Was talking about this with a friend today, and I think this incident highlights why I sometimes get really depressed about my career and technology.
I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the dominant one: the Internet would bring a "democratization of information" where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world. Really cool new services came online frequently. I still remember the first time I used Google, and at the time I was blown away by how good it was ("like magic!" I said) because the results were so much better than other search engines of the time.
But these days, the older I get the more and more I feel like tech is having a negative impact on both society at large and me personally. In the 90s we all thought the Internet would lead to a decentralization of power, but literally the exact opposite happened. Sure, telcos sucked, but there were tons of them spread across all corners of the globe. Now there is 1 single megacorp that a sizable portion of humanity depends on for phone/text communication.
It just makes me sad. Sure, there are pluses to tech I'm ignoring here, but I just think that how reality turned out so 180 from the expectations of the late 90s is what really hurts.
It's easy to feel blasé about the internet, but it's also played a huge role in making information easily accessible. I learned about electronics from online tutorials. Taught myself programming. Also learned a lot about home repairs and renovations. Made a lot of contacts, landed jobs, etc. I met my partner through a dating app. I would say the internet has brought a lot of positive things in my life so far. The open source movement we have today wouldn't really be possible in an offline world.
When it comes to all the toxic things that social media can bring, I think we're slowly learning about them as a society, and maybe that's a good thing? Maybe we can develop healthier forms of social media.
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me, but I think reddit is basically the anti-twitter, and is a lot less toxic as a result. On twitter you have a one-to-many broadcast system where one person can have hundreds of thousands and even millions of followers that basically encourages flamewars, short inflammatory comments. On reddit, you can get high karma, but everyone basically has an equal shot at writing a popular post, and negative comments tend to get downvoted. Clearly, some patterns lead to more or less toxic and hateful interactions. We should study and learn from them, and use that knowledge to design better social media platforms.
> I think reddit is basically the anti-twitter, and is a lot less toxic as a result.
Of course, this completely depends on where you are on both Twitter and Reddit. There are bad and toxic parts of Reddit, and there are good and wholesome parts of twitter.
The one main difference though that's useful to compare between the two is that a post escaping the original audience, with the context collapse and everything else that brings, is a foundational feature of Twitter. It's a lot harder for that to happen on Reddit.
> one person can have hundreds of thousands and even millions of followers that basically encourages flamewars, short inflammatory comments
Honestly you just described reddit, too, except of course for the follower count—but the point is that reddit doesn’t have to have that many participants in a discussion thread for it to reach a level of toxicity same as Twitter.
Sure, social media did make information more accessible, but the vision of the internet before Web 2.0 was that it’ll democratize information without the trade off that comes with social media today—because that trade off is exactly what we hated then about the status quo.
I sometimes think the Internet is like the Mirror of Erised from Harry Potter. It can show us what we want: if what we want is knowledge it will show us that, if what we want is proof that we are right it will show us that and if we want to see how horrible other people are, that is what we will see.
It was just that people turned out to value less truth less, than being told they were right. You can fault the engineers who built this for it, but then you are faulting them for thinking too highly of people.
I think the problem is also that we also are shown what other people want to see. I genuinely don’t want to see political positions of my relatives, or my neighbors getting into heated internet fights. But I do want to see my relatives small joys, and I do want to know important neighborhood news and activities. That I can’t filter appropriately makes social media toxic, as I can feel my social animal brain see heightened emotions and want to participate in social heightened emotions online, even though it doesn’t do anything for anybody. Even fighting the urge to post and participate just makes my day just that little bit less fulfilling.
Not only can you not filter, the stream is purposefully toxic to increase 'engagement'. I have a lot of friends on my feed that post constantly. Memes, cat pictures, etc, a few posts are about 'libtards'. Guess which posts show up on my feed.
My filter list consist basically of football and religious proselytism, two topics I never want to read about.
During the last world cup, or last euro cup or some event like that I had to filter about 10 groups, and the thing is, it works. I never get any football content in my feed any more.
I wonder if there's a single Product owner in social media organizations advocating for these points, but they're being drowned out by optimizing for profits. I could easily imagine, at the top of the timeline, a dropdown toggle that lets me toggle politics, neighborhood news, etc. But of course, I can't, so I've left FB altogether. At least with Reddit I can browse by topic, which somewhat puts me back in the driver seat. I can go to r/MyCity or r/cooking, but what I don't have then is those small, non-political joys posted by family/friends. Texting and phone calls for small life updates it is.
I think it's a combo of physical distance and ease of commenting. Remember the old Penny Arcade comic that frequently made the rounds years ago (about the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory)?
Not a terribly subtle bit of commentary itself, but it was a humorous reference to something most of us had experienced. In person, there are reactions to see. The other person/people's humanity is on direct display and most of us have at least some degree of innate empathy that keeps us from being a complete asshole all the time. And even those who don't mind (or relish) being an asshole have to worry about repercussions.
In contrast, if I read something I disagree with, it's a lot easier for me to just fire off a smartass reply without the effect that socialization has on me to consider how appropriate the comment is or what effects it might have. I'm just countering some words that I don't like with some other words I do like.
Large-scale social media just turns into the comment section for the entire internet.
> You can fault the engineers who built this for it, but then you are faulting them for thinking too highly of people.
Well, that's my argument against a communist society. It was designed only for perfectly altruistic people, and that's a kind of people I have never found anywhere. If we want something that actually works, we need something designed for the people that actually exist.
It's the same with the Internet. Once the spammers got the gist of it, it has been a constant struggle between spammers and anti-spam people. We have reached some form of equilibrium, but anytime a new person connects, it's a brand-new learning about avoiding potentially bad stuff. It can be very expensive learning.
I’m going to count HN as a social network. It’s one of my favorite places on the internet. It surfaces great content, and the comments are a gold mine of top-notch information and advice (by and large).
What general principles can we learn from HN that can be applied elsewhere? Does HN self-select its audience? No profit motive? Great moderation? (Thanks Dang!)
- a generally invested community that appreciates this is a special outcome
The interesting thing to me is that Slashdot shares many of these attributes, has a relatively sophisticated moderation feature and is a cesspool. It feels like a ship adrift in the Caribbean and the fourth generation of rats born on the vessel are at war.
The primary difference IMHO is dang. Anytime I think about the overall quality of HN, his efforts bubble to the surface of my mind as the primary causal factor.
The people who make Slashdot a cesspool probably pushed the reasonable ones out, and the refuge for these is HN. The same could probably happen here at some point, but people who want a civil forum could simply move elsewhere if that happens.
It helps that something like HN can be easily duplicated, so there will probably always be a space like HN where interesting and civil discussions happen.
I certainly agree that dang's moderation is excellent and contributes to the uniqueness of HN. But "+5 Funny" on Slashdot was a big driver in the other direction, rewarding the endless hot grits and Cowboy Neal humour, which usually drowned out more sophisticated comments.
There are profit motives and Y Combinator is being transparent on this. From the FAQ [1]:
> Another kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or comments. They begin part-way down and fall steadily. Only one is on the front page at a time. The rest are listed at jobs.
>
> What's the relationship between YC and HN?
> Y Combinator owns and funds HN. The HN team is editorially independent.
> HN gives three features to YC: job ads (see above) and startup launches get placed on the front page, and YC founder names are displayed to other YC alumni in orange.
But HN seems incentivized to keep the level of quality high and to not interfere too much with content beyond moderation, or people would leave. So it leaves us with good quality contents and discussions.
HN's incentives are well-aligned with serving its users best, and this is probably partly what makes it a good place.
Moderation, but also a community that is by and large more intelligent than the general pop. Add to that a set of common reference points grounded in tech. We almost al understand logic, math, have good language skills and tertiary education. This perhaps makes HN a little bit of an echo chamber in some respects but it also means there is space for well presented arguments that go against the grain.
I do think this website is still small enough to have decent moderation, but there are plenty of borderline toxic and/or trolling comments I've seen here that go unmoderated. I've also seen tons of blatant and dangerous misinformation posted in the comments section, you only have to look at the vaccine threads from last week to see that. Nothing is perfect anywhere and medical misinformation is really bad for everyone. Maybe we can blame Facebook for bleeding out into the rest of the internet and turning things toxic, but we still have to deal with the effects of it.
By healthy I would mean physically non addictive and without any negative long term effects. If you used it right it would just give you euphoria, motivation, stimulation and potentially nootropic effects?
For many ADHD sufferers there’s literally a healthier form of crack. Well actually meth. It produces most of what of what you mention, except the sense of euphoria. The euphoria comes from quick rushes of dopamine and are what lead to many of the worse outcomes of meth/crack like dropping hygiene or eating properly. Conversely meds generally help ADHDers with basic hygiene, motivation, etc.
> By healthy I would mean physically non addictive and without any negative long term effects.
But how would something like work? It's the substance's ability to cause euphoria that makes it addictive. You cannot have one without the other. Addiction occurs when one loses the ability to regulate their dopamine-driven activity, causing something akin to an infinite loop. Adderall is basically legal meth, and it's easily the most abused medication in the US.
It should somehow be able to reset or configure brain's chemical state.
There's 2 addictions, physical and psychological. Psychological, could yes still happen of course even if you restored the balance of dopamine and other relevant chemicals, but in theory you could at least get rid of withdrawals if you were able to manipulate those chemicals. We don't have a way to do that, and may be we won't have, and maybe we'll invent something completely different first that would make something like this or drugs completely obsolete. But just in theory.
