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We Should Replace Facebook With Personal Websites (vice.com)
Jason Koebler from Motherboard argues "we should replace Facebook with personal websites." An anonymous reader shares the report: As a freshman in high school, in the year of our lord 2002, I made a website called "Jason's Site." While a website named after myself and devoted to updates about my own life was unspeakably vain for the time, it was also quite forward looking: The site has a news feed, an "about me" page, and an email mailing list for people to receive updates. I intended for it to be funded by reader donations. It had a section for Flash videos and photos, a guestbook, and a "friends" page that was literally a list of my friends. It had an ill-advised but nonetheless prescient "hot or not" section that featured photos of my friends and acquaintances and predated both Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg's original idea for the social network, called "FaceMash." I updated the site regularly and obsessively for about three months, and then never returned to it. The site was embarrassing then and is embarrassing now, but abandoning it was a terrible mistake.
Facebook gets a lot of credit for "disrupting" social media and for turning MySpace into a worthless piece of garbage, but millions upon millions of teenagers and young adults were already sharing every aspect of their lives on other social networks, and on their own websites. Facebook had the good fortune of being new, slightly different, and exclusive. It was even luckier to come to power shortly before the rise of the smartphone. I guess what I'm saying is that Facebook isn't really all that much better or more convenient than having your own website, or sending emails or chats. But for some reason, Facebook (and Instagram) are where we post now. Facebook has of course become something much larger than a single website, and has, despite its flaws, "helped connect the world" for better or worse. But Facebook tapped into a trend that was already happening -- it didn't invent the idea of letting people put stuff about their lives online, it just monetized it better.
Facebook gets a lot of credit for "disrupting" social media and for turning MySpace into a worthless piece of garbage, but millions upon millions of teenagers and young adults were already sharing every aspect of their lives on other social networks, and on their own websites. Facebook had the good fortune of being new, slightly different, and exclusive. It was even luckier to come to power shortly before the rise of the smartphone. I guess what I'm saying is that Facebook isn't really all that much better or more convenient than having your own website, or sending emails or chats. But for some reason, Facebook (and Instagram) are where we post now. Facebook has of course become something much larger than a single website, and has, despite its flaws, "helped connect the world" for better or worse. But Facebook tapped into a trend that was already happening -- it didn't invent the idea of letting people put stuff about their lives online, it just monetized it better.
Facebook succeeded because it made self-publishing, and commenting, easier. (Easier even than the trivially simple 2 page original html spec.)
Google succeeded by making the search place on the Internet simple to use (one box, one, or was it two, buttons) and uncluttered by unsightly banner ads.
There's a lesson in that.
Giving too many degrees of freedom, or too much disorganized and useless information, reduces the size of the user base.
So maybe if someone comes up with a website-making template thing that makes personal websites (and their interaction) as constrained and uniform to use as facebook is, maybe that could happen. Otherwise, it won't.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Everybody laughed at those crappy personal websites but the environment back then was a hell of a lot better than today's sanitized corporate internet where one wrong thought gets you kicked off of all of the platforms. Why isn't it coming back when storage and bandwidth are cheaper than ever? One wrong thought on a customer's site gets the host kicked out of the colo, gets the colo DDOSed, etc. It's not just the Nazis, people are getting banned from the whole internet for saying stuff that Obama and Clinton campaigned on.
more people would have their own personal site. Those Raspberry Pis are perfect for it. But I believe most contracts prohibit you from operating a server. This is yet another reason we must demand that ISPs be given common carrier status.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
At least Geocities sites sucked differently compared to Facebook. Variety in suckage is better than mass-manufactured cookie-cutter PHB-controlled suckage.
Table-ized A.I.
I've already done my part.
If the nerd in each family where to do this, then start cross-linking with the nerds in other families in their circles we would have the share your meme, dog, and rug-rat circuit family and low-tech users need!
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There are tools like Diaspora* that essentially let you setup your own little facebook that can even hook up with other Diaspora* shards. At one point I thought about trying to get my wife and all her friends to migrate over to a private Diaspora* shard with paid hosting.
Was to hard a sell to the wife so I decided not to bother, but it definitely looked like a viable replacement. Not sure it supported all the games which was a deal breaker not to mention I don't want to run a social network site for fun.
But there are options.