[HN Gopher] Social networks are getting stingy with their data
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Social networks are getting stingy with their data
Author : hubraumhugo
Score : 95 points
Date : 2024-02-11 15:56 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| henriquez wrote:
| I keep seeing more and more traffic to my sites from the
| fediverse. I think the centralized social network model is in
| deep shit, at least as far as the WWW goes. The days of zero
| interest money and investment based only on user counts are over
| and traditional social networks are increasingly irrelevant.
| TikTok is obviously not in deep shit but that's a separate can of
| worms.
| calamari4065 wrote:
| I really don't see centralized social networks bring
| competitive with the fediverse for much longer. After all, how
| do you convince millions of people to use your service and pay
| for it while you spy on them, sell every scrap of data you can,
| and even then still show them invasive ads?
|
| Meanwhile mastodon is free as in freedom. If you want to, you
| can buy your admin a beer. People seem to like this arrangement
| quite a lot. You, an individual, are giving money directly to
| another individual for services they're providing to you with
| zero obligations. It feels more like buying your plumber friend
| a case of beer for fixing your sink and less like throwing
| money into a corporate void for no discernible benefit as the
| price slowly and invariably creeps upward.
|
| The really cool part though is that centralized social media
| has to compete with the fediverse, but the fediverse does not
| need to compete. It's not interested in competing. It will
| simply continue to exist for as long as there are users. No one
| cares what percentage of the global population uses it, or
| about infinite geometric growth forever. It's just people
| talking to other people. It's not an experience that you get on
| traditional social media anymore.
| huimang wrote:
| The public at large doesn't care about any of that at all. I
| don't think mastodon will ever grow that large due to how
| painful the signup process is. And that's fine! But we have
| to acknowledge that only a very small portion of people care
| about things like privacy to the point of uprooting their
| social media where their friends are.
|
| AT Proto is more interesting than ActivityPub anyway, but I
| think BlueSky will eventually succeed because the signup is
| painless. You just sign up on bluesky, there's no need of
| discussion on which instance, etc. There's no worry about
| losing everything if the particular instance you're on goes
| down, or having to deal with migrations.
| gargron wrote:
| What in your opinion are the pain points in the current
| sign up process?
| calamari4065 wrote:
| Mastodon.social. These enormous monolithic servers offer
| the worst experience and degrade the whole network. And
| now joinmastodon.org points you at mastodon.social first,
| then a list of the largest servers.
|
| In other words, centralizing.
| GenerWork wrote:
| >I think the centralized social network model is in deep shit,
| at least as far as the WWW goes.
|
| Meta just beat Q4 estimates by 10%. Just because you're seeing
| more traffic to your site from the fediverse doesn't mean that
| traditional social media is dying.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| You can beat estimates for a while by ramping up prices and
| cutting staff and costs.
|
| Facebook has, among other things, cut their developer support
| to basically zero. Bugs in the APIs sit around for years. The
| Groups API is just being discontinued entirely.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I imagine strategically they all think they got what they
| needed out of being an open platform and don't need to do
| it anymore. I guess we'll find out if that's true or if
| someone can take their bacon.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| > Facebook has, among other things, cut their developer
| support to basically zero.
|
| They're still doing well on PyTorch at least! Although they
| did drop GPU support for Windows soon after the WSL2 became
| usable (presumably because now users could just install the
| Linux version on Win)
| nradov wrote:
| Why should they care about APIs anymore? Those no longer
| contribute to profitability.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Come on, it's hard to deny that the last year has proven that
| the vast majority don't leave when platforms like Reddit and
| Twitter succumb to extreme enshittification. The eternal
| September is passive and docile.
|
| Those sites are already spiritually dead in the sense that
| they're only tolerated and no longer enjoyed. But they've
| achieved too big a network effect to be replaced anytime soon.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| They needed devs to grow back in the day, but now the devs have
| outlived their usefulness.
| amelius wrote:
| But seriously, didn't most devs see this coming?
|
| It's the same everywhere. "Thank you for helping us make the
| AppStore great, now give us 30% of your revenue."
| candiodari wrote:
| Obscurity in the future? Or obscurity now?
