Why the open social web matters now
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But I feel that talking about the open social web without addressing the reasons current ones aren't popular/get blocked doesn't lead to much progress. Ultimately, big problems with an open social web include:
- moderation
- spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl
- good faith verification
- posting transparency
These are all hard problems and it seems to make me believe the future of a proper community lies more in charging a small premium. Even charging one dollar for life takes out 99% of spam and gives a cost to bad faith actors should they be banned and need another dollar to re-enter. Thus, easing moderation needs. But charging money for anything online these days can cause a lot of friction.
And then if you could verify you'd paid it in a completely P2P decentralized fashion.
I'm not a crypto fan, but I'd appreciate a message graph where high signal messages "burned" or "donated money" to be flagged for attention.
I'd also like it if my attention were paid for by those wishing to have it, but that's a separate problem.
You could then spend the token with a forum, to gain and basic trust for an otherwise anonymous account.
- spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl
- good faith verification
- posting transparency"
And we have to think about how to hit these targets while:
- respecting individual sovereignty
- respecting privacy
- meeting any other obligations or responsibilities within reason
and of course, it must be EASY and dead simple to use.
It's doable, we've done far more impossible-seeming things just in the last 30 years, so it's just a matter of willpower now.
I've also come to the conclusion that a tightly designed subscription service is the way to go. Cheap really can be better than "free" if done right.
I'm not against subscriptions per se, but I do think a one time entry cost is really all that's needed to achieve many of the desired effects. I'm probably in the minority as someone who'd rather pay $10 one time to enter a community once than $1-2/month to maintain my participation, though. I'm just personally tired of feeling like I'm paying a tax to construct something that may one day be good, rather than buying into a decently polished product upfront.
And even if it works, there will still be carry-over of many of the problems we've seen with centralized social networks.
It's oxymoronic. Our communication was developed in highly developed hierarchies for a reason: continual deception, deviance, anarchism, perversion, subversion always operating in conflict and in contrary to hierarchies.
Language is not self-organizing, signaling is not self-learning it self-regulating. The web opened the already existing pandora's box of Shannon's admittedly non-psychologically relevant info theory and went bust at scale.
Even in a federated system, you can be blacklisted although it does take more coordination and work.
i2p and writing to the blockchain are an attempt to deal with that through permanence, but those are not without their own (serious) problems.
Payment processors underpin ad systems and they have strong leverage to pressure ad buyers and can pull your ability to make those sales. That's on top of the advertisers themselves having strong positions on what kind of content they want to advertise beside.
Everyone has to pay for servers somehow. Especially at scale. And doing that without payment processors is difficult. Crypto has not proven itself to be something consumers will use.
In all reality, the solution to as much free speech as possible on a social platform is to limit reach. If people want to broadcast to millions or even billions, then of course that will come with limitations and restrictions. Everyone has to balance the varied interests required to achieve scale. Limiting individual reach means more potential freedom for users.
Something like OAuth means that you can give different levels of private data to different actors, based on what perms they request.
Then you just have whoever is holding your data anyway (it's gotta live somewhere) also handle the OAuth keys. That's how the Bluesky PDS system works, basically.
Now, there is an issue with blanket requesting/granting of perms (which an end user isn't necessarily going to know about), but IMO all that's missing from the Bluesky-style system is to have a way to reject individual OAuth grants (for example, making it so Bluesky doesn't have access to reading my likes, but it does have access to writing to my likes).
If I have 100 followers on 100 different nodes, that means each node has access to (and holds on to) some portion of my data by way of those followers.
In a centralized system, a user having total control over their data (and the ability to delete it) is more feasible. I'm not saying modern systems are great about this, GDPR was necessary to force their hands, but federation makes it more technically difficult.
I don't really see my posts remaining in people's RSS readers after deletion as a problem. It's a fundamental property of information distribution as far as I am concerned.
But even then, that means there's resistance, but that's not the same as things being technically impossible. In federated systems, a delete is not a delete. It can't be because there's no way to confirm deletion on nodes you can't control.
And I understand your perspective as a realist on deletion generally, but that's not most social media users understanding when they're told they can control their own data, which is a common selling point of federation.
