What projects or companies are you working on to combat filter bubbles, walled gardens, emotional manipulation, and the like, and how can the HN community help you in your goals?
[1]http://veekaybee.github.io/facebook-is-collecting-this/ [2]http://veekaybee.github.io/content-is-dead/ [3] http://veekaybee.github.io/who-is-doing-this-to-my-internet/
http://hyperlinkserver.com/webdesigning/tomorrow/
I have had multiple developers quit and don't have the $80k budget quoted by Gigster.
Concept: in the same way you might register a username/handle on ig/twitter a user registers a new domain (or "connects" a domain the user already owns).
Using Enom API we also offer "branded" email and private registration, and in the background the name records are automatically pointed to their "tomorrowbook page". By logging into tomorrowbook the user can use the "text tool" to add posts to their website, basic website analytics, and ability to customize their follow/like buttons...also access the tomorrowbook email client for their branded email, not unlike a social messaging tool only open bc it works on email protocol.
Obviously the explanation above changes just a little for users who own domains with 3rd party registrars and/or using 3rd party hosting.
How can HN help? If there are any developers who can get the Enom API out of sandbox and fully functional where my other developers have quit.
Social media works well for announcing stuff on my own web site (new blog articles, new releases of open source projects, new books I have written, etc.)
Hosting long form content of someone else's domain is not playing the game right.
eg. My wife has a small business with an online store hosted on Shopify and her email provider is Gmail. But her website is www.her_domain.com and her email address is @her_domain.com.
She can easily switch out her providers and her contact addresses don't change. No real tech knowledge needed except for how to register a domain name and follow some how-to docs from Shopify and Gmail.
That's your choice. You can use the same credentials for all accounts you create and manage the entire mass as one. It's a bad practice, I know, but it's still a solution.
I guess my real question is, what exactly is that threat, how damaging is it, and how likely is it to occur?
By my mental math, I can't really justify spending even a few bucks, or more expensively, a few hours, protecting against some consequence that I can't really quantify at any real level of risk.
For business, sure, because there are other benefits to having a custom domain, but for personal stuff, I don't really see the cost/benefit analysis making sense. The biggest threat seems to be that the government will have my data and I'll be advertised at, but having my own domain doesn't help either way. Am I missing something?
Perceived by some but apparently not by many others who are still clueless. I know multiple people who invested considerable time and energy into building up Facebook pages only to suddenly be cut off from fans who had followed them when fb decided to go the pay to play route. I personally lost my YouTube channel, due to sheer incompetence on Google's side after they moved to the single login system across Google, Plus, YouTube, etc. I tried many times over multiple years to get access again but their support is crappy as I'm sure you've heard many times before...
For a short term experiment, it's totally reasonable to give it a shot. But if you're trusting Google, Facebook or any other tech giant (or even small startup) with things important to you, you're making a mistake. Not backing up something as important as all your email history in Gmail would be insane, in my opinion. Even with a backup, you could lose access to a lot of other services if Google ever locks you out, as they have done to many, many people in the past.
It might be too romantic these days, but it you might be better if you see it as a matter of principle...Doing the right thing (Backed by your own thought ofcourse).
Think of it as selling your identity off to a thrid party. If you see that as an improper thing on its own, then you shouldn't do it no matter how much value the third party provides, right?
Things like facebook are essentially saying. "Give us your identity, secrets and your whole life, we will save you some cash and make some (nonessential?) things (slightly?) easier for you"....
The biggest threat is that Google removes or locks you out of your gmail account.
So now she's forced to get another email address to log into Tumblr. I got around that by creating an email address at my own personal domain that forwards to her current bellsouth.net address, and that was good enough for Tumblr.
Enjoy your free Internet.
I have been working on a purposed solution over at http://www.peerprofile.com which allows creation of a personal domain and instead of getting locked in provides an open model.
Yeah it's a tradeoff and for many people giving up that control is worth it.
Due to some unexplainable optimism, people always believe that injustice won't happen to them. Just like with car accidents. And just like with car accidents, there should be some sort of "insurance" against unforeseen douchebaggery.
It's like this : - let's say there's a 1% chance of FaceGoogle abuse for anyone - when faced with that 1% chance, most people (99,99%) will choose to forego the insurance - 0.99% of people are now vulnerable to injustice
People are not as rational as we'd like. We don't have a very good sense of how likely something is to happen, especially when the probabilities get smaller.
EDIT: Never mind, I was straight-up wrong. Sorry!
> Make your website of record your website.
I don't see a typo (and your comment is 3 minutes more recent than his, so I don't think he made any corrections). Maybe "record" is throwing you off?
What he means is that "Your official or authoritative website (i.e., website of record, like owner of record) should belong to and be controlled by you."
Edit: If you're saying that the sentence could be hard to parse, yes I agree.
Others doesn't include whoever provides your MX records.
* https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ - cross-site commenting
* https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ - API for apps to create posts on various servers
* https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ - realtime subscriptions to feeds
* More: https://indieweb.org/specs
We focus on making sure there are a plurality of implementations and approaches rather than trying to build a single software solution to solve everything.
Try commenting on my copy of this post on my website by sending me a webmention! https://aaronparecki.com/2017/06/08/9/indieweb
Micropub servers: https://indieweb.org/Micropub/Servers
Webmention implementations: https://indieweb.org/Webmention
More details: https://indieweb.org/indieweb_network
I found this on the Webmention Implementation Report [1].
Is there way I can be notified about different such projects being done at W3C?
We've tried so hard to make technology ubiquitous and accessible to everyone. We thought that that was a good idea at the time, except we didn't really understand it entirely.
