This isn't so much a hostage situation as an undiagnosed case of Stockholm syndrome. The irony to me is that these same people often decry the "filter bubble," but by their writing, it seems to me that they really do _enjoy_ living in one.
Filter bubbles are easy: We are good, They are bad.
Real life is hard: We are imperfect people, They are imperfect people.
How are you supposed to feed the anger center of your brain if you occasionally have to see the objects of your hatred acting all kind and neighborly around your community? It's much easier to avoid Them and only interact with those who have the internet points to prove that they are ideologically pure.
Life is a filter bubble, this is what our brains do best, it is what our bodies do, filter out information. If you could not filter out signal from noise then you as a human would die pretty quickly.
When it comes to our digital lives it really is no different. If we couldn't filter out salespeople and propagandists would fill every moment of our existence with their slurm making this medium useless.
As a person who supports decentralization, and a user having the ability to control what content they see, or block (without a centralized party being able to stop it), I support the gist of this article.
But I think the author fundamentally misunderstands why people don't like the claimed upcoming Twitter changes.
The pro moderation people don't like the changes, because they want the supposedly benevolent dictator to control the centralized platform, to moderate it.
They want the Twitter team to be engaging in centralized moderation, and control who or who does not have access to the "digital square".
Therefore, given that this is what people want, suggesting that users leave to a decentralized platform, where the user controls everything, and can choose to read "misinformation" or choose to discuss things with others saying supposedly horrible statements, is counter to those pro-moderation goals.
The pro moderation goals only work where there are a couple centralized actors, all marching in lock steps, with few users on all the irrelevant alternatives.
And giving users back the power, undermined this goal.
I don't think it's reasonable to describe literally everybody who is leaving Twitter as some they that want only one kind of moderation and control over digital square.
I think that some people want what they understand to be misinformation off the platform because the misinformation is used in a hurtful way. E.g. gay people are pedophiles, so fill the feeds of gay people on Twitter with vitriol. I think that some people want misinformation off the platform because of the natural knee-jerk "someone is WRONG on the internet!". I don't think there's some nebulous they who consciously considers the narrative of social media as something to control. I think it's just very hard to remove bad actors in a non-centralized-tyrannical way.
And I think leaving to a decentralized platform isn't a hurdle because of some weird nebulous they who want power over everything. I think it's just less intuitive. I'm a mastodon user and I think "twitter but with decentralized spaces" can be super confusing to someone who is familiar with the centralized space. Many friends who have tried to move to mastodon to enter a community I'm in have accidentally signed up on other servers by accident.
Fortunately I am not doing that, and obviously instead describing general trends.
Does that clear everything up, not that I have clarified that I am not making the stupid argument of describing literally every person, with no exceptions, and I am instead making the much more reasonable argument, of generally describing overall trends?
> because the misinformation is used in a hurtful way.
But they still want it removed regardless. So everything I said still applies, because the motivation for why they want it removed, does not change the fact that they do want it removed.
And because they do want it removed, moving to a decentralized platform undermines this goal, because it is no longer possible for a centralized platform to remove it from the users who choose to keep watching it.
> there's some nebulous they
Well the "they" in this case would describe everyone who wants "misinformation", or "bad" content removed from the internet. For those people, my point applies.
> I think it's just very hard to remove bad actors in a non-centralized-tyrannical way.
So then you agree with me all along that decentralized platforms are harder to have content removed from. Yeah thats what I said.
> they who want power over everything.
I didn't say they wanted power. I said that they wanted content removed.
So yes, to those people, who want content removed, a decentralized platform is a hurdle, because decentralization makes it more difficult to have content removed, which you already agreed is the case.
I suspect the reason why they think that leaving censored platforms is useful for them is that everybody apes the black civil rights struggle in the US whenever they have any political disagreement, and it feels like a boycott. They just don't remember that the reason boycotts work is because they do economic damage, and instead think that there's some other magical effect that will cause Twitter et. al. to shut up shop after they leave (the most commonly cited is that "it will turn into 4chan and everybody else will leave.")
But not only would social networks not turn into 4chan if they reverted to pre-2020 moderation policies, but 4chan has been around for 20 years. If you want to keep people from talking to each other, starving them of your presence is not going to be the way to do it.
People that run Twitter don't want to keep people from talking to each other, they want to keep a particular crowd that is worth a lot of money talking so they can make billions doing it.
4chan is mostly worthless unless you're willing to take on very questionable advertisers.
I think you're describing and conflating two different things is what I'm pointing out. There are people who want things they see as harmful to remove off platforms they're on. There are also people who don't want to move to a decentralized system. But generally I think the same person who wants to remove bad people and not move to Mastodon are doing it for two different reasons, neither of which has to do with some kind of conspiratoral power that you're describing.
One, I think people generally want their personal experience with the centralized platform to be better. It just so happens it's very difficult to do this without removing people they don't like. That's it. I'm pretty sure if there was some magic woo-waa that let people only be engaged with by others who aren't mean at them, it doesn't really matter if mean people exist elsewhere.
Two, decentralized platforms are simply less intuitive than centralized ones to use and has nothing to do with content removal. I think you're hyper-focused on censorship in some way that doesn't actually reflect casual users. People generally just want to sign up on a platform and talk with their friends, and Mastodon makes it hard to sign up and talk to your friends.
I'm in your same camp, absolutely pro-decentralization and anti-Twitter/corporate social networking. But the fact is that what people are complaining about when it comes to Twitter moderation is not that they will see objectionable opinions, but that the people who have objectionable opinions are able to speak anywhere, even to each other.
