Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook

[lucio]

Nice job, if a touch taxing :-)

> A social network has to be stupid-compatible if it's going to be
> successful.  But it also has to be smart-compatible, i.e., done the
> "right" way, if we are to keep from going insane.  ;)

I don't even remember the name of the feature, but I used a tool way
back in the very early days of a public Internet (it was called a MOO,
I remember now) which had an inner programming language to construct
your identity (today that would be you avatar, but it was more like
your identity, life history and future behaviour all in one and
extendible).

Given a browser-style interface with 3D capabilities, it would address
social networking considerably better than Facebook (with which I have
the lightest of passing acquaintances), but you have to consider how
much working time - and consequently rewarded time - you can afford
your employees to spend in such a virtual world.

For that is what social media provide: a world-wide stage on which you
perform selections from your real life and any fantasy life you choose
to publish.  Stupidly, we still demand that people be consistent, but
that will drift away over time, of that I'm pretty certain.

Where to?  I think we're destined eventually to become bubbles of
information in a purely virtual organism that "may" instantiate itself
as a physical entity as the context demands, and that technology is
going to get us there as quickly as it is able to.  Reminds me of
Philip Jose Farmer's trilogy - long time ago, I'm not sure I can
recall the title of the first book, I do recall Mark Twain and the
Riverboat thing.  Because we're not likely to get Richard Burton and
Mark Twain back, sadly.

But thank you for the stimulating thoughts.

Lucio.

Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> cd /n/facebook

cd /
unmount /n/facebook
rm -fr /sys/src/cmd/facebook* /*/bin/facebookfs

Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook

[Staven]

It's not worth it.

You'll probably think I'm just being flippant, but I'm not.

It's just not worth it.

Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook

[Kurt H Maier]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 11:40:03PM +, cigar562hfsp952f...@icebubble.org 
wrote:
> Greetings, 9fans!
> 

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to social networking. Your idea will not work. Here is why it 
won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular 
idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state
before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) Users of Twitter will not put up with it
(x) Facebook will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for social networking
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of communications
(x) Huge existing software investment in Facebook
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than HTTP to attack
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Extreme profitability of Facebook
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Twitter
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been 
shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house 
down!


hth,
khm

Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook

[Winston Kodogo]

That's an awfully long troll. Some people have a lot of time on their
hands. And it's not yet April Fool's day, even in New Zealand.

On 31 March 2016 at 12:40,  wrote:

> Greetings, 9fans!
>
> We all know that Plan 9 started as a retrospective "re-take" on UNIX,
> occasionally referred to as "UNIX done right".  This has led to
> differences between "the Plan 9 way" of doing something vs. "the UNIX
> way" of doing it, such as those highlighted by the infamous "Unix to
> Plan 9 command translation" page on the Plan 9 wiki.  More generally,
> this can be viewed as the difference between the "right" way to do
> something versus the "popular" way to do it.
>
> So, my question is, what would be the Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook?
> Stated differently, if social networking were to be re-imagined and
> re-done "right" this time, how would it be done?
>
>
> E-Mail
> ==
>
> The obvious answer that comes to mind is e-mail.  It worked well for
> decades.  Although 9fans appear to continue this tradition in grand
> style, using e-mail for social networking poses a number of problems:
>
> 1. _Spam.  The fact that SMTP doesn't authenticate senders of e-mail
>messages has led to a proliferation of spam which has greatly
>burdened the medium, requiring complex workarounds that usually put
>legitimate mail at risk of misclassification as "junk".
>
> 2. _`Subject lines`.  Few people seem to know how to choose an
>appropriate "Subject:" line, anymore.  People will use subjects like
>"tonight's meeting", without specifying what group is meeting, when
>the meeting is, or what it is about.  When the topic of a thread
>drifts from its original topic, few people remember (or even think)
>to update the Subject: line.  Often, when one person wants to send a
>second person an e-mail, the first person will simply reply to the
>last message they received from the second person, even if it was on
>a completely different subject.  (This, of course, creates false
>relationships between the Subject: and References: fields used to
>define threads.)
>
>Despite the fact that most MUAs (including Webmail_) offer the
>ability to automatically sort e-mail into different categories, many
>people don't know how to sort incoming mail.  When they get too much
>e-mail in their "Inbox", the become annoyed and confused.
>
>These problems were addressed, somewhat, by the advent of the Web
>forums which were popular in the 2000's.  On a Web forum, moderators
>could reclassify posts and reorganize threads to better reflect their
>content.
>
> 3. Listservs.  For people familiar with mailing lists, sending commands
>to list servers is not difficult.  Unfortunately, many people don't
>understand listservs, and want some way to subscribe to and/or
>unsubscribe from mailing lists using a Web page.  While some
>listservs provide a Web interface in addition to an SMTP interface,
>it is becoming more and more common for mailing lists to append
>footers containing "unsubscribe" links.  This information (which
>usually duplicates information found in message headers and should be
>obvious to anyone who knows how to use the listserv, anyway) pollutes
>the content of the messages.  Furthermore, if a message containing
>such links is forwarded to someone else, the final recipient could
>unsubscribe the forwarding party from the list without his or her
>consent.
>
> 4. _`HTML mail`.  Nowadays, people will write things in e-mail messages
>like, "I've highlighted the changes in red".  On my display, plain
>text is rendered in black-on-white!  Or they'll write something like
>"here's the link," without specifying any URL.  You have to dig into
>the text/html part to find it.  Forwarding an HTML message to other
>recipients can also pose security risks, if _hyperlinks in the
>message offer access to personal information.  HTML mail also makes
>e-mail messages five times the size they need to be.
>
> 5. MIME.  It's great to be able to attach small files to e-mail
>messages, but there are WAY too many people who will just blindly
>attach Word Perfect, Microsuck Word, or ZIP files to their messages.
>I've even seen otherwise "well-educated" lawyers do this.
>
> 6. Large attachments.  MIME permits relatively small files to be
>attached to messages, but it is not really meant for distribution of
>large _files such as large images, audio files, movie files, ISO
>images, or tarballs.  For people like us, that's not a problem; we
>just upload the file to a server and post its location, along with a
>brief description of the file.  People who do not know how to do this
>will typically end up jumping through hoops to upload their file to
>some dreaded third-party service like Flickr or YouTub, and then post
>a link to that.
>
> 7.