What you're describing sounds vaguely like some naturally occurring psychedelics, but again, those typically aren't addictive because the body often tries to reject them, even when you achieve an altered state of mind. They're not pleasurable to take.
I highly recommend reading the Molecule of More, which does an incredible job of explaining the brain chemistry behind addiction in an accessible way.
I've switched completely over to a well-moderated mastodon instance and haven't looked back since. Finding an instance that aligns with your values is the tricky part but once you have done that it's a lot of fun. The absence of any advertisements or algorithms really has an impact on the quality.
Yes, but imagine crack/amphetamines/stimulants without negative health effects. With no addiction, tolerance, or making people stop doing basic habits like eating, drinking water, brushing teeth etc. A healthy form of crack that would only have benefits of the crack that could make you into a real motivated, energised work horse or entrepreneur. You could be on it, you could be off it with no consequences, but if you want to be extra productive you would be on it.
I think OP's really onto something here.
Maybe something to reset the brain chemical state in such way that tolerance and addiction could not come up. It surely must be possible in some way.
A friend of mine had this idea but with opioids. He invented an opioid painkiller which was, IIRC, a positive allosteric modulator of the mu opioid receptor - I'm not an expert, but I believe the gist was that it enhanced your endogenous opioid system, and was therefore less prone to addiction.
He ended up finding a handful of papers scattered across the last decades where people had come to the same realisation, but nothing came of it. Now, it's very possible there was something wrong with the idea. He did synthesise the molecule and we both took it, but not for long enough to really assess - even in a Shulgin-like way - whether it was addictive. But he ended up suspecting that the reason nothing came of it is that a non-addictive drug is simply not profitable, and is dominated, in the game-theory sense, by addictive drugs which bring consistent and greater revenue streams.
Also, apropos of:
> reset the brain chemical state in such way that tolerance and addiction could not come up
You may want to look into ibogaine. It doesn't give you both the high and the 'resetting the brain' functions - it only does the latter - but it's a very interesting case in that it has a very successful track record in resetting addiction. Though research is hampered by the fact that its cardiotoxic properties have killed a bunch of people who didn't do proper ECGs etc to check for heart abnormalities before taking it.
> I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me, but I think reddit is basically the anti-twitter, and is a lot less toxic as a result.
That entirely depends where you are. The big frontpage-able/default subreddits are strongly moderated (with at least some pressure on the mods to behave), but other subreddits have ended up as self-reinforcing cesspools, especially when moderators collude to ban any opposing viewpoint (as happens with r/conservative). And then you have the subreddits that were explicitly created for toxic purposes (e.g. T_D, c..ntown, fatpeoplehate, and a boatload of others listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...).
> Maybe we can develop healthier forms of social media.
I run a few social sites, nothing as major as Facebook, and this is something I struggle with daily. The problem isn't the tech, it's the people.
They post disinfo? So you put up a little warning saying this is wrong, they get upset and scream censorship, you push too hard and they just go to another platform.
People like being upset, they like having drama.
I have no answers, but I do think a friends-only feed, where you have to expressly opt-in to see posts works best, combined with easy discoverability (hashtags, interest channels and pages etc)
It does take knowledge to learn though sadly (and personal drive), I'm helping some family in an underdeveloped country and I stupidly want to be like "learn to code" but yeah... that doesn't really work. They have the time but not the ability to learn even though they have wifi/computer.
Anyway I too learned from the web and it has benefited me a lot.
“ It's easy to feel blasé about the internet, but it's also played a huge role in making information easily accessible. I learned about electronics from online tutorials. Taught myself programming. Also learned a lot about home repairs and renovations. Made a lot of contacts, landed jobs, etc. I met my partner through a dating app.”
If you genuinely believe it was, i suppose you're just incredibly unaware of how gated information was before the internet.
The poster said "easily accessible". The wealth of knowledge and information i have at my fingertips today was before hidden behind public libraries I'd have to plan a trip to, in courses i would have to attend, in the brains of experts i would have to interview in person, i would generally have to dedicate years of my life in order to match what I can today learn in a matter of days just because of the difficult process of sorting through the information and finding what I'm looking for.
Quite the exaggeration if I may say so. How were you born then? Did your parents meet on the internet? All of the mentioned tasks were not casual in nature. Most books are far better and more in depth than tutorials found online, so for true expertise you will most likely seek long form information found in books.
Sure, some online information may be “more accessible” but is it necessarily better information?
Sure, and before the invention of the telephone and telegraph you could just write someone a letter, and before the invention of the printing press you could just hire a scribe. Before the automobile you could just ride a horse. Before the cotton gin, just put some slaves in a field. Nothing is new under the sun.
Having all of this information available at one's fingertips and having the ability to communicate and publish globally, and practically for free, has been revolutionary in and of itself.
Revolutionary? By what measure? The pace of true core innovation has slowed by many measures. The largest and most valued businesses today are largely marketing organizations masquerading as “tech” companies.
Finally, I would argue that more, easily accessible information is not necessarily better information.
One thing that adds to this feeling for me, is that any device I own that has an OS, unless that OS is Linux, feels distinctly hostile. I can't own a handheld computer that's not trying to enmesh me in an "ecosystem" of some sort, curate my options without my consent, do god-knows-what in the background, brick itself on a timer, and the list goes on.
It's even worse with laptops and desktops, unless I'm willing to devote big chunks of my dwindling free time to making a hobbyist OS (which, to be fair, is a breath of fresh air when it works) behave.
When even the terminals to our increasingly-hostile internet are themselves hostile, it makes me dream of just walking away from it all that much more.
Yeah over the past few years this has been an issue I have found myself becoming increasingly passionate about. It's a particular problem of internet connected devices - in the past it was not really possible to own something which is acting on behalf of another party while it's in your possession, but that's exactly what corporate-owned operating systems do. And we haven't taken the time to develop legal frameworks around how that should work.
I think the core of the problem here is the free ad-supported model that's so pervasive in the industry. Data mining in order to optimize targeted ads is the business driver for this bad behavior and society has struggled to grasp it's implications.
The problem is that once something is free there's no going back. You'll never be able to compete with free. Free is the new antitrust. The only players that will be able to survive and thrive in this model are the ones with the most data and the most socially exploitative techniques.
Lots of us are happy to pay for nice things like operating systems that don't use this model but there aren't enough of us to adequately fund such projects. We're just not a big enough market share.
I'm thinking about some times when I chose "paid" over "free" and a big part of it was that the paid option was 1) considerably better and 2) unavailable for free due to physical limitations.
The first example I thought of was when I was younger and wanted internet access. I didn't pay for dialup as long as I could figure out a free option. Our library had some free system you could dial into and I figured out a way to make reasonable use of that. Then when I moved, I used some of those Juno and Netzero type services for a while.
But once I had the option to pay for cable internet, I just went straight for it. The experience was an order of magnitude better, and there was simply no way to hustle a roughly equivalent free option out there. But looking back, I don't know if I would've considered a free, ad-based cable provider if it existed back when I was a broke young dude pinching pennies wherever I could.
Then again, nowadays, I would pay a bit extra to ensure my cable internet provider did not read, prioritize, or otherwise mess with my data if that was an option. But I doubt many others would choose to do that if it was extra charge for nebulous benefits.
I would say that there's two models driving us to hell. In addition to the ad-supported model, there's also the "everything is a service" model. The AAS model is increasingly the only alternative to the ad-supported model that's available to those of us willing to pay for nice things. Teslas and iPhones are certainly not free, yet they're just as much inscrutable black-boxes as low-end smartphones and commodity "smart" TVs. The only difference is that they spend less time misbehaving because of careless updates, since this model motivates the manufacturers to invest more in QA. They're less openly hostile-seeming because they view the user like a high-end hotel views a guest - to be pampered and indulged. But the "user" is still a guest with limited-time and carefully-controlled access to the facilities, not an owner.
Am also from that generation, but got into an IT career from the early 80s.
I understand where you're coming from. I'm increasingly the least-tech focused of my family/social circle, despite being the most heavily involved in the tech industry. In fact, I think my lack of bullishness in tech is due to the fact that I've been in the tech industry for 40 years. I know where the downsides lie.
However, don't let the current reality get you down. One thing that being in this industry has taught me is that nothing is completely fixed and permanent. To wit, the global monopolist who benefited the most from the network-effect lock-in used to be IBM. Then it was Microsoft. Now it's Facebook. In time, this too will change.
What wont change is the need for level-headed 'grey-beards' and those others who have lived sufficiently long in the tech space to have accumulated some level of wisdom, which they can then share with those that follow.
> To wit, the global monopolist who benefited the most from the network-effect lock-in used to be IBM. Then it was Microsoft. Now it's Facebook. In time, this too will change.
Why does there have to be a global monopolist though? I wonder if we ever will end up in that decentralised dream.
The outage yesterday reminded me of how many other services do the exact same thing. The only app I use by FB is WhatsApp and it wasn’t too bad using signal, FaceTime and sms to communicate.
Let the sheep have their facebook apps. Modern tech has also brought us strong open source tools. We have stronger encryption in any linux distro than any army had in the 90s. We have communication pathways (Tor) that defeat censorship. I can send an email today, encrypted then sent via Tor, that no government can censor, read or even detect that I have sent. I have a dongle that plugs into my phone that can decode aircraft transponders, or tune any station on a wide spectrum, that cost less than a fancy coffee. Tech has brought many wonderful tools to those of us willing to learn.
