Facebook Sucks; Should Anything Like it Even Exist?
Hexmage-PA
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I acknowledge this is more of a Debate & Discourse sort of thread, but I'm genuinely curious how the opinions of SE++ regulars would diverge from those of D&D regulars.
Is there a viable alternative to Facebook?
Facebook itself was a latecomer to the social networking game. Before its rise to dominance, various social networking sites had come into existence since the 90's to provide a means for people to connect online. These included Six Degrees (which is largely considered to be the first social networking website), Classmates, Friends Reunited, LiveJournal, MySpace, Friendster, and many others. However, despite its late entry to the social networking service competition, Facebook has thwarted its rivals and now has about 40% of the Earth's population as active users.
That's not to say that no one has tried to challenge Facebook in the social networking industry since then. A few smaller, more obscure services have arisen in the meantime, which I will provide links to as well as Wikipedia excerpts describing them:
diaspora*
Ello
MeWe
Minds
NextDoor
Vero
So it's clear to see that may of these alternative social networks have their own problems. Diaspora seems promising...save for the fact that it's been in operation since 2010 and still only has 688,000 users (probably could've used a more memorable name, honestly). Its lack of central moderation also unfortunately meant it had trouble getting ISIS off the platform, too. Ello immediately surprised me upon accessing the homepage and looks nothing like I had expected, though it at least has manage to get 1 million users (however, at this point in its life it appears to be more like a wanna-be Pinterest, which itself has over 400 million users). Vero, an app that benefited from an exodus from Facebook, has managed to get 4.5 million users, which is relatively huge compared to these other sites by far, far, far short of Twitter's 350+million).
For the rest, it's surprising to see how many got boosts in their userbase following increased crackdowns on hate speech, misinformation, and other such content by Facebook and Twitter, as well as fears that Facebook would comply with government demands.
Minds in particular got a ton of Vietnamese users thanks to fears that Facebook would comply with the Vietnamese government, as well as Thai users afraid Twitter wouldn't protect activists' privacy, and now is looking to expand into India over fears that Facebook and Twitter are untrustworthy: Oulook India. Keep in mind that the people behind Minds are also against deplatforming hateful speech and content.
That said, for most of these I've listed, Google's "People Also Ask" feature gave the top result "Is x still a thing?"
So, with that in mind, are their reasonable alternatives to Facebook? Are there any, real or hypothetical, that could take-off? Even if they do, what's to stop them from developing the same problems as Facebook, or actually being worse?
Is there a viable alternative to Facebook?
Facebook itself was a latecomer to the social networking game. Before its rise to dominance, various social networking sites had come into existence since the 90's to provide a means for people to connect online. These included Six Degrees (which is largely considered to be the first social networking website), Classmates, Friends Reunited, LiveJournal, MySpace, Friendster, and many others. However, despite its late entry to the social networking service competition, Facebook has thwarted its rivals and now has about 40% of the Earth's population as active users.
That's not to say that no one has tried to challenge Facebook in the social networking industry since then. A few smaller, more obscure services have arisen in the meantime, which I will provide links to as well as Wikipedia excerpts describing them:
diaspora*
Wikipedia - Diaspora (Social Media)Wikipedia wrote:Diaspora (stylized as diaspora*) is a nonprofit, user-owned, distributed social network. It consists of a group of independently owned nodes (called pods) which interoperate to form the network. The social network is not owned by any one person or entity, keeping it from being subject to corporate take-overs or advertising. According to its developer, "our distributed design means no big corporation will ever control Diaspora."
---
The distributed design attracted members of the militant Islamist extremist group ISIS, in 2014, after their propaganda campaigns were censored by Twitter. Diaspora developers issued a statement urging users to report offensive content and helping pod admins to identify users' accounts associated with ISIS. Since the network is federated, there is no central point of control for blocking content. On 20 August 2014, the Diaspora Foundation stated that "all of the larger pods have removed the [ISIS]-related accounts and posts."
