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Silicon Valley Investors Wants to Fund a 'Good For Society' Facebook Replacement (calacanis.com)
Silicon Valley angel investor Jason Calacanis just announced the "Openbook Challenge," a competition to create a replacement for Facebook.
"Over the next three months, 20 finalists will compete for seven $100,000 incubator grants," explains long-time Slashdot reader reifman. "Their goal is to find startups with a sustainable business model e.g. subscriptions, reasonable advertising, cryptocurrency. etc. And they want it to be 'good for society.'"
Jason Calacanis writes: All community and social products on the internet have had their era, from AOL to MySpace, and typically they're not shut down by the government -- they're slowly replaced by better products. So, let's start the process of replacing Facebook... We already have two dozen quality teams cranking on projects and we hope to get to 100...
This is not an idea or business plan competition. We're looking for teams that can actually build a better social network, and we'll be judging teams primarily based upon their ability to execute... Keep in mind, that while ideas really matter, Zuckerberg has shown us, execution matters more.
Calacanis has even created a discussion group for the competition...on Facebook. And his announcement includes a famous quote from Mark Zuckerberg.
"Don't be too proud to copy."
"Over the next three months, 20 finalists will compete for seven $100,000 incubator grants," explains long-time Slashdot reader reifman. "Their goal is to find startups with a sustainable business model e.g. subscriptions, reasonable advertising, cryptocurrency. etc. And they want it to be 'good for society.'"
Jason Calacanis writes: All community and social products on the internet have had their era, from AOL to MySpace, and typically they're not shut down by the government -- they're slowly replaced by better products. So, let's start the process of replacing Facebook... We already have two dozen quality teams cranking on projects and we hope to get to 100...
This is not an idea or business plan competition. We're looking for teams that can actually build a better social network, and we'll be judging teams primarily based upon their ability to execute... Keep in mind, that while ideas really matter, Zuckerberg has shown us, execution matters more.
Calacanis has even created a discussion group for the competition...on Facebook. And his announcement includes a famous quote from Mark Zuckerberg.
"Don't be too proud to copy."
The ideal Facebook replacement costs zero bucks.
If there is no money to be made, then it should be sponsored by the state. Computers do consume energy after all. And we know that giving full control to the state just put more ties into three letters agencies. Another service would be e-mail. I do not know what is worse: e-mail read by Google or e-mail read by the NSA/CIA/others without any warrants.
The good replacement for a bad thing is the absence of the bad thing.
Imagine Silicon Valley writing a "Good For Society" US Constitution, and whether it would have anything resembling the 1st or 2nd (or 4th or 5th) amendments . . .
that makes sense.. cease fire stand down,, there are moms & babys in every town the wotld around.. that's the spirit,, never any subscription or cover charges.. thanks again..
They're free and open source, federated and open to anyone and everyone. And they already exist. They're just not from Silicon Valley and funded by billionaire VCs.
Me again, I meant to say GNUSocial and *Mastodon*.
There are already plenty of alternatives available --- why the hell they need to start yet another facebook equivalent for?
And that 'good for society' bit, for whose' society, and how to measure the 'good'ness?
But his approach doesn't really make a business. He intends to change social media from a website and a vendor who sells your info to advertisers, to a peer-to-peer protocol that our devices implement to propagate what we want to tell our friends, kind of like a modern-day NNTP with hard crypto privacy controls.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
- Openbook will run out of money (yes, it costs money to run servers for hundreds of millions of users)
- Openbook will sell ads to fund themselves
- Openbook will realize it's even more profitable to collect data and sell it to the highest bidder
- Openbook will get a "think of the children" or "Uuh! Terrorism!" injunction from some court or governmental agency, and will share their data with them
- Openbook = Facebook
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
because such a thing would still have to have all that user data. no company should be allowed to harvest, retain, or use for commercial gain, that amount of personal and/or private data
Fuck crypto currencies, or to be more exact, fuck crypto-currencies that set the difficulty rate so that huge amounts of energy has to be wasted in order to "mine" the currency - that just isn't necessary.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
and accountability to users and all the other things Facebook is screwing up. Or more accurately anger that trump supposedly benefited finally got people to care about all these things, when they couldn't have given a rat's arse that their electronic lives were being bought and sold six ways from sunday just a few months prior. You got to give him credit for this amazing awakening.
