This is IMO one of the greatest dangers of leaving those huge corporations like Facebook, Google, Amazon etc. unchecked - they're starting to attack competition by leveraging their primary products (Amazon blocking Chromecasts, Facebook censoring links and pages about their lawsuits are two latest cases) and are working deliberately against interests of greater public (and capitalism itself if we can stretch that :) )
I think it's slowly high time the anti-monopolistic regulation looks into their business practices and starts considering cutting them up into discrete companies per market.
It is not the anti-monopolistic authorities (who are part of the system, anyway), but WE_THE_PEOPLE who need to do something, so that competition is assured. WE need to keep switching services and not let one service rule everything.
Be it messengers, social networking apps, eCommerce stores, ERP software, anything - If we choose one organization to rule them all, it won't be very long before they start showing the traits of that one Saruman's ring that rules them all.
Yeah, that's not going to happen. The majority of "We the people" is made up of those who take the path of least resistance.
Facebook, by doing things like this, will only hurt themselves. We've been down this road before with Microsoft. It is anti-trust, and will get them in a lot of trouble.
It is anti-monopolistic authorities only purpose to do just that. And it is an important role to keep the economy running healthy. But I agree to an extend as I think that we also need to choose more actively to get better products. Each kind of action happens at a different level and they aren't mutually exclusive.
We the people have invented these authorities a long time ago precisely because we the people suck at making individual decisions to improve global outcomes, and we need to organize ourselves in institutions such as these to fix things.
What's the problem with not helping your competitor? Telegram can use that ("censoring") as marketing if they know how to play it. People wanting to tell others what to do and how to operate their business calling themselves "capitalists" is hilarious.
If nothing else, it's that the users get pulled into some braindead power struggle between two companies that they could care less about. Yet they are the ones who find that they cannot use the products anymore properly. Moves like this decrease the quality of both your product and your competitor's. Yet the whole sense of competition in capitalism is supposedly to increase quality.
Of course that's just the obvious consequences, ignoring the larger implications of allowing companies to place arbitrary restrictions on their services - when at the same time those services become more and more critical infrastructure.
Generally in a competitive market, you have one company selling product / service X and a competitor selling service Y which does something similar.
This is fine.
However online communication is different. Imagine if the telephone company would bleep out any time your friend mentions a competitor's company. You'd never know a competitor exists. Especially if that competitor is up-and-coming and doesn't have the pockets to send flyers to every damn house in the state.
We have many like Google plus, twitter, linkedin, reddit and even hacker news (catering to a specific niche). Problem here is that too many people whom we may call "less tech savvy" won't leave FB. So, in order to stay "compatible" with them, we need to keep our FB accounts active!
Reddit and Hacker News are rather content aggregators rather than social networks. Google+ and Twitter have the same issues than Facebook on these specific issues. LinkedIn is a bit too specialised for professional messages and they too like Google+ and Twitter don't have a great track record concerning privacy and abusing their position.
Reddit may have started as a content aggregator, but there are plenty of subs that mostly or only have original/self-posted content. talesfrom*, various hobby groups, support groups, crowd-sourced advice columns like legaladvice or relationships.
None listed by you come even close to what Facebook offer to majority of users. Linkedin is work environment and people wont go personal there, Twitter is just status update thing that really tries to become something bigger but fail to see what people outside their user base want and Google Plus is a joke - I am to this day surprised that they created it as Facebook killer, not as LinkedIn killer since obviously it is corporate style network, not a place where you go after the work, relax and see funny pictures.
Back when I played Ingress, most city-level activity was coordinated through private G+ communities (with neighborhood-level activity being done in Hangouts group chats), and the more social stuff (i.e., the stuff you don't care about keeping secret from the Smurfs) tended to happen in public G+ communities.
LinkedIn is a good tool for viewing someone's public resume, though I don't regularly log into it. Every once in a while, I'll log in to check out how a previous employer is doing (e.g. see which of my ex-coworkers are still at the company, what new positions have been created, etc.). I still have dozens of unanswered connection requests from recruiters, though (I don't accept people I don't know), and the site has gotten progressively spammier over the years.
This is a great comment, because it leads in right to the heart of the problem. Why is running a server so hard? This is actually really weird -- the cloud should mean that you can set up a server with a single click.
Of course, a Linux VPS needs a fair amount of love (fiddling with settings, updating, and so on). But there are other ways: https://sandstorm.io/
The heart of the problem is not publishing, it's discovery and curation. Grandma is not going to visit 20 dedicated servers for her grandkids picture fix, she needs it accessible in one place. But then how do you safeguard that place from the likes of games notifications and various spammy/fraudulent apps taking over?
> Grandma is not going to visit 20 dedicated servers for her grandkids picture fix, she needs it accessible in one place.
This is certainly a problem. If only there was some kind of . . . mechanism . . . by which her computer could collect photos off her friends servers and display them locally? Sounds almost impossible!
(Sorry for giving you a hard time:-) I appreciate your comment, but think that's a very solvable problem in practice.)
Your comment actually deserves a better response than I gave it. Spam is the open protocol killer. It's a totally serious issue. If our goal was to replicate HN or Reddit via only personal servers, I would be pretty dang paranoid about getting our anti-spam solution perfect:/
Happy in the case of Facebook-on-personal-servers, we have all the advantages and the spammers have all the disadvantages. Social network's main purpose is communication between people who know each other. Ignoring the Pages part of FB (which is really more Reddit-like than it is essential to a social network) communication happens between friends, or friends of friends commenting on photos or whatever. Spammy friend requests will be a problem, but that's not too big of a deal.
And then, once that's done . . . ahhhh. Your own filtering software, blocking game notifications to your heart's content (since it's your own server you can install whatever filter you want, though of course there will be good defaults). Guess where most of the unwanted posts on Twitter or Snapchat come from for me . . . Twitter and Snapchat. No more!
Sandstorm is interesting, but fundamentally the dichotomy is "leave the running to someone else" vs. "spend significant time and effort acquiring the skills to make your own administrative decisions".
If you're running on someone else's platform and automatically accepting updates, are you really "administering" it yourself?
A majority of people will never develop any real skill level at administering servers. We still need them to be able to use reasonably humane software though, because the consumer software industry revolves around them. If they continue to be easy pickings for predatory software (lock-in, etc.) the incentive for industry will be to continue improving at making predatory software . . . not ideal.
So empowering normal users (even partially, Sandstorm certainly doesn't give as much freedom as becoming a unix guru or whatever) is good for expert users too.
Thanks:) I really feel like this is the core issue here. People complain a lot about Facebook, but what would happen if by some heroic, Odyssey-worthy effort they actually get people to switch to some other social network?
. . .
The exact same thing. The exact same thing would happen, because the new social network would have _exactly the same incentives_ as facebook.
I have some more thoughts on this here: http://housejeffries.com/page/3 Not sure how clear my writing is, but the "Inspiration" section at the end has some links to great projects trying to fix this problem.
I think it's slowly high time the anti-monopolistic regulation looks into their business practices and starts considering cutting them up into discrete companies per market.