Google lives off the open web. Two out of four of its main products depend on the open web:
1. Search - the less of an open web, the less is searchable by Google. Facebook is a classic example.
2. AdWords/AdSense - Facebook, CNN, BBC don't need it. They have their own networks, and they 're big enough to offer a "take it or leave it" approach.
(The only two main products not relying on Open Web is Google Cloud and Android).
Google actually had everything set up, a social network (blogger), a wall (reader), IM (Google Voice, email).
But they decided that FB is taking over. What did they do? They made "their own FB". Which solved no one's problems. Google+ had nothing over FB (except for circles, which FB promptly copied), and killed their old social apps.
Now their running around as a chicken without a head.
That's a great point. Google should want the blogosphere to exist as a matter of competitive advantage. The higher ups in Google need to listen to this. They can still bring the blog back, and make the internet great again!
As I pointed out in other comments, something like FB can never be truly open for the simple reason that most people really don't want their posts to be searchable by everybody. Facebook is Facebook because you can post silly things on it without worrying if some future employer could find them if they wanted to. Sometimes an information silo can actually be a good thing, I suppose. But perhaps more research into federated social networks could take away this concern.
Theoretically, Google could let you "hide" certain posts if you're not logged in.
The thing that killed blogs as they are is that they're too serious. When signing up you need a title, subtitle, and input is optimized for long essays. Facebook is optimized for sign up, write your name, find friends, and post pictures, videos and sometimes text.
Really, if Google+ was Blogger Basic where you sign up, put AdWords, post pics, and it could have taken off.
well yes, I would be excited to see everyone simultaneously realize they won't get an ROI on their adspend.
But that isn't the sentiment right now. Discoverability is really bad and one of the only solutions people can come up with are creepy targeted advertisements
The fact that, even after applying all this technology and know-how, the ROI on ad spend is a black box with no meaningful metrics, and the spending vectors are based on sentiment tells me that advertising is not a safe long term foundation for revenue. At some point, someone is going to have to prove that the money is well spent.
"I think if we could manage to analyze that expenditure of money we would find that a vast percentage of it, probably one-half, is entirely wasted." - Robert Ogden, 1898.
I don't disagree with your comment, but wouldn't you agree that the last thirty years have introduced an unprecedented technology environment for tracking ROI on advertising? It seems clear that a lack of incentives, not abilities, is what keeps this racket afloat. For that reason, I'm not so certain that it will be allowed to continue forever. Once advertisers get a taste of real ROI metrics, they'll drop the hand-waving platforms overnight. Biggest market opportunity of our age?
Mathematically I don't know if it is possible to eliminate all returns from ad spend market wide. Then again, negative interest rates should have been impossible.
Every trend I see points to greater ad reach. AR + automated transportation means the web expands from your phone to your surrounding. Regulatory intervention could just firewall behavioral targeting and e-commerce in to existing platforms, making Google, Facebook, and Amazon far more powerful.
More and more people are self selecting into facebook and the advertisers follow. Google could fight it, but they would probably lose. There is an order of magnitude more people capable and willing to use fb and twitter compared to blogger.
I think that most of the people that are on facebook now were not "on the internet" at all ten years ago. Maybe as consumers, but not as content producers.
One could of course argue the value added by a typical facebook post, but let's not pretend that tens of millions of people were setting up blogs to keep their grandparents updated with pictures of their grandchildren.
Blogs are still here, I follow many of them and RSS is alive and kicking. Most people that had blogs before and produced long-form content are still there. The only problem is that the advertising well might go dry.
Interesting comments but you seem to have an outdated view of the company. Google is an incredible advertising machine that is far from running around "without a head."
They have an immense amount of data, easily matching and beating Facebook, with control at every layer including Android, Chrome, Google Analytics, Maps, Gmail and more, while also running the adtech infrastructure for 90% of the web. Publishers like CNN are not big enough to have their own networks and are constantly fighting a losing battle where Google is controlling ever more of the adtech supply chain. Even NYTimes runs Google's ad stack.
Sites today are really only left with custom executions using their production talents which is seen in the rise of sponsored/branded content, and Google is already making inroads there.
Search will always exist and always be massive, just as the open web will always exist and continues to grow. There will not be a consolidation into a single walled-garden, what you're seeing with Facebook is just another cycle that was repeated in the past with AOL and others. And search is still one of the best performing channels and will continue to get a majority of ad dollars online.
Google is also ramping up their Cloud Platform and have already overtaken AWS in some areas. Cloud computing stands to be an even bigger revenue source than their entire current ad business so they are well poised for the future.
I wouldn't underestimate this company anytime soon. They might have missed social (although not as much as you think, see Youtube) but there is plenty of opportunity out there.
That's the idea here. If all your friends had blogs, they could easily create/ share content there the way they do on FB now. You could follow them in Google Reader, or any other RSS reader. Moreover, you could add content from news sites, most of which still offer RSS feeds.
True, that is not really covered in this scenario. Except Blogger gives you an option of whether or not to list your blog on search engines. I have a privat blog from before the FB era that is not listed, and does not show up on Google searches for my name. Although of course, I would not put any confidential information on there.
Well, of course it should allow my friends to search my blogs
. Just not the rest of the world.