|
| There was no alternative. The old internet, frankly, requires
| people to pay. They don't if they can avoid it at all. This
| is what killed most desktop software before, and it is what's
| killing most internet software.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| > They don't if they can avoid it at all.
|
| Probably because the most common model is a $5-$20/month
| subscription to some "premium" version of the site/app.
| Subscription fatigue is a monster of the industry's own
| making.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Was easy not to see in maybe in 2008, then in, AFAIR, 2010
| Facebook started tightening the screws citing security first
| (and, well, there have been good reasons not to give full
| graph access to everyone at all), but then it became obvious
| that they were twiddling with feeds and what they didn't like
| at all was inadvertently giving you tools to build your own
| feed but without the ads.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| I don't use it that much, but the farcaster protocol as a
| backbone for a social app is super hot for devs right now. Most
| of the stuff is open source, they even changed some login steps
| so that it would be closer to web2 experience compared to usual
| 'web3'. Idk for how long it'll keep being this friendly for devs,
| but that's the state for now
| j1elo wrote:
| I was about to open a Mastodon account, but because I don't
| really use to publish anything too often anyway, instead left it
| for later.
|
| A couple month passed and the instance I had in mind, closed for
| good.
|
| I've been told before in HN that Mastodon's solution is non-
| existent for these situations. Has the landscape changed or
| you're still f*d if you choose the wrong one? (aka. an incentive
| for centralization or always chosing only among the most popular
| instances)
| ldjb wrote:
| The solution is to run your own Mastodon instance.
| Unfortunately, I find doing so can be quite a hassle. Obviously
| it's not free, and not only do you need to configure it
| properly, but you need to handle backups, updates and so on.
| Even for me, with a fair bit of technical experience, it can be
| challenging. I think there are significant barriers to doing so
| for people with no or little technical knowledge.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'm paying a coffee a month for masto.host to do it for me.
| Great little service.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| > The solution is to run your own Mastodon instance
|
| The problem is that Mastodon isn't really great for single-
| user instances (hassle to upgrade, slurps resources for
| breakfast, etc) but there are plenty of other ActivityPub-
| compatible software that is great for single-user usage, like
| Pleroma, Micro.blog, Akkoma and more.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| I did it with a free VM and wrote a guide here [1]. Zero
| administration work with docker automatic updates.
|
| [1]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2023-12-12_mastodon-docker-
| rootless...
| fanfanfly wrote:
| What service did you get your VM from?
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Oracle Free Tier
| mysteria wrote:
| While following a guide can get someone set up quickly, the
| problem is that they may not have the background to deal
| with issues/breakage down the road. Maybe it's a botched
| update, a strange error, or so forth. The security side is
| also another can of worms and I recommend that people do
| some reading into this topic before running a public web
| service.
|
| I'm not trying to dissuade you from writing this - such
| guides are always appreciated by the community. It's just
| that I've seen a lot of inexperienced people try setting
| these things up with a guide and getting bit in the back a
| couple months later.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Yes, your skepticism makes sense. I am running services
| since 7 years, so it is not that I did not know what I
| was getting in.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Thanks. What's stopping someone from creating a .deb that
| does most/all of this?
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| You're equally messed up if your account on a centralised
| service is banned, in which case you chose the wrong one. You
| could choose a server that's signed up to the Mastodon Covenant
| to provide some more peace of mind, and should always take a
| backup of your account from time-to-time.
| huimang wrote:
| You're incentivized to either choose a stable, robust instance,
| or self-host. A lot of instances are pet projects that people
| kill off once they get bored of mastodon and don't want to pay
| for the upkeep anymore.
|
| Self-hosting is the only way to really guarantee that it'll
| still be up years later. But you might get randomly banned from
| certain instances that blanket-ban single-user instances.
| michaelt wrote:
| I've got to say, that doesn't sound like a very good
| solution.
|
| How are people who aren't already part of the community
| supposed to know what a stable, robust instance is?
|
| And self-hosting is all very well, but if I wanted to join a
| community comprised exclusively of greybeard unix sysadmins,
| I'd use IRC :)
| bachmeier wrote:
| > I've been told before in HN that Mastodon's solution is non-
| existent for these situations.