I don't know if its willful or blind idiocy, but everything humans have created has been used for evil by someone. The more detached from others they are, the worse it has gotten. Facebook got huge and couldn't see the trees for the forest. Whatever any of these people come up with... will eventually be sold to a corporation that won't see the users as anything but a profit center and begin to exploit it.
Maybe next time instead of our data, its our computer's data. Maybes it not our browsing habits, but our usage habits. They'll try to abstract and wind up right back in the exact same place.
Because the fastest way to grow is to give your product away, and the fastest way to profit is to throw your morals out the window.
Facebook got huge the same way Google got huge... by creating a lure to get your eyes on ads, then selling you to advertisers. The only huge corporation that gives it away and stays free is Twitter, and they are on the auction block to anyone who can figure out how to monetize them (hint, it will be ads).
The entire point of social media is attention. YOUR attention. To keep your eyes glued to a screen and show you ads. That is ALL it is for. Yes you get benefits from it, if you didn't, you would not stay and see those ads, and the platform would die like so many others. The idea of making a social network that somehow avoids this forever and ever is just an ignorant rant from someone who doesn't understand how business works. Users will not pay subscription fees to join a social network, not when they can get it somewhere else for free. Oh they are running from Facebook in droves you say? And ask them where they are going, or who they are still using. Google +, Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. These companies are no different, they just have yet to get caught doing the same shit Facebook was caught doing. And it is inevitable they will be caught at it. And the users will flock to the next free thing because being social SHOULD be free... but as long as hardware and software on a centralized platform is required, it never will be.
Seriously people can't shoot themselves in the foot if you don't give them a loaded gun to do it with
Continue to mod parent up.
It's more than a little ironic that what's been going on for a decade took Trump 10 months to expose.
Go outside.
Wait...that's not gonna work.
Nevermind
and accountability to users and all the other things Facebook is screwing up. Or more accurately anger that trump supposedly benefited finally got people to care about all these things, when they couldn't have given a rat's arse that their electronic lives were being bought and sold six ways from sunday just a few months prior. You got to give him credit for this amazing awakening.
Just like special prosecutors were just peachy as long as they were going after Republicans, but when they started going after Democrats too, well, maybe we should rethink this ...
Things seem great until they turn around and start biting YOU on the ass.
I think it's called the "Social Credit System"
Who wrote that? Creimer? The quality of editing around here is abysmal.
First, no. The best replacement for FB is email and a telephone. If you canâ(TM)t keep in touch with people by those means, they arenâ(TM)t important enough people to keep in touch with, so... fuck it.
Second, Calacanis is a douche... so no.
Hello everyone. I would like to apologize for begin the raging asshole that I am. You see I am now undergoing a treatment program in an attempt to resolve my many issues. In going through this self discovery process I have discovered that a lot of my problems, especially with my inadequacy, centers around the fact that I was repressing my homosexuality. I now know that homosexuality isn't bad it is just the repression of it and the problems that causes are bad. Most notably his repression caused me to act out at anyone who rightfully pointed out my failings. I realize now that so much of what I said was just wrong. I also realize that I have developed serious problems such as stalking, harassment, poor physical health, and feelings of inadequacy. To this end I would like to apologize to the entire slashdot community.
