I think Zuck is too full of himself. People often get confused that their success means that they are wise, and that we should listen to them. Should we as well follow the thought leadership of drug cartels and the Saudi monarchs?
"Full of himself"? Way too mild an indictment. In the last 24 hours Facebook bought a story in a publication, pretended it wasn’t sponsored, their COO posted it, then when they got caught, they denied knowing anything about it. And what was that ad/story about? Their commitment to stopping disinformation. All the while we've learned that they have utterly sold the company to international electioneers.
Citations to your references would be appreciated. It's the first step to overcoming the state of internet disinformation, as well as helping society overcome the fear of missing out just because someone doesn't already know your references.
I understand what you are saying, but this is a mainstream story, easily searchable with DDG from hints in the comment, covered by both Washington Post and New York Times as well as being splashed all over Business Insider, Mashable, The Verge, etc. etc.
This is not the comment to be fighting this battle with.
I agree with providing citations if the situation warrants it. This comment is an aside with a recent, topical, well covered and easily verifiable anecdote, a citation is not needed or warranted.
This is NOT the hill for citation fanatics to die on.
[edit] also another comment had already provided a citation, in fact the citation you provided, so you or I providing the citation was unnecessary so I don't understand your point
I wasn't agreeing with the original claim, though it's probably somewhat accurate, nor that this news item supports that claim. Just disputing that a citation was required for that claim in this forum.
I agree, we're clearly not understanding each other perfectly, I think this phenomenon is all too common and it's worth some mild effort to investigate where things have gone wrong.
The original comment:
> Citations to your references would be appreciated. It's the first step to overcoming the state of internet disinformation, as well as helping society overcome the fear of missing out just because someone doesn't already know your references.
This request (and it's just that, nothing more) seems reasonable.
This subsequent comment exchange:
>> All the while we've learned that they have utterly sold the company to international electioneers.
> This is disinformation, laundered with the trust of the first comment.
...specifically: "laundered with the trust of the first comment" seems like perfectly valid criticism, and arguably adds to the "onus" (or value in) for the original person to provide a proper citation, in order to minimize misunderstanding.
And then here is where I see a problem arises:
> Just disputing that a citation was required for that claim in this forum.
You are criticizing someone for saying a citation is required, but it is you that introduced the idea of it being a requirement into the conversation - which is what I pointed out (perhaps not as eloquently as I should/could have).
Your subsequent reasoning:
> I deliberately swapped so you could see how that word doesn't work
...doesn't make sense to me. Replacing the original word with a new one that has a distinctly different meaning, and then criticizing OP for the new meaning of the sentence, doesn't make sense to me.
Yes, you are assuming I have a much more extreme view than I actually have. When I used the word required that didn’t mean I thought the original poster was ordering/demanding there be citations. When I tried to clarify that, you again misinterpreted my intent. And again now. At three misinterpretations it’s time to let it go. L
> you again misinterpreted my intent. And again now
Words have distinct (non-interchangeable) and broadly accepted meanings, independent of either intent or personal preferences for what the meaning should be. I have merely interpreted your words according to the broadly accepted meanings, have I not?
Upvoted because even though I knew the context of that comment, I consider it poor form to expect everyone else on a public forum to keep up with every bit of daily news.
I did have a hard time taking any of what he wrote seriously. It was not thought provoking for me and I felt it wasn’t deep or interesting. It’s interesting in the sense that it is useful to know where FB may be headed, but when I think of Facebook all I see is another advertising company looking for more ways to put ads in front of captive eyeballs.
One thing I can't understand is why Facebook is still around. But, at the same time, Twitter is still around, too. I guess people got tired switching platforms.
Because they actually solve a real problem for a majority of their users? I mean I get it, I'm on the hate train too but their actual product (the Facebook web site) provides a useful service. It allows me to share a bunch of stuff with a bunch of groups of people who I want to stay in touch with, in a low friction manner.
Pretending Facebook is useless is like pretending GM doesn't make cars. Sure, maybe you don't like GM cars but they fill a genuine need for a lot of people.
Because they also purchased IG and WhatsApp and because their messaging app is reasonably successful (in parts because they didn’t add groups to IG messaging, otherwise younger folks would have been even more eager to leave FB). As far as I can tell the main FB app/website has been pretty much deserted by younger people.
The UX of that process you describe (without something like facebook) sucks. It's surprising you haven't realized this once you've tried to do that for more than say ~10 people in the list.
If the UX sucks, it means it takes more time and energy to do the same thing, it means that I will not be doing the same thing, I will end up sending to less people or less information. Which means that facebook effectively allows new types of communication which would otherwise not even exist.
I'm not sure that's a bad thing really. Having easy to maintain distance relationships leads to accumulating less meaningful relationships. Then again, I'm hardly a good metric for sociability.
It is the low cost of Facebook (and social media) messaging that makes me not use it to send messages to people I love and care about. I still call them on the phone. When it comes to relationships, my communication theory is simple: the cost of the medium is the information. Goes without saying in this setting, there's only few people I call "friends."
If you have more than a handful of people that you wish to meaningfully connect with - facebook is a great tool. I know personally many people including myself that both use calls, emails, chat messages - and yes, facebook - all with the same people. They are just geared towards different kinds and modes of communication. The notion that I have to use phone exclusively to communicate with someone to call them "friends" seems very dated to me personally. It probably works for someone else. (But I mean the numbers show that a lot of people do indeed find facebook useful, it is not that popular for no reason.)
It's about the connection itself, it's about the energy and attention one puts into the relationship, not whether one allows oneself to use facebook for it or not.
Nothing. People just find other means more convenient and for some reason are willing to sacrifice their privacy in return. Also, by names and college and work you can find people on these social platforms even if you lost their contact long back.
Basically, it's more difficult/tedious to do. Facebook lowered the cost opportunity of this for the vast majority of people (you and others excluded, obviously).
While I don't actively use Facebook the way I use twitter, I've kept my account for messenging because its the only way to keep in touch with old friends and family. People change numbers, names, locations. Facebook is my Phonebook, in a way.
low effort intelligence collection. I wouldn't mind "investing" into those companies if I were an agency employing who are basically incompetent crooks.
To be honest, I’m always a little bit happy to see him writing something and have it come off as a bit awkward. I don’t feel so bad about my own writing style when I think that the CEO of a multibillion dollar company is the same :)
In the case of Zuckerberg specifically he's actually more likely to be right on this by virtue of being in a position to influence it. If Zuck persuades the board of Facebook that AR is the future then thousands of FB engineers could be tasked with building AR apps and libraries, and Facebook could invest billions in AR acquisitions. Those sorts of actions steer the future.
When a billionaire claims to predict the future they're not just making a prediction, they're really telling you what they plan to invest in.
Zuck is "not just making a prediction", he's not making any relevant statement about the future at all.
All he does is telling what he plans to invest in. But given his privileged position, that's almost as irrelevant as what he is going to have for dinner tonight, if his plans for the next decade do not address the urgent and burning issues that keep the rest of humanity awake at night in earnest.
I'm sure AR "is the future" in a decade. But then you'd have to ask to whose benefit and to what ends.
If a billionaire makes swiping statements about the social good, then I expect a proper argumentation that shows an understanding about the vast complexity involved, and their according responsibilities. Not vapid filler that reduce the issues to a mere generational conflict such as:
> Today, many important institutions in our society still aren't doing enough to address the issues younger generations face -- from climate change to runaway costs of education, housing and healthcare. But as millennials and more members of younger generations can vote, I expect this to start changing rapidly. By the end of this decade, I expect more institutions will be run by millennials and more policies will be set to address these problems with longer term outlooks.
Google+ failed because Google didn't know what they wanted it to be. I don't think that's down to engineering. That's a product and marketing problem.
AR is a little different because it's not a product; Facebook's AR apps might fail, but Zuck's vision could still succeed if Facebook create (or acquire) tools for creating an AR ecosystem.
Google doesn't actually have many customer-facing product wins on the strength of their GUIs / UX to its credit, period.
Google search was minimalist. Android followed everyone else in the market, and hasn't iterated core UX much since. G Suite office apps were acquired, and mostly cloned Office online. Same with Gmail.
Maps is about the only heavily-used app, and I wouldn't call its design revolutionary (or even good).
Chrome is about the best example I can come up with, and it's mostly iterated and improved on the back end.
Maybe I'm missing something major? But it's not a market they compete in or are particularly good at.
(This isn't to say that the initial lift of desktop apps to the web wasn't a technical tour du force; just that blue sky GUIs have never been something they're known for)
Mass media social networks are a winner-take-all game. All but one candidates will fail, and the success of that winner is all but certain to be based on a mix of ideosyncratic or non-apparent characteristics, though founding cohort can be and has been a major success factor.
Two of the largest online social networks to date have emerged from the highly-selective university space: Usenet (UCLA, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, UI, Rutgers, etc.), and Facebook (once: literally Harvard).
