[galistoca]

Ever thought about whether the assumption that having control over what your see on your Facebook feed might be incorrect?

If we're talking about the ideal world that may be true, but the real world is far from perfect. If you ask 100 people do you want to live a meaningful life, probably 99 of them will say yes. But do they? Probably 1 out of those 100 will live a meaningful life. If you ask people do you want to be told what to do, or do you want to do what you want, most of them will say they want to do what they want. But in reality most people just want to be told what to do because making decisions and being responsible for it is not an easy thing.

Coming back to Facebook feed, there's a reason why people keep using Facebook even though many people hate it. Sure it's not ideal but there will never be an ideal world. I think the reason why most "decentralization" advocates never succeed is exactly because they're being too ideal (read naive) about this.

That said I think the pendulum will swing back someday in the future surely, it just won't be by these guys. It will be from some random technology which didn't even aspire to "disrupt" the web.

[ZenoArrow]

> "But in reality most people just want to be told what to do because making decisions and being responsible for it is not an easy thing."

As I said before, content could be curated by apps. You could choose the apps that present the information in the way you like. The difference is, if a better app comes along you can switch to it without losing your past data because all the data would be application-agnostic, there's a greater degree of separation between the raw data and the presentation of that data.

[freshhawk]

I think it's just about network effects. Everyone is on Facebook because everyone is on Facebook.

Although network effects work the other way as well, when people start leaving social networks they collapse exponentially just like they grew exponentially.