[1]http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-18/bad-moods-...
As Facebook keeps accumulating users, and as users accumulate "friends", the SNR decreases and makes the product experience less valuable, notwithstanding the efforts they make to "optimize" the feed. Mine is mostly filled with things I'd rather never see.
Facebook is a social network that mostly reproduces geographic social networks, but that doesn't connect people based on affinities. The people discovery mechanism is close to non-existent. People in your Facebook neighbourhood are people who most likely live in your current, past, or "work" neighbourhood.
Are there any social networks that try to dynamically create communities/"neighbourhoods" based on behavior? (e.g. upvote a post and you get "closer" to the poster, with symmetric behavior for downvoting, and second order effects propagating to other users based on their own upvote/downvote of said post).
Apologies if that's too vague, I'm thinking out loud here.
It's amazing how you can wind up on a subreddit and realise that you're nowhere near the bottom of the rabbit hole that you've been calling a hobby for the past n years.
I don't know if this qualifies for what you're after, though, because these communities are:
* based on users actively seeking out forums based on what they consider themselves to be interested in, and
* each community is centred around a single topic. There might be a subreddit for people who love Fraggles and a subreddit for people who love pop-tarts, but no subreddit for people who love both Fraggles and pop-tarts.
After reading it, my conclusion is that it will be negative, unless we consciously discipline ourselves because of how self-reinforcing it can be (ie we start consuming only media that we agree with, unless we consciously decide that could be bad).
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/e-topia-Urban-Life-Jim-Know-ebook/dp/...
So from FB's point of view, they probably don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a more connected place than them.
I don't know about anyone else, but giving people Facebook-only service and calling it pretending that's the same as full internet access is not my idea of "more connected". Free or not, that's an insane level of lock-in.
One bizarre consequence of zero rating limitations is that in Angola people started attaching pirated content to Wikipedia articles to create free filesharing. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wikipedia-zero-facebook-fre...
It's impossible to overstate just how bad it would be to allow Facebook to define what is and isn't "the internet" for billions of people. I'm continuously stunned that anyone would defend their efforts in this area.
Can you think of a way to provide internet to everyone in the world that wouldn't involve a powerful entity who's intentions worry you? Maybe distributing mesh networking tech? Well, that would have to be developed, manufactured, and distributed, AND maintained. Who's going to do that? A charity? A consortium of charities?