A Real Estate Mogul Will Spend $100 Million to Fix Social Media Using Blockchain (msn.com) 93
"Frank McCourt, the billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is pouring $100 million into an attempt to rebuild the foundations of social media," reports Bloomberg:
The effort, which he has loftily named Project Liberty, centers on the construction of a publicly accessible database of people's social connections, allowing users to move records of their relationships between social media services instead of being locked into a few dominant apps.
The undercurrent to Project Liberty is a fear of the power that a few huge companies — and specifically Facebook Inc. — have amassed over the last decade... Project Liberty would use blockchain to construct a new internet infrastructure called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol. With cryptocurrencies, blockchain stores information about the tokens in everyone's digital wallets; the DSNP would do the same for social connections. Facebook owns the data about the social connections between its users, giving it an enormous advantage over competitors. If all social media companies drew from a common social graph, the theory goes, they'd have to compete by offering better services, and the chance of any single company becoming so dominant would plummet.
Building DSNP falls to Braxton Woodham, the co-founder of the meal delivery service Sun Basket and former chief technology officer of Fandango, the movie ticket website... McCourt hired Woodham to build the protocol, and pledged to put $75 million into an institute at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Sciences Po in Paris to research technology that serves the common good. The rest of his $100 million will go toward pushing entrepreneurs to build services that utilize the DSNP...
A decentralized approach to social media could actually undermine the power of content moderation, by making it easier for users who are kicked off one platform to simply migrate their audiences to more permissive ones. McCourt and Woodham say blockchain could discourage bad behavior because people would be tied to their posts forever...
Eventually, the group plans to create its own consumer product on top of the DSNP infrastructure, and wrote in a press release that the eventual result will be an "open, inclusive data economy where individuals own, control and derive greater social and economic value from their personal information."
The undercurrent to Project Liberty is a fear of the power that a few huge companies — and specifically Facebook Inc. — have amassed over the last decade... Project Liberty would use blockchain to construct a new internet infrastructure called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol. With cryptocurrencies, blockchain stores information about the tokens in everyone's digital wallets; the DSNP would do the same for social connections. Facebook owns the data about the social connections between its users, giving it an enormous advantage over competitors. If all social media companies drew from a common social graph, the theory goes, they'd have to compete by offering better services, and the chance of any single company becoming so dominant would plummet.
Building DSNP falls to Braxton Woodham, the co-founder of the meal delivery service Sun Basket and former chief technology officer of Fandango, the movie ticket website... McCourt hired Woodham to build the protocol, and pledged to put $75 million into an institute at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Sciences Po in Paris to research technology that serves the common good. The rest of his $100 million will go toward pushing entrepreneurs to build services that utilize the DSNP...
A decentralized approach to social media could actually undermine the power of content moderation, by making it easier for users who are kicked off one platform to simply migrate their audiences to more permissive ones. McCourt and Woodham say blockchain could discourage bad behavior because people would be tied to their posts forever...
Eventually, the group plans to create its own consumer product on top of the DSNP infrastructure, and wrote in a press release that the eventual result will be an "open, inclusive data economy where individuals own, control and derive greater social and economic value from their personal information."
Oh great, "friends" forever (Score:5, Insightful)
Blockchain without Bitcoin = Regular Database (Score:1, Insightful)
Bitcoin = math + incentives
Outside Bitcoin, the incentive structure always fails. This is the only thing you get:
Generic Blockchain = central authority + digital snake oil
SCOOP: @IBM
has cut its blockchain team down to almost nothing, according to four people familiar with the situation.
https://twitter.com/coindesk/s... [twitter.com]
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The word "Blockchain" was written in the Bitcoin source code to explain how Bitcoin operates. Blockchain is a part of Bitcoin. Outside Bitcoin, this is a nonsensical and pointless concept.
The USD is now printed to infinity; This will help to understand the concept of sound money.
F.A. Hayek in 1984: "I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly rou
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Re: Blockchain without Bitcoin = Regular Database (Score:2)
It's pretty much designed with the main objective of being truly decentralized !
Anything can be centralized without needing it to be designed to be centralized
And BTC effectively designed to have a high economic disincentive for anyone trying to centralize it. Ie Much larger fin loss even if you were successful
Re: Blockchain without Bitcoin = Regular Database (Score:4, Informative)
"Blockchain" is a type of linked list where each block in the list is tied to the previous block by a cryptographic signature of that block. Nothing more, nothing less.
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SHUT
UP
You stupid Bitcoin maximalist.
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Oh boy, as soon as they start quoting Hayek or the Austrian School, we're in trouble...