A centralized system which is properly incentivized to completely wipe all data associated with an account will be able do so, but a federated system can't.
But network effects seems to be a natural phenomenon of people wanting to establish a familiar routine. I look at Steam as an example here, where while it has its own shady schemes behind the scenes (which I hope are addressed), it otherwise doesn't engage in the same dark patterns as other monopolies. But it still creates a strong network effect nonetheless.
I think the main solace here is that you don't need to be dominant to create a good community. You need to focus instead on getting above a certain critical mass, where you keep a healthy stream of posting and participation that can sustain itself. Social media should ultimately be about establishing a space for a community to flourish, and small communities are just as valid.
For now. Google's motto was "don't be evil" until it wasn't.
> I think the main solace here is that you don't need to be dominant to create a good community.
I'm not so sure. I mean, yes, you can create a "good" community on a small scale. But when the system is geared towards larger entities, those communities are always at risk because they don't have a seat at the table, so to speak.
An example that's relevant recently is these laws about age verification. For small communities, things like age verification requirements can be an existential threat. One crazy person with a vendetta can sue them into oblivion for some technical violation, and unlike the big players, they don't have the resources to fight back. They also don't have the resources to lobby for verification mechanisms that are realistic at a small scale.
When the rules of the game are set by the big players, small players are always at risk of being declared in violation, or just having the rules changed in a way that ensures they can't win. I'm coming to think that small communities are not safe unless large networks are either destroyed or severely restricted in a way that involves ongoing monitoring and enforcement. (I hesitate to use the word "community" for these large networks because I don't think something like Facebook is really a community, although there are communities within it.)
These two seem like the same problem:
> moderation
> spam
You need some way of distinguishing high quality from low quality posts. But we kind of already have that. Make likes public (what else are they even for?). Then show people posts from the people they follow or that the people they follow liked. Have a dislike button so that if you follow someone but always dislike the things they like, your client learns you don't want to see the things they like.
Now you don't see trash unless you follow people who like trash, and then whose fault is that?
> which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl
This is a completely independent problem from spam. It's also something decentralized networks are actually good at. If more devices are requesting some data then there are more sources of it. Let the bots get the data from each other. Track share ratios so high traffic nodes with bad ratios get banned for leeching and it's cheaper for them to get a cloud node somewhere with cheap bandwidth and actually upload than to buy residential proxies to fight bans.
> good faith verification
> posting transparency
It's not clear what these are but they sound like kind of the same thing again and in particular they sound like elements in the authoritarian censorship toolbox which you don't actually need or want once you start showing people the posts they actually want to see instead of a bunch of spam from anons that nobody they follow likes.
Yes. But I see curation more as a 2nd order problems to solve once the bases are taken care of. Moderation focuses on addressing the low quality, while curation makes sure tye high quality posts receive focus.
The tools needed for curation, stuff like filtering, finding similar posts/comments, popularity, following, are different from those needed to moderate, or self moderate (ignore, down voting, reporting). The latter poisons a site before it can really start to curate to its users.
>This is a completely independent problem from spam.
Yeah, thinking more about it, it probably is a distinct category. It simply has a similar result of making a site unable to function.
>It's not clear what these are but they sound like kind of the same thing again
I can clarify. In short, posting transparency focused more on the user and good faith verification focuses more on the content. (I'm also horrible with naming, so I welcome better terms to describe these)
- Posting transparency at this point has one big goal: ensure you know when a human or a bot is posting. But it extends to ensuring there's no impersonation, that there's no abuse of alt accounts, and no voting manipulation.
It can even extend in some domains to making sure e.g. That a person who says they worked at Google actually worked at Google. But this is definitely a step that can overstep privacies.
- good faith verification refers more towards a duty to properly vet and fact check information that is posted. It may include addressing misinformation and hate, or removing non-transparent intimate advice like legal/medical claims without sources or proper licensing. It essentially boils down to making ensuring that "bad but popular" advice doesn't proliferate, as it it ought to do.
