of the game.
On the other hand, we know how this story goes: they either fail outright, or they succeed and scale up, slowly adding more and more features people request in order to create more growth, until eventually they look like the platforms they started as a reaction against.
Because Facebook, et al. didn't randomly arrive at the combination of qualities that makes them destructive, they got there by giving people what they asked for. Until you change what people ask for, you're either going to keep creating Facebooks, or get driven out of business by Facebook. Replace Facebook with the social media platform of your choice.
FB -> Insta -> Snap/jikjok or whatever
It would be nice if that company later sneaked like better privacy, open protocol / interoperability with activity-pub or whatever. i mean people won't use a social media cz it respects privacy etc.