Ask HN: Why are there no public social networks?

[nrvslghtnng]

(Not as in "going public".)

Why have we not seen a publicly-operated social network?

It strikes me that enabling people to connect with one another is fundamental to most governments as a public service. Cities and states make and fund roadways and public squares and parks. Social networks seem like an approximate digital parallel.

Given everything that's happened with Facebook and Twitter in the last months, why are there no examples of government-run social networks?

(Or, if there are, what are they? How do they work?)

edited the title for breadth

edit 2: thanks for sounding in! A lot of great answers. To be clear, I didn't mean to present this as a leading question. I was curious about the perceived reasons from HN's audience.

[roymurdock]

You need roads, bridges, water, electricity, and garbage collection to fulfill basic physiological needs, and also so you can swap menial tasks for higher level work/spending time with family/enjoying a better standard of living.

Framing in Maslow's pyramid [1]: Many of the goods/services the gov provides fulfill either level 1 physiological needs or level 2 security needs.

Social networks fulfill level 3 and 4 needs: love/belonging, and esteem.

We aren't yet at the point where we as a society decide we need to dedicate collective resources (taxes) to level 3 and 4 needs, especially while our level 2 and 1 services/goods aren't improving at the rate with which they did in the 20th century, and are in some cases deteriorating/being privatized.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow#/media/File:Mas...

[ninjakeyboard]

I like this answer. It presents a framework for reasoning about why it turned out the way it has, and why it likely won't change.

I think also the motivation for (advertising) profit is what is driving the innovation on the other side.

[dredmorbius]

People will choose communications over very nearly all other services. Author and historian Shelby Foote makes note of this in his anthology Jefferson County, observing homes wired for telephone service before they had electricity, circa 1910.

[ARothfusz]

I disagree. A large part of public schooling relates to love/belonging and esteem. Go $mascots! Science fairs, glee club, language clubs. Learning to organize support for causes. Learning to drive (there's a big social network!). And, indirectly, the zillion school newspapers and (I imagine), school websites.

We've been doing those things for a few generations now, but they haven't led to public newspapers. I don't know why we would expect them to lead to public electronic social networks.

[golemotron]

A slightly different framing:

https://www.livehouseautomation.com.au/blogs/news/75760388-w...

[douglaswlance]

Social networks fulfill all needs.

That is why the ultimate form of punishment in our society is to isolate the individual from all human contact.

Humans do terribly in an environment without other people.

Why does it matter that the medium is digital?

[zild3d]

> Social networks fulfill all needs.

not physiological needs... food, shelter, water, sleep, etc

> That is why the ultimate form of punishment in our society is to isolate the individual from all human contact.

it is a severe punishment, but again not as crucial as physiological needs. most would (and should) choose isolation from human contact for much longer than isolation from water

> Why does it matter that the medium is digital?

You can't eat it

[rootlocus]

> That is why the ultimate form of punishment in our society is to isolate the individual from all human contact.

I would've thought the ultimate form of punishment is execution. If you were talking about life in prison however, I think the reason is to keep the other people safe, not to inflict psychological pain on the convicted.

[sbjs]

All the other answers are great, but I think they're missing the biggest and most important reason: a social network run by any government entity would only run on Internet Explorer 6 or Firefox 2, would store your password in plain text, and would run on 15-year-old un-patched IIS on a few Windows XP servers stored in the basement of city hall. And it would probably all be built on top of a deprecated social media Wordpress plugin.

[Balero]

The meme that (all) government is terrible at technology is getting tired. It is not necessarily true that a publicly run system will inevitably be crap/inefficient/archaic. A good example is the British gov.uk group, who have made some well thought out, usable and technologically sound systems.

Please stop perpetuating this lie. You can, and should expect better of your public digital systems. Don't let them use "Public tech must be bad" as an argument.

[kodablah]

Is there a meme that we can use for "most" or is it a lie because you can find outliers so every single government entity technically isn't terrible at technology? What I grow tried of is the defense of general government ineptness using outliers.

Can't call a spade a spade because of the minuscule amount of times it might be a shovel. I suppose when making the comment GP made, they have to put an asterisk to say "most" lest the first comment immediately point out that there are exceptions.

[Balero]

It's the expectation that I dislike. Feels like people are resigned to poor systems.

