@Al_Kafir I forget the name of this service at the moment but there is an online service that lets you chat randomly, via both text, voice and video, with random people. Just hit “next” and it’ll randomly connect you with someone to talk to. I think the market would be people that want to meet and interact with new people. There is a certain appeal to some people to just talk to new people, even if it’s just random people, especially if it’s in a safe anonymous environment. If you don’t like the person at the other end. Boom. Just hit next.
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Lol…well I never…I guess I’m too old to appreciate what all the young ‘uns find interesting. I couldn’'t see a market…and its coz I’m an old fogey and not with it enough…lol…that serves me right.
Edit: Warren - I notice you keep referring to Slur again and a Pod member also said they were working on something similar (I maybe wrong…hope I’m wrong)…I thought maybe we could move to off-topic and you can tell me why you think its a good idea…actually, nevermind, found the Slur thread, I’ll research further to make sure I fully comprehend the concept.
Meh personally I agree it’s weird but that’s not for me to judge. There is a market that exists and I can understand the mentality behind it even if it doesn’t appeal to me myself.
I remember the word picture that brought this idea to mind before I heard of SAFE.
Think of a daisy. Put the person (end user) at the center of the flower. Replace the petals with arrows. In the olden days before cities we would have 100 or so people at the ends of those flower petals that we would converse with daily through lines (two way- double arrowheads.) These people were like our extended family but not in a tribal sense, not hierarchical at all. It was solid, voluntary power equal communication with roughly 100 people throughout the day. This is the theory and it supposes this is what we experienced for the vast span of human life up until the comparatively tiny recent 5000 years.
Contrast that with today where in the developed Western World we are lucky if we know 100 people and 90 those two way arrows are taken up time wise by a top down one way rays of experience with a screen surrogate where the people on the other side of the TV screen are trying to control our behavior and outlook one way or another. The TV replaces the input of 9/10 of the people that are supposed to be in our lives and blocks 9/10 of the dialog that would help develop us.
This type of app attempts to use screen tech to reverse this situation. Potentially longer term users would have more than 100 people they regularly conversed with daily. And there is something in the Skype/Face Time experience where the facial expressions adds an emotive channel that is missing from text systems and definitely missing with TV as its one way.
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Now you’re beginning to sell it…much more professional and clear pitch…you’ll be like that Advertising Exec, Don Draper from Madmen soon enough…lol
Seriously though, this post explains the concept a lot better for me.
So the basic idea (if I’m understanding correctly), is that we need to get back to a more natural and de-centralised social structure informed and directed by each other and away from the centralised Media/Advertising/Corporate informed/directed model we currently have?
This is aided by face to face interactions with other (poss anonymous) individuals - the app would essentially be an alternative to watching TV, or listening to radio etc - is this the idea?
If so, I grasp the benefits and market for the app, though I think it could also basically be a setting on a social media app similar to a Facebook/Twitter type hybrid…couldn’t it - or is it’s USP unique enough to act as a standalone do you think? Have I missed something?
Edit:By the way, as with the Slur app conversation – have you ever thought that your opposition to advertising may also be slightly mis-directed for similar reasons? What I mean is if you remove the money/paying element, then your objections may fade away. Is it not the “paid” aspect that is really the root problem? Can you not envisage a working model where people freely let others advertise reciprocally, if one site recommends the other’s service for example. I recognise we are still left with the “attention” grabbing aspect – so maybe sites have a dedicated page of reputable/recommended links?
I don’t really see a way to prevent paid advertising on safe, but maybe if sites adopted the above scheme, it would catch on and become the preferred format. Users would prefer to visit the non-ad sites probably. Just thinking aloud really……
This would also seem to be more attune to your “How small communities interact naturally” idea. If I’m say the village Painter and someone asks me if I can recommend or just know a Plasterer, then I can do so. The key is that they asked me- I didn’t walk around in overalls with “Tom’s Plastering” ….well…plastered all over them. In a similar way, the site visitor “asks” by viewing the dedicated page – it isn’t “in your face” I don’t need paying, I’ve just helped my customer, (and myself) and Tom…no cost
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That is spot on. I think you got it all.
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Why wouldn’t this platform be spammed?
You cannot censor it - and if you do you become the corrupt central authority that is censoring the flow of information.
By and large all relationships are transactional. We invest in one another and buy each other’s trust… Anybody who is willing to spout off their opinion to some random stranger for sport is selling something… That is just human nature…
ATM this is a bit like twitter, or how I use twitter. I use it both to be in charge of my “vertical” feeds, and to link up horizontally - though I generally choose vertical feeds that are willing to interact with me over ones that don’t.
As with twitter, i think it’s easy to eliminate spam from this.
BTW the is a random “alarm call” app where people volunteer to give a randomly allocated person the alarm call they’ve booked.
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Happybeing, With twitter you get an echo chamber of people with generally the same ideas you subscribe to. Transitionally this is beneficial, because we get talking points to support our view. Warren’s idea was to expose you to random ideas of strangers. In general, I think this will attract people who want to be heard a ton more than people who want to listen.
Would you like for me to tell you about my Lord, Jesus?
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With twitter you get an echo chamber of people with generally the same ideas you subscribe to.
