intergalplan (u/intergalplan)

intergalplan commented on Facebook threatens to make iOS users pay. Please do it, Mr. Zuckerberg zdnet.com/article/faceboo... · Posted by u/MontagFTB

eshyong · 5 years ago

I see this argument made often on HN, but it's not clear to me how an internet protocol would make social networks more accountable towards their users. Do you mind explaining your reasoning here? Specifically, how would a protocol prevent motivated companies from tracking your personal information?

intergalplan · 5 years ago

> Specifically, how would a protocol prevent motivated companies from tracking your personal information?

They could still try! But you'd have options.

Take email, for example. I cannot imagine something like that coming into existence today.

I can use my own client to avoid ads and tracking from my service provider—did I download this message? Sure, the server knows that. How long have I looked at the message? Which message did I look at next? Did I follow any links (yes, someone might track that part, but my email provider's going to have a hard time doing that)? What mouse movements did I make while looking at it? No such luck there, and yes websites and closed-platform services do track that stuff.

I can switch providers. Say my email provider starts injecting trackers into all links. I can just dump their ass if I don't like it. I keep using email, and now they receive zero info about me (I mean, they might get a little if I send emails to their users, but you get my point). If I have my own domain name I don't even need to tell anyone I switched.

I can email someone using a different provider. Yes blocklists or whatever might cause a problem but, fundamentally, this does work.

Protocols force providers to act like a telco, at least, except that the situation's even better for software because the barriers to entry in the market are so low... unless all your competitors are giving away access to their strictly closed ecosystem for free, and not supporting open protocols. Then you're screwed, and that's exactly what's happening now and why the Internet protocols are largely frozen in time.

intergalplan commented on Facebook threatens to make iOS users pay. Please do it, Mr. Zuckerberg zdnet.com/article/faceboo... · Posted by u/MontagFTB

vetinari · 5 years ago

The apps cannot track if they have no permission to access the respective APIs that give them data they are tracking. What are they going to send via the network? Only things that the users specifically give to the app.

intergalplan · 5 years ago

Look up what the Apple's tracking-prevention policy prevents for users that don't opt-in to tracking. You cannot ban generating device or user identifiers with OS permissions alone. Prevent using the built-in ones, sure, but fingerprinting or otherwise creating device or user IDs to share with 3rd parties and other apps? I'd love to see what a permissions model would look like that could do that automatically, at the OS level. I don't think such a thing exists. Not for any app with enough access to the system to do anything remotely useful in the first place.

intergalplan commented on Facebook threatens to make iOS users pay. Please do it, Mr. Zuckerberg zdnet.com/article/faceboo... · Posted by u/MontagFTB

karmelapple · 5 years ago

When you say a protocol, do you mean in the same way http is a protocol? Like a new way to communicate that web browsers would start adopting?

Because in my opinion the browsers would need to make it as easy to use as any other website or phone app if it were ever to gain traction.

intergalplan · 5 years ago

Usenet, email, http, XMPP, IRC, et c. Yes, just like those. In combination, that bunch is already not too far off. The trouble is that anything trying to do that is competing with "free" spyvertising services, which have no incentive to integrate with them (i.e. implement the protocol), unless it's to do it temporarily to eat their meager market share before cutting them off. IMO that dynamic is why protocols have stagnated for decades. Working on a client or server for some new protocol is thankless when you know it'll be niche at best, and more likely DOA. Making a go at a business with one is insane in this market. So they stagnate. No new ones catch hold, and old ones make slow progress at best, or gradually die.

intergalplan commented on Facebook threatens to make iOS users pay. Please do it, Mr. Zuckerberg zdnet.com/article/faceboo... · Posted by u/MontagFTB

ISL · 5 years ago

Facebook annual revenue is ~$47/daily-active-user . The number for US users is comparable.

intergalplan · 5 years ago

Notably, however, a competitor need not target the same level of profitability.

Now, whether asking users to pay for a social network at all is a viable business model, is another question.

intergalplan commented on Facebook threatens to make iOS users pay. Please do it, Mr. Zuckerberg zdnet.com/article/faceboo... · Posted by u/MontagFTB

fartcannon · 5 years ago

The app store is just wget and an install command. The permissions settings are in the OS.