"Hey most public stuff is crap, this is bad" - Fine by me. "Don't make that public, it'll be bad because public stuff is bad" - Not fine. Also it implies the inverse, that private is always good, or at least better.

Good is good. Better is better. Private can be good, and is best for most things. Public can be good, and is best for some things.

[kodablah]

Sure, yet another way to say "expectation" at this point is learning from past mistakes. Is it fine to say "don't give these institutions money that have made bad public stuff"?

I think the only reasonable answer here is to require the public entity making/maintaining such a system organically grow the system as a private company would. That is difficult to do with a public coffer because, while altruistic motivation may exist individually, as a whole waste will often take hold. Oddly enough, unlike the private sector, the only way to do this without large amounts of public waste is to not grow employee-wise.

Kind of a tangent, but in summary, take a small, focused set of devs, build a the system with features you want, and resist the urge to grow the feature count (beyond reason) and only grow the maintenance employee count, not the development employee count. And don't politicize it (however one does that).

[sshine]

Tired but true.

There are good examples of government IT infrastructure done right (e.g. https://e-estonia.com), but the economics is stacked against them in many ways.

It doesn't have to be bad, but it almost always is.

[cabalamat]

> The meme that (all) government is terrible at technology is getting tired.

And obviously wrong, when you consider the origins of the computer, the internet and the WWW.

[MrEfficiency]

What happens in a country 1/5 the size in population and 1/10 the size economically shouldnt be expected to perform the same on something literally 10x bigger.

You likely are much closer to your political representatives than we are. The amount of money flowing into your politicians pockets are less.

Here I expect the government contract to be unfavorable to the population at large. I expect the leading politicians to benefit greatly and the company contracted to do a subpar job that barely meets specifications.

I trust my local government, but I do not trust the federal government to be competent.

[Balero]

In the UK, voters are a fair bit closer to MPs than people in the US (where I currently live) are to their congress representatives. Though much much further from Members of the House of Lords than from Senators. However there is a complete missing segment of local politics that exists in the US, and that has good engagement, that is much less powerful/engaging in the UK (State and city level, compared to County/city Councils)

Comparing like for like in size and budget, shouldn't the larger states, eg Texas and California have good state level systems. And then the slightly small, but still well funded ones (such as Florida and New York) should have better systems?? I'm assuming that there is a lower limit for the system quality/population size trade off, where it stops being beneficial.

There are also some parts of the US government that have pretty good systems as far as I'm aware, in the military and security.

"The amount of money flowing into your politicians pockets are less." This is absolutely true, the amount of corruption in US politics is astounding.

I disagree that just being bigger leads to worse technology and systems. There are numerous, different reasons they are bad, and this is not directly linked to the size.

[clintonb]

USDS and 18F are staffed by confident people from industry. The federal government, when it comes to software, is not as incompetent as you think.

[dragonwriter]

An organization staffed by competent people that reports to people that are neither competent in the relevant domain nor willing to defer to those that are remains, as an organization, incompetent. As USDS and 18F are both in the executive branch entities, their organizational competence is limited by the leadership of executive branch; this is particularly true of USDS, which is in the Executive Office of the President.

[MrEfficiency]

This is literally the problem.

Instead of having a department make software, they are supported from a vastly superior group of developers that work temporarily with that department.

Maybe its too much to ask, but shouldnt the company providing the software also employ the talent that is used to make the software?

[dragonwriter]

At least part of the original idea for those entities was to serve as a cadre to improve competence government wide.

Having some experience with why government lacks organizational development competence (TLDR; short-sighted management with the wrong goals), I don't think they can do that—they literally are addressing the wrong problem—but the idea wasn't to be a silo of technical skill.

[eugeniub]

Much unlike today's social media networks, which have never had any massive privacy or security scandals.

[orblivion]

And it would be certified secure.

[symlock]

There are government run (even if by proxy) social networks. The are worse that Facebook.

https://vk.com/ is government run.

The Chinese "Credit Score" is run by Alibaba and Tencent, which run all the social networks in China and therefore have access to a vast amount of data about people’s social ties and activities and what they say. In addition to measuring your ability to pay, as in the United States, the scores serve as a measure of political compliance. Among the things that will hurt a citizen’s score are posting political opinions without prior permission, or posting information that the regime does not like.