But I guess that if Blogger would be "open", so that other search engines could also index those blogs, then this whole scenario would not work (malignant search engines could expose everything to everybody). So my suspicion is that it would actually be quite hard (or at least require more research) to make an "open" version of facebook.
To me, Twitter benefits from being public discourse and an open forum for replies. On the other side of the coin, Facebook benefits from being a private forum (as most people use it).
Solutions that don't facilitate these use cases aren't going to be successful. Understand why people chose the services they did (discounting network effect) and then try and build something to compete.
And what if what you really wanted to share was a photo, or a comment, or an article from NYT or Vogue, and not a long piece of writing? Isn't that what most of Facebook is used for?
On Facebook, one at least has some protection against outsiders searching for their name and finding one's "silly" (careless) postings. If all posts were open, no such protection would exist. I think this could be a real barrier for widespread adoption of this approach.
a blog is a webbed personal log with comments and the core functionality fb offers is just that, a simple to set up homepage? Blogs have a blogroll instead of a friendlist, does that make a big difference? Seriously asking, I don't use the latter.
1. Nobody except your echo chamber cares about using a distributed or user controlled system. In fact, the vast majority of users will actively avoid such a system.
2. RSS is great, we've just launched this little open source project
https://github.com/getstream/winds
But by no means does RSS replace Twitter. RSS will never become mainstream like Twitter has (to some extent)
3. The author has a point about the various issues with Twitter's usability.
A big issue with federated or, going even further, P2P alternatives to centralized platforms seems to be monetization. It's not so long ago that everyone seemed to be wondering if FB could turn a profit on their platform. What can an open, decentralized system do for revenue? Donations? Commercial tech support for node operators? It must pale in comparison with FB's advertising revenue.
This means a decentralized system can't beat a centralized one at marketing. Even with large resources, beating an established competitor is hard, but when the competitor has, and will always have, a huge edge in funds they can throw at user attraction, the problem seems insurmountable.
I agree, but I think a federated platform would look more like email. Very little advertising, mostly given away for free.
With a federated platform, that's possible because no single company is shouldering the entire cost. And users would migrate to the cheapest provider since they wouldn't be tied to any particular provider.
What does Facebook offer for all that money that is necessary, though? That is, why is monetization such a big deal for a communications platform? A marketing competition? There's no inherent need to participate in that.
A communications platform is useless if its user base is small; who will you communicate with? People have some limit on the amount of different communication platforms they can participate in simultaneously. The number one way to get more people on your communications platform is to have lots of people on it already; the number two way is convincing people to use it (that is, marketing).
Monetization is a big deal because communications service for 1.7B people is expensive, and Facebook is actually a very efficient system compared to regular telecom.
A centralized communications service for 1.7B people is expensive. Not that decentralized or federated services would be cheap, but the costs would be dispersed.
> Nobody except your echo chamber cares about using a distributed or user controlled system.
This is a straw man. Even people championing user controlled systems know that 99% of users would sell their soul to the devil for ease of use, or a UI with nicer colors.
He is correct in that distributed and user controlled are not highlight features of a successful product. This is something a lot of developers never seem to learn. It is the product that will succeed or fail despite what technology underpins it.
Aye. Like television before them, people can consume twitter- and instagram- and facebook-borne content without engaging executive functions of the brain. Sadly this characteristic seems essential for truly mass appeal.
Forcing people to consider any aspects of federation will be an instant barrier to adoption that reduces the appeal by an order of magnitude, at least, and prevent any such service reaching critical mass.
I am getting tired of people seemingly ignorantly repeating "echo chamber" and using it every time someone mentions Twitter. Systems like Twitter provide great ways for disseminating information -- there is nothing inherent about these systems that makes them "echo chambers" and they're definitely not worse in that aspect than mass media or other social networks like Facebook. So stfu and approach the discussion constructively.
No, it was designed to replace SMS. Hence the character limit.
And blogger is easy enough to use. Heck, my computer illiterate grandma was using it before she passed.
The problem is that blogging takes time and effort, and the vast majority of people have no interest in it. The only thing they want to do is share their fleeting thoughts and/or tidbits they have found elsewhere. Which they can do easily on their smartphones. Blogging though, not so much.
> blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people
But isn't this fixable? What about a service with a twitter-like UX, but where following people just subscribes to their announced rss-feeds. User profiles would be, at least under the hood, a list of user's own blogs (and the service would also provide twitter-like publishing) and followed rss feeds. You'd have the advantage of supporting most pre-existing blogs, but could also provide a great user friendly experience.
You'd also get twitter-like outages as 10k people all try to fetch the RSS from $semifamous at the same time. Or you get people burning their mobile data trying to fetch 2k RSS feeds multiple times per day. Or [any one of umpteen other problems people don't consider when proposing this solution].
What's the benefit of winds over other projects? Let me know, i'm looking for a native RSS experience to be honest. Although I love feedly, I'm tired of the fact that it doesn't have a mute feature.
Your project looks awesome. If you can package it into a standalone app, I'm sold. There's certain things I want in my browser and certain things I want to manage in a separate app.
Harder to set up. With centralized systems, all you need is the URL and you can get the magic social-stuffy box on any device you have.
(TBH a centralized service actually feels better, too, because you know it's the service and not some random collection of pieces held together by agreement and duct tape. Partitioning problems are pain enough with centralized services at scale, but they're worse with decentralized ones.)
