Things that I think will be important in the next decade
facebook.com
facebook.com
I could, I guess, go back to running mailing lists or manual methods of keeping track of contact details and sending things directly to people.
But short of that there's no easier way for me to keep up with friends who are distributed around the planet.
If the UX sucks, it means it takes more time and energy to do the same thing, it means that I will not be doing the same thing, I will end up sending to less people or less information. Which means that facebook effectively allows new types of communication which would otherwise not even exist.
It's about the connection itself, it's about the energy and attention one puts into the relationship, not whether one allows oneself to use facebook for it or not.
This assumption is based on what?
Pretending Facebook is useless is like pretending GM doesn't make cars. Sure, maybe you don't like GM cars but they fill a genuine need for a lot of people.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/26/business/gm-cars-dropping-pro...
This is not the comment to be fighting this battle with.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/business/media/teen-vogue... for those that are curious.
This is NOT the hill for citation fanatics to die on.
[edit] also another comment had already provided a citation, in fact the citation you provided, so you or I providing the citation was unnecessary so I don't understand your point
>All the while we've learned that they have utterly sold the company to international electioneers.
This is disinformation, laundered with the trust of the first comment.
The ask was: "Citations to your references would be appreciated."
It's true that a citation is not needed, but including one adds value, in that it increases efficiency.
> Just disputing that a citation was appreciated for that claim in this forum.
There is no word to replace required that wouldn't be open to your complaint; e.g. needed, necessary,
Yes, a citation would always be appreciated, but it's gate keeping to ask people to always provide citations when not truly necessary.
Appreciated is an appropriate word, you subconsciously swapped in required.
A citation is required if the goal is to maximize constructive communication - if that's the goal, of course.
The original comment:
> Citations to your references would be appreciated. It's the first step to overcoming the state of internet disinformation, as well as helping society overcome the fear of missing out just because someone doesn't already know your references.
This request (and it's just that, nothing more) seems reasonable.
This subsequent comment exchange:
>> All the while we've learned that they have utterly sold the company to international electioneers.
> This is disinformation, laundered with the trust of the first comment.
...specifically: "laundered with the trust of the first comment" seems like perfectly valid criticism, and arguably adds to the "onus" (or value in) for the original person to provide a proper citation, in order to minimize misunderstanding.
And then here is where I see a problem arises:
> Just disputing that a citation was required for that claim in this forum.
You are criticizing someone for saying a citation is required, but it is you that introduced the idea of it being a requirement into the conversation - which is what I pointed out (perhaps not as eloquently as I should/could have).
Your subsequent reasoning:
> I deliberately swapped so you could see how that word doesn't work
...doesn't make sense to me. Replacing the original word with a new one that has a distinctly different meaning, and then criticizing OP for the new meaning of the sentence, doesn't make sense to me.
Am I misunderstanding somehow?
Words have distinct (non-interchangeable) and broadly accepted meanings, independent of either intent or personal preferences for what the meaning should be. I have merely interpreted your words according to the broadly accepted meanings, have I not?
Facebook is behind getting the highest bidders elected all around the world.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-th...
I'm sorry we didn't participate in this conversation in the manner you wanted us to.
When in Rome...
Wow, you just described like greater than 99% of the internet.
Search engine results these days is like taking a metal detector to the city dump.
We might as well use Taleb's idea of Lindy to find good information. Unfortunately, the internet hasn't been around long enough for anything published direct to web to qualify.
Luckily internet gives us easy access to books that are a bit older :)
I don't read blogs. But I love the internet for being one heck of a library.
When a billionaire claims to predict the future they're not just making a prediction, they're really telling you what they plan to invest in.
AR is a little different because it's not a product; Facebook's AR apps might fail, but Zuck's vision could still succeed if Facebook create (or acquire) tools for creating an AR ecosystem.
all they really need is a collection of millions of AR-related patents allowing to sue any entity doing anything AR-related
Google search was minimalist. Android followed everyone else in the market, and hasn't iterated core UX much since. G Suite office apps were acquired, and mostly cloned Office online. Same with Gmail.
Maps is about the only heavily-used app, and I wouldn't call its design revolutionary (or even good).
Chrome is about the best example I can come up with, and it's mostly iterated and improved on the back end.
Maybe I'm missing something major? But it's not a market they compete in or are particularly good at.
(This isn't to say that the initial lift of desktop apps to the web wasn't a technical tour du force; just that blue sky GUIs have never been something they're known for)
That's a feature.
> Maybe I'm missing something major
Yes.
Two of the largest online social networks to date have emerged from the highly-selective university space: Usenet (UCLA, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, UI, Rutgers, etc.), and Facebook (once: literally Harvard).
Google+ might have been able to grow from its tech roots. My sense is that Google's marketing-and-advertising focus (and community), as well as gross mismanagement, doomed its attempt, nudged with some active antipropaganda from other sources, notably Facebook. That's not to say it would have succeeded, but there were numerous self- and externally-imposed injuries.
All he does is telling what he plans to invest in. But given his privileged position, that's almost as irrelevant as what he is going to have for dinner tonight, if his plans for the next decade do not address the urgent and burning issues that keep the rest of humanity awake at night in earnest.
I'm sure AR "is the future" in a decade. But then you'd have to ask to whose benefit and to what ends.
If a billionaire makes swiping statements about the social good, then I expect a proper argumentation that shows an understanding about the vast complexity involved, and their according responsibilities. Not vapid filler that reduce the issues to a mere generational conflict such as:
> Today, many important institutions in our society still aren't doing enough to address the issues younger generations face -- from climate change to runaway costs of education, housing and healthcare. But as millennials and more members of younger generations can vote, I expect this to start changing rapidly. By the end of this decade, I expect more institutions will be run by millennials and more policies will be set to address these problems with longer term outlooks.
That would also solve the problem of death for humanity.
VR talk with Mark Zuckerberg (bit nsfw): https://youtu.be/q2LIXcbDiZA
It will be a difficult battle for privacy when AR becomes mainstream. They will have reasons to track your surroundings and every body movement. :(
Depending on your definitions of "exactly" and "good".
I think a better question is something like: might it plausibly result in a net better outcome than some/all alternative approaches? I would say the answer to that question is definitely yes.