Those "sheep" (i.e. people who aren't crypto-nerds) are the people I mainly want to communicate with.
> Modern tech has also brought us strong open source tools. We have stronger encryption in any linux distro than any army had in the 90s. We have communication pathways (Tor) that defeat censorship. I can send an email today, encrypted then sent via Tor, that no government can censor, read or even detect that I have sent.
And those pathways are almost never used, except by people who have an unusual interest in the pathways themselves and people who want to use them to do ignoble and illegal things.
Also, those technologies aren't as powerful as you think they are. Any major government that cares to detect and block them can, and if they want to find out what you sent they can always hack your endpoint or beat you until you tell them. China is the proof of concept for that.
I used signal this morning to talk to a team of 100+ people on a big project. I sent an encrypted email to my parents last night. A month ago I used Tor to bypass a hotel's silly DNS block on "Torrentfreak.com". My laptop is running a linux distro that I downloaded as a torrent. These are all everyday non-cryptonerd activities that leverage very powerful security products.
n=1 and all. I think "almost never used" isn't far off the mark. All of this sounds like hardcore nerd territory to me, with the possible exception of Signal, which still has strong nerdy vibes and is very tiny compared to its competitors. Sending encrypted e-mail from Linux definitely seems to be something that's almost never done, at population scale. If that isn't crypto nerd territory, what is?
If you were looking for everyday things lots of people do that make use of powerful security technology, Whatsapp's e2e encryption or https would be much better examples I guess; people actually use these en masse and can do so all by themselves, without support or nagging by experienced hardcore nerds.
I had the same sort of attitude to the parent comment until I remembered that maybe you and I don't live in the same culture that the parent does. I mean culture here as group of networked individuals with overlapping interested. Maybe there's a significant portion of people out there that do use those tools on the regular, and you and I just haven't been exposed to them. The earth is huge, and it's very possible that while we think his n=1, from his perspective n->100%.
Sending encrypted email and using Tor to bypass WiFi is restrictions are very, very crypto-nerd things to do, and running Linux is non-mainstream at best.
Tempting. Sadly, if we let the sheep have their FB, the likely result will be that we lose whatever semblance of democracy we have left. Already we're down to one party that belives in free and fair elections. Our system depends on informed citizens, not massive authoritarian psyop experiments. The longer we go where the majority can't get overwhelmingly popular policies accomplished, the closer we get to turning to any strongman who promises bold action, no matter how nightmarish that would be for most people.
That is the US story. It has less to do with facebook and more to do with the US political system. There are plenty of countries who have very different systems that have not followed the same path in recent years. Tech companies are part of the problem but should not be made scapegoat to avoid the deeper issues within the American political system, issues that existed long before the internet was a thing.
UK Brit here. Countries like the UK and the US certainly have their flaws, but I'd take them before nearly everything else that's on offer.
China's system seems terrible. The whole of Africa seems like a corrupt system. The EU seems mostly woke, and I'm not sure I particularly want that. Canada seems to have bought a first class ticket on the Progressivist crazy train from what I've been hearing. What's left? Not much, by the looks of it. Singapore, maybe?
I’m by no means an expert in US political history but all books and papers I’ve read indicate that this polarisation between the parties did not always exist. Members were allowed to vote according to their own principals instead of just the party line which is basically always opposing the other party.
Senators and other politicians would have bbq on Saturday at each other’s place. It appears that this no longer happens.
Too much transparency. If thousands of eyes of gatekeepers are at you at all times, and immediately start screaming that you are a DINO or a RINO if you do not hold the party line at all times, you have all the incentives to be strictly partisan.
We generally consider transparency in politics a good thing, especially because it may reduce corruption. But it comes with significant downsides. Only very resilient personalities are able to ignore the psychopathic monkey cesspool that is the political Twitter. The rest will submit to Moloch.
(Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch" are a good read; I was lucky enough to meet the author two days ago at a meetup in Prague.)
I am talking about career politicians here, who usually use social networks to keep in touch with their electorate. Though they often have staff to do the lowly comment/response work.
Maybe it is a bad idea and a NNTP newsgroup would be better. Should be tried.
Deregulation of lobbying seems to have been the trigger, but any two party state with silly electoral systems like the U.K. and US is vulnerable to such polarisation.
Also "winner take all" election system combined with gerrymandering. The gerrymandering works short-term by helping you win the election, but it also makes you hostage to the more excitable and active of your party's members.
Sheep are interesting animals. I was in the Rockies last week, read a newspaper article about a female sheep who killed a bear who was threatening her children.
Temporarily shrouding oneself in Tor, DDG, VPNs, etc doesn't address the root problem: the commoditization of data. The next generations will have fewer and fewer tools to subvert the system. Real change will come from addressing the root problem rather than finding individualistic, temporary solutions.
The discussion environment is worse because there're more people online. Being online alone was a great filter for fruitful discussions.
At least we have Library Genesis and Sci-Hub, which fit the vision of "tech utopia". It would have been great if there's more stuff like that (I left out the vibrant open source landscape, because it also sort of existed in the 90s, in a (way) smaller scale though.)
There really is a gigantic portion of the population who seem to completely ruin everything they touch. It happens to everything that gains popularity. That root of the problem isn’t getting better.
Well as you get older, you are just more likely to be surrounded by the moan and drone crowd. Its just life.
Upto you to get out of that space now and then. Go watch the communities where kids are developing games, unity, webgl, godot, twitch streamers, VR/AR etc etc. That same energy and excitement of the blog and website era still exists.
It does, but it's different now. Back in the 90s people were excited by the tech, and the creative possibilities the tech afforded them. People would spend a lot of time making a website (home page) about their favourite thing just to tell other people about it.
That creativity still exists but now no one makes a site about their favourite things. Now it's pretty much always a play to get fame and fortune. If someone likes a show they have to "review" it to demonstrate their superior opinion that's worth subscribing to. If someone likes a game they start a channel where they play it live to an audience. If someone makes a game it's to try and make money through Steam Greenlight or Kickstarter. Even the creative coding scene seems to have shifted to trying to sell NFTs rather than just being about making cool looking things with math.
The passion to make things is still there but the motivation has changed from the joy of sharing what you like making to trying to make money, and that has changed things quite considerably. I think it's had a chilling effect on what people are willing to share.
> Sure, telcos sucked, but there were tons of them spread across all corners of the globe
Local monopolies rather than a global one.
What if there was a global, international messaging system available to everyone with a phone, that strove for five-nines reliability? And wasn't funded by advertising? And didn't deplatform anyone(+)?
Oh wait it's called SMS and everyone hates it, largely for good reasons. The internet has a lot of problems but it disrupted the telcos by being far cheaper despite using the same infrastructure while offering more capability.
I mean a reason SMS gets its hate is because the moment you send a message across international borders you start paying ridiculously large sums of money (compared to the amount of data transferred) for every single message. If you now take Europe for example where it's easy to have friends in another country that you talk to regularly and you can see why WhatsApp quickly gained in popularity there simply because it was the cheaper option.
Within Europe monthly free SMS to other European countries have been a common theme for a while. The main reason I see nether SMS not WhatsApp being popular today around here is how much more a app like Telegram does and how some of these apps actually protect your privacy. SMS is flawed, and WhatsApp everything but private.
I understand the feeling, but SMS really doesn't work. A the end of the day, it is just a hack on top of the telephone network.
There are countries were SMS is actually local to the carrier, and they don't route user messages out of their bounds. In the olden days it was fun asking people where they contract their phone to decide wether to mail them or message them.
Some countries have horrible reliability for SMSes, I think India is a famous one. Trying to do user auth over SMS becomes a nightmare.
Then the issues if you cross borders, where you'll be enjoying both countries SMS idiosyncrasies on top of the round trip costs.
Then carriers won't open SMS to non voice SIMs, even if they get an access to the network. But you'll need to meet specific criteria to get a voice enabled SIM.
All in all, it's a tried and true protocol in limited setups, but not something to hold as a global gold standard (I think there sadly is no global standard to hold on a pedestal...we can hope we make one in the future)
Tech enthusiasts never had the numbers to realize that world. It was the "It just works" users that determined how economic interest would shape the net in large parts.
That said, the classical internet is still there, it just isn't as buzzing as social media. I really appreciate that.
I think you had wrong expectation. I was 11 in 2000, when I got access to the internet behind my parents' back.
I was surrounded with shady people, learned the darkest of the dark of humanity very young and never had any utopia: people are monsters, women are always men, help is never truly free etc. Im not sure how it was before the internet, but clearly I never had a view of it as an utopia: it s a jungle.
Facebook and opinion sharing network in general are not very important: if people could be Nazi in 1940, Im not sure why you think it's different or even facebooks fault: they simply reflect what we are.
And nobody want decentralization of power really. People want power centralized closer to them.
For one, I think the internet became better and cleaner with time. Or it s me who get trapped a lot less.
Facebook and other social gardens took the Star Trek out of the internet
In a related thought that'll probably be when the next big internet wave happens - spaceships and colonies offline-first until a data sync drone flies by
>Now there is 1 single megacorp that a sizable portion of humanity depends on for phone/text communication.
