Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

The problem here is the dichotomy of "ownership" in social media platforms.

Facebook (and others) know that giving you that feeling of ownership and customization keeps you coming back. The Twitter Avatar, the Facebook profile, the MySpace page. All those posts on your profile add to your collection, your customization. They let you control that little bit so that you feel like you own it in some way. Did you love that old car so much that you put a bumper sticker on it, or did putting a bumper sticker on it make it more "yours" and so you loved it more? Same idea.

But you don't own it. Nothing you post on those platforms belongs to you anymore. It's theirs, to do with as they wish. And in this case, Facebook decided that retroactively deleting all that content that lets you be aware of other platforms was good for their bottom line- do they did what they wanted with their property.

Facebook deleted their posts. You only thought they were yours because Facebook makes more money if you think that.

MySpace and Geocities gave people more customizability and it kinda made for easily tacky pages. The only major platform that still allows this is Tumblr.

The clean looks of Facebook and Twitter have oddly kept them on top.

But yes, to your point, you aren't the customer. You're the product (unless you're buying adspace .. in which case you're both).

I recently started my own Mastodon instance and am just following random people on random instances and so far have some pretty funny/interesting feeds. It's actually a pretty friendly little fedverse.

It's not like that.

All your content is still yours, and with the GDPR you can request a copy of it at any moment.

However, Facebook has no obligation to preserve copies of your posts, there is no provision in that respect in the TOS, so if you don't actively preserve your posts, that's your problem.

Before everyone starts overreacting, please read the article first. There is no formal announcement from FB for this. Few users noticed their tweeted posts getting deleted and they suddenly arrived at conclusion that this is FB’s new policy. The article itself says this might be some bug that could have occurred due to recent API related changes.

Having said that, I really hope this is not the new policy from FB. Not only posts gets deleted but the conversation around it are also getting deleted. Many high profile people have setup FB accounts so everything is cross posted from Twitter. If this is new policy, it’s going to be the most boneheaded one so far from FB. So let’s hope this is just a bug.

Even if it's "just a bug", it's not over-reacting to be horrified at the loss of content. Even if it gets restored, it's a wake-up call for who decides what gets kept and what doesn't.

This thread is not just horror at the loss of content, it's FUD about the platform.

Had this happened to just about anyone else, the response would have been "whoops this obvious mistake really sucks!"

But it's Facebook, so HN's reaction is "wow fuck these guys for this clearly purposeful event!"

What do you think about the idea of classifying social media as a utility? I've heard a lot of people mention that lately...

Then people will have to come to terms that banning Alex Jones was a bad idea too. You can't support a companies right to ban people you don't like while simultaneously advocating protections as a utility.

I mean, you can get expelled from public schools.

Not for constitutionally protected speech (under the limitations on student speech set by Tinker's "substantial disruption" test, Fraser's "indecent" limitation, and similar jurisprudence).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_speech_(First_Amendment...

They don't want to be regarded as a utility as that would suggest that regulation is a reasonable course of action. They banned Jones in part to demonstrate that they can "self-regulate" and don't need regulation. Being seen as a utility is the last thing Facebook wants.

Yes, universal access to the utility makes sense. But what would the utility be? Could FB possibly be nationalized? It's international at its core. If governments created a copycat, it could fragment social media by country, which seems bad. I like the protective intent, but barely have an idea of how it might be implemented.

Centralized social media isn't long for this world IMO, look at what is happening to Twitter (userbase erosion) & Reddit (people are flooding there from Facebook, hurting site quality). Meanwhile notable figures have moved on from both sites, in part due to bans or purely due to the degradation of their former social home.

Utilities are limited in how they can raise money... tariffs are the core of utility regulation.

Alex Jones and other fringe elements with disproportionate large reach wouldn’t exist on a regulated utility because the advertising practices that allow Facebook to monetize Jones would likely not exist.

Water is a utility. Electricity is a utility. Gas is a utility. Roads are a utility. Social media is a utility?

sm seems to fit out in terms of scale and importance. We don't need social media like we need roads. Call me a crotchety old guy but I think quite the opposite, we'd all be better off with less social media. No need to enshrine it with the status of "utility".

Telephones are considered utilities. Many think that internet service providers should be considered utilities as well.

I'm still uncertain where I stand on social media being a utility though; I'm not sure what that would imply.

Thee need to own your own data is clear - only you should have the right to redact your posts for any reason. We should adopt systems that are fundamentally amoral, non-censoring, and non-competitive for our data being on their platform. Systems where we can profit from the success of our content. Can anyone think of some examples?

The average Facebook user would receive $10 per year if they were to distribute all of their annual profit to the userbase. That's the best case scenario. What's the point?

So users can profit from their content? They won't profit from their content, it's nearly worthless per unit. It's only in the vast total sum that there is any value, and only because it's held by one entity. If you distribute it per post or per person, it's very close to meaningless. $20 billion is a lot per year to one entity; $20 billion per year to two billion people, is not.

If you were generous with Twitter and assumed they can generate $400m per year in profit and then chose to distribute that to the userbase, you're talking about ~$1.30 per active user per year. If you tilt the value distribution toward the most active, famous users (whose tweets are far more valuable in regards to monetization), then you're just destroying the distribution premise to begin with by concentrating the wealth in a slightly different manner: Taylor Swift doesn't need to worry about earning $35,000 per year from her tweets, and Joe Smith getting $7 from Twitter for their 1,278 economically worthless posts also does not matter.

Ultimately you just end up with a YouTube outcome if you value tilt. A small group of rich users earning millions of dollars on FB or Twitter, and everybody else entirely failing to earn even minimum wage for the time put into their economically low value posts. How does that really change the equation vs the people that are capturing most of the value today? Taylor Swift can already capture the value generated by Twitter and Facebook, she can buy the stock.

Where do you get that $10 from? What is included in that? Total profit per user? Do you think that the sale of data for all users (bots included) is the same? per post is easily gamed - not a solution to be sure.

steemit.com has some ideas - but not perfect ones to be sure - to build incentive based content.

Where is the $400M twitter profit from?

Ultimately it is not about the direct monetary ROI for this in my mind. But empowering choice of you as to who can use your data (and knowing what they are legally able to do with it) is critical. Thinking about reducing the supply of data will likely spike the cost of that data as well. Most of what is sold is not content - but your use of the platform and _who you are and what you do there_ and predicting things about you - not what you post.

Also you should have the legal right to clear your data. I deleted my LinkedIn profile a year ago, I unsubscribed from everything and still receive spam from them. I literally want every bit of data they outright stole deleted.

You nailed it! I've been trying to explain this to friends, now I'll just point them here.

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