'Why It's Easier To Move Country Than Switch Social Media' (wired.co.uk) 82
Cory Doctorow, writing at Wired: When we talk about social media monopolies, we focus too much on network effects, and not enough on switching costs. Yes, it's true that all your friends are already stuck in a Big Tech silo that doesn't talk to any of the other Big Tech silos. It needn't be that way: interoperable platforms have existed since the first two Arpanet nodes came online. You can phone anyone with a phone number and email anyone with an email address.
The reason you can't talk to Facebook users without having a Facebook account isn't that it's technically impossible -- it's that Facebook forbids it. What's more, Facebook (and its Big Tech rivals) have the law on their side: the once-common practice of making new products that just work with existing ones (like third-party printer ink, or a Mac program that can read Microsoft Office files, or an emulator that can play old games) has been driven to the brink of extinction by Big Tech. They were fine with this kind of "competitive compatibility" when it benefited them, but now that they dominate the digital world, it's time for it to die.
To restore competitive compatibility, we would need reform to many laws: software copyright and patents, the anti-circumvention laws that protect digital rights management, and the cybersecurity laws that let companies criminalize violations of their terms of service.
The reason you can't talk to Facebook users without having a Facebook account isn't that it's technically impossible -- it's that Facebook forbids it. What's more, Facebook (and its Big Tech rivals) have the law on their side: the once-common practice of making new products that just work with existing ones (like third-party printer ink, or a Mac program that can read Microsoft Office files, or an emulator that can play old games) has been driven to the brink of extinction by Big Tech. They were fine with this kind of "competitive compatibility" when it benefited them, but now that they dominate the digital world, it's time for it to die.
To restore competitive compatibility, we would need reform to many laws: software copyright and patents, the anti-circumvention laws that protect digital rights management, and the cybersecurity laws that let companies criminalize violations of their terms of service.
Why switch? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just leave.
Re:Why switch? (Score:5, Funny)
Wrong room. This is "Why I may want to switch social media platforms". "Why you may want to stop using social media" is down the hall.
Re:Why switch? (Score:5, Interesting)
If social media sites interoperated, then the professional complainers would be whining about them sharing our info and allowing inter-site spam.
I have no interest whatsoever in getting random Facebook messages on my LinkedIn account. Or vice versa.
Silos are good.
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Don't suppose you could block facebook messages at your end, no?
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It seems of late, people are out there dying to boycott ANYTHING at the drop of a hat....except, apparently social media?!?
You know, if everyone simply just quit for a bit, they'd notice really fast in the old wallet.
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The story is about switching social media. Too easy, just create a new anonymous account and delete the old one, ohh wait, you can't because you were a moron and used your real identity for online social media. Well, that was fucking stupid wasn't it.
Drop social media with you real identity, really honestly truly. You have to become politically active, get others to join. Win by getting reasonable politicians with integrity, who then pass laws to force social media corporation to delete all content about y
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No, it's not.
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Re:Why switch? (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider the thread hijacked.
I, for one, hate Facebook and refuse to use it. It causes depression [healthline.com], spies on you [wikipedia.org], and manipulates our democratic process [time.com].
In short, it's bad for everyone. A veritable social disease that we should all work together to cure.
So, spread the word!
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http://facebooksucks.com/ [facebooksucks.com] seems to be available. Buy it and spread the word!
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I find much of FB depressing but still have an account because ballroom dancers (social and competitive) people use FB for announcements, classes, workshops, parties, etc. Obviously much of it has slowed to a trickle during these covid times. But without FB I would be virtually out of the loop so I hang on to it simply for messaging and bulletins. Outside ballroom dancing, FB has increased in hostile postings and I've unfriended many (including a few dancers) because some of the stuff became very ugly. I've
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Except Zuckerberg and his advertising sales department. They fucking love it, to the point of billions of dollars. That is why they continue to do it.
Not having a Facebook account is the cruelest thing you can do to them.
Re:Why switch? (Score:4, Funny)
Why Switch?
Because Nintendo.
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I see what you did there. ;-)
Re:Why switch? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can try. I never got into social media in the first place, but I can still tell that I am being left out of things - gossip that everyone in my friend-and-family group seems to know and I don't.
Re: Why switch? (Score:2)
Because, and I know this sounds crazy (Score:5, Interesting)
Most nerds are introverts, so yeah, social media seems kind of pointless to us. I have a buddy who is what I would call an extroverted nerd. Such nerds are not nerds by choice, but because of a combination of weird personality and physical quirks. They want to be around people but, well, people don't want to be around them.
Social media lets them find like minded folk who'll accept them. And as for regular folk they can find hobbyist and/or dating groups.
In short, people are using social media to, well, socialize. A lot. As an introvert it's not something I fully understand on an emotional level, but I understand the mechanics of it.