Google+ might have been able to grow from its tech roots. My sense is that Google's marketing-and-advertising focus (and community), as well as gross mismanagement, doomed its attempt, nudged with some active antipropaganda from other sources, notably Facebook. That's not to say it would have succeeded, but there were numerous self- and externally-imposed injuries.
If this post had been written by an anonymous dev, it would not be read as "full of himself". I think the "full of himself" subtext comes from the readers, not the writer.
This doesn't stop the possibility that Zuck actually is full of himself.
It's as much how it is written as it is what is written. No-one who isn't a captain of industry could write a blog post like that, because they wouldn't be writing a puff-piece and write in the guarded lofty tones of political speak.
You can give an anonymous dev the benefit of the doubt that they are probably not expecting millions of people to be influenced by the bullshit they are saying.
> I think Zuck is too full of himself. People often get confused that their success means that they are wise, and that we should listen to them.
Wow, you just described like greater than 99% of the internet.
Search engine results these days is like taking a metal detector to the city dump.
We might as well use Taleb's idea of Lindy to find good information. Unfortunately, the internet hasn't been around long enough for anything published direct to web to qualify.
> Should we as well follow the thought leadership of drug cartels and the Saudi monarchs?
To be fair, the Saudi monarchs are in the thought leadership business. Their influence over Islam is important to them and a lot of effort goes into it.
Drug cartels, as far as I'm aware, don't really care what you think.
This is unpopular to say, but when we're heading for a mass extinction event, maybe we should be sacrificing freedom for the sake of social cohesion. There should be facial recognition, social score and such things, to preserve humanity from chaos. I think there's a decent case to be made, and that's why I generally appreciate what China is doing. They are the best prepared for what might come.
A valiant effort could be made to make the argument for a social score to achieve a "greater good," but ending the statement by saying you appreciate China's implementation of it kind of ruins the argument. They're not exactly making use of it for "good".
> They're not exactly making use of it for "good".
Depending on your definitions of "exactly" and "good".
I think a better question is something like: might it plausibly result in a net better outcome than some/all alternative approaches? I would say the answer to that question is definitely yes.
What is this "mass extinction event"? You don't get to advocate for giving up freedom for the sake of security if you're not even saying what we should be so afraid of.
I suppose the mass extinction event is climate change - but if so the idea that having face recognition and social score will help humanity combat that problem is ludicrous.
Well he has the financial power to influence change in the world, so even if he may be someone whose insight you don't find useful, he is someone you should hear out. At least by listening you will have some idea of what he intends to do with his power, and from there you can decide if your actions will aid or not in whatever change Zuck decides to act on. For example, from this post it is clear the VR will be a big component of FBs future. From this you can do what you believe is a better path for VR and use your bit of influence by not providing money to FBs VR efforts (remove all FB VR apps(including Beat Saber), buy from Oculus competitors, etc...)
> Should we as well follow the thought leadership of drug cartels and the Saudi monarchs?
Please stay on topic and refrain from ad hominems that add nothing to the discussion. If you have disagreement with his predictions, focus on that in your reply.
Your comment adds nothing to the discussion and just lowers the quality of discourse. It's a shame it is the most highly voted comment.
A legitimate reason for being interested in his post is to comb through it for ill conceived ideas that may further damage privacy and spread hate and misinformation, in order to sound alarm bells. Because Zuckerberg has massive power and can implement whatever naive and gullible ideas he comes up with.
>"at some point in the 2020s, we will get breakthrough augmented reality glasses that will redefine our relationship with technology."
Constant video surveillance, direct-to-eyes on-glass advertising, targeted advertising beamed on every approved spot, interests profiling via retina movements/focus and God knows what else will undoubtedly come about if AR glasses become "cool" and ubiquitous like mobile phones.
Maybe we'll be able to see one another's social points, as earned on the Facebook Ubiquity Platform for All Things Interaction, when gazing upon one another? Maybe we'll be able to haze filter out those naughties who haven't earned enough, or have had points taken away for naughty behaviour like posting against the "community guidelines"?
Maybe we'll be able to use image recognition + the voter records to put an angel or devil next to the people we agree/disagree with politically? How novel would that be? And talk about a time saver! Who wants to even acknowledge those who don't vote in line with our party!?
But seriously though, what options do those of us have to not be part of this dystopian fucking nightmare that the tech elite have in store for us? Save up and try to buy a hut near their fallout shelters in NZ under the hopes that they won't shit where they hide?
Huh, I just want my heads up life display because...why not? Maybe I won’t trust Facebook to give it to me, but if the tech becomes good enough, I’m definitely going to embrace it.
Is it really a dystopian future? We’ve adjusted to the telegraph, camera, telephone, radio, TV, cell phone, smart phone and...why are AR glasses going to be the tech to bring society down?
Huh, I just want my heads up life display because...why not?
Assuming that your heads-up live display contains a public facing camera here's: Why not!
I don't like sitting in a bar (or a strip club, or in any other semi-public, or even public dodgy or non-dodgy place) and you hang there with your heads-up live display recording my image.
I don't like the fact that it's uploaded to some tech behemoth' server for further analysis (or even if not - by you later to your personal social media page, controlled by such a company).
I don't like an army of people like you recording every little nuance of my life, which then gets abused to feed even more AI algorithms by companies whom's major raison d'être is to violate all our privacy and infringing on my personal rights without permission or consent.
And no! Locking myself permanently into a room is really not a solution conductive to me or for us as a society.
Remember Google glass and why it failed? Not because the tech couldn't be useful. But it failed thanks to a company, which didn't give a shit about the impact of such tech and an army of glassholes (here's a nice example[1]) who cared even less.
I think the answer to your "why not" and to your personal gratification is that the price for us as a society is far too expensive.
Those bars and strip clubs already have plenty of CCTVs, you are being recorded. Police have body cams, cars have dash cams, almost every phone has a camera capable of taking video, the chance that you are being recorded if someone wants to is already very high.
A glass cam will probably work out the same way CCTV has: people are worried about the potential for privacy abuse, but in the end these fears don’t come to pass.
Google Glass wasn’t ready, the tech isn’t ready yet. People stopped using it because it wasn’t useful. The tech will be useful someday, however.
Luddites complained about the automated loom as well, saying the cost to society was too great despite its benefits. It didn’t work out well for them in the end.
the chance that you are being recorded if someone wants to is already very high.
OK, good, you understand the origin of the problem. Modern technology has co-opted ordinary people to act as spies for big, powerful data processing organisations, in the process seriously undermining our privacy.
Yes, the cameras are all around, but no, they aren’t spying on you, why should they? Most video just gets deleted unless some event happened, they don’t even archive it.
I guess we could get rid of all the cameras and have everyone walk around with blind folds so they can respect everyone else’s privacy from being seen, but it seems like a net negative in my book.
Yes, the cameras are all around, but no, they aren’t spying on you, why should they?
How can you ever be sure of that, though?
Devices get hacked.
The manufacturers of devices sell out, with or without being transparent about it.
Data hoarders grab more data than they should or they have the device owner's informed consent to take.
These things happen all the time, with everything from photos and videos and audio, to location information, via address books and "private" messages. As a third party who is not the device's maker or owner, you have little if any say about any of it. However, the combination of many devices capable of observing you and associating audio/video data with other information about you and the potential dangers created when this is done at scale in a highly asymmetric situation is enough to all but annihilate privacy, and more importantly, the underlying reasons we have come to value privacy in the past.
I guess we could get rid of all the cameras and have everyone walk around with blind folds so they can respect everyone else’s privacy from being seen, but it seems like a net negative in my book.
There is a vast, qualitative difference between someone casually walking past you in the street where the two of you see each other but pay little attention and move on, or even catching you incidentally in a photo taken for personal reasons and not shared, and the systematic, widespread acquisition of huge data sets drawn from multiple sources with or without the data subject's informed consent or even knowledge to be stored indefinitely in an automatically searchable format and then used for purposes unknown by parties unknown with consequences unknown to the data subject.
Let's say I'm grocery shopping or whatever and there's 3 people recording for whatever reason. Now I'm on their video, on Facebook, very likely to be tagged.
No thank you.
If they can do that, I am free to fly a drone above their head.
CCTVs exist for the business and to protect the business, and used to actually be closed-circuit. Now that a lot of them are becoming "cloud", they will create a lot of the same problems.
The difference with voluntary mass surveillance in combination with AI and social credit is that it incentivizes people to rat on each other to the government or Facebook.
Luddites complained about the automated loom as well
Now that's a really bad case of whataboutism. I'm not complaining about technological advance. I'm complaining about tech, which is a massive invasion of privacy. Have you ever been lying on a beach and some asshole lets his drone flying around? I don't know about you, but I really don't fancy to be half naked on some cretin's social media feed without my consent (which, needless to say I didn't give and would never ever provide).
Those bars and strip clubs already have plenty of CCTVs, you are being recorded.
I'm aware of that. I'm also aware that if such an establishment uploads the feed to the internet they'll go out of business mighty fast. In addition I don't have cops hanging around semi private places constantly recording what's going on in such places.