>they sound like elements in the authoritarian censorship toolbox which you don't actually need or want once you start showing people the posts they actually want to see
Yes, they are. I think we've seen enough examples of how dangerous "showing people what they actually want to see" can be if left unchecked. And the incentives to keep them up are equally dangerous in an ad-driven platform. Being able to address that naturally requires some more authorian approaches.
That's why "good faith" is an important factor here. Any authoritarian act you introduce can only work on trust, and is easily broken by abuse. If we want incentives to change from "maximizing engagement" to "maximizing quality and community", we need to cull out malicious information.
We already give some authoritarianism by having moderators we trust to remove spam and illegal content, so I don't see it as a giant overstep to make sure they can also do this.
This is effectively the same problem. The feed has a billion posts in it so if you're choosing from even the top half in terms of quality, the bottom decile is nowhere to be seen.
> The latter poisons a site before it can really start to curate to its users.
That's assuming you start off with a fire hose. Suppose you only see someone's posts in your feed if you a) visit their profile or b) someone you follow posted or liked it.
> ensure you know when a human or a bot is posting.
This is not possible and you should not attempt to do things that are known not to be possible.
It doesn't matter what kind of verification you do. Humans can verify an account and then hand it to a bot to post things. Also, alts are good; people should be able to have an account for posting about computers and a different account for posting about cooking or travel or politics.
What you're looking for is a way to rate limit account creation. But on day one you don't need that because your biggest problem is getting more users and by the time it's a problem you have a network effect and can just make them pay a pittance worth of cryptocurrency as a one-time fee if it's still a thing you want to do.
> It can even extend in some domains to making sure e.g. That a person who says they worked at Google actually worked at Google.
This is not a problem that social networks need to solve, but if it was you would just do it the way anybody else does it. If the user wants to know if someone really works for Google they contact the company and ask them, and if the company says no then you tell everybody that and anyone who doesn't believe you can contact the company themselves.
> It may include addressing misinformation and hate, or removing non-transparent intimate advice like legal/medical claims without sources or proper licensing.
If someone does something illegal then you have the government arrest them. If it isn't illegal then it isn't to be censored. There is nothing for a social media thing to be involved in here and the previous attempts to do it were in error.
> It essentially boils down to making ensuring that "bad but popular" advice doesn't proliferate, as it it ought to do.
To the extent that social media does such a thing, it does it exactly as above, i.e. as Reddit communities investigate things. If you want a professional organization dedicated to such things as an occupation, the thing you're trying to do is called investigative reporting, not social media.
> I think we've seen enough examples of how dangerous "showing people what they actually want to see" can be if left unchecked. And the incentives to keep them up are equally dangerous in an ad-driven platform.
No, they're much worse in an ad-driven platform, because then you're trying to maximize the amount of time people spend on the site and showing people rage bait and provocative trolling is an effective way to do that.
What people want to see is like, a feed of fresh coupon codes that actually work, or good recipes for making your own food, or the result of the DIY project their buddy just finished. But showing you that doesn't make corporations the most money, so instead they show you somebody saying something political and provocative about vaccines because it gets people stirred up. Which is not actually what people want to see, which is why they're always complaining about it.
> We already give some authoritarianism by having moderators we trust to remove spam and illegal content, so I don't see it as a giant overstep to make sure they can also do this.
We should take away their ability to actually remove anything, censorship can GFTO, and instead give people a feed that they actually control and can therefore configure to not show that stuff because it is in reality not what they want to see.
Maybe when you get to the scale of Reddit it becomes the same problem. But a fledgling community is more likely to be dealing with dozens of real posts and hundreds of posts of spam. Even then, the solutions differ from the problem spaces, so I'm not so certain.
You can't easily automate a search for "quality", so most popular platforms focus on a mix of engagement and similarities to create a faux quality rating. Spam filtering and removal can be fairly automatic and accurate, as long as there's ways to appeal false negatives (though these days, they may not even care about that).
>This [ ensure you know when a human or a bot is posting.] is not possible and you should not attempt to do things that are known not to be possible.
