Readit NewsThis is about storing data in the form of "Facebook user XYZ looked at a page about travel to Antarctica" and the reason Facebook wants to store such data is to show them travel offers when they read their Facebook feed?
If so, can I download this data about me? Is there a way to download everything Facebook stores about me and then I will see all the websites and pages I visited that Facebook knows about?
For example, if a user specifically asks for a
URL's full text, it might inadvertently fulfill
this request.
1: Bing has access to text on websites which users don't. Probably because websites allow Bing to crawl their content but show a paywall to users?
2: The plugin has a different interface to Bing than what Bing offers via the web. Because on the web, you can't tell Bing to show the full text of the URL.
I have to contact my ISP. That's not the open web I subscribed to :) Until they fix it, I just keep reading HN. A website which works the way I like it.
Going full time is the only way to go for a project you love and want to grow.
What is the business model?
How much visitors does Marginalia have?
Generally speaking, the issue with new startup competitors for social networks is that the first people they attract a critical mass of are people who got banned from the other sites for spam or excessive toxicity, and once they’re there they spook potential new people. It’s the online version of the “Nazi bar” problem.
* Hosting costs. Reddit was very lucky to have imgur pick up a lot of its bandwidth in its early days, but free image/video hosting sites are cyclical: absent a benevolent billionaire, the costs will rise with popularity, and the site will eventually need a source of revenue, which will introduce friction and start its inevitable decline in popularity.
* Moderation. Always a highwire tightrope act. Most Reddit spin-offs of the past several years have been focused on minimizing moderation, which ends up attracting people who tend to get banned from other places before the site gets a chance to form its own identity and pick up steam.
* Network effects, which are basically a lottery. You can have a scalable service with great UI, and a solid moderation story, but you still need to get lucky and catch lightning in a bottle to take off. This is common knowledge, which makes it even harder to justify starting to develop or use a new social medium.
Personally, I like places like HN, which focus on good moderation without trying to scale up. We are blessed to have dang, but if the site were structured more like Reddit or a forum with different boards, I bet it would become unmanageable very quickly.
Moderation: True, that's hard. But maybe piggybacking on HN's karma points could solve it?
Network effects: Do we really need many users to make something useful?
r/all subs like r/pics are completely replaceable, but something like r/personalfinance is an institution that is not easy to replicate elsewhere.
Any of them decentralized, so there is no "one ruler" who can close down the thing in the future?
To me it seems, that 99% of Reddit is just "content fast food" and low quality comments.
If we would get just 1000 HN users to use an alternative, that could already be something.
Hosting the posts shouldn't be that hard. Storage is so cheap these days. Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content?
Ranking the posts is another issue. Is that where the value of Reddit lies?
Maybe one could build some hybrid thing which capitalizes on existing structures? I could imagine a frontend which only shows posts by users who signed their posts via their Hacker News accounts. Aka they sign their post with a private key and publish the public key on their HN profile. This way, a new Reddit alternative could benefit from the karma distribution of the best community on the web today.
Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI.
Is that because there are simply not enough GPUs out there to do this at scale?
If so, it will become really interesting once that constraint goes away. There might be a shift in the search space like there was a shift from analog to digital photography.