A better social network?

Community Blog
21

That’s fair. I’ve supported them through the store

I suppose that’s another model I missed, too. Ecommerce. I would absolute pay a premium to buy merch through a social media platform, knowing the platform gets a cut when I make purchases.

Classified-style ads would also be okay to me, like Craigslist’s model. Most of their ads are free, but certain ones like housing and employment require a fee to post. The caveat there being I’d only want to see them if I went to the relevant section. Local group, interest group, whatever.

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Don’t they kind of already have this? (IDK, I’m not on fb)

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I haven’t been on FB in a while either, but last I knew they had groups that allowed sales. I wasn’t aware they charged fees for listing items in any of their categories though. I thought it was just a free feature they added to encourage you to use the “Send Money” feature that interrupted every message I send that included a currency symbol in it. :exploding_head:

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Oh, idk if they do… That’s a question for an active user (or former employee winkwinknudgenudge)

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Hey, thanks for the awesome feedback with all of this. It helps me get an additional perspective of what people want. I’ll throw some additional context for your points.

  • Aliases

The problem there is that if it still links back, it’s not truly anon. It needs to be anon.

– The goal with this feature was to allow a user to setup an ‘alias’ like a screen name. Lets say I have a couple communities or ‘cliques’ that I follow. Snowboarding, Programming, and some adult content. You could setup an alias for all the adult content that you follow which other users wouldn’t be able to link back to your profile. Think of it as a semi throwaway account. You would have full control of who is allowed to see it, and by default it is set to ‘only me’. (no sharing content with people you don’t want by accident)

Only the site administrators could link the alias back to the account and that would be only used for moderation tooling. Ex: User breaks rule, the user could be suspended for x hours/days/perm and that is linked back to the main account so they couldn’t create another alias. (I worded it poorly here, but the tldr version is that other users can’t link back to the main account if they are using an alias)

  • Delete Profile Data and taking a break.

Good thing we’re not them right :wink: I feel that if a user wants to leave a site, they should have the ability to have their content removed with no questions asked. If someone wants to take a break, were not going to email you and send a ton of annoying notifications to get back on the site. I even thought about allowing a person to ‘force’ a break. Lets say its finals and you really need to focus, you could take a break from the site during certain times or over a set period of dates and the ‘hardcore’ version would not allow you to login to change it until that date/time expires…

  • E2E Encryption

Would be nice, but how do we bring about that change on a system that allows for public consumption of 95% of the data ?

The site would be setup to not allow for content to be viewed by the public. You would need to be logged in, verified, and nothing on the site would be indexed or scraped by 3rd parties. The goal with this platform would be to change your typical experience from mostly curated content to personal custom content that you actually care about. Not sure how this is going to work yet, but I guess think of it like you could setup multiple ‘content feeds’ and subscribe or unsubscribe to whatever you wanted. So during registration you could get some recommendations for stuff to follow but really i want to leave that up to the user. I don’t wanna force garbage down into a feed.

  • HD Video, Audio, Photos

Due to space constraints and the cost of storage to store billions of peoples videos, memes, pictures they are horribly compressed. Think of a photographer who wants to share his awesome photo to a group of people I wouldn’t want my work to be compressed, I worked hard on the shot. Again I’m still trying to figure out how I want this to work. I would imagine that anyone with premium could upload and share non-compressed content and upto 4k video content with no hassles.

  • ContentID

Yeah, it is a very broken system. If you have better ideas for this please let me know. I just want to prevent user creations from being stolen and re-shared by some shitty ‘LOL MEDIA SITE’ (looking at you Now This…)

  • Advertisements

That sounds like an excellent improvement. I though they already gave ads based on interests. (is that not the case?)

They do, but the issue is that they have far far more targeted ads based on other sites you visit on the web. These would be advertisements that are non intrusive, curated, and setup in a way that is more privacy focused. (Ability to opt out, see why an ad was actually sent to you, and the ads don’t leak data to other sites and stuff like that.) Example: Search for a pair of shoes on Amazon, you’ll have the same exact pair of shoes show up on facebook. It is creepy.

Another issues content creators have is that they have no say over the types of advertisements shown with their content. We would have a system setup for content creators to choose ads based on a subject or something like that.

  • Security Options

I honestly don’t believe that Facebook is concerned with security. I think Facebook is more concerned with building a network that can be used to build huge user interest databases that drive ad sales. (maybe other nefarious shit, but that’s a bit tinfoiley for me)

I would get out that tin foil hat and strap it on. I’ve seen some shit, and have done some shit, but I can’t talk about it due to NDA.

  • Other concerns

My main problem with Social Media is that it’s a major source of depression

I personally feel this is due to depressing/outrageous stories that are posted on the platform to make you feel a certain way and to get you to react a certain way. (think 2016 election) If we can get away from content that is used to persuade the masses and focus on the content that you actually want it will help considerably . I’m up for more ideas on this.