The consequence of ubiquitous technology is that the majority now has access to powerful tools to 'express' themselves while being subjected to constant brainwashing into behaving in predictable ways - purchasing, thinking, liking, voting, etc.
By 'expressing' themselves, they contribute to a cacophony of content, which makes it very hard to discern truth from fabrication, leading to confusion, apathy and insecurity, exactly the sweet spots that advertisers of all kinds target.
A small minority profits greatly from this system, while the users themselves are rewarded with a 'virtual self' which is slowly taking over their 'real' self, making even the idea of losing it scary. This mental trap is very powerful - just look at the number of 'zombies' on the streets - people interacting with their phones there and then, disregarding others and their personal safety..
The remaining 5% who are aware of these issues get to share all the alternative technological solutions and monetary scraps left over from the big fishes.
So I don't think there's anything to 'do' about it - just be aware of it and try to stay away from large crowds.
I respect and applaud the efforts of so many who try to build distributed and anonymous systems, but I'm very bearish about any of them becoming 'mainstream' for the reasons described above plus this one: most people don't care about these things.
Those who control these systems are some of the most powerful people in the world. In time, they will get older and more conservative. Soon they will venture into politics on a global scale.
Considering the alternatives, maybe that's not the worst thing after all.
Billions of people can communicate and learn in ways never before possible. This is overall A Very Good Thing.
I'm sure when the tractor was invented, some bright minds realized this was going to be the end of small farms, and that some day we'd be eating manufactured food product out of a tube, having long forgotten the art of cultivating a rich breadbasket for your family.
They would've been right, of course, we've lost our health and our knowledge of the earth, somewhat catastrophically.
Which isn't to say we should've skipped the tractor. But just that "it's net good" won't be the end of the story.
Also, think about what companies start doing when they start failing. And don't make implicit assumptions that these megaliths will never fail or stumble. What would you, as the CEO who is supposed to "maximize shareholder value" do? Are you going to say "Well, we could do some shady things to exploit the data we have and buy ourselves some more time, but it is a better idea to declare bankruptcy and close the company"? Imagine a company like Facebook nearing bankruptcy. You can bet on your life that they will offer the appropriate third parties greater control of their data mining prowess in return for a bailout. Is that also overall a Very Good Thing?
Also, notice how the 2008 financial crisis unfolded. None of the offending parties got anything more than a slap on the wrist, because they had the keys to an engineering construct of extraordinary complexity (the financial system). It was just "heads I win, tails you lose". The way our lives are becoming intertwined with these tech behemoths is no different, and I don't see it playing out any differently if there is a similar crisis in the tech sector. How can that be overall a Very Good Thing?
The fact that billions of people can do something they couldn't do before is commendable, but it also raises the bar for everyone - just like reading and spelling did 100 years ago and now it becomes obligatory for everyone to learn and communicate or be left behind.
In other words, we have super powers compared to past generations, but it doesn't matter because everyone has them now.
As for whether this is a good thing: Who is president in the US again? How did this come about?
Get used to the zombies...they are going to become far more prevalent. When Neuralink or whatever technologies converge to directly project experiences mind-to-mind, people will not be broadcasting selfies...they will be broadcasting self, as in their current, total sensate experience. People will tune in and live the most exciting virtual life that they need...while their physical sits decaying with saliva dripping from their half-opened mouths. The drug wars will come nowhere near as close to the holo-virtual experience tune-out that's rather near.
Fast forward 15 years: many surprises happened, non-IT people don't even think of buying desktop computers. Laptops are borderline geek-devices, most of the stuff is going on cell-phones of which most are Linux-powered.
Windows as a growing platform is more or less dead. (There are serious efforts to reanimate it, but who knows...)
Maybe the example is too geeky, and one may argue that Windows didn't have so many users as Facebook and Google now. Instead think of Televisions, at least in Germany they are dead. Most of my friends don't have a TV and even among those people who have one, many argue that it's bad for you.
So yeah, think positive. ;)
If things continue on this trajectory its going to be even worse,
> while being subjected to constant brainwashing into
> behaving in predictable ways - purchasing, thinking,
> liking, voting, etc.
> So I don't think there's anything to 'do' about it
> - just be aware of it and try to stay away from large
> crowds.
To the OP, "combating" these tsunamis-that-already-happened is akin to various other (past or ongoing) "wars on intents"/ideas (won't name them here to not derail but insert any of the various "war on XYZ" memes that have been floated for the past century+ where XYZ is not a specifically identifiably nation or group) --- unwinnable.
The internet hasn't changed, we have, and the only way to take the internet back is if we change ourselves back.
I think this is a really important point. When I see services that give me a choice of either 1)logging in with Google or 2) logging in with FB, I don't do either. I simply elect to not use that service.
There is no way we can keep control of all those separate login details. There needs to be a central control over login.
Sure, login details are pretty old skool bonkers.
I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion, but in the real world where I have to hand a class of 35 students over to another teacher and they need to have confidence that all 35 can log in and complete the lesson.
Repeat this across all classes and all years. That's a lot of users.
Using Email does help in what way? Most people do use Mail , Gmail that is. Do you mean Email as a protocol in opposition to Whatsapp, FB Messenger?
How does not hosting on the major hosting providers solve the problems of walled gardens and filter bubbles and the closed internet? That's just ephemeral infrastructure.
Login integrations can make a lot of sense. I don't really see how not deploying integrations will protect us from walled gardens.