Not out of necessity. It's not as if any one corporation controls the internet and has a monopoly on mobile communication the way JP Morgan used to control the railroads. Plenty of options to text and communicate other than through Facebook exist. People are dependent on one specific app because they choose to be, not because they have to be.
And "sizable portion of humanity" is overstating it. For the vast majority of humans, this was a non-event, or at worst, a slight annoyance.
People always had the option to avoid JP Morgan’s network of rails by walking or using a horse. But of course that’s silly to say. JP Morgan had built the one and only network. It was the fastest and easiest way to move goods and people so that’s what people “chose” to use. They “chose” it over options that vastly inferior. That’s what a monopoly is.
And I would encourage you to think about the long-term implications of monopolies. Specifically when it comes to inequality, inefficiency, and opportunities for innovation. The negative externalities go far beyond “a slight annoyance”.
And Facebook isn't the one and only social network, or means of communication over the internet. They don't own the infrastructure, and throttle all other sites into uselessness. They don't manufacture all of the mobile phones so that they only use Facebook.
>It was the fastest and easiest way to move goods and people so that’s what people “chose” to use.
Facebook is not significantly faster or easier in this regard than other solutions. A few years ago someone made an app that just texted "yo" and it got a million dollar valuation. An app that sends texts over the internet isn't rocket science.
>That’s what a monopoly is.
And clearly what Facebook isn't. Thank you for making my case so strongly.
> The negative externalities go far beyond “a slight annoyance”.
Not when it comes to the simple matter of being able to communicate with people on the internet. If losing Facebook means you in essence lose communication with the outside world, that isn't because Facebook controls all world communication, it's because you chose to center your entire life around a single application.
This was a non-event for most people. If Facebook had the stranglehold on global communication that many claim it does, the entire Western world, if not much of the entire world, would have come to a screeching halt.
Same. I started online in the late 80s with something called Wired Writers - we shared stories online with famous writers who critiqued us. At the time I didn't think much about it (I was a kid) but it was sponsored by an oil company. Now I think about it a lot. I went on to digitize libraries, set up university databases (Silver Platter etc). I think about how my nieces don't know that internet that we saw. It is because the form of our society does not allow decentralization. This censors the content. I think about that.
I remember the late 90s a little differently. At least in the USA, it was a time where most people used centralized networks like America Online and Compuserve, and instead of websites, brands would direct you to their AOL keyword. Everyone was concerned about the centralization of power, but there was a lot of hope about the possibility of decentralized information. AOL lost its power in the begenning of the millenium, but it was quickly followed in popularity of other centralized networks like MySpace. Meanwhile, the decentralized networks only continued to grow along with them.
Maybe the mistake was thinking that the Internet would either be centralized or decentralized, that one model would win in the end. The large organizations never gave up, but the small networks didn't either. There's no meaningful end to depth of the current Internet, and the decentralized part is larger than ever. Even Gopher space has continued to slowly grow. Maybe the only thing we lack is curiosity, and that's easy to rediscover.
> I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the dominant one: the Internet would bring a "democratization of information" where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world.
Thanks for making me feel depressed right in the morning.
I was just cogitating this morning on how the internet is also drifting towards centralised infrastructure. The mesh is becoming a star. It may be more efficient to stick a tube in my body to feed me. I am not sure this is progress however. In the same way "easy" communication and infrastructure may not always be progress.
If it makes you feel any better, it's not exactly just about the internet or what we modern folk consider contemporary technology. The question of societal transformation to a place where technical knowledge (in a broad sense) has become a requirement for basic living and the side effects or unintended consequences that it entails have been on the minds of philosophers since the industrial revolution. People have notice that the reliance on "machine" is going to change their world similarly to how the internet changed our 80s and 90s world.
Two very interesting things I'd recommend reading for a different way of framing this issue (but from the same perspective) that's been helpful for me. Both by Jacques Ellul. First is "Technological Society" 1954, and second is "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes" 1962. The second one might not seem related, but it is.
I would argue that the internet has been very good at decentralizing power. The problem is that this is what decentralized power looks like. There are a seemingly infinite number of groups flexing their collective muscle, generating their own realities, and even their own economies.
I get that the rich have gotten richer and corporations have gotten bigger, but in so many ways their power has decreased. We live in a world in which the most important force in modern American society is freaking 4Chan (QAnon). The billionaire class has lost the thread on how to control this. They try to put the squeeze on the Facebooks and Youtubes of the world, but that seems to have little effect on the spread of very insane but incredibly meaningful movements.
I some times wonder if the mistake we all made was thinking decentralizing things was a good idea.
This is not surprising in the historical sense. "The Master Switch" by Tim Wu shows how this repeatedly happened to industry after industry, with every disruptive comms technology bringing about a stage of unfettered, ebullient, and at times reckless innovation, followed by consolidation, monopolistic behaviors, and finally regulation where the govt essentially creates inefficient but necessary safeguards against otherwise monopolistic, predatory, large companies. It happened with radio, television, landline telephony, mobile telephony, Internet, PC OSes, mobile OSes, social networks, and it is not over. It is the natural tendency of capitalistic markets with network externalities. The saving grace of it is, and that looks rather unusual from the historical perspective, there is still a relatively effective notion of net neutrality (Chinese firewall excluded). This means it is possible for an upstart like TikTok to effectively challenge incumbents like Facebook or Snap in a way that competitive telcos never could have 30 years ago (they really needed govts to crack monopolies open).
Optimism about new media tech doesn't survive long when average humans get their hands on it. It's all fun when it's computer enthusiasts only, but when FB or Twitter makes it so even the least considerate, most highly misinformed, and most toxic individuals can reach hundreds of others...that's the other tail of the distribution, that's the snake oil salesmen, conspiracists, religious fanatics, assholes, jerks, and all the people we used to go online to avoid.
Tech is having a negative impact on the elites, which is good. In the past they could basically get away with saying whatever they wanted unless another elite wanted you to hear otherwise. Now when $politician posts something on Twitter there is a regular person calling them out on their bullshit right underneath within seconds. They are working hard to re-cork this bottle with censorship and such, but I don't think that will happen in most places.
I wouldn’t put nails in the decentralization coffin yet. The Internet isn’t really that old, and it’s a complex topic.
Technical platform decentralization is hard for technical reasons and the Internet may indeed contain a bias against it, but physical decentralization (telework, geographic diaspora) is a decentralization prediction I see starting to happen.
Physical decentralization was underway before COVID. The pandemic just accelerated the trend by years.
> where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world.
The point is that this was never true. Well for me as a person with strong technical background it used to be true. But for many "regular" people not so. And when the usability and difficulty was lowered for the others, it was no longer feasible to self-publish websites.
> in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!)
I was in the same framing of age and schooling as you describe, and in an affluent area as well; perhaps the difference between your technology classes and mine was that mine were not "ham radio oriented".
The problem is that these corporations don't pay correct taxes and corrupt agencies don't do anything about it. This is causing centralisation as they have huge competitive advantage over honest businesses.
> In the 90s we all thought the Internet would lead to a decentralization of power, but literally the exact opposite happened
I completely disagree.
Corporate power changed, and sure, companies like Google and Facebook probably hold more power globally than companies in a single country.
But, individuals have gotten more power also. People can be more informed, and affect more change than they could previously, which is both a good and bad thing.
The tendency towards centralization (corporate or state, doesn't really make a difference) is because of three things:
1) Economies of scale for machinery (in this case, computers, routers, etc.) Nowadays, Facebook and Google are laying their intercontinental fiber optic cables. Apple and Amazon are developing their own silicon. Decentralized can't compete with that.
2) Economies of scale for user networks. In Monthly Average Users we trust. Maybe a Mastodon instance works out for a small group of like-minded tech-literate friends. Realistically, small platforms just can't compete without growing into large platforms. Even in the naturally-decentralized blog space, medium and substack dominate.
...hey Carl, substack and tiktok are new upstarts, how did they compete with centralized giants?
3) Economies of scale for attention. Advertisements these days are pretty compelling. UI is important for online platforms to get mass adoption. Both of these things need capital to build out, and benefit tremendously from scale.
Add these things up and there's no surprise the masses gravitate towards centralized services, especially since they've figured out a business model that's free and "just works" for the non-technical user.
I know it’s hard for a lot of people but why do we automatically blame everything on Facebook?
The inaccessibility to WhatsApp completely brings life to a standstill for a lot of people across the world. Isn’t that more of a failure on the part of the governments, people and companies that exist there? How is a app that needs access to internet somehow a bigger necessity than the basic function of the device the app was installed in: Calls and texts?
Shouldn’t we focus on making those services accessible and affordable? Instead of demanding Facebook be responsible for everything?
We did focus on making the services accessible and affordable. Then phone providers and ISPs took the goverment funds and went "nah". As late as 2005 I was paying AT&T ~$9/minute to call my family abroad and up to $1 per text. If it weren't for tech companies like Skype/WhatsApp/Facebook/Google I have no doubt that would still be the case today.
>We did focus on making the services accessible and affordable. Then phone providers and ISPs took the goverment funds and went "nah"
1. I hear this narrative a lot. is there more to this? I find it hard to believe that the government gave phone providers/ISPs $$$ no strings attached.
2. giving $$$ to companies to expand their infrastructure make sense to increase accessibility, but doesn't to make it more affordable. they'll charge what the market can bear, and a few hundred million in government funding isn't going to change that, unless there are strings attached (see above). otherwise we'll end up getting better coverage/speeds, but it will still cost roughly the same.