What does "printed to infinity" mean? I've watched the national debt go from $1T to well over $20T (largely thanks to Republicans, by the way) and the U.S. has never experienced hyperinflation in that entire forty year span. If printing money is so dangerous...where is the hyperinflation we were promised Chicago Boy?
Try reading up on MMT sometime. It's actually a theory which fits the facts.
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Like every framework in economics and market analysis MMT will most likely prove it works until it doesn't.
The problem is lack of any real independent experimental conditions. The military/security/trade relationships that have defined the interaction of nations have impact on the value of and perceived value of currencies. The dollar's only real peer is the Euro. Before there was a euro there was nothing else with as big an economy behind it. If the dollar did start to skid the perception was it could onl
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It is a decent solution for the double-spending problem. And I think maybe it could be useful for public records (for example titles and deeds and so on that are managed by the various counties all across america). I haven't tried to think through all the details. But I think maybe it could work, and offload the county from maintaining the records on their own computers (I mean, they could maintain a couple of copies for reference to make sure the data doesn't get lost).
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I think this probably the real - killer app - for block chain. It would make title searches universal and reliable as well. Most importantly it would solve a lot of murkyiness that tends to crop up when political boundaries are changed, like with towns incorporate and dis-incorporate. It gets really fun when records of private divisions have been transitioned through handful of different political entities, with multiple sub division events and sales along the way.
0.01% (Score:2)
IBM invested 0.01% of their revenue into checking into the possibilities. Which is kinda like if you spent one dollar.
They may have figured it had 20% chance of blockchain turning into anything; and 80% chance there's nothing there. That can be worth checking into when you have billions of dollars.
Could have figured that most likely it'd would end up being an interesting data structure like a mutilbit trie. The multibit trie hasn't changed yet he world, of course. The commercial applications of multibit tri
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And once again, we have some idiot AC imposing a Bitcoin discussion onto a topic that has precious little to do with Bitcoin. WTF is wrong with you? There are numerous ways for blockchain to flourish in the absence of Bitcoin's PoW algorithm.
Specifically, have you heard of Storj? Sia? Chia? Or any number of other decentralized data storage blockchain projects? Of course I could mention IPFS but you'd lose your mind over that.
At the very least you could be stumping for Rootstock or . . . whatever. But no,
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To be fair, if you hadn't considered everything you ever posted on the interwebz might eventually be used against you, you're not long on the probabilistic nature of consequence and repercussion.
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Apparently any time anyone becomes mildly famous, there's a land rush of journalists sifting through their ancient posts looking for anything remotely out of alignment with received wisdom on how to think as of 7 minutes ago, in hopes of becoming a talking head that evening.
Brave new world.
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The real problem with corporate controlled social media, not the idiots desperate for attention so they will get paid for advertising clicks, IT IS THOSE ADVERTISING CLICKS.
Want to do something socially fucking constructive, how about vetting those ads and ads that promote wasteful consumption, giving up just a fucking little on the greed addiction, the need for advertising clicks to pay for social media.
FOR FUCKS SAKE JUST SAY NO TO ADS THAT PROMOTE WASTEFUL CONSUMPTION, try to save the planet instead o
Re:Oh great, "friends" forever (Score:4, Insightful)
Thesedays, most people have their first turn at social media as kids. I know there were plenty of things I said ages ago on dialup BBSes that need not be resurrected. Even if you manage to avoid saying anything racist or bigoted in your entire time as a juvenile, you'll still say things that are incredibly stupid (or at least misinformed). Having a permanent record of that tied around your neck is not what anyone should want.
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Went through my Slashdot posts from a decade ago recently and it was interesting to see how my positions had changed on some things (especially cloud computing). I've been posting under my own name since the turn of the century (Cusco is a variation of my original 1999 SlashDot account, which I lost the password for). I've always figured if an employer wouldn't hire me because of something that I posted online on my own time then I probably didn't want to work for them anyway.
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That's a pretty short-sighted view you have there.
If you want some real humor, go back to the early 1980s and watch some "human interest" news stories that are riddled with racial stereotypes being uttered by fairly liberal members of the "media elite" and politicians that are just downright cringe-inducing today. Society's acceptance of some things changes over time, and what was (unfortunately) acceptable then may very much not be acceptable now.
And now apply that to literally everyone on the Internet.
Ar
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https://www.theonion.com/thank-god-we-didn-t-have-written-language-back-when-i-w-1834474884
Re: Oh great, "friends" forever (Score:2)
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People will gleefully sabotage themselves and their own future in exchange for a little exposure. That's a major problem with social media. People ruining their own lives.
