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Comment by Sileni | Hacker News Reader

I think the comment you're replying to is trying to strengthen that ability. Now you don't have to convince some critical mass of your friends to switch over; you just switch over to the new platform, which everyone is connected to via some open source API/protocol, or the company running the data service is not running a front end to present the data. You continue to get the data from your friends and family while using a front end that you feel safer in.

It would require regulating the companies who hold personal data and divorcing them from the entities that tailor feeds and provide a user experience for the data. I don't think it's that ridiculous of an idea, really.

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My point is exactly not having to impose regulation.

The power to move away is already in the people's hands. You can do it at any moment, without a governmental mandate.

The point is to use this power. But first people have to recognize their power, and learn to use it a bit.

Thanks for posting this. It's all too often people (like in this article) want to lean on bureaucracy and legislation to fix their problems as opposed to actually doing something about it. Not using Twitter and Facebook has a positive step for my sanity, much like not watching 24 hour cable news was another positive step. I don't need the government to break up CNN or News Corp to solve that problem.

The problem is far broader than that. Other people are still watching cable news or read Facebook 24/7, and what they take away from it guides their actions. When those actions start affecting you, it kinda becomes your problem as well.

When AT&T was a monopoly and you had to rent your phone from them at an outrageous price, you could also walk away. But having to either walk/drive around or send slow mail to communicate was not very efficient. Perfectly doable, mind you, but very inconvenient. Sometimes the cost of walking away is just too steep, so abusing a dominant position becomes very easy and tempting.

I don't think Twitter or Facebook are anywhere close to that threshold. Maybe that's just because I barely use them. But I'm sure some people were also not using phone in the seventies, so I won't conclude based on my individual case.

Walking away from AT&T was hard because of the expense of building a phone transmission network, and (I suppose) because of some patents they held.

Walking away from Twitter is much easier, because multiple global instant or near-instant messaging systems exist, including completely open and user-controlled systems, and even building a new such system is reasonably easy for a group of competent people.

The cost of getting everyone you wish to communicate with using the new system is non-trivial.

That's looking at it from a purely technical perspective. A 20% better Twitter or Facebook (from a technical perspective) is certainly comparatively easy to do, but would still have an approximate value of nil. The value of Twitter or Facebook is not technical (though running services at this scale is technically very challenging): it comes from the people using it. Building another Facebook, even with marginal improvements, is never going to be enough to make enough people switch.

So is the case for AT&T: even if you could build a network competing with the AT&T one it would still have been a largely useless endeavor, unless you could also force AT&T to be interoperable with your network.

No. That's just more software engineer hand waving to avoid taking responsibility for the way their products have changed the emotional landscape for real people in the last couple of decades.

It's like saying the CIA wasn't trying to destroy communities when they were handing out crack, because "moral people wouldn't have taken it". Every single person building these platforms knew how addictive they were. It was the entire reason these companies were valued from the start. It was the end goal.

Yeah, a junkie can decide not to go find another needle. But if that is your response to the drug epidemic, you then have marginalized people who you've decreed "not worth saving". And I don't like what that has looked like over the last 60 years.

+1. Totally spot on.

This is correct: if you see that you're taking part in building something you know (or suspect) is a bad thing, you are responsible if you continue to work on that.

This only reinforces my point: if you think it's a wrong thing, walk away from it. Leave that job at Facebook data science division; there's a number of other well-paid data science jobs.

But I'm not trying to talk about what "they" have done wrong, and could have done differently in the past, or what regulators should be doing. I'm talking about something you and me can do right now, and what is completely within our own power to do.

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