Who is "Rebecca"? I agree with 90% of her statements, and she appears in this conversation to have further ambitions of continuing with the ideas and convincing some powerful people, especially Paul Krugman, of their validity.<p>Did she ever succeed? Did she write her thoughts in a more digestible format and make those writings public? Does she have further commentary on her thesis on the capitalist or non-capitalist tendencies of modern software companies, or on other topics?<p>Mostly I'd just love to read more of her writing, if it exists.<p>Edit: I believe she is Rebecca Frankel, according to <a href="http://danluu.com/programming-blogs/#rebecca-frankel" rel="nofollow">http://danluu.com/programming-blogs/#rebecca-frankel</a>. Still interested in any pointers to more of her writing if it exists.
My "social network" is the internet. I can control where my domain resolves and I can serve content over HTTP and handle email via SMTP.<p>Anyone can link to my site from whatever social network they use.<p>I may or may not be able to link to everyone else, though. So far, I have no external links on my site. They're too likely to be broken in a year or three. If I get email related to my site, I often post it to the site.<p>I hope I can continue to interoperate with other people like this. I have tried a couple other social networks like Hacker News and Twitter, but if they disappeared or acted in a way I didn't like, I could abandon them without much loss.<p>Do I have any reason to be scared that my current setup might become "closed" in the future? Not trying to be paranoid, just wondering.
Brilliant, and eloquently phrases something I've tried to convey to myriad technologists during my time in the valley:<p><i>"When I was young my father read to me “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” advertising it as a great classic of futuristic science fiction. Unfortunately, I was unimpressed. It didn’t seem “futuristic” at all: it seemed like an archaic fantasy. Why? Certainly it was impressive that an author in 1869 correctly predicted that people would ride in submarines under the sea. But it didn’t seem like an image of the future, or even the past, at all. Why not? Because the person riding around on the submarine under the sea was a Victorian gentleman surrounded by appropriately deferential Victorian servants.<p>Futurists consistently get their stories wrong in a particular way: when they say that technology changes the world, they tell stories of fabulous gadgets that will enable people to do new and exciting things. They completely miss that this is not really what “change” – serious, massive, wrenching, social change - really is. When technology truly enables dreams of change, it doesn’t mean it enables aristocrats to dream about riding around under the sea. What it means is that enables the aristocrat’s butler to dream of not being a butler any more — a dream of freedom not through violence or revolution, but through economic independence. A dream of technological change – really significant technological change – is not a dream of spiffy gadgets, it is a dream of freedom, of social & economic liberation enabled by technology."</i>
The part that jumped out at me was this:<p>Piaw: "The magic trick that Facebook pulled off was getting the typical user to provide and upload all his/her personal information. It’s incredibly hard to do that: Amazon couldn’t do it, and neither could Google. I don’t think it’s one of those things that’s technically difficult, but the <i>social engineering required to do that demands critical mass</i>. That’s why I think that Facebook is (still) under-valued."<p>Rob: "@Piaw - it was an accident of history I think. When Facebook started, they required a student ID to join. This made a culture of “real names” that stuck, and that no one else has been able to replicate."<p>I added the emphasis. I think this exchange is significant in thinking about an open and better replacement. Why hasn't popped into my head.
I only read the start of this, but already there's 2 big problems with the idea of a collectively-owned social graph:<p>1. I may want to have different social graphs on different networks. Facebook for friends and family, LinkedIn for work, Google Plus for hell if I know, etc. Not only would I probably want different graphs for the different networks, I'd also explicitly want to avoid having those networks know about the social connections I have outside of it (e.g. I don't want to just tell LinkedIn to ignore my family, I specifically don't want it to have access to that info in the first place).<p>2. The social graph isn't the only component of the network effect. Even if we had a collectively-owned social graph, all of the content that you produce or consume is limited to a single social network. So even if Google Plus could see my entire Facebook social graph, anything I post on Facebook would not be on Google Plus (and vice versa). So the network effect is still strong, because everybody would still have to gravitate to the same social network in order to see each others' posts.<p>The only way this really works is if we have a federated social network, where all federated networks share the same social graph and have access to all the content. But while federation works for a messaging platform, it doesn't really work all that well for a social network because it also means all networks have to have the same feature set, and that's hugely restrictive. If Facebook was federated with Google Plus, Facebook couldn't introduce any new features since Google Plus doesn't have them. Or Google Plus couldn't introduce its Circles concept because Facebook doesn't (didn't?) have that.