Yes? Maybe not follow them morally, but a drug cartel lord will have more insight in leading a multi-national organization than me.
This doesn't stop the possibility that Zuck actually is full of himself.
To be fair, the Saudi monarchs are in the thought leadership business. Their influence over Islam is important to them and a lot of effort goes into it.
Drug cartels, as far as I'm aware, don't really care what you think.
Please stay on topic and refrain from ad hominems that add nothing to the discussion. If you have disagreement with his predictions, focus on that in your reply.
Your comment adds nothing to the discussion and just lowers the quality of discourse. It's a shame it is the most highly voted comment.
Constant video surveillance, direct-to-eyes on-glass advertising, targeted advertising beamed on every approved spot, interests profiling via retina movements/focus and God knows what else will undoubtedly come about if AR glasses become "cool" and ubiquitous like mobile phones.
Maybe we'll be able to see one another's social points, as earned on the Facebook Ubiquity Platform for All Things Interaction, when gazing upon one another? Maybe we'll be able to haze filter out those naughties who haven't earned enough, or have had points taken away for naughty behaviour like posting against the "community guidelines"?
Maybe we'll be able to use image recognition + the voter records to put an angel or devil next to the people we agree/disagree with politically? How novel would that be? And talk about a time saver! Who wants to even acknowledge those who don't vote in line with our party!?
But seriously though, what options do those of us have to not be part of this dystopian fucking nightmare that the tech elite have in store for us? Save up and try to buy a hut near their fallout shelters in NZ under the hopes that they won't shit where they hide?
"GO FLIP 3, with KaiOS 2.5, comes with Google Assistant to help you get things done like book appointments, make phone calls, and find answers on the go using just your voice." [1]
Resistance is futile.
Is it really a dystopian future? We’ve adjusted to the telegraph, camera, telephone, radio, TV, cell phone, smart phone and...why are AR glasses going to be the tech to bring society down?
The people that are against it are more of the position that it isn't the technology, but those that control it. As techies it is easy to see all the benefits and not think of the downsides. We are a niche group after all, but that is easy to forget (especially if you live in SV). As techies we use ad blockers and have tracking blockers. But as we've seen with this wave of tech, our data is valuable and highly sought after. There are campaign after campaign to make us believe that it isn't worth much while the largest companies in the world thrive on it and the most dystopian societies embrace it and quote Goebbels.
Every technology has benefits and drawbacks. The issue is can we mitigate the drawbacks while being able to take advantage of the technology? With forethought this is certainty and historically true (though historically it has been because we reigned technology in). But when we have companies offering to do social credit (not just China btw) and literally comparing themselves to Black Mirror and saying they'll do that, but in a good way? I for one am ready to pump the breaks a bit and be more cautious as we take this turn. It isn't Luddite mentality, but more that we should resolve issues with security and the control of technology as we move forward. The current top comment is mentioning decentralized systems, homomorphic encryption, mesh network, etc. It isn't anti-tech, but maybe we should focus on privacy first before we give away something that people have had all throughout history and the lack of has been showing to cause social problems.
I used to want more, now I want less. Even if I can make my own HUD I wouldn't make it.
For some jobs though I'd be happy to try: emergency, medicine
In the 90s all anyone could talk about was how terrible TV was, the ballooning amount of time people spent watching instead of being social or going outside, etc. And I certainly spent more time actually watching and focusing on ads (commercials) then than I do on the web, where I block them, ignore them, or pay for them to go away.
Can't deny that TV started to slip off on the wrong side of things but even then it wasn't as it is today.
The point is, most consumer technology is at penny stock level of progress in term of deep value.
Assuming that your heads-up live display contains a public facing camera here's: Why not!
I don't like sitting in a bar (or a strip club, or in any other semi-public, or even public dodgy or non-dodgy place) and you hang there with your heads-up live display recording my image.
I don't like the fact that it's uploaded to some tech behemoth' server for further analysis (or even if not - by you later to your personal social media page, controlled by such a company).
I don't like an army of people like you recording every little nuance of my life, which then gets abused to feed even more AI algorithms by companies whom's major raison d'être is to violate all our privacy and infringing on my personal rights without permission or consent.
And no! Locking myself permanently into a room is really not a solution conductive to me or for us as a society.
Remember Google glass and why it failed? Not because the tech couldn't be useful. But it failed thanks to a company, which didn't give a shit about the impact of such tech and an army of glassholes (here's a nice example[1]) who cared even less.
I think the answer to your "why not" and to your personal gratification is that the price for us as a society is far too expensive.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+scoble+glass+hole
A glass cam will probably work out the same way CCTV has: people are worried about the potential for privacy abuse, but in the end these fears don’t come to pass.
Google Glass wasn’t ready, the tech isn’t ready yet. People stopped using it because it wasn’t useful. The tech will be useful someday, however.
Luddites complained about the automated loom as well, saying the cost to society was too great despite its benefits. It didn’t work out well for them in the end.
Luddites complained about the automated loom as well
Now that's a really bad case of whataboutism. I'm not complaining about technological advance. I'm complaining about tech, which is a massive invasion of privacy. Have you ever been lying on a beach and some asshole lets his drone flying around? I don't know about you, but I really don't fancy to be half naked on some cretin's social media feed without my consent (which, needless to say I didn't give and would never ever provide).
Those bars and strip clubs already have plenty of CCTVs, you are being recorded.
I'm aware of that. I'm also aware that if such an establishment uploads the feed to the internet they'll go out of business mighty fast. In addition I don't have cops hanging around semi private places constantly recording what's going on in such places.
Those establishments may have a justified use, namely security, for such tech. You don't.
almost every phone has a camera capable of taking video
That was one of the more stupid arguments used by glassholes. When you whip out your phone and start recording that's obvious as hell. Not so, when you do it by a wearable.
people are worried about the potential for privacy abuse, but in the end these fears don’t come to pass
Actually they are very much. There were umpteen stories about glassholes using their gizmos even in places that explicitly banned their use. They then had the nerve to complain publicly about "ludites" that deemed this unacceptable.
Here's a search for you:
"privacy abuse google glass"
It yields 53’900’000 results. If just one procent of one procent involve actual stories of real privacy violations that's a massive invasion of societal privacy for ones own gratification. And that's exactly what's completely unacceptable.