Those establishments may have a justified use, namely security, for such tech. You don't.
almost every phone has a camera capable of taking video
That was one of the more stupid arguments used by glassholes. When you whip out your phone and start recording that's obvious as hell. Not so, when you do it by a wearable.
people are worried about the potential for privacy abuse, but in the end these fears don’t come to pass
Actually they are very much. There were umpteen stories about glassholes using their gizmos even in places that explicitly banned their use. They then had the nerve to complain publicly about "ludites" that deemed this unacceptable.
Here's a search for you:
"privacy abuse google glass"
It yields 53’900’000 results. If just one procent of one procent involve actual stories of real privacy violations that's a massive invasion of societal privacy for ones own gratification. And that's exactly what's completely unacceptable.
You're free to believe in your techno utopia and that it only leads to progess and betterment of humanity.
I think you're wrong and believe my arguments to be sound as proven by the last 20 years and the rise of those tech behemoths and their constantly shitty behavior.
Calling me a ludite and using tech, which truly benefited humanity to make your argument makes you, in my opinion, intellectually dishonest.
And that's where I'll close my argument, since it's pretty obvious that we'll never agree.
> When you whip out your phone and start recording that's obvious as hell. Not so, when you do it by a wearable.
Not necessarily obvious. You most likely can't tell if someone is just holding his phone in his hands, or is recording you. There are apps that don't show a preview or any other clues on screen, so you won't know even if you get to see their screen.
We have had CCTVs around for the last 30 years, where are the massive privacy violations that you guys predicted 30 years ago?
Very very few people had google glass to begin with, the glass hole term was invented and perpetuated by a bunch of conspiracy theorists, enough to get 3.9 million hits on google (for < 1000 units?), it provides no evidence of anything.
Tech Luddism is as old as technology itself. It isn’t surprising that you don’t want this, that you don’t want other people to have this, we’ve gone down this road before and we will go down it again.
Tech Luddism has nothing to do with these arguments. I do not want tech that someone else controls, because it benefits 'them', not me. I want tech that I can control. See, e.g., Free Software Foundation and Purism.
CCTV footage wasn’t uploaded for everyone to see and comment on. It is usually closed to owners of them, and authorities who have reason to use it for investigation of a crime.
Using the “conspiracy theorist” argument is a typical way of trying to put a negative label on a group of people you disagree with these days. 3.9 million results doesn’t sound like a group of 10 mentally unsound people spewing a BS conspiracy. It provides evidence that a large portion of people don’t agree with the tech.
>Those bars and strip clubs already have plenty of CCTVs, you are being recorded. Police have body cams, cars have dash cams, almost every phone has a camera capable of taking video, the chance that you are being recorded if someone wants to is already very high.
>A glass cam will probably work out the same way CCTV has: people are worried about the potential for privacy abuse, but in the end these fears don’t come to pass.
The first two Cs in CCTV don't stand for instantly uploading everything to a 3rd party for analysis.
CCTV is fundamentally different than the "instantly send the data to a central server" model that currently dominates because CCTV is not reviewed except when it needs to be.
and in addition... share it on social media. Benign examples being your girlfriend just saw you on Twitter buying a ring for her by virtue of facial recognition and auto-tagging.
Always-on glasses constantly recording and uploading video are at least very illegal in Germany. I know we are sometimes too conservative and risk-averse but always-recording AR glasses are a bit too much.
It currently is having success in enterprise, albeit probably in environments where everyone signed a waiver or Google said they weren't beaming data from the glasses anywhere the company didn't want it to go.
> why are AR glasses going to be the tech to bring society down?
The people that are against it are more of the position that it isn't the technology, but those that control it. As techies it is easy to see all the benefits and not think of the downsides. We are a niche group after all, but that is easy to forget (especially if you live in SV). As techies we use ad blockers and have tracking blockers. But as we've seen with this wave of tech, our data is valuable and highly sought after. There are campaign after campaign to make us believe that it isn't worth much while the largest companies in the world thrive on it and the most dystopian societies embrace it and quote Goebbels.
Every technology has benefits and drawbacks. The issue is can we mitigate the drawbacks while being able to take advantage of the technology? With forethought this is certainty and historically true (though historically it has been because we reigned technology in). But when we have companies offering to do social credit (not just China btw) and literally comparing themselves to Black Mirror and saying they'll do that, but in a good way? I for one am ready to pump the breaks a bit and be more cautious as we take this turn. It isn't Luddite mentality, but more that we should resolve issues with security and the control of technology as we move forward. The current top comment is mentioning decentralized systems, homomorphic encryption, mesh network, etc. It isn't anti-tech, but maybe we should focus on privacy first before we give away something that people have had all throughout history and the lack of has been showing to cause social problems.
I think the parent is worried about the possible mandatory ubiquity of AR devices more than anything. As long as skipping a tech is socially acceptable and does not impose impractical costs (try living without interacting with a computer or a phone in a big city for a month and see how well it goes), AR vendors will have to have consumers interests in mind. As soon as AR becomes pragmatically unavoidable, vendors can and will exploit their leverage to impose additional costs on consumers to their own benefit, because opting out of AR will be even worse than swallowing it whole (welcome to game theory).
This is true of all technology advances. See electricity, motorized vehicles, phones, email (or the earlier form, the telegraph), more generally the internet and computers. You can’t ride your horse everywhere anymore, if you want to contact a company, you can probably still write them a letter, but if it’s urgent, you’re going to want to call or email them. Technology changes things, whether you like it or not, and unfortunately you just have to get over that. Society doesn’t function the same as in the 1800’s, and that’s ok.
We certainly had to adjust to those technologies, and all of them came with side effects in addition to being valuable, the same as the new tech we've seen in recent years.
In the 90s all anyone could talk about was how terrible TV was, the ballooning amount of time people spent watching instead of being social or going outside, etc. And I certainly spent more time actually watching and focusing on ads (commercials) then than I do on the web, where I block them, ignore them, or pay for them to go away.
Personally I have been moved to only use a desktop computer with Linux on it and switched to a Go Flip 3 dumb phone. It's helped my sanity quite a bit. I'm convinced tech peaked in 90s and the desktop dream was the best one.
Enthused by your comment I visited the vendor's website just to be greeted with:
"GO FLIP 3, with KaiOS 2.5, comes with Google Assistant to help you get things done like book appointments, make phone calls, and find answers on the go using just your voice." [1]
First off, if it's overwhelming or if it goes overboard, people just won't use it, so your example of advertisements on every surface and excessive tracking of what users are looking at and doing at all times will likely either not happen or occur but never be demonstrated in any practicable, user-facing way.
Second, even with Facebook owning Oculus and investing heavily into its success (rightly so, by the way, the Oculus hardware is phenomenal), they're only successful because other software developers have made such great use of their systems. In some cases, Facebook has bought the successful software/companies involves (Beat Saber...), but it'll take a long time before they establish both a top-tier VR hardware and software footholds.
My youngest would love that future. Left to her own devices she'd have the TV going, phone going, laptop going, listening to music with one ear while creating critter number six in sculpey.
I don’t know why you think those technologies will show up in a new platform and dominate our society. We could make analogs to those things now and they either haven’t been implemented (because we have the sense to not let it be popular) or are not in a form to ruin our lives (yet) — audio surveillance, web tracking for ads, haptic feedbacks for mobile devices to tell us when someone “undesirable” is in our presence, etc
This read alot to me like the 1950s "kitchen of the future" advertisements that used to be in magazines. Our perception of the future is our present projected into our imagination. Humans prove to stay human, connected to nature and the world without being human-digital cyborgs.
I spend alot of time trying to envisage what I think the information aggregation "tool" of the future is/will be. A watch? Glasses? An AI assistant chip in our earlobe? Whoever thinks of that will be an interesting fellow.
The AR section was the funniest. I think China is more likely to build powerful products here than anyone else, the question is whether they see a need or not. IMHO AR requires a revolution in lots of other areas to be useful for the wide masses.
Facebook will implement the worst possible version of Whuffie? Ugh. Imagining that future makes me want to live in a cave even more than the modern web does.
You give a lot of weight to cryptocurrency/blockchain/similar tech, and there's a lot more out there than that. I'm still waiting to see one reasonably decent application of a blockchain, and remarkably few of the things you mentioned provide much more than opportunities for scams and speculation.
While I do have a certain interest in some of those technologies, the character "Cypherpunk" was not autobiographical.
Yeah, a lot of blockchain stuff seems quite impractical and motivated by pump-and-dump opportunities. But if I close my eyes, I can almost imagine a reality where the blockchain tech is useful and widespread.
Mark's definitely on his own augmented reality. Unfortunately the rest of us get to enjoy the Coriolis effects of it via his monetization of dishonesty.
IMHO this choice of word is not neutral.
Facebook is not the cool thing anymore, it faces many contestations.
Assimilating its adversaries vocabulary after rendering it meaningless can be a way to fight them, to prevent any change.
