I thought Elon's tweet was pretty funny, not just because "X" is already taken by X.com which he founded, but also because we already kinda tried an "everything app". It's called Facebook, and the reason why other social networks like Instagram and Twitter exist _at all_ is because Facebook could not keep everyone on their network.
Lest we forget, Facebook was the ONLY social network people used for a good long while, at least when I was graduating HS and entering college. You had Facebook for actual social networking, band/music pages on MySpace, and everything else was essentially porn bots and pedophiles, aka "spam city". So you have to wonder, if an everything app actually is a good idea, why couldn't the one company who had the most opportunity at the perfect time with as much funding as they could possibly need...not be able to do it?
Just because something works in China, doesn't mean it will work everywhere else. Actually, I would say that if something works in China, your best bet is that it _won't_ work anywhere else. TikTok being a notable exception.
> but also because we already kinda tried an "everything app". It's called Facebook,
While WeChat was adding features, such as an independent creator marketplace, or payment systems, Facebook spent time aggressively pushing online web games that almost killed their platform.
Then Facebook started going for attention metrics above all else, and it became an app that fed people stories that made everyone angry and depressed, but did a good job increasing engagement!
Facebook should have started cloning WeChat features years earlier than they did.
Facebook's other problem is their real name policy. Having to be friends with someone to message them seriously limits how many people I talk to through Messenger.
But as it is, Facebook Marketplace is winning. Facebook events is winning. Facebook payments, no, not sure how they messed that up. Venmo and a few others are duking that one out, heck Venmo is used at garage sales.
Facebook doesn't need hyper growth, they need to just keep current user's happy and coming back for things. It doesn't matter if they aren't the #1 destination for GenZ to post photos. If everyone is buying/selling used goods, and going to concerts, and arranging birthday parties, and posting a small selection of curated travel photos, then be happy with that, and keep expanding into adjacent markets.
And separate out "people I want to talk to" from "people I want to show my life to".
> Having to be friends with someone to message them seriously limits how many people I talk to through Messenger.
That's not a requirement at all. You can message literally anyone on FB, conditionally - there 'message' button is visible (exception to hackers). You can also message Zuck, even though you may not be friends with him.
HackerNews, where people talk about things they know nothing about with the authority of an expert.
You can "message" anyone you want, except that if you aren't friends it will almost always fall in some weird secret hidden bucket that most people never look at, and is hard to find even if you try.
If you share a direct connection it might go through, but in my experience not always.
> You can "message" anyone you want, except that if you aren't friends it will almost always fall in some weird secret hidden bucket that most people never look at, and is hard to find even if you try. If you share a direct connection it might go through, but in my experience not always.
YMMV! In the very recent times, I've sent countless messages to members in various Bronco groups and sellers in the marketplace, I've almost always got the response.
Messaging people you're in a group with, or people that have an active ad isn't really what we're talking about.
Try messaging someone Facebook doesn't think you have a reason to message. It will go to a different inbox that I bet half of users don't know exists, and even those that do check it once a year.
Isn't that exactly the problem? If I can't be reasonably sure that a message I send will be seen by the recipient, the messaging service is useless to me.
Its important to note "WeChat" was successful in China, which is not a democracy. State was already monitoring citizens every activity. Public knew about it. This is not a big deal for the public to combine real identity with sharing opinions. Anyway the are restricted by the govt.
This is not the case in democratic countries. Most people treat financial transactions and public opinion as separate entities. Commenting on amazon is way different than commenting on twitter. Integrating twitter with banking account is not going to be successful.
I would say that if something works in China, that's a useful heuristic to know that it should be stopped from adoption in the West at all costs due to anti-democratising technology.
The EU's biggest contribution to the internet in the last 10 years was forcing every site to add a popup, ruining UX while desensitizing the world, where it was transparent to everyone in the industry that if they wanted to do something they should have targeted browser vendors and not websites.
The EU's biggest contribution is the power it gave me, a simple citizen, to force* billion-dollar companies to not share and even delete my personal data if I want to, without a complicated procedure.
First off, thats not really in the spirit of account deletion in my opinion. Because you're making me pinpoint myself to another person that I want it deleted. Maybe I don't want a human browsing my stuff reading it wondering why I'm asking for it to be deleted. Even less privacy in my opinion.
But beyond that, it won't delete your messages. I guess they just own my words forever now.
> Because you're making me pinpoint myself to another person that I want it deleted. Maybe I don't want a human browsing my stuff reading it wondering why I'm asking for it to be deleted.
