I think they're human beings. I think that money is power, and that political suffrage (the vote) is no longer enough. We must also have universal economic suffrage as well. Every individual needs to have an assurance that their annual income won't fall below the poverty line, because poor people aren't human beings in the USA.
If they don't want to work, but live on ten grand a year while sharing an apartment with a few other people who want to live on basic, that's their problem. Ideally it would help parents, especially single parents. It would help students. It would help artists. It would help open source hackers and other people who do useful work that isn't adequately valued by our system.
And it would give us an excuse to get rid of our existing welfare system. We can tell people who aren't working, "You got your basic income. If you need more money, get a fuckin' job."
Oh, so we'll further debase an already worthless currency? Federal Reserve Notes haven't been anything but monopoly money since we abolished the gold standard anyway, so what's the big deal?
I said what I meant. We already have a basic income for the elderly and disabled in the US. It's called Social Security. There's no reason we can't extend it to cover everybody, except that doing so would require taxing rich individuals and corporations more while spending less on the military-industrial complex. It might be a political impossibility, but it isn't necessarily an economic one.
Sure.. but what about things that aren't really "secret" and yet you want to restrict? I don't really care if an advertiser sees that I drank way too many Molson's last weekend.. I kind of want my friends to see that crap. My family and boss? Not so much. By your definition I should either never show anyone or just assume I'm showing everyone. That's a bit of a false dichotomy.
Welcome to America. Big Brother is watching you. Anything you put on the network is insecure.
Most people really couldn't care less if FB sells their preferences to an advertising firm for the purposes of putting in "better" ads that they're just going to ignore anyway.
Most people believe in personal gods who give a shit about their sex lives, too. What "most people" think is irrelevant, and invoking them is fallacious.
I take it you don't have a whole lot of FB "friends."
Damn right I don't. The only reason I'm on Facebook at all is that my contract with my publisher requires it. The contract says I have to have an account and post to it regularly, but it doesn't obligate me to accept every friend request that comes down the pipe. Thank Arioch for small mercies.
I do, for what little it's worth, have a little over 20,000 followers on Google+ (the "ghost town"), of which I follow about 500. I'd prefer that Plus not filter my stream either, but it's Google. They have a hard-on for algorithms.
I'm assuming you don't run any spam filters on your email either. Those are just algorithms deciding what you want to see as well. Perhaps you really like P3n!s pills?
Those filters are different, because I created them and control them. I filter my mail by sender. Emails from every individual or business with whom I choose to correspond goes into separate folders for each sender. Everything else is deleted. Yes, it's anal as fuck, but it works for me.
Sadly, the world also requires janitors and teachers and car mechanics and fast food workers, and most of them won't have the skills needed to manually write pages themselves.
That sounds like a business opportunity to me.
Yup. When even your dog doesn't want to hang out with you, a personal calendar probably is a decent way to go.
Don't have a dog, but my cats and my wife like me just fine.:)
They're welcome to try, but I wouldn't use it. They've fucked over their users too many times to be trustworthy. Maybe Ello should take that route, since they're now a public benefit corporation.
zmooc, you might be interested in IndieWebCamp. One of their principles is that your primary domain name should be your identify on the Web. So, instead of creating handles like "Lilith's Heart-Shaped Ass" (Slashdot, but the truncated it) or "demifiend" (for GitHub), I should be able to use the matthewgraybosch.com domain to authenticate with other sites.
Your suggestions regarding the browser make sense, but I don't have the programming chops to implement them myself, otherwise I'd do it and submit patches to Firefox and Chromium.:)
If you ignore the ability to restrict personal data to particular people
If you want to keep secrets, keep them in your head. The second you put them on a networked computer, your data is at risk.
news feed with intelligent ranking that tries to guess who your real friends are
No. I don't want a proprietary algorithm deciding what news is important to me. I don't listen to radio because I don't want ClearChannel deciding the soundtrack to my life, so why in Hell's name would I want Facebook deciding who my "real" friends are and only showing me what they post?
I want an unfiltered feed, with a reverse chronological ordering by default with options to sort and filter as I deem fit. Facebook doesn't offer that, but a decent feed reader does.
so you don't have to upset people who post a lot by defriending them
I'm a misanthropic asshole, and proud of it. I don't care about upsetting people. Why in Satan's holy name do you think I became a programmer and a novelist instead of working in a trade that requires me to be more sociable?
the ability to tag people in photos
I can do that without Facebook. I wrap the img tag in a figure tag, and wrap information about the photo in a figcaption tag. That shit can be automated if you aren't a demon-ridden idiot.
the lack of any need for meaningless URLs
Like "facebook.com"? Sorry; that was a cheap shot.
a seamless way of organising events
The great thing about being a misanthropic asshole is that a calendar app on my phone is fine for organizing events.