Decentralization will not silence people with objectionable opinions (assuming someone like a Musk allows more range of opinion on Twitter), so it's not a solution to the problems of the pro-political-moderation camp, it's the opposite of one. The way you censor opinions (as a government) is to encourage more centralization - and by threatening to pick a different favorite if the right opinions aren't censored. It's an end-run around prior restraint.
>But the fact is that what people are complaining about when it comes to Twitter moderation is not that they will see objectionable opinions, but that the people who have objectionable opinions are able to speak anywhere, even to each other.
I'm also baffeld by this but that's one of the biggest selling point of Mastodon apparently. Everyone deserves their own safe space (except those who we don't like) so just make multiple little echo chambers.
Living in echo chambers is what society is. Family groups, friend groups, social groups - the choosing who you talk to, who you spend time with, what you listen to is basic freedom. It's what makes people happy.
Social Media is one of the first antipatterns here, showing down interactions with hated people down everyones throats. Basically, every person needs to constantly, every day suffer their annoying uncle at thanksgiving. No wonder it's causing mental health issues.
> They want the Twitter team to be engaging in centralized moderation, and control who or who does not have access to the "digital square".
Because that is just how an "analog square" works: shout out the N-word in a public place in any large city and you will face consequences for that. Either by police or by anyone else hearing you. "Analog" society keeps itself relatively clean, there is no reason why the "digital" society should allow racism and other forms of hate.
That doesn't sound objective at all & a diminishing number of people subscribe to that narrative.
> it’s harder for a motivated bad actor to have a global impact
Most of the world (most of Eurasia, the Global South, & many in the West) consider the current hegemonic power as the "motivated bad actor"...and the actions/reactions of the hegemonic power only prove their point. Soon the hegemonic power will no longer be in charge. As the hegemon loses influence, those who were once not inclined to speak about the situation will start talking about it...which is what we are seeing right now.
The hegemon will want to cling to it's power by suppressing the speech of those who say things that undermine the hegemon's position...
This is a piece that argues in favor of government regulation of internet communications platforms.
I think he’s got a lot of good points about how bad current social media is as controlled by billionaires.
I think he’s completely misguided about how great government control would be.
I think he’s equally misguided about the staying power of something like Facebook. It’s decaying and we don’t need to do anything about it.
He’s also just plain wrong about not being able to maintain connections with people who are left behind.
Younger people don’t bother to sign up, and pretty much everyone I know is steadily moving to signal or telegram for communications. People have multiple apps.
I still have Facebook messenger installed for ‘legacy’ contacts, but I barely use it anymore.
I frankly think he’s out of date in his thinking. He’s spent years on this political action, but technology is just moving faster than that.
> I think he’s completely misguided about how great government control would be.
It's not as though the premise is without precedent. It's easy to port your phone number to a new telephone company and all your friends can still call you. That's thanks to government "control" (aka regulation.) Maybe it's even too easy from a security perspective, but it's not as though you have to navigate a byzantine and capricious government bureaucracy to get it done. For the common person it generally works very well, seamless and painless.
I think most people are in favor of government when it comes to utilities, phones and landlines being a classic example (although in the age of wireless, one could argue government regulation actually makes things worse).
But social media is not a utility, in the traditional sense.
What is the intrinsic sense in which telephony is a utility but social media isn't? The wires? Phone companies all share the wires now (thanks again to government regulation), and with VoIP it's becoming less relevant by the day.. but phone number porting still works fine. The physical infrastructure natural monopoly stuff isn't a necessary component of what makes government regulation of phone systems work out well.
The government regulation of the phone system works well because the government regulations are well designed, not because there's a limit to how many wires you can hang from a pole.
It doesn’t work well. Telephones haven’t changed for decades and are now practically a dead technology. The wires are used for data, and phone service is grandfathered in. You can reasonably say this is the result of a lack of innovation caused by government regulation.
Now you're just being absurd. Do you think we had iphones decades ago? A few decades ago rotary dial phones were still common, cellphones were virtually unheard of, VoIP was a dream, nobody expected a resurgence of the telegraph (e.g. SMS), and switching was still done with in-band signaling.
Virtually everything about telephones has changed over the past few decades. It's easier to list the things which haven't changed: we still use phone numbers (kind of... because actually almost everybody uses the contacts app built into their phones.) We still pay phone companies for the service, except now there's tons of phone companies and you aren't stuck with one.
Nonsensical distinction. The common person sends and receives SMS using their telephone, using the same phone numbers used to call people, with the same disregard for whether they and the recipient use the same phone company because, like telephone calls, SMS works across companies. When you port your phone number to a new phone company, you continue to receive SMS sent to your number just as you do phone calls.
Different phones have different capabilities, what's there to explain? SMS is something people pay their phone company for, use their phone number for, follows them when they port their phone number to a new phone company, and works when they send it to somebody using a different phone company. It's obviously part of the telephone system.
(And in actual fact, there are phone companies that do offer SMS service to landline phones.)
> Different phones have different capabilities, what's there to explain?
That your definition of ‘phone’ is meaningless. If phones can have any capability you like, then ‘phone’ doesn’t mean anything.
Once you are playing that game you may as well just declare that social networks can be regulated because they are a ‘capability some things that can also communicate with phones have’, and phones are already regulated.
> Now you're just being absurd. Do you think we had iphones decades ago?
An iphone is an implementation detail, it's not the phone system.
The great thing about phones is the longevity. My parents have had the same phone number since the late 60s. Anyone who's known them for the past ~50 years can still reach out via the same number. That's awesome.
No proprietay social network will ever match that because they come and go on the back of the controlling company revenue performance.
The only way to stay in touch for the long haul is open standards, in the case of internet that means: email
I've had the same email since the mid 90s and will have it for the rest of my life. If you've ever known me, you can still reach me on the same email now and into the future.
Imagine having a phone number nobody can call because it's blocked from sending or receiving by your telephone company...
The vast majority of email is hosted by one of the large providers these days and if people can't reply to you the utility of your address is lessened.
> Imagine having a phone number nobody can call because it's blocked from sending or receiving by your telephone company...
Fortunately that's not at all what having a personal email is like.
First of all, you can always receive email no matter what. Nobody is blocking that.
Sending it to some larger providers requires configuring everything correctly, but it's not rocket science. Lots of people (including me) do it with minimal effort.
Finally, having your own email (domain) doesn't require self-hosting it if you don't want. You can always delegate that part to some provider. But you control the domain so you can switch providers (or switch to self-hosting) any moment. You can also do a hybrid option where you self-host receiving but farm out the sending, if you prefer. So many options, all of them work!
They are increasingly being used as a tool to censor legal but unpopular websites. You can build your own website but if your domain name get canceled and tier 1 ISPs block you, you can’t do a lot.
KiwiFarms is the latest example. No one is claiming it was a wholesome site, but it was entirely legal in the US and yet the owner is having difficulties getting it hosted because even though they have VPS providers willing to host the site, tier 1 ISPs have blackholed the sites IP. There is no alternative to a tier 1 ISP. You can't run your own, the are the lowest level of internet infrastructure and if they are being weaponized for censorship than it's all over for a neutral internet.
There are 16 tier 1 ISPs which basically hold the entire internet in their control. Arguably these companies should be required to route any legal traffic.
The government effectively established monopolies in phone service. Telephone numbering was not even close to seamless and painless. When dialing was introduced there was pushback and plenty of need for education of consumers, not to mention concerns about the loss of jobs for telephone operators. Establishing international numbering and the ITU has been a costly and slow diplomatic process.
The result is a system which is now almost useless because of the lack of spam prevention that facilitates elder abuse at a large scale.
If it wasn’t a legacy technology, I certainly wouldn’t recommend the telephone to my mother as a product.
The reason we have alternatives now is that there was no regulation preventing us from developing VoIP and other communications services via the internet.
Frankly it’s weird that we would even consider the telephone as a model for current regulation. It’s an antiquated legacy stepping stone from the time before computers.
So all this was caused... because people were able to port their phone numbers easily?
That was the example that was brought up.
Yes, some government regulations are bad. But some are good.
And this example of being able to port your phone number... seems to be a pretty simple, uncontroversial, and good feature, that could possibly be applied to social media companies as well.
It's really not. It's very hard to argue against a technological system that worked really well for as long as it did; only to be disrupted by the internet.
Honestly, it's hard to quantify how well it worked because we got so used to it; it stopped being "technology" and just became "part of life."
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. The government regulated telephone system was a success, and the only thing that actually brought it down was technological disruption, which happens. I believe you were trying to suggest that the regulation was a bad thing?
Wouldn't these points also apply to the internet itself? Large monopolies in infrastructure, having to teach people what domains are, diplomatic conflicts between nations over access to information/infrastructure, prolific spam and scams, etc.
The internet did grow out of telephony so perhaps it's not surprising that it shares many of the same qualities, however I think these government vs private debates often ignore that the failures and shortcomings of these systems are usually a result of both bad government intervention and bad private actors, not solely one or the other
> Wouldn't these points also apply to the internet itself? Large monopolies in infrastructure, having to teach people what domains are, diplomatic conflicts between nations over access to information/infrastructure, prolific spam and scams, etc.
Yes, many similar problems have indeed arisen, but the point is that they are being solved by many private actors, and not by regulation.
Email spam is solved by spam filtering. To the extent that spam filtering isn’t adequate, communications simply move away from email to other messaging services that have better permission models. To the extent that messaging services are not private enough, communications shift to E2E encryption. To the extent that domains are confusing, people shift to search and apps. The list goes on.
Anti-spam legislation doesn’t regulate the technology. It legislates the behavior of the spammers.
This is no different from say, assault, which doesn’t regulate hammers and baseball bats, but makes it illegal to hit people with them without their permission.
Your comment seemed to be claiming that, at least in the example of email spam, only technology (filtering) addresses it, that there is no role for regulation. I was disagreeing with that.
My understanding of phone spam regulation is there is some that legislates technology, namely forbidding completion of connections of spoofed phone numbers.
POTS had massive costs to achieve that low latency. And it's quality over long distances was suspect. It may have also held back innovation because of bad regulation and inertia.
Yes, and VoIP is saturated with spam and toll fraud. Lack of regulation has spurred innovation, but has also given bad actors free rein.
I agree that the telephone isn't a great example of where regulation has worked, but I think the specific example of phone number portability is a good one: something that no carrier would ever implement, but something that is great to help customers avoid being locked in to a single provider.
The phone system doesn’t lack regulation. Phone spam is already illegal. The reason for phone/VoIP spam is because the system is too inflexible to make it easy to prevent, and the reason the system is inflexible is that it is regulated.
We already have portability. When you sign up to a new network, you provide your phone number and email address, and your friends can find you.
But for decades, government programs ran surpluses.
It’s not hard to explain it away in memorized economics terms. The thing is those terms are merely one set of reasonable, generic language. Not immutable laws of reality.
Technology is moving faster than that because of government investment; IBM refused to invest in solid state fearing it would undermine sales of old tube computers. Government invested in and gifted them solid state patents.
What do you think the cheap money flowing to tech corps was about the last decade? Government subsidy of technology, which is verifiable in that now that rates are down tech genius CEOs are not innovating but pushing traditions of austerity. These companies are middlemen dependent on government subsidies.
Don’t be silly. The government doesn’t regulate how these services operate.
If you are going to argue that macroeconomic policy means ‘control’, then the government ‘controls’ everything in everyone’s lives at all times. You are welcome to believe this if you like.
The government regulates their existence, their ability to grow, hire, develop services.
Section 230 regulates what is allowed. DMCA, etc etc
You say I should not be silly but I can believe what I like. Which is it? You are not really selling a strong argument here, just wishy washy opinions decoupled from the negotiated terms of society documented openly.
Society, the rest of us, do not have an obligation to your head canon.
The Fed prints fiat which goes into the banking system to VCs & other investment vehicles. Fiat is based on the credibility & debt of the issuer. When the issuer looses credibility & when the issuer issues more fiat in relation to assets & production, then the fiat loses value. Large tech companies have received much of this credit & debt based fiat. When the value of the fiat falls, then the large tech companies' value is increasingly based on fundamentals which is based on underlying assets & production.
I think the macro trends support your comment. Economic credibility & social credibility are related. Let's say a regime that controls the monetary system consists of pathological liars that uses the monetary system to their advantage & a certain critical mass knows it...they will want as little participation with that system as possible...explicitly or tacitly.
If the large tech companies are the vehicle of the monetary regime, then aware people will want to maximize their interests...One way to improve their interests is to use alternatives or to somehow influence the large platforms. If the large platforms do not change in peoples' favor, then it becomes clear that the more effective use of time/energy to use alternative solutions
Even if the large platform does change one's favor, the awareness that those who control it are not creditable leads to distrust & an understanding that participating with the creditable is a better mid & long term strategy.
I think the thing is that people like yourself are probably conscientiously indifferent to the attraction, influence and dependency that “Big Tech” produces. If this isn’t the case for you, then allow me to speak for myself then. I think the very thought that the author is sharing is an overreaction, but it it’s a sign of the times that it even generates a conversation or that some people can even liken it to government intervention in the telephone business. I’m indifferent to the concept itself, but I find the idea in the context of the modern world and the dominant global culture…dramatic.
> I think the thing is that people like yourself are probably conscientiously indifferent to the attraction, influence and dependency that “Big Tech” produces.
Not at all. I just think it’s obvious that the sentiment has been waning for some time now. Who is going around saying how great big tech is?
I really hate spending any time or effort building connections on proprietary platforms since it is so inevitable all that effort will decay to nothing as the platform dies, as it eventually must because it is controller by a single corporation that isn't interested in interoperability nor maintaining it once it's no longer profitable.
To the extent possible I prefer to keep in touch with everyone via email since it is a decentralized open standard, so it will never go away.
This is a piece that mentions briefly that regulations promoting federation have been proposed. Otherwise, I don’t see much of an “argument” one way or another.
He’s also just plain wrong about not being able to maintain connections with people who are left behind.
a friend of mine lost his phone and was not able to recover his phonenumber. as a result he lost contact with hundreds of people and was not able to restore that contact to most of them.
and that's not the first time i heard about that happening. in china supposedly relationships have been destroyed because someone lost their wechat access, and definitely friendships have been lost.
this is my nightmare scenario. there are so many people i am in contact with through only one mode of communication, and if i were to lose that i would have no chance to ever get back to them.
i don't even know how many people i lost when my email addresses stopped working. because i didn't just want to blast out a global notice to all my contacts. of course there the important ones i could inform about the new address but the less important ones are gone snd they have no way to find me.
i am struggling to establish alternate contacts (like get the email addresses) of people to avoid that nightmare scenario for myself.
so no, i don't think he is wrong about not being able to maintain connections with people who are left behind. maintaining connections across multiple modes of communication is extremely hard.
A lot of the advice in this piece is all well and good for tech savvy folks, but what about trying to get Grandma onto some federated social media network.
This is all pie in the sky, Facebook has captured the over 35s, Twitter has got the next generation down and TikTok is cleaning up with the under 25s.
Friends and friends networks are too sticky to abruptly just leave.
Though to be fair it was a bit buried. Another commenter surfaced a relevant quote:
> There’s no technical reason that Big Tech can’t directly connect to the Fediverse. The ACCESS Act, a proposed US law, would do just that. The EU has passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which promises to impose interoperability on giant social media platforms…eventually.
I just text or FaceTime my relatives who are on Facebook. It works just fine. My mother, who doesn’t even have a cellphone, I call via skype to her landline phone. No problem.
TL;DR Mandate interoperability with federated networks.
I'm skeptical about the feasibility of the idea, mostly due to the fact that it will be impossible to get tech giants to agree to stick to a standardized content format, especially when they have conflict interests. But I would definitely like an app where I could follow all of my friends on whatever networks they choose, and see an ad-free list of their posts so I could choose which ones to view on the respective networks, and make sure that I don't miss important posts.
It's not feasible because there's no fee model for the users. It's a free service. With traditional "federated" networks, like telephones, the customers pay for the service and you can mandate interoperability that includes allowed peerage fees to incentivize quality and compatibility of these connections.
The proposed act requires one social network to carry messages for another with zero incentives between them. Even if you do get it implemented, I suspect it will never work with any reliability or will have so many limitations applied as to be essentially useless for the stated purpose.
Plus by the time it gets through congress and into written law the big tech lawyers will have riddled it with ways to suppress their competition and have it so complex/involved that only a large company could follow it (see: the bills following 'too-big-too fail' that merely reduced the number of big banks to 5 and hundreds of midsized ones could no longer deal with the new capital requirements).
I'm just trying to imagine how awful the standard will be, or how selective the enforcement will be, how some new technological development happens but adoption gets crippled by a policy written for the Facebook era, etc, etc.
There's always tons of downsides that outweigh these heavy handed interventions.
> There’s no technical reason that Big Tech can’t directly connect to the Fediverse. The ACCESS Act, a proposed US law, would do just that. The EU has passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which promises to impose interoperability on giant social media platforms…eventually.
The underlying assumption is that social platforms are the ideal way to communicate.
Is that really true?
I keep in touch with most people by texting. It does the job. Ditching almost every "social" app had no noticeable affect on my social life. I think I missed one housewarming party in 2019 because the host didn't realize I'd left Facebook.
None of us really picked the "post all your life updates to one feed with everyone you know and then scroll it"—the platforms designed that and we just sort of ran with it.
I'm not suggesting we should go strictly back to keeping in touch by phone calls and handwriting long letters (for starters, I forget how stamps work), but I'd rather have a slightly more personal model than replace one big feed with another.
SMS is very bad at groups, and the most effective way to stay in touch with friends for me is groups where we talk about shared interests. not everyone needs to engage but everyone can read and is thus kept in the loop. there is no problem for the more silent types to engage only once in a while whereas in one on one they would almost never stay in touch.
i use one on one almost exclusively for transactional messages, where we have to exchange information of some form, but rarely for just personally staying in touch.
so at least for me it's not social networks that are the ideal, but groups.
> I keep in touch with most people by texting. It does the job.
That requires giving your phone number to someone. I can imagine there's many situations where you'd be happy to have a casual social relationship with someone but not want them to have your phone number (and that's not even considering the potential for stalking, etc.)
This is a proposal, not something you can actually do.
Now, on LinkedIn, you can sort of do this. My LinkedIn profile says only, see my GitHub profile. But Facebook, not so much.
None of the federated systems have any traction. From PeerTube to Mastodon to Open Simulator, they're all orders of magnitude smaller than the commercial competitors.
PeerTube has an interesting model. It's useful as an ad-free video streaming service for when you don't need or want "discovery". As, for example, when you want to post a video and link it from elsewhere. It's partial peer to peer. There's one master copy. hosted on a server, but if there are enough watchers of that video, the watchers' browsers also become temporary caching servers to distribute the load. The source site thus avoids overload.
This is a useful way to do federation. The watchers don't have to be members, they don't have to store content long term, and they're not trusted. What else could be done that way?
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadReal life is hard: We are imperfect people, They are imperfect people.
How are you supposed to feed the anger center of your brain if you occasionally have to see the objects of your hatred acting all kind and neighborly around your community? It's much easier to avoid Them and only interact with those who have the internet points to prove that they are ideologically pure.
When it comes to our digital lives it really is no different. If we couldn't filter out salespeople and propagandists would fill every moment of our existence with their slurm making this medium useless.
But I think the author fundamentally misunderstands why people don't like the claimed upcoming Twitter changes.
The pro moderation people don't like the changes, because they want the supposedly benevolent dictator to control the centralized platform, to moderate it.
They want the Twitter team to be engaging in centralized moderation, and control who or who does not have access to the "digital square".
Therefore, given that this is what people want, suggesting that users leave to a decentralized platform, where the user controls everything, and can choose to read "misinformation" or choose to discuss things with others saying supposedly horrible statements, is counter to those pro-moderation goals.
The pro moderation goals only work where there are a couple centralized actors, all marching in lock steps, with few users on all the irrelevant alternatives.
And giving users back the power, undermined this goal.
I think that some people want what they understand to be misinformation off the platform because the misinformation is used in a hurtful way. E.g. gay people are pedophiles, so fill the feeds of gay people on Twitter with vitriol. I think that some people want misinformation off the platform because of the natural knee-jerk "someone is WRONG on the internet!". I don't think there's some nebulous they who consciously considers the narrative of social media as something to control. I think it's just very hard to remove bad actors in a non-centralized-tyrannical way.
And I think leaving to a decentralized platform isn't a hurdle because of some weird nebulous they who want power over everything. I think it's just less intuitive. I'm a mastodon user and I think "twitter but with decentralized spaces" can be super confusing to someone who is familiar with the centralized space. Many friends who have tried to move to mastodon to enter a community I'm in have accidentally signed up on other servers by accident.
Fortunately I am not doing that, and obviously instead describing general trends.
Does that clear everything up, not that I have clarified that I am not making the stupid argument of describing literally every person, with no exceptions, and I am instead making the much more reasonable argument, of generally describing overall trends?
> because the misinformation is used in a hurtful way.
But they still want it removed regardless. So everything I said still applies, because the motivation for why they want it removed, does not change the fact that they do want it removed.
And because they do want it removed, moving to a decentralized platform undermines this goal, because it is no longer possible for a centralized platform to remove it from the users who choose to keep watching it.
> there's some nebulous they
Well the "they" in this case would describe everyone who wants "misinformation", or "bad" content removed from the internet. For those people, my point applies.
> I think it's just very hard to remove bad actors in a non-centralized-tyrannical way.
So then you agree with me all along that decentralized platforms are harder to have content removed from. Yeah thats what I said.
> they who want power over everything.
I didn't say they wanted power. I said that they wanted content removed.
So yes, to those people, who want content removed, a decentralized platform is a hurdle, because decentralization makes it more difficult to have content removed, which you already agreed is the case.
But not only would social networks not turn into 4chan if they reverted to pre-2020 moderation policies, but 4chan has been around for 20 years. If you want to keep people from talking to each other, starving them of your presence is not going to be the way to do it.
People that run Twitter don't want to keep people from talking to each other, they want to keep a particular crowd that is worth a lot of money talking so they can make billions doing it.
4chan is mostly worthless unless you're willing to take on very questionable advertisers.
One, I think people generally want their personal experience with the centralized platform to be better. It just so happens it's very difficult to do this without removing people they don't like. That's it. I'm pretty sure if there was some magic woo-waa that let people only be engaged with by others who aren't mean at them, it doesn't really matter if mean people exist elsewhere.
Two, decentralized platforms are simply less intuitive than centralized ones to use and has nothing to do with content removal. I think you're hyper-focused on censorship in some way that doesn't actually reflect casual users. People generally just want to sign up on a platform and talk with their friends, and Mastodon makes it hard to sign up and talk to your friends.
Decentralization will not silence people with objectionable opinions (assuming someone like a Musk allows more range of opinion on Twitter), so it's not a solution to the problems of the pro-political-moderation camp, it's the opposite of one. The way you censor opinions (as a government) is to encourage more centralization - and by threatening to pick a different favorite if the right opinions aren't censored. It's an end-run around prior restraint.
I'm also baffeld by this but that's one of the biggest selling point of Mastodon apparently. Everyone deserves their own safe space (except those who we don't like) so just make multiple little echo chambers.
Social Media is one of the first antipatterns here, showing down interactions with hated people down everyones throats. Basically, every person needs to constantly, every day suffer their annoying uncle at thanksgiving. No wonder it's causing mental health issues.
Because that is just how an "analog square" works: shout out the N-word in a public place in any large city and you will face consequences for that. Either by police or by anyone else hearing you. "Analog" society keeps itself relatively clean, there is no reason why the "digital" society should allow racism and other forms of hate.
There are actually laws that force anolog public squares, even private owned ones, to allow people to do things like protest on their property.
You should check out the court case, pruneyard.
It was about a california law, that forces private malls to allow people to engage in political space on their property.
As in, the private property owner, was prevented by law from removing the protestors from their analog square.
This is not true.
What people don’t like is the idea of the world’s richest child turning it into Hate Central and a megaphone for Putin.
That said, his solution has only the advantage that in a decentralized world, it’s harder for a motivated bad actor to have a global impact.
Ultimately decentralization is a techno attempt to fix a political problem. It doesn’t work
That doesn't sound objective at all & a diminishing number of people subscribe to that narrative.
> it’s harder for a motivated bad actor to have a global impact
Most of the world (most of Eurasia, the Global South, & many in the West) consider the current hegemonic power as the "motivated bad actor"...and the actions/reactions of the hegemonic power only prove their point. Soon the hegemonic power will no longer be in charge. As the hegemon loses influence, those who were once not inclined to speak about the situation will start talking about it...which is what we are seeing right now.
The hegemon will want to cling to it's power by suppressing the speech of those who say things that undermine the hegemon's position...
Fun fact: I have about 1,300 "followers" on Medium. My articles have generated 90 views over the last 30 days [1] But there is hope [2]
[1] https://imgur.com/elke2GY [2] https://app.finclout.io/u/J%20Daniel%20Semrau
I think he’s got a lot of good points about how bad current social media is as controlled by billionaires.
I think he’s completely misguided about how great government control would be.
I think he’s equally misguided about the staying power of something like Facebook. It’s decaying and we don’t need to do anything about it.
He’s also just plain wrong about not being able to maintain connections with people who are left behind.
Younger people don’t bother to sign up, and pretty much everyone I know is steadily moving to signal or telegram for communications. People have multiple apps.
I still have Facebook messenger installed for ‘legacy’ contacts, but I barely use it anymore.
I frankly think he’s out of date in his thinking. He’s spent years on this political action, but technology is just moving faster than that.
It's not as though the premise is without precedent. It's easy to port your phone number to a new telephone company and all your friends can still call you. That's thanks to government "control" (aka regulation.) Maybe it's even too easy from a security perspective, but it's not as though you have to navigate a byzantine and capricious government bureaucracy to get it done. For the common person it generally works very well, seamless and painless.
But social media is not a utility, in the traditional sense.
The government regulation of the phone system works well because the government regulations are well designed, not because there's a limit to how many wires you can hang from a pole.
Edit: I say this as someone who loved the dial telephone era. I really want one of these: https://skysedge.com/unsmartphones/RUSP/index.html
I would have bought one, but then I realized that the phone is useless now.
Now you're just being absurd. Do you think we had iphones decades ago? A few decades ago rotary dial phones were still common, cellphones were virtually unheard of, VoIP was a dream, nobody expected a resurgence of the telegraph (e.g. SMS), and switching was still done with in-band signaling.
Virtually everything about telephones has changed over the past few decades. It's easier to list the things which haven't changed: we still use phone numbers (kind of... because actually almost everybody uses the contacts app built into their phones.) We still pay phone companies for the service, except now there's tons of phone companies and you aren't stuck with one.
The iPhone is not primarily a telephone. If you are going to argue that it is, you really aren’t being reasonable.
Also, if you look at the history, you’ll discover that these innovations were all held back by regulation and the fixed nature of the phone system.
Nonsensical distinction. The common person sends and receives SMS using their telephone, using the same phone numbers used to call people, with the same disregard for whether they and the recipient use the same phone company because, like telephone calls, SMS works across companies. When you port your phone number to a new phone company, you continue to receive SMS sent to your number just as you do phone calls.
(And in actual fact, there are phone companies that do offer SMS service to landline phones.)
That your definition of ‘phone’ is meaningless. If phones can have any capability you like, then ‘phone’ doesn’t mean anything.
Once you are playing that game you may as well just declare that social networks can be regulated because they are a ‘capability some things that can also communicate with phones have’, and phones are already regulated.
So not actually part of what it means to be a phone then.
> Now you're just being absurd. Do you think we had iphones decades ago?
An iphone is an implementation detail, it's not the phone system.
The great thing about phones is the longevity. My parents have had the same phone number since the late 60s. Anyone who's known them for the past ~50 years can still reach out via the same number. That's awesome.
No proprietay social network will ever match that because they come and go on the back of the controlling company revenue performance.
The only way to stay in touch for the long haul is open standards, in the case of internet that means: email
I've had the same email since the mid 90s and will have it for the rest of my life. If you've ever known me, you can still reach me on the same email now and into the future.
Anyone can buy their own domain and there are many providers who will provide email service.
The vast majority of email is hosted by one of the large providers these days and if people can't reply to you the utility of your address is lessened.
Fortunately that's not at all what having a personal email is like.
First of all, you can always receive email no matter what. Nobody is blocking that.
Sending it to some larger providers requires configuring everything correctly, but it's not rocket science. Lots of people (including me) do it with minimal effort.
Finally, having your own email (domain) doesn't require self-hosting it if you don't want. You can always delegate that part to some provider. But you control the domain so you can switch providers (or switch to self-hosting) any moment. You can also do a hybrid option where you self-host receiving but farm out the sending, if you prefer. So many options, all of them work!
There are 16 tier 1 ISPs which basically hold the entire internet in their control. Arguably these companies should be required to route any legal traffic.
The government effectively established monopolies in phone service. Telephone numbering was not even close to seamless and painless. When dialing was introduced there was pushback and plenty of need for education of consumers, not to mention concerns about the loss of jobs for telephone operators. Establishing international numbering and the ITU has been a costly and slow diplomatic process.
The result is a system which is now almost useless because of the lack of spam prevention that facilitates elder abuse at a large scale.
If it wasn’t a legacy technology, I certainly wouldn’t recommend the telephone to my mother as a product.
The reason we have alternatives now is that there was no regulation preventing us from developing VoIP and other communications services via the internet.
Frankly it’s weird that we would even consider the telephone as a model for current regulation. It’s an antiquated legacy stepping stone from the time before computers.
That was the example that was brought up.
Yes, some government regulations are bad. But some are good.
And this example of being able to port your phone number... seems to be a pretty simple, uncontroversial, and good feature, that could possibly be applied to social media companies as well.
No, it can’t because social media isn’t based on phone numbers, and social networks aren’t telephone networks, and each one works differently.
Honestly, it's hard to quantify how well it worked because we got so used to it; it stopped being "technology" and just became "part of life."
The internet did grow out of telephony so perhaps it's not surprising that it shares many of the same qualities, however I think these government vs private debates often ignore that the failures and shortcomings of these systems are usually a result of both bad government intervention and bad private actors, not solely one or the other
Yes, many similar problems have indeed arisen, but the point is that they are being solved by many private actors, and not by regulation.
Email spam is solved by spam filtering. To the extent that spam filtering isn’t adequate, communications simply move away from email to other messaging services that have better permission models. To the extent that messaging services are not private enough, communications shift to E2E encryption. To the extent that domains are confusing, people shift to search and apps. The list goes on.
Phone spam however, continues unabated.
This is no different from say, assault, which doesn’t regulate hammers and baseball bats, but makes it illegal to hit people with them without their permission.
My understanding of phone spam regulation is there is some that legislates technology, namely forbidding completion of connections of spoofed phone numbers.
When the phone service was a monopoly in the USA it had five nines of uptime and close to zero latency.
It's been downhill since then.
I agree that the telephone isn't a great example of where regulation has worked, but I think the specific example of phone number portability is a good one: something that no carrier would ever implement, but something that is great to help customers avoid being locked in to a single provider.
We already have portability. When you sign up to a new network, you provide your phone number and email address, and your friends can find you.
What if your friends only know you online, and do not know your phone number or email address?
But for decades, government programs ran surpluses.
It’s not hard to explain it away in memorized economics terms. The thing is those terms are merely one set of reasonable, generic language. Not immutable laws of reality.
Technology is moving faster than that because of government investment; IBM refused to invest in solid state fearing it would undermine sales of old tube computers. Government invested in and gifted them solid state patents.
What do you think the cheap money flowing to tech corps was about the last decade? Government subsidy of technology, which is verifiable in that now that rates are down tech genius CEOs are not innovating but pushing traditions of austerity. These companies are middlemen dependent on government subsidies.
If you are going to argue that macroeconomic policy means ‘control’, then the government ‘controls’ everything in everyone’s lives at all times. You are welcome to believe this if you like.
Section 230 regulates what is allowed. DMCA, etc etc
You say I should not be silly but I can believe what I like. Which is it? You are not really selling a strong argument here, just wishy washy opinions decoupled from the negotiated terms of society documented openly.
Society, the rest of us, do not have an obligation to your head canon.
With the money printer off, tech corp are going where the money is; government welfare, not a free market: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/google-and-...
The government does not “own assets” on paper but it has a whole lot of influence over agency
They aren’t mutually exclusive.
> The government does not “own assets” on paper but it has a whole lot of influence over agency
Feel free to believe that your agency is under government control.
If the large tech companies are the vehicle of the monetary regime, then aware people will want to maximize their interests...One way to improve their interests is to use alternatives or to somehow influence the large platforms. If the large platforms do not change in peoples' favor, then it becomes clear that the more effective use of time/energy to use alternative solutions
Even if the large platform does change one's favor, the awareness that those who control it are not creditable leads to distrust & an understanding that participating with the creditable is a better mid & long term strategy.
Not at all. I just think it’s obvious that the sentiment has been waning for some time now. Who is going around saying how great big tech is?
I think that that’s the thing. They don’t have to say that. The attention that their products get, good or bad, speaks loudly enough.
To the extent possible I prefer to keep in touch with everyone via email since it is a decentralized open standard, so it will never go away.
a friend of mine lost his phone and was not able to recover his phonenumber. as a result he lost contact with hundreds of people and was not able to restore that contact to most of them.
and that's not the first time i heard about that happening. in china supposedly relationships have been destroyed because someone lost their wechat access, and definitely friendships have been lost.
this is my nightmare scenario. there are so many people i am in contact with through only one mode of communication, and if i were to lose that i would have no chance to ever get back to them.
i don't even know how many people i lost when my email addresses stopped working. because i didn't just want to blast out a global notice to all my contacts. of course there the important ones i could inform about the new address but the less important ones are gone snd they have no way to find me.
i am struggling to establish alternate contacts (like get the email addresses) of people to avoid that nightmare scenario for myself.
so no, i don't think he is wrong about not being able to maintain connections with people who are left behind. maintaining connections across multiple modes of communication is extremely hard.
This is all pie in the sky, Facebook has captured the over 35s, Twitter has got the next generation down and TikTok is cleaning up with the under 25s.
Friends and friends networks are too sticky to abruptly just leave.
> There’s no technical reason that Big Tech can’t directly connect to the Fediverse. The ACCESS Act, a proposed US law, would do just that. The EU has passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which promises to impose interoperability on giant social media platforms…eventually.
I'm skeptical about the feasibility of the idea, mostly due to the fact that it will be impossible to get tech giants to agree to stick to a standardized content format, especially when they have conflict interests. But I would definitely like an app where I could follow all of my friends on whatever networks they choose, and see an ad-free list of their posts so I could choose which ones to view on the respective networks, and make sure that I don't miss important posts.
The proposed act requires one social network to carry messages for another with zero incentives between them. Even if you do get it implemented, I suspect it will never work with any reliability or will have so many limitations applied as to be essentially useless for the stated purpose.
I'm just trying to imagine how awful the standard will be, or how selective the enforcement will be, how some new technological development happens but adoption gets crippled by a policy written for the Facebook era, etc, etc.
There's always tons of downsides that outweigh these heavy handed interventions.
This couldn’t happen soon enough.
Is that really true?
I keep in touch with most people by texting. It does the job. Ditching almost every "social" app had no noticeable affect on my social life. I think I missed one housewarming party in 2019 because the host didn't realize I'd left Facebook.
None of us really picked the "post all your life updates to one feed with everyone you know and then scroll it"—the platforms designed that and we just sort of ran with it.
I'm not suggesting we should go strictly back to keeping in touch by phone calls and handwriting long letters (for starters, I forget how stamps work), but I'd rather have a slightly more personal model than replace one big feed with another.
SMS is very bad at groups, and the most effective way to stay in touch with friends for me is groups where we talk about shared interests. not everyone needs to engage but everyone can read and is thus kept in the loop. there is no problem for the more silent types to engage only once in a while whereas in one on one they would almost never stay in touch.
i use one on one almost exclusively for transactional messages, where we have to exchange information of some form, but rarely for just personally staying in touch.
so at least for me it's not social networks that are the ideal, but groups.
That requires giving your phone number to someone. I can imagine there's many situations where you'd be happy to have a casual social relationship with someone but not want them to have your phone number (and that's not even considering the potential for stalking, etc.)
Now, on LinkedIn, you can sort of do this. My LinkedIn profile says only, see my GitHub profile. But Facebook, not so much.
None of the federated systems have any traction. From PeerTube to Mastodon to Open Simulator, they're all orders of magnitude smaller than the commercial competitors.
PeerTube has an interesting model. It's useful as an ad-free video streaming service for when you don't need or want "discovery". As, for example, when you want to post a video and link it from elsewhere. It's partial peer to peer. There's one master copy. hosted on a server, but if there are enough watchers of that video, the watchers' browsers also become temporary caching servers to distribute the load. The source site thus avoids overload.
This is a useful way to do federation. The watchers don't have to be members, they don't have to store content long term, and they're not trusted. What else could be done that way?