Why social media fatigue is spreading
Dan Patterson and Jason Hiner discuss how early adopters of social media are turning away from it, and what that could mean for the future of Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms.
David Gelernter, famed Yale University computer science professor, is a pioneer in software, having invented in the mid-1990s a program called Lifestreams. It would come to be regarded as one of the very first social network programs.
Gelernter has teamed up with a group led by former Goldman Sachs banker Rob Rosenthal to create a new social network, based on blockchain and cryptocurrency. The group, Revolution Populi, unveiled its thinking in a screed by Gelernter a week ago on Medium that makes the case that people’s data should belong to each individual, not to the tech giants that horde that data. Facebook, Gelernter’s primary target, is a failed example of a social network, and an “opium den,” in his words.
In a companion white paper, Gelernter and Rosenthal and the team sketch the broad outlines of a plan to give the database of user data, in blockchain form, to the people, and to let a thousand flowers bloom, in the form of new social networking apps that will be built on top of the blockchain. Various goods and services will be able to be transacted via crypto through those apps, including people being paid for the ad revenue their information generates if they so choose. Gelernter and Rosenthal sat down this week for a chat with ZDNet about the tough questions facing anything trying to disintermediate Facebook.
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Many details of the infrastructure, and an initial app that Revolution Populi will provide remain to be revealed. The duo promises more information in the “coming weeks.” But Gelernter and Rosenthal are sure about one thing: Whether now, or some years from now, people will leave Facebook.
As Gelernter puts it, social networks “need to do important things they don’t do today. There is no way Facebook is the stopping point. It may not be us who knocks them out, but someday, somebody will.”
ZDNet: What gives you confidence people will switch to another social network, given how they’ve built their habits around Facebook?
David Gelernter: I really do think there are a lot of people who have been thinking in this direction. I think this is a huge area, and we will see developments over a matter of decades, not months, and that Revolution Populi is a step in the right direction. Facebook is not the end of the story; it is just one awkward step. It’s not their fault they were the first out there, but it’s hardly surprising that there’s a desire for something else.
Rob Rosenthal: The other aspect of this, in terms of a killer app, is that it’s not going to be just one. We are going to be shepherding a public blockchain on top of which anybody can build apps. So it’s more like death by a thousand apps. We believe David is going to design a brilliant new social network, that is incredibly elegant in its design, on top of which you will be able to get not just music streaming, which is cool, but also a system whereby you make the money from your data.
Gelernter is passionate in his belief people crave, and will respond to, elegant software, which he says Facebook lacks.
Revolution Populi.
Gelernter: Rob’s point is tremendously important. We’re talking about a bunch of apps. The best thing about this medium is that anyone with this idea can build it, you don’t need a huge group backing you. It’s been impossible to make room for yourself in a world dominated by, monopolized by, a very strong player. You’re losing what ought to be software’s biggest source of strength.
ZDNet: What about fair use? Sometimes I want to ‘retweet’ something, or share someone else’s photo. I don’t necessarily want to pay for that every time.
Rosenthal: There will be fair use, yes. We address this in the white paper. There is software out there that through various different ways, we can very elegantly attach a user’s likeness to them. Therefore, they will be the beneficiary of transactions. I was a musician previously. I didn’t want people taking my songs and making money off of it. If you take a picture of a sunset, it’s fair use, but if someone takes a picture of you, and an ad pops up against that, you should get that money.
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Gelernter: There’s a larger point here. These guys convinced me of something: it seemed to me very few people will attract a non-trivial number of followers, because most people are cared about by no one. But, there are all sorts of people who are outstanding in a field that you’ve never heard of. But there are people who care about them, maybe just on their block, or at the school board meeting, or the local garden sale. They may have a couple of thousand followers. These are not movie stars and sports heroes, but they have distinction in fields that people care about. There are important gradations between having millions of followers and being of no interest to anyone. There are people who do have their own modest followings.
Rosenthal: There is a moral issue beyond this as well. There are lots of people who don’t sign up for streaming music because the price is too high. It is the height of elitism to contend that $10 a month is meaningless. It’s meaningful to some people. Now, if you have a following, it’s your natural resource, it belongs to you. Our belief is that it will find a way to make money. We believe, like I said, that if people take this up because we do the social net better than it’s been done, because it’s righteous, and people accept that notion, and accept that they should be the ones making the money for it, we’re offering people a service which we know is going to be attractive to them.
Gelernter: I’ve seen the software industry respond arrogantly since the day it was born to the idea that consumers care about quality, and whether it makes a difference to people. The fact is, it makes a lot of difference to people. There’s so much crummy software out there. We will have a better social network than Facebook. It will have a better package of services, and they are going to leave Facebook.
Rosenthal: And guess what, we are also putting ourselves in competition with ourselves.
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Gelernter: Yeah, the bar is set pretty low, we really want to do something good, and there are going to be other apps as well.
Rosenthal: It’s a gut check, knowing there will be hundreds of thousands, even millions of other social networks.