The filter bubble problem is particularly relevant for us because it's critical for an open network to let users filter out abusive content (whether that's spam, stuff they find offensive, or just a topic they don't care about)... but doing that in a way which doesn't result in creating a profiling db or creating bubbles and echo chambers. The problem is one of letting users curate their own filters (including blending in others' filters), whilst keeping the data as privacy protecting as possible. It's a fun problem, but on our medium-term radar.
Do you never wake up and just feel depressed about the state of things? Ever wanted to just say fuck it and create a facebook account?
In my opinion it all comes down to putting your money (and time, effort, convenience or lack of it, etc) where your mouth is. I don't like Google, Amazon, or Facebook's policies and practices so I choose not to participate. That most people around me are subsidizing their lives (free storage, free email, 2-day shipping, easy home automation, etc) in exchange for their privacy and independence doesn't really factor into my own decision. I do try and raise awareness and encourage others to take similar steps but ultimately they need to make the decision for themselves of they won't commit to it.
This sounds a lot like my own practices.
There is one pitfall which I find interesting and that is that you cannot host your own phone number in the same way that you host your own email/DNS.
If you own a domain and self-host your DNS and mail, you really are the provider - the requests come to you and you first and you have a good deal of "control" over that resource.
However, unless you actually become a CLEC, you cannot "own" your own phone number and become the "server" of that resource. No matter what your setup, some third party intercepts that requests and hands it to you - you are never first in line with a phone call.
One reason this is interesting is, if you run your own mail server, you can email other local users without generating any network traffic - it's just a local copy operation. This is not the case with VOIP/asterisk/anything - your calls are going over the telco network no matter what (again, unless you are a CLEC).
I know some of it is not completely ratioanal--Boeing makes civilian aircraft as well as military. And I accept that not all "defense" products are bad. We need a strong defense. What we don't need is bombs falling 24x7 for 17 years now jus so some a-holes can make billions of dollars off the suffering of others.
And yes, Microsoft, Oracle, and even Apple and Google products run a lot of military systems that enable that killing.
What I found in this exercise is that many of the companies I worked for were indirectly compromised--it's amazing how many firms take money from government sales, money handouts from government/military programs, etc. It's truly amazing how little "private" there is in the private sector.
All developers should take a course in ethics and not stray from those teachings. It would also be helpful to get some philosophy in your toolbox as well. And then maybe, maybe, some of this bullshit would finally cease.
I think the bigger problem is cross-generational power. YC itself is somewhat terrifying in this regard, but that's a different topic. In regards to Google and FB, even if we like Google now, we probably won't like the Google 60 years from now. But what is there to do?
Google stopped Microsoft by making Microsoft irrelevant, in the "Microsoft is Dead" sense: Nobody is afraid of them anymore. But people fear Google and FB. Imagine a Microsoft competitor to your startup vs a Google or FB competitor.
This could be a lack of imagination, but it's very difficult to imagine some new company making Google or FB irrelevant in the same way they made their predecessors irrelevant. Think of oil fields. At one point, before oil fields were monopolized, I've heard the ecosystem seemed pretty similar to Silicon Valley circa 2008. Everybody seemed to be able to get a slice of the action, and while it took determination and luck to get involved, it was possible.
Now the oil industry is on lockdown. Imagine asking "What are we doing about Exxon Mobil?" or Walmart. You can't do a damn thing, and there's no shame in admitting that.
As defeatist as it is, we may want to start thinking about ways of riding out the next 40 years in a productive fashion. It's more beneficial to say: Ok, Facebook, Google, and the closed internet are here to stay. Now what?
For example, if you're really set on doing something about it, one of the most effective things you could do is try to join the companies and shape them yourself.
So what happened?
A competitor came long with less scruples. Facebook erupted on the scene very happily crossing the creepy line to wring every bit of data they could out of their users.
So Google now has to compete with this company that has far, far more data (advertiser captnip) than they do. And no one really seems to care - Facebook grows to 2 billion users. Google can either be outcompeted on this front, or they can race to compete, gather more and more data.
Google perhaps tried to stop Facebook by becoming them, but there's so much money in this industry that people are willing to do anything unethical to get past you to get it.
Same with the open web. Same with vendor lock-in. Etc.
I wouldn't bet too highly on those services.
Software is easier to copy and replace than many other things, but make no mistake: The amount of engineering done at the largest software companies is massive, and has gone way past the point of being easy to replicate. Let's talk someone smaller, like Twitter. Building a Twitter for 100 people is trivial. Scaling it to work well for serious volumes, building all the pieces that make it have actual revenue, and not be just a giant money pit, and all the effort required to build the userbase itself is just enormous. When we go past Twitter, and we think Facebook and Google, serious disruption of their core businesses is really, really hard, because every single user they have is an efficiency you don't.
In practice, every large software company today is running a whole lot of machine learning under the hood. Whether it's figuring out which ads to send you, just get you to stay on the site longer, or just have great fraud protection, the difference in data matters. Imagine your machine learning model is trying to sell ads. How much of a disadvantage are you in vs a company that is the user's default search engine, and has analytics hooks in the websites that your target person is on 75% of the time? What if they also have their text messages, know their friends, and their friends' purchases? You can have much better algorithms, but they have such an insane data advantage that you have to be orders of magnitude better to even compete with them!
So I'd definitely bet highly on those services, because they've spent years building moats. That doesn't mean they are unbeatable: We all remember the time when Microsoft and IBM looked unbeatable, and we all know what happened, but I don't think anyone without massive funding and a completely new, must have product has a prayer of entering their space and not be swallowed whole.
Open source search engines are still years behind what Google can do, but those technologies are much nimbler and easier to customize. Reactive paradigms, dockerization, open source tools for machine learning. Such tools might benefit the small players to allow building technology that might disrupt the big players.