There are plenty more too. Just hope the US doesn't make a government-run social network.

[_Microft]

Not sure why you are being downvoted as this is a very interesting question indeed.

Social networks tend to kill each other due to network effects as people are flocking to the most used network since there's the largest value for everyone. So having multiple networks might not really work well.

It wouldn't have to be several networks though and it doesn't even have to be your own government running it to provide the value you're looking for (social networking without users being monetized).

Image for example Twitter being bought by a country with good reputation, strong privacy laws and sufficient economy to sustain it in the long term. Iceland with some additional funding from the EU or something like that.

Does not sound too bad, in my opinion.

[nrvslghtnng]

International governments are another version of your Iceland example. A UN-run Twitter?

[dredmorbius]

Simply trying to gain traction is hard. Most attempts fail.

[pasbesoin]

In the '90's, there were -- or something closer to this. E.g. IIRC, "prairienet", in Illinois -- run, again IIRC, by U of I or some affiliated organization. Perhaps there was State involvement.

It wasn't a "social network", by today's standards, but you could get a free account.

The "Internet" received a big boost with an government/academic initiative for high speed links between universities and perhaps some other, government locations. Initially, this was to be segregated out for use by academics and their designated projects and the like. But after a year or two, it was opened up to the general public.

There's a phrase, "Privatizing the profits and socializing the costs."

This connectivity had a lot of value to users. And private companies succeeded in inserting themselves and extracting it. Building upon the public investment that started the whole thing.

This is part of why you don't see public social networks. Similar to how ATT, Comcast, et al. fight tooth and nail to limit and shut down any public ISP initiatives. And they have the bigger pocketbooks, as well as legislators in pocket.

Why are there no public social networks? There are certainly other arguments, other pieces to that puzzle. But one primary one is, because there is money to be made.

P.S. https://localwiki.org/cu/Prairienet

[chrisBob]

The biggest challenge I see to starting a government run social network (assuming US here) is the free speech issue. While Twitter and FB can censor hate speech, there would be an expensive legal battle over the government doing the same thing.

[seorphates]

I might go so far as to say that our potential for a publicly operated social network is already here, or right close, but is being severely and intentionally hampered by ISPs more than anything or anyone else - and by extension recalcitrant, ignorant or paid-for representation.

Unrestricted symmetrical broadband would be a more than adequate foothold for robust frameworks that could fulfill the aspirations of one voice among billions in a truly decentralized fashion as well as provide a true springboard for thoughts, ideas and actions.

I believe the only role government should have here is ensuring access to the pipes that are regulated as an unhindered, affordable utility whose content is regulated only by you.

I also believe there are no words worth censoring. Yes, even nazi fucks. Let them speak and their words will prosper or fail on their own merit. We can't treat symptoms or causes if we drive unwanted words into darkness where they can fester and puss.

[amarant]

I think it's a great idea, assuming that you're from a country whose government you trust won't to spy on you. Other commenters seems not to see the potential benefit, so I'll spell it out: A government operated social network would be tax-founded, and thus not have any need for profit.

this, one could argue, enables a social network that doesn't spy on you, respects privacy and doesn't even have ads!

of course it also comes with the risk of the ruling party spying on you and engaging in manipulation. depending on where you live, and how..conspirationally inclined you are, this may or may not be a risk you're willing to take

I'm not sure that this is the best way to spend them tax-dollars. But the network itself would certainly be nice though

[pcarolan]

SMS could and should be expanded to include more social primitives within the protocol. Lately, I find myself using group chats in SMS more than any social network. Facebook and Twitter have a dis-incentive to do this, but Apple and Microsoft both make phone operating systems and don't have large social networks to compete with an open protocol. It is really annoying whenever I run up against walls like 'You can only have 10 users in 1 group chat ... unless they're all Apple' situations. The protocol should be device/os agnostic akin to http => browser. But I'm not seeing a lot of movement in the SMS protocol as late, just more messaging apps.

[poisonborz]

Google-backed RCS standard is trying to address this.