I've never understood why P2P always goes for the end users.. in most cases it doesn't work for exactly the reasons you mention -- harder to set up, etc. (For some reason bittorrent became the exception that proves the rule.)
However, I think there must be something between true user-to-user P2P and completely centralised systems. Why not something like Twitter or Facebook but where lots of different people can set up servers, and accept users? The servers could exchange information and act like a "single" service with a standard protocol, and users would not need to set up a thing, only choose which server to use, but otherwise the experience would be more or less identical, with access to the same information and profiles, all cached and mirrored. (I call this myself a "federated P2P system", not sure if that's a good term.) Of course such a system would need some crypto support to ensure that data is not easily spoofed and man-in-the-middle modified, but different servers could offer different ways of curating news feeds, etc., and some competition on the front-end where all competitors have access to the same decentralised back-end data would be just fantastic.
I think one example of this was OpenID, which seems to have failed unfortunately. I always thought it was a cool idea. But it seems that people need more than just a common protocol, they really need a common entity to adhere to, they need to be able to say "I'm on X" and for everyone to know what that means and how to find them. And a single company with a single domain seems to provide that.
Unfortunately being open protocol and open source and all that, while well-intentioned, is simply no replacement for a really good marketing department.
About the only two successful federated communication systems I know of are phone network and e-mail. It doesn't matter who you pay your phone bill to, nor where your e-mail address is hosted, you are globally reachable. There might be something insightful in how those two systems started and what keeps them being relevant.
> Unfortunately being open protocol and open source and all that, while well-intentioned, is simply no replacement for a really good marketing department.
Indeed. And you can't fund a good marketing department if you don't resort to m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶e̶x̶t̶o̶r̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶a̶c̶t̶i̶c̶s̶ vendor lock-in and similar strategies. It's something that, by the way, I see as a direct cause of why so much products are utter shit nowadays - because marketing has much, much better ROI than actually making something useful.
>>About the only two successful federated communication systems I know of are phone network and e-mail.
And they were both developed by governments/universities with no profit motive. That should tell us everything we need to know regarding how to go about creating the next ubiquitous federated/distributed system.
IRC, usenet? Even email is usually implemented that way: few end users run their own SMTP servers in the basement.
They have one thing in common: nobody is polishing the brand, nobody is A/B-optimizing addictive properties, there is no startup success story in which users can feel included, rooting for their network of choice.
Oh, and changing a federated system not only requires unanimous decision, it requires unanimous investment. Did the protocols i mentioned feel a bit dated? Might be because of that.
I purposefully didn't mention IRC in a parallel comment because I don't see how it is federated. You always connect to a particular server and stay within its bounds; you don't get the shared space handled by multiple servers that are abstracted away. Or simpler, you say "I'm hanging out on channel #x on freenode", or "on QuakeNet", not "on IRC".
The isolation level you speak of is between networks, not between servers. This distinction might seem a little arbitrary since no centralized system of relevance is running on a single server either, but the key difference is still there: in the larger irc networks, the different nodes that form it are run by different organizations.
Splits are a possibility in any federated system and in systems with nonhierarchical, unique naming, any merge requires some amount of namespace violence proportional to the duration of the split.
Also, the promise that it's safe because you can check the source is really lost when, you know, you can't actually check the source for lack of time, skill or trust in the chain of trust.
"Setting up a blog at for example WordPress.com is not much more complicated than creating a new Twitter account."
I don't think I can take an idea seriously when it comes from someone who says stuff like this. Anyone who's had to manage a product will know better. It's like saying email and twitter are the same. But seriously, this post seems pretty out of touch with the reality.
He uses politics as an example, but for majority of the people politics is exactly why they leave Twitter because it's so annoying having to listen to these people. It's like listening to your grandfather talking about the same thing over and over again--most of his words are right, but after a while it gets old and you want to get away from having to listen to same shit over and over. Twitter is worse because it's not even some wisdom. Most tweets are low quality and increasingly many tweets have negative energy.
Lastly, we don't have to worry about Twitter's future. This guy worries that Twitter may go away, but I'm sure he wouldn't really care if it actually did. Instead, some other service will come along and swoop up anyone who want to keep using the format (Although it would be much smaller number since people now know better)
So you need to pre-approve posts? It seems like this would only increase the "echo chamber" factor for the audience, since they'll only see whatever opinions the author chooses to present in the comments section. I also don't see how this reduces abusive posts or work for the author. The author still has to read each post to review it, meaning they'll still see the abusive posts even if they don't approve them. And the most viewed authors will receive far too many responses to sift through. If you get 2000 comments, then chances are you won't view them all.
So when the problem right now seems to be that people aren't being exposed to diverse viewpoints, I don't think something like this would necessarily help.
I also don't necessarily think that giving Twitter our public history is bad. I suppose you need an alternative if you want the things you type to be forgettable, but I'm not sure that represents very many Twitter users. If you are using Twitter, surely you intend to let people know how you stand now and how you stood in the past? There isn't really a pretense of privacy with Twitter, and I don't think there ever has been. It serves a completely different purpose from something like Facebook, where there is a greater expectation that access to your data will be limited.
The idea of a blog-based social media network already exists; it's called Tumblr. I think Tumblr is much closer to meeting the needs of the Author, so maybe that is a better model to start from. Users have more control of their content there, from length of messages and mixing content to basic formatting.
