I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how you’d launch rival social networks. My sense is that unless you can find something that lets you stay in touch with your friends that are already on Twitter and Facebook, you sort of have no prayer of launching anything new. And so my analogy for this is to say, imagine that you had a web browser that could only look at Facebook. It couldn’t look at any other website. Well, that’s what we had more or less in the days of AOL and CompuServe. They finally had to open up, otherwise they would die. But that was that walled-garden model.
In many ways, that’s now what we’re all dealing with on our phones, you know? My Facebook app won’t let me look at Twitter, and it won’t let me look at Mastodon, and it won’t let me look at anything else. I would really like to get back to the moment where I could have a single application that could let me look at existing social networks and new social networks. And that seems like the sort of direction we’d need to go in if we actually wanted more competition and more creativity than we’re getting right now.
Thanks to commenter Handle for the pointer to a whole set of articles on the theme of “what went wrong on the Internet.” The entire interview has a lot of thoughts that are similar to mine. But not the last two paragraphs.
He suggests giving users information about why they are being fed certain content and certain ads. I would say that most users would do nothing with that information. By the way, that is also a valid argument against my idea for a competitor to Facebook where users give more indications of what they would like to see, rather than having it fed to them by algorithm. That is, users are too lazy to create metadata.
Which leads me to think that we need to pay attention to the problems that emerge when a service caters to users who aren’t very savvy and aren’t very pro-active. The folks who need to be regulated are not the service providers–it’s the users.
As a thought-experiment, perhaps we should imagine requiring a license to use the Internet, or some parts of it. The analogy would be with a driver’s license. There are different licenses with different restrictions. I cannot drive a bus, for example. So maybe certain apps on our phone would not be available until you got the necessary license, which might require you to pass a test of some sort.
The question is not whether you would want this implemented–I am pretty sure that I would not. But come up with ideas as if you were going to implement this, just to see how the problem looks from that perspective.
I guess I just don’t see what the fuss is about. I have never bothered with Facebook. I took a principled stand against it when it was new and have never missed it. I do, on the other hand, use LinkedIn, because the networking function was valuable to me. All their myriad emails go to my spam folder. Their attempts at chat, blogs, etc., are of no interest to me. I only log in to add new business contacts so I won’t lose them. If I had a desired to store my personal network from before my working life somewhere else, I might have a Facebook account that I never accessed.
My wife does use Facebook, and complains about how many childhood friends she has to ignore to make her feed even remotely palatable. She categorizes a glance at her feed alongside her other guilty pleasures: Romance books and trashy reality TV. At the end of a mentally demanding day she wants to chill. Not my cup of tea but it works for her. She wouldn’t be caught dead checking Facebook at work, she has actual work to do.
This whole conversation about Facebook really feels like saving people from themselves. I see three categories here: 1) People like me that refuse to enter the Facebook ecosystem, 2) People who use it as a tool but are not sucked into the time sink or outrage, 3) People who lack the self-control over their attention and compulsively check Facebook.
I don’t understand why we’re discussion how to provide an alternative for the #3 types. We don’t discuss how to get them a healthy alternative to Burger King, do we? They’re going to fritter their lives away somewhere.
If you want to profit on their existence, don’t try to out-Facebook Facebook. Instead, figure out a new way to cause a billion people to compulsively view your ads on their phones, one that has nothing to do with their social graph.
This WILL happen, just as it has throughout the history of tech. We just — as usual — can’t conceive of what it will be until it’s suddenly right there and happening.
How hard would it be for Facebook to coopt the whole argument and get it’s “customers” (product) on the same side of the table as the company? Each user gets paid $5 a month to use the service. (obviously, some reasonable fraction of what FB is making) FB wins, their users feel like they’re winning and advertisers win. Real transparent trade-offs here. You are the product, we are selling ads to you, you get a cut. No complaining.
Of course the complaints would be immediate about the payoff being too small, but any politician who started regulating the business would be at the risk of FB reducing the monthly payout because of “senator X’s new bill” and the pressure from voters would be enormous. FB would be able to play an interesting game of chicken with D.C. Who has a better claim to the loyalty of your voters/our users….? Has there ever been a company before whose business model is to send money TO consumers on a regular basis?
“Has there ever been a company before whose business model is to send money TO consumers on a regular basis?”
Banks.
“How hard would it be for Facebook to co-opt the whole argument and get its “customers” (product) on the same side of the table as the company?”
“Has there ever been a company before whose business model is to send money TO consumers on a regular basis?”
Just to define some terms:
Facebook’s consumers: The people/companies that pay for ads
Facebook’s product: Metadata
Facebook’s raw material: The end users
Uhh…. You do have that application. It’s called your phone.
