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Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

I was struck with the same thing.

There is a reason we moved from newsgroups, to HTML and browsers to search engines. Each step became a better, more powerful tool to find content faster, more efficiently.

These days so many of the tools we're using are so entrenched, even with some of the changes the author talks about, it would still be a monumental task for people to change.

I mean, look at how bad FB is (on several levels) and look at all the alternatives which allow you to keep your information private and share what you want like Diaspora or Freenet. I tried (repeatedly) to get friends and family to join my Diaspora pod and tried to convey all the advantages of it being private. Nope, nada, no way. None of them ever joined and many just said FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives, it was crazy.

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Don’t forget that we WANT to eliminate all the middlemen if we can, because middle men = bloat. It IS undeniably cheaper to interact directly than it is through a middle man. Don’t forget that!

This is analogous to function pointers (or vtables or dynamic dispatch) in programming. It’s a really tight analog actually, almost literal. It’s slower (more expensive) to go through a cranks. You only do it for external reasons, but you should always try to eliminate them. I hope people around here saying these companies add value aren’t forgetting that we want to destroy them because in an ideal world things are more direct than they are already. We SHOULD want that too, that is the right direction to move in.

There's no way there's any "right and wrong" or any "should" about this. Also, middlemen save me money all the time. Without my grocery & retail middlemen I'd be out there trying to find an apple orchard, a dairy, a tailor, all by myself, and hassling them to sell me quantities too small to make any money on. And that's just the first dumb example I thought of. There is value in aggregation and in making connections and in brokering. My middlemen make me richer by me paying them. That's why middlemen have been around since there's been commerce and why you can't engineer them away. Engineering them away is just doing it cheaper, beating them in the "middleman services" market and becoming the new middleman.

Facebook is a shit middleman that doesn't provide enough value to me, so they're not included in this.

No right or wrong? Why not?

Well it's not always inefficient to have a middleman (sometimes it's more efficient, like in my example above), so you can't say categorically either "with a middleman" or "without a middleman" is always better, i.e. "right."

Also, let's say we're looking at one of the times when the middleman is less efficient. Even if a customer wants to take on those inefficiencies on purpose, we can't judge that person as being "wrong" because they might have other reasons. It's more complicated, is all I was really trying to say.

> FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives

Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive!

This reads like an episode of Black Mirror, only scarier because it's not science fiction: https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...

> Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive!

How so? What makes Facebook so appealing is the fact that pretty much everybody is on there, just like a telephone book. As such an alternative, with a huge positive effect, has to deliver at least this "centralization" to fulfill the same needs Facebook has been serving until now.

This is a pretty common theme around IT savvy communities: People complain about Facebook and how there are so much better alternatives and how you supposedly don't even need Facebook. But the reality for over 2 billion people (among them many friends and family members of said tech-savvy folk) out there looks quite different, they use Facebook because it's what everybody uses, it wouldn't even work without that, which is what most Facebook competition comes to realize sooner or later.

I just don't see any good solution to any of this that doesn't involve some paradigm shift how we handle private information as societies and as businesses.

What if a lot of your friends and family are on it, and some interesting people you don't know yet are on it, and your favourite brands… aren't?

What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it?

> What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it?

Facebook might have started out that way, but don't think that angle is gonna help you build a new, even bigger, Facebook.

How long did Facebook actually stick to its "Only students" rule? Imho that was more marketing than anything else.

Scuttlebutt is designed deliberately so that you don't see the whole network, only the bits you care about.

Partly this is view-filtering, but also your user agent only requests and stores data if it might be relevant to you, i.e. friends of friends and replies to their messages.

It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks.

> It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks.

That might hold true for the technical implementation, but it doesn't hold true for the actual user experience.

If you are from the US and looking to befriend somebody from France, then you don't have to join "Facebook.fr" to make that connection, it all works through Facebook.com.

Not too long ago the same process looked pretty much like this:

"Are you on AIM?"

"No, are you on ICQ?"

"Nah, but I'm on MSM!"

"Sorry I'm not on MSM, but I'm on Linkedin!"

"No good for me I don't like Linkedin!"

"Guess I'm gonna make an MSM account -_-"

For that very same reason I ended up creating my first Facebook account on Facebook.de, which was a scam site back then. But decades of compartmentalization of users into "regions" convinced me that if I want to get any use out of Facebook I better sign up with their German version of the site, as most of my friends/family are German, that's how alien this whole "aggregate all your social contacts in one place" idea was back then.

> > It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks.

> That might hold true for the technical implementation, but it doesn't hold true for the actual user experience.

Talking about Scuttlebutt here, it's actually the other way round. It's one protocol and any two people on it could connect, but in practice you won't see everyone, because you only have a social connection to certain people.

>Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive!

No, the task is to first create alternatives which are just as accessible and user-friendly as Facebook, and then sell them to the mainstream on terms they actually care about. Why would my 60-odd year old mother who uses Facebook to talk to her COPD support group even care about Diaspora? I don't know what the answer is, but I do know the answer has nothing to do with open source, anonymity or censorship-resistance.

> the task is to first create alternatives which are just as accessible and user-friendly as Facebook, and then sell them to the mainstream on terms they actually care about.

That's exactly my point! A term they might care about is: this is so much nicer to use than Facebook; I feel happier using this to keep in touch.

> I do know the answer has nothing to do with open source, anonymity or censorship-resistance.

Scuttlebutt is neither anonymous nor censorship-resistant. It's free of adverts and sponsored content experiences. It's a friendly, co-operative culture (hence the software is open source, but your mom only has to care about those details if she wants to help build the software).

> A term they might care about is: this is so much nicer to use than Facebook; I feel happier using this to keep in touch.

Here's the problem though - it's not really nicer to use than Facebook for someone who is already familiar with Facebook and who doesn't mind using it. The UX of these platforms tends to be rough in ways that would annoy many non-technical users, which is understandable given their newness, and the fact that technical users are early adopters, but still makes mainstream adoption difficult.

The Scuttlebutt client I downloaded has a search form at the top that will not behave as mainstream users will expect - they will wonder where their "newsfeed" is, try to search for a topic of interest and it will fail out of the box. Making an intellectual or emotional argument for why an alternative to existing social media clients is preferable won't work as long as the physical experience of using the alternatives is more complicated.

>but your mom only has to care about those details if she wants to help build the software.

But those are the details that dominate the frontpages of these platforms. She either has to care or else care enough to wade through it to find what she needs. That's a real problem.

Yes, I agree with you on all of this.

The user experience of using the app, and of discovering the app (i.e. its web presence), needs to be friendly and relevant to the user.

I don't think we want to imitate Facebook too directly, because we don't want it to be Facebook, but it needs to make sense as you use it :)

(By the way, I'm a mere end-user here, and this is just my opinion!)

I've been trying to explain this for years here. People don't care that much about privacy because they can't see it and it's hard for them to conceptualize the scope of what they're giving up. It's a selling point, but not that great of a selling point - certainly not good enough to overcome the network effect.

I forget who pointed it out, but I like the point that to disrupt a big incumbent you need to be not just 10% better, you need to be 50% better. You can get started by doing something that nobody else does which is useful. What FB did better than anyone else was provide a clean interface to social network curation that made it far more useful to the initial population than the alternatives that existed at the time.

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