You're free to believe in your techno utopia and that it only leads to progess and betterment of humanity.
I think you're wrong and believe my arguments to be sound as proven by the last 20 years and the rise of those tech behemoths and their constantly shitty behavior.
Calling me a ludite and using tech, which truly benefited humanity to make your argument makes you, in my opinion, intellectually dishonest.
And that's where I'll close my argument, since it's pretty obvious that we'll never agree.
Very very few people had google glass to begin with, the glass hole term was invented and perpetuated by a bunch of conspiracy theorists, enough to get 3.9 million hits on google (for < 1000 units?), it provides no evidence of anything.
Tech Luddism is as old as technology itself. It isn’t surprising that you don’t want this, that you don’t want other people to have this, we’ve gone down this road before and we will go down it again.
Using the “conspiracy theorist” argument is a typical way of trying to put a negative label on a group of people you disagree with these days. 3.9 million results doesn’t sound like a group of 10 mentally unsound people spewing a BS conspiracy. It provides evidence that a large portion of people don’t agree with the tech.
Not necessarily obvious. You most likely can't tell if someone is just holding his phone in his hands, or is recording you. There are apps that don't show a preview or any other clues on screen, so you won't know even if you get to see their screen.
OK, good, you understand the origin of the problem. Modern technology has co-opted ordinary people to act as spies for big, powerful data processing organisations, in the process seriously undermining our privacy.
Now, how do we solve it?
I guess we could get rid of all the cameras and have everyone walk around with blind folds so they can respect everyone else’s privacy from being seen, but it seems like a net negative in my book.
How can you ever be sure of that, though?
Devices get hacked.
The manufacturers of devices sell out, with or without being transparent about it.
Data hoarders grab more data than they should or they have the device owner's informed consent to take.
These things happen all the time, with everything from photos and videos and audio, to location information, via address books and "private" messages. As a third party who is not the device's maker or owner, you have little if any say about any of it. However, the combination of many devices capable of observing you and associating audio/video data with other information about you and the potential dangers created when this is done at scale in a highly asymmetric situation is enough to all but annihilate privacy, and more importantly, the underlying reasons we have come to value privacy in the past.
I guess we could get rid of all the cameras and have everyone walk around with blind folds so they can respect everyone else’s privacy from being seen, but it seems like a net negative in my book.
There is a vast, qualitative difference between someone casually walking past you in the street where the two of you see each other but pay little attention and move on, or even catching you incidentally in a photo taken for personal reasons and not shared, and the systematic, widespread acquisition of huge data sets drawn from multiple sources with or without the data subject's informed consent or even knowledge to be stored indefinitely in an automatically searchable format and then used for purposes unknown by parties unknown with consequences unknown to the data subject.
No thank you.
If they can do that, I am free to fly a drone above their head.
They actually didn't. They just broke them because they (rightly) saw that as an effective means of raising the price of their artisanship.
The luddites are more akin to the Paris Uber strikers - who also weren't anti technology.
>A glass cam will probably work out the same way CCTV has: people are worried about the potential for privacy abuse, but in the end these fears don’t come to pass.
The first two Cs in CCTV don't stand for instantly uploading everything to a 3rd party for analysis.
CCTV is fundamentally different than the "instantly send the data to a central server" model that currently dominates because CCTV is not reviewed except when it needs to be.
and in addition... share it on social media. Benign examples being your girlfriend just saw you on Twitter buying a ring for her by virtue of facial recognition and auto-tagging.
Always-on glasses constantly recording and uploading video are at least very illegal in Germany. I know we are sometimes too conservative and risk-averse but always-recording AR glasses are a bit too much.
The difference with voluntary mass surveillance in combination with AI and social credit is that it incentivizes people to rat on each other to the government or Facebook.
Keiichi Matsuda http://hyper-reality.co/
But it does seem like the most likely human conclusion to schedule/task/todo/interests lists.
Second, even with Facebook owning Oculus and investing heavily into its success (rightly so, by the way, the Oculus hardware is phenomenal), they're only successful because other software developers have made such great use of their systems. In some cases, Facebook has bought the successful software/companies involves (Beat Saber...), but it'll take a long time before they establish both a top-tier VR hardware and software footholds.
I spend alot of time trying to envisage what I think the information aggregation "tool" of the future is/will be. A watch? Glasses? An AI assistant chip in our earlobe? Whoever thinks of that will be an interesting fellow.
> A New Private Social Platform
Cypherpunk: Signal! Tor! Riot!
Mark: Small groups of people who know each other.
> Decentralizing Opportunity
Cypherpunk: Bitcoin! Peertube! IPFS! Mastadon! Namecoin! Scuttlebutt!
Mark: Products for small businesses.
> The Next Computing Platform
Cypherpunk: Ethereum! Urbit! Homomorphic encryption! RISC-V! Solid! Dfinity! Blockstack!
Mark: Augmented reality.
Yeah, a lot of blockchain stuff seems quite impractical and motivated by pump-and-dump opportunities. But if I close my eyes, I can almost imagine a reality where the blockchain tech is useful and widespread.
That's not what you think it means. The crowds behind the names you dropped are very different and have very little overlap.
The Wikipedia page for cypherpunk mentions Tor, Bitcoin, and Signal. So some of them are definitely cypherpunk. The 2 things I think are the least similar are RISC-V and homomorphic encryption. Both of those are mentioned in at least a couple threads on cpunks.org . In fact everything listed is mentioned on cpunks.org except Riot, Peertube, Dfinity, and Blockstack (although a different thing called Blockstack is mentioned). Riot is mentioned in /r/cypherpunk . There are articles linking Blockstack[1] and Dfinity[2] to cypherpunks.
I guess the only one that really stands out then is Peertube. It has a slight link due to a cypherpunk-themed instance[3] and the @cypherpunk@mastodon.social account boosting toots about Peertube.
There is one place where all those things are discussed: Hacker News. So I could have said "Hacker News user", but HN users have a reputation of being cynical, whereas I wanted a more optimistic term, and thought cypherpunk fit that.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/cypherpunk-dream-blockstream-develo...
[2] https://fortune.com/2018/10/23/dfinity-blockchain-assassinat...