> Ars Technica has a lot of reports about this, if you wish to learn more about it:
with all due respect, your links don't seem to be relevant. I skimmed the first few and none of them look related to the question of "did the government give phone providers/ISPs money with no strings attached?"
appears to mainly talk about unbundling rather than whether strings are attached to government grants/subsidies. at the end there's discussion about them wanting to receive grants similar to south korea, but doesn't say anything about the actual terms of the money that was given.
Comes close but seems to be isolated to a single entity, whereas everybody seems to think all the major players are doing it. Is AT&T taking the money and not spending it on broadband, in contravention of the terms of the grant? If so, was there an investigation substantiating this? Or was it simply a case of people expecting them to spend it on gigabit fiber but instead they spent it on copper lines for rural residents?
I don't know why you are so hung up on the "strings attached" part. It doesn't matter how many conditions the government imposes if no one is held accountable for actually achieving them.
>It doesn't matter how many conditions the government imposes if no one is held accountable for actually achieving them.
Is that what's happening though? Are there a bunch of strings attached but the FCC isn't bothering enforcing them? If so, can you substantiate this? At least from the batch of links from the parent post, the only requirement seems to be "needs to be spent on building infrastructure", not that we get gigabit fiber or whatever.
The major providers are notorious for not upgrading their infrastructure. The bizarre decision to "punish" centurylink by giving them $91 million is par for the course.
The absurd definition of broadband used by government means centurylink got $91 million and all they had to do was keep up with dsl capabilities. You'd hope that much money would get fiber to the home to a few communities, but nah.
>all they had to do was keep up with dsl capabilities
The terms of the settlement are bizarre, but there does appear to be strings attached to the money, contrary to what you claimed.
>CenturyLink will receive more than $91 million over the next six years to deploy 10 megabit-per-second download and 1 megabit-per-second upload broadband to 33,000 high-cost rural locations in Montana.
DSL is capable of the specs in the requirements. Centurylink has done basically nothing but maintain status quo and upgraded minimal copper and dsl connections. Wibaux montana can get satellite or dsl. Centurylink pocketed the cash and called it good.
Wolf Point has a similar situation. Montana is about to see about 300 million in federal funding and big ISPs are lobbying to slurp it up, and guess what they'll do with it? Probably bonuses for regional execs, and some marketing to make the local yokels think something has been accomplished.
>DSL is capable of the specs in the requirements. Centurylink has done basically nothing but maintain status quo and upgraded minimal copper and dsl connections.
right, because the terms of the funding seems to be that they bring access to new homes, not upgrade existing lines to faster connections. is this just a disconnect between what the public was expecting (ie. "dsl gets upgraded to fiber!") versus what was actually required (ie. "more people get dsl!")?
> This. If calls and international calls were acessible, whatsapp wouldnt exist
Whatsapp offers a whole lot more: read receipts, group chats, images and video, voice notes, location sharing, a web client (albeit a quite limited one), and it has a generally pretty good UX/UI (much better than Androids stock messaging app). Regardless of the economics, on a technical level calling/texting isn't competitive with Whatsapp.
"at the technical level calling/texting isn't competitive with Whatsapp."
This does not seem to an a comment informed about how the network works
VoLTE is better quality audio than what's app, it gracefully works in large crowds and countryside instead of degrading into individual sylabiles the way whats app does. Latency is 10x lower. There is no central server that cam fail like it did last week. Calling is an intrinsic, optimised part of the mobile network, replacing it at a higher layer will always be inferior.
Its the economics that moves the needly, my mom would have neber installed an app to get all the other fluff like read reciepts
With "technical" here I mean the featureset that's delivered to the user.
Maybe your mom doesn't care about the "fluff", but your mom isn't the person in society that sets the standard for apps that intrinsically require a network effect, and the people that do set such a standard, do care about what you dismiss as fluff.
"people that do set such a standard, do care about what you dismiss as fluff"
Quick poll among my friends, 15% care about read reciepts but 100% care about money.
My mom is about the median age of a what's app user, who are these magical people that set the standard more than she does? Based on what evidence do you believe their preferences are different to her's?
RCS tries to offer the feature set of WA and iMessage while engaging the mobile operator. WhatsApp and iMessage are "over the top" services that "only" leverage mobile data / TCP etc.
RCS was an awful compromise in order to pander to the telcos. Being a simple data service avoids a lot of the problems introduced by cellular infrastructure. We can expect all of the same functionality/robustness/compatibility issues of SMS/MMS.
There seems to be only lukewarm support for it from all parties involved. (Apple isn't even bothering to do much/anything, so that's a huge installed base where nothing is happening.)
Accessible would be the mobile networks allowing people to call overseas for $0.01 per minute.
I would not dare try to call an international number via ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile outside of Canada/Mexico, because I would expect to pay at least $10 for the call if not more.
I do not know where one would get $0.01 per minute international calls from the US, but it is most likely not as easy as an app on your smartphone.
Honestly, is there a good reason this hasn't happened yet? If people use WhatsApp, the mobile networks get $0, so they ought to be offering at least somewhat competitive prices...
Why and how would the telephone networks compete with $0.00? As far as I understand, the whole telephone protocol is decades old and involves various networks paying each other based on who knows what per years old contracts at years old prices.
VOIP from tmo/vz/att is still 100x better quality than voip from WhatsApp or zoom, I’ll choose tmo calling if it’s cheap or free over WhatsApp every time.
even then, with an unlimited (or semi-unlimited) data plan, the provider/ISP would have been paid at some point. Same with wi-fi, except that the user might not be the one paying for the connection between the wi-fi hotspot and internet, but the entity providing the connection to the WA servers would have received some money. In both cases, there's no direct relationship between messages sent/minutes of voice call and the money paid to the network provider, but the network provider still receives money in exchange of providing the connection.
Phone calls are essentially dead technology, kept alive by people who can't or won't install an app. Thus the price is whatever squeezes out the most revenue out of the residual users until the well runs dry.
In some countries this process is happening faster than in others.
Entire economies have been built on the principle that the price of a call or message is 0 and you only pay for data used (if any). That is the future that is coming, even for the US, but it might take a few more decades there.
But don’t you see what you’re saying? If the phone companies (TMobile, Verizon, etc) offered competitive pricing these apps/internet services wouldn’t exist! We would all happily pay Verizon the reasonable fees, instead they try to milk us and end up losing our business entirely.
I and my partner have several telephone packages that allow practically unlimited calling within Europe (which we regularly do) yet we mostly use Telegram and Signal because they are more comfortable.
Edit:// in my phone I even have a internet only SIM, without number attached.
not necessarily, because WA offers options that normal calls and text don't, like group conversations/calls, easier documents and picture sharing and video calls. I mean I have rather affordable texts for my usual correspondents, but I'm mostly using WA to chat with them
re-reading this, when I said "rather affordable texts", I should have said that I've got unlimited texts for contacts in the country, as part of my subscription (5€, got also 2 hours of call and 100 Mo per month)
There are tons of ways to make cheap calls from your phone -- when I used to travel internationally a lot, I set up my Android phone dialer with my SIP provider, then I could make and receive calls from the default phone dialer.
But now I don't even bother, I just call home via a video call using Hangouts/Meet or Zoom and use my local SIM to make a local call.
That's on top of paying for the internet itself. You must be young. If international calls are what you are looking for, calling cards and prepaid phones have been easy and cheap since a decade before these messaging apps. Then there was Skype and desktop messaging, and VOIP.
I kept calling cards in my backpack to make my international calls before WhatsApp and mobile data came along. But they are certainly not easy compared to WhatsApp, nor “cheap” compared to free.
Paying for the internet is not a consideration since people will be paying for the internet anyway.
I don't know many people overseas (other than my relatives), but Guam and the US VI are free from my cell, Samoa is 7 cents/minute. (unless I use my home VOIP provider, then it's 2c/minute if I buy a block of 500 minutes).
The demand is to not make Facebook responsible for everything. They shouldn't be in charge in what's ostensibly a public utility for most of the planet.
Calls can be listened to and texts can be read by Governments. In my opinion that's unlikely to change so there will always be a good reason to use apps like WhatsApp or Signal for communication.
Why would breaking Facebook down and regulating them solve anything related to the global dependence on WhatsApp? Aren’t the only people who know how to run these services already running them?
Like, do we expect the government to take WhatsApp away from Facebook and then create government contracts for companies like Oracle to maintain the infrastructure? So we’re back to square one but with the bureaucratic mess of the government involved?
The answer to all of this is very rarely “break it apart and give it to the government.” It might work for utilities and public works, but do we seriously believe that apps - the interfaces of the utilities - need to be regulated? I don’t get these arguments, and I see them everywhere.
It's strange that you're ignoring the massive area between "unregulated" and "nationalized" (which is where most companies fall already).
No one is saying to break up Facebook and give it to the government. The idea is to break up Facebook because they've been buying competitors instead of trying to compete. It is an attempt to make the market more competitive.
In the tweet's case also, if Whatsapp were split from Facebook, Facebook's BGP failures wouldn't have taken it down, so the decentralization has robustness benefits even if you ignore the market benefits.
"The idea is to break up Facebook because they've been buying competitors instead of trying to compete."