That's a pretty weird objection. Even if there was a button at the bottom of your profile page that you could push to delete your account, there's nothing stopping that button from notifying some real person behind HN who could peruse your posting history before deletion.
> Even less privacy in my opinion.
What "privacy" are you talking about? You've posted these comments to a public website, where any user can view your entire comment history.
> But beyond that, it won't delete your messages. I guess they just own my words forever now.
I haven't read HN's terms of use or privacy policy (I suspect you haven't either? Ironic, considering the tone of your post), but presumably, as a condition of signing up in the first place, you've elected to allow that practice.
As a fellow HN user, I think it would be really bad for the community if random bits of old discussions just disappeared, making it difficult or impossible to understand the conversation that was going on at the time. I certainly think there should be exceptions; say you accidentally (or regretfully) posted some personal information that should be deleted... I believe in that case the HN mods would do you a solid and delete it. And I know that in some (all?) cases of account deletion, they'll make up a new username to attribute your posts to, which would dilute any association the posts have with you (assuming you used a name that you've used in other places).
Regardless, there's nothing stopping someone from scraping HN (or using the HN API) to mirror the content of discussions elsewhere. And they might not be in a jurisdiction where you can expect to get your data deleted if you really want to.
To me, these privacy/deletion laws are most useful to force a corporation to delete any data it has on you that it holds privately, and could use to identify you or monetize you or whatever. Once user-generated content comes into play, it feels like a different beast to me.
Oh you got me, I didn't read the policy when signing up. Like 98% of people.
Yet from a site dedicated to creating the modern web, I assume modern web practices are followed.
Even 20 years ago in forums you could go through and delete your posts and edit your comments to blank. Add in 20 years of "we should be able to delete our accounts!", I had figured HN follows this practice.
Whatever, I don't care, I just make a new username once every few months.
dang can and will delete any post or comment you've made if you ask him to, and the FAQ literally says while they prefer not to delete your entire comment history they will if that's what you want.
Yes, although HN has a (transparently spurious) legal argument for why what they do is OK, so you may have to actually take them to court to make it happen.
The outcome is really the only thing that matters in a practical sense. The EU might have good intentions but they've likely been a net negative to the web as a whole.
You're proving GP's point. The EU's legislation left a doorway open so websites could bully users in to continuing letting them harvest their data. If the EU had gone after browsers instead of individual websites, this wouldn't still be an issue.
This is misleading. If only technically necessary cookies are used, no consent pop-up needs to be shown.
I can't follow your point regarding targeting browser vendors. The websites are tracking their users so websites are the right target.
They are not forced to make those popups because they are not forced to collect that data in the first place.
I will take those annoying popups all day every day and happily in return for everything else that's getting better only because of them and the rest of the effects of gdpr.
And it's still weaksauce. It's merely a solid start. They should keep going and do even more.
MORE GDPR PLEASE.
I cheer them on. It's a shame I have to rely on some other countries governments to do their damned jobs that my own isn't.
It's also a shame some of those same governments are also trying to censor porn. But this comment is about the cookie consent popups.
The pop-up is only necessary if you engage in shady tracking nonsense. GDPR does not mandate a pop-up for cookies that simply allow the site to function. Essentially, it's like blaming the flashlight for having made the rats scurry across the kitchen floor.
I read gp’s as: some people expected the rat problem to be solved, but found out that rats now suggest you to opt out of them by filling out a complex form every time you visit a kitchen. Idk, this frustration is understandable.
Every site chooses to uses a popup as a fig leaf to justify their unnecessarily intrusive data collection. Comply with GDPR rules by default and you don't need a popup or can defer it until necessary.
> To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must:
> ...
> Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies.
Defined as:
> Strictly necessary cookies — These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are necessary should be explained to the user.
It's entirely possible to have a useful website without requiring a popup. It's just not how most companies prefer to have the web work.
No, a popup or banner would be for requiring consent. A non-consent explanation can be in the privacy policy, or on a dedicated page that is linked in the page's footer or something.
Also, "should" be explained; I don't believe it's a violation of the law to not do so.
The GDPR is mostly good [1], but the EU is trying to ban porn and censor the web, which is wholeheartedly worse than the good that they've done. We should care about our privacy, but we should care an order of magnitude more about our liberty. One does no good without the other.
[1] In its current form, the GDPR massively helps entrench existing incumbents. Compliance is technically difficult and costly and can be difficult for new players just getting started. There should be more assistance given to startups and small companies, and pieces such as the right to access and export data should only apply to companies of 10 employees and larger (or some revenue threshold). These are costly and difficult to implement, and I know my startup is not in compliance. It would take a month just to build that functionality.