That assumes you follow people with supporting ideas. That’s up to the individual, which is my real point. Twitter is much more self curated, and so is vertical or horizontal to the extent you choose.
Also, individuals tend to be far less homogeneous and more complexin their views that vertical media, so even those I follow for my interest in the things they cover (I actually don’t think it is accurate to say “have similar ideas” to me) will often surprise me from time to time, or bring things into their feed that I’m not normally likely to come across. I even follow some people who tweet about things I’m not interested in, just because I like the variation this beings.
It depends how you use it, but you are in control. I prefer that to random, and I think it is more comparable to the historical situation that @Warren describes. Those 100 people one came into contact with each day were far from random, but selected according to various practical, social and personal factors.
Why do people post?
Because they have an agenda.
People with agendas are biased, and ought not be trusted…
Most social media forums are full of people who want to hear themselves talk.
No thanks.
The only people I’ve heard criticize twitter have turned out to be people who don’t use it, and don’t understand it. You are free not to use it, but I don’t think you know what you are talking about.
On some level, yes everyone has an agenda, and many on social media, or any other means of communicating information, have their agenda. To avoid this, you would have to never read a book, attend a talk, read a newspaper, a circulated email, or a blog post. You’d have to avoid any publicly shared information and stick to highly curated one to one communications. That’s the logic of your criticism of twitter, and that’s why I don’t think your points about twitter are made from a place of understanding.
I rarely watch TV, and get my information from lots of different sources under my control because I share your distrust of “people with an agenda”, but that’s a reason to make use of sources where we are more in charge, not to avoid it. Once the decentralised alternatives reach critical mass I look forward to things moving even further away from other people’s agendas.
What sources do you use?
I believe both Gandhi and Martin Luther King had agendas…
I would argue that most of the Ferguson madness was caused by incorrect information for horizontal media.
The story-line that was being repeated on social media was demonstrably and provably wrong. The bullet holes where in the wrong places and the blood trails where in the wrong places. The story was trusted because it came from horizontal sources, but cities burned because those sources where wrong.
Horizontal media can make matter far worse. For the most part, CNN MSNBC and FoxNews get their storylines from Twitter these days anyway. They can report what they can’t report by saying “@thisidiot tweets” -------------
Why would you need maidsafe for an app like this?
FoxNews & CNN are joke media, only yesterday one Fox “expert” said Birmingham UK was an entirely Muslim city where non Muslims dare not go. It’s 80% non-Muslim, but I digress.
You illustrate merely that given an open (horizontal) media, people are free to choose their sources. A lot of the most accurate reporting was also available from twitter, and I doubt very much of that was relayed on entertainment / propaganda shows like Fox News.
If you don’t want to rely on information put together by “someone with an agenda”, you have to curate your own sources, which I have been doing for several years.
@jreighley You didn’t answer my question: what sources do you use, or did you in fact mean that you use Fox and CNN?
I avoid investing much energy into obtaining news. The news media is in the business of selling newspapers and as such they need to sensationalize everything and make it a much bigger deal that it really is.
99.999995 percent of the world’s new should be “nothing of significance happened today” but instead we have 20 or 30 things to be riled up and politicized about every hour… If something is newsworthy enough that it actually effects my friends and my family, I will hear about it and can investigate it myself.
The politicians are in the business of stirring discontent. That is how they get and keep their votes. The news media is their favorite tool in doing so. Here in the US most legislation is proposed not because some party wants it passed – They propose legislation for the sole purpose of chastising the opposing party for voting against such a thing. It is all a game, and I choose not to be a pawn.
I am a Glass if half-full guy. If you look at the trajectory over time, Things are generally on the upswing when you compare it to 100 or 200 or 500 or 2000 years ago.
OK, so according to you twitter is rubbish, mainstream media are rubbish, and there’s no point in informing oneself about events because very little of importance happens day to day , except things get better over long periods.
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Not really. Twitter is a telegraph service. Kinda handy, but not terribly revolutionary. This seems to be to be just another twitter. Which is fairly inconsequential as far as it’s game-changingness.
I am not uninformed. I choose not to be riled up over the fact that shit happens, because shit has always happened, and shit will always happen. We oughta be good people and not make shit ourselves but the media alarmism causes exponentially more shit than it fixes. “Keep the whole world pissed off about something” is the name of the game for the politicians and the news media both. No thanks. Life is good, unless you believe them.
By and large when you build yet another platform to let people communicate you get a bunch of people spouting their opinions. And next to nobody who listens. I see all kinds of stories go across facebook with 1000’s of comments or 10000 comments. It is absolutely unfeasible that commentor 10000 read the prior 9,999 comments or by sheer luck came up with some brilliant insight that the other 9999 missed… Chances of anyone reading any of the comments after the first 10 or 20 become mighty slim. It is a silly absurd waste of time. Lets build more and more of those, and expect the world’s problems to be fixed?
What you mean is that at least as far as current affairs are concerned, you are only interested or informed about things that directly affect you and yours…nice
You sound pretty uninformed to me.
I am not uninformed. Just un-propagandized… Most of the conversation here is extremely propagandized.
You don’t know me.
Does anyone deny that the politicians and the media are in the business of keeping us pissed?
On the whole, are you better off because you are pissed?