What is wrong with current social networks and messengers app?
This post is an article of a series of articles about the "The new paradigm" that will be gradually placed on the site. There are few published posts, you can find at the end of this article.I consolidate social networks and messengers, apps and websites in one place, since they are hardly distinguishable by their features and functionalities nowadays.
This is not a new topic, and I am not the first critic, so I list all problems and then immediately go to my proposal in order to address these issues.
Fails:
- No privacy, not enough good encrypted messaging either direct messaging or group messaging, in both end-2-end encryption and client to server encryption. And all of them suffer from metadata leakage.
They all have very serious problem because of requiring people to link their “identity”through a retard-phone(aka smartphone) to network, in excuse of spam and troll fighting.
- Hidden algorithms, so that no one know how they decide to recommend particular connections or content or advertises to users and how and why they filter some feeds.
- Lack of data sovereignty, either the content or the connections(relations, likes, shares, comments, feedback, etc). The friends list and user network and interactions are not under users ownership, they are companies properties. Users can not export out their created contents, connections, comments, history, etc... in order to self backup these data, or immigrate and import these data to another platform. Instead the companies use this information to analyze users as precise as possible, in order to maximize their profit.
- Gaining high profit and having minimum willingness to share revenue with their creators (the app users). keeping users staring their apps as long as possible. Increasing dependency to their app by abusing users habit.
To me, the social networks and messengers must facilitate the “action”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Condition#V_-_Action , while they do not care about it. They are existed just for money and control, even by encourage users to low quality activities and waste their time in their platform.
- Seemingly free services, while in reality users are ‘paying’ (with) attention. Indeed users are the product and not the consumers. Interesting article “Reasons not to be used by Facebook” as an example.
https://stallman.org/facebook.html .
They provide “free” services to encourage users to expose themselves, their believes, their habits, even their impulsive, as much as possible. They are totally free, to persuade you to reveal yourself in order to be used against you very soon.
- Their business model is not just about the money, they provide these facilities to surveillance, “full pipe monitoring”, secrecy, censorship, disrupt social movements and gaslight users perception.
Solution proposal:
The solution is creating a “real” decentralized social network. The system that has open source and free licensed code, like Bitcoin.
The whole system will be a pure protocol and a reference implementation. No one will be the protocol owner or software owner at all, and everyone can run software on their computer and join to network with no mandate or obligation. The “protocol“ is secured by users consensus.
The user data and all kind of information about user is controlled by user itself. s/he decides “what” to share, and with “who”, and for “how long”.
The software will have vary set of different open-source and transparent algorithms to organizing data and feeds to users home page, so that user can decide to get the feeds under a particular policy or share/broadcast her/his content by another policy.
For example if a user don’t want to remain ensconced in her/his safe and familiar community and idea-sphere (with basic level and safeguarded inputs and content suggestions algorithms), s/he can switch to an adventurous or heuristic algorithm. Or even sets a combination of five percent safe algorithm, plus ten percent popular algorithm, and twenty percent elite-like algorithms plus half a percent Facebook-like algorithm (just as a reminder about past custodial algorithms). Every developer or enterprise company can create new scoring and sorting algorithms and promote it to users. These algorithms must be transparent as well and users can use new algorithms in order to organize their home page and feeds. Again there is no place for abusive or exploitation algorithms. Whole algorithms must have the ability to explain the reasons behind theirs judgments. And these explanations need to be shown routinely to users in a way they can understand.
What people are really missing with Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal/Zoom or whatever messenger in future is the fact that “End to End” encryption makes no difference in privacy level, if the service is only accessible from a “single app, provided by a service provider”, who can impose an automatic update. In other word no messenger of no company will be secure and private, since soon or late they will be forced to implement at least one backdoor.
The only practical solution, as I told before is an “open and free standard/protocol” for communication that can be implemented and used by different clients (e.g. different mobile apps, developed by different companies or different clients developed by different people for different operating systems). The only definitive thing is the “protocol” itself.
This “protocol” must be implemented by a decentralized consensus, and maintained by a decentralized mechanism too, in a fully open-source ambient, where no one can impose malicious upgrades to protocol. This goal can be achieved, only if a decentralized decision making process about the “protocol” (aka a decentralized community and governance) already exist.
It looks like the chicken and egg problem! We need a decentralized community of developers, in order to implement a decentralized and secure protocol of a decentralized social network.
It won't be an unsolvable problem, if we start from a pure centralized community and step by step decentralized it. I explained this “continuous peeling in community and rules and governance”, from different angel in “Redefining exchange rates to excellence index in democracy term”
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5303276.0 Building this protocol and embody it in a software and forming a community on top of it will not an easy process at all, and needs huge efforts and resources. There is a proposal to address this, titled “Open Money, a glue for accelerate Openness“
https://community.hackernoon.com/t/open-money-a-glue-for-accelerate-openness/50908Obstacles:
does really a real decentralized social network support influencers and their million followers live streams?
At this point definitely no, and the proposed architecture supports normal users with hundreds of friends and connections. But it doesn't mean this model will never work in bigger scale. It is the first step and we definitely will make on top of it the better products.
Is there any sustainable and feasible business plan for this proposal?
Yes, the business model will be a combination of classic advertisement model and a monetary model that I explained in another article titled; “Can we imagine an alternative monetary model to recover our current economic fails?”
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5305584.0 Hu
Redefining “exchange rates” to “excellence index” in “democracy term”
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5303276.0 Can we imagine an alternative monetary model to recover our current economic fails?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5305584.0 There is no place for feats, beauty and “heroic deeds” in the modern world
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5306920.0