Obviously that’s not what he means. He wants integration, not segregation, and having different apps on your phone that keep themselves and their users separated is the issue.
This same issue came up in the old Instant Messenger days, with AOL-IM, ICQ, and various IRC providers being dominant for a while (and maybe the Compuserve and Prodigy and even “global” chat rooms hosted via local BBSs with FidoNet before the web killed them all.)
Some of the people you wanted to chat with had only one account on one of these platforms. Some people would have an account on every platform and do their best to keep all those applications open at the same time, which was taxing of both computing and mental resources. These were all proprietary and you couldn’t open up a group chat with people on different platforms, and so forth.
So there were several initiatives in the mid to late 90’s to build a “one ring to rule them all” kind of software that everyone could use to talk to anyone using an account on any system. This actually wasn’t that difficult since, back at that “Wild West” time, most programmers were using non-coded open-text sent via the same protocols everyone else was using, and they just weren’t making much effort to deploy sophisticated uses of the network or protections of proprietary processes. So using ordinary tools one could reverse engineer these IM applications in a day.
The trouble was all legal. First, none of the companies would agree to any of this for obvious reasons. And second AOL in particular started suing the pants off of anyone who even thought about trying and, IIRC, actually got someone who leaked the AOL IM source code prosecuted. Then they started releasing a bunch of version updates in a flurry (which greatly annoyed their quickly aging customer base) to encode and route chats through their servers and make it harder and harder for anyone else to piggy-back on their system.
Some efforts were still able to enjoy a small amount of “success” (albeit of a very buggy, poorly maintained kind), but they were all quickly “overcome by events” as it were. And that’s just not how people chat / instant message now (with the exception of workplace networks where either Slack or Microsoft’s “Skype For Business” (formerly Lync) seem to dominate.)
So, what Ethan actually wants is a single “chat app”, where he can see all his contacts and friends, and which is his “one stop shop” he can use to send instant messages to people on twitter, gab, whatsapp, line, Skype, direct text to their phone via SMS, and so on, without ever having to even know what service(s) those individuals are using, with all the details handled invisibly in the background. Ideally, if he switched his primary account from twitter to gab or facebook to google+, then he should be able to take all his contacts with him, easily and seamlessly, and furthermore, his contacts shouldn’t notice anything different, and when they send him messages, via facebook or the super-app, it gets automatically routed to whatever service he’s using.
And, absent government interventions forcing it upon them through some kind of common-carrier non-reimbursable ‘universal reciprocity’ mandate, I just don’t think there’s any reason at all to expect that any of these companies would do anything but fight tool and nail to prevent anything like that from coming into existence.
“perhaps we should imagine requiring a license to use the Internet, or some parts of it.”
I think you can achieve the same thing without a central licensing agency. Just set up a community/app where participation is difficult/requires tech savvy. Then set up some tests of cognitive bias that pop up occasionally. Get more than 30% wrong over a given period, and you’re out. Maybe throw in some prediction market things too to check if people are good at operationalizing their knowledge of cognitive biases.
We had the first third of this combo back in the old irc and newsgroup days. The quality of discourse was much better. You still had your blow-hards, and it was a bit heavy on the autism spectrum, but I feel like people could be reasoned with from a common ground of accepted, usually scientific/rational, assumptions.
Kind of like a combination of a CAPTCHA and a Google interview challenge problem with a time limit. That has potential.
Huh. There’s an idea for a commenting system. Dial in the minimum IQ to allow comments and the system deploys a mini IQ test and sets permissions accordingly. That would be interesting to see play out…
Google and Facebook should have pages where they list everything they know about you. The raw data — sites visited, etc. Then you have the ability to delete all or some of it.
The catch is that it costs you money to delete what they know about you, since you are depriving them of targeted ad revenue. Pay enough and you can even get rid of all ads. If you don’t care, pay nothing and delete nothing.
Just a thought!
Crypto smart card
I agree to share a public key with my friends. Doesn’t matter which network, the provider sees garbage. My private key hidden in a plastic ATM card, unobserved and counterfeit proof. When I get on social media, my plastic card holds all the public keys needed to decode.
Easy, proven technology, and it is on its way.
I should note however. The idea of anonymous smart cards that can use keys is very scary to spy agencies. The exact same technology also makes ‘know your customer’ rules easy to manage by prequalified and enforceable contract. Here the plastic smart card is essential. Hence a large contradiction to be resolved. I guess the regulators want enforceability and will adopt smart cash card. Thus everyone will have them, embedded or in plastic.