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Yes. Similar to how crypto exchanges verify your identity before you can go /r/wallstreetbets on the crypto market.

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There are a lot of “”""“alternative”""" social media platforms, like Mastodon and Gab.ai, but good luck finding anyone you know IRL on them. People are not going to switch to whatever complicated decentralised peer to peer TOR Dark Web solution is in this month, unless said platform is bang on with their marketing.

this brings up a question I keep asking the privacy crowd. If you are this certain your privacy needs are not being met, why are you on social media IN ANY FORM? Wouldn’t a better plan be to just abstain from the medium all together rather than the 40 square-peg-round-hole solutions that seem to try and take the “social” out of social media?

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Literally anything but ads.

I believe we have this covered with a premium subscription, this would also include other perks as well.

There’s no way to make an effective advertising platform without violating user privacy in some ways, and it’s a death blow to privacy when ad data is coupled with real life identity.

Yeah I totally agree, its a tough problem to solve. The platform would ensure that metrics wouldn’t be linked to an actual name or identifier. But instead give a slightly broader scope such as age, gender, and other stuff. (This makes the ad’s platform less powerful, but I’m hoping to be able to push the ad-free experience so we can focus on the fun content on the site.)

Patreon’s subscriptions are also a successful model. I can make use of all of Level1Techs stuff without paying a dime, but I give them $19 a month because if someone doesn’t, it goes away.

This is a huge thing for me. I want content providers to be able to make a bit of money on the platform. That can come from a site subscription model similar to patreon or from ads played on the video or video sponsors or allow a tipping option? (I’m not a content creator, so I would love more insight to what THEY actually would like so we can make it a good experience for both them and the audience)

I’d also be willing to mine crypto in the browser if the option were presented to me. I’m opposed to it when it’s sneaky, but I’m willing to opt in if there’s transparency.

No plans for anything like this. Maybe an opt in feature? but idk.

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While I agree that news articles are a component, I and a lot of students I mentor experience FOMO a lot because when you are sitting at home on Friday night scrolling through facebook, seeing what your friends are up to, you get depressed and think “oh, I could be out doing x or y or z with friends” but in reality, 40% of your friends are doing the same. I’ve always held fast to the idea that you only post the top 10% of your life to facebook.

The average person doesn’t post a selfie with the dryer with the caption “doing laundry today!” and if they do, well, they’re definitely unique.

I don’t have any solutions to this, just trying to accurately describe the problem as I see it.

RE: election, I think different people will have different opinions of the election news coverage. Some people liked it, some people hated it, and some sat back and watched, with popcorn.

That’s a huge thing for me. It’s a sort of mutual respect. Either that or state that the content I post becomes the property of X service, in the EULA. (and make the EULA human readable, please)

Interesting. I feel like that’s completely different from pretty much every platform I’ve seen so far. I’d like to explore this a bit more.

The Level1News covered this briefly today. Not everyone can host video content. It takes a huge amount of storage and bandwidth. I’m curious what the solution is.

That, IMO, is what flickr is for. Flickr doesn’t really compress stuff that much and people there are okay with slower delivery times.

Manual flag system. If you see content that’s in violation of DMCA or whatever else, flag it, and maybe have a form for “who’s the legitimate owner” so the reviewer can try to get in contact? I’m not sure, all I know is that ContentID’s accuracy is pretty much a coin toss.

Yeah, I’ve had people ask for my content before. I’ve denied them permission and they used it anyways. I have not recourse on Youtube to solve that. But this isn’t about youtube, We could have an entire thread about Youtube’s lack of customer support.

Ah, I like that. Sort of a middle ground between mined data and elected interests?

Excellent! This sounds like a good solution.

Don’t get me started, I work for a realtime micro-scale geolocation services company based in SF. Let’s just say I’m not happy with everything they do, or everyone they work with.

Not a terrible idea, but browser crypto miners will make Google and other search engines delist you for “malware”

That’s the thing, I’m not.

Anyways, I’m going to head off for the evening, I’ll try to catch up with this thread later.

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Good idea, but my only worry is that I don’t have quality control over the content sold over the platform. There are WAYYY to many scams on facebook. I’ve seen where an ad will grab your hometown and generate a logo on a shirt “BORN AND RAISED IN {HOMETOWN}” and that makes me cringe pretty bad.

But if content creators had merch they wanted to sell and that I could verify somehow I would be game for that.

Classified-style ads would also be okay to me, like Craigslist’s model. Most of their ads are free, but certain ones like housing and employment require a fee to post. The caveat there being I’d only want to see them if I went to the relevant section. Local group, interest group, whatever.

Not a bad idea, ill throw this on the list to think about.

I just don’t want an experience where if I googled ‘unemployment’ that you get a shit ton of ads on this site for related unemployment stuff. It is depressing.