I think it's a lot easier to comply with the GDPR now if you're just starting out as a brand-new company. The difficult bit was if you were an existing, smallish company with (in some ways understandably) lax data collection/tracking policies, and suddenly needed to spend a multiple of your revenue to clean all that up in order to comply with this new law that was coming onto the scene. Big companies also had a lot of trouble getting their systems in order, but often had a lot more resources available to do so.
If you are starting out now, and you want to avoid trouble, you just avoid collecting data about site visitors. And when you do need to collect data (perhaps you need customer accounts), then you spend some time thinking about what it means to furnish that data on request, or to delete that data. No, it's not zero work. But it's a hell of a lot easier to build these sorts of controls into a system from the start, than it is to build it in later. I don't really work with web/full-stack frameworks, but I would be surprised if there aren't built-in or third-party modules for the popular ones to help with this process.
"Compliance is hard" when it comes to the GDPR is patently false. Don't gather data you don't need, and don't track things you don't need, don't share personally identifying data, and don't retain data you no longer need.
All those things are the default. It is hard to run into a situation where you risk violating the GDPR without actively making a decision to do so, with maybe the exception of the whole "users have a right to all their information/delete all their information" thing, which should be a straight-forward database operation unless you're doing something asinine.
The minute you have user accounts, you have to export everything associated with EU residents that invoke data export rights. Every table with a user foreign key.
This is a big scope.
Every upvote. Every comment. Every file upload. Even on your innocuous personal blog. Not sure if it's in scope? Hire a lawyer.
Any product imaginable quickly becomes a big GDPR data export problem and legal headache.
If you're a small company, then you probably only have one database with a few tables in it. If that's the case, it really shouldn't be a huge burden to be able to run a few queries to export that data. And if it is, then you probably have other scaling problems that are an existential threat to your business.
As an example: assuming a standard RDBMS setup with a primary and replicas, I would expect that bulk operations would be done on particular replicas dedicated for that purpose. That way you aren't interfering with writes, or with the "normal" reads that come with regular website use.
GDPR is a small step in the right direction but there have also been major steps backwards, especially with respect to encryption. They talk consumer privacy on one hand but discuss how to remove protective tools with the other. I'm not saying it is better anywhere else, but that we can't just say "oh GDPR is here, everything is alright."
I understand why people point to GDPR but I agree that it is misguided. Mostly Americans see the dark patterns (when I use a European VPN the experience is generally smoother). The much larger share of the blame is on the companies, the ones who got us into this mess in the first place. And there are egregious examples like StackOverflow which just have no excuse.
Governments have always lagged to regulate corporations, either because of conflicts of interest or plain incompetence, which is especially true for Big Tech.
But at least the EU is trying to some extent, which was GP's point.
> No they just made it peppered with useless popups.
The popups were a workaround the web adopted due to the lack of technical details in the law, but the law itself isn't to blame. There have been many fines handed out, which is a step in the right direction, at the very least. We should celebrate any step towards protecting citizens from corporations, not scoff that it's not perfect.
The lack of technical details was a good one. The pop ups was the solution the industry chose.
They could have gone with the do not track header, but they didn't although they still could and it would be okay within the concept of the law which just requires consent for tracking.
I agree, and nearly everyone on this forum could come up with a better technical solution. I'm not familiar with how the GDPR came to be, but presumably they had technical advisors, and still took this approach. Maybe it was due to corporate pressure, maybe incompetence; we can only speculate at this point.
I'm hopeful that the laws will keep evolving in response to citizen needs, but I'm still glad I have some control over the data companies have on me, however limited that may be.
I didn’t say any and all ideas coming from China are bad, merely that we should be cautious of anything that got adopted with a wildfire speed throughout the Chinese society.
These ideas get so widely adopted for a reason, and that reason is often that a particular idea thrives in, or reinforces, a totalitarian social environment. For example, “everything apps” are a dream come true for any anti-democratic regime.
A single point where all everyday transactions and information flows through, that you can easily monitor and influence to control citizens? And it comes with free network effects that mean you don’t have to spend time eradicating or control competing ecosystems? Very useful.
Yes, any idea that's enthusiastically supported by the CCP is antithetical to human well being.
For example China has done more to make lock downs impossible to happen again in the last three months than three years of trucker convoys and freedom marches could have done.
That's a very uncharitable reading. "Works in China" in an Internet context would have to include something about having government approval and being subject to government control.
