The one key element I added was privacy. If your posts are private to your social group then there is no mechanism to try appealing to a broader "viral" audience. Also--if it is decentralized then the company (or person in my case) building it can't change their mind and start selling your data/eyeballs.
I have a LOT of thoughts in this space. Lots of people think they want some sort of healthier social-media alternative, but we're fighting against systems that are so finely tuned engagement monsters that is hard compete to protect your attention and time.
I met a guy a while ago who's passion was enabling self-hosting. His vision was to use an old android phone as a server--he ended up building a domain registrar[1] to facilitate OAuth-style flows for configuring DNS and an ngrok-style proxy[2] service that could configure DNS through said flow.
This is very cool. I have been thinking of a similar service that should exist.
Suppose you want to host your own email, or a mastodon server or similar. You download this application to your local computer. You pick what you want to install. It asks you which domain name provider you want to use, and which server host you want to use (eg. local or hetzner). It guides you into creating accounts for these services. Then uses their API, to set up the appropriate server, DNS settings etc.
It might not be fully automated, but something like this can seriously bring down the skill floor needed to host anything.
who's can also mean who has, which is where you've probably seen it used in ways that imply a possessive, but normally means who is, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45257167 indicated
Further off-topic: You're not wrong, but maybe you should be. It's one of the most pointless irregular grammar rules in English. Nobody is ever confused by the wrong usage of the apostrophe here (when spoken there's no voicing of it). Native writers of English often get it wrong. If we had an Academy Anglaise we'd just regularise this usage. I give it 50 years max before possessive "who's" is considered correct (along with "it's").
> I give it 50 years max before possessive "who's" is considered correct (along with "it's").
"It's" is one I've struggled with a lot. I understand "It's" -> "It is" but my brain wants to add an "'s" for possessive-ness. It just feels more right. I'm been able to mostly break that bad habit but I still don't like it.
The one that people get wrong all the time is "its" vs "it's" for exactly this reason. By the usual use of posessive apostrophe you would expect "it's" and yet that's only ever correct if you're eliding something (i.e. you mean "it is", "it has" etc.)
Honestly if we (in England) really had an institute of that kind we'd probably just end up formalising the weird spellings and grammar as being "right" instead of what we have now where our grammar rules are descriptive instead of prescriptive. Who knows how the differences with American, Indian, Australian, etc. dialects of English would be handled, but I'm sure we'd make a big mess of it somehow.
Edit: incidentally I now live in Sweden where there is such an institute, and they do seem (to my ignorant understanding) to make sensible updates to the dictionaries etc. to reflect actual modern pronounciation - but I'm still sure my homeland would figure out a way to mess it all up ;)
This is a class of errors I never made when I first learned English (mostly by reading/writing). My pronunciation was so bad that I pronounced these words differently.
It was a major milestone for me when I made my first its/it's mistake in writing :)
(open source) Self-hostable, private social media alternative (like Facebook circa 2012). Functionally it is a private blog that speaks RSS with a built-in RSS aggregator. Self-hosting being the only way to actually have privacy in a social-media-type space.
I have opinions[1] on Webmentions. It sounds like such a great approach, but it also opens up the original author to hosting mountains of spam and other low-quality comments, and moderation is a lot of work. Arguably, we see the same problem today on sites that let you post comments.
There is a lot of interesting work in this space by the IndieWeb community. They've got a vision of (and lots of a spec for) a social reader[1] that uses RSS for lots of the things people got in the habit of with Web2 social media (comment, repost, etc)
(Although the IndieWeb community has this weird thing against "side files" and prefer having the content inside the HTML, marked up with Microformats2 special attributes. A social reader then polls the HTML and parses it additionally with the Microformats2 algorithm. I suspect this cultural preference is a result of the usage of static site builders of the early IndieWeb pioneers like Tantek.)