[poisonborz]

I keep thinking about this, but no way should this be run by a government. The tech for it to be peer-to-peer, without any central authority is already there and would make the best fit. The only - admittedly huge - hurdle is that no authority means no marketing, no support, integrations, and probably a harder setup/learning curve. While an organization like EFF could help sustain some of this, it has no resources to represent or support billions of users. Of course if the network would be open, smaller businesses could capitalize on it, taking over these tasks, but this could result in walled gardens and incompatibility.

Shaking off big corporations from services that should have been always open and free-for-all is maybe the hardest and most important question of the Internet for the future. I think an answer can only rise upon the ashes of the current big players, should that be a scandal, disaster, or else.

[dumbfounder]

I'm assuming you mean available to the general public, run by the government? There probably are smaller, niche social networks for gov employees to collaborate. If there aren't there probably should be.

But to answer the assumed question, it's because there is no practical way they could compete with private companies. Sure, theoretically they could dump tons of money into developing cool new features, slick UIs, and obtain top talent. They would also need to spend billions to crush or acquire upcoming networks to maintain their dominance (Whatsapp, Instagram). Or legislate them out of existence. In practicality there is no way this would (or should) ever happen.

[nrvslghtnng]

The "they'd never develop great features" argument is an interesting one, as I think most social networks can contribute most of their success to the network effect itself. Once that positive feedback loop gets churning, it's hard to turn it around.

Twitter's a neat counterexample here, I think. On the front-end, at least, the features released by Twitter in the last few years haven't left me awestruck. Yet it has become a seemingly self-sustaining space on the internet for public discourse.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

Think a bit: if we are upset about being constantly observed and spied on by the ones of Google and Facebook, how much more we would be if it was the government itself running these services? I can't imagine anyone using them.

[tobylane]

It's not wanted. Nearly every social network out there isn't wanted.

[drivingmenuts]

Not a good idea - how would that even be moderated, given that there is always, always, always going to be pushback from politicians and their followers (not necessarily constituents) depending on how the social currents are trending that minute.

Given the constraints of the 1st Amendment in the US, it might not even be possible to moderate a public social network, which would then quickly devolve into something resembling the most excessive wet dreams of 4channers everywhere.

Whatever good might arise would be drowned out by the impulsive emanations of every 14-year old with a passing whim.

[tarboreus]

A nation state running a social network removes an essential political fig leaf, mainly that these networks are not affiliated with the government. Obviously they've been co-opted, but people tend to ignore that in practice. The government is also technologically slow-moving, which makes it great for large and essential research projects in basic science (like every major advance in the 20th century) but not great for consumer-facing and short-term technological applications in the market.

[randomdata]

The internet, which in many places is supported by government, seems like the approximate digital parallel of a park. What you choose to do at the park is up to you.

[ajeet_dhaliwal]

It strikes me that enabling people to connect with one another is fundamental to most governments as a public service. Cities and states make and fund roadways and public squares and parks. Social networks seem like an approximate digital parallel.

The roadways, public squares and parks are under the direct control or ownership of the government, the virtual/digital parallel doesn't really exist.

[kevinmchugh]

The US government recently built a social network but it failed to be adopted, partially because they weren't building it for USAmericans: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-twitt...

[Endy]

I suggest you consider the current situation in China. They have state-run social network. They use it to keep up their state surveillance and censorship apparatus. A government run social network is one where you can and will be indicted for anything you say which is at all against the law, and your comments will always be in the public record.

[gibsons77]

As much as everyone likes to shit on crypto, this is exactly what public programmable blockchains will be used for.

[haggy]

It depends where you plan to leverage blockchains. They have well known limits around transaction rates and given basic functions such as private-messaging on social platforms, they have the potential to have a much higher txn rate than anything else currently using blockchain.

[wolco]

Which government? Worldwide like UN or country level like Peru or some regional / city wide network?

It is probably the one thing no one asked for but could be done. Would probably make more sense in areas with limited freedom as a means to control society.

A non profit would make more sense as they can be seen in a more neutral light.

[kodablah]

Simply put, the cream rarely rises to the top in the public sector like it does in the private sector. As much as we bemoan financial incentives for the bad they incur, they also bring good ("good" in definition of quality, not morality).

[bsvalley]

So you would rather trust the government instead? They mostly work with private companies to run their IT stuff so at the end of the day your data would end up on some private servers anyway.

[js8]

That's a false dichotomy - in many countries, there are public institutions that are (somewhat) independent on the government. (In Czech Republic, we have universities, radio and TV station that are run like that.)

