8 ms·

The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is how we take it back

88 points by okket 9y ago

whataretensors 9y ago
As with media today, they don't get the problem right and have terrible solutions ready. The real way forward is decentralization. We need to remove the authoritarian's 30-50% cut from everything.
nipponese 9y ago
FTA... Thanks to social media, the internet had apparently decentralised power. In the old days, information was passed down from the mountain top – by a government, say, or a news organisation – to the crowd below. Now the crowd could speak to each other and to the world. At least one aspect of the techno-utopians’ early hopes seemed to have materialised. And it’s that hope that Cambridge Analytica has shattered. For what we now understand is that those at the top, the political parties or governments that could afford it, have been engaged in a radical act of recentralising power. They saw the way social media was working, empowering individuals and networks of individuals, and they decided to grab those same weapons for themselves. I find it hard to swallow this piece since the data was collected before "any of the early hopes seemed to have materialised". If social media is responsible for negatively impacting a US foreign policy adversary, that's no fluke. The only difference between pre-CA and now is Trump.
- racer-v 9y ago
  > And it’s that hope that Cambridge Analytica has shattered. Seems more accurate to say, that hope was shattered when people gave up on decentralized infrastructure like RSS and email in favor of Facebook's walled garden. Now there's an opportunity to go back (to the future!) and do it right.
  - mikekchar 9y ago
    I know this seems completely naive (and it probably is), but the internet was awesome before the endless summer. What's the main difference between then and now? It seems to me that we've spent a lot of time making the internet accessible to the masses and now we're complaining that the masses are controlling the shape of the internet. It might go beyond the ethos of HN, but I honestly wonder how much we should consider arguments like, "Normal people won't be able to use it" and "You won't be able to build a business on that because only a tiny fraction of people would want to use it". I often think about PGP/GPG (and especially web of trust) that way. I know it's useful to me and I know that the people I want to use it with are more than capable. But they decline. RSS is an even better example. Why are we not building RSS tools? Why are we not building a brand around blog posts, FAQs, etc that contain RSS? Why is it not the "secret password" that opens the gate to the "good content that's not being gamed for the masses"?
    - racer-v 9y ago
      I would love to see some tools for decentralized mass moderation of RSS feeds.
    - extra88 9y ago
      > endless summer Do you mean the eternal September [0]? Going back to the Internet being only for governments and universities is a bad idea, a bad thing to want. I think the complaint at the moment is not the that masses are controlling the shape of the Internet but that a few corporations are both directly shaping it and, intentionally or not, shaping the masses. RSS could maybe make a comeback. Podcasts are RSS and are more popular than ever. Subscribing to YouTube channels, following people on Twitter, these are actions people understand and do, it could be extended, "hey, why not use this thing that lets you subscribe and follow your favorite stuff not on individual web sites but everywhere?" The problem is, it makes it harder to make money off those eyeballs than to keep them in your walled garden. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
      - racer-v 9y ago
        There's a tendency for too much money to ruin things. I agree that excluding all non-government and non-university participants from the Internet would be a bad thing. But there were some wonderful qualities to the Internet in the days before mass commercialization, and it's not a bad thing to want those qualities back.
adventured 9y ago
Yeah, the Web was so much better before Google made search and email radically better. Just loved that Excite search and Hotmail in 2001 where I could store dozens of photos in my couple of megabytes. It was better before Wikipedia (a legitimate giant) existed and Google sent them vast traffic to help them build out their service. It was better before Yahoo gave me access to free, rapidly updated stock quotes. It was better before Netflix carved up the old TV content monopolies. Those awesome days when old media held me entirely hostage. It was better when classified ads were spread across the entire country in localized newspapers and you couldn't easily access them in a centralized giant service like Craigslist. It was better when real estate pricing and information was a black book. It was better before Spotify, Pandora, Apple, Amazon, YouTube gave me easy, low cost access to all the music I could ever possibly consume. It was better before Amazon made shopping online easy, with a vast selection, relatively inexpensive for shipping, and very consumer friendly customer service. It was better before I could easily and inexpensively send money to other people using PayPal or Venmo or 37 other solutions. It was better before I could take ten minutes, plug in a few things, and accept payments via Stripe or Square. It was better when I had to use a janky static Mapquest, or spend money on cumbersome physical maps just so I could navigate a new city. Back in those amazing days when hunting for stores or locations was so much fun. It was better when I had to go through hell to operate my own hosted infrastructure. This whole insta-infrastructure AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Linode, stuff must stop. And who the hell wants a free CDN, down with Cloudflare! Those old glorious days.