Non-expert will be a bit more lost because the same words will now mean two different things. Now, we will have to explain the difference between Fediverse decentralized and Facebook decentralized for example.
Until they ""steal"" another word :P
I agree somewhat. I was having a hard time thinking of a good term, but cypherpunk was the best I could come up with (better than crypto-anarchist, crypto-utopian, hacker, geek, nerd, cryptographer, crypto-enthusiast). I did intentionally include variety even though I know it weakens the overlap. There were a bunch of things I could have included instead that would have been more similar, but I thought that was a bit boring.
The Wikipedia page for cypherpunk mentions Tor, Bitcoin, and Signal. So some of them are definitely cypherpunk. The 2 things I think are the least similar are RISC-V and homomorphic encryption. Both of those are mentioned in at least a couple threads on cpunks.org . In fact everything listed is mentioned on cpunks.org except Riot, Peertube, Dfinity, and Blockstack (although a different thing called Blockstack is mentioned). Riot is mentioned in /r/cypherpunk . There are articles linking Blockstack[1] and Dfinity[2] to cypherpunks.
I guess the only one that really stands out then is Peertube. It has a slight link due to a cypherpunk-themed instance[3] and the @cypherpunk@mastodon.social account boosting toots about Peertube.
There is one place where all those things are discussed: Hacker News. So I could have said "Hacker News user", but HN users have a reputation of being cynical, whereas I wanted a more optimistic term, and thought cypherpunk fit that.
Mark seems to be embracing remote work here citing how it can help alleviate skyrocketing housing costs, yet Facebook doesn't hire remote workers. He's in a position to start an industry trend here by putting his money where his mouth is, but instead we just get this blog post.
Certainly better than nothing though, just like him previpusly bringing up universal basic income. Would be nice to see him again put his money where his mouth in and support Andrew Yang. He's rich enough to do whatever he wants and actually change reality.
Zuckerberg said he supported UBI because he recognized that he was only able to start a business because he grew up well-off enough to know that he wouldn't starve if the business failed.
But... I always like to think of the Taleb quote: "Don't tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio"
So, still waiting (unlike Elon Musk and Sam Altman who have both come out in support of Yang right now)
I honestly don't think privacy legislation would make much headway, simply for the reason that vast majority of people outside of the HackerNews crowd don't care about it.
When people say they care about privacy, most of the time they mean they care about anonymity, as in privacy from people who knows them personally. They don't want their internet search history to be known by friends or family or coworkers, but they probably have no qualm if it's just data being sent to large corporate service providers.
That's why people would continue to trade personal info for conveniences for the foreseeable future, and as long as corporations maintain public anonymity for those data the most we'll ever see are temporary public outrages.
>When people say they care about privacy, most of the time they mean they care about anonymity, as in privacy from people who knows them personally. They don't want their internet search history to be known by friends or family or coworkers, but they probably have no qualm if it's just data being sent to large corporate service providers.
>That's why people would continue to trade personal info for conveniences for the foreseeable future, and as long as corporations maintain public anonymity for those data the most we'll ever see are temporary public outrages.
Absolutely agree. We've had no shortage of privacy related issues surfaced in the mainstream media, likely most notably Snowden's leaks. Some in the media made a concerted effort to make people understand just how grave the situation was, for example Colbert letting everyone know, on air, that they can access the dick pics you've sent people privately.
People heard it, digested it briefly, shrugged their shoulders and continued on without regard. In fact, people have become worse with their private information than ever before:
- People are now sending their DNA to private companies, with no care for the T&Cs involved, in exchange for utterly shallow, almost irrelevant genetic history infographics.
- People are wearing "wearables" that are reporting their heart rate, activity levels, sleep quality, etc. to private companies.
- People are opening their homes up to 24/7 surveillance with always on, always listening "smart home" devices.
- Many more people than ever are posting naked photos/videos of themselves on Reddit, Snapchat, etc., hosted on sites whose owners they have no clue of, ran by staff they have no idea of, etc.
They were told the risks, they did not care and so will be given, and will deserve, zero sympathy when something comes out highlighting the abuses enabled by some of the above. "We didn't know!" does not cut it anymore.
How do the ethics line up for an insurance company analyzing data from your wearables and seeing a data point that indicates a significant increase in the chance of a heart attack? Do they tell you and pay for preemptive care? Do they drop you as a customer? How many people have to die vs survive a heart attack to make warning you vs hoping you die the most profitable option?
In the US, insurance companies are required to provide you with insurance, and the insurance must cost only a certain percentage more than insurance for the healthiest (youngest) people. This is effectively a subsidy from people not likely to need healthcare (young) to people likely to need healthcare (old). Aka Medicare or nationalized healthcare in other countries.
This website has a nice table showing the adjustment factors.
NJ has a nice pdf explaining age rating factors, showing that early 20s is the benchmark, and even though people in 50s and 60s use much more than 3x the healthcare people in early 20s do, the premium is capped at 3x of those in early 20s.
As an aside, when people complain in the US that the ACA law increased their healthcare costs, what they are complaining about is having to pay for other people’s healthcare. Other than increase supply of healthcare (doctors, medicines, etc), there is no solution to bringing costs down.
This, exactly this.
I have been trying to convert a bunch of my non-tech social network to start using privacy respecting services (DDG/Signal/Tutanota primarily) and have seen more of apathy than pushback. People seem to have no qualms about their search history/messaging being analyzed/indexed/used for targeting as long as they can keep using those services free.
Honestly, until they experience first-hand a totalitarian government weaponizing their information they won't care. Even then, only that generation - well the survivors of that generation - will care. It's not enough to ponder about how much more deadly the Soviets could have been, or reading about what China is doing. For most people, if it's not happening to them immediately and directly, they just don't care.
Tutanota has a subpar UI/UX, and people like shiny. You won't get the masses with that.
DDG is valiant, but doesn't give the same "read my mind" feeling that Google has people used to. I see few people stick with it due to this.
Signal has proven itself as a great product in many ways, but people opt for the convenience that other messengers provide. The Signal crew seems to understand this, though, and slowly be working towards ways to match that. They'll (eventually, IMO) succeed for this reason - more "privacy respecting" entities need to take this route and understand that you will not get users or attention solely on espousing privacy rights.
My personal experience has been that people often don't know the extent of the data recorded and stored by corporations. For instance, someone (young and otherwise smart) simply refused to believe me when I told them that Google maps estimates traffic by tracking the location of every car using Google maps [1]. They thought Google was using live satellites imagery to estimate traffic.
[1] Didn't even mention the part about Google possibly tracking your location even if you don't use maps.
They might not but being concerned with that type of a thing comes with a deeper more committed understanding of why we might want to care about it can you take away the government is accountable for a lot of layers of our existence which we might not daily care about but are absolutely critical
> (US sites comply by region blocking GDPR covered users).
The only thing they comply with is their own paranoia. The GDPR doesn't even apply to US companies if they don't specifically target EU users.
I wouldn't be surprised if many sites were only violating the GDPR because they show those "cookie notices" which completely miss the point and don't help with compliance but could be considered catering to EU users.
It’s making headway right now, in the form of CCPA and GDPR. CCPA sets it up so masses of people can have a simple way to not only opt out of data collection but also delete data.
Ignoring his ramblings, but saying what I think will be important:
Control. The problem with technological advances today aren't with the tech itself, it's that the burst of consumer users allowed people like apple to turn computing into a user prison where the user has no control. This then set a standard, and many people have grown up without ever using a free and open source piece of software.
So AR and VR and AI and virtual assistants etc, the main problem is always going to go back to the root of why RMS started GNU in the first place; because he saw the future of tech was a fight for control of the user. He was just a man ahead of his time and socially awkward enough that it was and is easy to dismiss him based on what are essentially ad hominem attacks.
The future I want is FOSS/FOSH, regardless of the tech!
The dream of open source isn't any closer to being realized than it has ever been. Open source enthusiasts tend to overlook the fact that most people don't want control. Control is difficult to handle and requires a lot more energy and effort than ceding the control to another entity.
This isn't strictly a terrible thing. Anyone who has chosen to share their life with a partner gets that it is a lot easier if you divide up control of different aspects of your life among each other.
The problem is - as a society in general, and as tech consumers in particular, who should we cede the control to and how should the controllers be held accountable?
These are the same problems societies have faced for millennia, and now that newly emerging tech can operate at the scale of society in a couple of years, it is unreasonable to expect that billions of people adopt the libertarian mindset when it comes to tech alone.
"When I started Facebook, one of the reasons I cared about giving people a voice was that I thought it would empower my generation"
I'm pretty sure this was not one of his goals when he started facebook.
> A New Private Social Platform
So more facebook, just bite-sized for smaller groups.
> Decentralizing Opportunity
Essentially libra.
> The Next Computing Platform
Oculus.
> New Forms of Governance
"There are a number of areas where I believe governments establishing clearer rules would be helpful, including around elections, harmful content, privacy, and data portability. I've called for new regulation in these areas and over the next decade I hope we get clearer rules for the internet."