Ello
Wikipedia - Ello (Social Network)Wikipedia wrote:Ello was created as an ad-free alternative to existing social networks. It has pivoted from its earlier Facebook-like incarnation toward a Pinterest-like website showcasing art, photography, fashion and web culture. The Ello service claims several notable distinguishing intentions as a social network such as never selling user data to advertisers or third parties, never showing advertisements, and not enforcing a real-name policy.
MeWe
Wikipedia - MeWeWikipedia - MeWe wrote:MeWe is an American social media and social networking service owned by Sgrouples, a company based in Culver City, California. MeWe's light approach to content moderation has made it popular among American conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and anti-vaxxers. Due to concerns with possible pro-China censorship of Facebook, the site also gained popularity in Hong Kong in November 2020. The site's interface has been described as similar to that of Facebook, although the service describes itself as the "anti-Facebook" due to its focus on data privacy.
---
MeWe's loose moderation has made it popular among conspiracy theorists, including proponents of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, which was banned from Facebook in 2020, and the "Stop the Steal" conspiracy theory relating to the 2020 United States presidential election. According to Rolling Stone, MeWe has "played host to general interest communities related to music and travel, but it has also come to be a haven for anti-vaxxers, QAnon conspiracy theorists, and, as reported by OneZero, far-right militia groups."
---
Shortly after the 2020 United States presidential election, MeWe and other alt-tech platforms experienced a wave of signups from Trump supporters, following crackdowns on election-related misinformation and promotion of violence on mainstream social networks. On November 11, MeWe was the second-most downloaded free app on the Apple App Store, behind its fellow alt-tech social network Parler.
On January 22, 2021, MeWe's CEO said in an interview with NPR that "MeWe is serious about putting limits on what people can say" and that he doesn't like sites where "anything goes", describing such sites as "disgusting". He also said that MeWe would be hiring more moderation staff. In the coverage, NPR noted that MeWe's stated rules are still "more lax than Facebook and Twitter," and that MeWe had not yet banned groups dedicated to QAnon
Minds
Wikipedia - MindsMinds is an alt-tech blockchain-based social network. Users can earn money or cryptocurrency for using Minds, and tokens can be used to boost their posts or crowdfund other users. Minds has been described as more privacy-focused than mainstream social media networks. Engadget and Vice have criticized Minds for its preponderance of far-right users and content.
---
Minds was co-founded in 2011 by Bill Ottman and John Ottman as an alternative to social networks such as Facebook, which the founders believed abused their users via "spying, data mining, algorithm manipulation, and no revenue sharing".
---
A Facebook page affiliated with the hacktivist group Anonymous encouraged its followers to support Minds in 2015, and called for developers to contribute to the service's open source codebase.
---
In 2018, over 150,000 Vietnamese users joined Minds after fearing that Facebook would comply with a new law requiring them to remove political dissent and release user data to the Vietnamese government. Beginning in May 2020, over 250,000 Thai users joined Minds after growing concerns about privacy on Twitter, which had been widely used for political activism. This led Minds to add Thai language support to its mobile apps, and upgrade its servers to handle the influx of traffic.
---
A 2018 Wired article noted that hate speech was not disallowed, and reported that "The vast majority of content on Minds is innocuous, but posts do appear there that would constitute hate speech on other platforms." Ottman has said that he opposes removing hate speech and other objectionable content because he believes it can draw more attention to it, and that he opposes deplatforming extremists because he believes it only serves to push people towards more "other darker corners of the internet."
NextDoor
Wikipedia - NextdoorNextdoor is a hyperlocal social networking service for neighborhoods. Users of Nextdoor are required to submit their real names and addresses (or street without the exact number) to the website; posts made to the website are available only to other Nextdoor members living in the same neighborhood. Since 2015, Nextdoor has been criticized for enabling its users to racially profile people of color. As a platform, it also has been accused of operating as fear-based media, colonizing the public sphere, serving interests of real estate, private security, and police, reaffirming class and racial biases, and spreading conspiracy theories such as the stolen election conspiracy theory and COVID-19 misinformation.