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You got the sequence backwards.... (Score:5, Insightful)
All of the examples ("like third-party printer ink, or a Mac program that can read Microsoft Office files, or an emulator that can play old games") were the results of lawsuits forcing companies to support some level of competitive interoperability - in all those cases the companies involved wanted to close everything to maximize lock-in, and they were forced to open up, usually either by lawsuits or by customers getting laws passed to defend their rights. IBM used to only allow IBM parts and repair and software to be used with IBM mainframes. Car companies tried to block third-party parts and repair services. Book publishers tried to shut down used book stores. All those customer rights had to be fought for over corporate objections!
Re:You got the sequence backwards.... (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be easy to set up some basic interoperability, as we do with the web, but then everyone would want to customize it with certain features, like extended emojis, which means to use those feature you are back to using a specific tool which only operates for specific providers.
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then everyone would want to customize it with certain features, like extended emojis, which means to use those feature you are back to using a specific tool which only operates for specific providers.
Apple with their iMessage has fallbacks for content that only works in their platform. It's a good idea, but a poor execution since I don't want to receive a full copy back of a text I sent just because someone liked it. (e.g. Sent message: "Hello" and iMessage user clicks like? Receive a reply of "Liked: Hello")
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> Not to mention IE purposefully breaking web pages.
He may be too young to have seen that example, but Google has been deliberately breaking Gmail, YouTube, and (AFAICT) everything else they own (except search) on every browser that isn't Chromium for a few years now already, and the most recent time I've seen it is less than a year ago.
So yeah, the practice is not just still alive and well, it's actually far more aggressive than even MS ever was.
We used to make jokes about this sort of thing wrt Apple a
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I remember reading a short story in Analog back in the 80's that described a world where the automotive industry was like the home computer industry. You could only drive a Ford on roads designed for a Ford's proprietary wheelbase and tires, only use Chrysler gas in a Chrysler, etc. Good stuff, but I guess he missed that one.
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As for social media platforms, even if I really cared I wouldn't expect them to let their competitors connect and siphon off revenue.
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Isn't that rather the point of things like the "Diaspora [wikipedia.org]" social media thing. Or maybe I''m thinking of "Mastodon [wikipedia.org]"? Or maybe I'm thinking of the OStatus [wikipedia.org] framework? Or am I thinking of Standards [xkcd.com]? I rather got lost in trying to understand the field while (and this is probably the important point) not really giving a shit about what they're trying to do.
The problem is probably one of the network effect - and between heavy advertising spend and founder eff
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But yeah, it used to be far, far worse! And Doctorow should know this better than most! When was there any kind of compatibility whatsoever between Apple, IBM, Commodore, TI, Tandy, or BBCMicro? That's right, never. Even if it was the same software the media formats were probably so wildly different that you couldn't hope t
Seriously? (Score:1)
What a useless metric. Literally anything a person does can be applicable to this. For example switching jobs can be harder than moving countries. For example if you are a medical doctor with who has never done any sports, becoming a world class gymnast might be harder than switching countries.
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I don't quite get this.
I quite one job....get hired and start at another job.
Ok, it is usually best to get hired at the new job before you resign at the old one, but really...what is so difficult about changing jobs?
People do it all the time, quite commonly.
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Technology sector. Non-compete and non-disclosure agreements can make job switching a bit more complicated than that.
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switching jobs can be harder than moving countries.
It's not. You have to think of a rather contrived scenario before that happens (like, a person who isn't working, or a country that only has one company to work for).
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Not contrived, but just poorly planned. If you are in an overly specialized field it is very easy to find yourself with very few equivalent job opportunities if you leave your current company. My previous specialization left only a few spots in the country to work at if I left, so I instead changed specialties and lost a couple rungs on the ladder to become much more mobile. Ignore this at your own peril.
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If your employer didn't let you move out of the country, then moving to a different country would have involved finding a new job in the new country, which compounds the problem.
Training (Score:2)
For example if you are a medical doctor with who has never done any sports,
Hey, I also have a licence as a ski teacher too, you insensitive clod!
(in Dr. Leronard "Bones" McCoy's voice) I'M A DOCTOR, JIM! NOT A... wel... actually... I do teach sport some week-end as a hobby.
The Actual Monopoly; Your Time (Score:5, Insightful)
The actual monopoly that social media has on everyone, is your precious time.
Social media is one massive time suck.
It's not time to figure out which pile of shit you want to try and live in.
It's time to start questioning why you want to wallow around in shit all day.
Not Everyone (Score:2)
The actual monopoly that social media has on everyone, is your precious time.
Not everyone, only those who bother to use it.
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The actual monopoly that social media has on everyone, is your precious time.
Not everyone, only those who bother to use it.
Then best continue to attack and kill it with fire and acid. I fear the society of tomorrow will force everyone to not have a choice in the matter.