Pre-emptive apology for longpost - not all of it is aimed at you!
This is the first time I've seen Tumblr mentioned in overarching discussion of "what are we going to do about Facebook and Twitter?" that HN (and others) have been having recently.
OP's two main concerns about Twitter both stem from the fact that it's a centralized system belonging to one company:
1) It's a single point of failure; everything is lost if Twitter goes bankrupt.
2) Twitter holds and (more visibly, recently) is exercising supreme veto power over who gets to use their product and what they use it for. (Note: opinions diverge here; some think Twitter isn't effective enough at identifying and curtailing abuse; others think Twitter is censoring free speech. Both are possible because of centralization, both are bad.)
Tumblr is still centralized and thus solves neither of these concerns, but you are aware of that; you cited it as a possible model, not as a drop-in solution. But real, federated blogging already exists - OP is using Wordpress, not Blogspot, Ghost, etc. (Hey, you can even self host Wordpress! or Jekyll, Hexo, etc.)
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, basic tools exist for federated blog networking and discovery - RSS, blog rolls, search engines. Like OP, I think there is significant margin for improvement in the UX of those tools.
Tumblr's barrier to entry is almost nil - username, password, bam - but WP's free hosted option honestly isn't far behind. That kind of setup would work for average users. If it had good network/discovery tooling built into the platform using open standards, it'd be on par with Tumblr.
But on top of that, a user banned from free WP hosting has the option of buying shared hosting pre-installed with WP from another provider and still being able to participate. It goes down a continuum of ease-of-setup vs. degree of control through VPS to a machine in the basement.
"But why would you want people who get banned that much to still be able to publish?" People get bullied off Tumblr not infrequently through malicious mass reporting. The automatic thresholds are not that hard to trip; the people that suffer are the ones that have developed a following but are not "famous".
I've seen a webcomic artist disappear from Tumblr because they drew a panel of character A calling character B a virgin insultingly. A fan discussion developed over whether B was canon asexual. The artist contributed and said they weren't. This set off a whole bloc of users who started calling the artist heteronormative and a lot of other things, and they eventually mass reported the artist's accounts and got them banned.
Of course there are support channels to rectify this sort of thing, but the process, from what I've seen, is usually painful and slow and not guaranteed to be successful. If the artist gets their account(s) back (which the one in my story did), they now publish in fear of offending that one portion of their fandom, which both dampens their motivation to publish (usually not high for internet artists) and can result in work that panders to the disruptive fans, to the displeasure of the others who were enjoying the artist's original work. If the artist doesn't get their account back (refused by staff or too much trouble), they often lose irreplaceable artwork and history (though shame on them for not doing local backups). If they choose to open a new account, they have have to rebuild their fandom from scratch and PMs to whoever they have non-Tumblr connections with, or they will be found by the troublemakers again and basically be in the same situation as if the account was reopened except still missing all the archives. If both seem like too much trouble, they fold and are never heard from again.
Anyway, this kind of thing has happened to too many people that I was interested in who used Tumblr, which is what, three or so? Enough that it seems like a problem.
- - - -
This is somewhat of an aside, but the design choices Tumblr has made that make it more than a simple blogging platform have strongly colored its community.
I found a blogpost titled "The Toxoplasmosa of Rage"[0] a while back that mused at length about why and how people get so mad about the things they do, especially now that we have the Internet facilitating it. Tumblr was only one of many subjects he touched on, but it stuck with me the most. Put succinctly: on Tumblr, you don't comment on posts; you reblog them and add your own commentary. Both post and commentary are seen by the previous (re)blogger(s) and your followers, who often share your views.
The result is that if material is only seen by people who like it, everyone is happy - but if (as frequently happens) someone sees something they don't like and are compelled to comment on it, Tumblr's system sets up a perfect storm of vitriol as material is alternately bounced between clusters of the network with opposing opinions.
All of which now seems especially ironic to me, given the recent uptick of interest in more accurately identifying echo chambers in media (social and otherwise), and attempting to negate them somehow, possibly by adjusting feed algorithms to expose people to opposing ideas more often. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
It's worth noting that the traditional blog platform avoids this issue by keeping comments confined to the post they were made on.
There are some systems that fuzzy the system so it isn't totally compartmentalized. Disqus is its own little network, for instance. I think Wordpress uses its own commenting ecosystem so people can click on the profile pic of your comment and find your blog, if you have one. Backlinking also increases connectivity by letting readers know who has responded to the piece they're reading, which I hardly consider a bad thing. Maybe the context shifts forced by systems like backlinking or comment linking dampen fly-off-the-handle emotional reactions that fuel flame wars like on Tumblr or Twitter. HN does something similar by hiding the reply link from the front page when a chain nests deep enough, forcing you to go to the comment's own page to reply. Just a little kick, asking "is replying really necessary?".
This is what the folks at https://tent.io were trying to do: create a messaging protocol that was decentralized (like email).
The problem is that it's hard to compete with momentum. People use Twitter because it's where all their friends, followers, and interesting people to follow are.
If you're going to create an alternative, it has to be able to hit critical mass.
Don't forget the free (?) advertising media gives them. Well media is who using it in the first place of course, but it's strange twitter is not able to leverage that to go more mainstream.