Like all engineering, I'm not expecting perfection. I'm expecting a good effort at it. Is there anything stopping me from hooking an LLM to my HN account and have it reply to all my comments? No. But I'm sure if I took a naive approach to it that moderation would take note and take action on this account.
my proposal is two fold:
1. have dedicated account types for authorized bots to identify tools and other supportive functions that a community may want performed. They can even have different privileges like being unable to be voted on (or to vote).
2. action taken on very blatant attempts to bot a human account (The threshold being even more blatant than my above example). If account creation isn't free nor easy, a simple suspension or ban can be all that's neede d to cub such behavior.
There will still be abuse, but the kinds of abuse that have caused major controversies over the years are not exactly subtle masterminds. There was simply no incentive to take action once people reported them.
>This is not a problem that social networks need to solve, but if it was you would just do it the way anybody else does
Probably not. That kind of verification is more domain specific and that's an extreme example. Something trying to be Blind and focus on industry professionals might want to do verification, but probably not some casual tech forum.
It was ultimately an example of what transparency suggests here and how it differs from verification. This is another "good enough" example where I'm not expecting every post to be fact checked. We just simply shouldn't allow blatantly false users or content to go about unmoderated.
>What people want to see is like, a feed of fresh coupon codes that actually work, or good recipes for making your own food, or the result of the DIY project their buddy just finished. But showing you that doesn't make corporations the most money, so instead they show you somebody saying something political and provocative about vaccines because it gets people stirred up. Which is not actually what people want to see, which is why they're always complaining about it.
Yes. This is why I don't expect such a solution to be solved by corporations. Outside of the brief flirting with Meta, it's not like any of the biggest players in the game have shown much interest in any of the topics talked about here nor in the article.
But the tools and people needed to make such an initiative doesn't need millions in startup funding. I'm not even certain such a community can be scalable, financially speaking. But communities aren't necessarily formed, ran, and maintained for purely financial reasons. Sometimes you just want to open your own bar and enjoy the people that come in; only caring about enough funds to keep the business running, not attempting to franchise it through the country.
>We should take away their ability to actually remove anything, censorship can GFTO, and instead give people a feed that they actually control and can therefore configure to not show that stuff because it is in reality not what they want to see.
If you want a platform that doesn't remove anything except the outright illegal, I don't think we can really beat 4chan. Nor is anyone trying to beat 4chan (maybe Voat still is, but I haven't look there in years). I think it has that sector of community on lock.
But that aside: any modern community needs to be very opinionated on what it allows and doesn't upfront, in my eyes. Do you want to allow adult content and accept that over half your community's content will be porn? Do you want to take a hard line between adult and non-adult sub-communities? Do you want to minimize flame wars or not tend to comments at all (that aren't breaking the site)? Should sub-communities even be a thing or should all topics of all styles be thrown into a central feed and users get to opt in/out of certain tags? Is it fine for comments to mix in non-sequiturs in certain topics (e.g. Politics in an otherwise non-political post?). These all need to be addressed not necessarily on day one, but well before critical mass is achieved. See Onlyfans as a modern example of that result.
It's not about capital-C "Censorship" when it comes to being opinionated. It's about establishing norms upfront and fostering around those opinions. Those opinions should be shown upfront before a user makes an account so that they know what to expect, or if they shouldn't bother with this community.
Yes, this is a good system. It'll work particularly well at filtering spam because people largely agree what it is. One thing that will happen with your system is people will separate into cliques. But that's not the end of the world. Has anyone implemented Anthony's idea of using followees' likes to rank posts?
Yeah, that's how you create echo-chambers where people truly believe vaccines cause autism, immigrants commit the most crimes, etc.
When these people are inevitably showing at ballot, other people will call for more moderation. So no, this doesn't solve "moderation."
Social media is often seen as a public opinion manipulation machine, but I hope building another one of those is not the goal.
It would let you identify users uniquely, but without revealing too much sensitive information. It would let you verify things like "This user has a Michigan driver's license, and they have an ID 1234, which is unique to my system and not linkable to any other place they use that ID."
If you ban that user, they wouldn't be able to use that ID again with you.
The alternative is that we continue to let unelected private operators like Cloudflare "solve" this problem.
