Building a Modern Social Network
A whizz kid programmer wanted to create an open and free social network to help the world connect in an increasingly online world. No, this isn’t the story of Mark Zuckerberg. This is the story of Joel Hernández, a social entrepreneur “on a mission to build human-centric, responsible, sustainable and fair technology for a more prosperous tomorrow.”
Joel joined The Hague Tech community last year, setting up his office where he mainly keeps to himself while glued to his computer screen with an occasional break to play FIFA 19. The only insight into what is going on behind the glass office is a colorful sign with the name Openbook. At The Hague Tech, we make it a point to learn about what our members are working on so that we can help connect them throughout our community. With all of the mystery around Openbook, we knew there would be an interesting story and one that we were excited to share with our community and network.
As much as Joel wanted to just discuss Openbook and the mission behind it, it’s just as important to understand Joel’s background that led to its creation. Joel grew up in Mexico where his sister brought a book back from the US when he was 10 years old. C++ for Dummies was Joel’s first introduction to programming which led to him becoming a self taught software engineer and starting a company all before he turned 18. But Joel was hesitant to call what he founded as “a company”, saying “I’m not sure if you could call them companies because it was not legal for me to have a company. I was underage so my parents had it.” Joel started with game servers where he accepted donations, eventually moving into building websites and eventually a t-shirt company. He was a full fledged entrepreneur before the age most of us even learn what entrepreneurship really means.
When asking how Joel ended up in The Netherlands, he truly had a one in a million story.
“There was a teacher here at the university, I’d watched some courses online on Coursera. I was like, oh, must be nice to actually have him around” he explained. “I had a few lectures with him but it was a bit different than online. He was teaching Java on a chalkboard.”
Joel started his corporate path working for a telecom provider before joining KPN as a frontend software engineer. He became increasingly interested in opensource software and started contributing to Javascript and Typescript, even getting a language proposal accepted into Typescript. While working at his desk, Joel was approached by a woman who “came into the room and was like, so, you’re the engineer. She then just wrote her number and she was like, are you tired of your job? Come work with us.” The woman who approached him is Jaya Baloo, now the Operations Sensei for Openbook. She brought Joel into a small security team within KPN where he would spend his days crafting security tools. But Joel saw the limitations of the reach of his work, he wanted to solve larger scale matters. So he started working on ideas, wanting to make “something radical, crazy!” He was working on a project with a model of microjobs for everyone but then the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke he knew his current project could wait, saying “I think it’s more important to try to fix some of these issues that are actually hurting us as a society.” This was the beginning of Openbook, born out of Joel’s late nights and weekends before officially quitting his job and enlisting ex-colleagues to help build his vision.
Openbook would be a modern social network, built from the failures and lessons of platforms before it. Joel explained that “the way that social media works nowadays, the people that created it are not afraid to say it, it was purely an accident. They had the metric of followers count and they decided, okay, let’s just do it.” Social networks were a new concept, they were built without the lessons of an internet history and on the basis of growth, not sustainability. Joel points to comments as an example of this (made even more relevant by Youtube’s recent decision to ban comments on videos with minors).
“If you really take a step back and you see the comment section, it’s crazy that comments are public by default, that anyone can see it. It’s an interaction between the person that created the post and you, yourself. Why should other people see this? And this presents a channel that makes the poster vulnerable to other comments. So we’re trying to reengineer these things.”
Joel consistently brings up ephemerality (the idea of things only existing briefly) and anonymity when discussing the need to reengineer modern social networks. He asks important questions required to critically analyze the failures of platforms such as Facebook; “What are the implications of being anonymous in a social network? How can we take the safety net of being anonymous while preventing users from exploiting that safety net to hurt other people? We’re looking into all the research that actually has been made and trying to create alternatives into how social networks work.”
Another issue Joel brings up is follower counts, making the point that “it’s been used as a way to measure your social rank but while that might be interesting for celebrities or bloggers, for normal people, I mean, that shouldn’t matter at all. They don’t want to participate in this ranking game. Just simply engaging with their friends, with their family. So what we’re doing is disabling this by default and you know what, if you want to have your followers count, you want to be a celeb, go ahead. But at the end, we want a choice, for the users to decide if they want to play that game or not.”
Reactions are another point of interest and research at Openbook. How often have you seen reactions or reacted to something yourself on Facebook or LinkedIn? Now how often do you consider why there are reactions and just how easy it is to react? As Joel puts it, “reactions, they’re kind of meaningless. It’s so easy to react to something it loses the whole value. So we’re experimenting with how can we expand the range of emotions you can express and kind of make it a bit difficult so you’re only motivated to do it if you really really have something to say about it. We’re trying to see what went wrong and take as much data as possible and take a step forward.” If you’re interested in the problems Openbook is tackling and the mission behind it, they’ve released an entire Manifesto on their website.
It’s eyeopening and refreshing to see someone question the routine online interactions that we’ve taken for granted for so long. Facebook was founded in 2004 when the internet was a very different place, but beyond the change in look and updated style, how much has really changed in the basic interactions over the past 10 years?
Of course we had to ask Joel the most important question. Does he have a Facebook? “Yeah I do, I had deactivated it but the reason I got it is we have an Openbook page on Facebook. There’s people reading updates for Openbook.” It’s a perfect example of the power Facebook has over the online social world. Even the founder of a company with a set mission to disrupt platforms like Facebook, has to succumb to creating a Facebook page.
Openbook just released their first live demo with beta access coming soon. We are all hoping for nothing but success for Joel, who’s built a truly disruptive platform based off of his admiration and dedication to opensource. The Hague Tech will undoubtedly have an Openbook page of our own, will you?
Written by Charles Weiler-Ulin.
