he doesn't control twitter anymore and when he was CEO it's not like he could have shut it down given that there was a board of directors and shareholders that would have opposed it. HIs only recourse would have been to resign.
They shut down vine for business reasons not because of any soul searching. Business is business. 99.9% of companies will NEVER shut down over ethical reasons.
Exactly, you can keep 100 million so there's no doubt you'll have an extremely comfortable life and then put your billions make a difference, if you really mean it.
Twitter tried committing to some decentralization thing with their "BlueSky" project, but it never went anywhere. I think the best solution would have been giving Twitter a read-only RSS interface alongside an ActivityPub implementation, but I'm guessing that solution didn't appeal to investors all that much.
lol, they may have just hired you on, Paul, but the project as a whole is vaporware. It deserves a healthy amount of criticism and skepticism.
A community is a generous thing to call a bunch of Discord channels. Twitter Inc could have had a seat at the table with the W3C federated social web peeps but decided to ignore everything and do its own thing.
In 2008, Evan Prodromou himself gave us something the cool kids will use anyway (the Fediverse), despite what gets cooked up at bs web <dot> xyz.
EDIT: Bluesky is an embodiment of anti-competitive Not-Invented-Here Syndrome. It should be shunned. If you want to develop open protocols, the proper channels would be to play within the friendly confines of a group like the W3C. If you want to know how I really feel, I feel like Bluesky is destined to fail due to its untrustworthy origins (no offense to the people involved, Golda is an amazing person and has been doing her best so far).
I wish you luck with the project, but I have to agree with the other poster; all signs point towards vaporware. If they've just become funded as their own org, that says to me that some Twitter executives were willing to pay beaucoup bucks to put distance between themselves and the team they put together to decentralize their service. No legitimate interest in decentralizing a platform should have this many roadblocks.
The operators of Mastodon software are not one hive mind, they make independent decisions whether to federate or not. There are thousands of instances, and it's not fair to say every single operator would block Twitter.
If the interoperability requirements of the EU's Digital Markets Act go far enough, Twitter might end up having to federate with Mastodon at least for users in the EU:
Acknowledgement isn't repentance, or even an apology. If he thinks his actions caused harm, this isn't even half of a first step towards rectifying it.
*when he has stopped being financially reliant on it.
Facebook, Twitter, and Google, all had alternative paths where they make significantly less money but are much more of a positive influence on the internet and society at large. They chose money - and here we are. I struggle to think of a single organization (even Mozilla) in their class of company that did NOT choose the money. And it makes me think the financial structure of all these companies forces them from conception to use the money path.
It’s arguable whether apple would have made more money by reducing the price on their devices and maximizing ad revenue from customer behavior (ie android).
I kind of feel like they made their decisions based on Jobs’ hardware profit margins strategy that worked well before service or data profit margins.
Also, although not a company I feel like Apache has turned down multiple opportunities to sell out and kept to their principles.
He's not truly powerless though. He's got plenty of money that can be put to use by lobbying for anti-trust, pro-privacy legislation and stronger regulations on social media companies.
Sure. But he has been CEO of Twitter like three times. And yet Twitter is, well, Twitter. If he actually cared he could have done something. His words will always ring hollow because every time he is the guy to enact change he doubles down on… Twitter.
> It’s amazing how this guy only grows a conscience when he’s powerless to do anything about it.
When I talked with him about his founding of Twitter in 2006, I thought he had a conscience back then, and was one of the nicest people I’ve ever had the opportunity to meet. 99% of the criticism against him as a person is FUD from his competitors.
Does he though? Jack likely regrets losing control of twitter about 3 separate times. This feels like the outrage of the moment, one he can capitalize on to get more folks also regretting Jack losing control of twitter about 3 separate times. At most this has a feeling of rose colored glasses. Man the past sure was better except for, you know, everything about it.
hm, I disagree with that. I think all signs point to Jack being a true techno-utopian of the old 90's Wired magazine era. If that’s true, then it makes perfect sense that his tech-hippy leanings would be incompatible with turning Twitter into the FAANG-grade blockbuster that his investors were banking on.
And crypto of course slots neatly into that same Wired/Jaron-Lanier/early-Burning-Man sect. I think this is a case of the simplest explanation being the likeliest: He's telling the truth, and he's a huge dork.
More apologies to dress one's self up with morality and a tinge of nostalgia, with nothing substantive actually being done about it. Typical white liberal behavior.
Why? Jack is the one that is publicly regretting it. He’s the one that needs to propose solutions. And if he is working on a solution, then tell us that solution or what he’s planning to do
Implement ActivityPub inside twitter to make it Just Another Fediverse Instance. Jack has (had?) the authority to do it, unlike the GP who can't fix the problem individually from their laptop
Elon, for all his bluster, built an industry with the goal of getting humanity to Mars. Recently, he's sold off his mansions as being unneeded excess.
There's no end to charitable work that can use the funds. He could lobby for affordable housing in San Fran, fighting all those "nimby" interests. He could lobby against the military industrial complex, against the revolving door between Wall Street and the White House, for clean energy, for non-GMO natural foods (and against Bill Gates's soylent projects).
You know, stuff like that. He'd only need to pick one to make a difference.
Or maybe... Lobby for the destruction of the engagement algorithms.
Granted, this would make a great many powerful people very angry, and they'd turn on him like sharks on a wounded school-mate, but it would be more honorable than complaining after the massive payday.
help build an alternative that isn’t designed solely around accomplishing neoconservative objectives like the dissemination and amplification war propaganda, and general subversion of democracy by inciting racial division, removal of democratically elected leaders, etc
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how annoying someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
I think the nostalgia is really rooted in the fact that there was a stronger filter for who was on the Internet back then. You had to be willing to put in more time, you had to understand more things, it was harder to use. You were much more likely to be a tech enthusiast or an academic if you were on the Internet even up until ~2008. I feel like smartphones are the real September that never ended, and social media just lowered the barrier further. People were blogging before that but even setting up a blog was harder than writing a Facebook post or a tweet.
There are upsides to the new world though. That filter wasn't exclusively good. Computers were a lot more expensive. Poorer communities lacked access. People without tech savvy are often still pretty smart and have good points to make.
I don't fully agree. One thing is having a built-in filter, but the other thing is encouraging harmful behavior. Not only has the filter now been removed, but the new entrants have been encouraged (through algorithms which promote divisive content) to produce and consume harmful content because it increases "engagement".
There was a period of time where social media was just starting out where the filter has essentially been removed (anyone can easily join and start producing & consuming content) but harmful content wasn't yet encouraged. Social media was about keeping up with your friends' content, and while I'm sure harmful & divisive content was present, you had to explicitly seek it out (by liking/following the right accounts).
Nowadays all social media uses algorithms that promote content that will yield the maximum amount of "engagement" on your part so you increase the time spend on the platform and the amount of ads watched.
The definition of harmful content is a big sticking point with me.
Engaging in civil discourse on a hot topic typically ends with one side being accused of something heinous. That’s not harmful. That’s blatant censorship.
Indeed there's no clear answer as to what content is "harmful", which is why I'm not advocating for censorship but merely to let the user be in control of what they see.
Currently, the algorithm will prioritize content that produces the most "engagement", including even content that you otherwise have no link with and don't follow the user who posted it. Divisive, outrageous, hateful or blatantly fake content will typically generate tremendous amounts of engagement (as people start arguing over it) as opposed to mundane content such as updates from your friends.
There's also no way to have "civil discourse" when the algorithm prioritizes the hottest takes as opposed to more reasonable arguments.
There's another factor that I haven't see mentioned: I have no interest in most sections of the news. And even if I select only some kind of news, say "computers" I'm not very interested in consumer's hardware or commercial programs including apps or games, just programming, security and little more.
But social media live on ads. They tend to promote contents that cater to wide audiences.
If I'm only interested in a few niches, social media are a big waste of time. The contents and the discussions around them.
Potentially, but that's still not an argument in its favour. Why should there be an "algorithm" to begin with? Unless you have thousands of "friends", you do not need an algorithm to keep up with them, a chronological timeline works just fine.
If anything, maybe the algorithm should do the opposite and discourage arguments?
> There was a period of time where social media was just starting out where the filter has essentially been removed (anyone can easily join and start producing & consuming content) but harmful content wasn't yet encouraged.
Prior to social media there was usenet, specialized forums, imageboards such as 4chan, and mass use of IRC. The average social media user would recoil in horror at the 'divisive' content that was common to that time period. REAL neonazis spread their message with impunity, anarchists gathered and distributed tutorials on how to make homemade weaponry, illegal pornography was rampant, and mass shooters were glorified. The 'divisive' content of today is quite tame and is focused primarily on promoting the interests of one of a handful of relatively similar political parties over the others. My point being that social media has amplified the voices of billions, but the money machine behind it has toned the violent poltical rhetoric of the net down to a dull roar. Anyone claiming otherwise is either misinformed or has something they want to sell you. </rant>
Many of those extra-divisive platforms are still around in one form or another, and are likely bigger than they were in the past (thanks again to reduced barriers to entry). But a normal person can avoid engaging in those platforms entirely by just… not going on them.
Imo the danger of modern social media’s algorithmic feeds is that it draws in otherwise perfectly normal people, who would never voluntarily seek out the divisive content that gets promoted on their feeds. So now we have the worst of both worlds: platforms with violent political rhetoric are still highly available to those who would seek them out, and more average folks are drawn to seek them out by the “dull roar” that draws them in on the major social platforms.
> platforms with violent political rhetoric are still highly available to those who would seek them out
I would submit that they are no longer highly available or their core userbase has moved on to the "dark web". The genius of the centralized social media platform is that it lives on advertising dollars. The advertisers will pull back whenever a platform becomes too uncontrolled. This was the case when Pewdiepie's accidental Nazi reference video was released. A massive pullback in advertising dollars 'forced' YouTube to reconsider its previously lax content policies and policing. That's not to say that YouTube is some pleasant walled garden, but rather that those creating videos and making real money from the site are incentivized to police their own behavior and rhetoric. Most people talking about 'divisive' content are talking around the Trump/QAnon fiasco. Which is very different from the internet I grew up on where even on a 'kids site' you would often see users calling for outright genocide of specific racial groups.
Given the amount of content out there, there's potential to be stuck in a local maximum where there's enough harmful content to cause negative externalities, but not enough to be seen as the majority of the content. This is reinforced by algorithmic feeds and targeted advertising where there's just no way for someone (whether the advertisers themselves or an independent watchdog) to tell what's actually going on, since their feed will be significantly different from someone stuck in an echo chamber full of harmful content.
> Most people talking about 'divisive' content are talking around the Trump/QAnon fiasco
Not even Trump per-se. The problem goes far beyond Trump and his political party when he - the supposed "leader" - gets booed by his own crowd. QAnon is just one example of terribly harmful content out there, but there's plenty more, from the Covid vaccine conspiracies, alternative "medicine", or just plain racism/nationalism and neo-Nazism.
> where even on a 'kids site' you would often see users calling for outright genocide of specific racial groups.
The forum software wasn't promoting said content though, so they were likely to remain a minority, which is both easier to control and explain away ("there are bad people on the Internet, learn to ignore it"). Facebook on the other hand will happily keep feeding you more and more of said content if it sees that you engage with it.
> Prior to social media there was usenet, specialized forums, imageboards such as 4chan, and mass use of IRC
The content was segregated and you explicitly had to seek it out. Not to mention, there was no algorithm to ease you into it, so even someone whose political views would lean towards a particular affiliation might recoil in horror at the craziness they'd see on one of those "specialized forums", where as Facebook will happily ease you in bit by bit until the craziness appears normal, even if you originally had no intention of reading about/discussing politics and just wanted to keep up with your friends' holiday pictures.
> is focused primarily on promoting the interests of one of a handful of relatively similar political parties over the others
I disagree. I believe the vast majority of divisive content nowadays is created & promoted by random people who don't benefit financially from it; in fact there's no single source (political party, etc) that would pay to originate this stuff, instead Facebook and other social media just use any divisive content to increase ad impressions, regardless of the political affiliation of said content. I'm sure political parties sometimes benefit from these "useful idiots" but even they don't actually fully control the narrative.
> in fact there's no single source (political party, etc) that would pay to originate this stuff
There are private firms working in cahoots with state actors to influence opinion and shape narrative all across the internet and especially on social media.
> I believe the vast majority of divisive content nowadays is created & promoted by random people who don't benefit financially from it;
You're both wrong, and you're both right. Facebook isn't focused on promoting the interests of any particular political party. But there are political forces abusing Facebook's algorithms to promote their message. Most recent example: https://apnews.com/article/china-tiktok-facebook-influencers...
4chan and most of what you described are much more recent than the period of Internet Jack is being nostalgic for. Obviously there were ton of assholes, trolls and bad people on Usenet and IRC before year 2000 and around that time, but everybody was more active so the "good ones" usually won and kept the community working. But it was an easier task because of raw numbers.
Today...well, for more than a decade now, to do moderation at scale and emerge content you have to automate it, and Internet is now a giant business, so the incentives are totally different and so are the outcomes. There can be still a few happy islands where life is good as it was, and by number of users they are probably even bigger than ~2000 Internet, but they are now minority.
> Prior to social media there was usenet, specialized forums, imageboards such as 4chan, and mass use of IRC. The average social media user would recoil in horror at the 'divisive' content that was common to that time period.
This was stuff you had to look for. I certainly looked for it and found it, but it was also trivially avoidable.
> REAL neonazis spread their message with impunity
Still plenty of "real" neonazis on the internet, and a lot more friendly venues for them if they stick to those ideas of theirs that have become more popular since they were once ghettoized on Stormfront, and keep the master race talk to coded memes and oblique references.
> Not only has the filter now been removed, but the new entrants have been encouraged (through algorithms which promote divisive content) to produce and consume harmful content because it increases "engagement".
I agreed with this until I started seeing more information about how much divisive content there is on whatsapp, which isn’t algorithmic or driven by anything other than people, similar to old email forward chains.
We don’t like the algorithmic feeds and everything else because they’re a big mirror that just reflects back how humans act, and we don’t like what we see. The algorithms themselves aren’t the problem IMO.
That’s my point - whatsapp doesn’t promote content, but it is still one of the largest distributors of disinformation content. This is a clear supporting argument that people share that without algorithmic any help.
> Not only has the filter now been removed, but the new entrants have been encouraged (through algorithms which promote divisive content) to produce and consume harmful content because it increases "engagement".
I think this narrative has been blown out of proportion.
The “algorithm” has become an easy stand-in to blame nebulous programmers for people choosing to view content they want to see.
The “algorithm” isn’t literally a model trained to recognize divisive content and promote it to as many people as possible. It doesn’t have motives or intentions. It’s literally just a recommendation engine that suggests similar content to people.
Platforms without algorithms are still full of divisive content which spreads virally. Some of the worst content on the internet won’t be found on Facebook or other moderated platforms at all. You have to work to get to it, and people do the work to get there. No algorithms to blame, just people.
We really need to stop giving people a pass and stop piling our complaints on to the “algorithm”. People who make bad choices and consume bad content are doing so on their own volition, and we need to treat it as such if you want to make progress on the solution. Railing against faceless personifications of algorithms isn’t going to get us anywhere on solving these social problems.
> The “algorithm” isn’t literally a model trained to recognize divisive content and promote it to as many people as possible. It doesn’t have motives or intentions. It’s literally just a recommendation engine that suggests similar content to people.
Mostly agreed, though I don't believe "similarity" is the only factor - "engagement" is also a factor, likely a big one considering the business model of the company.
Yes, the algorithm doesn't have intentions or political bias (yet?), however it doesn't take a genius to infer that divisive content will generate more engagement than other, mundane content, and even more so when the algorithm has been deployed to production and there's real-world data to prove this.
> Platforms without algorithms are still full of divisive content which spreads virally.
Without algorithms the only way this content would spread is for people to explicitly re-share it to their friends - it will not pop up "organically" otherwise. You will need to explicitly attach your name to it if you were to share it, and be ready to defend it and bear the risk of being ostracized from your group. This also means that as long as you choose your Facebook "friends" carefully, you can curate your feed and keep craziness or other irrelevant content at bay.
> Some of the worst content on the internet won’t be found on Facebook or other moderated platforms at all. You have to work to get to it, and people do the work to get there. No algorithms to blame, just people.
And thankfully that worst content has (yet?) to make it to my non-technical friends' Facebook feeds, so it seems like the system is working as designed? Twisted people will keep finding & producing said content, but it's contained and will not make its way onto mainstream platforms without explicit efforts from those people and everyone else on the network to re-share it multiple times.
> People who make bad choices and consume bad content are doing so on their own volition
Disagreed. People went onto Facebook (or other social media) to keep in touch with their friends & family, but over time, the algorithm was locking them into an echo chamber full of whatever divisive, harmful, false or outright crazy content it could find as long as it was driving "engagement" numbers up.
If you could travel back in time and ask some of the people that stormed the Capitol or are forever lost in the QAnon conspiracy whether they thought they would do so when they initially joined Facebook, I bet they would call you crazy. In fact, I bet a large chunk of those people are old enough to know the "old" Internet and yet didn't turn to extremism until the craziness was delivered to them in a nice, harmless-looking format.
This isn't true, underground hate groups were very early to the web.
A buddy of mine worked for a big tech company in the early 2000's when a fantastic resume came across his desk from an applicant for a developer job (this would've been around 2003-2004). My friend googled him and very quickly found that this guy ran a white supremacy forum (the candidate made no effort to conceal his true identity on the forum and his profile included a photo). Talk about a different time.
My friend didn't really know what to do because he feared a discrimination lawsuit if he outright rejected the candidate so he reached out to some folks for advice. They eventually found another good candidate so they got to play the "we found someone better" card, even though they had no intention of hiring the first guy.
I can't remember what the name of the forum was, that was almost 20 years ago. But this guy had written some deeply, deeply opinionated and explicit essays on his views and they were quite inappropriate. He was fairly prolific too. It's so weird to think back on how easy it was to just read his stuff and know who he was.
For some people complaining about the state of the Internet seems to be an end in itself. We might have lost some hacker/open culture along the way, but there are still good bloggers, there are still good forums, there are even good Facebook groups for hobbies that simply weren't on the Internet back then.
You have to look for them just like you would have to look for a good IRC/Forum/Blog back then. The bar of entry is discoverability and what your interests are. I highly doubt that finding dedicated beekeeping community is harder now than it was 20 years ago...
Hacker culture is alive and well, but you aren't going to find it on Twitter. They even call HN "the orange site". Because orange = bad, got it? Unless you're code golfing, there's simply no way to "hack" or talk about anything worthwhile in 140 characters anyway.
The Internet has become far less diverse since smartphones. Because practically all "influencers" are now after the same mass-market demographic, that is all about passive consumption of the most mindless content imaginable. You have to look for specialized sites and venues to find anything genuinely interesting.
You always had to look. There's more to find now, and to a certain extent it's easier than ever to filter out crap if you're willing to throw out the few worthwhile FB or Reddit, etc, groups with all the rest.
For example, a brief excursion to the nearest Geocities archive will immediately demonstrate that access to the Internet was by no means something exclusive to tech nerds and academics even around year 2000.
Plus, the notion that "access" is even the right thing to measure is nonsensical. It's pretty obvious that big tech employees want to get a pat on the back for the fact that every homeless drug addict in US probably has a smartphone now. The real question is whether this "access" is actually beneficial to the poor or just creates a larger pool of individuals for big tech to parasitize and profiteer from.
> You had to be willing to put in more time, you had to understand more things, it was harder to use. You were much more likely to be a tech enthusiast or an academic if you were on the Internet even up until ~2008.
I have similar periods where I nostalgically remember the old internet through my favorite memories.
But whenever I look at old archives or use the Wayback Machine to revisit old websites I remember that the old internet had a huge amount of trolling, vitriol, and otherwise low-effort and toxic content. It’s easy to forget just how bad the flame wars could be or how toxic some of the internet spaces could become.
Even today, some of the most vitriolic and toxic online communities can trace their lineage back to the early 2000s internet scene. Facebook and Twitter get a lot of bad press, but the most toxic content I’ve seen comes from places like Reddit, 4Chan, and various offshoots.
Reddit is perhaps the perfect example of this dichotomy. Mention Reddit in a negative way and it’s defenders will quickly jump in to explain that it’s “not that bad if you pick the right subreddits”. Yet the front page is always full of misinformation and Reddit has a famous history of hosting a lot of subreddits that sexualized minors until they were reluctantly forced to make a policy against it due to negative news coverage.
It seems like a sour grapes moment, he would never have said that while still at the helm of Twitter. I still have more respect for Mark Zuckerberg, who in practice did more for freedom of speech in comparison, though he too capitulated to the whims of a vocal minority. That is the purpose of freedom of speech, to prevent the tyranny of the majority’s opinions from receiving outsize importance and visibility
Honestly, looking at political discourse today, I could only agree that the supposed “tyranny of the majority” has been replaced by a tyranny of the minority.
Freedom of speech doesn’t imply the freedom to be heard. It just means you shouldn’t go to jail for saying something stupid. But now we have a million stupid people demanding the right to scream at us. And they are using that right for their own material betterment, at the expense of everything, most especially the truth.
The internet used to be low-level infrastructure, now it is a collective global consciousness. The "old days" weren't better or worse, they were just completely different. Decentralization simply does not serve the reason that most people go online for today.
I think his point was that "the old days" were decentralised (e.g email, IRC networks, sites), but today lots of people use centralised Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Discord instead.
I have come to believe that Dorsey is very much a non-visionary. He doesn't understand why his own products are successful. Twitter is successful in 2022 for reasons that seem completely separate from what was ever intended. Like many successful entrepreneurs, he is vastly undervaluing how lucky he got. Twitter is neither micro-blogging nor a social network. It's a low-touch, self-service PR platform and it's wildly successful at it. That is completely orthogonal to what usenet was (and is) for. If there's a modern replacement for that niche, it's reddit.
There were a lot of women on IRC back in the day and it wasn't just hobbyists. Almost every web forum had an associated IRC channel and forum users would congregate there. Depending on what the forum was about, you'd often see more women than men.
I wonder do people who work for Twitter, Facebook, etc ever have thoughts about what they actually doing. Do they have the "are we the baddies" moment in their head? Do people who make Facebooks shadow profiles or insert tracking into every orifice of the internet think they are "the good guys?" Or do they just tell themselves good guys don't exist and they are just doing what everyone is doing?
I recently had a long conversation with someone who works at FB, someone asked them “what’s the morale like there right now, do people feel bad for working there at all?” And his answer was “yeah morale’s pretty low right now because the stock price tanked recently but other than that things are good.”
It made me realize that some people truly do not think critically about the impact of their work. I think Facebook inadvertently selects for those kinds of people (or at least filters out people on the other end of the spectrum).
You’re taking a sample size of one and using it to stereotype or generalize a large group of people working for a company. Many do care, and dedicate our time into making FAANG systems respect user’s privacy and improving security.
There are internal discussions into ethical/moral consequences of decisions. Large organizations dedicated towards privacy, security, and integrity are given power to ensure the company operates ethically. It’s not perfect but it’s a hell of a lot more than most do.
I hate this moralization of companies btw. Companies are not good or bad, but they are capable of causing harm or good. Instead I see it often used because person X decides that they hate company Y, so in their mind they label the company as “evil” or “bad”. But of course they ignore harmful behaviors that their own company are making.
I’ve heard it all from folks in industry. Customer data leaking into Slack channels, data security being non-existent, no audit trails available in investigations, implementing only SMS MFA because it’s quicker and let’s them focus on more “impactful” projects. Ignoring verified accounts being sold on marketplaces. Making decisions which ultimately make the company a juicy target for attackers, without a discussion of trade-offs. Promoting culture which prioritize the company’s goals over the safety of users. Taking the “well that will never happen here” stance because their employees have “ethics” compared to those dirty FAANG employees. Promoting messaging platforms to children without proper safety protocols in place. Treating decentralization as the thing to fix all things, when historically the internet has been responsible for amazingly disgusting things long before the days of social media. The list goes on and on and on and on.
I try to write about this on HN to combat the popular narrative but I’m slowly thinking that this isn’t the place to do it. But alas here is another one.
Most of your comment is about other bad actors which I don’t disagree with in the slightest. The majority of tech companies cause harm, Facebook is one of them. It also happens to be a really big company, so I don’t think the disproportionate hate on FB is wholly undeserved.
Also, what’s wrong with moralization of a company? All companies cause some good and some harm, it’s worth determining what the net is and judging the company appropriately. I don’t think it’s too far off to call a company (subjectively) “bad” if their net impact is (subjectively) “bad”.
Yeah, if you have a problem with it, you probably aren't applying to Facebook if you have other options (and if you can get a job at Facebook, you have other options).
There are a lot of shades between “I think this work is interesting and potentially beneficial” and “I am a bad person”. IE “Digital advertising in its current form has existed for ~12 years. The current landscape is comparable to cars before seatbelts, safety laws, and speed limits. I find the tech interesting and would love to work on privacy legislation or features in the future, but need years of experience to do so.”
When you are paid $500K in total compensation (and a majority of it paid in how well the stock is performing), most worker drones will just not care.
Golden handcuffs will blind you to the atrocities you are building. Or maybe the company has fully siloed off the teams. Maybe the worker drone doesn't know his/her project is actually being used to create these monsters. Either way, I have been resigned to not work for F(M)ANG companies. The engineering is beautiful, but the use of their work by the business is not.
> I wonder do people who work for Twitter, Facebook, etc ever have thoughts about what they actually doing.
I've worked at a few large social media platforms. The number one thing you realize is content moderation is hard. It doesn't scale well, human moderators aren't necessarily better than AI, and you're going to make people mad at you one way or another. Mental health issues of users are also complex. Different people might find the same content empowering or triggering.
To Dorsey's point, I understand how people miss smaller, federated communities of the early internet, but those don't scale. If you want a platform with the potential to reach everyone with an internet connection, it's going to get dumbed-down, and so will the conversations. Or you can build federated echo chambers.
90% of the criticisms you hear are armchair quarterbacking that's easy to ignore.
The point of specialized, federated communities is that they don't need to scale. When a specialized community becomes too large and unwieldly, self-contained sub-interests start to splinter off and create new specialized communities of their own. You can even see it with various HN 'alternatives', each with its unique selling points of its own.
> I've worked at a few large social media platforms. The number one thing you realize is content moderation is hard. It doesn't scale well, human moderators aren't necessarily better than AI, and you're going to make people mad at you one way or another.
You might be missing the problem people have with AI moderation. People generally aren't upset that AI moderation gets it wrong. The problem is when AI moderation gets it wrong, there are no humans to review the process. A good example of this is every "Google closed me account and I don't know why" post on the front page of Hacker News every other week.
The reality is that most people simply do not care as long as they're being paid, and there's nothing wrong with that. Life is short and the chance of you as an individual making any meaningful change in these companies is next to zero.
Rambling mini anecdote which may or may not be of useful relevance, but which resonates on a similar frequency:
In my 40s now, I've had recent reflections about the small, golden friendship group of my university years. What they were then, vs the kind of life they pursued, and where they ended up. This little group of harmlessly rebellious nerds, playing computer games, smoking the odd joint and listening to heavy metal full of lyrics against The Establishment[1], etc. Playing our guitars and inwardly sneering (or more likely, laughing - we weren't really the sneering types) at the corporate world. [1]term used tongue-in-cheek, but I'm sure you know what I mean!
20 years later, and of the half dozen, I'm probably the only one left outside The Establishment.
Among the others, we notably (and disappointingly) have the aloof senior professional fully integrated into the Old Boy's Club of his industry, think Mason-y power conglomerates which run their local region for the profit of a few; and the commerce professional who regularly and gleefully spams LinkedIn with info about his latest Salesforce certifications, alongside Likes for Boris Johnson content.
Do they think they're "the bad guys"? (and in fact, if we're going to be really honest - ARE THEY the bad guys?). The answer to both may well be Probably Not. They have their own justifications and reasoning just as we all do.
I can't help being somewhat disappointed, but as the odd-one-out, who am I to say what's normal and good?
I worked for Facebook out of college because it was the only FAANG i got an offer from and it was a great start to my career. Definitely had a bit of a bad conscience and felt like a sell-out though, which eventually drove me to quit.
As someone who looks back fondly back on the days of IRC, things have just gotten way out of hand. Everything is about that new product, that new platform, that new framework.
People don’t care how it really works or who are the people behind it. People just want money and ultimately want to forget their problems through it.
Then again, I was very much into mischief and that’s how I grew up. Social media is low-level stuff that bores the hell out of me because it serves no tangible purpose no matter how hard you try.
Those days had meaning to them because of many factors, but mostly because everything felt new, fresh, and not filtered through hundreds of opinions or social norms.
Seems to have fooled almost everyone about building Twitter and now it is a so-called 'addictive' digital drugs platform for venting your outrage on to one another.
Now since he left, he is doing the same thing but for crypto.
To be fair a decade ago only 30% of the world was online. Now that number is closer to 65%. Back in 2012 was the first moment they decided to censor on a country by country basis. Fast forward ten years and it’s on a person by person basis. Laws and regulation corrupted Twitter with enough time, not the invention itself. At its best, social media puts a mirror to humanity and reveals the full complexity of the world. It shines a light on the dark aspects of human nature.
I never used my real name on anything in the early days of the web, IRC, Usenet, or anything else. I've always worked to keep my online identity fine-grained and siloed wherever I could reasonably do so.
Twitter had a relatively good signal to noise ratio until 2011 or so. It became the place where people go to freak out and spy on their coworkers somewhere between late 2011 and mid 2012. By the mid 2010s it was creepy.
maybe my use of twitter is wrong, but it's where i go to find interesting news, articles, breaking news and somewhat uncensored opinions. Most 'aggregators' are saturated with the most mindbogglingly boring groupthink. Twitter is like FM tuner, you search for the good stuff. I wish it will be replaced with some kind of RSS though, it s terrible that it's all held by a not-so-competent corporate
the interface is crap in general. it's 2022 and just now the page randomly reloads as i was reading an interesting thread, i lost my position as it was 15 or so infinite scrolls down. How can it be in this day and age i can't scroll, sort, search a list of tiny telegraphic sentences and images. The aliens who are watching us must be shaking their heads in disbelief
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadhttps://nitter.net/jack/status/1510314535671922689
Perhaps it's for the best to save everyone from themselves.
How would that change anything.
How do you handle the things you regret in life??
There's a way to undo the harm he's already done, but I don't know if he can make that sort of change at this point.
1. https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/2-28-2022-how-it-started
A community is a generous thing to call a bunch of Discord channels. Twitter Inc could have had a seat at the table with the W3C federated social web peeps but decided to ignore everything and do its own thing.
In 2008, Evan Prodromou himself gave us something the cool kids will use anyway (the Fediverse), despite what gets cooked up at bs web <dot> xyz.
EDIT: Bluesky is an embodiment of anti-competitive Not-Invented-Here Syndrome. It should be shunned. If you want to develop open protocols, the proper channels would be to play within the friendly confines of a group like the W3C. If you want to know how I really feel, I feel like Bluesky is destined to fail due to its untrustworthy origins (no offense to the people involved, Golda is an amazing person and has been doing her best so far).
By opening the door, diffusion can take place over time.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eus-digital-markets-act-adop...
Facebook, Twitter, and Google, all had alternative paths where they make significantly less money but are much more of a positive influence on the internet and society at large. They chose money - and here we are. I struggle to think of a single organization (even Mozilla) in their class of company that did NOT choose the money. And it makes me think the financial structure of all these companies forces them from conception to use the money path.
I kind of feel like they made their decisions based on Jobs’ hardware profit margins strategy that worked well before service or data profit margins.
Also, although not a company I feel like Apache has turned down multiple opportunities to sell out and kept to their principles.
When I talked with him about his founding of Twitter in 2006, I thought he had a conscience back then, and was one of the nicest people I’ve ever had the opportunity to meet. 99% of the criticism against him as a person is FUD from his competitors.
And crypto of course slots neatly into that same Wired/Jaron-Lanier/early-Burning-Man sect. I think this is a case of the simplest explanation being the likeliest: He's telling the truth, and he's a huge dork.
Burn in hell.
Suggest solutions.
There's no end to charitable work that can use the funds. He could lobby for affordable housing in San Fran, fighting all those "nimby" interests. He could lobby against the military industrial complex, against the revolving door between Wall Street and the White House, for clean energy, for non-GMO natural foods (and against Bill Gates's soylent projects).
You know, stuff like that. He'd only need to pick one to make a difference.
Or maybe... Lobby for the destruction of the engagement algorithms.
Granted, this would make a great many powerful people very angry, and they'd turn on him like sharks on a wounded school-mate, but it would be more honorable than complaining after the massive payday.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
There are upsides to the new world though. That filter wasn't exclusively good. Computers were a lot more expensive. Poorer communities lacked access. People without tech savvy are often still pretty smart and have good points to make.
There was a period of time where social media was just starting out where the filter has essentially been removed (anyone can easily join and start producing & consuming content) but harmful content wasn't yet encouraged. Social media was about keeping up with your friends' content, and while I'm sure harmful & divisive content was present, you had to explicitly seek it out (by liking/following the right accounts).
Nowadays all social media uses algorithms that promote content that will yield the maximum amount of "engagement" on your part so you increase the time spend on the platform and the amount of ads watched.
Engaging in civil discourse on a hot topic typically ends with one side being accused of something heinous. That’s not harmful. That’s blatant censorship.
Currently, the algorithm will prioritize content that produces the most "engagement", including even content that you otherwise have no link with and don't follow the user who posted it. Divisive, outrageous, hateful or blatantly fake content will typically generate tremendous amounts of engagement (as people start arguing over it) as opposed to mundane content such as updates from your friends.
There's also no way to have "civil discourse" when the algorithm prioritizes the hottest takes as opposed to more reasonable arguments.
But social media live on ads. They tend to promote contents that cater to wide audiences.
If I'm only interested in a few niches, social media are a big waste of time. The contents and the discussions around them.
If anything, maybe the algorithm should do the opposite and discourage arguments?
Prior to social media there was usenet, specialized forums, imageboards such as 4chan, and mass use of IRC. The average social media user would recoil in horror at the 'divisive' content that was common to that time period. REAL neonazis spread their message with impunity, anarchists gathered and distributed tutorials on how to make homemade weaponry, illegal pornography was rampant, and mass shooters were glorified. The 'divisive' content of today is quite tame and is focused primarily on promoting the interests of one of a handful of relatively similar political parties over the others. My point being that social media has amplified the voices of billions, but the money machine behind it has toned the violent poltical rhetoric of the net down to a dull roar. Anyone claiming otherwise is either misinformed or has something they want to sell you. </rant>
Imo the danger of modern social media’s algorithmic feeds is that it draws in otherwise perfectly normal people, who would never voluntarily seek out the divisive content that gets promoted on their feeds. So now we have the worst of both worlds: platforms with violent political rhetoric are still highly available to those who would seek them out, and more average folks are drawn to seek them out by the “dull roar” that draws them in on the major social platforms.
I would submit that they are no longer highly available or their core userbase has moved on to the "dark web". The genius of the centralized social media platform is that it lives on advertising dollars. The advertisers will pull back whenever a platform becomes too uncontrolled. This was the case when Pewdiepie's accidental Nazi reference video was released. A massive pullback in advertising dollars 'forced' YouTube to reconsider its previously lax content policies and policing. That's not to say that YouTube is some pleasant walled garden, but rather that those creating videos and making real money from the site are incentivized to police their own behavior and rhetoric. Most people talking about 'divisive' content are talking around the Trump/QAnon fiasco. Which is very different from the internet I grew up on where even on a 'kids site' you would often see users calling for outright genocide of specific racial groups.
Given the amount of content out there, there's potential to be stuck in a local maximum where there's enough harmful content to cause negative externalities, but not enough to be seen as the majority of the content. This is reinforced by algorithmic feeds and targeted advertising where there's just no way for someone (whether the advertisers themselves or an independent watchdog) to tell what's actually going on, since their feed will be significantly different from someone stuck in an echo chamber full of harmful content.
> Most people talking about 'divisive' content are talking around the Trump/QAnon fiasco
Not even Trump per-se. The problem goes far beyond Trump and his political party when he - the supposed "leader" - gets booed by his own crowd. QAnon is just one example of terribly harmful content out there, but there's plenty more, from the Covid vaccine conspiracies, alternative "medicine", or just plain racism/nationalism and neo-Nazism.
> where even on a 'kids site' you would often see users calling for outright genocide of specific racial groups.
The forum software wasn't promoting said content though, so they were likely to remain a minority, which is both easier to control and explain away ("there are bad people on the Internet, learn to ignore it"). Facebook on the other hand will happily keep feeding you more and more of said content if it sees that you engage with it.
The content was segregated and you explicitly had to seek it out. Not to mention, there was no algorithm to ease you into it, so even someone whose political views would lean towards a particular affiliation might recoil in horror at the craziness they'd see on one of those "specialized forums", where as Facebook will happily ease you in bit by bit until the craziness appears normal, even if you originally had no intention of reading about/discussing politics and just wanted to keep up with your friends' holiday pictures.
> is focused primarily on promoting the interests of one of a handful of relatively similar political parties over the others
I disagree. I believe the vast majority of divisive content nowadays is created & promoted by random people who don't benefit financially from it; in fact there's no single source (political party, etc) that would pay to originate this stuff, instead Facebook and other social media just use any divisive content to increase ad impressions, regardless of the political affiliation of said content. I'm sure political parties sometimes benefit from these "useful idiots" but even they don't actually fully control the narrative.
There are private firms working in cahoots with state actors to influence opinion and shape narrative all across the internet and especially on social media.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica...
You're both wrong, and you're both right. Facebook isn't focused on promoting the interests of any particular political party. But there are political forces abusing Facebook's algorithms to promote their message. Most recent example: https://apnews.com/article/china-tiktok-facebook-influencers...
Today...well, for more than a decade now, to do moderation at scale and emerge content you have to automate it, and Internet is now a giant business, so the incentives are totally different and so are the outcomes. There can be still a few happy islands where life is good as it was, and by number of users they are probably even bigger than ~2000 Internet, but they are now minority.
This was stuff you had to look for. I certainly looked for it and found it, but it was also trivially avoidable.
> REAL neonazis spread their message with impunity
Still plenty of "real" neonazis on the internet, and a lot more friendly venues for them if they stick to those ideas of theirs that have become more popular since they were once ghettoized on Stormfront, and keep the master race talk to coded memes and oblique references.
I agreed with this until I started seeing more information about how much divisive content there is on whatsapp, which isn’t algorithmic or driven by anything other than people, similar to old email forward chains.
We don’t like the algorithmic feeds and everything else because they’re a big mirror that just reflects back how humans act, and we don’t like what we see. The algorithms themselves aren’t the problem IMO.
I would say that Whatsapp is a big mirror, not of how humans act, but of how humans behave in other social media.
I think this narrative has been blown out of proportion.
The “algorithm” has become an easy stand-in to blame nebulous programmers for people choosing to view content they want to see.
The “algorithm” isn’t literally a model trained to recognize divisive content and promote it to as many people as possible. It doesn’t have motives or intentions. It’s literally just a recommendation engine that suggests similar content to people.
Platforms without algorithms are still full of divisive content which spreads virally. Some of the worst content on the internet won’t be found on Facebook or other moderated platforms at all. You have to work to get to it, and people do the work to get there. No algorithms to blame, just people.
We really need to stop giving people a pass and stop piling our complaints on to the “algorithm”. People who make bad choices and consume bad content are doing so on their own volition, and we need to treat it as such if you want to make progress on the solution. Railing against faceless personifications of algorithms isn’t going to get us anywhere on solving these social problems.
Mostly agreed, though I don't believe "similarity" is the only factor - "engagement" is also a factor, likely a big one considering the business model of the company.
Yes, the algorithm doesn't have intentions or political bias (yet?), however it doesn't take a genius to infer that divisive content will generate more engagement than other, mundane content, and even more so when the algorithm has been deployed to production and there's real-world data to prove this.
> Platforms without algorithms are still full of divisive content which spreads virally.
Without algorithms the only way this content would spread is for people to explicitly re-share it to their friends - it will not pop up "organically" otherwise. You will need to explicitly attach your name to it if you were to share it, and be ready to defend it and bear the risk of being ostracized from your group. This also means that as long as you choose your Facebook "friends" carefully, you can curate your feed and keep craziness or other irrelevant content at bay.
> Some of the worst content on the internet won’t be found on Facebook or other moderated platforms at all. You have to work to get to it, and people do the work to get there. No algorithms to blame, just people.
And thankfully that worst content has (yet?) to make it to my non-technical friends' Facebook feeds, so it seems like the system is working as designed? Twisted people will keep finding & producing said content, but it's contained and will not make its way onto mainstream platforms without explicit efforts from those people and everyone else on the network to re-share it multiple times.
> People who make bad choices and consume bad content are doing so on their own volition
Disagreed. People went onto Facebook (or other social media) to keep in touch with their friends & family, but over time, the algorithm was locking them into an echo chamber full of whatever divisive, harmful, false or outright crazy content it could find as long as it was driving "engagement" numbers up.
If you could travel back in time and ask some of the people that stormed the Capitol or are forever lost in the QAnon conspiracy whether they thought they would do so when they initially joined Facebook, I bet they would call you crazy. In fact, I bet a large chunk of those people are old enough to know the "old" Internet and yet didn't turn to extremism until the craziness was delivered to them in a nice, harmless-looking format.
A buddy of mine worked for a big tech company in the early 2000's when a fantastic resume came across his desk from an applicant for a developer job (this would've been around 2003-2004). My friend googled him and very quickly found that this guy ran a white supremacy forum (the candidate made no effort to conceal his true identity on the forum and his profile included a photo). Talk about a different time.
My friend didn't really know what to do because he feared a discrimination lawsuit if he outright rejected the candidate so he reached out to some folks for advice. They eventually found another good candidate so they got to play the "we found someone better" card, even though they had no intention of hiring the first guy.
You have to look for them just like you would have to look for a good IRC/Forum/Blog back then. The bar of entry is discoverability and what your interests are. I highly doubt that finding dedicated beekeeping community is harder now than it was 20 years ago...
- Reset their Facebook password
- Use more than 1 password for all of their accounts, social media, email, and banking included
- Use their TV if an HDMI device switches it to an unfamiliar input
- Stop (or start) push notifications for any app on their phone
The filter didn’t get lower, but a lower on-ramp was build that’s just low enough to let a 75yo create a Facebook account with their Hotmail.
But they also made the Internet so much more diverse and non-tech centered. Which is really beautiful.
For example, a brief excursion to the nearest Geocities archive will immediately demonstrate that access to the Internet was by no means something exclusive to tech nerds and academics even around year 2000.
Plus, the notion that "access" is even the right thing to measure is nonsensical. It's pretty obvious that big tech employees want to get a pat on the back for the fact that every homeless drug addict in US probably has a smartphone now. The real question is whether this "access" is actually beneficial to the poor or just creates a larger pool of individuals for big tech to parasitize and profiteer from.
I have similar periods where I nostalgically remember the old internet through my favorite memories.
But whenever I look at old archives or use the Wayback Machine to revisit old websites I remember that the old internet had a huge amount of trolling, vitriol, and otherwise low-effort and toxic content. It’s easy to forget just how bad the flame wars could be or how toxic some of the internet spaces could become.
Even today, some of the most vitriolic and toxic online communities can trace their lineage back to the early 2000s internet scene. Facebook and Twitter get a lot of bad press, but the most toxic content I’ve seen comes from places like Reddit, 4Chan, and various offshoots.
Reddit is perhaps the perfect example of this dichotomy. Mention Reddit in a negative way and it’s defenders will quickly jump in to explain that it’s “not that bad if you pick the right subreddits”. Yet the front page is always full of misinformation and Reddit has a famous history of hosting a lot of subreddits that sexualized minors until they were reluctantly forced to make a policy against it due to negative news coverage.
Freedom of speech doesn’t imply the freedom to be heard. It just means you shouldn’t go to jail for saying something stupid. But now we have a million stupid people demanding the right to scream at us. And they are using that right for their own material betterment, at the expense of everything, most especially the truth.
It made me realize that some people truly do not think critically about the impact of their work. I think Facebook inadvertently selects for those kinds of people (or at least filters out people on the other end of the spectrum).
There are internal discussions into ethical/moral consequences of decisions. Large organizations dedicated towards privacy, security, and integrity are given power to ensure the company operates ethically. It’s not perfect but it’s a hell of a lot more than most do.
I hate this moralization of companies btw. Companies are not good or bad, but they are capable of causing harm or good. Instead I see it often used because person X decides that they hate company Y, so in their mind they label the company as “evil” or “bad”. But of course they ignore harmful behaviors that their own company are making.
I’ve heard it all from folks in industry. Customer data leaking into Slack channels, data security being non-existent, no audit trails available in investigations, implementing only SMS MFA because it’s quicker and let’s them focus on more “impactful” projects. Ignoring verified accounts being sold on marketplaces. Making decisions which ultimately make the company a juicy target for attackers, without a discussion of trade-offs. Promoting culture which prioritize the company’s goals over the safety of users. Taking the “well that will never happen here” stance because their employees have “ethics” compared to those dirty FAANG employees. Promoting messaging platforms to children without proper safety protocols in place. Treating decentralization as the thing to fix all things, when historically the internet has been responsible for amazingly disgusting things long before the days of social media. The list goes on and on and on and on.
I try to write about this on HN to combat the popular narrative but I’m slowly thinking that this isn’t the place to do it. But alas here is another one.
Also, what’s wrong with moralization of a company? All companies cause some good and some harm, it’s worth determining what the net is and judging the company appropriately. I don’t think it’s too far off to call a company (subjectively) “bad” if their net impact is (subjectively) “bad”.
Golden handcuffs will blind you to the atrocities you are building. Or maybe the company has fully siloed off the teams. Maybe the worker drone doesn't know his/her project is actually being used to create these monsters. Either way, I have been resigned to not work for F(M)ANG companies. The engineering is beautiful, but the use of their work by the business is not.
I've worked at a few large social media platforms. The number one thing you realize is content moderation is hard. It doesn't scale well, human moderators aren't necessarily better than AI, and you're going to make people mad at you one way or another. Mental health issues of users are also complex. Different people might find the same content empowering or triggering.
To Dorsey's point, I understand how people miss smaller, federated communities of the early internet, but those don't scale. If you want a platform with the potential to reach everyone with an internet connection, it's going to get dumbed-down, and so will the conversations. Or you can build federated echo chambers.
90% of the criticisms you hear are armchair quarterbacking that's easy to ignore.
You might be missing the problem people have with AI moderation. People generally aren't upset that AI moderation gets it wrong. The problem is when AI moderation gets it wrong, there are no humans to review the process. A good example of this is every "Google closed me account and I don't know why" post on the front page of Hacker News every other week.
In my 40s now, I've had recent reflections about the small, golden friendship group of my university years. What they were then, vs the kind of life they pursued, and where they ended up. This little group of harmlessly rebellious nerds, playing computer games, smoking the odd joint and listening to heavy metal full of lyrics against The Establishment[1], etc. Playing our guitars and inwardly sneering (or more likely, laughing - we weren't really the sneering types) at the corporate world. [1]term used tongue-in-cheek, but I'm sure you know what I mean!
20 years later, and of the half dozen, I'm probably the only one left outside The Establishment.
Among the others, we notably (and disappointingly) have the aloof senior professional fully integrated into the Old Boy's Club of his industry, think Mason-y power conglomerates which run their local region for the profit of a few; and the commerce professional who regularly and gleefully spams LinkedIn with info about his latest Salesforce certifications, alongside Likes for Boris Johnson content.
Do they think they're "the bad guys"? (and in fact, if we're going to be really honest - ARE THEY the bad guys?). The answer to both may well be Probably Not. They have their own justifications and reasoning just as we all do.
I can't help being somewhat disappointed, but as the odd-one-out, who am I to say what's normal and good?
People don’t care how it really works or who are the people behind it. People just want money and ultimately want to forget their problems through it.
Then again, I was very much into mischief and that’s how I grew up. Social media is low-level stuff that bores the hell out of me because it serves no tangible purpose no matter how hard you try.
Those days had meaning to them because of many factors, but mostly because everything felt new, fresh, and not filtered through hundreds of opinions or social norms.
Now since he left, he is doing the same thing but for crypto.
The grift continues.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2012/tweets-still-must-flow