|
| What are you worried about losing? You can download everything
| if it's a concern. Honestly though, the concern you're raising
| is non-existent on every platform, because the others only have
| a single instance.
| keep320909 wrote:
| Run your own blog, on your own domain with github. It takes
| like 2 hours to setup and costs $20/year. Lately, it really
| feels like the whole "social media" decade was a dead end.
| quaintdev wrote:
| what 20$? I am running it for free except for domain name
| cost.
| fanfanfly wrote:
| Can you share your setup/tech stack?
| LTL_FTC wrote:
| I'm guessing that's what their $20/year is for. GitHub
| pages lets you use your own domain once you buy it.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| It's basically analogous to e-mail. To have an e-mail account,
| you have to choose a host first. Most people choose a popular
| host (Gmail, Outlook), but there are various reasons one could
| prefer a different one.
| stevenicr wrote:
| I really feel there is a need and future growth in distrubuted
| backup as a service -
|
| A few of us should get together and make a 'backup your stuff
| service' that can pull from mastodon and any other service, and
| make 2 backups in two different places around the world.
|
| Offer addons for storing BnW copies of pics maybe, addon's for
| other services.
|
| Should login, add link to your thing, walk through authorizing
| whatever is needed, and getting an email or DM that backup
| succeeds every week or something.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I chose a mastodon instance for which the financing is quite
| clear. I donate once a year. Admin is reactive and all to
| updates and also use the instance daily.
|
| If somehow I find out admin start not giving updates and
| updating the instance, or the donations are not meeting the
| goal I assume I would have time to startup my instance and or
| move somewhere else.
| sehugg wrote:
| This could have been a headline from 2011
| rebolek wrote:
| _their_ data?
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| I was wondering quote often about data possesion. It is their
| software. It sits on their servers. They convert and maintain
| it. Do i own my data? Currently - of course I do not. They do
| with it whatever they want. They sell it to whom they want.
|
| I have option only to not use their service.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Read any of the contracts you have to agree to in order to use
| one of these networks. You own your data but grant them a
| perpetual, royalty-free, no-exceptions license to use it
| however they want for ever. They get to eat the cake and have
| it.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| Of course it isn't their data it is ours. But only worth anything
| in aggregate.
|
| It was well known how much this stuff was worth before and that
| amount has been declining. With AI hype convincing people of
| unknown potential it becomes a speculative asset again.
|
| Reddit was a financial failure and now it is trying to IPO again
| on the basis that your shit posts are the new NFTs. This issue
| will resolve itself I don't think devs are missing out.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| Of all the social networks, I think Reddit is actually the one
| with the highest signal to noise ratio. It's invaluable to get
| real human opinions on product recommendations, travel
| recommendations, how to do something, etc.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| It is infamously astroturfed to the maximum and has been for
| over a decade. Nowadays not just for future landfill items
| but also politics.
|
| And by selling the data to LLMers its fate is sealed.
| mvkel wrote:
| Data is oil (including synthetic), and consumer data companies
| (social networks) are sensing that their data is soon going to be
| the only defensible IP they have. Gotta hoard every little bit of
| it to maximize market cap
| seydor wrote:
| "Megaphones are trying to keep the shouts for themselves"
|
| This is such a silly concept. Users and 'influencers' use social
| media as megaphones, and they ll easily give their data to e.g.
| openAI if they ask for it. Social media have no moat there
| notsure357 wrote:
| Does anyone really believe that an AI based on Reddit or
| Twitter/X data would somehow be more superior than other AI's? Or
| that it would somehow provide a snarky competitive advantage
| included with other data? I don't see it.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Superior may depend on your goal. If it's mass disinformation
| campaigns produced by generative AI, those mentioned data sets
| may be ripe for the cause.
| causal wrote:
| Yup. They're exactly what you need if your want to imitate a
| redditor or Twitter user.
|
| Also not useless for just learning language.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| Doesn't matter. Execs, MBA types, and VCs only hear "data is
| the new oil" and think it is just as fungible.