Although I somewhat sympathize with his predicament here, whose regulation is he talking about? If governments step in, then facebook would have to ultimately fracture into national facebooks. US, European nations, India, Middle eastern nations, etc are not going to have the same ideas about elections, harmful content, privacy and data portability. Even within the US, we are not going to have real consensus on this issue. This is where principles could help, but principles always seem to lose to political and financial interests.
In short, zuckerburg envisions we'll be using facebook on oculus paying with libra while governments solve all of facebooks intractable problems for him.
>I don't think private companies should be making so many important decisions that touch on fundamental democratic values... As long as our governments are seen as legitimate, rules established through a democratic process could add more legitimacy and trust than rules defined by companies alone.
This is a big chicken and egg problem. Mark wants the government to set the rules but what happens when Facebook doesn't make the rules, people are elected through questionable means (notice he used the phrase 'seen as legitimate'), and those people don't want to crack down on Facebook because an unregulated Facebook is a key to them remaining in power. There is a feedback loop there that Facebook could shutoff with a single decision from Mark. It is much harder to fix that problem through government action.
--There are a number of areas where I believe governments establishing clearer rules would be helpful, including around elections, harmful content, privacy, and data portability.
Mark could do a lot on his own without waiting for government.
Mark could:
Ban harmful content, he is a US citizen and could start with keeping a tighter lid on content that doesn't conform with non extremist western values. And then integrate other value systems shortly over time.
Mark could:
get out of all election advertising and push Facebook to be a place where everyone doesn't talk about that stuff and ban targeted political adds and just do other stuff.
Mark could:
Easily respect peoples privacy. I hardened my facebook profile a while back to remove most public content and the level of granularity to the privacy controls seemed like it was intentionally made difficult to do what I was doing. Dark patterns.
Mark could show leadership. he really could, he doesn't.
Mark wants the government to enact rules that only huge established players can possibly comply with in order to stamp out competition. If FB just went ahead and did these things themselves another player could enter the field in their place.
And he wants a seat at the table where those rules are designed. It's all of a piece, Facebook's place in the law and the kind of bog-standard Econ 101 regulatory capture I'd expect from Zuckerberg.
At least people are elected, I don't remember electing anybody in facebook and I don't want facebook to decide for me what is true and what is not, certainly when I know most of them politically lean in a very obvious way.
Look at everything Mark's overseen at Facebook over the last decade.
The unimaginably deep dark pools of data collection, the targeting, Internet.org's absolutely transparent attempt to get developing nations trapped on Facebook under the guise of philanthropy, the complete non-response to extremism on their own platform until way after it was a problem, the list goes on and on.
That's the last 10 years. Now Mark says they're building a more private, smaller platform? Private for who?
Mark says he wants to enable small businesses to connect with customers through their networks. What he's really saying is he wants every last piece of society to operate through his network so Facebook can get it's cut of the local laundromat.
I hate these grand-yet-bland, corporate flavored prognostications. There's absolutely no reason we should believe any of these things he's excited about will be a net benefit for the rest of us.
So his main point is a private & potentially decentralised social platform. He didn't address how the platform is going to be funded though.
Advertising as we know it is well and truly dead, and I don't think Facebook or Zuckerberg are the right entities to push for change in this field. They've already demonstrated their bad faith and maliciousness.
There are ways to make advertising ethical, but Facebook definitely won't do that, as they currently profit from the negative externalities & bad side effects of the current advertising model. Doing advertising ethically will be a serious downgrade from their current income, and while it's still a big chunk of money they for sure won't like it and will never do it for this reason.
Based on what? More people are spending more money online than ever, the holidays alone in 2019 broke records at an increase of 3.4% over the previous year's sales [0].
That is on top of an increase of 2.8% the previous year, something which was heralded as a disappointment [1].
Given the above, people are clearly being guided what to buy and where to buy it, so how could one realistically claim that "advertising as we know it is well and truly dead"?
People are creeped out and think phones are listening to them, privacy regulations around the world (GDPR and the California one) are making it very hard to do targeted ads, etc.
Nobody thinks that. Just a handful of loud ones. Look what happened after Snowden. Did people start spending less time using their phones? The biggest step they took was covering their webcams via tape. Nobody cares that they are being watched as long as it doesnt make the news.
> Advertising as we know it is well and truly dead, and I don't think Facebook or Zuckerberg are the right entities to push for change in this field. They've already demonstrated their bad faith and maliciousness.
How is advertising as we know it is well and truly dead? Online, it has been different from the time cookies, especially third party cookies, were added on sites. I agree it has become far worse with tracking and reporting devices people carry around all day, and with Facebook ruthlessly and unethically monetizing it and harming people (and countries).
Aren't things like Slack and Discord essentially private social networks? Same with other forms of group chat. I see way more activity in these kinds of channels than most of the public facing social networks other than Twitter.
No one in this thread has pointed out that Zuckerberg states that he is literally planning to bring how WeChat works in China (one marketplace for literally everything, sent through conventional apps and all fielded by a single company) to the entire world with Facebook.
That ambition is impressive, amazing, and terrifying, and everyone is completely ignoring it.
Since I am self taught Mandarin, I thought it was novel when he did too, and I saw his humility when he tried to speak it. Now he is painful to read for me. First, he lost my trust. Second, it's esoteric, nothing very concrete. Perhaps our ability to be anywhere through augmented reality sounds interesting, but not all that novel.
I really don’t think he did, just that is what the Chinese wanted to think for face reasons. He seemed very much like the average foreigner leaning it because he thought it was cool, because he had some family connection, and so on. Even him jogging in smoky Beijing is something a fresh off the plane foreigner would want to do (like I did when I was newly arrived to Beijing).
In the next decade I don't want to give you any money and I don't want you to know anything about me. Also my friends, family, likes, dislikes, my appearance, what my voice sounds like, or what I'm susceptible to buying. You have no right to this data and I want you to stop trying to get it. Kind of like what was absolutely normal in the 1990s or earlier, where it would have been impossible to know such things without literally following people around 24/7--you know, the kind of stalker behavior that would end up with me getting a restraining order against you. Kind of like before your insatiable and frightening lust to know everything about people drove you to build a surveillance panopticon designed for one purpose: to make you and your ilk some of the richest people in the world.
Honestly for a decade of change; this doesn't seem like a big enough perspective to have. Rather current challenges and things that are mostly anticipated. All of this is on CNBC everyday.
>A New Private Social Platform
Marc doesn't know what it will be but wants to buy it.
He knows that it is a thing.. Well we all do and have
been trying to figure it out. Path was one attempt...
maybe it was too early.
> Decentralizing Opportunity
Marc could already allow easy "buy it now" buttons in Facebook but doesn't for some reason...
>New Forms of Governance
This is the wrong question. He should be pushing
democratic ideals world wide.
Why don’t we start the decade off right and knock it off with the political ads on Facebook. Seriously, this guy lacks so much self awareness it blows my mind.
It’s called hypocrisy! He pretends to care for decentralization while he pushes policies which fortify a monopolistic hold on social media. He claims to care for democracy as he runs a platform which undermines it by putting our governments for sale to the deepest pocket and most malicious. It’s disgusting.
Funny the way that he included "Decentralizing Opportunity", and then followed up by envisioning a scarily centralized future for e-commerce.
Thats a shame because a re-decentralization of the web is one of the things that really should happen.
True decentralization will happen when anybody can host a functional website on their mobile phone(s) without depending upon the services of a corporate behemoth.
Early adopters are already using some form of what will become mainstream this decade. Will came a a lot of new things for early adopters, but only a few will become mainstream in the next one.
In the same way, intelligence agencies, hackers, and more are already using things that with a bit of luck general people will become aware this decade (but will fail to take good measures about it), and new advancements will become gradually available for both kinds of bad players in the next years, some that will remain, others that may be override by more prevailing ones.
Besides technology, the divide that I did above will become more important next decade too. How technology changes us, and what we become caused by it, is more important than the technology itself. Think in how we went from a culture of discretion and privacy to one of mindless sharing.
,,Today, many important institutions in our society still aren't doing enough to address the issues younger generations face -- from climate change to runaway costs of education, housing and healthcare. ''
Maybe there are ways to improve the quality of discussions _within_ Facebook to help solve these problems. It works for Hacker News, so I don't think it would be impossible. Of course indirect revenue from oil companies would decrease somewhat, but a balance should be found.
I'm always curious about claims that HN is degenerating. Where are those dissenting opinions of which you speak?
I took a look, and didn't find any. I did see several early comments by your account, including its very first one, that were downvoted. Which comments were downvoted vs. not seemed consistent with what would get downvoted today, though today they'd probably get downvoted more—probably because there are many more readers who can downvote things.
The problem is that these perceptions are very much in the eye of the beholder. As the saying goes, things have always been getting worse.
If anyone can come up with an objective measure for any of this, I'd be interested. As far as I can tell, though, these perceptions are strongly affected by the fact that the things that we dislike make a much stronger impression than the rest of what we see.