Then again, many of those tools come from the big players which kind of defeats my point here...
Note that while I'm happy to deal with smaller businesses, and happy to spend money on them, I am still pretty wary of advertising-based businesses. It is a slippery slope of doom, and I think it's ideal to try and stay off of it.
* ActivityStreams 2.0 - https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/
* ActivityPub - https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
* https://distbin.com - My implementation of the above. Who wants to federate?
Another aspect of the project comes from a "house terminal" that I set up here, basically an offline Raspberry Pi running GNU/Linux and a custom chat/guestbook program that runs as a "kiosk". This terminal will morph into a kind of in-house only access to the federated network with real time communications etc.
The internet is only closed if we keep acting like it is. The protocol is the same. Go build stuff.
You are more likely to spread your ideas about open internet in a public place like Medium than the faraway countryside like your website.
Why should the end user care about this problem?
Have you heard your non-entreprenuer/engineer friends or others online complain about this problem?
If the answer to above two questions is Negative, then the problem/pain point simply is not large enough to fix.
And, as a potential success case to model our strategy off of, we should be looking towards DuckDuckGo, they've written some good material on how to do it.
So what if Facebook as stagnated with user features? Why should your average Joe care? It's already serving their purposes, most if not all of their friends and relatives are on the platform. Again why is this bad for the end user?
I'm not sure what can be done about that, but it's certainly becoming an up hill battle.
Ultimately, email clients are services that have maintenance and development costs - if you're not paying for it, someone is selling your information to fund the service.
They mostly use email for promotion/ad emails and registering for services/games/whatever.
I've thought about switching, but last time I tried I couldn't get my own domain working on the first try, so I just gave up. I think even I would just like to have my own domain in the email and wouldn't gain any other benefits.
How do you get everyone to update their contacts?
Also it seems like even if you forward form Gmail to your Fastmail account Google still knows your business.
I'm not trying to make a case for not doing it but rather would be interested in hearig what has worked for others.
Running your own email server takes quite a bit of maintenance but as long as you're not using it for marketing you'll be fine.
Really? That hasn't been my experience the last couple of years. I wasn't joking when I said that Google and MS routinely blackhole mails from my users to their users. These are legitimate mails. Sent by real people, to real people. Often people they've been conversing with for years.
You can play by the rules, set up SPF, DKIM, periodically check blacklist statuses and be perfectly fine, and suddenly mail still disappears. No bounces, and no ability to contact an MS or Google postmaster to shout at. This certainly isn't due to incompetence on their part, so I can only assume it's a strategy to frustrate mail server operators to simply give up and use their little walled e-mail garden.
[1] https://ipfs.io
I want something that is fully decentralised, open source, doesn't depend on DNS, and doesn't expose metadata (including the social graph).
I have a slice of hope still that we (the whole community, dev's just like users who need to use services) can "make the world a better place".
The proble I currently see is that: 1. We are too few ATM 2. Facebook, Google, Apple,... already nested into the minds of many people, even the one's who claim to "think different" 3. There has to be something: - big - useful - attractive - free of costs
to use instead of their sh*tty services and you somehow need to convince "Jenna to take here FB profile and also their friends with her to the new place in town".
The same goes for other services like WhatsApp, searching with G., buying on A. etc.
How will we be strong enough (against companies with billions of $$ and the brightest minds in tech cause they wanna earn 120k/yr) to put something up that can not only withstand them but convince all the zombies?
How will you get those zombies moving? The most of the ppl. not even reads news anymore and if they do they just believe what they see & hear. There is no discussion, if someone is pissed she/he is right. There is no science for someone who doesn't even know the value of a scientific method. We are royally screwed and there has to be A BIG UNITING OF ALL ACTIVISTS under one flag.
If we go on like this with every hackin' Joe trying to construct his own facebook clone then we will just die like the rest.
https://joinmastodon.org https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon https://mastodon.social
As a matter of fact, the fact that the browser by default sends everything I type into that bar up to some 3rd party, whether I've pressed enter or not, is pretty scandalous. It's not necessary.
I want local copies of pages that are important to me, for offline viewing, and I want to be able to bookmark specific parts of them in annotated, searchable, useful ways. I want to be able to share these. I want to be able to upvote and downvote their relevance as I use them again and again. I want human readable formats for storing these things. I want them on my filesystem, but not in a bunch of jumbled, strangely named files hidden deep somewhere on the computer. And I want to be able to share them peer to peer.
Remember the good old days, when people had WWW hyperlink indices? It's 2017 and centralized search/social platforms have all but destroyed the artform of digital curation. It is an artform that deep learning will clumsily fumble again and again. This website is a perfect example of how powerful human curation can be. The articles are curated and annotated collectively by human beings. The protocols and the web standards are more or less masterfully designed. We have unlimited programming languages.
I want to subscribe to notable peoples public web-bibliographies. I want them available in formats that are interoperable with my web browsers bookmarking and annotation tools.
Storj for example is an order of magnitude cheaper than AWS, uses peoples spare hard drive space, encrypts everything and back it up using peer to peer tech.
I am currently pretty comfortable as an Android dev, but I am wondering if I should start learning everything I can about blockchain tech in order to help on projects such as these?
uPort: Self-Sovereign Identity (https://www.uport.me/)
Userfeeds - Content Ranking System (userfeeds.io/)
Status - Messaging Platform (https://status.im/)
Brave - Browser (https://brave.com/)
So I'd generally like to see more effort put into making it easier for people to engage in more thoughtful ways.
