Have you considered that, perhaps, the reason facebook is full of people with nothing to say is because most people have nothing to say?
I don't actually think that's the case, or at least it's not the sole reason, there are many features that facebook has that linked pages crawled by google or whatever don't: A social reward structure, reduction of potential meaningful criticism, content aggregation - that last one's a big one by the way, there hasn't been content aggregation through an even vaguely visually pleasing interface before.
The best push-based content aggregation outside of the social networks is still RSS - a fact so sad it almost makes me want to weep.
And then there's the problem with reputation metrics still being totally screwed to hell to the point where your friends list is still a reasonable shot at people you'll trust. Which is just >_> Yeahhhh.
Don't get me wrong. I think that centralised publication systems constitute a serious threat to freedom of speech, and perhaps more importantly to the likely level of speech - facebook et al tend to be set up to discourage discussion - but I think there are non-trivial technical and social issues that feed into its popularity beyond people not knowing how to set up their own websites.
There is this great quote attributed to Mark Twain:
"If you have nothing to say, say nothing."
The current state of the internet is quite far from this: we are all encouraged to say something, anything. Here on HN it is quite far from this, but most on the traffic on the social networks I believe can be related to "dumb shit".
I do wonder how much of that we're responsible for sometimes. I was quite little when the internet started to become popular, to the extent that I barely remember it, but I do remember that it used to seem to make people... well, I don't want to say smarter but definitely more rounded.
Lots of people say that technological solutions to social problems don't tend to work. However, things like the size of textboxes, the granularity and orientation of rating systems, the way that threads get created for comments, the efficacy of ignore options and so on... you do have to wonder, I think, how much of an effect these have on the ability of people seeking better conversations to find them and be nurtured by them.
Especially when you consider how that sort of thing's going to interact with search engines as a fairly standard point of entry. If you can't sort for a desired quality then ... oh dear. :/
You know? I was talking to my father a few months back now and he said that there's nothing on the internet. Now you and I know that's not necessarily true - but equally actually finding something like Gwern's site or Hacker News, unless you were looking for it, unless you were moving in certain circles already....
The state of dialogue on the internet looks a lot like the result of a really horrible sorting problem interacting with a bunch of weird incentive structures to me.
I don't actually think that's the case, or at least it's not the sole reason, there are many features that facebook has that linked pages crawled by google or whatever don't: A social reward structure, reduction of potential meaningful criticism, content aggregation - that last one's a big one by the way, there hasn't been content aggregation through an even vaguely visually pleasing interface before.
The best push-based content aggregation outside of the social networks is still RSS - a fact so sad it almost makes me want to weep.
And then there's the problem with reputation metrics still being totally screwed to hell to the point where your friends list is still a reasonable shot at people you'll trust. Which is just >_> Yeahhhh.
Don't get me wrong. I think that centralised publication systems constitute a serious threat to freedom of speech, and perhaps more importantly to the likely level of speech - facebook et al tend to be set up to discourage discussion - but I think there are non-trivial technical and social issues that feed into its popularity beyond people not knowing how to set up their own websites.