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> Technological utopianism (often called techno-utopian-ism or technoutopianism) is any ideology based on the premise that advances in science and technology could and should bring about a utopia, or at least help to fulfill one or another utopian ideal. A techno-utopia is therefore an ideal society, in which laws, government, and social conditions are solely operating for the benefit and well-being of all its citizens, set in the near- or far-future, as advanced science and technology will allow these ideal living standards to exist; for example, post-scarcity, transformations in human nature, the avoidance or prevention of suffering and even the end of death. Technological utopianism is often connected with other discourses presenting technologies as agents of social and cultural change, such as technological determinism or media imaginaries.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_utopianism


> The real problem here is that YouTube has an effective monopoly as the only working platform for monetized online video.

Vimeo has their VOD service. It works very differently, but still...


Vimeo and Youtube are two very different things, like a sniper rifle and a machine-gun is. Vimeo is primarily a video hosting service, whereas Youtube is a publishing hub.


> Vimeo and Youtube are two very different things, like a sniper rifle and a machine-gun is.

That is actually a great simile. :)


I'm so glad Matrix/Riot.im is getting some traction. This and https://blog.status.im/status-invests-5m-in-riot-im-4e3026a8... may be two important steps.


> hello is the first social network built on loves, not likes.

I'm sorry, but this sounds like a joke to me. Loves instead of likes? Is this the first thing you want to say about your born again social network.

> I designed hello to help you connect with people who share your passions.

Sound very much like the “Facebook has always been about helping people make connections” mantra.

So, I guess it's Facebook with loves and mobile app only... Say what you want about Mastodon, but at least it's a real alternative.


I thought the same, but the portuguese version of the text offer a different view:

> hello is the first social network build on profound friendships instead of 'likes'.

So maybe it is a social network whose focus is people you really know well instead of companies and random people? I dunno, it's still very vague.


I checked and you're right. For launching an entire product, they're really dropping the ball in the first sentence.

I read the English to imply that the network is based on your "loves" (passions, hobbies, goals) but the Portuguese makes it pretty obvious that's not right at all. I have a hard time interpreting the English in any way that matches the Portuguese version.


>a social network whose focus is people you really know well instead of companies and random people

Funny, that was FB's advantage over MySpace. But, I suppose FB found it too limiting to only monetize real relationships.


The idea of the platform is to connect you based on interests. Do you love hiking? They will connect you with hikers.


It sounds like Pinterest to me.


> Facebook will be irrelevant in a generation or less.

A lot of harm can be done in one generation. Don't you think the history shows us that?


What history teaches us is that past generations have been ruined by serious things, like war, political upheaval, disease, and economic collapse, not by a frivolity in their social lives like FB.

Modern marketing has ensured that everyone in the US born after the'80s has grown up in an environment of marketing saturation, but modern marketing/propaganda was invented in the early 20th century. (Thanks, Edward Bernays) It changed our lives and the way we think, from Fascist propaganda to Coldwar rhetoric, and to the belief that orange juice is a breakfast drink and the engagement ring is a thing.

FB is one of thousands of powerful entities continuing the tradition, but of course, data mining has reached obscene levels, but FB is only one of many players.


While they're only one of many players, they are a big player, and from experience it's mostly boomers that use Facebook. They have a lot of power, but I do not think they should be broken up. Things have been allowed to be this way, and I doubt they will change for the better.


While true, I think it’s worth remembering that history is being written constantly. Facebook’s position and scale has no precedence, and we’re just now really beginning to understand what the consequences of such a position can be. Today’s event was historic in its own right (even though I think it was mostly unproductive).

We’ll emerge from this a little wiser, and maybe with some new regulations. Whether regulation is good or bad I can’t say, but this is all very much a learning process as a society and, to some potentially great extent, as an industry.

Frankly, I think crossing this line was necessary.


And even more harm can be done in the attempt to avoid harm. Ever read Sophocles?


I’m being extremely generous with that approximate duration of relevance.

Look at Microsoft. Windows’ golden period lasted from 1998 until 2006 with the release of Vista. With the release of Vista, Microsoft’s strangle hold on relevance disintegrated in a summer. And now what? Microsoft technically “exists” but who cares?

We are witnessing Facebook’s Vista moment right now. Donald Trump is Facebook’s Windows Vista.