It could also be a cooperative, or a non-profit.. there are many models.

[bsvalley]

I think the problem is slightly more complex for a large-scale social network. When we look at the cost of running something like facebook, we're looking at hiring an army of expensive developers (someone has to build that platform and maintain it), buying or renting an army of expensive servers to make sure it's up and running 24/7, designers so people can actually use it, extra offices in order to host everyone, etc. It seems to be a money issue as well as an organizational issue.

The scenario we'd be looking at would be a small internal network for a university or a small organization. I believe any government could handle such a thing. For something like facebook we're looking at a lot of money and a bunch of skilled people. Not sure that's in line with governments...

[sigfubar]

Because governments are generally incapable of delivering large software projects. Because any such facility provided by a government will be automatically labeled untrustworthy due to real or imagined involvement by four-letter agencies or their international equivalents. Because there are good reasons not to waste public funds on whimsical projects; funds that could and should be used to actually improve living conditions, energy security, healthcare, and so on. The list of real wrongs to be righted is too long to recite here.

[paulpauper]

Social networks are global. public goods are local or national. Would the rules that apply to non-citizens or non-locals apply to outsiders?

[eof]

The government doesn't need to run one. They just slurp up data from the ones we sign unto voluntarily.

[jenscow]

The Internet?

[Alex3917]

What advantage is there of a government-run social network over one run by a co-op?

[dredmorbius]

Interesting question, and one that opens up numerous areas of history, communications, community, control, freedom, and public vs. private operation.

In the United States, the postal service from its beginning was publicly operated, and served specifically to distribute timely information and general knowledge in the form of discounted rates for newspapers, magazines, and books, as well as providing personal correspondence and parcel delivery. It also established principles of privacy to correspondents.

This was in contrast to various earlier systems, either privately operated or, frequently, operated as part of royal intelligence services.

With the emergence of telephony and broadcast technologies, there were numerous national debates throughout the worrld over public vs. private operation, with many countries opting for primarily public systems. The U.S. chose instead, generally, a regulated private approach.

There are a few histories of these developments, though fewer than you might think. University of Illinois media scholar Roberrt W. McChesney has several books on the topic.

Several countries leveraged their national telecoms systems to create early computer networks, most notably France's Minitel. In the US, the early DARPANET, ARPANET, and Internet were largely public operations, though through a mixed-control operator network, including the Department of Defence, RAND, SRI, the National Science Foundation, and numerous universities, themselves a mix of public and private.

The Internet itself gradually transitioned from research to commercial use between 1985 and 1995, in a not particularly structured manner. See for example: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-paper...

There remain elements of government involvement and access to both Net infrastructure and firms, including investments in several significant firms (notably Google and Facebook), as well as intercept capabilities through network operators, engineered device and protocol weaknesses, CA compromises, and both law-based and extralegal means, fairly trivially confirmed through a few moments research. (EFF and The Intercept document much of this.)

At the same time, there are countries which do substantively operate or participate in social networks either directly or through public-private enterprises, notably Russia and China.

And much of the objective of networking the world has been accomplished through largely private operators.

In short: they could, some do, there's a great deal of history, and the present regime arose likely in significant part as national governments and agencies thought they were seeing their needs met through the cooptable efforts of others.

[nrvslghtnng]

Thanks for the thorough reporting!

[fimdomeio]

that's what public gardens should be for :)

[petraeus]

corruption would exist on day 1 and day 3545

[abtinf]

NSA.

[SublimeWarior]

Because Facebook is free and taxes aren't.

[richjdsmith]

Have you ever used a government website?

With the exception on gov.uk, they are all god-awful. I suspect lack of talent within the government is one major reason.

[rootusrootus]

I think a more likely answer is a lot of successful lobbying by large crappy software companies. See also Oracle.

[beaconstudios]

I'd argue it's more lack of organisational innovation. You can be incredibly talented but if your organisation doesn't sign off on anything innovative then you'll be stuck writing menial code. Governments are some of the most change-resistant organisations around, ignoring legally mandated changes.

[scarejunba]

Login.gov (SSO for gov services) is quite good. I think they’re modernizing.

[kwhitefoot]

The Norwegian state websites are pretty good too.