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>"I'm so sure people will be OK with a forever record of their "friends" and all their posts that's verifiable. "
Exactly what I was thinking. It is stupid enough to post so much personal crap on these sites already. Doing it with no expectation of any privacy, forever, is beyond creepy.
I love this quote:
"blockchain could discourage bad behavior because people would be tied to their posts forever..."
Right, because when everyone is watching everyone and everything, forever, with 0% anonymity, I am sure p
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I'd be kind of OK with that if it got rid of the plague of Anonymous Cowards.
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Indeed. Most of humanity is excessively slave to trends and saying something specific can get you cheered for today, vilified in 10 years and outright send to prison in 20 years. And the other way round. And, of course, the same thing can happen with associations to other people, again without any real factual basis. There is no logic or foundation in reality to these trends, they are just the "stupidity of the crowds" at work.
It may be one of the reason quite a few actually serious advice series mask as "c
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Came here to say the same thing. I like having different, unconnected profiles on different sites. I also delete any tweets over 6 months old automatically to prevent people mining them.
Georgetown University, obviously (Score:5, Funny)
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Everyone should just go back to a GeoCities type account, learn to code, and create their own space using a protocol standardized by the W3C.
What's that, you can't learn to write HTML.... perfect, then you don't meet the minimum requirement to spread your poorly thought out verbal diarrhea.
FFS! (Score:2)
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Recall that Google really wanted to limit each user to one account. Yet the best defense is that
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Sir we failed here is my (Score:2)
Gilmore Weeps . . . (Score:2)
A decentralized approach to social media could actually undermine the power of content moderation, by making it easier for users who are kicked off one platform to simply migrate their audiences to more permissive ones.
i.e. They'll interpret censorship as damage, and route around it. What a sad, authoritarian mess the tech press has become . . .
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I remember that! It sounded so cool back then. Hasn't been true for a long time.
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Gotta gotta keep the audience that believes the dangerous lies.
How investors think (Score:5, Funny)
Pitch 1: Blah blah blah blah blah blah
Response 1: That's dumb.
Pitch 2: Blah blah blah blockchain blah blah
Response 2: That's a winner! I'm in!
Not enough money (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't even know how this is supposed to work. I can already tell it will never work. I know that 100 million is not enough to fix social media because if that was all it would take, social media would already be fixed. But it isn't. If you can post pictures, memes, and commentary, and large numbers of people can see it and comment on it, you automatically get a dumpster fire unless you somehow moderate it. But if you moderate it, you automatically get into a bias situation, whether the moderation is automatic or done by people. So you just can't win. Social media is fundamentally fucked.
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Social media doesn't want its problems fixed. That which amounts to problems for you or I might be a profit opportunity for them. Rest assured that more than $100 million is being spent yearly to prevent people from migrating between platforms or otherwise managing their own data.
Also bear in mind that the linked story says nothing about fixing any of the problems you've mentioned. It only addresses the problem of portability of content, e.g. can you move your social media profile from one host to anothe
There it is! (Score:2)
Re: There it is! (Score:1)
Don't get ahead of yourself. There's another 6 months of Slashdot to read before the year ends.
Dopamine hacking (Score:2)
I thought Facebook already proved companies don't win social media with "better services" as defined by this billionaire, but with psychologists running a/b testing on how to keep people engaged.
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Frankly what is most important is network effect.
Facebook dominates first and foremost because it's first and foremost.
The tricks Fb pulls are secondary to the fact that Fb is where the people are.
Any Successful Blockchain Apps? (Score:1)
Just curious, but have there actually been any blockchain apps that have been successful outside of cryptocurrencies? Or is this just a word that gets thrown around willy nilly now to garner interest?
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If there have, it's not because of the technology.
There is no problem (that needs solving) that isn't done better by existing trust-based systems. Using a blockchain for anything is like running a marathon with a ship's anchor tied to your waist.
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Yes. Absolutely. Careful, though: someone might wind up shilling an ERC20 token (or similar) tied to the project if you provoke a discussion over it.
Here's the Project Liberty website (Score:1)
Here's the Project Liberty website : https://www.projectliberty.io/ [projectliberty.io]
White Paper on DSNP (Score:1)
It's called Mastodon (Score:4, Informative)
It's called Mastodon and it doesn't even require you to bring anti-efficient blockchain technology into the picture for some reason. I'll take that $100m now thanks.
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Yeah but using Mastadon doesn't get your name on a building at Georgetown University, which is where the majority of his money is going.