Certainly better than nothing though, just like him previpusly bringing up universal basic income. Would be nice to see him again put his money where his mouth in and support Andrew Yang. He's rich enough to do whatever he wants and actually change reality.
But... I always like to think of the Taleb quote: "Don't tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio"
So, still waiting (unlike Elon Musk and Sam Altman who have both come out in support of Yang right now)
When people say they care about privacy, most of the time they mean they care about anonymity, as in privacy from people who knows them personally. They don't want their internet search history to be known by friends or family or coworkers, but they probably have no qualm if it's just data being sent to large corporate service providers.
That's why people would continue to trade personal info for conveniences for the foreseeable future, and as long as corporations maintain public anonymity for those data the most we'll ever see are temporary public outrages.
DDG is valiant, but doesn't give the same "read my mind" feeling that Google has people used to. I see few people stick with it due to this.
Signal has proven itself as a great product in many ways, but people opt for the convenience that other messengers provide. The Signal crew seems to understand this, though, and slowly be working towards ways to match that. They'll (eventually, IMO) succeed for this reason - more "privacy respecting" entities need to take this route and understand that you will not get users or attention solely on espousing privacy rights.
>That's why people would continue to trade personal info for conveniences for the foreseeable future, and as long as corporations maintain public anonymity for those data the most we'll ever see are temporary public outrages.
Absolutely agree. We've had no shortage of privacy related issues surfaced in the mainstream media, likely most notably Snowden's leaks. Some in the media made a concerted effort to make people understand just how grave the situation was, for example Colbert letting everyone know, on air, that they can access the dick pics you've sent people privately.
People heard it, digested it briefly, shrugged their shoulders and continued on without regard. In fact, people have become worse with their private information than ever before:
- People are now sending their DNA to private companies, with no care for the T&Cs involved, in exchange for utterly shallow, almost irrelevant genetic history infographics.
- People are wearing "wearables" that are reporting their heart rate, activity levels, sleep quality, etc. to private companies.
- People are opening their homes up to 24/7 surveillance with always on, always listening "smart home" devices.
- Many more people than ever are posting naked photos/videos of themselves on Reddit, Snapchat, etc., hosted on sites whose owners they have no clue of, ran by staff they have no idea of, etc.
They were told the risks, they did not care and so will be given, and will deserve, zero sympathy when something comes out highlighting the abuses enabled by some of the above. "We didn't know!" does not cut it anymore.
https://onezero.medium.com/if-you-want-cheap-car-insurance-y...
How do the ethics line up for an insurance company analyzing data from your wearables and seeing a data point that indicates a significant increase in the chance of a heart attack? Do they tell you and pay for preemptive care? Do they drop you as a customer? How many people have to die vs survive a heart attack to make warning you vs hoping you die the most profitable option?
This website has a nice table showing the adjustment factors.
https://www.valuepenguin.com/how-age-affects-health-insuranc...
https://www.cms.gov/CCIIO/Programs-and-Initiatives/Premium-S...
NJ has a nice pdf explaining age rating factors, showing that early 20s is the benchmark, and even though people in 50s and 60s use much more than 3x the healthcare people in early 20s do, the premium is capped at 3x of those in early 20s.
https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
As an aside, when people complain in the US that the ACA law increased their healthcare costs, what they are complaining about is having to pay for other people’s healthcare. Other than increase supply of healthcare (doctors, medicines, etc), there is no solution to bringing costs down.
People regularly complain about the GDPR here (US sites comply by region blocking GDPR covered users).
The only thing they comply with is their own paranoia. The GDPR doesn't even apply to US companies if they don't specifically target EU users.
I wouldn't be surprised if many sites were only violating the GDPR because they show those "cookie notices" which completely miss the point and don't help with compliance but could be considered catering to EU users.
[1] Didn't even mention the part about Google possibly tracking your location even if you don't use maps.
Control. The problem with technological advances today aren't with the tech itself, it's that the burst of consumer users allowed people like apple to turn computing into a user prison where the user has no control. This then set a standard, and many people have grown up without ever using a free and open source piece of software.
So AR and VR and AI and virtual assistants etc, the main problem is always going to go back to the root of why RMS started GNU in the first place; because he saw the future of tech was a fight for control of the user. He was just a man ahead of his time and socially awkward enough that it was and is easy to dismiss him based on what are essentially ad hominem attacks.
The future I want is FOSS/FOSH, regardless of the tech!
This isn't strictly a terrible thing. Anyone who has chosen to share their life with a partner gets that it is a lot easier if you divide up control of different aspects of your life among each other.
The problem is - as a society in general, and as tech consumers in particular, who should we cede the control to and how should the controllers be held accountable?
These are the same problems societies have faced for millennia, and now that newly emerging tech can operate at the scale of society in a couple of years, it is unreasonable to expect that billions of people adopt the libertarian mindset when it comes to tech alone.
I could do without paid PR fluff.
"When I started Facebook, one of the reasons I cared about giving people a voice was that I thought it would empower my generation"
I'm pretty sure this was not one of his goals when he started facebook.
> A New Private Social Platform
So more facebook, just bite-sized for smaller groups.
> Decentralizing Opportunity
Essentially libra.
> The Next Computing Platform
Oculus.
> New Forms of Governance
"There are a number of areas where I believe governments establishing clearer rules would be helpful, including around elections, harmful content, privacy, and data portability. I've called for new regulation in these areas and over the next decade I hope we get clearer rules for the internet."
Although I somewhat sympathize with his predicament here, whose regulation is he talking about? If governments step in, then facebook would have to ultimately fracture into national facebooks. US, European nations, India, Middle eastern nations, etc are not going to have the same ideas about elections, harmful content, privacy and data portability. Even within the US, we are not going to have real consensus on this issue. This is where principles could help, but principles always seem to lose to political and financial interests.
In short, zuckerburg envisions we'll be using facebook on oculus paying with libra while governments solve all of facebooks intractable problems for him.
This is a big chicken and egg problem. Mark wants the government to set the rules but what happens when Facebook doesn't make the rules, people are elected through questionable means (notice he used the phrase 'seen as legitimate'), and those people don't want to crack down on Facebook because an unregulated Facebook is a key to them remaining in power. There is a feedback loop there that Facebook could shutoff with a single decision from Mark. It is much harder to fix that problem through government action.
