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Yep, it's not a public utility, it's not governed by a neutral third party, it's not open, transparent or free. What did you expect? It's a surveillance and marketing platform that you subjected yourselves to out of convenience, operated for its own benefit and indirectly to the benefit of its customers, certainly not its users.

I've never really understood social media in this form, nor understood its takeover as primary communication channel and I'm not going to go full RMS or expect anyone else to have the same values as myself, but if people do share those values, and do want better than facetwitsnapagramblr (without any judgement on if they should) then they should have participated in building and using something better instead of deluding themselves.

> Yep, it's not a public utility, it's not governed by a neutral third party, it's not open, transparent or free. What did you expect? It's a surveillance and marketing platform that you subjected yourselves to out of convenience, operated for its own benefit and indirectly to the benefit of its customers, certainly not its users.

With the possible exception of "surveillance" everything you just said is also true of newspapers.

Facebook is also the town square where people are selling the newspapers, Facebook is the streets that newspaper delivery trucks drive down, and Facebook is the sidewalks on which employees at the newspaper walk to work.

There is no public space on the internet, just a network of private residences.

Facebook has positioned itself as the public square. The freedoms of the press, speech and protest are predicated on equal access to these public forums and they clearly do not exist in our current media landscape.

> There is no public space on the internet, just a network of private residences.

Net neutrality/common carrier rules make the streets public space. But that means only open-source, authority-less p2p communication is free.

Everything else is under someone's thumb.

Not really relevant, I didn't have to subscribe to NYT in order to stay in touch with my friends and family.

If you're going to start splitting hairs then you don't "have to" use any one particular method of staying in touch with people. Supreme convenience is not force.

> Supreme convenience is not force.

In theory, it is not. In practice, it is. Not only that, in case when there is a fight between almost anything (such as privacy, security,...) and convenience, the latter will always win (on large scale).

> I think the better solution to the problem as it stands is to force people to start hosting their own content

I'm encouraged that Tim Berners-Lee is working on this exact problem with Solid (Socially linked data) "a way for you to own your own data while making it available to the applications that you want to be able to use it."

http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-we...

you kinda already have an instance of IPFS from the creator of bittorrent, its called btsync. totally p2p. Tho somebody needs to make a 'Solid' layer on top of it.

as far as social net is concerned I'd settle for a middle ground social network like ello with irrevocable privacy and non-censorship protections built in from the founding doc itself.

Btsync isn't open, is it?

The optimist in me would like to believe that we are still in a "Napster" world in terms of content, and we will eventually get back to a more bit torrent centric environment - what we lack is a killer UI that me, my kids, and mother-in-law will all use.

>I think the better solution to the problem as it stands is to force people to start hosting their own content

Does this mean people need to start moderating their own content, also? I don't want to have to decide on rules of what to keep/delete, and I don't want to just let anything go, either. If I wanted to manage my own site, I'd build one -- I almost always just want to use a service that someone else maintains for me, including determining what content to show/hide. If I wanted to manage all that stuff myself, I'd just build my own Facebook.

The way I look at is this, self-hosting should be the norm and not the exception today. We have plenty of hardware solutions for this but the consumer end of the problem is largely due to ISPs not wanting to be what they are: utilities. If we could politically fix that problem (regulate Comcast and company properly) then I think the rest should be obvious for people. The rest comes down to making hardware solutions as simple as pressing a button and go from home.

>I just wish people would realize that corporations aren't our friends, they're here to make a profit.

I wish people would stop saying that corporations are some disparate entity, rather than a collection of people with a defined purpose, like our friends and family members. People just like you in other words.

Corporations don't have a mind of their own, nor do they pursue profit regardless of ethics.

> I wish people would stop saying that corporations as some disparate entity, rather than a collection of people

The whole point of a corporation is to be a separate entity from the collection of people that have interests in it.

>The whole point of a corporation is to be a separate entity from the collection of people that have interests in it.

It doesn't have a mind of its own, any direction comes from real live people making decisions every day. Or can you point to a single instance where this isn't the case?

> Corporations don't have a mind of their own

Of course not, as you mentioned they are composed of human beings who make the decisions about how a company operates.