From my perspective, the downvoting isn't more aggressive than it used to be, there isn't more junk on the front page than there used to be (though there might be more ideologically conflictual material, since society is moving in that direction), and the titles aren't more baity than they used to be, since we edit most of the bad ones. I'm biased, though, and conditioned by the moderation job. The interesting question is whether there's a way to get beyond such biases.
While I think "degenerating" is a strong word, I do think there is a noticeable drop in the quality of comments since a decade ago. I don't have any hard data on this, but I think it's fairly obvious if you dig around in the archive. There used to be a more academic and countercultural feeling to commentary, as well.
Maybe some metrics to investigate are: number of words per comment, vocabulary level of the average comment [1], and so on. While neither of these are solely indicative of quality, I think they are something to consider.
I dig around in the archive a lot, and that's not obvious to me at all. There was a lot of variance in the past and there's a lot of variance now.
Number of words per comment would be easy enough to measure, but I'm not sure length is a good indicator of quality—not everyone who goes on at length has much to say. Your vocabulary link is interesting though—thanks! I've made a note to look into that.
Edit: since you mentioned "academic", I was thinking of your comment when I noticed the top two comments in the current Sci-Hub discussion:
To me that seems more common than it used to be, and a good sign. But it could just be sample bias.
Edit 2: here's another, randomly run across today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012673. Not academic, but technical in an unexpected way. There are a lot of physicians posting to HN.
All perceptions are in the eye of the beholder. Anyway, my unobjective measure is number of interesting articles and discussions I want to read after scanning the front page. It’s declining over the years.
It’s not really surprising since there are two contributing trends:
Online communities generally degrade as they increase in size.
Attention economy brings “heat death” of internet: amount of produced content is higher, quality is lower.
There's the notion of where good conversations are found, or what sources are referenced by external sources, or what links where will result in more traffic (or conversions) to linked sites / services.
There's metrics such as MAU and user time-on-site.
As dang noted in another recent comment, one of HN's scarcest commodities is its front-page slots. As with attention and time/day, that's an absolutely rivalrous good, and one which decreases comparatively as the site increases in size and volume -- more users means more competition for the 30 front-page slots per user.
And if more stories rotate through those slots, there will be either less time per story, or a restricted exposure (e.g., stories presented to only a subset of readers), or both. (I'm not sure what HN's specific mechanics are here, though I believe it's a mix of both.)
Conversational quality metrics are difficult to come by. Most tend to be expensive to calculate, especially in the absence of clearly parseable engagement information (e.g., likes, re-shares, comments). I've played with this concept in a few cases, most recently when trying to make assessments of activity / genuine community in Google+ Communities, prior to their shutdown.
Some of the more interesting research I'm aware of was based on Usenet, looking at thread dynamics, out of Microsoft Research, in the early/mid aughts. I think it was Marc A. Smith, see for example:
As for me, I didn't get a DM, just a shadow ban for a controversial comment (xiphias is my original user name). A few months after not ever being voted up somebody wrote to me that she sees that I'm shadow banned even though I'm writing constructive comments.
At the same time I don't know anything even comparable to HN, so I shy away from controversial wording / topics, and this way things that I write goes through the ,,dang'' filter. I still think that he's much more constructive than what would be here without him at this scale of (non-geek) users.
Lobsters is probably the closest, I’d think. It’s not super active, though. Why not build it yourself?
I got shadowbanned on Reddit after creating one of the more popular subreddits. It’s a weird feeling. With decentralized moderation, who sets the constitution? This is why AI/ML in response to this self-governance stuff is a meme.
I don't need decentralized moderation actually, I would prefer highlighting comments of people that I like and people that they like. This would be enough for me to find constructive smart people.
The why not I build part: network effects are strong, so I think it's really hard to do something that people would use.
There are several identifiable commenting communities, and quite a few different voices.
I consider myself a dissident voice. Whilst my input isn't always appreciated, it often is, and I've found some measure of success pressing back against several of the more notable hivemind sentiments.
Not taking the challenge personally helps. Finding your own best argument also. Persistence pays off.
I think I see some patterns where topics that used to get downvoted get upvotes instead, and I hope that's because others have decided that they don't like what this says about the community, and so they upvote them on general principle. (The Cynic worries that someone's astroturfing budget ran out).
It seems schizophrenic because there really isn't a hivemind. Rather, there are various mutually antagonistic groups who differ in their beliefs in what the "hivemind" represents (as opposed to "authentic" Hacker News culture,) based on their suspicions about what sinister conspiracy is behind moderation and comments contrary to their point of view. Almost no one here seems to trust that people who disagree with them are ever posting in good faith.
Whether a topic gets upvoted or downvoted seems to depend on which camp gets to it first, and the bias introduced by the first comment, which will inevitably determine how long the topic lasts, barring moderator intervention.
I have noticed this trend as well. That is why I read HN with dead comments enabled, and vouch+upvote a dead comment whenever I think it adds to the discussion (e.g. brings new info or brings up a point or angle that I haven't seen in that thread and makes me stop and think about it for a second or two), regardless of whether or not I agree with that comment.
Sometimes good comments end up forgotten, just because someone got to them first, who disagrees with them and is not intellectually mature enough to handle that.
I think the fact that he cites work on a 'private social platform' is significant. Even if you set aside broader trends in consumer apps and just look at FB itself, this trend is inevitable given the way statuses--a prominent part of the Newsfeed--have been in decline for years, while Groups have been flourishing.
I agree we need a new private social platform. But, I hope it isn't Facebook that wins that race.
I've been working on a social network that I believe represents "generational change" - no ads, no clickbait news, no public profiles. It goes against the grain of what current social networks are doing.
Hey I tried out your app, but I don’t understand how to use it at all, in fact there’s no information really at all on what it is. Maybe you could consider making a small tutorial when you first sign up? Also feel free to email me if you want to talk about it, I’m also working on a social app. Was this built in react native?
This seems to be everything that commenters on HN claim to want, but the $20 a year thing seems to be fundamentally incompatible with how social networks grow.
> By the end of this decade, I expect more institutions will be run by millennials and more policies will be set to address these problems with longer term outlooks.
He "expects" this? This is trivially true in that it is an unavoidable result of the human lifecycle. 40 years from now, the boomers won't be in congress or in jobs -- they'll be dead. The only possible conclusion is that the millennials will replace them. I don't see why he felt the need to state that he "expects" this. Everyone who understands that humans die expects this.
> reconstruct all kinds of smaller communities to give us that sense of intimacy again.
This is how people use Facebook already. Most of my friends who "use" Facebook are really just in private groups and chat. Twitter is the go-to global platform -- it's one big bubble. Facebook is distinguishing itself as more of a private platform of isolated bubbles. This has already been happening for the past 10 years.
> Decentralizing Opportunity... If we can make it so anyone can sell products through a storefront on Instagram, message and support their customers through Messenger, or send money home to another country instantly and at low cost through WhatsApp -- that will go a long way towards creating more opportunity around the world
Decentralizing Opportunity? Maybe. Centralizing monetary transaction traffic to Facebook so they reap the equivalent of a VAT on every sale? Definitely.
I still don't understand how the one of the most intelligent minds in Silicon Valley work for Facebook to make sure people click ads. Can they work on real problems like the ones Bill Gates foundation is working on? No, non-profitable enough
That's interesting. I just don't think there has been any research into holistically evaluating social networks. AFAIK studies mostly focus on small parts often with the premise to find something negative (e.g. effect of seeing other feeds with success stories).
Obviously a lot of people do in fact derive pleasure and some other benefits or they wouldn't keep using it.
"Obviously a lot of people do in fact derive pleasure and some other benefits or they wouldn't keep using it."
That doesn't follow at all. When I used to use Facebook it was based on an addictive compulsion but each time I used I realized it made my mood worse. My life got better when I stopped using the platform.
Because Facebook pays a lot more money and hire more people. If Bill Gates would pay me six figures to end poverty, I'd quit engineering and take him up on that offer. Unfortunately I have student loans to pay off.
As your mind will become another peripheral to cloud systems, I think in the next decade, is more important to regain yourself from the social media fake virtualizations and balance with true life experiences.
so he's focusing on low hanging fruit for 10 years. i take it this is his retirement announcement?
if not, why not focus on real challenges like climate change
when did an industry decentralize historically? the tendency is towards centralization. The only thing that can counter centralization is ubiquitous encryption
Almost always: industries or activities which were once only viable in a single (or small number) of instances, but which, given increases in net total capabilities, but no inherent efficiencies of scale, require replicated instances rather than a centrally-controlled monopoly.
Even here, if there's a space for centralised control, it's possible that either some single entity will gain effective unitary control or impose a control overlay.
High-mass products, which ship poorly, products which are very highly localised (culture, custom), "high-touch" (1:1 or 1:(small-n) activities, on-site services, specifically-tailored activities, rapid spoilage, tend to be amongst these.