However, if everything is linked to your ID - those that control that will be able to cancel you all at once. A bit like the consequences of being de-banked in an cash-less society.
So if you bring in laws that require digital ID"s they have to be implemented with a very robust set of safeguards in my view.
A simple chronological feed of content from feeds I chose to follow is enough. I do have to take on the challenge of finding new content sources, but at least fore that's a worthwhile tradeoff to not be inundated with spam and to not feel dependent on someone else to moderate what I see.
And how did you discover those feeds in the first place? Or find new ones?
I know people have tried to have a relatively closed mesh-of-trust, but you still need people to moderate new applicants, otherwise you'll never get any new idea of fresh discussion. And if it keeps growing, scale means that group will slowly gather bad actors. Maybe directly by putting up whatever front they need to get into the mesh or existing in-mesh accounts. Maybe existing accounts get hacked. Maybe previously-'good' account-owning people have changed, be it in opinion or situation, to take advantage of their in-mesh position. It feels like a speedrun of the internet itself growing.
Agreed, though when you are your own moderator that really is more about informed consent or free will than moderation. Moderation, at least in my opinion, implies a third party.
> And how did you discover those feeds in the first place? Or find new ones?
The same way I make new friends. Recommendations from those I already trust, or "friend of a friend" type situations. I don't need an outside matchmaker to introduce me to people they think I would be friends with.
Surely an algorithm focused on that would best me, but the only ones out there today are only motivated by selling ad space and data. Its a bit of an unfair fight today since that isn't my goal, but I don't expect anyone to fund a social media platform with similar goals to mine in their algorithm.
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Honestly, that's how things should work. People should simply avoid, block and hide the things they don't like.
If you hit follow and 99% of your feed should be blocked, unfollow them and move on.
That's exactly how a useful social information system works. I choose what I want to follow and see, and there's no gap between what moderation thinks and what I think. Spam gets dealt with the moment I see something spammy (or just about any kind of thing I don't want to see).
This is how Usenet worked: you subscribed to the groups you found interesting and where participants were of sufficient quality. And you further could block individuals whose posts you didn't want to see.
This is how IRC worked: you joined channels that you deemed worth joining. And you could further ignore individuals that you didn't like.
That is how the whole original internet actually worked: you were reading pages and using services that you felt were worth your time.
Ultimately, that's how human relationships work. You hang out with friends you like and who are worth your time, and you ignore people who you don't want to spend your time with, especially assholes.
Your explanation actually proves why USENET doesn't work anymore because that client-side moderation is unusable these days. I was on Usenet in the 1980s before the WorldWideWeb in 1993 and continued up until 2008.
Why did I quit Usenet?!? Because it worked better when the internet was much smaller and consisted of universities federating NNTP servers. But Usenet's design can't handle the massive growth of the internet such as commercial entities being allowed to connect in 1992 and "The Eternal September" of massive users from AOL. Spam gets out of control. Signal-to-noise ratio goes way down. Usenet worked better in a "collegial" atmosphere of a smaller internet where it's mostly good actors. It's fundamental design doesn't work for a big internet full of bad actors.
This is why a lot of us ex-Usenet users are here on a web forum that's moderated instead of a hypothetical "nntp://comp.lang.news.ycombinator" with newsgroup readers. With "https://news.ycombinator.com", I don't need to do extra housekeeping of "killfiles" or wade through a bunch of spam.
Whatever next gen social web gets invented, it cannot work like Usenet for it to be usable.
>Spam gets dealt with the moment I see something spammy
Maybe consider you're unusual with that preference because most of us don't want our eyeballs to even see the spam at all. The system's algorithms should filter it out automatically. We don't want to impose extra digital housekeeping work of "dealing with spam" ourselves.
IP blocks and initial filtering typically make a massive difference in total system load so you can get to the point that the majority of the posts are 'legitimate'. After that bot filtering is needed to remove the more complex attacks against the system.
Since a community requires posting and an access point, spam is pretty much inevitable.
IIRC twitter was originally called a "micro-blogging" platform, and "re-tweeting" and replying to tweets came later. At that point it became social media.