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Yeah, that reminds me. I thought about banning political ads by default unless opted into or you subscribe to a topic/subject that is political.

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As far as I know and based off my experience there are no charges for buying or selling content on the site.

They are pushing for using payments in messenger, hell there was news today bout them getting into crypto? lol (after they ban the ads… but I don’t have enough alcohol for this topic)

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Would you prefer a nature metaphor, or a sexual metaphor?

You could replace the word privacy with something like aspirations and say why do it at all?! I feel it comes down to people feeling like they belong and are apart of something (its human nature In my opinion)

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Except the purpose of the platform you are seeking is to be able to communicate with other human beings in a social setting other that face to face. And according to a school of thought most employed by a worrying number of users on this forum

  • NO member of the big three social media platforms [Twitter, Facebook, Instagram] suitable for use
  • ALL modern email services are not trustworthy
  • Apple and Android alike are selling your data
  • Phone manufactures are submissive to Alphabet agencies
  • Google is the pinnacle of evil on this planet
  • Linux is the only hope of saving you from government spying
  • Your router should be flashed with Open Source software
  • Windows 10 is reporting your every move to Microsoft, who are also in league with Google
  • on and on and on

it gets to a point where, without people necessarily being WRONG about ANY of that, I just throw my hands up in complete bewilderment about what the hell anyone is supposed to bloody DO ABOUT IT.

What does that have to do with your post? ANY social media platform you or anyone could EVER DESIGN, is going to have SOME exploitable weakness. And my reasoning is, if someone is going to create FlaceBrook, who nobody I know is going to be on, I will bite the bullet and use the platform already available to us right now.

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TIL

ANY social media platform you or anyone could EVER DESIGN, is going to have SOME exploitable weakness.

Understandable, I’m trying to create one that makes it very difficult to abuse. I feel that I can take my personal experience from Facebook and all the dumpster fire news they have had recently to make a better platform. One that doesn’t sell your data, abuse you from a targeting perspective, and has original content where they can be compensated well.

If you build features and have privacy control figured out, I feel that people will abandon their platform(s). (see myspace to facebook)

You could say that I’m building a platform that has less windows and doors built into it. Less snooping, and the door is much harder to kick down. (Privacy settings are strict by default, there are no public API endpoints, and you can’t view content on the site without being signed in and verified.)

I feel like you are saying there is no hope for this, that is why I’m reaching out to get ideas and share what I currently have brainstormed.

But honestly, I’ll take the challenge.

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Even with the alias feature? Mainly I have verification to stop bots. They are a bitch to tackle without advanced ML and other very non-privacy friendly tools (webrtc for example)

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Facebook is more secure and private than irc. No idea why people think it’s a privacy solution or more secure somehow. It’s pretty much the worst in these respects.

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Some interesting ideas and discussions here. One point that’s not adressed yet (or maybe I missed it):

What about people that don’t have a drivers license? I am not solely concerned about the resulting age restriction but also about people that can not get a drivers license because of medical reasons. This is an arbitrary restriction for a social media platform and varies from country to country. There has to be a better way to avoid bots and spam accounts.

I think community curation is a good thing, but I am not sure how well it scales. At the moment I am a bit in the dark about the current state of social media because I don’t use any. This forum is the closest thing to social media I use and it took quite some time convincing myself to try it.

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You’re still new, give it time :grin:

After reading through this thread, my primary question is, why are you hiding your name on social media? I thought the point was to have friends and family that know who you are. Otherwise, join a message board/web forum.

If you join any sort of online community that focuses on community and networking, it’s recommended to use a professional username or handle that associates with the real you. This advice stems from all kinds of resources, business professors, career advisors, to even Eric Raymand and Richard Stallman, commonly known as esr and rms in social forums.

Would I do this on Reddit, 4chan, or some other disgusting netsack of hive mind fornication? No. I was tempted to do this on here (in fact, if you guys saw me on the L1 Discord, I did have my initials on there).

Also, the concerns about privacy are new and exciting, but I honestly think they’re a bit overblown. I’ve said it before, so I won’t hammer on any specific points, but before mass personal computer/Internet adoption, collection of information was taking place via retailers, credit card companies, phone companies, etc. Does that make it right, fair, justified? I suppose not, but this isn’t a new phenomenon. The profits might be breaking records, but the act of this has been going on long before the Internet advertising and data mining existed.

Telemetry and data mining is not inherently evil. Not properly securing and mishandling the information is where I start to get irked.

Anyway, I tried Mastodon, and it wasn’t for me. To be honest, Twitter isn’t for me either, but I have it for “networking” purposes. Haven’t had a Facebook in 8 or 9 years, I’d guess. I prefer message boards and online forums. I understand I’m not the target demographic.

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That is gonna be a no from me dawg.