Examples which come to mind of each:
- High mass: concrete, dairy, and water. Shipping costs rapidly eat into profits, though water can move efficiently for hundreds, possibly as much as 1,000km, via aqueducts and pipelines.
- Localised: culture, including to an extent the film industry (at least at the national level), which contrasts with video's otherwise extreme ephemerality, and hence centralisation. Teaching is probably the ultimate, with the failures of ed-tech reinforcing this yet again. The gold-standard in teaching remains 1:1 tutoring, for complex reasons. Most personal-care services, ranging from medical to beauty, therapy, and training. Activities proscribed by widely-varying local regulation also tend toward geographical dispersion.
- Most of the trades -- plumbing, electrical, HVAC, landscaping, on-sight equipment maintenance, auto repair, and the like, all spawn from the fact that it's cheaper to provide local expertise and capability than to move the equipment to a centralised facility. The more specialised equipment is, the more likely service is to be centralised, and some transport equipment (aircraft, ships) sees centralised servicing based on both mobility and complexity.
- The degree to which spoilage is no longer a pressing concern is impressive: cold-chains and air freight mean that fresh fruits, vegetables, and flowers now move globally, though local produce remains viable. Freshly-cooked meals remain a holdout, with even in-city delivery limited to a few standbyes: pizza, Chinese takeaway, and the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel. (https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...).
In most other cases, the supposed freedom from location afforded by technology and ephemeralisation actually strongly favours centralisation. Almost anything related to mass culture (film, music, video games, and some books, as well as clothing and fashion) tends extremely toward centralisation.
Look around you at the "small shops" in your neighbourhood, town, or suburb. Those are the serivces which have resisted centralisation, though almost all have some strongly centralised elements.
> I don't think private companies should be making so many important decisions that touch on fundamental democratic values.
> One way to address this is through regulation.
> I've called for new regulation in these areas and over the next decade I hope we get clearer rules for the internet.
Surprising to hear a near-monopoly call for regulation.
> Another and perhaps even better way to address this is by establishing new ways for communities to govern themselves. An example of independent governance is the Oversight Board we're creating.
> Surprising to hear a near-monopoly advocate for regulation.
Not really. When a company reaches a certain level of dominance, government regulation is a good thing because it increases the cost of entry to the market, so it acts as a kind of moat for the established players.
It would be harder for a fledgling competitor to comply with an increased regulatory burden than it would be for Facebook. This is especially likely given that Facebook would be influencing the regulation. That is one incentive for Zuckerberg to advocate for regulation even though he runs a monopolistic firm.
Absolutely. Regulation for Zuckerberg, written by Zuckerberg's counsel, with loopholes accommodating Zuckerberg, and penalties that would be a mere cost-of-doing-business if raised for Zuckerberg.
The US government needs dramatically less influence from moneyed lobbyists and tech powerhouses, not more. God help us if it goes the opposite direction. It would make the utter scandal that was the US government granting immunity to the telecom companies for facilitating widespread surveillance by the US government look like a child's game.
There are regulations that establish ground rules, that encode best practices into law, which means contracts and conflict resolution becomes more well defined and much easier for all parties, which decreases cost of entry.
Not to be confrontational, but what is Facebook’s monopoly? I don’t use it or any of their other products and I’m not missing anything. We could say monopoly of social, but then there is Twitter et al, for messaging, I have iMessage and email, for photos, I can email or iMessage them. For online advertising, there is Google and others, for offline ads, there is print and TV. I’m not getting what Facebook’s monopoly is..
Analysis of whether a company is a monopoly should involve things other than market domination, for example anticompetitive behavior like buying all competitors. Even if you feel you have a choice as a consumer, the analysis of whether Facebook or any company has an economically detrimental monopoly should include their actions to stifle competition and achieve pricing power.
Well, this is a thread speculating about the future decade, reflecting on a guy's insights who has a dubious track record, by intelligent people that are in the loop of current tech trends.
I'm amused by this assessment given how you could pretty much say the exact same comment in reverse.
Specifically, between these "intelligent people [on Hacker News]" and a "guy [with] dubious insights", one of these groups has a couple of billion dollars invested in every single one of the topics in the document whereas the other... well, maybe Bill or Jeff or Satya or one of the others reads Hacker News, but I doubt it. :)
This thread is a good example of how HackerNews has become less about analysis and informed commentary, and more about opinions and advocacy.
I look at Mark's post and I see him being honest with people about how he believes the world is going to evolve - not necessarily how he wants it to evolve, nor how Facebook even intends to move forward.
Everyone is so blinded by their emotional hatred of Mark that they cannot stomach discussing the points he is making.
Zuckerberg has a history of being intellectually lazy and making choices that are a net negative for society. There is no secret to the nefariousness. It is right out in the open. He is not a good guy and his response to the overflowing racism and bad faith political content on FB is a giant meh. Twitter showed real leadership. It is Facebooks turn.
No. VR is probably destined to remain a niche interface. There just aren't enough potential applications which would benefit from VR, or which would be improved with VR. It won't be adopted en masse because there will never be that great a demand for it.
Although if the price went down, what demand there was would probably be met. I definitely don't want to pay $400 or more for something that should just be a peripheral.
Anyone who's seen clips of an NFL or NBA game on a VR headset knows that this is the future. Unfortunately we are not there yet and development seems to have really cooled down recently. In fact we might have another VR winter on hand until someone makes a new breakthrough and re-awakens all the hype and interest. But I don't think it's too far-fetched to say that sometime within my lifetime VR could easily become the main delivery medium of entertainment, replacing TV sets, movie screens and gaming consoles for most households
Even beyond entertainment, when working hours in an office, I'd rather look at a beach or fantasy landscape with a nice ambient sound than a dull wall with rain under a greyish light outside. I'd likely spend most of my time in VR just because it's nicer.
Life-like VR fundamentally holds the promise of being one more great social equalizer if you can essentially simulate material wealth (objects, locations) like a video game, even just the visual part of it. E.g. IKEA is all over such research, with good reason.
Most people also don't realize that in terms of communication, any non-physical interaction (so excluding sex and hugs) would be just as good in VR as in reality, thereby making face-to-face meetings the norm anew (like before any form of distant communication existed, save for mail). That's bound to be a healthy change, a welcome improvement from text, audio and even video.
It's just a little bit too early indeed, and probably headed for a (shorter) winter I agree. Come 2030ish we should have much more decent options to move forward (from current specs you'd estimate a 10x at least to reach 'acceptable' capabilities, and more like 100x if you seek visually life-like sim, i.e. ~250px per arc minute at 100Hz or more over at least 180° field of view).
I’ve been using my Quest daily for working out since I bought it in May, hard to argue with 30 pounds of weight loss. On the other hand, I’ve never actually gamed with it, or used it for anything other than about an hour of fitness daily. Totally worth it for me, I can’t wait to see what comes next.
Mostly BoxVR but with some BeatSaber mixed in. BoxVR is super effective once you’ve learned its quirks and really commit to shadow kick boxing (putting a lot of force into your punches). BeatSaber is more fun and less of a grind, but its lack of a fitness mode means you fall out of zone too much inside and between songs. I want to try some more games with fitness potential like PistolWhip, and I’m still hoping for something better than BoxVR, which has a lot of usability deficiencies.
You should get the "Thrill of the Fight". Better workout than BoxVR and truly feels like a real boxing match (except for the part where you don't end up with a black eye).
I have it and it seems to require way too much space. Would nice to have a tutorial or something, and also because it is like real boxing, it is much more difficult to grind. There really isn’t a rhythm you can easily get into, you have to keep thinking and reacting. Rhythm games have a huge advantage in the grinding department.
I’ve bangered up my hands with BoxVR enough by hitting my controllers against my headset. Really should wear glove or something.
This strikes me as mainly a lot of malarkey from a person who will happily earn more billions in coming years trough the monetized distraction of a another final generation.
But I’m dumbfounded by the private network reference. Zuck sees people trying to circumvent oppressive regimes as some sort of emerging market opportunity? Or does he think you and I would pay to use “FB Private” if they promised to turn off everything about normal Facebook’s current business model?
What a bunch of crock! It seems like it’d always remain too much to ask for Mark to understand things and look at the big picture for the good of everyone. IMO, this post yet again makes a good case for breaking up the company.
Most of this post is about how Facebook is looking for new ways to make money, and just a few sentences about large problems like diseases or poverty.
He carelessly uses words like “private” and “decentralized” in dishonest senses to mean that:
a) Facebook (the company) will provide you these solutions and misname them as private and decentralized
b) Facebook (the company) will still run on ads and profiling users.
Augmented and virtual reality — yet another way for Facebook to surveil people.
Asking for regulations as if he wants it. What he has wanted from the time Facebook has come under scrutiny by lawmakers is regulatory capture...getting laws passed in a way that prevents competitors from even trying, while Facebook can continue to claim that it’s doing its best with “independent” boards and committees and escape penalties and punishments.
Anyone wanting something better for the future can only hope that Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg get out of running Facebook the company in any manner by 2030, if we go by wishlists by decades.