They could have all the same levels of security without the need to prevent competition.

intergalplan · 5 years ago

You can't realistically keep apps from tracking users without permission unless you're rejecting apps that are discovered to be doing that. If they have network access, they can track. The behavior is too abstract to be handled with permissions alone.

intergalplan commented on Facebook threatens to make iOS users pay. Please do it, Mr. Zuckerberg zdnet.com/article/faceboo... · Posted by u/MontagFTB

BTCOG · 5 years ago

Uploading your daily business, personal photos, and down to what you eat to a profile on someone else's servers was never a good idea from the very start. I find it pretty amusing how it becomes outrage and parroting after the fact that bad news comes out about Facebook. We knew what Facebook was doing in 2008-2012 era as well but nobody parroted these old and tired narratives then.

intergalplan · 5 years ago

I've always taken Zuck's infamous "dumb fucks" comment to come from a place of astonishment, more than malice. Posting tons of private info under your own name online was strongly against Web norms at the time, but all those newbies didn't know that. FB and others made it normal, but the reasons it was a bad idea to begin with didn't go away.

intergalplan commented on Facebook threatens to make iOS users pay. Please do it, Mr. Zuckerberg zdnet.com/article/faceboo... · Posted by u/MontagFTB

bonestamp2 · 5 years ago

I would actually consider using Facebook if I could pay for it and not be tracked or datamined. There is a let a legit use case for sharing photos, personal stories, and discussing news and information with a curated list of your friends and family.

intergalplan · 5 years ago

"Social" should be an Internet protocol. The only reason it's not is that we basically stopped making protocols (well, ones that gain any meaningful traction, anyway—I'm aware there are some lightly-used efforts at social protocols) because all the companies in a position to push them to a meaningful number of users are better served by making interoperability difficult. The "free" services spyvertising economy, where captive non-paying user count & eyeball time is what matters, is why things are this way.

intergalplan commented on JavaScript for Shell Scripting github.com/google/zx... · Posted by u/gigel82

alpaca128 · 5 years ago

I think it's also made much worse by how JS doesn't care about whole classes of bugs. Forgot an `await` somewhere or called an async function assuming it's sync? Now you've got a bug and in some cases no idea where to look for it. TypeScript is also blind to it (although now that I think of it a linter might flag it?).

intergalplan · 5 years ago

A really good point, and all the more reason to make developer-visible async behavior something the developer has to to ask for, even if the call is in fact async under the hood and might let, say, code handling another request run while it's waiting on I/O.

I think a pattern where there are one or two great places at the lowest level of a Node program for program flow to act async, and then a bunch of business logic where it rarely is (probably running "under" the part where async makes sense, if you take my meaning) is far more common than those where async-friendly flow is what you want for over 50% of calls. "Call this chunk of code async, but run everything in it exactly in order" is super-common, and the interface to achieve that is exactly backwards in Node.

intergalplan commented on Facebook threatens to make iOS users pay. Please do it, Mr. Zuckerberg zdnet.com/article/faceboo... · Posted by u/MontagFTB

macspoofing · 5 years ago

For sure it's bluster. Even putting a 1 penny fee would cut their userbase significantly.

intergalplan · 5 years ago

It's bigger than that: iOS is big enough that Facebook charging on that platform would be an existential threat to the company.

How?

It opens up the perfect opportunity for some competitor burning VC cash to swoop in and grab a ton of market share in a hurry, with a free iOS app.

FB knows this, so yeah, it's a completely hollow threat. But, just the idea that one of the tech giants has been backed into a corner by the risk of competition from paying-for-marketshare VCs or operating-in-the-red-on-purpose other tech giants, is really, really funny to me. No fun, eh Facebook? Hahahaha.

intergalplan commented on JavaScript for Shell Scripting github.com/google/zx... · Posted by u/gigel82

alpaca128 · 5 years ago

Neat idea, but what's the point of async-await when you just put await before 100% of calls like in the first example? Now you've got more to type for no gain.

I don't get this popularity of async-await, especially in JS where I find its combination of syntax and absence of pre-run checks overly confusing and error-prone.

And this, seriously?

    await $`exit 1`

intergalplan · 5 years ago

IMO it was always a fundamental mistake to force the programmer to deal with the event loop by default. Run async in the background, but present as sync to the developer unless otherwise requested, would have been a much saner design. Unless you're developing a framework or library, odds are good your ratio of leveraging async versus contorting yourself to make it (from your script's perspective) go away will be 1:10 at best.

JS keeps coming up with new ways to make this less painful, but it's ridiculous every time because it's a fundamental problem with how Node presents itself. A comical sea of "await"s in front of damn near every call is the modern version of this, and is utterly typical in real JS codebases, but before it's been callback hell, or screwing around with promises all over your codebase when 90+% of the time you just wanted things to execute in order (from your perspective), and so on.