Vero
Wikipedia - Vero (App)Vero (stylized as VERO) is a social media platform and mobile app company. Vero markets itself as a social network free from advertisements, data mining and algorithms.
---
In March 2018, Vero's popularity surged, partly helped by an exodus from Facebook and Instagram following the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. In the wake of the scandal, Vero devised an advertising campaign aimed at defected Facebook and Instagram users, hoping the app's policies and privacy settings would assuage concerns over sharing personal information on the internet. Within the space of one week, the app went from being a small service to being the most downloaded app in eighteen countries.
So it's clear to see that may of these alternative social networks have their own problems. Diaspora seems promising...save for the fact that it's been in operation since 2010 and still only has 688,000 users (probably could've used a more memorable name, honestly). Its lack of central moderation also unfortunately meant it had trouble getting ISIS off the platform, too. Ello immediately surprised me upon accessing the homepage and looks nothing like I had expected, though it at least has manage to get 1 million users (however, at this point in its life it appears to be more like a wanna-be Pinterest, which itself has over 400 million users). Vero, an app that benefited from an exodus from Facebook, has managed to get 4.5 million users, which is relatively huge compared to these other sites by far, far, far short of Twitter's 350+million).
For the rest, it's surprising to see how many got boosts in their userbase following increased crackdowns on hate speech, misinformation, and other such content by Facebook and Twitter, as well as fears that Facebook would comply with government demands.
Minds in particular got a ton of Vietnamese users thanks to fears that Facebook would comply with the Vietnamese government, as well as Thai users afraid Twitter wouldn't protect activists' privacy, and now is looking to expand into India over fears that Facebook and Twitter are untrustworthy: Oulook India. Keep in mind that the people behind Minds are also against deplatforming hateful speech and content.
That said, for most of these I've listed, Google's "People Also Ask" feature gave the top result "Is x still a thing?"
So, with that in mind, are their reasonable alternatives to Facebook? Are there any, real or hypothetical, that could take-off? Even if they do, what's to stop them from developing the same problems as Facebook, or actually being worse?
0
Posts
Shit, I forgot about that one. I'll add it later when I have time.
May God have mercy on it's soul.
Steam - Talon Valdez :Blizz - Talonious#1860 : Xbox Live & LoL - Talonious Monk @TaloniousMonk Hail Satan
I have a bad habit of effort posting.
I'm also in my first semester of a networking technology major after previously earning a Sociology major a decade ago, so I'm finding the concepts, history, and possible future of social media particularly fascinating.
What are your complaints regarding facebook?
{Twitter, Everybody's doing it. }{Writing and Story Blog}
They already did
It's called SpaceHey
To essentially rehash a lot of what is posted in the related Debate & Discourse thread:
- It's a monopolistic platform that has 40% of the human population as active users with a lot of social pressure to join and check often.
- Other services pretty much have to have Facebook integration to stay relevant (this was a big reason for the recent, lengthy argument in the D&D thread over an Australian law arguing that Facebook should have to pay news publishers when news content is posted to Facebook).
- There are a lot of data privacy concerns (Cambridge Analytica led to the most significant departure from the platform I've aware of, with many moving to Vero).
- It's essentially too big to police without algorithms that frequently make mistakes and human moderators who continuously monitor incoming user content to find and block illegal and/or disturbing content.
- It doesn't have enough safeguards in place that are actively enforced to prevent the proliferation of hate speech (Facebook essentially enabled a lot of violence in Myanmar for a long time, though I see it finally decided to ban the Myanmar military from Facebook today).
- It (along with social media in general) might possibly have a role in increasing teen suicide rates.