Something like RSS doesn't work for direct messages, but it does still allow for you and I to post to our feeds. Nothing stops it from going a step further and acting much like twitter, we all post to our own site but they can be short messages and they can reference a post on someone else's site as "replying to" or similar.
1. Users are not given a choice (well, accept to leave, and I know many people who have).
2. This is measured on time spent, not user satisfaction.
In practice, we demonstrated that algorithms designed to be addictive are addictive (success?), not that there’s an actual preference.
Contrast this to the “medias” like Threads, Bluesky, etc - moderation becomes impossible just because of the sheer scale of it all. Somehow everyone feels compelled to “correct someone who is wrong” or voice an opinion even when the context does not invite one. This is just a recipe for “perpetual engagement”, not actual platform for social interaction (networking).
Wut ? Moderation at Bluesky is fantastic: users build their block lists and share them for others to subscribe to - moderation à la carte... Power to the users !
My point of sharing this info is that BlueSky is not a user-driven moderation system. It arbitrarily and centrally bans accounts, just like Twitter.
Hopefully, atproto + community will provide alternatives for moderation services. Work is being done on this, we'll see what we end up getting. I feel that a competitive ecosystem of moderation services is probably the best answer we can hope for to that inherently messy problem.
That would change for the better when BlueSky itself only manages legal prohibitions and lets Everything Else be an optional layer.
While the hermetic narrative security would still be there to split people, it would only split by optional layers.
But human or machine, open or closed, moderation will always be biased. Each community will have its culture, and moderation will reflect that.
A community of Nazis will moderate out stuff that many places would welcome. Some communities would moderate anything not cats on Roombas.
HN is one of the best-moderated communities I’ve ever seen, yet, it has its biases. Organic moderation reflects cultural biases. I’m not always happy about what gets put on the chopping block, but I usually can’t argue with it, even if I don’t like it, or am cynical about why it’s nuked. I stick with HN, because, for the most part, I don’t mind what gets moderated. The showdead thing lets me see what gets nuked, but I usually like to leave it off. I’m not really one for gazing into the toilet.
The main thing that an open fediverse can bring, is transparent moderation, so folks will know when stuff is being blocked, and can use that knowledge to decide whether or not to remain in the community, or advocate for change.
Some UX decisions even attempt to "passively moderate" content, which unfortunately also deter some from actively using the platform as they don't get the as much the feel for the "crowd". For example, not showing the amount of "likes" of a post unless you interact with said post goes a long way in preventing mob-like behaviour.
Little stuff like this adds up. But it is hard to sell...
The one principle benefit it has is it provides a resource stream to fund other things - but that's kind of it, because the other assumptions essentially assume there are no monetary thresholds in the system - i.e that spammers and botnets rely on volume and thus can be priced out of the market.
And to an extent it's true - but there's a threshold problem. How many accounts do you need to pay for in order to seize narrative control of a space, or to effect a takeover by seizing positions of power like moderation positions?
People I think like to think "hundreds or thousands" - but at least temporally this is well within reach of motivated threat actors (i.e. consider bot farms which are literally just racks of stripped down actual smart phones being puppeted - that is not a trivial investment), but the other side of it is - it's probably closer to like, 10 relatively active personalities.
What do you mean with "now"? If you've ever been in a competitive industry before, you're already used to the random DDoS, and if you've published a moderately successful website, you've dealt with misbehaving scrapers/user-agents too, like the ones that get stuck and get requesting random 100 URLs per second for weeks.
I'm guessing you're alluding to AI scrapers, but are they really that different from what we've already learnt to deal with on the public internet?
We seem to be facing a similar balance today, only in digital context and on a global scale. Human nature being what it is, no system will ever be perfect. What we can do is build safeguards (structures that empower users and raise the cost of abuse) so that bad actors must find diminishing returns for bad behavior.
It's way easier to censor a decentralized social network if the majority of its nodes run on AWS, GCP and Azure, for instance.
What'd be great is if we could run these networks primarily from our personal devices (i.e. true edge computing), but the more the computing's pushed to the edge the harder it becomes to implement technically and socially.