It's an echo chamber for journalists and activists. Normal people don't use twitter either, they use fb, instagram, snapchat.
I have a very simple dream, although I haven't taken the time to code it up.
I want a website with my name on it, owned by me, that auto-generates an index of all public content I put on the net -- FB posts, Tweets, HN posts and comments -- all of it. If I upvote a story on HN, it's listed on the site. If I explain something on Quora, it goes on my site too. It should be easy to download/backup. If I delete/modify something on my site, it gets deleted and modified on the other platform.
In this fashion, online content providers can make a buck off of me if they like -- but the stuff I create is primarily owned and managed by me. Which is the way it should be.
Mastodon is a FOSS alternative to Twitter, with a focus on UX. Github: https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon/ Screenshot and demo video linked from the README
- Discovery system 1 is based on upvotes, like reddit.
- Discovery system 2 is based on reposts, and works like twitter.
- Subscription functionality works like RSS. You can follow people and see their posts in a reverse-chronilogical order on your front page.
- Publishing tools work like on Medium - beautiful editor, tags, publications.
- This platform is open source and decentralized. Anyone can easily export their data and spin up their own instance, which will be automatically plugged into the network(that functions like GNU Social).
- It has an API that enables developers to do everything they wanted to do with twitter API.
- The community instance that I'm going to launch will have strict moderation, like Hacker News, that will optimize for the quality of the discussion. But anyone can launch their own instance, and that will enable the absolute freedom of speech.
- I am going to monetize it by offering easy and effortless hosting, the way Discourse does. That will take care of the development and server costs, while keeping the platform ad-free.
I think this sort of system would be perfect, and the only thing required to build it was the right decentralization protocol, which has appeared recently - ActivityPub.
At the moment I have implemented all the functionality aside from the most challenging part - decentralization with AvtivityPub, which I am still figuring out.
If you are interested in testing out this platform and would like to give me some feedback and shape it's development - send me a message(raymestalez@gmail.com), and I will invite you to the beta version.
If you would like to contribute to it's development - you can find the code over here:
A multi-protocol solution is sorely needed. One that combines mesh networking, internet, QR, audio encoding, even USB dead drops (https://deaddrops.com/).
"Why?", you may ask. Because around the world transparency and accountability is under attack. The many dangers of anarchic information (there are many) are mitigated by the many dangers of repression and influence operations globally.
The back and forth fight between the two is healthy.
> A multi-protocol solution is sorely needed. One that combines mesh networking, internet, QR, audio encoding, even USB dead drops (https://deaddrops.com/).
Add APRS and regular ham radio.
I'm only half-joking, it would be pretty cool to have something like that! :).
I've heard some really interesting things about the LoRa packet radio protocol. Runs in ISM bands (433/868/915 MHz), low-power, excellent range (2 km urban, 20+ km LOS).
Do you know of anyone who's combining one or more of these, in app form, for this purpose?
I have made an "audio encoder" (https://github.com/quiet) and I've given some thought to how you might make a mesh tweet network on top of it, but real world constraints are hard.
- hashtags (big aggregators are needed that can answer hashtag queries). Similarly, proposing new tweeters to follow, etc.
- receiving messages. This needs more than RSS, which is only a pull mechanism. It needs both push and pull.
Then there are social problems.
I don't know how far diaspora and OStatus/GNU Social have come. I think diaspora is more concentrated on building a software platform than on protocols (which if so I think is the wrong approach).
OStatus, i.e. thinking of communication protocols, is the right way to go. However it's very very difficult to agree not only on a common protocol, but also on data formats (what's a tweet, what is an album, etc.)
At the end of the day users just don't care about decentralization. They do care about:
* The network of users present on the app
* Quality of the mobile and desktop clients
* Ability to have success promoting their own voice/ content
Decentralization kills innovation in the underlying protocol. (see email for a nice example of common standards holding things back). It also creates a situation were nobody can effectively monetize the platform. Which makes it hard to create a competitive product.
Sure, open standards work well for many things, don't think it will ever catch on for social networks though.
Another thing that they care about way more than we recognize, is
"the latest trend among tech nerds"
Focusing on the Everyman is essential if your criteria for value is a consumer mindshare natural-monopoly (and an exit for VCs) within five years.
The next five years will probably have less of those companies than the last five, and (if the tone of newspapers are anything to go by) ordinary people are becoming distrustful of large monopolistic companies.
Now seems like a good time to hack on what we want. I can't think of a better time for a new, open, social network.
I'm not sure if I want innovation in the underlying protocol. A protocol should be exactly that, underlying.
What ideas do you have for innovation? The only problem with email that I can think of is the lack of end-to-end encryption. But that's a social, not technical problem.
Over the last few years there have been many open projects trying to displace the big names in social media, but none of them seem to have even taken baby steps into fulfilling their goals in becoming a widespread open standard. On the other hand siloed services, such as Slack, pop up out of nowhere and take the tech world by storm.
What is the solution here, because it just seems to be getting worse? I don't want all my data to be controlled by a single company, on the other hand I don't want to like like a hermit in a cave.
Free, open source projects generally suck at good UX and gaining momentum, and I'm not sure either of those is a solvable problem. Well sometimes you can fix it if there's a major corporate backer willing to fund a bunch of full-time devs, but that's not really consistently reproducible.
What if the corporate structure reserved ownership shares for the users, and/or per-impression ad revenue went directly to the content creators. Some way to keep control distributed instead of centralized, that is baked into the company charter from day 1.
I don't think that would really solve anything. You can go out and buy shares in Alphabet if you want, but if (without the funds of say Warren Buffet) you think that's going to stop them selling your data to advertisers, good luck.
I meant something where the content creators are the owners from day 1, and are always the owners, like a co-op. Then any profits left over after infrastructure costs get paid as a dividend proportional to the audience size of the content creators or the ad revenue they generate.
Somehow removing the middle man that is Alphabet, Twitter, facebook while still providing the infrastructure.
One problem with distributed systems is the lack of a centralized authority for usernames. (Who says @POTUS is POTUS?) So why not create a custom TLD for a Twitter-like service? Each domain would be required to implement the API for that service. This would solve the username problem, and allow the registar to remove abusive users, but also let users host their own content. The only problem is domain registration fees, but hey, .tk domain names are still free.
> Blogs and RSS, the latter a system for subscribing to a collection of blogs, and being able to read their posts in a single chronological stream, almost exactly like Twitter, have been around forever.
> ...Setting up a blog at for example WordPress.com is not much more complicated than creating a new Twitter account. Readers can subscribe to your blog using any number of apps, for example the WordPress.com Reader or any other so-called aggregator, such as Inoreader or Feedly. Your list of subscriptions can be freely exported from one aggregator and imported into another.
"almost exactly like Twitter"..."not much more complicated"...
So the alternative is to sign up to a blog service, write posts that have content similar to tweets, sign up to a separate RSS service, subscribe to RSS feeds and hope other people you want to follow do the same?
Some coders really underestimate how much even a tiny bit of friction can stop ideas from going viral especially when there's an integrated and easy to use alternative. Regular people don't want to cobble together their own brittle solution.
That's why the following section in the post is titled "what needs to happen" :)
I have a good idea of the challenge involved. Because of that, I don't have that much hope that this will succeed, but, due to the fact that the building blocks have been available (and used) for so long, it's interesting to think about (and experiment with) how much effort would be required to make blogs+rss as slick as Twitter.
The main thing this guy seems to want to do is curtail abuse, or in other words he wants to restrict the ability for people to say things to you that you don't want to hear. Given that, I'm surprised he's advocating a distributed system where this would probably be an even harder problem to solve.
But frankly I don't understand why "Twitter abuse" is seen as such a big problem. In general if you wish to publish something and provide a channel for people to respond, it's practically impossible for anyone to guarantee you'll be happy with all the responses you get. This is one of the hard parts of being a publisher, which is what you become when you sign up to Twitter. It's sad if someone is hurt by the responses they receive, but it's not really Twitter's problem. Twitter does provide ways to shield yourself from hostile and abusive users but the expectations being placed on them seem unreasonable to me.
It's interesting that this exact same conversation is going on about Reddit (how people are offending each other, and we need to "fix" this). It's as if no one grasps that this has been going on since the beginning of time and if there's more of it at the moment that might point to a deeper problem in society which needs to be resolved through dialogue.
There's a huge difference between criticism (good) and abuse (bad).
You're most probably (I say that in the statistical sense) a white middleclass guy (I am too BTW). For us it's easy to airquote "twitter abuse" and ask what the problem is. However, for a great number of non-white-middleclass-guy-people it's a huge and real problem that we should do our absolute best to help address.
I'm sorry but this idea that there's mysterious knowledge of hardship which white, male members of the middle class automatically don't possess is garbage and is exactly the sort of thing I was hinting at in the last sentence of my comment. You can be as polite about it as you want but it immediately shuts down dialogue and informs the original speaker that he is the replier's intellectual inferior and his opinion isn't valued. In short it's a form of ad hominem. No matter how well-meaning it distracts from the discussion of the actual issue and drags us into identity politics.
In this specific case I think it also demeans publishers who are not white and male. Plenty of non-white, non-male people have been publishing controversial material since long before Twitter existed. Just like the white and male ones, they learned to take the heat or get out of the kitchen. Things like the civil rights movement were accomplished within this context. The issue at hand is not a race or gender issue. All races and genders are being attacked on Twitter. The issue is that some Twitter users don't realize how hot the kitchen can get before they walk into it.
> You're most probably (I say that in the statistical sense) a white middleclass guy (I am too BTW). For us it's easy to airquote "twitter abuse" and ask what the problem is. However, for a great number of non-white-middleclass-guy-people it's a huge and real problem that we should do our absolute best to help address.
This is the most ironically hilarious statement I've seen in a while. I don't know where this "white guy privilege" meme started, but I find it funny when "white guys" call themselves privileged. No you're just a human being and you just happen to live in a country where the majority is white people. If you go to an Indonesian cannibal tribe, you're just a food and no longer "privileged".
The reason I find that sentence ironic is you're talking about "do our best to help" but the sentence itself reeks of some sort of weird idea that you are above other non-white men and women. Statements like "You're most probably a white middleclass guy" is what hurts the people most, and you don't even realize that. I laugh out loud imagining if OP was a woman, she would be like "WTF is this guy". People don't "need help". The precise thinking that they need help is the first thing you need to abolish from your mindset if you really care.