Many of the interpretations you have, and the intents and beliefs you claim Zuckerberg holds, are not evident in the article.
You're coming across as someone with an intense confirmation bias.
It's important that Facebook and other tech giants not be allowed to harm society in the coming decade. But an intense and emotional overreaction only makes that position seem less credible to the uninformed.
> But an intense and emotional overreaction only makes that position seem less credible to the uninformed.
But haven't those same companies already proven themselves to not be credible by their actions? What happens when everyone doesn't have this reaction, we get complacent and it's too late because they've already taken control? That's not confirmation bias, that's critical thinking.
> Many of the interpretations you have, and the intents and beliefs you claim Zuckerberg holds, are not evident in the article.
This is like listening to Pooh bear saying he's going to eat less honey this year because he wants to lose weight without ever reading any of the books.
when i read Zuck's post, I thought to myself he has a solid vision on how to compete with the Chinese companies that have huge overlaps with how he thinks mobile will be used in the coming decade.
Any future avatar based communication system (VR/AR) needs to be open source and auditable if it’s going to mediate a large portion of human affairs and interaction. It also needs to be actually decentralized, the way the web and Internet are.
VR communication systems are a toy/gimmick like second life was. I have spent some time with VRchat and see no reason why it would end up becoming a primary method of communication over IM/social media. Its a good way to mess around and have some fun but its less convenient than existing methods.
It seems highly likely 5-10 years from now you will be able to wear a device that is comfortable and unobtrusive that can deliver the presence of any other connected user to you instantly, including body language and full spatial awareness. In such a world where these devices exist, it would be pretty stunning to think people would not use them regularly for such purposes.
There are a few things that make it less convenient. One of them like you pointed out is the size and comfort issues but there are other issues. VR/AR chats require your full attention / real time communication. Most communication has left phone calls and moved to asynchronous communication methods. Another is limitations of the space, people spend a large % of there communication time on public transport, instant messaging translates well to this since it requires no listening or making noise and requires minimal space. Full body tracking and spacial awareness is useless when you are sitting down.
I think if people really wanted to primary communicate with facial/avatar awareness, we would see everyone using video calls over social media and IMs.
I think VR/AR communication has some place in the future but I do not see it becoming a serious/primary communication tool.
I'm confused, are you arguing that video calls are not a primary communication tool? If avatar based comms became as common as video calls I'd consider that a primary tool.
Besides, the idea is not that this would meaningfully displace existing media (except perhaps video for some use-cases), but provide a fundamentally new medium for communication that has no present day analog other than face-to-face. Much like current tools, you'd use it when it is the ideal context and situation for it to be maximally useful.
Video calls and other media have distinct tradeoffs, and are objectively worse than face-to-face along a variety of dimensions.
The argument is simple, if you believe:
- people value face-to-face over existing digital communication tools for certain contexts
- VR and AR based communication meaningfully approaches face-to-face in certain ways that existing tools do not
- VR and AR technology will eventually get to a point where it is ubiquitous
Then it seems that tech will be used for those purposes. Either of the latter two assumptions could be wrong, but early research [1] supports the argument of first, and based upon the tech track the second seems highly likely.
For what purpose though? Front facing cameras are in every device now and IM/voice chat is still more common. I guess it depends if you are communicating for function or for social/entertainment purposes. I just don't see the added value of avatar communication other than the novelty of being a video game character or a fox person
The value of avatar based communication, vs video in particular, is about:
- social presence: the feeling of being together and of unmediated communication
- shared spatial awareness: the ability to have a shared reference frame of physical reality
these are the two key features of face to face communication that digital communication tools have largely failed to replicate. (as studied by academic research)
I also conjecture there's a third:
- ability to dynamically spawn and manipulate contextual mixed media in a shared spatial environment (videos, images, 3d models, data, etc)
These three characteristics combined are met already today to some degree by modern day video games, but VR/AR seems likely to be the key tool to knock down much of the barrier regarding social presence due to its ability to transmit many more forms of non-verbal communication between people than existing tools.
agree, but it's the best example we currently have of a global scale decentralized digital network. (crypto assets aside, which aren't really a good analog to what i'm talking about here) would be happy to make a better one tho!
I don't understand your attitude towards him. When I read his post, I didn't feel this way at all.
It seems the problems you have with is rooted on the nature of big corporations. Basically all the big companies are doing those things, especially regulatory capture.
How is replacing Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg with anybody else will give you a Utopia Facebook?
In the world as it is today, the only way that is going to happen is if someone like Facebook or Google sponsors a decentralised solution. Projects like Matrix/Riot are technically great, but that alone is not going to make regular people adopt it. They want something that's easy to use and where most of their friends are. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a free (from corporate control) and decentralised chat platform gain as much adoption as email in the next decade, but realistically I can't see that happening.
I wish more people would do it (though I’ve been advocating for this for a long time). The network effects are still strong, and people are loathe to try another platform that may not serve the same needs.
I keep trying to push people away from WhatsApp (somewhat easily, I should say) because there are many alternatives. Instagram is tougher. The newer federated alternatives like Pixelfed aren’t there on features, and they don’t even have a mobile app yet! Facebook groups is another thing that doesn’t have a good enough replacement.
In certain cases Facebook remains the best option to reach people. I’m not talking about personal messages or interactions, but about things of value to larger communities focused on social good.
They're invaluable for democracy. Right now, there are a number of anti government, pro democracy protests taking place in my country. All of them are being organized and spread via Instagram and WhatsApp
That's about as practical for me as giving up my local water utility as an inner-city dweller. I mean I definitely could. I can get large bottles of potable water delivered quite cheaply, and I guess I could setup a system so that that's what came out of the taps.
But what I really want is for the government to intervene so I don't need to give up my local water utility, by guaranteeing minimum levels of service, and providing solid regulation.
There are lots of communities and events that are organized through Facebook. Also lot of my friends are on Facebook and they organize gatherings etc through it.
Could you create an empty account with no personally identifiable info and use that to see events? Before deleting FB I deleted the app from phone and used browser only. If I went back it would be as a zero value profile.
This is already jumping through hoops. If my friends organize birthdays they do it through private FB events and group chats, meaning I would have to still readd all the friends I have. And at that point I am sure my new account could be correlated and linked to my old account.
Some groups like my local housing community I would have to explain who I am and give a huge spiel about how I deleted my Facebook account and I am actually X.
You can internally think doing something is frustrating, but the more frustrating things you are willing to do for the friendship the more it shows you value that friendship. And it does require effort, there is no argument about that.
Well the argument was whether one can do reasonably as well without Facebook. So the point is there are quite many inconveniences caused by that. This is why it would be preferable that Facebook was regulated properly.
It is not as simple as asking to send an SMS. I will be missing out on a lot of information, bonding opportunities, picture sharing and I will be that annoying dude making others jump through extra hoops as well.
I am personally not going to make that sacrifice.
I could also live in complete isolation in the woods and without friends. I just do not want to live like that being constantly paranoid.
It is. Inform your friends that you don't use Facebook and ask them to treat you the same way they would treat any other friend that doesn't use Facebook: reach out and communicate through any of the other myriad ways available to everyone.
> I am personally not going to make that sacrifice.
That's fine, but any objections you have to Facebook's behavior ring hollow since you recognize the problem but are unwilling to do anything about it. You are thus part of the problem.
> I could also live in complete isolation in the woods and without friends
Silly hyperbole. This is not the end result of not using Facebook.
I can still object and demand government to do something about that. This is my legal right. If I quit Facebook it is not going to solve the problem on a higher level except alienate me from other people.
This is not a silly hyperbole. It would be a solution to avoid sharing your data with anyone. There are also other entities that could abuse your data.
Social media is my primary means of communications with my friends and family, and wider support network, which I absolutely need to survive.
Yes, I could find another way to contact my support network. I could also find another way to get drinkable water. I'd rather there was simply regulation though.
Do you remember when he did that BBQ ad saying he wanted to tour America and hear opinions? It looks like he might be trying to edge his way into a political career again.
I like him because his uncanny valley appearance and single-minded morally-neutral totalitarianism make me feel like I'm living in some high-quality vintage science fiction.
A little irksome to be told that climate change is an issue "younger generations face." Like I'll be dead soon so it doesn't matter to me. Is that what you're telling me? Well all right then, I'll sell that bicycle I keep laboriously pedaling and start partying with gasoline! Don't worry, you guys got this!
No but the funny part is, since the climate has already changed, that actually means I'm currently dead.
I believe that’s incorrect. The best people at FAANG aren’t working on next gen tech. They’re working on making fractional improvements to advertising, because the tiniest improvement there is a billion dollars.
SV is brain draining more fields than just computer sciences.
Can't see this article as connections to malicious domains like facebook.com are blocked on my network - anyone has the full text on a PasteBin or something?
It's less about proving a point and more that I have it blocked at the router level because I don't use Facebook myself and yet they still use the domain to serve tracking & stalking scripts which are malicious.