For this to be long-term sustainable though, it needs to be implemented in such a way that non-tech-savvy folks can also participate very easily, without needing to learn anything about P2P, relays, decentralized or edge computing, etc.
I skimmed this article, I still don't get it. I think group chats cover most of what the author is taking about, public and private ones. But this might be my lack of imagination. I feel there article, and by extension, the talk could have been a lot shorter.
Social media has two functions: chat (within groups/topics/...) and discovery (of groups/topics/...). So unless we rely only on IRL discovery, we need a way to do discovery online.
Once you start algorithmically shoving content to people you have to start worrying about spam, trolling, politics, copyright, and all kinds of issues. The best discovery system is friends sharing chat invite links to other friends who are interested.
The only times on the internet I've felt part of a community was on old web forums.
I used some of those similar web type services for discovery in the past but they became shit fast or shut down. HN is the nearest I can find that surfaces stuff I'm interested in. Social media might have stuff on it but I'm unwilling to waste my time trying to find it
But you're posting here, in socisl media, no? So you sought out something here that a group chat wouldn't give.
Most of the article here is focused more on making sure any social media (be it chats, a public forum, or email) isn't hijacked by vested powers who want to spread propaganda or drown the user in ads. One approach to that focused in this article is decentralization, which gives a user the ability to take their ball and go home.
Of course, it's futile if the user doesn't care about wielding that power.
This is true, of course. I'm here interacting with strangers. But, for me, HN is about discovery not community like what the article talks about. I'd be just as content not posting if the ability wasn't there. I just don't agree that social media is that important.
I personally think what the article talks about is already available in the form of group chats on platforms like signal. My impression, from the article, is the author is extremely politically motivated and seems to believe social media is somehow a good thing, as long as the people they don't like can't control it , and likely can't use it? That last point might not be true.
All of my friends do this on instagram or snap.
I wish this was true. Far too many people mistake the content of social media for some kind of truth.
The site's marketing is geared towards collecting donations in the US$20,000 and up range. That doesn't scale. They don't have viewer counts big enough to make it on payments in the $10/year range. So that doesn't scale either.
The back-end technology of this thing has zero bearing on those problems.
Elgg has ActivityPub plugin now https://elgg.org/plugins/3330966
Why wouldn't a genuinely open social web allow people to communicate content that Ben Werdmuller thinks constitutes white supremacy, just as one can on X? Ideas and opinions that Ben Werdmuller (and people with similar activist politics to him) think constitute white supremacy are very popular among huge segments of the English-speaking public, and if it's even possible for some moderator with politics like Werdmuller to prevent these messages from being promulgated (as was the case at Twitter until Musk bought it in 2022 and fired all the Trust and Safety people with politics similar to Werdmuller's), then it is not meaningfully open. If this is not possible, then would people with Werdmuller's politics still want to use an open social web, rather than a closed social web that lets moderators attempt to suppress content they deem white supremacist?
> As I was writing this talk, an entire apartment building in Chicago was raided. Adults were separated into trucks based on race, regardless of their citizenship status. Children were zip tied to each other.
> And we are at the foothills of this. Every week, it ratchets up. Every week, there’s something new. Every week, there’s a new restrictive social media policy or a news outlet disappears, removing our ability to accurately learn about what’s happening around us.
The reaction to the raid of that apartment building in Chicago on many social media platforms was the specific meme-phrase "this is what I voted for", and indeed Donald Trump openly ran on doing this, and won the US presidential election. What prevents someone from using open social media tech to call for going harder on deportations, or to spread news stories about violent crimes and fraud committed by immigrants? If anything can prevent this, how can the platform be said to be actually open?
You can apply the concepts the author talks about to _literally_ any group that would make use of social media.
>You can apply the concepts the author talks about to _literally_ any group
The presentation could have been modified to avoid alienating people if the author had focused on champinioning how open social media allows for the ability to solve these problems.
>I have no idea what niche political agenda you're talking about
Search the page for "Why should anyone care?", and you'll see it. Thos section of the talk he complains that the political situation of America doesn't match his views. Then in the next section, "The capitulation of social media", he complains about how other social media sites don't match his politics. Then in the next section, "The decline of journalism", the talker tries to argue his political opinion that journalists are a good thing. Then in the next section, "The problem is global", he explains that more places than just America don't share his political view.