- lend000 9y ago
  If you're in the business of collecting HN upvotes, you had best subscribe to the hive-mind. The very existence of this article and its prominence on a news aggregator site refutes it.
- hugh4life 9y ago
  I largely agree with you but I think there needs to be some balance here. The fact remains that twitter, facebook, and google make many subtle decisions to store up content in silos and to get people to click on their ads. IMO, the internet was in many ways better around 2006-2010. I liked the web better when there was google reader, a google blogsearch, and google forum/discussion search and not everything was completely centered on twitter and facebook.
judah 9y ago
What a bunch of populist clap trap. The people owned the web, but tech giants stole it? Please. Tech giants gave people what they wanted. Google, Facebook, Amazon: they gave people what they wanted and are compensated richly for that.
- darawk 9y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Not to mention the fact that you're still perfectly able to do all the things that you've always been able to do. Anyone can still put up a website whenever they want. Now they just feel entitled to all the views and ad revenue that the big platforms will drive to them.
  - gregknicholson 9y ago
    You know how in the 1980s everything was corporate suits and shiny expensive PDAs and that was fashionable, and then in the 1990s grunge happened? Well, maybe the 2020s will look like Neocities.
    - bfuller 9y ago
      seems like we are in the age of bearded grunge kids wearing flannel holding expensive "PDA" equivalents
- cma 9y ago
  They disproportionately capture people's network effect value and sell it back to them.
- loggedinmyphone 9y ago
  A better headline might be, the thing everyone thought they wanted is now an obviously terrible idea.
  - SlowRobotAhead 9y ago
    >the thing everyone thought they wanted I’m a really firm believer in this. The Henry Ford quote is the most succinct way to describe it I’ve ever seen, but the topic of “miswanting” is dear to me.
lupinglade 9y ago
The problem is that a lot of people are relying too much on Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/etc and not contributing to the web in other more direct ways.
marcus_holmes 9y ago
I missed the bit about how we take it back... ?
- koonsolo 9y ago
  With standards and open source. Email is great because there is no vendor lock in. Open source is great because large groups of people can decide to fork it (or even inividuals). The blockchain tech now opened a lot of applications that could rival these current tech giants. Just 1 example: OpenBazaar received 3 million dollar investment. I'm curious what these kind of web 3.0 techs will change.
  - marcus_holmes 9y ago
    Nothing. They will change nothing. The illusion that "no-one is in control" of blockchain applications is going to meet the brick wall of regulatory reality pretty hard.
    - koonsolo 9y ago
      You mean the same like the regulatory of copyrighted material on BitTorrent? Can't wait. BitTorrent is indeed another nice example of what I meant.
      - marcus_holmes 9y ago
        In which case, yes, you're absolutely right. Open-source protocols could possibly change the situation. But that's got exactly zero in common with funded organisations making applications using the blockchain. You can't monetise what you don't control.
        koonsolo 9y ago
        The example that I gave (OpenBazaar) is not an organization making application using the blockchain. That's like saying Bitcoin is such an organization. Yes, they got 3 mil for developing their open source platform further, which in my opinion, is mind blowing. Especially since they don't have any clear plans on how to make revenue out of this. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar
bcoughlan 9y ago
Can anyone explain to me what part of the Cambridge Analytica / Facebook thing is news? We've known for years that tech companies have made their money off collecting data, profiling users and selling access to the users and their profiles. The general public never cared before. They signed in with Facebook around the web, knowingly gave the app permissions to read their personal data, and agreed to give third party apps access to that information. People are not stupid. They traded privacy for convenience. Why act dumbfounded now? Why blame Facebook instead of ourselves?
- avoidit 9y ago
  Maybe we are agreeing, but we humans don't have sufficient cognitive resources to extrapolate every little action we take into the future and predict new things technology can enable. Our brains are always looking for shortcuts ("do what the crowd does, because there must be at least some wisdom in it"). We also have the reasonable expectation that the companies will not turn our own cognitive limitations against us (such as Nir Eyal's "Hooked" encourages), nor do we know all the tools at their disposal if they so wish, and we probably never expected that these tools could be automated. In other words, a person who is taking all the necessary steps and doing everything right in terms of the privacy of their digital footprint, is either off the grid, or is likely considered a tin foil conspiracy theorist by peers. Human survival instinct usually overrides such thoughtfulness.
- Angostura 9y ago
  Every time stories of this kind come up, you can’t pretty much know that the top comment will be from a privacy-savvy commenter asking ‘why is it news?’ Why is it news to you that a large proportion of the population aren’t privacy savvy? The same people who are worried about Facebook are still fine giving WhatsApp unfettered access to all the contacts on their phone, so it knows who their bank, dentist, and employer is. Go figure.