APK
P.S. => As part of my treatment I have been forced to read what I wrote and realize now that all the mockery and insults I received were fully justified... apk
I have no issues at all with Facebook keeping data on me. To expect less online is foolish. If you want an experiment get a script for a diabetic meter. Your doctor will swear he never lets out information as will almost all drug stores. But within 24 hours the phone calls will start offering you diabetic supplies. I get at least one call a day from companies offering me supposedly better diabetic supplies. Sometimes i get three in one day. Everyone sells data. You can bet when you buy groceries that data is also collected and sold. You pay auto insurance on one car yet you purchased three sets of tires while telling the insurance company you only drive 20,000 miles a year. You tell the truth and say that you do not own a motorcycle and yet your credit card reflects you buying three or four gallons of gas twice a week on weekends. It turns out that your brother is over seas and you constantly drive his bike. The point is that we are entering an age in which honesty will be earned and cheating will be used against you. Why does anyone consider that wrong? The truth will set you free more often than not.
Or is this shadow funded by Google Ventures?
Not "wants" to fund.
ie: Silicon Valley Investor wants to fund...
ie: Silicon Valley Investors want to fund...
One is plural (investor) the other is not.
See the difference?
This is third grade grammer folks.
People feel guilty when they owe someone else for their good fortune. Some even lash out.
What was cool about facebook is that it connected college students to each other. I was on facebook because all of my friends were on it. But later facebook opened to the greater public, globally, and then I saw a friend request in 2012 from an aunt and cousins I haven't spoken to in 15 years (and didn't wish to do it again, really) I decided that the only way to deny this request "gracefully" is simply to leave facebook. And I haven't missed it since then.
Even funnier is how Obama was praised for his shrewd use of social media. The hypocrisy is palpable. If the left likes the candidate, all is well and the person is a genius. If not, how dare they use the tools available to win.
We saw the same with Bill Clinton. Everyone excuses (or used to) his treatment of Monica Lewinsky. She was an employee/intern. The apologists would say "it's just sex." But Trump' s extramarital relationships are somehow disqualifiers for being President.
These are double standards. I know both sides dabble in this, but when the left does it, it seems to drone on forever on every "news" network except one.
No need to thank me. Just use Diaspora*, open, distributed, optionally self hosted Facebook alternative
I would suspect a few patents might get in the way...
Silicon Valley Investors want to capitalize on the current wave of hate for Facebook to create a replacement that will make a lot of money.
Also, we should all trust that the investors will be happy with small returns on their investment and won't make demands later on which would force the replacement to perform the same Orwellian profit-seeking behavior that Facebook is hated for.
No need to thank me lads. Just use Diaspora*, open, distributed, optionally self hosted Facebook alternative
As others have noted, it costs money to run servers, apply patches, and man help desks. Any attempt at getting someone else to pay (sponsors, states, ads) leads right back to trouble. To be trusted, it will have to be fully paid by user-fees, iron-clad no-commercialization, and have user voting rights on changes to the bylaws.
So, how much would it cost? Given community-supported OSS software, cloud servers, and volunteer help communities, it wouldn't take much per person "at scale". If you assume $5/mo for 10M users (a reasonable start toward world domination), you have $600M/yr. You can run a lot of servers on that.
But how to get people to move, given the network effect of Facebook? I mostly leave it to others to solve -- I don't use Facebook precisely because I knew the business model from the start. But I would suggest:
a) Offer Facebook a free pass on the 2011 settlement ($40,000 per violation times 87M users) in exchange for open copyright on Facebook's look-and-feel.
b) Ask the Parkland students to define a new-and-better Facebook replacement (i.e, copyright issues). They in turn would communicate with their vast Internet-native community. Then us old(er) guys could code it up.
c) Write it in Python, with optimizations where needed in C. I don't trust democracy to Java, Javascript, and C++.
Internet sites are at least in some part responsible for the divisions within society increasing. The reason is simple enough, when you visit the site, it immediately tries to learn what you like and give your more of it.
The idea is innocuous enough, they simply want to increase engagement between the user and the site. The result is that the user is quickly exposed only to those things that the site thinks are of interest to you.
It is quite is easy to create an experiment and see for yourself. Clear your cookies (flash based etc.) and create a new user, ideally on a different browser than you normally use. Compare what you see to your existing user and browser and you will see just how far your experience has been curated just for you. The problem is that in doing this users quickly lose exposure to different ideologies.