That seems like your own interpretation of the tweet. The author says in a later tweet that they think Whatsapp should be treated as a utility. That seems to suggest they do want Whatsapp to be handed to the government.
If you regulate WhatsApp so that it has to be interoperable with other IM systems (similarly to how email or matrix work), then not everyone has to be dependent on WhatsApp.
For one thing, many governments will have laws about availability of key infrastructure (roads, snail mail, 4G and 5G, wired internet, financial services etc.) which result in resilience decisions:
* Have at least 2 or 3 mobile networks; if 1 fails, people can still dial 112 (911) over the remaining one(s)
* If banks break down, you can still withdraw up to €xyz from an ATM during the emergency
* Even if all mail isn't delivered on all days, letters from the government or letters announcing someone died are still delivered
* If a city is "serviced" by two highways they can't both be closed at the same time
* Etc.
In some countries, governments (or utilities etc.) use WhatsApp in critical processes and communication. So just like the things above, WA should be considered in these contingency plans. Stuff like:
* WhatsApp cannot be the only contact info agencies have - they need at least a backup contact method
* Facebook should announce maintenance activities to WA to these governments in a standardized fashion
* Facebook has to commit to keeping (the main functionality of) WA free of charge
* Etc.
If Facebook doesn't want to commit to stuff like that - fine, but then the consequence should be that WA is no longer considered a valid tool for critical communication, as Facebook then clearly sees it as a "hobby app" that can go down for hours without real consequence.
When had all sms or phone service in your country gone down? Sure a carrier might have issues - but there are other carriers who can pick up the load and there are likely government contingency plans for just that situation.
The sms and phone service infrastructure is more centralised than you might think and carriers probably have less redundancy than big tech when it comes to it.
What I’m talking about here isn’t my WA group chat with my soccer team.
I’m talking about 911 being reachable, or about government communication with its citizens etc.
For these bigger use cases, there are contingency plans. For example, 911 will remain reachable via other carriers for you even when your carrier goes down.
For some governments, WA is in the critical path for these use cases. And you can’t route around WA as it’s one product by one company who is the sole maintainer of it.
this likely depends on the point of view. ie. if you count the offline hours of all telcos vs. whatsapp, sure wa comes out on top. but from the perspective of an individual, the availability of wa is far lower than that of my mobile phone network.
> It might work for utilities and public works, but do we seriously believe that apps - the interfaces of the utilities - need to be regulated? I don’t get these arguments, and I see them everywhere.
I don't get the distinction you're drawing? These apps are very directly akin to utilities like mail (usually government-run) or phone (usually semi-privatized but heavily regulated), and they're natural monopolies for which market competition can't be expected to work well.
No they aren't. There are hundreds if not thousands of competitors to these services. Infrastructure is just a web server. It is not similar to utilities like electric and water. They are built on physical cities which are controlled by the government.
Whatsapp is just an app. It just happens to be a popular one and people chose to use it. That's it. Just like ICQ, MSN Messenger, etc.
> Whatsapp is just an app. It just happens to be a popular one and people chose to use it. That's it. Just like ICQ, MSN Messenger, etc.
Hard disagree. In some countries, WA is used by the government for communication between them and citizens. And it is also deeply ingrained into the private economy for communication.
I'm making the assumption here that Facebook likes that the above happens and that their IM app is the "chosen one". But usage like that also gives Facebook the obligation to make sure WA works.
> In some countries, WA is used by the government for communication between them and citizens.
Last time I checked everything but private use was against their TOS. Other than that this sounds like a horrible situation the government should be blamed for.
The uptime of Comcast where I live is definitely an order of magnitude lower than any large internet site. I have no other options for high speed internet, which doesn't seem to be a particularly bad deal for Comcast...
Because some people think government is the answer to every problem and if you just regulate Facebook and by law they have to have 100% uptime - then surely they will.
These are also usually the people close to government or in it unfortunately.
> Like, do we expect the government to take WhatsApp away from Facebook and then create government contracts for companies like Oracle to maintain the infrastructure?
I would think it would be more like how AT&T was broken up into all the baby bells. Take WhatsApp, break it apart into 100 companies that must interoperate and see what happens.
This. The entire reason the acquisition was allowed was that it would remain independent. They lied about it so there's no need to honor that purchase. Divest immediately.
Also the author cites Palestinians and Israelis both relying on WhatsApp as justification for breaking down and regulating Facebook. Pray tell, if nationalized, how many nations would be impartial enough to let both sides continue to use such an (apparently) essential communication platform?
The parent comment spoke directly of nationalization. I was indulging their scenario, not seeking to argue with the original Tweet’s author or anyone in particular.
This would only make it worse. The reason barely anyone in my environment uses WhatsApp is because they don't trust them. I doubt they would trust the US gov more than Facebook, these days.
Facebook’s culture is “move fast and break things” the exact opposite of what you want from a utility used by billions every minute. Forgetting Facebook and insta for a second, WhatsApp really is the defacto phone and text service for many parts of the world: the taliban set up WhatsApp groups to manage things as they took over in Kabul.
Putting a little more maturity into their SOP isn’t the worst thing.
How often Facebook really breaks? I've had a much higher number of electricity blackouts and internet outages in the last decade than Facebook going down. Basically I don't even recall Facebook ever going down for that long, or breaking in any other way.
Why is the conclusion in that tweet "the billionth reason to break down and regulate Facebook" rather than "the billionth reason not to use whatsapp as the de facto phone and text messaging platform"?
I use Signal as much as possible, but here in Brazil it seems WhatsApp/Facebook has some deal with all the cellular operators by which the a) give customers "unlimited WhatsApp usage" that doesn't count against their 3 or 5 GB/month internet usage quotas, and b) give WhatsApp traffic preference when their networks are congested, meaning that sometimes Signal messages don't get delivered immediately but WhatsApp messages do. Really.
The "unlimited WhatsApp usage" as part of a basic plan alone means that Signal doesn't have a chance. Most people hit their quota limits during a typical month, and that means no more Signal messages/calls.
I worked at WhatsApp until 2019 and worked on technical stuff for the WhatsApp part of the zero-rating deals. Part A is definitely part of that, but AFAIK, your part B, network prioritization was never part of the deal.
Facebook does a lot of network peering though, and has PoPs in Brazil, so there's some potential that Signal goes over transit and WhatsApp goes over peering, but peering is not (or was not, when I was there) a requirement for zero rating. I think AWS may peer in Brazil as well?
WhatsApp likely works better than Signal on congested networks because of the protocol design, timeout length, and DNS fallbacks. These are things Signal could improve on. If your network is so congested that packets are delayed 30-60 seconds and DNS always times out, I expect WhatsApp to still work, but not a whole lot else. That's solvable for other services, but it takes time and determination and accepting the use case as valid and important. Of course, all that and WhatsApp was still inaccessible for a significant amount of time today.
Someone who can't spend 2
minutes to install a free private messaging app to maintain a social or personal connection to me isn't someone who gives a shit about me (and whom I'm presumably better off without).
Friends don't ask friends to submit to Facebook surveillance.
Would you be willing to install "a free private messaging app", Facebook Messenger, in order to "maintain a social or personal connection" to a person in your family?
Given your refusal, would you think that, for that person in your family, you would fit the description of "someone who can't spend 2 minutes to install a free [..] messaging app to maintain a social or personal connection"?
Would you think that that person in your family would be presumably better off without you?
additionally, android builds are also often shipped by OEMs to randomly kill apps running in the background, with an exception for whatsapp but not other messaging apps like signal and telegram
and irc folks have splintered now to irc4ever hardcore, matrix preachers, mastodon tooters, other small social media jesuses and so on. oh, and discord lunatics. Can't wait for that walled garden to crash.
Good thing is that there are choices.
Bad thing about the good thing is that there are too many and we're stretching thin.
That you're not tied to a single provider/client/platform... Also for some people it's just a nicer, more on point, communication platform.
But for most people the barriers are greater than the benefits, so it's not a viable solution in today's world.
How on earth is government intervention the answer to Facebook being down? How are these two things even related? What a bizarre place we’ve arrived at.
Supposing FB and Whatsapp are splintered when FB goes down then people will still be able to use Whatsapp. When Whatsapp goes down people will still be able to use FB.
Both my mobile and ISP have gone down over the years many times more than fb, and often for much longer (last year it was a solid week), and I live in one of the most connected points on the west coast.
> the billionth reason not to use whatsapp as the de facto phone and text messaging platform
Serious question, what do you suggest the general population should use? Something that still works on a 5-year old Android phone with no software updates in the last 2-3 years (at least), all free of charge.
Why is the attitude so prevalent in 2021 that the market is always the answer and regulation never is?
Every high-functioning society is built on a foundation of sensible and fair regulation. Over the past 30 years, we've seen a rise in truly transformative web technologies, and mostly we've left it up to the market to see what would happen. And what has happened has not been universally good. When will we decide it's time to regulate these tech firms?
I despise the company that Facebook is, and hope that it crashes and burns in ignominy such that by comparison we remember AOL fondly.
That said, I'm utterly alarmed by calls such as this to "regulate" Facebook. We really want to legitimize f*cking Facebook like that by nationalizing / turning it into a utility? Then we'll be stuck with it for-goddamn-ever
Let's stick to principles, enforce existing (or write effective) anti-monopoly, consumer- and data- protection laws.