This can also be applied to advertising. I'm trying to avoid chips, but if they're in front of me I'll eat a handful. So then the internet thinks, "This guy wants more chips!" So if advertising were more about my long-term values rather than my short-term behavior, then it'd be more valuable.
Anyway, it's pretty hard on social media to share deeper analysis and arguments and thoughts. I get that medium was sort of an effort in this direction, counter to twitter, but that's really just blogging with some extra algorithms thrown in. Need something else.
You miss the critical purpose served by more emotional hind brain thinking - its easier to repeat and get predictable responses to.
Think of this as much older hackers using new tools to do better at their subject - their subject being the hacking of human brains.
---
A simple way to test the effectiveness of your proposal is to see how forums perform. The more complex a topic, the fewer participants and the fewer posts.
People don't want to engage in complex topics, unless they fulfill certain selection criteria.
You can't make people consume more complex information - unless you remove all other mental food options from the table in the first place.
It is very much like making children eat broccoli. Except the children are grown adults, and are being bombarded by companies selling them thought sugar because it generates click revenue.
There is no market solution to this - there may not even be a regulatory solution to this.
The best I can expect is a legal challenge, but who would the injured parties be, and what would be the injury?
If this is inevitable, and this is best for "WE"/"OUR" needs - then does it just make more sense to accept it and strive to be in charge of the process instead?
Is it now OK, to just accept that people will be manipulated by those who know the method to do so? And apply to those firms?
----
Yes - If people turn out to be harder to model, it may be harder to corral people and ideas. The model and assumptions in the larger discussion being held in this topic will be logged as hyerbole and we will move on.
Yet - its clear that people DO have some obvious levers, essentially the human hind brain is an easy target to throw emotionally laden messages at. The brains react and then oppose whatever target they are provided.
It's easy to trash Facebook, but clearly it provides an insane amount of utility, and people aren't willing to stop using it because of others saying that en masse that is bad for a hypothetical Internet they never really took part in anyway.
IMO the focus should be getting the government to keep its hands off of it. That's not only more possible, but infinitely more important than not letting Facebook try to show us the right ads.
As systems, governments are playing catch up in many areas, while leading in areas we don't want them to have power.
For example - governments should have already put out rules against skinner box games, the most popular kind on Facebook and the rest of the net.
Governments made rules against things like subliminal messaging - because it targeted and manipulated human choice at a subconcious level.
We wont be able to protect ourselves against corporations, unless we have coordinated action. The mechanism for this is always going to end up being political.
A related problem is that human readable data is often unnecessarily encoded into binary machine data. If we weren't wasting so much space on presentation, we could have just served the human-readable data.
In this future I think it will be considered ridiculous that you had to load an entire webpage full of unrelated images and icons just to read an article or weather report.
This concept will be huge for AR. In AR extra unnecessary information and uncontrollable presentation is beyond annoying, it actually makes users angry and uncomfortable.
Look out for Optik.io .
The design of HTML5 and associated web tech separates semantics (HTML) from presentation (notionally CSS, but this bleeds over into JS) and behavior (JS).
It occurs to me that all extant social media apps have, at a high level, exactly the same requirements:
1. Allow users to upload some data to cloud storage 2. Make that data discoverable to certain other users 3. Show everyone ads
Whether FB, Twitter, etc were to be dislodged by another app that is essentially the same app is not terribly interesting. So let's look at which of these reqs are amenable to change:
a. "ads" - No one actually wants them, so get rid of them b. "Cloud storage" - Lots of people would rather own their data, so switch this to "the user's own server."
That sounds pretty compelling. I don't hate FB, but I'd sure rather switch to something that allows me to own my own data, and share pics of the kids with Nana without having to run them through Facegoog's billion-dollar snooping engine. However, there are two big hurdles:
i. Most people don't have a server on which to host it ii. Most people won't pay for it, so someone would have to write it and make it really easy to use, for free
...and by a lucky cooincidence, both of those objections have the same answer: Amazon. Most people don't have a server? Amazon will rent you one. Who would develop a self-hosted FB clone for free? Amazon, to get people to rent servers.
Just a thought...
Identification should be on that list. Allow me to uniquely identify myself, and prevent others from attempting to impersonate me.
"a. "ads" - No one actually wants them, so get rid of them"
Nobody wants them, but you need to keep the lights on somehow, and people are even less inclined to pay for things.
"i. Most people don't have a server on which to host it ii. Most people won't pay for it, so someone would have to write it and make it really easy to use, for free ...and by a lucky cooincidence, both of those objections have the same answer: Amazon. Most people don't have a server? Amazon will rent you one. Who would develop a self-hosted FB clone for free? Amazon, to get people to rent servers."
So now you're trading Google for Amazon? That's no better. And you just said that people don't want to pay for things, but now you want people to pay Amazon for servers?"
We live in the land of Startups. All good technology innovation we're used to over the last 20 years has come from the Startup/VC world, when the internet was fresh and nobody knew what would work. Over the coming decades, we'll need vehicles for technology innovation that go beyond the "take over the world & prayer" model, assuming that silicon valley's vehicle of ultragrowth monoliths will eventually align with civic values. They won't.
To illustrate this, let's say you want to improve some problem with Facebook/Google/etc. To even begin, you need $50 million and a minimum of 3-5 years building a userbase. By then, you have payroll, growth obligations, & investor pressure & are forced to monetize, usually in a way that compromises longer-term values.
We can solve this with smarter internet infrastructure. If you could share social graphs between applications, for instance, you eliminate an incredible amount of overhead in developing and experimenting with new social applications. There's a number of great initiatives trying versions of this (IPFS, Urbit, Blockstack -- I'm tracking a number of popular ones over at http://decentralize.tech).
