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.
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.
And a massive stampede of advertisers and small businesses blowing their whole marketing spend on said chicken
No worries
That's what newspaper execs said in the 90s
Everyone was on blogs ten years ago. Had Google kept up their product, people wouldn't need to leave.
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.
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.
But like you say, the fact is not enough people cared.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbs348/diaspora-the-per...
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.
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.
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.
Twitter was designed to replace blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people.
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.
Check me if I'm wrong, but isn't that ahistorical? Maybe it had that effect. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that that was the intent, though.
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.
Why is this?
(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 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 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.
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?".
[0]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ (CTRL-F for "completely different" if you only want Section V that mentions Tumblr)
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.
It's an echo chamber for journalists and activists. Normal people don't use twitter either, they use fb, instagram, snapchat.
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.
I'm not part of the Dev team, but I do donate to the patreon because I'd love it to succeed.
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
Sorry to be pedantic, but it's implementing OStatus standard.
(It's still work in progress, launching soon)
Here's my vision for the ultimate platform:
- 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:
https://github.com/raymestalez/nexus
(I am currently cleaning up the backend code, and rewriting the frontend in React).
I'll probably plug in my email later and check it out when there is some progress! <3
"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.
Add APRS and regular ham radio.
I'm only half-joking, it would be pretty cool to have something like that! :).
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.)
* 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.
"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.
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.
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.
Follow Dave Winer and absorb the lessons he has/is solving ~ http://scripting.com/2016/11/19/fasterScriptingcomHomePage.h...
> ...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.
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.
Yes, Twitter is not perfect from business perspective, but users should not care.
Twitter is also not perfect from users' perspective, but it works and people use it. That is enough.
Mention of twitter is skyrocketing (election driven).
http://searchreddit.net/?relevance&direction=desc&view=analy...
Twitter rules in sports and politics..
http://searchreddit.net/?relevance&direction=desc&view=analy...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
Federated XMPP?
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.
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.
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.
Then if you get bored you can click on a username to view a complete (chronological) feed.
The problem is getting three hundred million dumbasses to use it.
> 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.
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.
There's already an alternative available, and it's growing: https://gab.ai
It doesn't solve the problem of giving your data to a company, but it's a hell of a lot more open and inclusive than any other platform.
http://beforeitsnews.com/politics/2016/11/twitter-verifies-m...