  - JBlue42 9y ago
    Or have to be told that even though '123' as a password is 'easier' for them, that no, it's really not a good idea. As to FB, if you were there in the beginning, you can definitely watch the scope creep: Some of us hopped on Facebook in college when it expanded from Harvard to other schools (02? 03?) and it was a completely different beast. You could add friends or people from your classes, send messages, connect with that cute girl in your class (because you could search by classes), personalize it with quotes and photos, etc. It was basically a cleaner MySpace. As it expanded, I used it as a personal address book to keep track of folks I met while abroad and could see what they're up to. Over time though, it really changed, was less useful, and I honestly had no reason to go on it except for once a year when people would chime in with a happy birthday and I would catch up with them. I'm much more worried about how integrated Google is into my life or the flashes of guilt when I order something from Amazon, which used to book that quirky bookseller with a poorly-designed website that had free shipping (5-10 days) but is now a behemoth that sells everything on a poorly-designed website that has different tiers of shipping which might be leading to abusive practices of its workers.
wonton2 9y ago
Thech giants never stole the web. Governments have just failed to regulate them or failed to see the power they get with their currently vast scale. They need laws and a set of ethical rules people will leave them for breaking.
- loggedinmyphone 9y ago
  What did Facebook do that should be illegal?
  - patkai 9y ago
    Already four years ago they ran experiments [1] on how to program your mood. They built an API to your emotions, and they started selling it, without you knowing it. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
    - loggedinmyphone 9y ago
      Are you proposing a law against trying to manipulate people's moods?
      - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
        You mean a law against non-consensual psychological experiments? Yes.
        loggedinmyphone 9y ago
        Sounds dodgy. If I give you a free refill to see how you react, I go to jail?
        skinnymuch 9y ago
        That’s incredibly broad. Seems over the top.
lifeisstillgood 9y ago
The people own the web, in the same way we, the people, own the real world. all cambridge analytica and every retargetting ad firm does is to try and trick that power into mistakenly choosing against the powers own interest - but that has always been true, and the old solutions, of free press, free association and education are still the solutions. where those rights are enshrined in the real world we will triumph, where they are not we will have to fight a bit harder. I recognise the value of articles like this in highlighting the problem, but it's not hopeless, it's actually the opposite - the web is awesome, and now we get to keep the awesome, and clean up the problems ready for next time.
marknadal 9y ago
Yeah, I missed the "how we take it back" part. This is a pretty poor article that is largely the author's political complaint and rant being twisted into the slightly relevant click bait title that is trending right now. If you actually want to take the internet back, join SSB or build a decentralized web like with https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-with-e2e-encryption-f90505b2ff8 https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi... .
- loggedinmyphone 9y ago
  The author's suggestions are fairly ridiculous. It's as if he can't fathom the idea people could use something other than Facebook. Quote: It could be regulation; it could be anti-trust legislation to break up those tech giants that act as virtual monopolies. I like Derakhshan’s idea of obliging Facebook and others to open up a marketplace of algorithms: if you don’t like the current social media preference for popularity (retweets) and novelty (“latest”), you should be free to choose a different algorithm that acts on different values.
Yetanfou 9y ago
Nobody "stole" the web as such, what they did was lure in the sheep to the herd like what happened in "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" [1]. The web grew, both in number of users as well as in size, from Geocities (also centralised, grew annoying habits like adding advertising to users' pages) through Myspace to the current Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat/Tumblr/etc. concoction. I consider these to be growing pains, as long as there are no China-like restrictions on actual internet connections the web - or what follows after it - will find a way to grow past this stage. The real problems will start when the censorship and leaching of data is moved to the entry points for the 'net, i.e. the internet access providers. The only way around such an obstacle would be some form of "darknet", either a "virtual" infrastructure on top of the physical one offered by the 'net or something which bypasses it altogether. We're not there yet but it doesn't take that much thought to realise that once some form of self-hosting takes off - with more and more fibre-connected users this becomes a viable proposition - those who call for censorship will not be satisfied much longer when they see the efficacy of their filters dwindle. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin
aembleton 9y ago
He could have recommended Privacy Badger [1] so that his readers can block all of the data that The Guardian sends to Facebook and Google about which articles they are reading. 1. https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