The community needs more organization and more funding around these problems, especially in the field of developing new business models that work for software that don't involve selling out user priorities to global ad networks. I'm in San Francisco and working on this problem full-time if anyone wants to meet up and discuss solutions; Email's in profile.
What am I doing about this? Nothing yet, but I have been thinking about this recently.
It's tempting to blame Google and Facebook, and they definitely converted a lot of public value into private value. But I suspect it's mainly down to self-selection bias of internet early-adopters. I call the present state of affairs "eternal October".
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...
If, instead, I had no freedom to build a house at all or the rules were dictated to me by others, I would be less free. And poorer.
Where are the specs for the Outernet Protocol: a NAT to NAT DNS system that doesnt rely on gatekeepers/ISP access. Use the 198.162.xxx.xxx addresses on all of our existing routers for neighborhood scale networking. Build trust by proximity by allowing only known neighbors to connect. Could be very interesting. Especially when Joe mirrors Wikipedia and Samantha mirrors Archive.org and Jan has a realtime mirror of some good Reddit feeds.
Automate the mirroring the internet. Scrape every last bit, in real time, without the ads and crap. Make it available to those trusted folks in your proximity.
Speak at events/conferences. Speaking generally to a broad audience with broad information and hard-hitting references not only gets the message out, but also makes it more difficult to make someone feel targeted, like you might one-on-one or in a small group.
I target two groups: technical people who can actually do something about it and teach others (but might not care or be aware of the issues), and average users and groups who might know or not care. Talking to your family and friends (and spouse) helps gain great insight on what people are thinking without quickly ending the conversation if it makes them uncomfortable. As does HN. ;)
Talk to groups you _know_ will be hostile to you. Learn common rebuttals. Learn how to respond to them. And harden yourself with relentless attacks on your facts and opinions.
Offering practical alternatives is difficult. Even if you can, people want to socialize where others socialize---I'm not going to get my friends all on GNU Social or Mastodon (or the fediverse in general) for example. Work security and privacy into their current practices the best you can understanding that compromise is _essential_. Maybe they can transition further in the long-term as they get used to certain ideas.
I encounter similar issues (and get a lot of practice with it) with free software activism---getting people to care about and understand software freedom is far more of a difficult battle than getting someone to care and understand about privacy and security issues.
For those looking for some resources to get them started:
https://mikegerwitz.com/projects/sapsf/plain/sapsf.bib https://mikegerwitz.com/talks/sapsf.pdf
And this is an _excellent_ resource:
Matrix.org is a start.
On a much much broader scale the Web 3.0 will be build on Blockchains, the so called Fat protocols will surpass the Web 2.0 or eventually merge.
https://www.usv.com/blog/fat-protocols
Ethereum will build up a considerable part of the ecosystem, with Dapps like status.im
We need it to be easier to write secure applications. We need to eradicate undefined behavior from our software stacks. Rust is a good step in this direction. We need well-thought-out APIs that are hard to misuse.
I think we also need a better search engine, and tools to filter news. Tools that detect clickbait, overzealous advertisements, and other forms of low-quality content and push them to the bottom of the rankings, and also punish sites that link to low-quality content.
We need email to be more user-friendly than it is; maybe we need a new protocol that's simpler and consistent with how email (and Facebook/linkedIn mail) is used in 2017. Setting up an email server should be easy, and the settings should be secure by default.
We need tools to identify credible information sources, possibly by analyzing if a given information source is vouched for by someone we already trust. Flooding comment sections and forums with fake comments is an easy way to manipulate the public and create an illusion of consensus or a made-up controversy, but it's a little harder to be fooled if you have automated tools to filter out people that aren't connected to anyone you know by some kind of chain of recommendations.
A (personal) system that keeps your own notions (and versions of) and crosslinks them to each another, with translators to/from other persons/entity notions (and subsets - think i/o facades/faces).
Like the tags u put on your images. And how u would explain them to somebody else. And take some of their images (i.e. of same event) with their tags. And tag them yourself. maybe in time.
http://www.svilendobrev.com/rabota/notionery/ http://www.svilendobrev.com/rabota/notionery/1.html
it's rough sketch, may live on top of any p2p technology. Back then noone could be bothered about "why would i put another layer around myself". Now maybe the awareness is better, i don't know. (contacts in profile or that site) have fun
http://www.sampenrose.net/civilization-absorbs-technology/
There is just civilization, which the Internet used to be meaningfully separate from but is no longer.
Google (however big they are) provides a lot of value to my world at least. Just for search alone. Sure, there are other search engines but none nearly as good. Making it easy to find relevant information is of huge benefit and really does "change the world". I consider this enhancing.
Facebook is like the owner of a seedy bar. Preying on people's need to socialize and serving rotgut. Profiting from degradation rather than enhancement. (IMOP).
People should stop drinking rotgut. That's the way to stop Facebook. Rotgut is cheap anyway. You can even make your own in the basement. But if you want to stop Google you need to build a better search engine. Best of luck with that (seriously, I'd use it, no loyalty but so far Google has some truly useful products).
1. I have quit Facebook, minimizing Twitter use, and am using Mastodon[0] for my social networking fix. My existing Facebook friends aren't on it, but the people I'm "meeting" are very nice. Will be blogging about it soon.
2. I am re-launching my long-idle blog, but this time supporting indieweb[1] standards for identity. This way, I have a central identity on the web across social networking sites, that I control.