The result is that instead of connecting society, Facebook, Google etc have instead created echo chambers. They are so efficient at telling people what they think people want to see that people no longer even see the headlines for anything else. When people only hear things from one ideology they tend to become less rounded and more partisan. The longer the ideological echo chamber is allowed to persist, the more partisan society will become.
Just think of how Hitler motivated German Citizens to improving themselves with his policies.
Investors want to try and clean up their image so they can say that they care about society when we all know they just care about the bottom line. Which is exactly why this wont work in the long run.
Crypto currencies wont work because none of them will ever be stable enough to support such a large organization.
Reasonable ads quickly become unreasonable ads once investors want to start pulling profits from their share value. The same thing goes for subscription fees as well.
To put it plainly, the only way that a "good for society" facebook replacement works is if it is funded the same way wikipedia is funded by donations. This would also need to be managed by volunteers and pretty much require the source code to be open and free.
But seeing as there are already existing options (like diaspora) It is clear that these investors are looking to profit off of the hit to Facebook's reputation and dont really care about the good of society.
They will have to operate in a capitalistic society and such a "society" will favor NOT ALL, but only a part of it, as seen right now.
Same goes for other social structures communistic totalitarian, monarchy, plutocracy and what else there is. Seems some countries in northern Europe are doing somewhat better, Norway, Sweden, where social well-being has been found to improve when the spread between wealth and income between individual shrinks.
So - let's wait a couple of centuries and see how this pans out, if there will be an environment for mammals to flourish. Maybe lichens and fungi will do better and happier...
The Second does shit. Now, it's just a feel good right and wedge issue that is totally worthless.
Why is it that I'm stopped at 11AM at a road block = Papers Please! Drunk drivers and war on drugs.
Our government can search and seize our property at will. War on terrorism; war on drugs.
The government is getting powers to collect data from our own devices to accuse ourselves.
Sure, you can own a tactical weapon, dress in camo, and a flack jacket and parade around like your some cammando wannabe, but the fact is tat anytime if you are accused of being a drug dealer or potential terrorist, your guns can be seized and there's not much you can do about it. Oh, the ATF knows who you are.
Red Dawn was a movie and the insurgents in Iraq and Afganistan are just that, insurgents. And ISIS can only get so far with all their military weapons and training before a professional military knocks them out. So, spare us any links to the Revolutionary war where Americans got their asses handed to them before the French helped, or thinking that teh Viet Cong were amateurs (They booted the French out.) .
Anyone who thinks that having their AR-15 will one day help them with "tyranny" is seriously delusional and needs to put the remote down and stop watching gun porn.
How about just funding some useful FOSS project for an open standard mesh-networked E-Mail/Usenet replacement with proper FOSS clients for all major OSes including Linux and BSD, to get the opinion leaders (us) on board. That would rid us of Facebook and other product along those lines.
But I guess that would involve actcual investment and provide actual results in short time, rather than just getting some PR with an inflated press release.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
And who determines this good for society?
That is why some of us voted for him. When everyone likes the people in power, those people grab more and more power to themselves deteriorating society as they do it and coming to the belief that they have a right to it. When the people in power are fighting against themselves, they try to expose each other's dirty tricks and do whatever they can to block the people they don't like from gaining any more power. Sometimes that hurts society, sometimes it helps. A chance at an improvement against corruption is worth voting for even if you don't agree with the policies of the person. Policies change on a whim. Corruption is near impossible to remove and difficult to slow down. Anything that may slow it down over the long term is worth it for the short term.
Eliminating freedom is the whole point of disarming the plebs.
No, they don't want to create a Faceboook replacement. They just want to get enough attention that their start-up investments get bought out by Facebook and they rake in the money.
If you want to prevent turning into Facebook, you need everyone to self-host. So one of the first steps would be convincing ISPs to stop banning home servers and to increase upload speeds. You'll never get that to happen, so you'll always end up with single, large companies which are slowly pushed in the same direction Facebook went just like all companies now engage in data mining. It works to improve profits and most measured metrics, so it'll continue. The days of a personal web page, one made by you rather than one customized to you, are long gone. Geocities died.