And, I'm fine with taking the karma hit if even one person hears this: You. Yes, you, reading this. Stop bitching about Facebook and delete your account. We as a society can neither build nor evaluate anything better while you, and yes, I mean you, you specifically, reading this, use Facebook. Especially when you rationalize it by reference to the fact that everyone else is on it. Kick that crutch out from under yourself and learn how to keep in touch with friends, family and that cute barista without compromise. Delete your account.
> That said, I'm utterly alarmed by calls such as this to "regulate" Facebook. We really want to legitimize fcking Facebook like that by nationalizing / turning it into a utility?*
The govt is attempting to regulate Facebook by breaking it up, not by centralizing it. Facebook is guaranteed to maintain its market share if it can continue to buy and operate competitors.
agree, there is only one stab at the vampire, and it better be the right instrument at the right place
imho its the freaking business model that is the core of the problem. everything else (monopoly, poor regulation, dark patterns etc) are things the world has seen before, again and again
but we have never (in recent times) seen such amoral political and market endorsement of what is essentially a dehumanizing societal regression: they treat their (largely unsuspecting and ignorant or captive) human users as classifiable, data minable, bidable data objects. Nothing good will ever come out of that. This is a practice that simply has to be tarnished as contravening basic (digital) human rights and incompatible with any society that has any pretense to cohesion and fairness.
NB: they are neither the first nor the only ones following this heinous business model but their are its single most effective promulgator
I think the point of breaking down Facebook into smaller entities is to reduce centralization of operations, and thus the impact of single-point failures. The same conclusion should be made of a giant state-owned company.
Cloudflare and Whatsapp are not comparable. The relationships are different (CF provides hosting for individual businesses or services, Whatsapp facilitates person-to-person communication), the switching costs are different (most or all CF customers can on a reasonable time delay switch to a different provider with 0 downtime, while 'switching' away from whatsapp requires moving your entire social graph to a new app), and the impact of an outage is different (some or all CF-based services are degraded/down vs you can't communicate with anyone from your social graph unless you can reach them on the phone or in person)
Or for a basic summary: Cloudflare is interoperable, and the damage done by a CF outage may be widespread but it's limited to CF customers. Whatsapp isn't interoperable and an outage effectively shuts off wireless/internet communications for a sizable chunk of the earth's population. It certainly shouldn't be that way.
There are probably other ways you could combat this instead of just breaking up FB - for example some telcos give special deals to Facebook and Whatsapp so they're cheaper than competitors, and they're already often cheaper than SMS. You could fix that. But centralization can be fought directly on US soil by breaking the company up, while fixing those issues I mentioned has to be done legally on a country by country basis.
> Whatsapp isn't interoperable and an outage effectively shuts off wireless/internet communications for a sizable chunk of the earth's population. It certainly shouldn't be that way.
I agree with this. However, I completely disagree that we should "break down and regulate Facebook". We already have gazillion alternatives. And it's up to governments and people themselves to use them. This accident is a great reminder that people should have an alternative.
Well the 2003 Northeast blackout was started by a power utility in Ohio, and took out most of the north-east USA and even Ontario -- making it an international outage.
The 2011 Southwest blackout was caused by a substation in Arizona, and took down power in large parts of California and Tijuana (another international one, fun).
There was apparently one in 2019 in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay that was started by a transmission line in Argentina.
Not super common, but more common than you'd think, power grids are very interconnected and weird.
The premise of this question is that we know how often a power outage in Nebraska was caused by a power outage in New York. We don't know, and the conclusion should not be that it is not that often, but that we do not know.
If anything is vulnerable to cascading, domino, effects, it is electric grids: interconnected networks, even at an intercontinental level.
It would have been a well put snarky tweet if that were the intent.
>I think you’re assuming these empty moralizing statements aren’t just made for the clicks…
I am guilty of not immediately considering people who write these things as attention seeking virtue signaling consensus wanting idiots; I may as well be the idiot failing to understand what they're saying.
Social media and messenger communication should be based on common protocols allowing different networks and services to be connected. I should be able to message you on your application from my different application because neither are walled gardens and are under-pinned by a common protocol. I can phone anyone on any network anywhere in the world or email them regardless of their provider. This has to be no different.
Hardly a new idea, and I know such things exist in embryonic form, but it really seems like the only future I would want with regards to these technologies. Obviously the barriers to this are immense, how would you get Facebook to let go of its walled garden? This will kill a lot of businesses.
I'm not saying it's likely to happen but I still think we must strive for something like this. It wouldn't stop profitable products from being built but they would be equivalent to email clients. Obviously far less profitable than owning that user and their data. The social good that would come from this though would be immense.
"You have built, bought, or maintained a product which is vital to billions. It's a free service unavailable 0.01% of the year. For this you must be punished."
Whatever you think of Zuckerberg, Ayn Rand, or politics, it's unquestionable that Zuckerberg and Facebook have built, bought and maintained useful services used by billions. That's literally what the featured tweet is complaining about - Whatsapp is so crucial for so many it's like a utility.
This is so disingenuous. From day one, Facebook have done all in their power to make themselves a monopoly while simultaneously trying to avoid all of the legal restrictions that normally apply to a utility service.
FB is a toxic, sociopathic company, led by a sociopath. Full stop. Talking about its 'incredibly smart business choices' is like talking about the 'smart moves' a serial killer took to avoid capture for years & years. Interesting to some perhaps, but obviously not worthy of any admiration.
I don't think the point is being made from the standpoint that facebook ought to be punished, but from a more pragmatic one that no one private entity should be in control of something so vital
Shhhhh on HN you can't have independent thought, your hive mind has to hate Facebook for every incident even if it makes no technical or logical sense.
The Tweet is a good reminder how Facebook is a utility and more than a 'fun' app.
It's nonsense to then go it needs regulation due to this outage. It's obviously unintentional, and as you point out, outages are rare and it would be unlikely any government would have less.
It's like no one here has ever run a server and understands how hard not having down time is, so has to bike shed ohhhhh Facebook bad because of some other incident. HN really has a low technical knowledge base.
This is a clever troll. It's so full of ignorance I thought of reporting as a troll, but that would only serve to validate one of your false claims that one can't have independent thought.
The point ideologically is that society should not be so dependent on one private company. Government is regulated by the people and serves the public interest. Facebook serves only itself and profit.
Government intervention, so the theory goes, could mandate a market or set of chat protocols that prevents a single operator from dominating the chat sphere via network effects or by technical operation.
Does it matter? It is an app built by a dude. Facebook found value in it and invested. They can shut it down completely and no one has any right to stop them from doing it.
When you spend 16 billion on an acquisition is not just an app "built by a dude" anymore. To say nothing of the fact that even at that point Whatsapp was more used than FB's messenger tool (still is, I bet).
> and no one has any right to stop them from doing it.
FB can of course do whatever it wants to do. The powers that be can also do whatever they want to FB.
The main issue with WhatsApp as the primary platform of communication is that it’s exclusive. You can’t actually switch to Signal and continue with business because you’d need everyone to switch with you. Tech has yet to go through it’s ‘industrialization’ phase where one of the main advents was replaceable/interchangeable parts.
WhatsApp cannot be pointed to another network, it’s total vendor lock-in. Today happened at a non-critical time. If this happened during a hurricane, or any other disaster, the critical nature would be exposed.
Right now we’re just amused, but the implications are real. Facebook has way more accountability in all of this than just, as Zuckerberg said ‘Senator, we sell ads’.
> Tech has yet to go through it’s ‘industrialization’ phase where one of the main advents was replaceable/interchangeable parts.
I disagree, tech has had periods of exactly this. Open protocols and APIs meant that you could write against almost any app or service that used them and switch them out and replace them.
In the early to mid 2000's, this was the case for a lot of things in the tech world, especially when it came to communication and messaging. It's only recently that we've gone removed those open protocols and APIs in favor of proprietary systems and silos.
That spirit is still alive today in some open source software.
> Tech has yet to go through it’s ‘industrialization’ phase where one of the main advents was replaceable/interchangeable parts.
Not going to happen without legislation. Maybe not even with it.
Industrial standardization was driven by the US Army around and after the time of the Civil War. The Army wanted rifle parts to be replaceable by any spare of the same type, not only those from the same batch as the gun.
There is no large single buyer with "social" apps, and the incentives for vendors are to try to lock in their customers.
That's why instant messaging needs open standards like Matrix, which make switching apps and provider a nobrainer, because it almost wouldn't matter which one you would loose.
Additionally, only one of many service proviers would be seriously affected if a service goes down.
Yes, why shouldn't the next standard (like 6G) introduce support for a better messaging network than SMS? With group chats and image support. Each carrier could decide if you can send unlimited messages or a few thousand. In any case it would remove this dependency on a single company.
Late last year here in Australia, I remember ACT Health announced a major change to the territory's COVID restrictions exclusively on Facebook Live one afternoon and didn't update their website until the following morning.
Highly inconvenient for someone without Facebook looking to visit the territory.
While I understand the relevance to the tweet, at least to me, this isn't Facebook's fault, but rather the government's for using a private companies' platform, instead of it's own website.
I understand why so many companies and services are piggybacking on Facebook/WhatsApp, but they should always have a fallback, in case their single third-party service goes down.
The elephants in the room are the countless "governments" around the world that not only have sold their citizens' data sovereignty lock stock and barrel but generated a strategic vulnerability of major proportions.