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Does Mastodon have any failure points? How easy is it to take it down, as a service?
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There are no central points of failure I can find, so it should be about as difficult to take down as an arbitrary number of websites (which may or may not be hosted on a darknet).
"Blockchaaaaain" (Score:2)
So we have a new way to waste 100 million dollars (Score:3)
So to get everyone off of Facebook, it is going to have to work as well as facebook, but do it with this new distributed format they want to use, and have it spool up fast enough that facebook can't adapt to this new threat.
And facebook would have to burn to the ground overnight with no warning and this new social media platform would have to be waiting for everyone right there, perfect in every way giving none of the other social media wannabes any chance to gain a foothold.
Google could have done it (Score:2)
If their circles system was all a proper open federated protocol (with 80% of traffic but not 100% being on Google's server).
But they tried to just follow an established player. Fail.
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> Facebook works
No it doesn't [netflix.com]
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And facebook would have to burn to the ground overnight with no warning
That's the thing isn't it. It's not enough to be as good as Facebook. Heck it's not enough to be better than Facebook. You need to have the contents and the connections of Facebook active automatically or the social network is a non starter.
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To get everyone off Facebook, we just have to convince people that the things they post to Facebook and read on Facebook are useless. Then they shut down their accounts without creating replacements elsewhere.
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And facebook would have to burn to the ground overnight with no warning
Sounds like a plan. Lets hope they don't do backups.
Wrong title (Score:3)
Better would be "Rich guy thinks he can change reality to get even richer, will likely fail", or something like that. Let's face it: Social media can very likely not be fixed. Some people make far too much money with the way it currently is and nobody knows what alternate forms would even work.
The headline is the punchline (Score:2)
Ignores intentional compartmentalization (Score:4, Insightful)
The people I network with on LinkedIn don't need to know anything about my personal life or my personal connections, and the people I connect to on Facebook don't need to know anything about my professional life and connections. A system that ignores the different motivations that people have for engaging different people in different ways across different social media channels is pretty much DOA, regardless of how much money you want to throw at it.
It also ignores privacy (Score:2)
Flawed from the start? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Exactly. What if you change your opinion? What if someone you knew twenty years ago is no longer someone you want to be associated with? With a permanent record, there would be no way to make that known or explicit.
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Why is changing your opinion a bad thing? I didn't know as much when I was 20 as I do now, I'd damn well better not hold the same opinions now as I did 40 years ago. If someone digs up a letter to the editor or something that I wrote in 1981 and waves it in my face I have no problem telling them that I was wrong and that I had changed my mind. I'm not sure why that's supposed to be a bad thing.
Illegal content will get this shut down (Score:2)
Someone is going to post illegal content into this - child pornography, for example - and then a lot of law enforcement people are going to demand its removal. Remember that in many places in the world, simple possession or control of a child porn image is illegal. If you can remove it from your social media, file sharing, etc, service then you can alleviate the problem for yourself, but if you can't then you will have a hard time arguing in several courts that you're "unable" to remove it. Law enforcement
Burn out my eyes please... (Score:2)
Some money grubbing real estate agent picks out the two things he's heard of in the last 10 years of technology.... Social Media and blockchain... slaps them together and then markets it as "Project Liberty"... I'm going to puke !
This is probably the worst article I've ever seen posted to Slashdot.... there's almost zero content in it that I would regard as not being waffle.
Re: Burn out my eyes please... (Score:2)
This week on solutions looking for problems (Score:2)
Has he ever med a hyper conservative? (Score:4, Insightful)
discourage bad behavior because people would be tied to their posts forever...
That only works if, A you even think about the future and B You are aware of how shameful your post is.
A . People of all persuasions say really stupid things without considering the future. Some because they are young and stupid (been there), Some say them because they are not convinced there will be a future!
B. They see their behaviour as something to be proud. A non social media example of this was all the people who proudly posted out pictures of themselves in the Capitol in January. They were proud of their attempts to overthrow your government and "knew" that it was a wonderful thing they were doing!
No. I don't think future exposure will limit many peoples stupid actions on social media.
Only dead social media (Score:3)
...is a good social media.
Wow, $100 million for a .CSV file. (Score:2)
Oh, wait, this is a .CSV with diffs! That's TOTALLY different.
The data engine is irrelevant (Score:2)
How to get VC funding (Score:2)
Use "blockchain" in the description.
With cryptocurrencies, blockchain stores information about the tokens in everyone's digital wallets; the DSNP would do the same for social connections.
Sorry, I don't think the problem with social media is finding a technology for storing connections.
My opinion (Score:1)