To be honest, I don't despise Facebook like a lot of the posters in the long-running D&D thread do, though I do know people who have left or have expressed that they would leave if there was an alternative service. After all, there's no other way I could have kept in as close contact with friends and family I haven't seen in person for years as I have, and as I mentioned in the OP people have wanted a service like this for a long time. Facebook still has a ton of problems, though, and I'm curious what could hypothetically could be done.
My irl social group uses Telegram, also somewhat infamous for being a haven for white supremacists/QAnon/zoosadism/pedophiles.
And my online triva group shifted to Signal, which I haven't heard anything bad about, yet.
Zuckerberg and all multimillionaire should be taxed and have their assets seized until they're no longer multimillionaire
That begs the question, though: What, if anything, should replace Facebook? Facebook was a latecomer to the struggle to become THE social network that nonetheless overtook MySpace, Friendster, and other, older competitors; the desire for a service like it has been around since at least the 90's.
no, not digital ones.
The Penny Arcade Forums
Something like instagram, but with less "public" pages or whatnot. Sharing pictures with friends and family is a lot of what made facebook a thing for me and my family early on. I had to cut my oldest brother out of my life 2 Sundays ago because he has apparently been deep diving in QAnon nonsense from facebook. E: so anything that gets rid of that kind of possibility being wide open to the public would be pretty nice.
I do think it’s a wider issue that most people post off the cuff, and often don’t even fully understand or believe what they’re saying. Worse still, so many lonely people fall into evil groups and let it slide in return for a sense of community. I can’t imagine engaging with someone online.
However, I assume any of these corporations get something out of having you on the site, be it ad revenue or date collection, so at best they’re just as covetous as any big business, at worse downright sinister. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, I just mean all big businesses are part of the banal, common evils of modern life.
I only use this forum and Pinterest these days, so I can’t really give you much else from experience.
I don't think anything needs to replace it, other than maybe something like instagram before facebook bought it and turned it into whatever the fuck it is now
I use Facebook for the groups thing. All of the traditional archery forums have died, thanks to Facebook, so I go to archery groups on facebook
I can check in on family through family group texts
Something I omitted from the OP that I was originally going to include is that the recent Australian law differentiated "social networks" from "social media".
According to its framers, a social network's primary value is the fact that the people on a social network know who each other are and want to maintain contact or using their mutuals to forge new networking connections with other people. Facebook and LinkedIn would be examples in this case.
As they defined social media, it differs from social networks because the content posted and discussed is the primary value, and the users can remain anonymous and never know anything substantial about each other.
The bulk of the destructive, toxic business practices come from the ad serving and promoted post model treating the users as the product by collecting data and that model driving the way you run the place
So social media platforms themselves would be less toxic and exploitative if there was no advertising
BUT, effective moderation is profoundly expensive, so gutting the revenue produced by advertising means there's no money to set up functional moderation, which means fringe groups move in because they can get away with their bullshit.
I honestly think the only way a social media platform can be free of both problems is if it's treated like a utility and moderation is a public service. That probably won't ever happen because of the aformentioned profound expense, but who knows, the people might demand it.
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
Oh see, I think that all groups should be eliminated from Facebook - I exclusively want it for its direct interpersonal connections to people I know, and my ability to communicate with those people. Its ongoing attempts to push groups and fan pages on me are what I would say are the problem with Facebook.
For those unaware, Facebook banned the sharing of news content from Australia for a week recently in protest of the then-proposed (now passed) law (which I've been informed by Australian PA members is a transparent attempt to get Facebook and Google to give Rupert Murdoch's News Corp more money). My personal take was that Facebook might should ban "news" content in general from the platform globally if it would help prevent misinformation from spreading.
I was also very against the idea that Facebook should be expected to pay publishers for its users (including the publishers themselves) posting links to news sites that increase the publisher's traffic anyway. The inventor of the World Wide Web, Timothy Berners-Lee, even testified before the Australian senate that he feared their proposal would set a precedent for future abuse where users would have to pay any time they try to post a link (he said this despite himself being very concerned about the power Facebook wields and wanting to find solutions to curtail it).