In the name of what and why? Free markets? How is a total monopoly a free market. Modernity? How is this neofeudalism / neocolonialism in any shape and form progress?
Hopefully the 600+ journalists that just released the pandora papers (documenting the widespread deceit and corruption of worldwide elites) will also cast some light into how we came to be in this deplorable state (who benefited, who signed of, who didn't ask any question)
ICQ was once the king of the hill, then Msn messenger, for a short time google talk, then WhatsApp. People find alternatives, things change all the time
But every time there are more people than the previous time. This means it's getting harder for everyone to switch.
And then there's this: I have no idea about other countries, but over here in Russia, instant messaging got somehow consolidated over time. I used to have to run ICQ (as qip), Mail.Ru agent, Skype, and VKontakte (in a web browser) to be able to talk to everyone. Now Telegram and VKontakte cover 99% of my IM use. Some people do use WhatsApp, but not in my circles, thankfully. Some people have managed to delete their VK accounts without inconveniencing themselves and others much, but I'm not able to do that. Overall, the more users a social app has, the harder it becomes to switch away from it. Also — those old IM services only had one-to-one chats, but all the current ones have group chats, which make switching immensely harder. Can't imagine myself switching away from Telegram in the future for example.
I really don't get the point about WA outage being a catastrophe. WA pretty much forces you to put all phone numbers in your contacts to communicate to anyone at all (ok, except group chats to an extent). Why can't you just send an SMS? Why can't you call? Even if it is across the border, just send an SMS: "hey buddy, WA is down, install telegram so we can talk tonight as we agreed to".
I could understand the same argument about FB Messenger, I do occasionally talk to people I have no contacts except Messenger. But we also talk once a month or so, a few hours of outage isn't a huge deal, is it?
In my experience many people have outdated phone numbers on Whatsapp, since changing phone numbers on Whatsapp requires all your contacts to update your contact manually. This happens in particular for people that move between countries frequently. Why go through the trouble of updating Whatsapp to your current phone number, especially if you still have access to your old phone number for when you move back to your home country.
When you update your phone number, as long as you register the transfer in WhatsApp (as opposed to creating a new account) it's pretty seamless. There's no need for everyone to update your contact.
The UI makes you believe that is the case, but people that still have your old contact will send messages to your old number and you will not receive those messages. See also their FAQ on the website [1].
To stay connected with your contacts, we recommend you inform them about your new phone number before changing phone numbers and ask them to make any necessary changes in their phones’ address books.
I ran into this problem when I changed my number while temporarily staying abroad. After switching back to my old SIM I suddenly got a bunch of messages that I had missed from people who messaged my old phone number.
I’m all against the Facebook ecosystem, but no, Facebook doesn’t need to be regulated.
IMHO Governments should stop babysitting people on all the matters.
Relying on WhatsApp for anything important (like your business) is madness, and I hope this serves as your wake-up call that giving the US government and a giant US ad network veto power over your basic personal and professional communications is not a good choice.
Absolutely, plus I have seen a bunch of people going mental about not being able to reach friends or family because WhatsApp is down, when WhatsApp uses the person's phone number as a means of addressing messages, just dial them and talk to them or send them a text... People can be a little dim sometimes and forget that the primary function of a phone IS communications, and not just a platform for running apps.
Texts are super expensive and don't always work between countries, and are even more censored than WhatsApp, and can't always attach images or video or voice (or are even more ludicrously expensive if they can).
Entire Latin America relies on whatsapp. From government services and doctor appointments to pretty much any business there is. It is such a vital part of the infrastructure that I don't know what would happen if it went down. I mean I even got vaccinated via whatsapp here in Argentina.
This highly illustrated a point for me this morning.
My oldest friend is in a foreign country and has no support network. He left his job yesterday and was overall having a terrible day. He desperately needed me to call him, and WhatsApp has been our primary contact medium since he left the US.
Fast forward to this morning and literally in between “I’ll call you in a few minutes” while I was finishing up morning stuff, WhatsApp suddenly switched to “Connecting…”.
Error messages that appeared were generally along the lines of “you aren’t connected to the internet” although clearly I was.
Meanwhile I was completely separated from my buddy who needed someone to talk to. Until news popped up that FB was having issues I had no idea what was happening.
Personally this reflects poorly on WhatsApp’s design. The error messages don’t make sense and are inconsistent. Clearly their devs aren’t testing for this situation.
More alarmingly, it initially looked like chat was working during the outage. I haven’t confirmed this yet, but I sent sent multiple chat messages that locally appeared to go through while the video/audio connect options were hidden by the “Connecting…” text.
Luckily email still works and I was able to get confirmation my friend was ok, and we had a good lengthy conversation a few hours ago once FB systems came back up.
Why break Facebook down instead of requiring large social platforms to provide exhaustive open APIs?
The latter is much more constructive, purely technical, and instead of levelling field as a one-off actually lays down the foundation required for a heterogenous social tech landscape.
Meanwhile, the breaking down is political, and does not address the underlying mechanics that will keep producing these quasi-monopolies.
I ditched WhatsApp when I switched from Android to iOS and WhatsApp would not import my history.
I lost years of texting and image history, and just decided there was no reason to use WhatsApp if they can’t keep my history (possibly the most important part of texting including the images!)
Yeah, yesterday evening I could only communicate to myb Signal buddies, about 50% of my chatting traffic. Sadly, everything "official" (like kids/school related things) is still only on WhatsApp.
It's crazy to me that people can have this viewpoint. Facebook has built a product that lots of people use because other services can't/won't match it.
Then it goes down because things happen.
And you want to break down and regulate the innovator? I don't understand how that could be the answer. If there's a surefire way to turn a useful service into one that never improves again, this is it.
There are so many alternative communication systems besides Whatsapp and Facebook owned systems. Had I not checked HN and other news sources, I wouldn't have even noticed Facebook was down. I communicate domestically and internationally. I use LINE for international communications but there are plenty of additional options.
There are myriad options for communications. Being "regulated" won't make any of them more or less reliable (though probably will insulate them even further from competition).
It was almost like the fallout of in 2012 when GoDaddy went down with their internal network collapsing. Being a very large registrar, root certificate authority, and a number of other significant hosting resources, half the internet died that day with it.
I guess you can at least sense "what if facebook went offline?" if just by employee fubar, or if say the government shut them down China-style (or US probably ought to).
If you compare Facebook's uptime vs Reddit it is no contest. Granted, it isn't as widely used compared to Facebook Login, WhatsApp etc. but still it's impressive
If you have WhatsApp you used an email to install it from an app store and you have the other person phone contact. The solution is obvious, but social outrage seems more important.
Why do we even let corporations own things that we consider "utilities"? Seems like a case of people being perfectly happy with using a free service until it breaks, then it's all a shitstorm. If WhatsApp's mere existence is enough to warrant deregulation, what does that mean for platforms like iMessage, which fundamentally fill the same role?
I'm not confident in government to do a better job at keeping it up, tbh. I also wouldn't use a messaging app by my gov, if that's what you meant. Too many dystopian ways for that to go wrong.
I have several messaging apps on my phone, and maybe that's just how it is for now.
I think it would be awesome of the USPS offered email and Matrix services for free to people. I could even see it being useful as an official government communication mechanism. And every post-office would be an in-person help-desk for getting locked out or requesting any access help. Also, free 100kbps wifi, completely open.
Along with banking and check-cashing, making the USPS into the generic hub of "dealing with money and communications with the goal of public service, not profit" would be amazing.
If you have "several messaging apps" on your phone, I'd wager that you are using a messaging app by the government. Unless you have SMS disabled and talk to Grandma in her Matrix server, I doubt anyone is truly "safe" from government surveillance.
It’s not a utility, and shouldn’t be considered one, and the extent to which it is used as if it were a utility anyway is very unfortunate, pointing to substantial underinvestment in general purpose messaging and information management systems.
Which also were not a utility... Rotary phones are an interface to a utility.
But let's be realistic, the copper required to connect homes to each other required a massive public works effort. Facebook turned on a server and ran some PHP to stalk college women. Big difference.
I'm not old enough to remember firsthand, but I believe rotary phones (in the US) are generally from the era when the phone company was a monopoly and strictly controlled what was plugged into their lines. So I think it may be technically correct to call them a (part of a) utility and not just an interface.
Yes. The telephone in your house belonged to AT&T, and you had to rent it from them. It took a lawsuit for them to allow other devices to connect to the phone network. Today's vendor lock-in is no different.
Ah right so. Well if we're being pedantic like that, I guess my oven is just an interface to the gas line, and my lights are just an interface to the leccy lines. Guess I don't need to pay my utility bills, which is great news because they're gone through the roof.
I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the dominant one: the Internet would bring a "democratization of information" where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world. Really cool new services came online frequently. I still remember the first time I used Google, and at the time I was blown away by how good it was ("like magic!" I said) because the results were so much better than other search engines of the time.
But these days, the older I get the more and more I feel like tech is having a negative impact on both society at large and me personally. In the 90s we all thought the Internet would lead to a decentralization of power, but literally the exact opposite happened. Sure, telcos sucked, but there were tons of them spread across all corners of the globe. Now there is 1 single megacorp that a sizable portion of humanity depends on for phone/text communication.
It just makes me sad. Sure, there are pluses to tech I'm ignoring here, but I just think that how reality turned out so 180 from the expectations of the late 90s is what really hurts.