I'm specifically objecting to the phrase "closed internet". It sounds like the opposite of net neutrality, but in reality, any privacy options within Facebook and Google have been user-driven.
The focus should be on removing Pai. Regarding Facebook and Google, you can simply choose to not use them if you wish.
You only have one choice for broadband, and Pai wants to extend ISPs' monopolies. Let's not let that happen without a fight.
I recently discovered that, on Reddit, anything beyond your more recent 1000 posts/comments/upvotes is totally irrecoverable to you, even via scraping.
I hope I'm wrong about this.
To get people off of Facebook, you'd have to find a way around that.
1. I don't talk to Google and Facebook - I mean, really, litteraly http://sling.migniot.com/index.html?filter=no_.*sh
2. A decade without Google Search and DuckDuckgo instead - sometimes I have to use !g at work
3. I have rooted phones without a Google account - but I know no single other person who does it
And the corrolaries :
- I get a lot less ads for free
- I have to talk again to Google from time to time, for captcha purposes
- I have real-life friends who call me - like in "phone-call", they know I have no Fb, no Insta', no Pinter', no Google, no Snap'
- From Google and Fb's standpoints I'm like a blackhole: I don't leave intentional traces, opinions, preferences but I'm as traceable as a dead pixel on a uniform background.
I left this comment because I feel like a Unicorn : I do this nearly as a hobby and to prove that "It's still possible" - but it takes a BC in computer science and constant fighting :
Nobody does that
Instead of using open standards, most of our medical data is trapped in proprietary vendor systems that are at best antiquated.
Patients are unable to move their data easily, doctors and hospitals have to pay huge sums to access their own data. The vendors extract massive rents but were all left in the dark and our health suffers
I walled it myself by making a small social network for close friends.
Sure, it's probably a big bubble but at least I don't emotionally manipulate my friends by showing them ads or changing the order of their posts.
www.hellolyra.com
Most walled gardens are built for convenience of consumption whereas most federated networks seem to assume a more active and informed participant. The kinds of features you'd build for one group are at odds with what you'd build for the other one.
Then again Brave seems to be tackling the problem from the right angle. I hope their model takes off and people start incorporating similar ideas into other open networks that respects the network participants instead of just treating them as passive consumers.
http://fivefilters.org/content-only/
Increasingly, I get my news from non-profits that do original research, or technolgists that are the primary source of the stories I read. They don't use advertising to fund their work, which eliminates the moral dilemmas around stealing content vs supporting our corporate surveillance state.
Also, RSS is the opposite of a walled garden.
I'm currently waiting for our supreme court to decide if judges have that power before I spend more time on it (or not). Maybe I'll have my answer next week.
Related concept video from a few years ago: "Twirlip Civic Sensemaking Project Overview" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mRy4sGK7xk
Wish I had more time to work on it.
Why do both Facebook and Google exist? They exist to manage servers. Why do we need servers? Because your personal computer/phone might not be able to handle all that much traffic and might not have dem five nines. How much traffic does it need to handle? What if your phone could handle all the traffic the entirety of humanity could generate? The need for these companies would go away.
A wordpress-like open source platform that communities can install and have their own facebook.
A platform that allows developers to release apps that communties can install. Or turn their existing app into one.
An auth protocol that works with everything else out there and lets people manage their identities across the web, and link up with their friends from their private address books.
And more.
- Distributed and secure routing, specifically in mesh networks.
- Creation of scalable economy of digital goods (Storage, computation power and networking) between computers.
I believe that these will provide a foundation to build things like distributed email.
Currently freedomlayer contains mostly research documents, though I plan to implement some of it in the near future.
"filter bubbles, walled gardens, emotional manipulation" are things I no longer think about
The role that big companies can play (we still need them) is supply hardware, and perhaps subordinate software libraries, also like in the old days.
I have nothing against Github, but I wish developers knew better :/
One way to do this could be for open source authors to introduce a section in the README file expressing the wish that the software will not be used in ways the user is not aware of, such as user-tracking.
I don't really believe social media filter bubbles exist, relative to the bubbles of the past. Even the most isolated Facebook user is more enlightened than my parents were during their childhoods in India.
Emotional manipulation was probably worse when the United States only had 3 TV networks. Before that, "yellow journalism" helped lead the US into the Spanish-American war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#Spanish.E2.8...
Of course, we should still work to do better than the status quo, but I enjoy being able to develop a following on social media and/or purchase ads for whatever distributed Internet ideal I want to create.
I've been watching emotional manipulation in India and around the world for decades now. Its always been among my top concerns, and its definitively become worse. I'd argue its a lot worse on all axes, but if you want a singular reasons - targeting has now all encompassing. Its on all the time, it knows where you are, who you know, what you like, in a dramatic way.
Also - you have a third confounding variable in your data. Parents in India from that era were not as educated as counterparts in the west.
The west went through its periods of darkness, where the average person was not educated, and when religious institutions dominated the scene.
They had decades to over come this, generally following the Enlightenment.
India too will hopefully struggle with these same issues. But the new medium for ideas is more dangerous than the one which came before - for ideas themselves.
In a slower news cycle there is also time to reflect. The lack of being always connected, meant that the transfer of memetic force was always broken up.
Emotion is the lever by which most of the world is moved. Whatsapp forwards come at any time, can contain any content and will be accepted by the receiver often without reflection.
The world has iterated, and for the worse.
Also bootstrapping https://www.remarkbox.com
One thing is creating websites where they control the content users can see. But the web is still "open", even if facebook bans my content I can still create another website and share it with everybody (probably nobody will ever see it, but that's another problem). The real problem is the new tendency of app stores (Apple Store, Google play, Alexa skills...) If Google/Facebook/Amazon decide to block my content, I have no way to reach other users.
