Calling All Hackers: The World Needs a New Social Network

By JG Vibes
intellihub.com
November 5, 2012

Everyone remembers the mass exodus from MySpace to Facebook that took place a few years ago.

Facebook developed a following because it allowed people to connect with friends more easily, and due to these increased capabilities they became the dominant social network on the internet.

Over the years Facebook has become one of the most popular websites in the world, and recently the company has been taking advantage of their social network dominance.

The newest controversies surrounding Facebook have been the intentional censorship of activist profiles and the “promotional posts” scam which has cut off every single Facebook user from a vast majority of their posts.

Since these changes silently went into effect a few months ago, every single Facebook user can now only see a fraction of the stories which should be in their news feed.

For artists, activists and people with websites, there is now an option for them to promote their posts for a ridiculous fee and have more of their fans see their posts.

Many Facebook users don’t even realize that this is happening because unless you’re using the site for promotional purposes you don’t really notice.

Also, for years there have been so many rumors about Facebook charging that now when activists try to tell people about these new changes, it has turned into a “boy cried wolf scenario” and no one pays attention.

According to a social media expert at the New York Observer:

“It’s no conspiracy. Facebook acknowledged it as recently as last week: messages now reach, on average, just 15 percent of an account’s fans.

In a wonderful coincidence, Facebook has rolled out a solution for this problem: Pay them for better access.

As their advertising head, Gokul Rajaram, explained, if you want to speak to the other 80 to 85 percent of people who signed up to hear from you, “sponsoring posts is important.”

In other words, through “Sponsored Stories,” brands, agencies and artists are now charged to reach their own fans—the whole reason for having a page—because those pages have suddenly stopped working.

This is a clear conflict of interest. The worse the platform performs, the more advertisers need to use Sponsored Stories.

In a way, it means that Facebook is broken, on purpose, in order to extract more money from users. In the case of Sponsored Stories, it has meant raking in nearly $1M a day.”

In addition to this monetizing scam there has also been an increase in censorship.  Last week Infowars reported that they had posts removed from Facebook because of their political nature.

Just following that announcement The Intellihub was also hit with a removal warning, as were our good friends who manage the massive Exposing The Truth Facebook page.

If we wanted to fight a losing battle we could protest Facebook, and try to get them to change their polices.  However, that doesn’t really seem like it would be effective, and it hasn’t been effective in the past.

What actually needs to take place is the same sort of exodus that we saw from MySpace to Facebook, and in order for that exodus to take place we are going to need a more appealing social network for people to migrate to.

There are already some newer social networks popping up, but it doesn’t seem like any of them can compete with Facebook, at least not yet anyway.

I know that there are masses of hackers out there that are way more intelligent than Mark Zuckerberg, and they can work together to create a decentralized, open source social network that blows Facebook completely out of the water.

so what do you say guys? is the challenge accepted?

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Read more articles by this author HERE.

J.G. Vibes is the author of an 87 chapter counter-culture textbook called Alchemy of the Modern Renaissance, a staff writer and reporter for The Intellihub and host of a show called Voluntary Hippie Radio. 

You can keep up with his work, which includes free podcasts, free e-books & free audiobooks at his website www.aotmr.com