I'll stop here, but it goes on further, even to the very last sentence. I thought this was supposed to be a technology keynote, but this talker turned it into a place for him to complain about the political situation of the world.
Here’s Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, owner of LinkedIn, who contributed a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund.
Here’s Mark Zuckerberg, who owns Threads, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, who said that he feels optimistic about the new administration’s agenda.
And here’s Larry Ellison, who will control TikTok in the US, who was a major investor in Trump, and who one advisor called, in a WIRED interview, the shadow President of the United States.
Social media is very quickly becoming aligned with a state that in itself is becoming increasingly authoritarian. ---
This was the real why. When control amasses to the few we end up in a place where there is a dissonance between what we perceive to be true and what is actually true. The voice of the dictator will say one thing but the people's lived experience will say something else. I don't think mastodon or Bluesky or even Jack Dorsey's new project Bitchat solves any of this. It goes much deeper. It is ideological. It is values driven. The outcome is ultimately decided by the motives of the people who start it or run it. I just don't think any western driven values can be the basis of a new platform because a large majority of the world are not from the west. For better or worse, you have the platforms of the west. They are US centric and they will dominate. Anything grassroots and fundamentally opposed to that will not come from the west. It must come authentically from those who need it.
Did this guy complain back when pre-Musk Twitter was fully in bed with the state? Or was he okay with it because that authoritarian relationship was on the right side of history?
cue links to the nothing burger that is "Twitter Files" lol
Social media can't be saved, it can only be revolutionary as a development arena for a new form of language.
"The subject of integration was socialization; the subject of coordination was communication. Both were part of the theme of control...Cybernetics dispensed with the need for biological organisms, it as the parent to cognitive science, where the social is theorized strictly in terms of the exchange of information. Receivers, senses of signs need to be known in terms of channels, capacities, error rates, frequencies and so forth." Haraway Primate Visions.
I don't understand how technologists and coders can be this naive to the ramifications of electronically externalizing signals which start as arbitrary in person, and then clearly spiral out of control once accelerated and cut-off from the initial conditions.
Once language became a strategy of cybernetic and then cog-sci regimes (which is what all computer science is modeled from), the basic principle of control-deception in language became electronic through its perceptions of socialization, which comp sci totally mistakes as information (see above) and then control, accelerated and now automated. The entire point of computer science operating socialization is completely off the rails mindblowingly simple-minded and damaging to us. Algorithms a/b tested to succeed are in essence, suicidal to the survival of our species. We're not optimized to horizontalize communication of this type: arbitrary metaphors and symbols. Language wasn't built for speed, horizontalization or decentralization.
Now read the above again. To call Donna Haraway the great theorist/historian of cyborg studies and the development of science into cog science pseudo in any way reveals you have never grasped anything deep and resonant about human computer interaction.
It seems you can't explain your ideas clearly. Maybe they just aren't clear ideas.
That language is deception primarily can be factual along with 99% of its users remaining unable to detect that deception, and it's not even fully contradictory. What kind of scientist can't hold near contradictory processes in their working memory to reach correlational theoretic statements, certainly none that I know.
If you don't know the animal world of signals heavily discounts arbitrary forms from roles in survival, I don't know what to tell you. Go back to undergrad and start all over again.
The amount of work about language being too indirect to be valid, stable signals and thus deceptive is rather vast, and you pretending it will vanish with that little narrative shuffle "peoplw will ignore it" means you must be either doubly moronic, have no idea about the human capacity for self-deception in signals, mythological thought, or spend your days playing defensive games in debates you just can't win.
I count over 300 papers discussing the deceptive nature of language, beginning with Aristotle.
..at some point a direct contact must occur between knowledge and reality. If we succeed in freeing ourselves from all these interpretations – if we above all succeed in removing the veil of words, which conceals the truth, the true essence of things, then at one stroke we shall find ourselves face to face with the original perceptions.. Ernst Cassirer The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms