Hacker News Reader

Comment by kzrdude | Hacker News Reader

Instead of attacking specific content or specific people/personal info, what if we go at the structure and system instead?

- Don't care about the content of the tweet (no fact checking boards)

- Don't care to register who sent it (no privacy leak to government)

"Attack" the structure:

- Heavily tune down features that can enable posts on social media to go viral. Basically ban virality. Boosting high-emotion posts above all else is the largest systemic issue.

Yes, it's heavy-handed, but it's not censorship. It's not registering who has which political opinions. It's just changing the rules equally for all, to create a better forum.

View on HN

I would love to see something like this happen, basically force Facebook and Twitter to become boring message boards that require some higher quality forms of engagement to reach a broader audience (if reaching a broader audience should even be possible).

The problem is that Yyu'd essentially be killing one of the primary revenue generators for these companies, which are already built on top of fundamentally unsustainable business models in terms of actually managing content. The thing is that you'd have to define what exactly "high-emotion" posts are and how content will be assessed, which is effectively a form of censorship.

In what I'm trying to explain, there is no classification of content. Only suppressing vitality itself by removing mechanisms for it, in general (!)

> Basically ban virality.

That seems roughly as feasible as banning maths.

Maybe but I think it's a stone worth turning.. to see if is there any solution in this direction?

No, stop tuning other people's lives, you're not in charge of "tuning" humanity.

I mean .. maybe, but how do you phrase this as a law, and how do you make the billionaires dependent on virality obey it?

Ban feeds that are other than chronological of people you follow.

Would this include banning retweets (or equivalent)? Because that’s a huge driver of virality.

The government has no business banning the way private companies operate. There is no quantifiable harm.

Instead, just stop using those platforms if you don't like them. It's just that simple.

> The government has no business banning the way private companies operate.

That's, like, exactly what the business of government is.

> There is no quantifiable harm.

If this is in reference to the particular mode of operation suggested to be regulated upthread (where it might, arguably, be true) rather than the generality in the previous sentence (where it clearly is false), then its an argument against the particular regulation, not against government regulation of private business patterns generally.

You are correct. My first sentence was imprecise and inaccurate.

Government does exist to, among other things, regulate what private businesses can do.

I should have stated that governments should not create regulation when there is either no quantifiable externality or the harm is a part of a voluntary trade between private parties.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com