| delfinom wrote:
| Unfortunately data post launch of ChatGPT is now worthless as
| it's contaminated by the very same bots
| fatihpense wrote:
| reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-
| background_steel
| markhahn wrote:
| Data autonomy. How do we get across to people that there's real
| value in owning your data - controlling it, hosting it, not just
| being someone else's product.
|
| Why should we not take the broadest possible view? You own your
| likes, your comments, your amazon order history, your dental
| xrays, your histology reports, everything. One way to incentivize
| data consumers and processors would be to make them liable for
| mishandling, make the data so radioactive that they don't even
| want to hold onto it.
| randunel wrote:
| So... GDPR? You can download your own data, force the data
| controller which acquired it to delete it and they're liable
| for mishandling it. Companies don't usually want to hold on to
| EU citizens' data because GDPR makes it quite radioactive, for
| them and whomever they sell it to.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Yeah, leaking financial data for millions of people should ruin
| the company and have fallout that hits the members of the board
| and C-suite. Instead it's actually just an opportunity to sell
| an identity theft "protection" subscription.
|
| I have no faith that people will get clued in and make it
| happen. Everyone is merrily lining up to use the third-party
| face scanner at the airports.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Once data gets out it's impossible to completely take back.
| Regulations could help corral law-abiding actors, so I agree
| with the idea.
|
| Though I can also see how the incentives of social platforms
| encourage clamping down further and further on 3P access.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| > Once data gets out it's impossible to completely take back
|
| As a society, we understand that rights !== access. Just
| because you share your data with Facebook, giving them access
| to it, in the normal course of interacting with their servers
| does not grant them rights to that data.
|
| When Netflix delivers a video to your device, society
| understands you can't make a copy of that video and share it
| with your neighbor. That's called "The Pirate Bay."
|
| Data on the internet is lacking equity: an ownership interest
| in property. As you generate data online, platforms
| accumulate equity in your data giving them control over that
| valuable property.
|
| If, instead, you accumulated equity in your data the entire
| data broker market would be "The Pirate Bay."
| godelski wrote:
| This. Honestly I'd love a government to take up the privacy
| mantel and protect its citizens. Sure, you lose the ability
| to spy on your citizens but so does every other country in
| the world. Seems like that's a net win.
|
| If USPS was made to ensure that all Americans can
| communicate, even making it explicit in the constitution. I
| don't know why this wouldn't also apply to cell phones and
| the internet. Are they not modern evolutions? Put the code on
| the gov's GitHub along with the rest. Other players can
| exist, but it sets a baseline standard. But any country can
| do this, doesn't need to be the US.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| this isn't being done for privacy these orgs want to keep their
| LLM gold chests to themselves.
| happytiger wrote:
| Pay them to hold on to their data and manage it? That's about
| the only way for end-users to experience the actual value of
| data.
| nradov wrote:
| Legally speaking you already own your healthcare data such as
| dental X-rays. In many cases you can even download your data
| from provider and payer organizations in industry standard
| formats (although dentistry specifically is way behind in this
| area). But for most patients this data is worth zero. Legal and
| privacy concerns aside, there's just not much use for it.
| Several start-ups have tried to de-identify and agregate such
| data for sale to researchers but consistency and quality issues
| make it tough to use in real studies.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| I don't think the approach of getting consumers to care can
| work. Most people really just don't care about taking
| precautions when the negative impacts of not doing so are so
| diffuse and time-delayed; it's an unfortunate aspect of human
| nature. We usually overcome these individual failings by
| organizing into groups better suited for long-term planning. In
| this case the solution that comes to mind would be to make
| personal data legally onerous to hold and process for
| companies, to the extent that they would go out of their way to
| design their products and services to never touch the stuff,
| and if they _do_ need it to operate then they would be
| incentivized to store it locally on users ' devices and only
| synchronize it in a completely encrypted form such that they
| never have to deal with the legal implications of having access
| to it.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| AI is going to push data autonomy hard. Users are going to want
| to subscribe to different models for different things, and plug
| those models into whatever they're using. Everyone is going to
| support it, and to make it work there needs to be data
| exchange. Companies that don't support it to try and keep the
| data walled are going to hemorrhage customers.
| tgv wrote:
| Devs? Or other leeching companies that might cut into their
| revenue?