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The actual monopoly that social media has on everyone, is your precious time.
Social media is one massive time suck.
It's not time to figure out which pile of shit you want to try and live in.
It's time to start questioning why you want to wallow around in shit all day.
Says the guy who spends his time on slashdot posting about how others are wasting their precious time.
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Says the guy who spends his time on slashdot posting about how others are wasting their precious time.
Settle down there, fellow Slashdotter. Ain't exactly a UI that keeps you glued, even with a "fun" unicode translator.
It would probably take the two of us and another three dozen posters a month to piss away the time suck of the InstaFaceTube junkie binge-fucking their smartphone all day long.
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Because they have successfully moved a lot of casual interactions online.
Facebook is essentially the local hangout. You don't go there for deep, serious conversations about life - for that you still invite your friend over or to a bar. But if you just want to hang out, have some small talk with some lose friends or distant acquaintances and meet the occasional stranger - if you just want to press a few buttons to satisfy your built-in desire for social contact - FB is now the place to be.
Like a supermarket,
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Because they have successfully moved a lot of casual interactions online.
Facebook is essentially the local hangout. You don't go there for deep, serious conversations about life - for that you still invite your friend over or to a bar. But if you just want to hang out, have some small talk with some lose friends or distant acquaintances and meet the occasional stranger - if you just want to press a few buttons to satisfy your built-in desire for social contact - FB is now the place to be.
That's certainly the cute story you tell the children.
Now about the reality of Facebook; it's become a cesspool of human "interaction", with perceived and proven bias and censorship, forcing CEOs to be called out on the Congressional carpet, all while their platforms are turned into the most toxic shitholes during any major election. Twitter? Hell, that's become a political weapon now. Won't be long before it's a military one.
Congress isn't chewing CEOs asses, calling for corporate break-ups, and threate
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No, Congress isn't calling for corporate breakups etc. because it's a "cesspool of human interaction". They're doing that because they think they can get more money by threatening FB, or more votes if they can just arrange the fragments of FB just so....
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Now about the reality of Facebook; it's become a cesspool of human "interaction",
Unlike you, I'm observing facts, not judging them. As an introvert, most of what people do "hanging out" is to me shallow, meaningless and totally unnecessary - just like Facebook. And don't get me started on gossip and backyard intrigues. But all that isn't the point. The question was why people move their interactions to FB - because it's convenient and is replacing real-wold interactions. That's why. Like it or not.
Congress isn't chewing CEOs asses, calling for corporate break-ups, and threatening with Section 230 because you're hanging out at the virtual watercooler, bullshitting about football games and music with your friends.
Because that's not a convenient target. If it were a central watercooler where everyone me
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Now about the reality of Facebook; it's become a cesspool of human "interaction",
Unlike you, I'm observing facts, not judging them. As an introvert, most of what people do "hanging out" is to me shallow, meaningless and totally unnecessary - just like Facebook. And don't get me started on gossip and backyard intrigues. But all that isn't the point. The question was why people move their interactions to FB - because it's convenient and is replacing real-wold interactions. That's why. Like it or not.
And because interaction has been reduced to virtually connecting with people in your backyard or halfway around the world, all hiding behind a keyboard, people can and have become real assholes. Like it or not? No. I don't "like it". Not because people are lazy and it's convenient to replace human interaction with messaging. But because the overall quality of that interaction, has become worse and worse over time, and will continue to degrade. This, will eventually lead to war and bloodshed. Like it
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people can and have become real assholes.
More people, true. But people can and do behave like assholes offline as well. In fact, being able to avoid the actual real-world assholes who will not only insult, but also physically attack you, was almost certainly one of the early drivers of online communities. I remember BBS and mailbox days and a lot of us liked it there because even if communication was sometimes rough, at least no joker would beat you up.
Not convenient or central? Facebook? Two billion humans, hang out at that particular watercooler. And it's a US Company. Operating under US law. On US soil.
That, exactly, was my point. The "not convenient" referred to the actual watercoolers.
Why would you want to? (Score:5, Funny)
The reason you can't talk to Facebook users without having a Facebook account isn't that it's technically impossible -- it's that Facebook forbids it.
Thank you Facebook. :-)
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it's that Facebook forbids it.
Thank you Facebook. :-)
Really.
Can I see a show of hands from all the non-Facebook users who want to receive messages from Facebook?
Anybody? Anybody at all?
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> to find someone's contact information in the past few years
There is *no* need to have a FB account. In my house nobody has one and my wife use FB to lookup a lot of people, after a few views (a day) she is kicked off, so that's than for the next day (if she rembers;)
Re:Why would you want to? (Score:4, Informative)
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Not just their customers: I've seen complaints forms that need a facebook account. From the perspective of the companies, using social media logins is a handy way to reduce spam and trolling.