88 points by okket 9y ago

As with media today, they don't get the problem right and have terrible solutions ready. The real way forward is decentralization. We need to remove the authoritarian's 30-50% cut from everything.

nipponese 9y ago

FTA... Thanks to social media, the internet had apparently decentralised power. In the old days, information was passed down from the mountain top – by a government, say, or a news organisation – to the crowd below. Now the crowd could speak to each other and to the world. At least one aspect of the techno-utopians’ early hopes seemed to have materialised. And it’s that hope that Cambridge Analytica has shattered. For what we now understand is that those at the top, the political parties or governments that could afford it, have been engaged in a radical act of recentralising power. They saw the way social media was working, empowering individuals and networks of individuals, and they decided to grab those same weapons for themselves. I find it hard to swallow this piece since the data was collected before "any of the early hopes seemed to have materialised". If social media is responsible for negatively impacting a US foreign policy adversary, that's no fluke. The only difference between pre-CA and now is Trump.

racer-v 9y ago
> And it’s that hope that Cambridge Analytica has shattered. Seems more accurate to say, that hope was shattered when people gave up on decentralized infrastructure like RSS and email in favor of Facebook's walled garden. Now there's an opportunity to go back (to the future!) and do it right.
- mikekchar 9y ago
  I know this seems completely naive (and it probably is), but the internet was awesome before the endless summer. What's the main difference between then and now? It seems to me that we've spent a lot of time making the internet accessible to the masses and now we're complaining that the masses are controlling the shape of the internet. It might go beyond the ethos of HN, but I honestly wonder how much we should consider arguments like, "Normal people won't be able to use it" and "You won't be able to build a business on that because only a tiny fraction of people would want to use it". I often think about PGP/GPG (and especially web of trust) that way. I know it's useful to me and I know that the people I want to use it with are more than capable. But they decline. RSS is an even better example. Why are we not building RSS tools? Why are we not building a brand around blog posts, FAQs, etc that contain RSS? Why is it not the "secret password" that opens the gate to the "good content that's not being gamed for the masses"?
  - racer-v 9y ago
    I would love to see some tools for decentralized mass moderation of RSS feeds.
  - extra88 9y ago
    > endless summer Do you mean the eternal September [0]? Going back to the Internet being only for governments and universities is a bad idea, a bad thing to want. I think the complaint at the moment is not the that masses are controlling the shape of the Internet but that a few corporations are both directly shaping it and, intentionally or not, shaping the masses. RSS could maybe make a comeback. Podcasts are RSS and are more popular than ever. Subscribing to YouTube channels, following people on Twitter, these are actions people understand and do, it could be extended, "hey, why not use this thing that lets you subscribe and follow your favorite stuff not on individual web sites but everywhere?" The problem is, it makes it harder to make money off those eyeballs than to keep them in your walled garden. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
    - racer-v 9y ago
      There's a tendency for too much money to ruin things. I agree that excluding all non-government and non-university participants from the Internet would be a bad thing. But there were some wonderful qualities to the Internet in the days before mass commercialization, and it's not a bad thing to want those qualities back.

adventured 9y ago

Yeah, the Web was so much better before Google made search and email radically better. Just loved that Excite search and Hotmail in 2001 where I could store dozens of photos in my couple of megabytes. It was better before Wikipedia (a legitimate giant) existed and Google sent them vast traffic to help them build out their service. It was better before Yahoo gave me access to free, rapidly updated stock quotes. It was better before Netflix carved up the old TV content monopolies. Those awesome days when old media held me entirely hostage. It was better when classified ads were spread across the entire country in localized newspapers and you couldn't easily access them in a centralized giant service like Craigslist. It was better when real estate pricing and information was a black book. It was better before Spotify, Pandora, Apple, Amazon, YouTube gave me easy, low cost access to all the music I could ever possibly consume. It was better before Amazon made shopping online easy, with a vast selection, relatively inexpensive for shipping, and very consumer friendly customer service. It was better before I could easily and inexpensively send money to other people using PayPal or Venmo or 37 other solutions. It was better before I could take ten minutes, plug in a few things, and accept payments via Stripe or Square. It was better when I had to use a janky static Mapquest, or spend money on cumbersome physical maps just so I could navigate a new city. Back in those amazing days when hunting for stores or locations was so much fun. It was better when I had to go through hell to operate my own hosted infrastructure. This whole insta-infrastructure AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Linode, stuff must stop. And who the hell wants a free CDN, down with Cloudflare! Those old glorious days.

lend000 9y ago
If you're in the business of collecting HN upvotes, you had best subscribe to the hive-mind. The very existence of this article and its prominence on a news aggregator site refutes it.
hugh4life 9y ago
I largely agree with you but I think there needs to be some balance here. The fact remains that twitter, facebook, and google make many subtle decisions to store up content in silos and to get people to click on their ads. IMO, the internet was in many ways better around 2006-2010. I liked the web better when there was google reader, a google blogsearch, and google forum/discussion search and not everything was completely centered on twitter and facebook.

judah 9y ago

What a bunch of populist clap trap. The people owned the web, but tech giants stole it? Please. Tech giants gave people what they wanted. Google, Facebook, Amazon: they gave people what they wanted and are compensated richly for that.

darawk 9y ago
Couldn't agree more. Not to mention the fact that you're still perfectly able to do all the things that you've always been able to do. Anyone can still put up a website whenever they want. Now they just feel entitled to all the views and ad revenue that the big platforms will drive to them.
- gregknicholson 9y ago
  You know how in the 1980s everything was corporate suits and shiny expensive PDAs and that was fashionable, and then in the 1990s grunge happened? Well, maybe the 2020s will look like Neocities.
  - bfuller 9y ago
    seems like we are in the age of bearded grunge kids wearing flannel holding expensive "PDA" equivalents
cma 9y ago
They disproportionately capture people's network effect value and sell it back to them.
loggedinmyphone 9y ago
A better headline might be, the thing everyone thought they wanted is now an obviously terrible idea.
- SlowRobotAhead 9y ago
  >the thing everyone thought they wanted I’m a really firm believer in this. The Henry Ford quote is the most succinct way to describe it I’ve ever seen, but the topic of “miswanting” is dear to me.

lupinglade 9y ago

The problem is that a lot of people are relying too much on Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/etc and not contributing to the web in other more direct ways.

marcus_holmes 9y ago

I missed the bit about how we take it back... ?

koonsolo 9y ago
With standards and open source. Email is great because there is no vendor lock in. Open source is great because large groups of people can decide to fork it (or even inividuals). The blockchain tech now opened a lot of applications that could rival these current tech giants. Just 1 example: OpenBazaar received 3 million dollar investment. I'm curious what these kind of web 3.0 techs will change.
- marcus_holmes 9y ago
  Nothing. They will change nothing. The illusion that "no-one is in control" of blockchain applications is going to meet the brick wall of regulatory reality pretty hard.
  - koonsolo 9y ago
    You mean the same like the regulatory of copyrighted material on BitTorrent? Can't wait. BitTorrent is indeed another nice example of what I meant.
    - marcus_holmes 9y ago
      In which case, yes, you're absolutely right. Open-source protocols could possibly change the situation. But that's got exactly zero in common with funded organisations making applications using the blockchain. You can't monetise what you don't control.
      - koonsolo 9y ago
        The example that I gave (OpenBazaar) is not an organization making application using the blockchain. That's like saying Bitcoin is such an organization. Yes, they got 3 mil for developing their open source platform further, which in my opinion, is mind blowing. Especially since they don't have any clear plans on how to make revenue out of this. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBazaar

bcoughlan 9y ago

Can anyone explain to me what part of the Cambridge Analytica / Facebook thing is news? We've known for years that tech companies have made their money off collecting data, profiling users and selling access to the users and their profiles. The general public never cared before. They signed in with Facebook around the web, knowingly gave the app permissions to read their personal data, and agreed to give third party apps access to that information. People are not stupid. They traded privacy for convenience. Why act dumbfounded now? Why blame Facebook instead of ourselves?