Not the same definition as discussed here, but: All my social networking among friends is "closed". I almost never post publicly, everything happens in closed groups on facebook, in a group chat, in a Slack for a group of friends/coworkers/organization, Snapchats where you're either in or you're out etc.
From TFA: "Lessig told me I had to write an account that fit in five pages in order to hope to be heard, to which I reacted with some despair. I can’t! There is more than five pages worth of complexity to this problem! If I try to reduce beyond a certain point I burn the sauce. You are watching me struggle in public with this problem."
Potentially this could have been titled: 'Technology, Freedom, Economics and Scarcity'. Rebecca is rarely well articulated, her arguments are innovative, nuanced and delightful to read; to which the closed social network issue seems merely as an aside.
there seems to be a flaw with rebecca's only example. she seems to imply that google is responsible for the conference tables existence, which is most certainly not true. if anything, Google in this case is responsible for restricting local markets, and directing traffic to foreign ones. Conference tables have always been needed, and have always been made (most often sourced locally), Google didn't create the conference table business, it just helped direct conference table buyers to this one particular site. that seems to be to restricting market freedom, not expanding it.
Answers to this question tend to get philosophical very quickly. The literal act of sending a message is democratized to the extent that we share protocols like English, UTF-8 or SMTP across our systems. But the social value of the message is oft contextual, creating an infinite number of spaces for socialization. You can have the same group of people in same room and yet send them on a radically different conversation by priming them to focus on something new.<p>Hence I think it is beyond the power of a company to monopolize the social sphere in Orwellian fashion, but monitoring, nudging, and creating an atmosphere - those things happen in any coffeehouse or bar. Small towns are known more for lack of privacy than the opposite.<p>In the past week I "returned" to Facebook after years of effective silence on it. The impulse was relationship-based, as many of these things are, but I had to decide on a method of engagement and decided that I was going to treat FB as a direct extension of Twitter, which I've kept up with - just tweet as usual but follow a second thread. I used to want to keep them separate to have parallel lives, but since I abandoned FB that "life" was already dead and I have learned a way of public living on Twitter that I am comfortable with.<p>Fortunately there is enough linkage between the two that this is straightforward. They have presented a tool that adapts to my preference, rather than an imposition or decorum. This, I think, is the direction that social software is moving towards inexorably - to separate or merge bodies, accounts, and personas as needed, across systems, according to various models of seeing the world.
We designed a decentralized platform to power social apps. Precisely to give organizations the power and choice of running their own server and install social apps, the same way they can run Wordpress and install plugins. While regular users have their accounts seamlessly work across all domains, and connect with friends across communities and privacy just works as it should.<p>See it at qbix.com/platform -would love to hear your opinions.
Ah yes, the Eric Schmidt-era Google was so seemingly altruistic with so much hacker ethos that all the cynical hackers dared to dream that they would save us. Alas.
One of the key take aways I got from this article is that it is nearly impossible to depair the efficiency of exploitative capitalism of 'physical industry' and the abstraction that is an economic, or generically a bloodless, revolution.<p>It is economically more efficient to centralize the resources but far less robust. SV could disappear tomorrow and a significant amount of the Internet's "revolutionary" capabilities would disappear. This doesn't appeal to SV's narcissistic sell of a special snowflake, but the power they wield in their capacity to damage any progress associated with the growth of the internet.<p>On the other hand, a distributed internet is far more diverse and robust yet the economic costs can be exponentially far more damaging and costly.
> “The Social Graph” and its associated apps should be like the internet, distributed and not confined to one company’s servers.<p>It is like this though. Any one of us can re-create our social graph in a heartbeat on any of these services at any point in time by importing our contacts and letting the network present us with our associations at the moment in time we want it to.<p>I've done this with linkedin, having zero presence there until the moment I wanted to network in a new area.<p>I've done this with snapchat<p>Telegram<p>anything I want at that point in time<p>there is no need for continued presence on any one of them since you can come and go as you please with new profiles and reconnecting to existing associates.
We already have an open graph, its the Internet Protocol and associated addresses. All other experiences that are delivered over IP are just sub-protocols with attached UX that is preferable for the users.