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Not just their customers: I've seen complaints forms that need a Facebook account. From the perspective of the companies, using social media logins is a handy way to reduce spam and trolling.
And customer complaints.
I know I wouldn't create a FB account for this...
(I don't have one now and don't intend to ever get one.)
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If the cafeteria you're forced to eat at only serves shit, you don't ask for the production of shit to be more tightly regulated so it's less likely to make you violently ill: you seek a ban on allowing cafeterias to serve shit .
I'm not sure why some people have so much trouble with this concept. State entities shouldn't be passing the buck on to Zuck, period.
A strange game (Score:5, Insightful)
Joshua: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play"
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How about a nice game of chess?
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And this is one of the primary reasons.... (Score:2)
that I don't use proprietary formats. Be it proprietary operating systems (I'm taking about you Windows and Mac) or proprietary applications like Facebook and Twitter. Privacy concerns aside, I think it is a mistake to use these walled gardens. The pitfalls outweigh the benefits.
Participating in them only helps to cement monopolies and, as we have seen, monopolistic companies do not treat their customers very well and non customers even worse.
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Proprietary applications like ... Slashdot?
Exactly the same issue that this story is talking about applies right here to this website as well. People just ignore it when it doesn't form a convenient part of their argument...
Ephemera (Score:3)
FaceBook users are not locked in due to lack of interoperability, they are locked in due to network effects. The messages and posts there are too ephemeral for technical barriers to be a big deal.
When FaceBook was popular with my teenagers, they happily used its Messenger. Then the teenage network had a phase change, and they all left just like that. As for myself, I am also quite glad not to be receiving spam in my messaging services, so I would be pretty unhappy with maximalist access.
I like interoperability, but information-age legal reform has bigger issues to address.
Guh? (Score:5, Interesting)
What in the fuck are people doing on Facebook that's so important? I have an account, I check in once in a while to read what people are doing, message some people on it, and I explicitly do _not_ post anything remotely inflammatory (or really, anything at all other than "happy birthday" or "like" on innocuous personal posts) because I'm not a mental defective.
Get a fucking grip, I could turn it off right now and not make my life any better or worse in any way. But seems people are either convinced it's the literal debbil out to get them, or they are so obsessed and dependent on it that moving away from it is like moving to China or some silly shit.
And the Facebook haters are just as bad as the obsessed. It's like the old saying about the opposite of love not being hate but apathy. They are wallowing in pathological hate, normal people are just apathetic about the whole thing.
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> And the Facebook haters are just as bad as the obsessed.
BULLSHIT. The Social Dilema [netflix.com]
Stop defending FecesBook.
i have many friends on facebook (Score:2)
Inter-service email was a big thing (Score:2)
[1] DEC geeks will recognize these large octal numbers as a PPN for the original underlying H&R Block PDP1
If you could talk to FB users wo an Account (Score:2)
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I can't even imagine the hellscape of a FB with the added benefit of their unique brand of shit posting.
How about a /. which allows posts directly from Facebook, Fark or Reddit?
This worked for the telephone (Score:2)
This reminds me of how regulation force different telephone operators to interconnect and one of the reasons for the formation of the ITU. In fact the notion of "interconnection [regulation...wledge.org]" is ranked an important feature per ITU surveys:
“According to ITU surveys, interconnection-related issues are ranked by many countries as the single most important problem in the development of a competitive marketplace for telecommunications services” (Intven et al. 2000)
A number of social platforms did dip their feet into inter-connectivity, at least at the messaging level, but quickly gave up on that. XMPP being one of the solutions that was offered to do this. Without regulations it is more appealing to be an island, rather than federating different
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But telecoms isn't a good analogy anyhow. It is a simple, straightforward service that is functionally and structurally uniform. Social media platforms differ wildly in nearly every way. Twitter and Facebook work differently and do different things. Pick
So (Score:2)
What country should I move to?
BTW I don't use FB
Even when laws support interoperability ... (Score:1)
Be careful what you ask for (Score:2)
What OP is really suggesting is that you have a universal logon id that can be used across all social media.
Not just "Use your Google ID to sign onto slashdot", but more like "log onto your phone and have access to pretty much everything"...which also means that everyone in every application has access to you.
Google Wave (Score:2)
Google Wave showed the worst aspects of the concept of federated social media. Just being open and extensible is a wasteland.
Also bots, unless you explicitly pick and choose which networks you trust messages from.
Facebook and Twitter are pretty low value really (Score:2)
Cell phone (Score:2)
Facebook Reader/Writer (Score:3)
Though I guess Facebook would consider it "scraping" and ban it in its terms of service.
It's not (Score:2)
Switching social
Perfectly normal (Score:2)
"The reason you can't talk to Facebook users without having a Facebook account isn't that it's technically impossible -- it's that Facebook forbids it. "
You can't have the morons you're milking talk to normal people, they might get a clue.