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Comment by darkerside | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a big government advocate, generally speaking, but enacting this at a federal level, would be akin to a modern day postal service. Social media communication without the bells and whistles--or the obsession with engagement. I'd be all for it.

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Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I don't think it's likely that government-provided social software would work all that well in the contemporary USA (unless they built it with better security and privacy than they have ever wanted to see in the private sector), but the government can be seen as a version of cooperative funding and it's certainly worth thinking about.

I would like it if my local government funded an alternative to Nextdoor, for instance.

I think the bigger problem in the US would be how to deal with free-speech issues. It either has to be moderated (sorry, no free speech here!) or it will be overrun by trolls, spammers, and other evils.

That's a great point. No need for moderation through postal mail because it's all 1-to-1 communication. OTOH, all broadcast media is heavily moderated today.

Lol postal mail has a long history of moderation. A lot of first amendment case law with respect to obscenity and fraud comes from postal cases.

Do you have some examples of what you're talking about?

The Comstock Laws [1] are probably the most famous US example, which made it illegal to use the USPS to send any obscene materials, including personal letters with sexual content.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws

I think this is a false dichotomy.

I agree that the issue arises for current systems that allow broadcast (one-to-all) communications such as this forum. I also acknowledge that it exists for email (one-to-one), but I think only because in that case it's so cheap and easy to mass mail something that one-to-one has effectively been automated into one-to-almost-all. I'd also note that modern spam filters are quite good at their job.

But for example, SMS isn't meaningfully moderated in any way yet when was the last time you had cause to blacklist a number?

I don't see any reason why a newly designed system couldn't apply different techniques to (mostly) avoid the problem. Just off the top of my head there's personal whitelists and blacklists, federated systems (pick the centralized ruleset that works for you), community moderation (ex StackExchange), web of trust, the subscription blacklist model that adblockers use...

A lot of that could be solved by just only allowing one account per person (no corporate/organizational at all) and requiring your real name, with any trangressions handled through the usual mob rule chaos. Nothing says this has to be a platform for healthy discorse, it just needs to hold well enough to announce block parties and post pictures of your dog

Every company that sends me unsolicited emails is forced by law to have an unsubscribe button on those emails. I have a huge amount of control around filtering spam and blacklisting and whitelisting specific addresses.

There is no way for me to stop the US postal office from delivering me giant catalogues of advertisements multiple times a week. I regularly get mail addressed to "current resident." I ought to be able to go to the postal office and say, "If someone doesn't know my name, just don't deliver the letter." It's friendlier for the environment, it would make the experience of checking my mail more pleasant.

The reason I can't do that is because spam is a giant source of revenue for the US Postal service. Coincidentally, the US Postal service has a number of services specifically designed to make it easier for advertisers to get mail into my mailbox. There is, in my mind, no reason to believe that a nationally owned social media platform would have any different incentives than Facebook would.

Email, a federated service that doesn't really make the government any money, doesn't have those incentives. So open protocols that are unaffiliated with any single organization (government or company) work better in my experience, unless whatever service is created is isolated from making profits in traditional ways. There are some good examples of that, but I'm not completely sure the Post Office is one of them.

Completely different example. Those advertisers are a customer of the service just like you. In most social media, we're not paying to post, but advertisers are. The rules of the game might be stretched to allow benefit to advertisers, but it's not rigged like you seem to think.

The NSA would build it for us, free of charge!

I know you're joking, but there needn't be anything private to be hidden on this network. That would seem to make this of limited use to the NSA.

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