| computerfriend wrote:
| I used to make and run Twitter bots. I wasn't a leeching
| company that might cut into their revenue.
| dudinax wrote:
| You're collateral damage
| vdaea wrote:
| After what they did to Facebook because of what Cambridge
| Analytica did using API access, this makes all the sense in the
| world. API access, even if it's read-only, is a huge liability.
| tqi wrote:
| Yeah the media loves to have it both ways because at the end of
| the day, they'recompetitors in the same attention business.
| axegon_ wrote:
| I was having this exact thought around 2015, not longer after
| spaCy became open source. When I first tested it out, I was blow
| away how well it performed in every possible task: it was light
| years ahead of nltk and gensim, which were the big and well
| established players in that space. Even back then I was certain
| that in the not-so distant future, data will cost a fortune:
| considerably more than it already did. And I won't lie, starting
| to harvest data online on a massive scale did cross my mind and
| capitalize on it when the day comes. And now I really regret not
| doing it. Reddit closed itself off, so did stackoverflow, twitter
| is a no go, facebook made it nearly impossible. Cloudflare makes
| traditional scraping nearly impossible, if scraping wasn't
| already a nightmare with the modern web stacks: the doors are
| nearly shut and it will only get worse.
|
| It really hurts me to know that I expected this to happen and
| didn't do anything about it. Oh well... One of many missed
| opportunities in my life I suppose(WAY more than I'd like to
| admit).
| Eisenstein wrote:
| This is hilarious because Sam Altman was on the board of reddit
| until recently. I don't believe that reddit closed off API access
| due to AI data scraping. They did it to force people to use their
| shitty app so they can get more ad impressions before the IPO.
| molticrystal wrote:
| Twitter used to view itself as a microblogging service and was so
| open that they allowed syndication by offering an rss endpoint,
| we are light years away from that at this point.
| chaseadam17 wrote:
| Farcaster solves this. I'm surprised it's not mentioned in the
| article or anywhere in the comments.
| seanwbren wrote:
| Farcaster is a decentralized social network, much like Twitter
| but with Channels (which are similar to subreddits). All the data
| is open.
|
| A cryptographic signing key is attached to each account, and they
| have been experiencing very fast growth over the past month.
|
| A dashboard is possible to share because the data is open:
| https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster
| INTPenis wrote:
| What's the role of Ethereum in farcaster? I noticed it in the
| design Overview but I don't really have the time or motivation
| to get deeper.
| Yhippa wrote:
| It seems to me that what you did _inside_ the social networks
| used to have a lot of value but now it seems like what you do
| _outside_ may be even more valuable to try to model users wants
| (product or otherwise). If everybody starts closing their doors I
| wonder if there will be a breakdown of the prediction abilities?
|
| I guess every app and webpage is willing to sell your behavior to
| the highest bidder so it probably doesn't matter.
| INTPenis wrote:
| And the great people driven fediverse should also be mindful
| about who they let in as users. Because you need a user account
| to get an API key.
|
| The gatekeeper is always the mod who approves new user accounts.
| Focus on that part and we might keep the data hungry monopolies
| out of the fedi too.
|
| Many small instances is much more viable than a few huge ones
| that let anyone in.
| srameshc wrote:
| They were always stingy with their data. It has been repeatedly
| challenging when they change their ToS. I will never build on top
| of another social network unless they are federated in nature.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| if only there was a way to guarantee data availability through
| some kind of system
|
| like redundant hubs
|
| check out farcaster.xyz or download the client on warpcast.xzy
| simplify wrote:
| Farcaster a decentralized "enough" social network, which fixes
| this. Easy to run your own node too
| solobalbo wrote:
| Use nostr
| geor9e wrote:
| I (stupidly) stored all my 4k video footage on facebook. It was
| great for a while. Only later did I learn that if the video
| viewership drops below a threshold, they delete the 4k stream
| without warning, leaving only the 360p stream. So I just have a
| bunch of blurry videos when I export all my facebook data.
| casefields wrote:
| Terrible for you but saves them a boatload of money at their
| scale.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| About a month after closing an account on one of these social
| networks one realises that nothing of value was lost.
|
| Furthermore, ,,their data".
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