Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes thinks "It’s Time to Break Up Facebook"

It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

Mark is still the same person I watched hug his parents as they left our dorm’s common room at the beginning of our sophomore year. He is the same person who procrastinated studying for tests, fell in love with his future wife while in line for the bathroom at a party and slept on a mattress on the floor in a small apartment years after he could have afforded much more. In other words, he’s human. But it’s his very humanity that makes his unchecked power so problematic.

Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. He controls three core communications platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — that billions of people use every day. Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.

Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government.
Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. I’m disappointed in myself and the early Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders. And I’m worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them.

Photo by Aimee Vogelsang

Evangelical IndieWeb

Return to the Open Web! vs Join the Open Web! by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)

Dries Buytaert, the originator of the Drupal CMS, is pulling the plug on Facebook. Having made the same observations I did, that reducing FB engagement leads to more blogging. A year ago he set out to reclaim his blog as a thinking-out-loud space, and now a year on quits FB.
I’ve seen this in a wi...

Repopulating the feed reader? Never left it. Returning to the open web? Never left it? Dumping Facebook? Not gonna happen.

It makes me wonder how we can bring others along with us.

I don't think they want to (or care) come along? I shop at the mall because the flea market is a smelly noisy mess and the quality of the products/services are poor. Caveat emptor. I expect that's why walled gardens (or should that be malled gardens) do so well.

The first walled garden, AOL, got my wife and her family on the Internet. It was easy for them to use and understand. They've never blogged and have never wanted to. They want to go to that place "where everybody knows your name".

Why are many people (it's starting to sound like an echo chamber) thinking about "saving" people? I see articles that remind me of those evangelical Christians who would bark out to me as I walked across the step of the Georgia Tech Campus. "Unless you accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour, you can not be saved". It didn't matter if I was happy doing what I was doing. I needed to be saved from myself.

It's as though the default assumption is "those people must be having a bad experience", let me save them. Let's write a piece about how much I hate Facebook. Make sure to mention some person few care about who has recently deleted their account. Let's all nod our heads in agreement. Let's ignore the fact that far more people are enjoying Facebook/Twitter and find utility in it.

When was the last time you helped someone get started on the open web?

Shall I force it on them? Shall I be the arrogant tech geek who looks upon them with pity that they are not enlightened? Shall I show them Mastodon and when they say, "but ... none of my friends are here and the user experience sucks", tell them, "it'll get better. just make new friends among all these random people you've never met?"

Or ... I can say, "Hye, I'm doing this cool thing that I feel gives me the freedom to express myself. I fully own it and the content on it. Would you like to join me?".

As my wife likes to say when someone makes a face and comments negatively her favourite foods, "stop yucking my yum".