Perhaps you should have spent the 5 seconds to look up where I live. You might have understood that my perspective is different from yours.
Based on previous arguments with privilege deniers (invariably white middleclass guys who are unable to have this discussion without getting quite emotional), I know that this little discussion is not going anywhere.
One day either you or I might change our viewpoint with regard to this topic. I already did this once quite some time ago. I hope that one day you might too.
Since your response to him contained a racist stereotype which you used to justify not engaging in further dialogue, I certainly hope you do change your viewpoint in the future. I continue to be baffled by this idea that it's okay to use racist stereotypes against whites but not anyone else.
The common denominator of all your discussions with emotional white middle class guys is you...
(there are many more good resources -- the bottom-line is that if you're white, you have been privileged by that fact. What you do with this knowledge is of course up to you.)
You can keep on insulting my person, but instead my suggestion is that you read as much as you can about this important topic.
P.S. here's more on women (another non-white-and-male group) having to suffer online abuse:
See you're not listening. The previous person told you that you were assuming someone's race (actually it's not even race, you were assuming the gender as well), and you're just talking about your little links you found online.
It's ridiculous how you're talking about "open mind" when you're so closed off that you don't even realize you're the exactly the problem you're trying to defeat.
No one is denying that online abuse is a massive problem.
The point is that behaviors like yours--not even realizing how much of an offensive statement you're making online--is the core of all problems that you're claiming to help solve. If you really care about this, ask around people with open mind if what you said here is acceptable.
You have clearly not read the links I posted. Doing so would contribute positively to your development.
The fact that you're a HackerNews user, means that you're most probably white and male. That's not racist, it's statistics, as I made clear from the very start.
So cocktailpeanuts, my username here is my real name. I connect my real identity to this whole discussion. Why don't you do so too?
"The fact that you're a HackerNews user, means that you're most probably white and male. That's not racist, it's statistics."
=> Assuming someone is of certain gender and certain race, based on the environment is the most sexist and racist thing you can say. Again, you don't seem to realize how asshole of a behavior that is, but let's take some time to imagine if the OP was a black woman, and some guy on a forum says "You're most probably (I say that in the statistical sense) a white middleclass guy (I am too BTW)." hahaha I don't even know where to start.
Heres what you can do next:
1. Maybe wonder if there's something wrong with yourself when you claim to want to help these people who are affected by racism and sexism, when everyone on this thread is telling you you're the one who's being racist and sexist. Kinda ironic, right?
2. Or keep doing your thing. People call that "hipster wannabe activism". It may blow your mind but "hipster activism" is actually a thing. Read this article: http://www.yeshacallahan.com/is-hipster-activism-the-new-act... Yup that sounds pretty much like you, exactly down to the behavior of sharing all the links for awareness and trying to preach.
I know I'm being harsh, and maybe you are actually a nice guy, just misguided. People can get excitied about something they recently learned, especially if they believe it's the right thing. Hopefully you will actually try going through this thread and read what other people are telling you and giving a serious thought on if your approach is the right way.
I think a better step for twitter would to be decentralize the admin powers to its users with better blocking options (blocking on chosen words, regex for racist memes?), but in this case there will be the possibility that you're just building more echo chambers. One could only wish that one day an AI would be able to analyze a long incoherent rant and distill it to some debatable arguments.
Even if you build a superior p2p platform you won’t make Elon Musk and Katy Perry sign-up.
My guess is you have to copy iMessage approach. Partner with awesome Twitter clients like Tweetbot which are also not happy with the way Twitter going. Authorize with Twitter account, integrate original Twitter feed, replies and conversations, add the killer feature and make authentic tweets feel like “green bubbles”.
I am not too concerned about Twitter keeping content b/c in the wall/river model of showing posts the past is irrelevant, even to the point that if a user wants to save a post for future reference/accountability a screenshot is far more effective than say scrolling down forever and find it (if it wasn't deleted). In other words: Twitter is more like a news channel not a blog.
Wanna fix Twitter? Fix trolls. It is far too obvious for the real users to spot when trolls are pushing a trend or flamming. Why can't Twitter setup some AI to mitigate troll activity? Same thing with big bucks pushing dubious campaigns a la Trump.
Two features that will make it better user experience: bookmark a tweet and add subjects/tags to tweets or accounts so users can have multiple streams well classified by subjects. Having a shampoo of content in chrono order forces scroll down to the point where one left last time.
However, all these fixes would make Twitter less profitable. So, nevermind.
While I'm sympathetic to the sentiment of not wanting to silence legitimate, civil discourse, I'd like to think there's some middle ground that's broadly acceptable.
We don't tolerate people running around cussing at others with impunity. (I'm not going to go into the "contrary opinions" aspect of it, because I think at least for a first approximation general uncivil speech works well enough.)
The penalties for doing this in real life are also offset by the cost of actually doing it: you have to physically be there, and others can retreat to private spaces. Online you can spin up fake accounts and bots with nearly all of the cost of dealing with it on the part of the recipient (by for example, blocking the user).
What do you think? This is something I've been thinking earnestly about and I'm interested in others opinions.
