gregasquith

Very true. I have to confess to a very leading question there, as I am building exactly this and thinking long and hard about monetisation. I do like the cable analogy and think it's very true.

I think ads can be done better/more ethically than currently as well though - whether that be less of them, less "native" so they don't appear exactly like posts from your family/friends and with less granular targeting - whether advertisers would go for it is another matter entirely though...

Is there now a gap for a new social platform that goes back to chronologically ordered content from those you choose to follow/friend rather than algorithmically curated content from other sources designed to lure you in?

Scrollbait?

Yeah, the problem is those that are seeing/potentially being manipulated by this are (I would imagine) highly unlikely to use a browser extension or (more likely, in developing nations where Facebook is forcing itself on users through the Internet.org project) on the mobile app anyway

The quote “There is a lot of harm being done on Facebook that is not being responded to because it is not considered enough of a PR risk to Facebook,” kind of sums it up!

Django is a sensational piece of open source software - I've used it on so many projects.

Seen some replies saying it's a pain to deploy - look at guides for Heroku and Google's App Engine - both are super simple processes. If you want more control AWS Lightsail also has a great guide.

100% agreed!

A lot of advertisers didn't care when Safari etc. did it, such is the scale Chrome has - they just stopped targeting users not using Chrome. Now it's affecting everyone there's an outcry

There are various proposals they are working under the umbrella of the Privacy Sandbox project, couple of key ones here:

https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/tree/master/proposals/...

https://github.com/WICG/turtledove