I don't know if its willful or blind idiocy, but everything humans have created has been used for evil by someone.
Clowns. Definitely clowns.
You gnore history, like Vietnam, Afghanistan and plenty of other places.
Keep enjoying your comfy life, bought with American blood, American dollars, and American technology.
We didn't demand anything of you. We just said it would be nice to hear thanks. Which you couldn't bring yourself to do.
We should have let the Nazis burn you too... You're basically the same thing.
First, this is a reactionary action. If someone wanted to supplant Facebook during the height of social unrest about it, they would have needed to start several the development years ago.
Second, what makes Facebook attractive to most is the critical mass of users. It's the ubiquity that if you use it, it's the most likely venue to find your friends also on it. I can shift and try any number of new social networks, but if the people i want to reach are not there, it's a non-starter.
Third, social site success is achieved via a mixture of timing, fantastical luck and hitting the sweet spot of user interest. Creating a Facebook alternative is comparatively easy. Achieving success is surprisingly difficult.
Forth, balkanization of the social media market won't help anyone achieve critical mass. Launching 7 efforts at supplanting Facebook seems like a good idea. "Surely one of them will be successful". But in reality the more there are, the more fragmented the audience becomes, making it even more difficult for one of them to achieve dominant success.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
Domestic surveillance is a problem when governments do it, just like its a problem when private companies do it.
The best replacement for facebook is nothing. If everyone quit volunteering their private data, PRISM would be near useless.
If everyone quits sharing their entire lives online, both governments and private companies would have no data to abuse.
The fake profiles will be empty shells with name tags, for both the NSA and political research labs alike.
Moral of the story is.... Turn off the TV like your grand parents said. Go interact with humans more, and email your family and friend pictures, securely.
Also please ban facial recognition. Its a cool concept, but will only make this uncalled for surveillance worse.
Whatever the reasons, the Condederacy lost that civil war. So the idea that a civil war is automatically lost by the federal government is demonstrably false.
Iâ(TM)m not suggesting that a civil war cannot be won. Iâ(TM)m suggesting that the idea that itâ(TM)s been studied and a US civil war can never be won by an existing federal government is demonstrably false.
To turn a profit, by definition you must take more than you produce. So either Openbook will be a premium social networking site for the privacy-aware that takes your money instead of your privacy (cryptocurrency is just a hyper-inefficient and criminal-friendly form of money) effectively making them a charity-supported operation, or the best they could hope for is something approaching "neutral."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Silicon Valley has burnt its "global brand" forever. I don't trust anything crawling out of cancer valley for a millisecond.
If it's not headquartered in Europe under jurisdiction of my privacy rights, it can fuck right off.
why doesn't this genius investor give $700k to one company which might actually do something - what could a $100k investment accomplish, as low as it is?
... or the UK or Japan or Australia or Germany. https://www.theguardian.com/us...
"London murder rate overtakes New York as knife crime rises ... Of the 47 murders in London so far this year, 31 have been committed with knives"
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
I'm sure the Vietnamese wold like to hear your thoughts on how American guaranteed their security too!
june 2015: "This week, the United States and Vietnam deepened their defense ties during a three-day trip by U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to the Southeast Asian state. Most notably, Carter and his counterpart, Vietnamese Defense Minister Phung Quang Thanh, inked a Joint Vision Statement on Defense Relations. The statement itself, which comes as both sides celebrate the 20th anniversary of the normalization of their ties, is not wholly new. It builds on a 2011 memorandum of understanding ..."
https://thediplomat.com/2015/0...
The Second Amendment is there to defend the First. If they fall, then the Fourth and the Fifth fall shortly thereafter. And then the dark times.
It's easy to see that this is not true. Plenty of European states without something comparable to the 2nd amendment, but with constitutional rules comparable to 1th, 4th and 5th Amendment.