Yeah, I don't really grok the focus on MF2 given the wide adoption of RSS/Atom, but the social reader concept isn't one I've seen anyone else advocating for. It also suffers from the same spam problem of anything else that allows public submission of content. I've been exploring it more in the context of _private_ blogging were you already have a layer of access control.
Is there a Github API for creating issues? I also maintain a free, open-source app and would love to make it easy for a crash to give users a button that opens a Github issues form--allowing users to see what crash data is populated and submit it if they want.
Oh cool, it's like RSS consumption for video content (I think). I worry that since it isn't using blessed APIs it would get shut down by the platforms if it gets much traction. Also "trust me instead of them" can be a tough sell to the privacy-focused crowd. I'd love something that makes it trivial effort for the creators to directly publish on more open platforms--more like RSS publishing for video content. But youtube gives you discovery and a cut in the ad revenue, so I'm not sure how to get the incentives to align...
You don’t need APIs if your app includes a web browser, though; you just need the patience to hook into the browser’s APIs, rather than the page’s, in order to backup content when viewed. User-operated Selenium is legitimately the biggest threat model to content islands. It’s too bad a third-party had to invent Grayjay as a standalone, rather than one of the browsers figuring this out and shipping it as subscription-payment functionality :/
(It has to be subscription payment to deal in a scaleable and timely manner with sites changing their page schemas anticompetitively.)
It's funny; as I've been working on Haven[1], one of my guiding lights is what Facebook _could have been_[2]. To that end the opening section is really inspiring. This is describing a world where digital tools enhance your friendships. I think that's still possible and still a worthwhile goal--I just don't think it can be done by an entity with a corporate incentive structure. Those incentives will always tend towards enshittification[3].
In 2010, facebook changed. Twitter was cooler. Myspace was more money. So facebook took a page out of their platforms.
In 2012, facebook went to Washington DC.
In 2016, Washington DC went to facebook.
When did facebook change? When zuck lost control of it after sandberg came on board. When did zuck get control? When zuck changed to be in alliance with the master plan… which was take control of the world… politically. Remember zuck running for election?
Zuck had — and I believe still has — complete control of the company. Demonizing Sandberg and lionizing Zuckerberg is a complete disservice to reality. It was the focus on growth and not money that ruined everything.
Many changes occurred in this period. I was there.
A big change is that ads became profitable. I think it’s fair to say this change was sudden. Facebook went from being scrappy and underfunded to being wealthy and powerful.
At the same time, the growth had eclipsed competitors and Google Plus came and went. The media tone and coverage changed from “oh this startup is doing neat stuff” to a point concern for data privacy and the implosion of journalism revenue. So they became a lot more influential culturally.
Being suddenly wealthy and influential but with a cultural mentality of being a scrappy and upstart— something this book accurately reflects — lead to hubris.
The focus on hypergrowth which had served them well from a small startup — under the umbrella of this hubris — led to events like the Cambridge Analytica disaster. Insufficient care was being placed on how data could be collected and misused by others, growth took priority.
This focus on Hypergrowth meant that changes that responded well in metrics got pushed. The longer-term damage of people not enjoying their experiences wasn’t a high enough ranked metric compared to engagement and user metrics.
None of this was Sandberg’s fault. She was an extremely competent manager and is brilliant. Absolutely she was instrumental in leading Facebook to profitability but this push wasn’t a big factor in their decline.
Instead, Facebook got too big way too fast and the employees and Zuck didn’t have the mindset shift needed to consider everything as it was happening. Yes, money ruined everything eventually — but that came later.
The most crucial damage had already happened — people gave up on trust that Facebook could handle their data responsibly, and trust that they’d have a good experience on the site.
> The most crucial damage had already happened — people gave up on trust that Facebook could handle their data responsibly, and trust that they’d have a good experience on the site.
