Comment by okamiueru
9 days ago
Nah. We should normalize public services and resources to develop knowledge and tools, that are made freely available. Provide incentive programs and reward those that take on such initiatives.
There are many such services where I'm from. And the feeling when using them is refreshing. You're not looking for an ulterior motive to be misinformed. They're responsive as they don't load a 10 MiB JavaScript blob to track your interactions "for marketing".
As an example, consider a service that gives you nutritional information of food. https://www.matvaretabellen.no/en/
The software solution and hosting is not remotely as expensive as the lab work needed to gather the nutritional information.
If this was made by a private company, it would be a subscription service, without a doubt. You'd find certain brands but not others because of deals under the table. It would have user profiles for collecting and selling data, not to mention integration with fitness and weight loss services. You might also wonder if part of the data is incorrect because of all that darn expensive lab analysis. Heck, maybe some CTO figured they could "predict" this information with an LLM.
Here, it is covered by taxes, benefit all, full page load in about 0.2 seconds (or 0.5 seconds for nutritional value). This is how the internet could be.
So, steal from everyone (taxation) whether they want to support or use government-run Facebook, give the money to government-run Facebook, and everything will be great because Government?
What incentive does that mechanism have to spur innovation for government-run Facebook? Does the government fund two Facebooks and scale funding based on market share? Or, like what virtually always happens in government, does it metastasize, realize it's actual "customer" isn't its "users" but is actually the government itself, and act accordingly to protect and grow its own budget?
Everything about a subscription model is better. If it sucks, don't pay for it, and if no one thinks its a worthwhile bargain then they run out of money and it dies. Efficient. If people do like it, then great.
Not sure to what extend, if at all, I should engage here, as you do have some strong preconceptions that probably makes it less likely productive.
> Steal from everyone (taxation) [...] give the money to government-run Facebook, and everything will be great because Government
Not touching this. As an exercise, take it upon yourself to figure out how much it cost per meter (or, I assume more familiar to you -- football field) for the road you last used, and where that money came from.
> government-run Facebook?
Yes. But, it depends what you think Facebook is, which I'm assuming isn't what Meta does with Facebook. They are in the business of collecting, profiling, and selling to data brokers, and influence to foreign countries or private interests. All of this is of negative value to both end user and society. In a world with a "government run Facebook", it wouldn't exist.
So what is the service Facebook actually provides then? A way to manage communities and events. A way to find, connect, and communicate with others. And it would absolutely be a good case for something that could easily surpass the value of services provided by "facebook", if done right, without incentive beyond making good services.
Not sure if you've noticed or paid much attention. None of the most important services do product development guided by <improving the service>. Google wouldn't have replaced Play Music. Your search result might be immediately useful but that would make you move on. I'd also wager that your YouTube client doesn't automatically skip the sponsor segments.
> So what is the service Facebook actually provides then? A way to manage communities and events. A way to find, connect, and communicate with others.
I don’t have Facebook or use any social media (except LinkedIn) and yet I still plan events, connect, and communicate with others. I have not touched a mainstream social media site since probably 2013.
We don't need Facebook, and we especially don’t need to spend a bunch of money on a poorly run government Facebook either.
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It's sad that people today can't digital equivalents to things like the telephone network or the postal service existing without a private company being able to profit from them. What we consider infrastructure is still stuck in the 20th century.
The earlier link you provided is indeed refreshingly quick to navigate. What a joy that’s unnecessarily rare. It renders like trash and is unusable on my intentionally-not-updated iPhone, but still. Yay.
“Provide incentive programs and reward those that take on such initiatives.”
We have that too, we call it capitalism. It’s not very unique, but we heavily market it under the “land of opportunity” moniker. Do a thing of value and your reward is the lion’s share of that value. “You get what you’re given” seems to make some countries happy, but I’m sure you can understand the appeal of “you get what you earn”, even if neither of them matches the brochure. The scholars can debate the pros and cons of it, and where it goes wrong, but you’re talking about investment reward structures like it’s a fresh concept coming out of Scandinavia.
On that note, let’s set aside the endless conversation around “government Facebook” and talk foundational: Size, diversity, and population. It’s funny when I see comments from micro->small nation states with relatively homogeneous citizens throwing up their hands like “Everyone should just agree on what to have for dinner, like we do.” Oh I’m sure you’re aware that ‘America be big’, maybe even visited New York and were impressed by all those not-tall non-blonde people waking around, but perhaps without fully appreciating that it alone has a 50% higher population than your whole country. Something more your speed would be the Atlanta metro area, which still has a ~10% higher population. Getting everyone to happily chip in a few bucks on a half pepperoni/vegetarian pizza (or, I assume more familiar to you — “Grøt med smør eller rørte bær”) is a lot easier when everyone can be fed by that pizza.
But that leads to the larger point: we don’t have as much of a problem getting our Norway sized cities to provide various communal welfare services to the local residents, the problem is in scaling that up to 65 Norways.
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I'll grab onto the very first thing you've said as it seems to be a basis for the rest - taxation isn't fun, but low taxes don't guarantee anything. Look at Hong Kong - one of the lowest tax rates in the world, but it doesn't really mean the citizens have more free income. The government still needs money to function, and the main source is land sales instead. The landlords have taken over instead and insane rent for smallest places is now the actual tax. And then it's reflected further in the price of the food or products, where rent is the biggest business expense.
The money just goes into private hands instead. Is that really the better option here? Innovation isn't necessary if you have a de facto monopoly - and frankly, Facebook is a good example; nothing it has done in 10 years was actually an improvement to the service or humanity.
It would be alright to socialize the good parts and get rid of the bad ones.
Yes. We should stop listening to idiots that say taxation is theft.
Taxation isn't theft but poor fiscal policy is larceny.