And other European states (ex Switzerland) show that civilian access to firearms, even semiautomatic firearms, is not a problem. Of course criminal and mental background checks, safety training, and secure storage help.
There is a hue and cry for knife control in the UK. It's the logical next step.
The problem with Facebook isn't that we have the wrong people in charge of a centralized social network. Replacing Facebook with a different entity won't fix the inherent incentives to spy on users and sell their data. The problem *is* the centralized social network. The role of Facebook should be obsoleted by peer to peer protocols in the original spirit of the internet.
This isn't a new idea, obviously. I think the missing ingredient in making it succeed is some kind of non-profit org with enough funding to popularize standards like ActivityPub, pump out positive PR to explain why it's needed, and encourage development of end user software with good UI/UX (easy enough for your mom to install, maybe even a phone app).
We have gone through a few social networking tools and it turns out the most popular one is pretty simple. People don't want to jump through loads of hoops to contact friends. Why do you think people give up privacy? Because it enables convenience! Make it worthy and unfriendly, like Linux, and it won't be adopted ;)
Anonminity. Privacy. Thoughtful analysis.
None of these are possible in a connected Facebook society. The only winning move is never pkaying the game.
We get it NRA
Seems to be the general sentiment here. And I agree wholeheartedly.
"Social Media" is an euphemism worthy of George Orwell.
Christ! It's so fucking Chinese! In fact these people should look there for ideas and funding. Authoritarians like to help other authoritarians, for mutual benefit and survival.
Whatever, as long as they can't block access to the real Facebook or anybody else, who cares what they do?
I sincerely hope that people with money and talent are developing real ad-hoc peer to peer networks to unchain us from the ISP. They are the real obstacle. Then we won't have assholes telling us what's 'Good For Society'!
"The Second Amendment is there to defend the First. If they fall, then the Fourth and the Fifth fall shortly thereafter. And then the dark times."
That will be when we have to figure out whatever the 3rd amendment was, so we can defend that too.
Users create all the content, which allows them to be profitable. Therefore I am never posting or liking anything again until I am paid to do so.
Signed,
Captain Ironic
I have a bit of experience with a piece that could be added to the ultimate solution. You can use multiple identity providers with the model it uses. Pretty nifty.
Yes, and besides that, his whole shtick is to scare people back into voting for democrats again after they fucked up with Obama/Clinton instead of looking for independents. The 'Stormy Russians' distraction is working like a charm. Trump is a democrat, and he is working with the Clintons. This real life 'Wag the Dog' is so such better than the movie.
Maybe they need Muslim control.
Experienced technologists in crypto needed to implement beyond the look book UI. You are A+ team player. You work in small teams of three. You are a developer who ships. You have supported crypto in production. Secrets, you know how to keep...small.
Open to springboard schemes
Have the next month to give, the next decade open
I miss GeoCities. :(
You do realize Clinton HAD to step down or he would be impeached. No special treatment.
In fact, they threw a lot of resources at nailing his ass.
No double standard. Wrong is wrong no matter who you are. Grow up.
Everyone knows the John Titor story in which a time traveler from the future confessed who he was on Usenet. He was a hoax loosely based on a real time traveler named John Eater who helped find Facebook.
In John Eater's future, everything about your health can be surmised by an AI analysis of your diet. The purpose of Facebook is to create photographic records of everyone's meals for medical purposes. Also, so employers can estimate the health of future employees.
An opensource version of WordPress without the garbage - and that means start over WP is a trash heap under the hood, RSS style individual news distribution through local "friend list", ISP buy-in for a CHEAP YEARLY FEE provide army of phone support to get the civilians up and running - because of fee the ISPs approach this like a kennel of dogs in heat.. The option to place ads on your own page and keep all the money - through adsense or whatever, ad brokers take a cut so feeding frenzy if scale is approached.
