[lucaspiller]

Over the last few years there have been many open projects trying to displace the big names in social media, but none of them seem to have even taken baby steps into fulfilling their goals in becoming a widespread open standard. On the other hand siloed services, such as Slack, pop up out of nowhere and take the tech world by storm.

What is the solution here, because it just seems to be getting worse? I don't want all my data to be controlled by a single company, on the other hand I don't want to like like a hermit in a cave.

[bootload]

"I don't want all my data to be controlled by a single company, on the other hand I don't want to like like a hermit in a cave."

Follow Dave Winer and absorb the lessons he has/is solving ~ http://scripting.com/2016/11/19/fasterScriptingcomHomePage.h...

[TulliusCicero]

Free, open source projects generally suck at good UX and gaining momentum, and I'm not sure either of those is a solvable problem. Well sometimes you can fix it if there's a major corporate backer willing to fund a bunch of full-time devs, but that's not really consistently reproducible.

[jlj]

What if the corporate structure reserved ownership shares for the users, and/or per-impression ad revenue went directly to the content creators. Some way to keep control distributed instead of centralized, that is baked into the company charter from day 1.

[lucaspiller]

I don't think that would really solve anything. You can go out and buy shares in Alphabet if you want, but if (without the funds of say Warren Buffet) you think that's going to stop them selling your data to advertisers, good luck.

[jlj]

I meant something where the content creators are the owners from day 1, and are always the owners, like a co-op. Then any profits left over after infrastructure costs get paid as a dividend proportional to the audience size of the content creators or the ad revenue they generate.

Somehow removing the middle man that is Alphabet, Twitter, facebook while still providing the infrastructure.