Web ads are working less well than in the past, but they still work. The companies that have a high-visibility 'start page' (news orgs in 1990, yahoo in 1997, G & FB today) are going to have a lot of power.
Create a compelling start page, get 30% of the world to use it once a day, and your problem will have been solved.
Statebus makes web programming wayyyy easier, and opens up the insides of websites -- you can go to any page, hit a hotkey, and edit the code live to add a feature, or incorporate state from a different site, or re-use the state or code from somewhere else, just as easily as you use your own site's state and code! Because it puts the insides of sites onto the web protocol itself. In Statebus, every piece of state has a URL! And you can synchronize with it as easily as <a href="state://..."> today!
This breaks up walled gardens like Facebook! Today, we have monopolies at the level of websites, because each different website is implemented with a different proprietary stack of web gunk -- MVC server frameworks, reactive view frameworks, networking frameworks, babel, webpack, and -- YUCK! Statebus replaces all this gunk with the web protocol itself -- the statebus protocol -- which opens the state, and itself automatically synchronizes all this state together!
Statebus transforms HTTP from State Transfer to Synchronization:
HTTP: Hypertext *Transfer* Protocol
REST: REpresentational State *Transfer*
Statebus: State *Synchronization* Protocol
Statebus makes websites wayyy easier to program, and this means that the easiest way to program websites is now the most open way. This changes the economics of the web, and is going to break up the walled garden monopolies that have arisen around websites -- just like the web itself broke up the AOL walled garden in 1995!
Remember AOL? It provided a lot of the same features as the web -- shopping, chat rooms, forums -- but then was outcompeted by the open web around 1995! Why? Because programmers found it was easier to put their content online with HTTP and HTML than by convincing CEO Steve Case to add their content to AOL's garden! In the same way, Statebus is going to make it easier to build social content than by going through Facebook's walled garden! The future will be a diverse, realtime, synchronous symphony of social state!
You can find technical docs here: https://github.com/invisible-college/statebus/ And a demo video here: https://stateb.us
Or would that just put the power into the hands of whoever runs the DNS system
DNS is (relatively/-ish) decentralized, and isn't AFAIK, heavily used for data collection. And you can't exactly show ads via DNS.
I liken it to the attitude people are starting to take with regard to other aspects of their lives, such as food and materialism. When I go to the store I know that I can save a few dollars by buying the absolute bargain basement produce, flown in from south america, taken from high intensity factory farms, or packaged up and made mostly out of HFCS. Or I could see what I can buy from local producers and from farms that prioritize ethically raising animals. It means my eggs cost 3 bucks more, and I can't have kiwi fruits in February. But wanting kiwi fruits right this minute, even though it is February in a northern latitude is the exact sort of attitude I am speaking of.
So how can you put this into practice? Well a few people have already made similar suggestions so some of this will be duplicating their suggestions, but I still think it is worth saying.
1) Use your own email. I personally like Fastmail. For $50CAD/year I get a great service. I know that I am paying for a service and am not the product. They are doing good work with the open email protocols that exist, and working to produce new open standards for the future.
2) Use Firefox. Do we really want to give a dominant majority marketshare in the browser market to a browser made by a company that makes 90% of its money through advertising to you? This isn't even some sort of rant about google being "evil", it's just a common sense decision. It wasn't a good idea back in the day to give dominant marketshare to a company who incentives were aligned against the web and towards desktop single platform applications, and it won't be a good idea to give that sort of power to company that is beholden to shareholders and makes it money through tracking and gathering data on users.
3) Delete your facebook account. I don't have a fallback here, but honestly I don't think you need one. Between messenging apps, smartphones, email and other communication tools, you will be able to stay in touch with people you care about. Facebook is not irreplaceable and I say that as someone who was in University when Facebook blew up. I am still happily communicating with all of those people.
4) In general, think about your purchasing decisions and who they empower and what the long term gain is. Shopping at the new walmart in your town may save you money for a year or two until they have devastated the local economy and have no incentive to keep prices low. Even if they do, your local area is made worse by the unemployment they cause, and the underemployment they provide. Same thing with Amazon. Are you saving yourself a dollar today to wonder where the retail jobs that helped underpin your community went in a few years? Are you doing all your searches through google when you could maybe do them through Duck Duck Go, or Bing, or just anything that slightly breaks the monopoly that Google has on search?
All of this is stuff that Richard Stallman has been saying for years, and people keep being surprised that he is "correct", but it's usually pretty easy to see that he is just taking a longer term view of things, and understanding that just because an organization acts decently when they are not in a position of power doesn't mean anything about how they will act once they are on top.
In summary, try to think longer term about your decisions, instead of prioritizing immediate convenience, and paltry economic savings, especially when we, as privileged engineers and developers, have the ability and monetary flexibility to do so.
Switched my default search engine to Startpage. I still end up on Google for half of my searches -- particularly if I need to get a map to a business -- but it helps that I now have to consciously type in the name of a Google product before I make use of it. It's like treating an addiction.
It's a token for advertisement that rewards the user, to be used at Brave browser: https://brave.com https://github.com/brave
People switched to Chrome because Google told you it was a better experience every time you made a search. I don't see how people of my parents generation (60s) will ever hear about Brave.
People also fund patreons, donate to charity etc to show off and get recognition - maybe some integration into one's social media to show which content creators you enjoy (support).
Walled garden can still exists, if people value them, they will buy to get content, nothing wrong with this. If people aren't willing to buy to get content, it will then be a hint that the content isn't worth the money.