I know. As I said to daemonhunter, being indie is a colossal pain in the ass. Sure, we can save on hosting by using Jekyll and GitHub Pages and then add a CNAME record to point our domains properly, but that requires a DIY approach to making websites that might not appeal to most people.
I'd mod you up, but I can't in this thread for obvious reasons. I'm too young to have much direct experience with the 90s corporate networks (CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, etc.) aside from using AOL CDs as cat toys - I'd reflect sunlight off the shiny side and let the cat chase the light spot.
The thing is, I can't deny that corporate sites aren't entirely useless. I met my wife on a Yahoo! forum, for Hell's sake. But writing messages on a corporate-run web forum was one thing. People are pouring their entire lives into silos like Facebook because it's still easier than the alternative.
If you want an independent presence on the Web, you need to be able to do the following:
Register a domain
Obtain hosting
Build a website.
Add your content to the website.
Keep your website up to date if you use something software like self-hosted WordPress
Police your website's comments, if you permit comments, to crack down on spammers and trolls
Reach out to others so you're not just shouting into the dark
I know how to build my own sites from HTML and CSS, and I know how to use tools like Jekyll and GitHub Pages to make building a site easier, but most of the people on the Web are muggles. They couldn't tell a Cascading Style Sheet from a Cuisinart, and don't want to learn. Until it's as easy to go indie as it is to just join some corporate web silo, we won't be able to kill off Facebook, Google+, Ello, Tsu, and their all-but-inevitable successors.
CHK6, I often suspect that those most prone to bloviating about what the Internet needs aren't programmers or technicians with a working knowledge of how the net actually works.
Many of the 99% you mention would insist that people who use social networks at all, for any reason, are uncool. You're using a converse of the argument from popularity; the argument from unpopularity.
I got my first email account in 1996, and met my wife online in 2000. We've been married 10 years as of this Halloween. You're not alone. I just don't know how to fix the web. It changed while I was busy writing, and I'm just trying to adapt.
It was called the World Wide Web. People made their own websites with their own domains. If they liked something, they linked to it They communicated on mailing lists or web forums or by IM or IRC. All the tech is still there, and we can go back to using it instead of feeding our lives into one corporate silo after another.
Hasn't USENET been overrun with spammers, though? No worries; Vlad Tepes would have known how to deal with it. Ten feet of rebar, right up the pooper. (He wouldn't use wooden stakes nowadays; steel recycles.)
Slashdot Mirror
I think they're human beings. I think that money is power, and that political suffrage (the vote) is no longer enough. We must also have universal economic suffrage as well. Every individual needs to have an assurance that their annual income won't fall below the poverty line, because poor people aren't human beings in the USA.
If they don't want to work, but live on ten grand a year while sharing an apartment with a few other people who want to live on basic, that's their problem. Ideally it would help parents, especially single parents. It would help students. It would help artists. It would help open source hackers and other people who do useful work that isn't adequately valued by our system.
And it would give us an excuse to get rid of our existing welfare system. We can tell people who aren't working, "You got your basic income. If you need more money, get a fuckin' job."
OK, fche. Don't take Social Security once you're eligible, because that money is coming out of workers' paychecks. Otherwise, you're a hypocrite.
Oh, so we'll further debase an already worthless currency? Federal Reserve Notes haven't been anything but monopoly money since we abolished the gold standard anyway, so what's the big deal?
I said what I meant. We already have a basic income for the elderly and disabled in the US. It's called Social Security. There's no reason we can't extend it to cover everybody, except that doing so would require taxing rich individuals and corporations more while spending less on the military-industrial complex. It might be a political impossibility, but it isn't necessarily an economic one.
The sane thing to do would be to institute a minimum basic income.
Facebook is the Microsoft of social networking: widely used but barely tolerated.
Being a metalhead, I have to say that I like overkill. Nothing succeeds like excess.
Welcome to America. Big Brother is watching you. Anything you put on the network is insecure.
Most people believe in personal gods who give a shit about their sex lives, too. What "most people" think is irrelevant, and invoking them is fallacious.
Damn right I don't. The only reason I'm on Facebook at all is that my contract with my publisher requires it. The contract says I have to have an account and post to it regularly, but it doesn't obligate me to accept every friend request that comes down the pipe. Thank Arioch for small mercies.
I do, for what little it's worth, have a little over 20,000 followers on Google+ (the "ghost town"), of which I follow about 500. I'd prefer that Plus not filter my stream either, but it's Google. They have a hard-on for algorithms.