Scale is of course the problem. FB worked because it was colleges out of the gate and who doesn't want a bunch of college girls in their network (writes the middle aged tech). If a portion of the tech communities Venn Diagrams started pushing something along these lines it would stand a chance. And, like the dumpster fire that is WP, it would provide billable to freelancers sorting out grandma's not-Facebook-but-you-should-use-it
On a month by month basis in the very recent past then this is true. However, looking at such a short time scale probably isn't useful. For example, in January there were 18 killings investigated by the NYPD and 8 investigated by the police in London. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-4...
That was MySpace, before they prevented users from using the search/browse/filter functionality to find exactly who they wanted to interact with by interests, demographics, job networking, etc. Facebook bought and killed that by locking down all the features then auctioned it off after it lost the userbase and wasn't a threat. They want to be the ones controlling Facebook.
There is the tiny minority that think special prosecutors should go after whoever may have committed a crime. Strange, I know.
Semiautomatic? The Swiss militia (basically, everyone, though I think they're sexist enough to not include their women) requires members to keep FULLY automatic weapons, plus lots of ammo for same, on hand.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I'm a little shocked I ever created a Disqus account considering I've never picked up a Facebook account on principle (it's nobody else's business who I am;it's a privacy nightmare; take my comment for what I say and not what you know about me in other words). Disqus's censorship system is awful. It's not "just" a spam filter and I'm leery of spam filters as they are a means of censorship. Just because it isn't government censorship doesn't make it not censorship either. So the other day I quit after I had just had enough with this censorship.
We need a replacement for Facebook- but if you are just realizing this now you're probably just going to fund a replacement that ends up being as bad as Facebook is today. What we need is a decentralized social networking platform that enables users to interact with each other. Sort of like email. Centralized platforms are dangerous because they give too much power to a single company/government/individual/etc. While I am no fan of the KKK I'll fight for the right of all to associate, speak, and organize. For if you deny them a right you can deny me my rights too.
So the organisation can invest in one guy for part of a year, provided the founders don't get any of it. Essentially they expect that the replacement is somehow under way and mostly funded through other means - this is meant as a tiny little top-up.
It cant be tied to wall street/stocks at all in order to be a site that cares about what its users want. Google,FB are 2 prime examples of what happens to a company after they sell their ass to wallstreet and its money.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Inflection points, by definition, break the historical trend.
Semiautomatic? The Swiss militia (basically, everyone, though I think they're sexist enough to not include their women) requires members to keep FULLY automatic weapons, plus lots of ammo for same, on hand.
I believe keeping military ammo at home is no longer the case, except for highly specialized personnel. Keeping the military weapon itself at a local armory might now be an option for many, not sure on this one though.
In any case I am not referring to a reservist's issued weapon. I am referring to what a civilian may personally own. I believe a civilian may own weapons that would be banned in US jurisdictions like California.
... or the UK or Japan or Australia or Germany. https://www.theguardian.com/us...
"London murder rate overtakes New York as knife crime rises ... Of the 47 murders in London so far this year, 31 have been committed with knives"
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
There is a hue and cry for knife control in the UK. It's the logical next step.
In case people thought you were joking ...
"London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced a crackdown on knives Sunday in response to the rising levels of violence in London, which recently surpassed New York City's homicide rate for the first time. "No excuses: there is never a reason to carry a knife," Khan tweeted. "Anyone who does will be caught, and they will feel the full force of the law.""
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
Because the ideal replacement is going to be zero cost and zero profit.
It's time for "silicon valley investors" to step aside and let grassroots developers solve this problem.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
...tells us all we need to know about how this will work out.
dude everything we have here is made in china
Try neocities.org.
What makes a social-network better than Facebook? Or to reverse the question, what makes MySpace and AOL a lesser social-network?
There are 3 problems with Facebook: 1) The ceaseless publication of propaganda; 2) Refusing to censor incitement of violence (despite incitement being a crime); 3) Facebook promoting its distribution and worthiness.
Facebook works because it sells a better product; you. Anything that depends on eyeball time, as history proves, will fail.