--There are a number of areas where I believe governments establishing clearer rules would be helpful, including around elections, harmful content, privacy, and data portability.
Mark could do a lot on his own without waiting for government.
Mark could: Ban harmful content, he is a US citizen and could start with keeping a tighter lid on content that doesn't conform with non extremist western values. And then integrate other value systems shortly over time.
Mark could: get out of all election advertising and push Facebook to be a place where everyone doesn't talk about that stuff and ban targeted political adds and just do other stuff.
Mark could: Easily respect peoples privacy. I hardened my facebook profile a while back to remove most public content and the level of granularity to the privacy controls seemed like it was intentionally made difficult to do what I was doing. Dark patterns.
Mark could show leadership. he really could, he doesn't.
I think a lot of people in this thread are confusing these twi very different perspectives.
The unimaginably deep dark pools of data collection, the targeting, Internet.org's absolutely transparent attempt to get developing nations trapped on Facebook under the guise of philanthropy, the complete non-response to extremism on their own platform until way after it was a problem, the list goes on and on.
That's the last 10 years. Now Mark says they're building a more private, smaller platform? Private for who?
Mark says he wants to enable small businesses to connect with customers through their networks. What he's really saying is he wants every last piece of society to operate through his network so Facebook can get it's cut of the local laundromat.
I hate these grand-yet-bland, corporate flavored prognostications. There's absolutely no reason we should believe any of these things he's excited about will be a net benefit for the rest of us.
Advertising as we know it is well and truly dead, and I don't think Facebook or Zuckerberg are the right entities to push for change in this field. They've already demonstrated their bad faith and maliciousness.
There are ways to make advertising ethical, but Facebook definitely won't do that, as they currently profit from the negative externalities & bad side effects of the current advertising model. Doing advertising ethically will be a serious downgrade from their current income, and while it's still a big chunk of money they for sure won't like it and will never do it for this reason.
Based on what? More people are spending more money online than ever, the holidays alone in 2019 broke records at an increase of 3.4% over the previous year's sales [0].
That is on top of an increase of 2.8% the previous year, something which was heralded as a disappointment [1].
Given the above, people are clearly being guided what to buy and where to buy it, so how could one realistically claim that "advertising as we know it is well and truly dead"?
[0]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/25/reuters-america-corrected-re...
[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/14/holiday-sales-were-a-huge-di...
How is advertising as we know it is well and truly dead? Online, it has been different from the time cookies, especially third party cookies, were added on sites. I agree it has become far worse with tracking and reporting devices people carry around all day, and with Facebook ruthlessly and unethically monetizing it and harming people (and countries).
That ambition is impressive, amazing, and terrifying, and everyone is completely ignoring it.
The 2020s are going to be interesting.
He thought learning Mandarin would help him conquer China. lol.
In the next decade I don't want to give you any money and I don't want you to know anything about me. Also my friends, family, likes, dislikes, my appearance, what my voice sounds like, or what I'm susceptible to buying. You have no right to this data and I want you to stop trying to get it. Kind of like what was absolutely normal in the 1990s or earlier, where it would have been impossible to know such things without literally following people around 24/7--you know, the kind of stalker behavior that would end up with me getting a restraining order against you. Kind of like before your insatiable and frightening lust to know everything about people drove you to build a surveillance panopticon designed for one purpose: to make you and your ilk some of the richest people in the world.
Please stop trying to sell access to my eyeballs.
If you look at the Twitter responses to any famous person's comment, you can see how polarising it tends to be.
Everyone there is kissing Zuckerberg's ass, for the lack of a better expression (sorry). What's going on there?
>A New Private Social Platform Marc doesn't know what it will be but wants to buy it. He knows that it is a thing.. Well we all do and have been trying to figure it out. Path was one attempt... maybe it was too early.
> Decentralizing Opportunity Marc could already allow easy "buy it now" buttons in Facebook but doesn't for some reason...
>New Forms of Governance This is the wrong question. He should be pushing democratic ideals world wide.
Facebook’s active complicity in spreading falsehoods is appalling.
Thats a shame because a re-decentralization of the web is one of the things that really should happen.
True decentralization will happen when anybody can host a functional website on their mobile phone(s) without depending upon the services of a corporate behemoth.
General Predictions from experts/specialists are almost useless.
For decent predictions of the ways of a world, find multi-disciplinary generalists. They would likely be right, at least directionally.
Early adopters are already using some form of what will become mainstream this decade. Will came a a lot of new things for early adopters, but only a few will become mainstream in the next one.
In the same way, intelligence agencies, hackers, and more are already using things that with a bit of luck general people will become aware this decade (but will fail to take good measures about it), and new advancements will become gradually available for both kinds of bad players in the next years, some that will remain, others that may be override by more prevailing ones.
Besides technology, the divide that I did above will become more important next decade too. How technology changes us, and what we become caused by it, is more important than the technology itself. Think in how we went from a culture of discretion and privacy to one of mindless sharing.
Maybe there are ways to improve the quality of discussions _within_ Facebook to help solve these problems. It works for Hacker News, so I don't think it would be impossible. Of course indirect revenue from oil companies would decrease somewhat, but a balance should be found.
Shields up — ready for the downvotes.
Not a great model for FB to follow. You’ll start getting DMs from people like “dang” telling you to behave, LOL.
At the same time I don't know anything even comparable to HN, so I shy away from controversial wording / topics, and this way things that I write goes through the ,,dang'' filter. I still think that he's much more constructive than what would be here without him at this scale of (non-geek) users.
I got shadowbanned on Reddit after creating one of the more popular subreddits. It’s a weird feeling. With decentralized moderation, who sets the constitution? This is why AI/ML in response to this self-governance stuff is a meme.
The why not I build part: network effects are strong, so I think it's really hard to do something that people would use.
I was still posting and didn't see any sign that my account is banned, maybe it would be a good feature for HN (or not being able to log in).
I think I see some patterns where topics that used to get downvoted get upvotes instead, and I hope that's because others have decided that they don't like what this says about the community, and so they upvote them on general principle. (The Cynic worries that someone's astroturfing budget ran out).
Whether a topic gets upvoted or downvoted seems to depend on which camp gets to it first, and the bias introduced by the first comment, which will inevitably determine how long the topic lasts, barring moderator intervention.