Those filters are different, because I created them and control them. I filter my mail by sender. Emails from every individual or business with whom I choose to correspond goes into separate folders for each sender. Everything else is deleted. Yes, it's anal as fuck, but it works for me.
That sounds like a business opportunity to me.
Don't have a dog, but my cats and my wife like me just fine. :)
They're welcome to try, but I wouldn't use it. They've fucked over their users too many times to be trustworthy. Maybe Ello should take that route, since they're now a public benefit corporation.
zmooc, you might be interested in IndieWebCamp. One of their principles is that your primary domain name should be your identify on the Web. So, instead of creating handles like "Lilith's Heart-Shaped Ass" (Slashdot, but the truncated it) or "demifiend" (for GitHub), I should be able to use the matthewgraybosch.com domain to authenticate with other sites.
Your suggestions regarding the browser make sense, but I don't have the programming chops to implement them myself, otherwise I'd do it and submit patches to Firefox and Chromium. :)
If you want to keep secrets, keep them in your head. The second you put them on a networked computer, your data is at risk.
No. I don't want a proprietary algorithm deciding what news is important to me. I don't listen to radio because I don't want ClearChannel deciding the soundtrack to my life, so why in Hell's name would I want Facebook deciding who my "real" friends are and only showing me what they post?
I want an unfiltered feed, with a reverse chronological ordering by default with options to sort and filter as I deem fit. Facebook doesn't offer that, but a decent feed reader does.
I'm a misanthropic asshole, and proud of it. I don't care about upsetting people. Why in Satan's holy name do you think I became a programmer and a novelist instead of working in a trade that requires me to be more sociable?
I can do that without Facebook. I wrap the img tag in a figure tag, and wrap information about the photo in a figcaption tag. That shit can be automated if you aren't a demon-ridden idiot.
Like "facebook.com"? Sorry; that was a cheap shot.
The great thing about being a misanthropic asshole is that a calendar app on my phone is fine for organizing events.
Raw deal. I could have used a good rant to distract me from a certain networked terrorist campaign spawned by rejects from /b/.
I know. As I said to daemonhunter, being indie is a colossal pain in the ass. Sure, we can save on hosting by using Jekyll and GitHub Pages and then add a CNAME record to point our domains properly, but that requires a DIY approach to making websites that might not appeal to most people.
Probably. Good luck getting Dice.com to add one. :)
I'd mod you up, but I can't in this thread for obvious reasons. I'm too young to have much direct experience with the 90s corporate networks (CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, etc.) aside from using AOL CDs as cat toys - I'd reflect sunlight off the shiny side and let the cat chase the light spot.
The thing is, I can't deny that corporate sites aren't entirely useless. I met my wife on a Yahoo! forum, for Hell's sake. But writing messages on a corporate-run web forum was one thing. People are pouring their entire lives into silos like Facebook because it's still easier than the alternative.
If you want an independent presence on the Web, you need to be able to do the following:
I know how to build my own sites from HTML and CSS, and I know how to use tools like Jekyll and GitHub Pages to make building a site easier, but most of the people on the Web are muggles. They couldn't tell a Cascading Style Sheet from a Cuisinart, and don't want to learn. Until it's as easy to go indie as it is to just join some corporate web silo, we won't be able to kill off Facebook, Google+, Ello, Tsu, and their all-but-inevitable successors.
CHK6, I often suspect that those most prone to bloviating about what the Internet needs aren't programmers or technicians with a working knowledge of how the net actually works.
What's wrong with UUCP? It worked for USENET back in the day. :)
Many of the 99% you mention would insist that people who use social networks at all, for any reason, are uncool. You're using a converse of the argument from popularity; the argument from unpopularity.
You can format your posts with Markdown, which is nice, but not quite enough.
He's the new JonKatz.
I got my first email account in 1996, and met my wife online in 2000. We've been married 10 years as of this Halloween. You're not alone. I just don't know how to fix the web. It changed while I was busy writing, and I'm just trying to adapt.
It was called the World Wide Web. People made their own websites with their own domains. If they liked something, they linked to it They communicated on mailing lists or web forums or by IM or IRC. All the tech is still there, and we can go back to using it instead of feeding our lives into one corporate silo after another.
Bring back the independent Web!
Hasn't USENET been overrun with spammers, though? No worries; Vlad Tepes would have known how to deal with it. Ten feet of rebar, right up the pooper. (He wouldn't use wooden stakes nowadays; steel recycles.)
Let's bring back forums and mailing lists. We'll party like it's 1999.
If so, we might be screwed.