Gelernter: Yeah, right. This is an important area. Social networking is failing to do some things it ought to do. A lot of societies on this planet are going to have to deal with social networks, which has a lot to do with the emerging shape of public discussion. When I first described the social network back in the 1990s, I had ridiculously inspirational ideas. I thought the first social network would be used to discuss the forthcoming elections. It’s obviously not going to change human nature, but it will affect discussion, among other things. The main use of social networks, it turns out, is gossiping. Gossip has always been mankind’s second-favorite activity. But they read the newspaper, also. They watch news on TV. Not everyone in this country cares, but some people do. And the public function will be important, and the private as well. For people to put their own stories online, and also to find out what goes on in public life, generally.
Rosenthal: I think David’s point is so well put. The other thing is, this system will be controlled by the people. No one entity considers what is the right information for you to see, that’s critical.
ZDNet: Why did you decide to include crypto-currency in this system? It seems you’ve brought on yourselves all the problems that crypto has, such as which crypto is the right one for transactions, and all the fraud and theft that has been seen with crypto. You could have just made this a blockchain effort supported by fiat currencies.
Rosenthal: Crypto is elegant, and it’s part of the stack. It’s an elegant way to do straight-through. If an advertiser pays you directly, you go straight through to your music or movie streaming, or whatever else is offered in that system. This is a blockchain initiative, with crypto attached to it as an elegant way to do that, and to have smart contracts for people to control who they want to see. It’s just an elegant stack.
Gelernter: I have an idea that crypto is becoming more important to people. As they overcome concerns with storing stuff on line. They have had the luxury of not thinking too much about it so far.
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ZDNet: And the matter of fraud in crypto?
Rosenthal: We will be releasing our technical details in coming weeks, but we have been thinking a lot about all those issues. They are all solvable. This is relatively new technology, but it’s getting better every single day. There are a lot of smart, interesting people working on solutions to the issues that have come up. As David said, people are interested and excited about it.
Gelernter: There’s real interest and excitement about these algorithms. These are not new, but they are becoming more and more important. Computing and computer science and the technical fields generally are fascinated with the algorithm and its application. They are fascinated with crypto and crypto-currency. It’s just too hot an issue not to be exciting to people in the field. There is technical interest, and the technical knowledge is growing.
ZDNet: What about the supposed transparency of the blockchain? In some aggregated, perhaps anonymous sense, the blockchain knows what you’ve been doing. That might disturb some people in the context of social media. How do you reconcile the transparency of the blockchain with privacy?
Rosenthal: We will be releasing more details in coming weeks, but we are absolutely confident all these issues are addressable. As I said before, this is a new, burgeoning technology, and there are lots of people working through many known issues.
Gelernter: These are important questions. We have been talking with people about these substantial questions. The good news is that there is a tremendous amount of interest and excitement in the community. We have been seeing seeing a lot of people who have been working on this.
ZDNet: What’s the role of government in all this? Given that the Internet was created through a public-private partnership involving ARPA, one might imagine a blockchain-based social network could emerge out of some public project that would be similar to how the Internet got started.
Rosenthal: Well, there will always be temporal law! At the same time, we believe that in terms of this conundrum, or issue, facing the world, that instead of hand full of colonizers, the database needs to belong to everyone. I don’t think we believe government is the right solution. We think the problem should be solved outside of that.
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Gelernter: Government did something very important, and reliable, with the release of TCP-IP. In building infrastructure, and defining protocols, and generating protocols in the community — these are some of the more technical accomplishments. I don’t think people are giving enough credit to the defense research agencies and the NSF. They did tremendously important things. The American taxpayer was willing to pay for scientific research for the country’s defense. And so government has done something extraordinarily important. But having created this beautiful and fascinating cyber-world, the private sector is called upon now for something new. Government has done the hard protocol work that we can take for granted. It’s now up to us, not the Defense Department anymore, but the software thinkers of the world, to do something interesting. And there is a lot of interesting stuff to come. We haven’t seen anything interesting yet…
Rosenthal: That’s exactly right. Who owns the internet? Why can’t the database belong to the people?
Gelernter: I was amazing lucky during the 80s as a kid, and the 90s, we were amazingly lucky that there were brilliant people at ARPA, and a few industrial labs, that got funded in the very early years of the Internet. But we can’t count on that now. It’s in fact counter-intuitive that this government project [the Internet] came out so brilliantly.
ZDNet: As you said, it seems a lot of people are thinking about this. What about competition to your efforts?
Gelernter: If you asked me where the really brilliant social networking software is going to come, I would say from a design group that has a history of understanding the history of elegant design, and why elegance matters. Elegance means something else in software. The average software engineer talks about elegance but hasn’t the faintest idea what that means. The average engineer wants features and programmability and switches to set, and that has been out of keeping with what the individual wants. It’s the designer who thinks about the user, as opposed to the algorithm. I agree there will be a replacement for Facebook, a social network done right. And there are going to be a lot of them. My bet is ours will be the best.
Rosenthal: Also, think about this: The elegance of a very simple idea. We are not creating a new Internet. The Internet works fine. This is, simply put, a public database that is going to be the solution to the decolonization of the internet. David’s software that he designs will flatly be better than anything else you’ve ever seen. This solution will prevail.
Gelernter: Facebook is not enough. You know, some people would have said that about Unix. We don’t really need that much more work on operating systems. That’s certainly not the case where social networks are concerned. They need to do important things they don’t do today. There is no way Facebook is the stopping point. It may not be us who knocks them out, but someday, somebody will.
Rosenthal: Or several.
Gelernter: Or several
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