Sometimes good comments end up forgotten, just because someone got to them first, who disagrees with them and is not intellectually mature enough to handle that.
I took a look, and didn't find any. I did see several early comments by your account, including its very first one, that were downvoted. Which comments were downvoted vs. not seemed consistent with what would get downvoted today, though today they'd probably get downvoted more—probably because there are many more readers who can downvote things.
You banned yummyfajitas, aka Chris Stucchio. That was where the elves left Middle Earth for me.
Fewer constructive discussions due to aggressive downvoting based not on the quality of argument, but on the opinion expressed.
More junk on the front page, this is general trend in attention economy, so somewhat unavoidable.
One of the telling things is structure of the titles. Few years ago titles where more informative, now more clickbaity on average.
If anyone can come up with an objective measure for any of this, I'd be interested. As far as I can tell, though, these perceptions are strongly affected by the fact that the things that we dislike make a much stronger impression than the rest of what we see.
From my perspective, the downvoting isn't more aggressive than it used to be, there isn't more junk on the front page than there used to be (though there might be more ideologically conflictual material, since society is moving in that direction), and the titles aren't more baity than they used to be, since we edit most of the bad ones. I'm biased, though, and conditioned by the moderation job. The interesting question is whether there's a way to get beyond such biases.
Maybe some metrics to investigate are: number of words per comment, vocabulary level of the average comment [1], and so on. While neither of these are solely indicative of quality, I think they are something to consider.
Number of words per comment would be easy enough to measure, but I'm not sure length is a good indicator of quality—not everyone who goes on at length has much to say. Your vocabulary link is interesting though—thanks! I've made a note to look into that.
Edit: since you mentioned "academic", I was thinking of your comment when I noticed the top two comments in the current Sci-Hub discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22008977
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22009107
To me that seems more common than it used to be, and a good sign. But it could just be sample bias.
Edit 2: here's another, randomly run across today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012673. Not academic, but technical in an unexpected way. There are a lot of physicians posting to HN.
Edit 3: or check out the top comment of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22025961
Edit 4: and of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21963509
It’s not really surprising since there are two contributing trends:
Online communities generally degrade as they increase in size.
Attention economy brings “heat death” of internet: amount of produced content is higher, quality is lower.
There's the notion of where good conversations are found, or what sources are referenced by external sources, or what links where will result in more traffic (or conversions) to linked sites / services.
There's metrics such as MAU and user time-on-site.
As dang noted in another recent comment, one of HN's scarcest commodities is its front-page slots. As with attention and time/day, that's an absolutely rivalrous good, and one which decreases comparatively as the site increases in size and volume -- more users means more competition for the 30 front-page slots per user.
And if more stories rotate through those slots, there will be either less time per story, or a restricted exposure (e.g., stories presented to only a subset of readers), or both. (I'm not sure what HN's specific mechanics are here, though I believe it's a mix of both.)
All media tend to fall in quality with size. See Dwight MacDonald's 1953 classic "A Theory of Mass Culture" (https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...).
(Also apparently "Masscult and Midcult", which I've only just run across and have not yet read: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/macdonald.pdf)
Some of the more interesting research I'm aware of was based on Usenet, looking at thread dynamics, out of Microsoft Research, in the early/mid aughts. I think it was Marc A. Smith, see for example:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/picturi...
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240051972/MIcrosoft-Res...
(There were more detailed discussions I've seen in the past, I don't have references handy.)
In particularly, post/response dynamics seemed to fit a number of distinct categories:
- Single post, many responses, no follow-up: question with a single obvious answer provided by many.
- Single post, extended discussion, "conversation-killing" response: hard question, with unclear answer, eventually obviously provided.
- Long descending "right-shifted" thread between two parties: personality conflict / flame thread.
- Post, much response, multiple parties: successful trolling.
I've played a bit with the notion of indicators of significant vs. insignificant discussion, based on sentinal keywords: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
I know HN has an API and have considered looking at it though as yet haven't explored this.
Any ideas as to what would indicate desirable or undesirable trends, threads, and/or posts?
I consider myself a dissident voice. Whilst my input isn't always appreciated, it often is, and I've found some measure of success pressing back against several of the more notable hivemind sentiments.
Not taking the challenge personally helps. Finding your own best argument also. Persistence pays off.
https://nofb.pw/?p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F4%2Fpost...
I've been working on a social network that I believe represents "generational change" - no ads, no clickbait news, no public profiles. It goes against the grain of what current social networks are doing.
Check it out at https://get.thread-app.com.
It's still early days, but I would appreciate any feedback!
He "expects" this? This is trivially true in that it is an unavoidable result of the human lifecycle. 40 years from now, the boomers won't be in congress or in jobs -- they'll be dead. The only possible conclusion is that the millennials will replace them. I don't see why he felt the need to state that he "expects" this. Everyone who understands that humans die expects this.
> reconstruct all kinds of smaller communities to give us that sense of intimacy again.
This is how people use Facebook already. Most of my friends who "use" Facebook are really just in private groups and chat. Twitter is the go-to global platform -- it's one big bubble. Facebook is distinguishing itself as more of a private platform of isolated bubbles. This has already been happening for the past 10 years.
> Decentralizing Opportunity... If we can make it so anyone can sell products through a storefront on Instagram, message and support their customers through Messenger, or send money home to another country instantly and at low cost through WhatsApp -- that will go a long way towards creating more opportunity around the world
Decentralizing Opportunity? Maybe. Centralizing monetary transaction traffic to Facebook so they reap the equivalent of a VAT on every sale? Definitely.
Microsoft makes money. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spends money.
It's a bit strange to compare Mark Zuckerberg's money making organization to Bill Gate's money spending organization.
Pretty much all the research I've heard about social media indicates that it makes the world worse. So I think it is relevant.
Obviously a lot of people do in fact derive pleasure and some other benefits or they wouldn't keep using it.
Sure, but it could still be overall harmful. E.g. gambling, drugs, smoking.
That doesn't follow at all. When I used to use Facebook it was based on an addictive compulsion but each time I used I realized it made my mood worse. My life got better when I stopped using the platform.
Even here, if there's a space for centralised control, it's possible that either some single entity will gain effective unitary control or impose a control overlay.
High-mass products, which ship poorly, products which are very highly localised (culture, custom), "high-touch" (1:1 or 1:(small-n) activities, on-site services, specifically-tailored activities, rapid spoilage, tend to be amongst these.
Examples which come to mind of each:
- High mass: concrete, dairy, and water. Shipping costs rapidly eat into profits, though water can move efficiently for hundreds, possibly as much as 1,000km, via aqueducts and pipelines.
- Localised: culture, including to an extent the film industry (at least at the national level), which contrasts with video's otherwise extreme ephemerality, and hence centralisation. Teaching is probably the ultimate, with the failures of ed-tech reinforcing this yet again. The gold-standard in teaching remains 1:1 tutoring, for complex reasons. Most personal-care services, ranging from medical to beauty, therapy, and training. Activities proscribed by widely-varying local regulation also tend toward geographical dispersion.
- Most of the trades -- plumbing, electrical, HVAC, landscaping, on-sight equipment maintenance, auto repair, and the like, all spawn from the fact that it's cheaper to provide local expertise and capability than to move the equipment to a centralised facility. The more specialised equipment is, the more likely service is to be centralised, and some transport equipment (aircraft, ships) sees centralised servicing based on both mobility and complexity.
- The degree to which spoilage is no longer a pressing concern is impressive: cold-chains and air freight mean that fresh fruits, vegetables, and flowers now move globally, though local produce remains viable. Freshly-cooked meals remain a holdout, with even in-city delivery limited to a few standbyes: pizza, Chinese takeaway, and the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel. (https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...).
In most other cases, the supposed freedom from location afforded by technology and ephemeralisation actually strongly favours centralisation. Almost anything related to mass culture (film, music, video games, and some books, as well as clothing and fashion) tends extremely toward centralisation.
Look around you at the "small shops" in your neighbourhood, town, or suburb. Those are the serivces which have resisted centralisation, though almost all have some strongly centralised elements.
Generally, though, that's my point: infotech tends strongly to monopoly.
> One way to address this is through regulation.
> I've called for new regulation in these areas and over the next decade I hope we get clearer rules for the internet.
Surprising to hear a near-monopoly call for regulation.
> Another and perhaps even better way to address this is by establishing new ways for communities to govern themselves. An example of independent governance is the Oversight Board we're creating.
Oh I see, self-regulation is the answer.
Not really. When a company reaches a certain level of dominance, government regulation is a good thing because it increases the cost of entry to the market, so it acts as a kind of moat for the established players.
Regulation can often mean a higher bar to entry for competitors. Compliance costs time/money and Facebook has plenty.
The US government needs dramatically less influence from moneyed lobbyists and tech powerhouses, not more. God help us if it goes the opposite direction. It would make the utter scandal that was the US government granting immunity to the telecom companies for facilitating widespread surveillance by the US government look like a child's game.
Analysis of whether a company is a monopoly should involve things other than market domination, for example anticompetitive behavior like buying all competitors. Even if you feel you have a choice as a consumer, the analysis of whether Facebook or any company has an economically detrimental monopoly should include their actions to stifle competition and achieve pricing power.
Well, not surprising, given that this is the internet and Hacker News. :)
Specifically, between these "intelligent people [on Hacker News]" and a "guy [with] dubious insights", one of these groups has a couple of billion dollars invested in every single one of the topics in the document whereas the other... well, maybe Bill or Jeff or Satya or one of the others reads Hacker News, but I doubt it. :)
I look at Mark's post and I see him being honest with people about how he believes the world is going to evolve - not necessarily how he wants it to evolve, nor how Facebook even intends to move forward.
Everyone is so blinded by their emotional hatred of Mark that they cannot stomach discussing the points he is making.
Huh?
Although if the price went down, what demand there was would probably be met. I definitely don't want to pay $400 or more for something that should just be a peripheral.
Life-like VR fundamentally holds the promise of being one more great social equalizer if you can essentially simulate material wealth (objects, locations) like a video game, even just the visual part of it. E.g. IKEA is all over such research, with good reason.
Most people also don't realize that in terms of communication, any non-physical interaction (so excluding sex and hugs) would be just as good in VR as in reality, thereby making face-to-face meetings the norm anew (like before any form of distant communication existed, save for mail). That's bound to be a healthy change, a welcome improvement from text, audio and even video.
It's just a little bit too early indeed, and probably headed for a (shorter) winter I agree. Come 2030ish we should have much more decent options to move forward (from current specs you'd estimate a 10x at least to reach 'acceptable' capabilities, and more like 100x if you seek visually life-like sim, i.e. ~250px per arc minute at 100Hz or more over at least 180° field of view).
I’ve bangered up my hands with BoxVR enough by hitting my controllers against my headset. Really should wear glove or something.
Generational change: Boomers and political reposts are making younger, more desirable demographics not want to use my platform.
A New Private Social Platform: Making everyone in the world talk in the same space is damaging user engagement
Decentralizing Opportunity: Selling stuff and moving money on Facebook. Mark wants to be a bank.
The Next Computing Platform: Mark wants to be your next remote access client for your job.
New Forms of Governance: How much do I pay and to who for regulatory capture so competitors can't arise?
But I’m dumbfounded by the private network reference. Zuck sees people trying to circumvent oppressive regimes as some sort of emerging market opportunity? Or does he think you and I would pay to use “FB Private” if they promised to turn off everything about normal Facebook’s current business model?
Hear hear. "Holy shit, I got rich, I must be smart! It's a new decade, let me write something I think sounds smart and publish it."
Most of this post is about how Facebook is looking for new ways to make money, and just a few sentences about large problems like diseases or poverty.
He carelessly uses words like “private” and “decentralized” in dishonest senses to mean that:
a) Facebook (the company) will provide you these solutions and misname them as private and decentralized
b) Facebook (the company) will still run on ads and profiling users.
Augmented and virtual reality — yet another way for Facebook to surveil people.
Asking for regulations as if he wants it. What he has wanted from the time Facebook has come under scrutiny by lawmakers is regulatory capture...getting laws passed in a way that prevents competitors from even trying, while Facebook can continue to claim that it’s doing its best with “independent” boards and committees and escape penalties and punishments.
Anyone wanting something better for the future can only hope that Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg get out of running Facebook the company in any manner by 2030, if we go by wishlists by decades.