I am sure you will agree that a significant number of humans will disregard ethics when it comes to personal enrichment. Let me provide one example who comes immediately to mind: Pablo Escobar (thanks, Netflix). US prisons do contain a large number of white collar criminals.

> nor do they [companies] pursue profit regardless of ethics.

This does not follow. Companies are composed of people, and people do disregard ethics.

The law says corporations are some disparate entity, except when they want protections given only to people, in which case the law can be convinced corporations are made of people.

Corporations are institutions and like all institutions there are legal and social norms which regulate them. In terms of private corporations (for profit) they have only one norm that trumps all others: profit motive. As this is their primary function, with all else being secondary, you should expect them to act in terms of that. All the appeals to Zuckerberg and the board of director's own consciences is not going to work every time. In fact, it's the sloppiest way to deal with this problem. Let's say tomorrow Mark and the BOD agree 100% with the anti-censorship thesis for Facebook, what then? How are they able to override the other shareholders? What happens the shareholders sue Mark and the BOD? Forcing them into court with an injunction to maintain the status quo at Facebook? See where this goes now? Basically, it goes right back to what we have and that's that. You can't just say "Oh screw the shareholders" when our own laws protect them. It's one of the biggest jobs of the SEC which is to suppose to protect shareholders which include you and me who have retirement accounts. Again, institutions are affected by NORMS not individual consciences. I wish it were the case that appealing to the better nature of billionaires would and could change the world but it doesn't because billionaires don't make the final decision it's institutions like governments, courts, AND corporations that do. Don't like how this works? Too bad, it's the real world. We don't live in loose tribes like we did 100k+ years ago. Thus your individualistic expectations don't fit the actual world. Sorry for coming at you with this rant but it annoys me to no end when I see people naively thinking you can overturn a complex system like what we have in institutions by default. You have to work with what things are and not with what we want things to be.

I'm having a tough time understanding what you're saying. You're saying that the decisions of a company are made due to cultural norms, and not individual consciences? And that Zuckerberg doesn't actually have any power, because the shareholders would out-vote them? And the shareholders make their decisions based on cultural norms? Then where do those norms come from? What leads those cultural norms?

I legitimately don't understand what you're saying.

I'm saying that there's more at work which is beyond the individual choices of each person on the board at Facebook. They have legal obligations to their shareholders, nebulous legal obligations to users, and many other concerns I couldn't list here since I don't know them all. But just of the tension between the legal obligations to their shareholders and that of their users which results in the shareholders having the advantage here. There's little in the way of US law that prevents Facebook from doing what they do since Facebook isn't like a broadcast company or a utility (as per the legal definitions). So the default mode for Facebook's board is to side with investors and protect the value of their stocks, not to protect the privacy of users nor to protect their other civil liberties. You can't just throw away the law whenever you like. At some point, the law has to trump our feelings on an issue like this. And when it's inadequate to handle these edge cases we should take action to reform the law. But that takes time. You can't expect an individual CEO, President, or regulatory chief to make that choice alone if the law doesn't grant them that authority.

??? You absolutely have the right and ability to host your own content on your own page. Facebook is incredibly popular, but it's not the "centralized" communication medium. If you want to make a political statement or whatever, you absolutely can-- presuming you can get people to actually come see what you have to say.

People use Facebook or other social media because it's significantly more convenient to do so. And distributing content on Facebook/Twitter/etc. is much more effective than trying to get people to go to your own personal website.

No doubt, but the fact file sharing networks were and still are largely self-hosted proves that people will have no issue doing the same to get a copy of some movie or music album. So self-hosting your FB-like wall or Twitter-like timeline shouldn't be much harder. If anything, I think it would be easier since the remaining data that would be stored would be relatively small (thinking of Vine-like videos, photos like you have on Instagram, etc) with the rest just being hyperlinks. Hell, I think you could make them all hyperlinks and put storage in some other distributed protocol if you have to. In any case, it's not a technical problem in my opinion, it's just a problem of making such a platform as easy as installing it on your phone without a second thought beyond are you JamesBond007SexyTimes123 or whatever you silly handle would be.