Then posts from groups show up in my news feed, so I "unfollowed" those groups
This is essentially what happened with diaspora*. They created a system that on paper seems like it should work well and avoid a lot of the problems Facebook has, but the lack of money and strong, central moderation made it difficult for them to remove ISIS-related content from their platform.
But also you'll pry my tiktok from my cold dead hands
I will say that, before COVID, the local comic shop was able to use Facebook to set-up groups for various TTRPGs and TCGs so people could organize Dungeons & Dragons games or get news about M:tG tournaments being hosted.
However, I've also gotten several requests from friends to join groups that I truly had no interest in, but did anyway to avoid hurting their feelings.
This does seem to be a very, very common sentiment.
I don't even like TikTok that much myself, but two of my friends (one of whom boycotts Facebook) loves it, so I go on there anyway every few days to see what videos they've shared with me. I used to hunt for new videos to send them back, but since they don't know each other I often cheat and just send one of them a few videos the other sent me.
We nerds used the internet when it was new to found our own communities, to find people who were similar to us and who we could converse with. As time went on and the internet became a thing it was bound to open this up to the rest of the world and other groups. The problem with that is most of the world fucking sucks and is full of assholes. Even if we get rid of Facebook, something will replace it because people want to communicate with their newfound in-groups. I don't even think thats necessarily a bad thing, Its good to have open communication around the world. The problem is the assholes abuse it.
Yeah, I agree with this take. Facebook and Twitter created centralized spaces where people who would otherwise never interact were put in the same space, and smartphones made it so the number of people accessing the Internet increased greatly. There were always horrible assholes on the Internet, but barring things like forum raids they were usually somewhere else online from where you were and you never heard from them.
Used to, I was one of the only people in my family to use the Internet daily via the Desktop PC. My dad and mom used it very sporadically for specific things, and my grandparents never used it. Now everybody has smartphones that make it trivial to access the Internet.
I actually cringed a bit when I found out my grandpa had gotten a smartphone and had started using Facebook a lot.
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-breakup-restoring-competition-regulation-experts-say-2021-1
Honestly now that I know Minds exists I am going to be sure to keep tabs on it. Not use it, of course, but see if it actually becomes a potent force in the countries its concentrating on. The idea of some countries largely abandoning Facebook (which has a lot of problems) for Minds, a crypto-social platform that explicitly does not bar hate speech or other objectionable content while also telling its users they can hypothetically make money for posting on it is scary.
Also, apparently a lot of Parler users migrated to Minds, which before the migration had 2.5 million active users, up a million a half from 2018.
Not just because it's awful, and becomes a pseudo-government with untold power that is used to enable authoritarians though that's a good enough reason but also because literally no one wants this. No one behaves like Facebook is posting to the entire world, ever. People act like it's a tiny social network where only the ten people you give a shit about can actually see things.
I think the best world would be one in which social networking sites fully did not exist, but an okay world would be one where every site was at least as siloed as like, this forum. Once you exit the capacity to manually moderate, it stops being a thing that's defensible.
I'm forever grateful that neither of my parents ever gave a shit about getting into social media.
https://spacehey.com/
Also Mark Zuckerberg is an emotionally damaged man-child who thinks he’s the second coming of Augustus Caesar. Facebook generates more economic activity than many nations. Their actions were large contributing factors in the Myanmar massacres, the election of Rodrigo Duterte, the spread of Q anon, and the rise of the alt-right among myriad other nasty things. They are also shown time and again they have monopolistic desires (as all companies tend to pretty much)
Facebook is a threat to individual liberty, dignity, and autonomy the world over and should be preferably destroyed or at least have its monopoly broken down
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
I joined it a while ago, but don't feel like learning basic coding to change my background =p