It’s a good one… nice reference on the variants…
It also reminds me of the VR episode of Community…
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Nah, we’re blaming it on FB for amplifying, multiplying, and monetizing the worst of humanity. Selectively.
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Was thinking about this, and I’d suggest a tweak. The communications protocol should be regulated as a utility, rather than the platform.
Reason I say this is the “just use Viber or LINE instead” type of argument. Say that people switched en masse to one of them, building up the same network effect advantage that WhatsApp currently has.
Rather than a Facebook owned platform functioning as a utility, we’ve now got a Rakuten or SoftBank owned platform functioning as a utility.
Needs an interchangeable standard agreed on, similar to SMTP and the like with email. Doesn’t matter if I email from a GMail account to a Hotmail account, or to someone using a corporate account, the mail’s delivered. Same thing’s needed for instant messaging, make it so that it doesn’t matter if you’re messaging from a WhatsApp account to a LINE account, or a corporate account, the message should get through.
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But they’re all utilities.
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There is one, actually. In true open-source community fashion it has the delightfully easy-to-remember-and-say name of “XMPP”, because apparently “Jabber” (its old name) wasn’t technical enough.
The problem is, for reasons I outlined elsewhere, no one wants to use it precisely because it would allow people to communicate without being part of their own platform, and venture capital investors are all about those Monthly Active Users. Google Talk (the original Google chat app, not whatever reincarnation they’re up to by now) was actually built on top of XMPP, but they abandoned that in favor of inventing roughly sixty-eight proprietary communication protocols of their own over the ensuing 20 years.
Now, to be fair, XMPP as a spec does have its own list of technical problems that might well be solved by building something completely new, but nobody who has a say in how chat apps are made is willing to put in that work for everyone to then be able to use.
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And that’s why it’s a utility. You don’t get to have a special current flowing through the lines or a special plug.
Phones transmit information when I make a call. They’re still a utility.
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Oh to be sure: it would be great if everyone could connect with one another using an open protocol like XMPP the same way that phone calls, emails, and web pages are served agnostically to all comers. While I’d perhaps be reticent to mandate that everyone implement a specific protocol (because law and code frequently do not get along), I’d absolutely be down with a mandate that everyone at least pick something.
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Yes, any of us using Facebook to torment your 36 year old daughter would be neither gentlepersons nor scholars.
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Another point of view on the “just go outside and talk to people” approach to Facebook itself, rather than WhatsApp: Stonekettle Station: Recap: October 4, 2021
Isn’t it because these companies want to be able to mine your data so they can use it to sell ads?
Yep, and it’s hard to sell ads if people can use your service without being forced to see them because they’re using a different client that strips them out of the data feed.
Hence why Twitter killed their RSS feeds and tried to freeze out third-party clients that used their old APIs.
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Sounds like Tron to me:
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