I think it was also that people were beginning to see the consequences of “over sharing” with people you’d never normally share things with. The vision of connecting everybody sounds great but not everybody needs, wants or even should hear everything everybody else says. And once such a realization comes about, away goes the linear timeline and in comes a more algorithmic approach. Suddenly your own posts get algorithmiclly ranked, sorted and filtered by every person on your friends list. And to get your post to show up on their feed you have to please an algorithm first in order to get permission. Thus comes a whole host of negative social interaction and toxicity.
I dunno. Maybe the decline of things like Facebook are simply because society “figured out through lived experience” what the end game of a tool like facebook looks like.
But encouraging people to share to the widest audience was another aspect where short-term growth of metrics was prioritized over long-term health of the platform.
There was a possible future where FB leadership didn’t get worried about/envious of Twitter and push so hard on public sharing. But that type of call was solidly on Zuck and not Sandberg.
I'm not aware of that personally, but I believe it. The revisionist history trying to paint Zuckerberg as being manipulated here is so just insulting to reality. Zuck deserves the credit for both driving the decisions between both the successes and the failures that arose here.
She mentioned it in a performance session that was recorded before I joined FB (I joined in 2013, I believe the talk was from 2011).
I completely agreed with her, but after watching the talk came to the conclusion that if she couldn't change it, then I certainly wouldn't.
More generally, younger people tend to be OK with everyone knowing everything, while as you get older you want to share with smaller circles to avoid conflict. Sheryl was quite a bit older than Mark and Chris at the time, which may have been the difference.
The points you illustrated is part of what I think caused Zuckerberg to lose control: hyper growth, fast money, an emerging market of personalized ad tracking. Sandberg being the more experienced manager steered the company well enough during this time but in a direction that I don’t think Zuckerberg felt at home with. Hence This red book was a way to bring back some of his spirits.
I also think so much potential for political influence had a weight on facebook but was not in the roadmap from Zuck’s POV. But it surely was for Sandberg because she had already been at Google witnessing the power of influence. Her husband’s own successes with SurveyMonkey emphasized some of that. This success+money+potential+(emerging ad tech) for facebook combined with a young startup spirit led to many scenarios that young Zuck was not prepared for. It definitely steered the company away from its founding vision. The company was suddenly infused with professionals that did not embody the spirit. And Zuck was quietly observing during this period.
Today, he looks around FB and says that things need to change. “And if people are not happy about this, then I am ok with them finding something else.” (i am paraphrasing).
Zuck has doubled down on a different vision now: Oculus VR. It seems his desire for FB social networking has plateau’d.
I don't think what car he was driving was a factor at all. He had incredible wealth even before this, driving a cheap old car is effectively just a stunt to promote a specific kind of public image. Which is fine, but it's somewhat irrelevant.
The change happened because FB didn't internalize quickly or deeply enough that the mindset that got them to defeat MySpace wasn't the mindset they needed to become a trusted service for the long-term. Obviously yes it still exists but it's an absolute shell of what it could have been had this not been squandered -- which is the point that the parent comment was addressing.
I know like three people who bought cars they couldn't park near their employees in good conscience, and I think there's a point where obvious disparity starts doing things to your brain.
Almost like a "I don't owe, but I should pay more, but I don't owe..." thought process that leads to moral vapor lock.
I think there used to be more release valves for this pressure. There aren't any tithing billionaires, for example.
It's worse than that. _Tree_ isn't even a well-defined thing.
> Trees are not a monophyletic taxonomic group but consist of a wide variety of plant species that have independently evolved a trunk and branches as a way to tower above other plants to compete for sunlight.[1]
The one key element I added was privacy. If your posts are private to your social group then there is no mechanism to try appealing to a broader "viral" audience. Also--if it is decentralized then the company (or person in my case) building it can't change their mind and start selling your data/eyeballs.
I have a LOT of thoughts in this space. Lots of people think they want some sort of healthier social-media alternative, but we're fighting against systems that are so finely tuned engagement monsters that is hard compete to protect your attention and time.
Herman- I'll reach out to you by email!
[1]: https://havenweb.org
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