= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
James_Miller comments on Crazy Ideas Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (92)
Someone should create a free speech Twitter that doesn't censor anything protected by the U.S. 1st amendment.
Decentralized twitter where nothing is blocked and everyone subscribes by the rules they choose, including delegation of subscription rules.
I think there is a strong case for breaking up Facebook and Twitter as telecom monopolies. They would be forced to adopt open standards, so anyone could send information to their users, and other companies would be able to create their own clients to send info to facebook/twitter users and vice versa.
Quite a while anybody could send information to Facebook users because Facebook implemented the open standard of Email. I think that feature was mostly used by spammers.
I don't want everybody to send me messages in an unfiltered way.
As far as breaking up Facebook, I don't see a reason why they should have Instagram and WhatsApp but the core Facebook service can't be easily broken up.
Sure, I could send emails to your facebook account, but if I wanted to see any of your social media content, I would have to start a Facebook account and access it via Facebook's walled garden. If I want to use Google+ and you use Facebook....
It's as though you had to use a Verizon phone to have a conversation with other Verizon users, and you couldn't use your Verizon phone to contact people who use AT&T. The outcome is inevitably a monopoly due to Metcalf's law.
Your social network client could still have filters, but the filter would be something you control, and it wouldn't be as arbitrary as "you may only friend-request other facebook users, and only other facebook users may friend-request you."
Start with an open standard for friend requests; i.e. Google+ must accept friend requests from Facebook and vice versa. Any new startup would be able to create their own social networking client, capable of sending, accepting, and displaying friend requests, media shares, private messages, wall posts, etc. This would create a much better, more competitive system with vastly more consumer surplus.
As a rather illustrative case study look at the history of XMPP at Facebook and Google (Talk). Facebook messaging used XMPP until 2015, but it was not federated - but at least you could use client of your own choice. Then they switched to a proprietary API. Google talk used federated XMPP for years, but then dropped server-to-server encryption, effectively cutting off majority of servers, and then dropped Talk in favour of proprietary Hangouts altogether. So the trend is just the opposite - if the player grows big enough and the community becomes self sustained, they will start walling the garden.
Google+ doesn't have a concept of "friend request" or friend. Forcing them by law to do so, reduces the freedom of companies to innovate.
https://status.fsf.org/fsf
Good enough?
Name: Fritter.
Most likely it would contain a lot of spam and most advertisers wouldn't buy ads there in order not to be confused with spammers.
That might be a perfect usecase for Urbit.
Lower-hanging fruit in terms of making money, I think, would be to create an explicitly pro-meritocracy Github competitor. You could call it "MeritHub" as a reference to the "United Meritocracy of Github" rug that Github famously removed when pressured. Startup ideas like these market themselves. It wouldn't be much work: use Gitlab as a starting point, make it available for open source projects that are leery of hosting their project on Github's servers, and charge money to commercial entites who want to host their code with a company that isn't controlled by leftists. Server costs might get expensive, though, if you had a high ratio of open source projects to pay projects, or you had to survive sustained DDOS attacks.
(I actually disagree with your Twitter idea--Twitter is terrible. Memetically speaking, it's the equivalent of ingesting 10000 petri dishes full of bacteria chosen randomly from labs around the world just to see what it does to your gut flora and immune system.)
Which kind of companies do you expect to care about his enough to pay money?
Github already has paying customers who are looking for private code hosting solutions. (They host public repositories for free, but it's not wise to keep your code public if you're trying to make a profit.) So, sell to the same customers, but to the conservative-leaning ones. You could even go dirty and write a blog post compiling Github-related SJ controversies, then suggest that they aren't a reliable place to host your code (intimating that if your company became the focus of an SJ controversy, and SJ advocates pressured Github to make your code public, they might do it. Who knows if this is actually a risk or not, but it couldn't hurt to plant it in peoples' minds.)
NRxhub.com - a place to host code during this century and the next.
When it comes to trust, it's easier for companies to trust big companies like Github than it is to trust a random person who decides to provide code hosting.
Even if someone buys that argument, hosting with Atlassians Bit Bucket would make more sense then to host it with a random place. Businesses can be attacked for hosting their code at NRxhub.com and suffer PR damage.
I could imagine a trustless solution that works by doing decent crypto to draw an audience but wouldn't expect a simple solution to do so.
Someone should pay to install and maintain a printing press and supply of ink and paper, installed in the public square, for all comers to print pamphlets and disseminate their views, ads, rants, wedding invitations, conspiracy allegations, and so on. Surely this would be an excellent and effective contribution to public discourse... and if not, to the wage of the cleaner who sweeps up litter.
Too easily exploitable. It was common in the fax era to waste a lot of ink (paper too but you can't waste more than one paper per paper) by sending a completely black document.
There's probably more sophisticated ways to attack such a system, but don't ask me. Go read Bruce Schneier.
Seems like a great idea for a sci-fi or a fantasy story, or even a detective one... Like, there is a small community in a remote village, a conflict of interests, and the possibility of communication either in the daytime, or by leaving anonymous messages sent by night...:) something like SSC's 'It was you who made my blue eyes blue', but with LESS VIOLENCE.