Would love you gentel opinion on a related experiment we have with crowd moderated forums. If each group member rate just one new post, the group as a whole can collectively filter through thousands of ideas. See more informaion here http://blog.postwaves.com/about
Dynamics is very different than Reddit since each new post is sent only to a small random group of users to vote whether it should be public, no one else sees the post before that, and voter dont know who the submitter is so votes are less biased.
In the first 3-4 years of Twitter, the internet was full of blog post about "writing a twitter killer". Please give it a rest.
The only way to replace twitter is with a big push in protocols, and with open source software based on those protocols: easy one click install apps on the cloud or self-hosted.
Imagine if tweets were RFC'd like emails were, or NTP and then clients were built around it. It could work like IRC where you still have servers which only purpose is to link the nodes. You'd have internet splits like in the good old days (unless you cache everything everywhere, but then there are privacy concerns on delete tweets) but such a system would be open, and you'd retain your data and your feed's.
Now I'm imagining all the viral tweets I've seen lately containing fake news, and how much help pre-approval would be in stopping the inconvenient replies containing Snopes links. More control is a tool that cuts both ways.
Why did gnu social fail? What happened to diaspora?
I think what blogs were missing where the social network. They had the blogroll, but it wasn't enough. Tumblr almost got it right, but somewhere along the way they seem to have messed up.
GNU social didn't fail. It still has a growing community. Check out mastodon.social to see a newborn server (with it's own implementation of everything, in Ruby) for example. It was featured here some weeks ago.
In the coming weeks, I will be running a little experiment by trying to post even my short, previously twitter-only blurbs to this blog. I will have to cross-tweet these, but at least the primary source will be right here in my own database.
So basically the blogger plans to start adding tweet-length blog posts, and otherwise will continue using both Wordpress and Twitter as they're intended to be used.
The problem with blogs is: they lack private, instant communication channels.
Blogs may be better if you're e.g. a politician, philosopher or anyone who wants to distribute long-form content - but they're unusable if you like to engage in personal conversation.
I surely would not have found my last girlfriends without Twitter, just saying... it has unique advantages over FB, blogs, mail, Tinder and anything else out there.
If twitter let you filter tweets and easily build lists around users, it would be most of the way towards being a more functional platform that let you easily finds signal amidst noise.
Twitter would be useful if they gave me the firehose in my feed. Having to follow someone is so caveman era stupid. I would even pay for the firehose then let my friends spam me with their 'ads'.
You're gonna have to elaborate -- usually Twitter's "firehose" means the entire unfiltered stream of all Tweets, which would be beyond useless as a normal user for obvious reasons.
Accounting for hyperbole I agree to a certain point, however:
> The problem is getting three hundred million dumbasses to use it.
You would probably be more likely to succeed in that if you start thinking of them as humans, humans who aren't familiar with computers, don't have much time etc etc ;-)
Oh, and that guy with the social network said something like that at some point and it is now the most famous quote from him.
I'm a huge fan of blogs, agree with the author in general, but think he's defining "something much better" in a way that doesn't make sense to the average person.
Twitter is at least easy enough for the average person or even dopey + clueless non-technical celebrity to add to their phone, search, and use normally.
Blogs give infinitely more customization options, and in theory are easy to setup, but in practice are still a lot more work and harder to setup. All of their advantages are for nothing when it takes a lot more work to setup compared to a Twitter account for the average person.
Regardless, Twitter is done for. They're trying in vain to achieve an impossible politically correct goal (all of their new safe spaces features to eliminate trolling and name calling) rather than actually innovating or coming up with a business model that can sustain them.
This is categorically false. People who love and want to defend free speech go there. If you want to continue living in a bubble world, stay on Twitter.
It doesn't have to be a 'Nazi symbol' for self professed Nazis and white nationalists to identify with it. Check out the mentions of any prominent Jewish person on twitter, it's a cesspool of Pepe frogs telling them to get in ovens or whatever other idiocy they've come up with today.
Case in point, David Duke saying "you can't zog the frog":
Does Twitter have no right to freedom of speech, when there are alternatives to it? If they don't want to be associated with white nationalists, then why should they allow themselves to be?
If the difference between Twitter's speech limits and Gab's is that the latter allows Nazis and harassment, I think you'll find most prefer "less" free speech.
On the contrary, we should support Twitter more after their recent laudable efforts in banning neo-Nazi accounts. There is no freedom to spout hate speech on someone else's platform.
Expecting a tolerant person to be blindly tolerant (of anything) is an adolescent argument. Tolerance is not a binary state, and has never meant a binary state.
I'm not sure it's "neo-nazi sympathisers" as much as "oblivious young white male libertarians who don't realise the bubble they live in." Admittedly they do tend to sound the same when it comes to "censorship" but I think the distinction helps.
Google lives off the open web. Two out of four of its main products depend on the open web:
1. Search - the less of an open web, the less is searchable by Google. Facebook is a classic example. 2. AdWords/AdSense - Facebook, CNN, BBC don't need it. They have their own networks, and they 're big enough to offer a "take it or leave it" approach.
(The only two main products not relying on Open Web is Google Cloud and Android).
Google actually had everything set up, a social network (blogger), a wall (reader), IM (Google Voice, email).
But they decided that FB is taking over. What did they do? They made "their own FB". Which solved no one's problems. Google+ had nothing over FB (except for circles, which FB promptly copied), and killed their old social apps.
Now their running around as a chicken without a head.