Give us something above and beyond what FB can even conceive of.... Here are some of my nutty ideas. :P
A VR room where you can meet your friends as if they are really there.
Lets do something more than just play games... let us search for habitable planets together... let us code together if we like.
Make it so that when folks learn things unintentionally even.
Augmented Reality get the folks to go outside.
People love free... you will need to start a revenue stream there needs to be another brilliant idea that would fund it.... github was built in a weekend... they are profitable.
Give the users a deep field telescope (of sorts) in orbit.... let people use it to search stars ect.
Teleportation... ya well maybe not :)
[($)]
Pay them... let them opt in for advertisers... give them 100% of the advertisers fee.
[($)]
Everybody jump through hoops to give us their best ideas. We'll siphon up the results of their efforts and several will 'win' which means they get to generate cash for us going forwards. Win win win, for us.
Requiem for the American Dream
One where you can take to any website
Its not as simple as you suggest, the civilian vs military scenario actually a bit naive. If things were to degenerate to large scale rebellion various members of the military would likely be as conflicted as civilians. Civilian vs military unlikely, more likely civilian and military of faction A vs civilian and military of faction B. We have two example of this in US history, the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. In one the legacy power lost, in the other the legacy power won. Conclusions on the proposed outcome of a third go at it are premature.
The problem is mostly solved - send people text and images, and they will send them back. In the past we did this with e-mail, IRC, FTP, and USENET.
So I just need to go on USENET to find my highschool and college classmates? My cousins' wives are likely to post pictures of my little cousins on IRC? hrmm somehow I think you missed the point.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This is true. However in all of 2017 there were 3 times as many murders in NYC compared to London. I think, that looking at this graph https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/... it's somewhat difficult to imagine that this year there will be fewer murders in London than NYC. Then again, maybe I'm wrong. The signals are noisy, on a short enough time scale it's possible make any sort of unfavourable comparison. If some guy breaks a five year dry spell by getting laid in the last half hour it doesn't make him Don Juan.
The only way to make a service like Facebook available to EVERYONE is to use advertising and other for profit methods like scraping your posts for products like F-150 (Ya, it happened to me) in order to have targeted advertising.
So, how do you make a service free to everyone while not forcing an advertising paradigm? Easy. You make a backend service. Then you provide the content to 5 companies. The 5 companies get the same access to photos, posts, etc. They can decide to do a fee based service, an ad revenue based service. You could even make a distributed service model like torrents so there is no real server.
People need to start thinking outside the box for Facebook 2.0.
Here's the rub. Facebook already has EVERYONE. And they have deep pockets. So the second a new model threatens them, they will be able to mimic whatever that new provider is doing. So there really is no winning. I mean there is winning but I don't see it.
The name "Good for society" is puzzling. Isn't that the very type of thing Facebook already is? A liberal, pro-censorship, Islam loving, freedom hating, anti-gun organization?
Sorry, but I'm an Angel Investor also and I along with several others will be starting a ground floor Pro-freedom service.
Seems like a product without a market. He seems to be taking advantage of the current headlines to bring in investor money - but he doesn't need to produce anything.
When (never) complete he'll dump it and move to the next big headline generator.
The idea that Silicon Valley Tech can solve all of our problems is a meme, a TV show, and also in recent headlines regarding "tech people being out of touch."
People talking about replacing Facebook always miss the point. The technical issues are trivial, financing the system, or whether there are ads, is irrelevant. The system that replaces Facebook with be the next one that manages to sign up 2 billion subscribers. Until someone can figure out how to get all the users to leave Facebook en masse and sign up for another service, no alternative is going to replace Facebook.
It was perfect. It was just what we wanted. It didn't show pictures, though -- we had to actually READ stuff and CLICK ON stuff if we wanted to see pictures or videos or hear sounds.
Facebook is a poor substitute, and I'm ashamed that we let usenet just drift away.
Presumably, this new site would have to have some kind of revenue, right? If they implemented some type of revenue sharing with the users, wouldn't that create a massive incentive to switch?