Think about that for a second.


I wonder how many suspensions there are going to be before everyone accepts that data leakage is nothing less than by design.


RSS never (un)died for me. I run FreshRSS[1]. It works well on shared hosting and it runs on SQLite (no migration troubles!).

The best thing about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.

Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use https://twitrss.me/ to follow users. If you don't find a feed, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/).

[1] https://freshrss.org/


When I created my personal website I thought: “Eh, if anyone asks for RSS I’ll make it then.” To my surprise I started getting asked after the second article! It didn’t take long to code up (relative paths to full urls was the biggest hurdle—but not exactly hard) and it’s kinda nice knowing that people can just follow the content without having to be lucky enough to see an article go by on Twitter.


I am guilty of emailing or otherwise attempting to contact authors for a feed link for their blog. It's often because I have become really engaged with one of their articles, read a few more and developed a hunger to see their fresh work.

Twitter is just a firehose, but my aggregated feeds are categorized and hand picked so I am far more likely to catch content I'm interested in on there and therefore be much more engaged with it.


This has been my experience as well. Granted, my audience is primarily tech people, but man do they want a feed. I had no idea.

(I am curious though, I may just try using feeds myself.)


> The best thing about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.

Honestly, I don't think algorithmically curated feeds are a problem. The main problem is the goal of the given algorithm which is often trying to maximize someone else's profit rather than minimize your time reading the feed...

That being said, I am always amazed at the ability of my brain to go through my feed and filter the interesting out quickly.


> The main problem is the goal of the given algorithm which is often trying to maximize someone else's profit rather than minimize your time reading the feed...

True that. Sadly, that is the business model for the larger part of the internet. My use of RSS is partly a way of trying to escape that.


Every feed algorithm's goal is to maximize someone else's profit. Ergo, feed algorithms are the problem.


Did RSS ever die?

I've migrated from Google Reader to TTRSS when I was forced to make a change.

Then a few months ago TTRSS started to act up and started making bold claims like "your database doesn't respond" so I moved over to FreshRSS which was a much bigger improvement than I thought that it would be to begin with.

Runs fine using Postgres as a database.


> Then a few months ago TTRSS started to act up and started making bold claims like "your database doesn't respond"

Oh, exactly what happened to me. All kinds of strange errors, especially after upgrades. I eventually gave up and found FreshRSS. Been running (and updating) it over a year, without a single problem.


Thanks for the twitrss.me link -- I don't use Twitter, but I follow a couple of journalists who do, and my RSS reader is much better than Twitter's website, with its semi-random threading and light-boxes. I've run NetNewsWire since forever, and it's easy to add a few Twitter feeds in their own folder. If I have time, I'll scan through them; if not, Command-K and they're all gone.

This article really overstates RSS's problems, and underestimates "users," who it seems to view as epsilon semi-morons attached to credit cards. On the reader side, it's simply not that hard to control the rate of things you receive, and to quickly scan them for things you want to read. On the publisher side, it's trivial to keep track of the number of people subscribed to your feed(s). And if you want to know how long each of them spent on each article, and where their mouse cursor and eyeballs pointed that whole time, then too bad -- you are part of what's wrong with today's media ecosystem.


Twitter offered a RSS feed directly. But they disabled it, with their "new" API, because of some bogus reason.


They had a very simple reason, they can't show ads in the RSS feed.


There's nothing stopping ads in RSS feeds, just tracking. Those should be separate things.


>There's nothing stopping ads in RSS feeds, just tracking. Those should be separate things.

Bingo. Plenty of my RSS feeds have ads, they just publish them as articles and say "This RSS feed is sponsored by. . ."

It's the same ad model as podcasts basically.

Other ones just give you an abstract or short blurb on your feed with a link to go back to the main site, which works just as well.


I always thought of a "marketing" "reason". Like "we want people on our site" which is not the case when a user reads postings with a RSS reader. At the same time they restricted apps more. Which, was probably because ads.


Just curious, is there advertising in the YouTube Kids app?


nope!


Realistically, if they don't care about users data, what hinders them from collecting data on .grindr.com and grindr.mobi and sharing with third-parties?


> The law isn't in effect yet.

Sort of, kind of.

http://dbsdata.co.uk/blog/gdpr-2018-deadline-red-herring/


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