I also read it with the uncharitable reading. I think if OP's intention was this, they shouldn't talk about China in such general terms.
Even with the "charitable reading", I don't agree with OP. China is ranked better on the gender inequality index than America. This would fit in with the notion of government approval and subject to government control, or lack therefore. Similar picture with self-made billionaire women. Does that mean the United States should strive for the contrary?
So China has a more equal gender distribution of both oppressors, and the oppressed? Indeed, very progressive.
The context for any general points raised by my comments is readily available from any online source of your choice. It’s widely known that in China, big tech intersects with anti-democracy, oppression and social control. I specifically mentioned anti-democratic tendencies in Chinese tech for this reason.
So then, should the useful heuristic include the US as well? By far, the most imprisoning country in the history of the Earth? Whose major technology companies have been clearly documented to be funneling user information to that same state's security services?
> we already kinda tried an "everything app". It's called Facebook
Before Facebook, we had America Online, and that had vertically integrated the browser, feed readers, search, file sharing, email, async messaging, chat, social networking, and the ISP. It was so integrated with society that we used to advertise brands e.g. "Go to Keyword NBC1999" and everyone just knew that was an AOL keyword and knew how to use it.
As best as I remember, AOL failed because it only offered dial-up access for the longest time, and users jumped ship to DSL. Would something like AOL survive now?
AOL was a mix of premium subscriber features and free features.
Its main social component, AIM, was free for anyone to use. Basically they were unable to monetize the primary social component of their network!
Except on mobile, where on feature phones AIM was a paid add on.
In some alternate timeline AIM could have become the WeChat of the west, AOL had all the needed features, but by the time technology was ready for WeChat like apps, AOL was basically gone.
They should have become WhatsApp though. Missed opportunity there.
People forget how great AOL was in the 90s, it was way more powerful than the web at the time. Great forum software, good chat interfaces, and tons of original content was being generated for it.
AIM is the only part of AOL that I experienced, and AFAIK was the best of the GUI instant messengers in that era. Sadly even today, it's either IRC or something written in electron, not much competition otherwise.
Sadly, I must offer a correction, my positive memories of AIM are because for later usage I was actually using alternative clients like DeadAIM and pidgin.
And TikTok is maybe proof that the "everything apps" don't work so well even in China; if they did then there would, by definition, be no need for TikTok.
Also Taobao/Tmall and Alipay is completely separate.
WeChat certainly filled in a lot of holes in iOS such as QR code scanning (which didn’t get native support until a few years ago) so it provided a sort of OS within the phone OS to get a utility knife of features being used in China that Apple neglected. But I wouldn’t say they have complete domination of all markets.
Keep in mind QR codes were a thing in China since the early 2010s, whereas the US didn’t start adopting QR codes until the later half of the decade when Apple finally made QR scanning part of the OS… because Apple was hell bent on making BLE beacons a thing.
So our “everything app” was iOS and Apple literally held us back by 5-8 years regarding QR code adoption just because of some corporate agenda…
I think the “social media everything app/superapp” characterization is slightly off the mark: A lot of those are private chat apps. It’s called WeChat, you know, not WePostPublic.
Yeah, I’m thinking it’s more like “extreme scope creeps in private real-time text console sometimes works”.
Like there had been the famous PizzaTool in SVR4, countless hacks over modern history with IRC, server status reports with pagers, prepaid topups over SMS, or food deliveries and micropayments with WeChat, on and on. The common denominator of those isn’t China or Asia. Sorry I didn’t post it as a top level comment, maybe I should have.
Because teenagers will always want to rebel against the status quo. It's one of those "nobody goes there anymore because it's always too crowded" situations. It's no longer cool to listen to that band because they're on the radio now and everyone listens. It's no longer cool to post on that site because everyone's mom is there now. etc etc etc.
At some point, moms will once again infiltrate TikTok to make the kids not want to be there. Something else will pop up in its place, and the process will start all over. again.
The biggest problem with Elon's "everything app" concept is AFAIK he has not explained what problem it solves, aside from capturing a lot of value for shareholders.
Reminds me of the TV show Silicon Valley. The technology was an easily copyable algorithm, but the business plan was an incoherent and vague competitor to a giant yahoo/google type company, to be built from scratch.
Yeah, if I remember right, their "connect to the internet" mode was a special dial string at the end of the dialup number that selected between normal Compuserve access, and Internet access. If you used Compuserve to get on the Internet, you were unable to access the normal Compuserve services through the Compuserve app! Not a great way to integrate. The only main integration point I remember was that you could use your Compuserve login ID as a full Internet email address.
(This was all back in the 90s when I was a teenager of course, so I may have gotten the details wrong, or just didn't know what I was doing when I was using Compuserve's Internet connectivity.)
Facebook is a very poor attempt at an "everything app" - and that's wholly due to who its founder is, his unethical tactics, and him not being a creative person.
Walled gardens and trying to control and extract as much wealth-value for yourself, and lazily to maximize profits and reduce effort and intelligence-skill-sophistication required, goes contrary to nature and how tribes work - where adequately sharing of resources, and arguably distribution skillfully with purpose, is necessary for [social] cohesion.
Facebook was so successful solely because it piggybacked on the VC and advertising industrial complexes and was first-to-market; externalities wise though they weren't successful - Facebook and what Mark created and maintains has been net harmful to society, and arguably to a very severe degree; though he's not solely to blame, other systems and processes had to be corrupt, captured, in order for the scale of harm to be able to unfold, cascade.
Well, I can't imagine any "everything app" that wouldn't have those flaws.
Anyway, most people fled Facebook because they didn't want a single identity linked to every kind of thing they post. That's why the alternatives keep their users even when they are owned by Facebook.
Indeed, it's difficult to easily imagine a platform that requires enough complexity to facilitate a relatively free market ecosystem where third-parties voluntarily integrate in reciprocal relationship; it's not straight-forward, not obvious, perhaps will be obvious in hindsight once the working model is clearly defined.
Re: "FB wasn't first-to-market"
What platform then first connected close peer groups via requiring a university/college email address for login, for the platform to then quickly associated those users with each other relevancy wise - leading to the network effects that quickly launched Facebook?
(Zuckerberg knowing that there only needed to be one such platform, why he lied to/misled the ConnectU twins who were actively paying him to develop ConnectU - to which he launched TheFacebook first to get an advantage)
Long before Facebook, even before MySpace became huge our small national social network (actually a SMS and logo site that exploded) allowed you to choose a school and show you other people from that school that you could filter by age. Everyone below 20 was using it.
Facebook could have been an "everything app" if they had bothered to really try; as it is they ate almost all small business/small group "websites", sadly.
> a very poor attempt at an "everything app" - and that's wholly due to who its founder is, his unethical tactics, and him not being a creative person.
This would also apply to any App associated with Musk.
Culture and consumer expectation is a big part of product/market fit. It's really only the current crop of SV companies that have sometimes managed to transcend this culture gap and operate identically in every market while making a profit. (To see an SV example of this bombing, Uber did not fare well in China or SE Asia.) But traditionally, companies like Walmart, KFC, etc. have had many failures branching out of their home markets because of a lack of product market fit.
China runs a risk of any sufficiently isolated economy; its consumer preferences start diverging from the rest of the world's. The intentional isolation of the Chinese economy through measures like protectionism and the Great Firewall only increase this risk. It's not limited to China though, Japan has similar issues. As an example, until the advent of smartphones Japanese phonemakers were producing increasing amounts of esoteric features that only Japanese consumers wanted.
Looking back at Wechat from how it was since ~2013, I think there’s a decent amount of recency bias influencing it as “the everything app”. It definitely wasn’t close to being as horizontally integrated until recently.
On another note about Facebook, even though Facebook/Messenger is still past its prime in the US, Whatsapp is like the closest Facebook-made Wechat equivalent because that is absolutely popping off in other parts of the world like Latin America. Literally everyone (people & businesses) use it as their primary channel of interaction on a daily basis. In the US it’s still not nearly as popular.
Facebook was also limited to JUST college students at that point which very much made it not an Everyone app. Part of the appeal originally was that Grandma couldn't comment on the photo your friend posted of you where you were passed out shirtless on a random persons couch covered in doritos
You have a long history of breaking the site guidelines like this. If you keep doing it we will ban you. Commenters need to follow the rules regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
Edit: dismayingly, your recent comments have been so frequently vicious that I think enough is enough at this point. I've banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Lest we forget, Facebook was the ONLY social network people used for a good long while, at least when I was graduating HS and entering college. You had Facebook for actual social networking, band/music pages on MySpace, and everything else was essentially porn bots and pedophiles, aka "spam city". So you have to wonder, if an everything app actually is a good idea, why couldn't the one company who had the most opportunity at the perfect time with as much funding as they could possibly need...not be able to do it?
Just because something works in China, doesn't mean it will work everywhere else. Actually, I would say that if something works in China, your best bet is that it _won't_ work anywhere else. TikTok being a notable exception.