I keep trying to push people away from WhatsApp (somewhat easily, I should say) because there are many alternatives. Instagram is tougher. The newer federated alternatives like Pixelfed aren’t there on features, and they don’t even have a mobile app yet! Facebook groups is another thing that doesn’t have a good enough replacement.
In certain cases Facebook remains the best option to reach people. I’m not talking about personal messages or interactions, but about things of value to larger communities focused on social good.
Did WhatsApp and Facebook help elect right-wing autocrats? Yes.
Are WhatsApp and Facebook also helping protestors against right-wing autocrats organize and protest? Also yes.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/27/facebook-...
I do hope that the people taking real risks are doing their most sensitive communication on something better like Signal.
But for mass reach using another tool seems necessary as of now.
But what I really want is for the government to intervene so I don't need to give up my local water utility, by guaranteeing minimum levels of service, and providing solid regulation.
Facebook? Who needs it!
Whatsapp? Signal!
Instagram? I don't know... Read something?
How are their services like water?!
Some groups like my local housing community I would have to explain who I am and give a huge spiel about how I deleted my Facebook account and I am actually X.
It is not as simple as asking to send an SMS. I will be missing out on a lot of information, bonding opportunities, picture sharing and I will be that annoying dude making others jump through extra hoops as well.
I am personally not going to make that sacrifice.
I could also live in complete isolation in the woods and without friends. I just do not want to live like that being constantly paranoid.
> It is not as simple as asking to send an SMS
It is. Inform your friends that you don't use Facebook and ask them to treat you the same way they would treat any other friend that doesn't use Facebook: reach out and communicate through any of the other myriad ways available to everyone.
> I am personally not going to make that sacrifice.
That's fine, but any objections you have to Facebook's behavior ring hollow since you recognize the problem but are unwilling to do anything about it. You are thus part of the problem.
> I could also live in complete isolation in the woods and without friends
Silly hyperbole. This is not the end result of not using Facebook.
This is not a silly hyperbole. It would be a solution to avoid sharing your data with anyone. There are also other entities that could abuse your data.
SMS might not be the safest thing either.
I have a friend who refuses to use Facebook. About twice a year I remember to send her updates.
Then when I see her I have to go over all the updates everyone else already saw on Facebook. I literally pull out my phone and show her my feed.
It’s really frustrating and inefficient. I only do it because she’s a really good friend.
Yeesh. I'm glad my friends don't regard me this way. IMHO, your comment is a perfect example of why one should quit Facebook.
/S
Yes, I could find another way to contact my support network. I could also find another way to get drinkable water. I'd rather there was simply regulation though.
It seems the problems you have with is rooted on the nature of big corporations. Basically all the big companies are doing those things, especially regulatory capture.
How is replacing Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg with anybody else will give you a Utopia Facebook?
Not to speak for the OP but the idea is that you don’t replace them, you just remove them. And use decentralised, open source solutions instead.
I like him because his uncanny valley appearance and single-minded morally-neutral totalitarianism make me feel like I'm living in some high-quality vintage science fiction.
We are working on it at Mozilla: hubs.mozilla.com
More info here: https://github.com/mozilla/hubs-cloud/wiki/The-Web-Emergent-...
I remain skeptical, but this has been a recent argument coming from oculus devs and others in the VR/AR community.
The more you look at the web/Internet, you’ll notice it’s not as decentralized as most people believe
If AR/VR becomes built into a form factor similar to reading glasses today I suspect we will see a lot more avatar based chatting.
- social presence: the feeling of being together and of unmediated communication
- shared spatial awareness: the ability to have a shared reference frame of physical reality
these are the two key features of face to face communication that digital communication tools have largely failed to replicate. (as studied by academic research)
I also conjecture there's a third:
- ability to dynamically spawn and manipulate contextual mixed media in a shared spatial environment (videos, images, 3d models, data, etc)
These three characteristics combined are met already today to some degree by modern day video games, but VR/AR seems likely to be the key tool to knock down much of the barrier regarding social presence due to its ability to transmit many more forms of non-verbal communication between people than existing tools.
I think if people really wanted to primary communicate with facial/avatar awareness, we would see everyone using video calls over social media and IMs.
I think VR/AR communication has some place in the future but I do not see it becoming a serious/primary communication tool.
Besides, the idea is not that this would meaningfully displace existing media (except perhaps video for some use-cases), but provide a fundamentally new medium for communication that has no present day analog other than face-to-face. Much like current tools, you'd use it when it is the ideal context and situation for it to be maximally useful.
Video calls and other media have distinct tradeoffs, and are objectively worse than face-to-face along a variety of dimensions.
The argument is simple, if you believe:
- people value face-to-face over existing digital communication tools for certain contexts
- VR and AR based communication meaningfully approaches face-to-face in certain ways that existing tools do not
- VR and AR technology will eventually get to a point where it is ubiquitous
Then it seems that tech will be used for those purposes. Either of the latter two assumptions could be wrong, but early research [1] supports the argument of first, and based upon the tech track the second seems highly likely.
You're coming across as someone with an intense confirmation bias.
It's important that Facebook and other tech giants not be allowed to harm society in the coming decade. But an intense and emotional overreaction only makes that position seem less credible to the uninformed.
when i read Zuck's post, I thought to myself he has a solid vision on how to compete with the Chinese companies that have huge overlaps with how he thinks mobile will be used in the coming decade.
But haven't those same companies already proven themselves to not be credible by their actions? What happens when everyone doesn't have this reaction, we get complacent and it's too late because they've already taken control? That's not confirmation bias, that's critical thinking.
> Many of the interpretations you have, and the intents and beliefs you claim Zuckerberg holds, are not evident in the article.
This is like listening to Pooh bear saying he's going to eat less honey this year because he wants to lose weight without ever reading any of the books.
No but the funny part is, since the climate has already changed, that actually means I'm currently dead.
SV is brain draining more fields than just computer sciences.
Many of the answers are the same: Facebook. At least for developers, Facebook is generally seen as a net negative for the world in it's current form.
> Another perhaps better way ... is the new Oversight Board we are creating...
Zuck wants to use FB to continue to delegitimize democratic governments so he can replace them with FB itself.
Zuck is a fascist.