avoidit 9y ago
Maybe we are agreeing, but we humans don't have sufficient cognitive resources to extrapolate every little action we take into the future and predict new things technology can enable. Our brains are always looking for shortcuts ("do what the crowd does, because there must be at least some wisdom in it"). We also have the reasonable expectation that the companies will not turn our own cognitive limitations against us (such as Nir Eyal's "Hooked" encourages), nor do we know all the tools at their disposal if they so wish, and we probably never expected that these tools could be automated. In other words, a person who is taking all the necessary steps and doing everything right in terms of the privacy of their digital footprint, is either off the grid, or is likely considered a tin foil conspiracy theorist by peers. Human survival instinct usually overrides such thoughtfulness.
Angostura 9y ago
Every time stories of this kind come up, you can’t pretty much know that the top comment will be from a privacy-savvy commenter asking ‘why is it news?’ Why is it news to you that a large proportion of the population aren’t privacy savvy? The same people who are worried about Facebook are still fine giving WhatsApp unfettered access to all the contacts on their phone, so it knows who their bank, dentist, and employer is. Go figure.
- JBlue42 9y ago
  Or have to be told that even though '123' as a password is 'easier' for them, that no, it's really not a good idea. As to FB, if you were there in the beginning, you can definitely watch the scope creep: Some of us hopped on Facebook in college when it expanded from Harvard to other schools (02? 03?) and it was a completely different beast. You could add friends or people from your classes, send messages, connect with that cute girl in your class (because you could search by classes), personalize it with quotes and photos, etc. It was basically a cleaner MySpace. As it expanded, I used it as a personal address book to keep track of folks I met while abroad and could see what they're up to. Over time though, it really changed, was less useful, and I honestly had no reason to go on it except for once a year when people would chime in with a happy birthday and I would catch up with them. I'm much more worried about how integrated Google is into my life or the flashes of guilt when I order something from Amazon, which used to book that quirky bookseller with a poorly-designed website that had free shipping (5-10 days) but is now a behemoth that sells everything on a poorly-designed website that has different tiers of shipping which might be leading to abusive practices of its workers.

wonton2 9y ago

Thech giants never stole the web. Governments have just failed to regulate them or failed to see the power they get with their currently vast scale. They need laws and a set of ethical rules people will leave them for breaking.

loggedinmyphone 9y ago
What did Facebook do that should be illegal?
- patkai 9y ago
  Already four years ago they ran experiments [1] on how to program your mood. They built an API to your emotions, and they started selling it, without you knowing it. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
  - loggedinmyphone 9y ago
    Are you proposing a law against trying to manipulate people's moods?
    - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
      You mean a law against non-consensual psychological experiments? Yes.
      - loggedinmyphone 9y ago
        Sounds dodgy. If I give you a free refill to see how you react, I go to jail?
      - skinnymuch 9y ago
        That’s incredibly broad. Seems over the top.

lifeisstillgood 9y ago

The people own the web, in the same way we, the people, own the real world. all cambridge analytica and every retargetting ad firm does is to try and trick that power into mistakenly choosing against the powers own interest - but that has always been true, and the old solutions, of free press, free association and education are still the solutions. where those rights are enshrined in the real world we will triumph, where they are not we will have to fight a bit harder. I recognise the value of articles like this in highlighting the problem, but it's not hopeless, it's actually the opposite - the web is awesome, and now we get to keep the awesome, and clean up the problems ready for next time.

marknadal 9y ago

Yeah, I missed the "how we take it back" part. This is a pretty poor article that is largely the author's political complaint and rant being twisted into the slightly relevant click bait title that is trending right now. If you actually want to take the internet back, join SSB or build a decentralized web like with https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-with-e2e-encryption-f90505b2ff8 https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi... .

loggedinmyphone 9y ago
The author's suggestions are fairly ridiculous. It's as if he can't fathom the idea people could use something other than Facebook. Quote: It could be regulation; it could be anti-trust legislation to break up those tech giants that act as virtual monopolies. I like Derakhshan’s idea of obliging Facebook and others to open up a marketplace of algorithms: if you don’t like the current social media preference for popularity (retweets) and novelty (“latest”), you should be free to choose a different algorithm that acts on different values.

Yetanfou 9y ago

Nobody "stole" the web as such, what they did was lure in the sheep to the herd like what happened in "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" [1]. The web grew, both in number of users as well as in size, from Geocities (also centralised, grew annoying habits like adding advertising to users' pages) through Myspace to the current Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat/Tumblr/etc. concoction. I consider these to be growing pains, as long as there are no China-like restrictions on actual internet connections the web - or what follows after it - will find a way to grow past this stage. The real problems will start when the censorship and leaching of data is moved to the entry points for the 'net, i.e. the internet access providers. The only way around such an obstacle would be some form of "darknet", either a "virtual" infrastructure on top of the physical one offered by the 'net or something which bypasses it altogether. We're not there yet but it doesn't take that much thought to realise that once some form of self-hosting takes off - with more and more fibre-connected users this becomes a viable proposition - those who call for censorship will not be satisfied much longer when they see the efficacy of their filters dwindle. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin

aembleton 9y ago

He could have recommended Privacy Badger [1] so that his readers can block all of the data that The Guardian sends to Facebook and Google about which articles they are reading. 1. https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger