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I am not arguing or ignoring anything. I'm expressing confusion by the lack of continuity in the full quote. Edit: I am now banned from replying to comments on

I am not arguing or ignoring anything. I'm expressing confusion by the lack of continuity in the full quote. Edit: I am now banned from replying to comments on HN again. Probably because of the enormous wave of downvotes that follows me everywhere. I don't understand why HN thinks it is better for me to reply like this than in the now-banned reply box below. Oh well, here is my response to the comment below. > He is saying that ideally self-regulation is best, but here and now we need regulation because we messed up self regulation. Ookay, but to me, that says that self-regulation was never going to work, and we should just admit it and move on. We should have had regulation on social media from the beginning. We didn't "mess up" self-regulation. Self-regulation in a hyper-capitalist environment is obviously going to fail. It has been shown time and time again, every day, that corporations will be selfish and do everything they can, legally or not, especially exploiting new dubious legal territory, to extract cash in the short term using dubiously moral and legal methods no matter what. Corporations should be regulation and it's insane that Tim Cook is just saying "ahhh ooops they messed up, guess it wouldn't work out that way, too bad" but it has always been that way. There was never a world in which Facebook was going to "self-regulate".

danlevine 9y ago
He is saying that ideally self-regulation is best, but here and now we need regulation because we messed up self regulation.
matthewmacleod 9y ago
Chill out there - you’re not banned from replying, but the HN site imposes a steady increasing delay on comment replies as the thread gets deeper, primarily to avoid rapid back-and-forth flamewars. To your specific point: I don’t think it’s contradictory, and I tend to agree with Tim Cook. We should assume that markets are unregulated by default; the job of government is to step in when there is a problem or imbalance and use regulation to correct it. I would argue that this is almost bound to happen by definition, purely because the emergence of any new market is into a society that doesn’t regulate it. You say that we “should have had regulation on social media from the beginning” - but what was the beginning? What is it that defines social media versus “traditional” media? Was Isenet social media? Web forums? MySpace? It’s difficult, in most cases, to preemptively regulate a market. We’ve moved quite quickly with self-driving cars, but there the dangers are much more obvious and easily understood. The implications and danger of social media are harder to understand. What would regulation look like? Is the concern the treatment of personal data? The tracking of behaviour itself? The manipulation of users? The point is, I think it’s more complex than “obviously it should have always been regulated”.
- cryptoz 9y ago
  > Chill out there - you’re not banned from replying, but the HN site imposes a steady increasing delay on comment replies as the thread gets deeper, primarily to avoid rapid back-and-forth flamewars. No, you are incorrect. I am/was banned from top-level comments too. This comment turns out to have gone through. I think it is time-based. I don't know how it works. But daily I get banned from making submissions and comments across the site. > We should assume that markets are unregulated by default; the job of government is to step in when there is a problem or imbalance and use regulation to correct it. This sounds extremely dangerous, and always allows for large-scale actors to break society's expectations of their good behavior every single day. Society can't function by just trusting huge megacorps to play nice every day. They need to be regulated from the day they start work, not a decade and a half later after so much damage is already caused. > We’ve moved quite quickly with self-driving cars, but there the dangers are much more obvious and easily understood. I don't agree with this. In the 90's all the adults in the world were telling kids about the dangers of being online with your real name and all the scary abuse that could come with that. What happened is that the adults forgot this advice. It was already known and it was not a surprise when it happened. > The point is, I think it’s more complex than “obviously it should have always been regulated”. No, I don't think it is. Regulation is simple and useful.
  - matthewmacleod 9y ago
    You seem to have hand-waved away the main point I made - I don’t think that regulation is simple at all. “They need to be regulated from the day they start work” - what does that even mean? Even if we accept that strong regulation is required - what are you actually proposing we regulate? You say it’s simple - so what is it?
cko 9y ago
> Probably because of the enormous wave of downvotes that follows me everywhere. But look on the bright side: you have way more karma than me, and only one of my comments has been in the grey, ever.

danlevine 9y ago

He is saying that ideally self-regulation is best, but here and now we need regulation because we messed up self regulation.

matthewmacleod 9y ago

Chill out there - you’re not banned from replying, but the HN site imposes a steady increasing delay on comment replies as the thread gets deeper, primarily to avoid rapid back-and-forth flamewars. To your specific point: I don’t think it’s contradictory, and I tend to agree with Tim Cook. We should assume that markets are unregulated by default; the job of government is to step in when there is a problem or imbalance and use regulation to correct it. I would argue that this is almost bound to happen by definition, purely because the emergence of any new market is into a society that doesn’t regulate it. You say that we “should have had regulation on social media from the beginning” - but what was the beginning? What is it that defines social media versus “traditional” media? Was Isenet social media? Web forums? MySpace? It’s difficult, in most cases, to preemptively regulate a market. We’ve moved quite quickly with self-driving cars, but there the dangers are much more obvious and easily understood. The implications and danger of social media are harder to understand. What would regulation look like? Is the concern the treatment of personal data? The tracking of behaviour itself? The manipulation of users? The point is, I think it’s more complex than “obviously it should have always been regulated”.

cryptoz 9y ago
> Chill out there - you’re not banned from replying, but the HN site imposes a steady increasing delay on comment replies as the thread gets deeper, primarily to avoid rapid back-and-forth flamewars. No, you are incorrect. I am/was banned from top-level comments too. This comment turns out to have gone through. I think it is time-based. I don't know how it works. But daily I get banned from making submissions and comments across the site. > We should assume that markets are unregulated by default; the job of government is to step in when there is a problem or imbalance and use regulation to correct it. This sounds extremely dangerous, and always allows for large-scale actors to break society's expectations of their good behavior every single day. Society can't function by just trusting huge megacorps to play nice every day. They need to be regulated from the day they start work, not a decade and a half later after so much damage is already caused. > We’ve moved quite quickly with self-driving cars, but there the dangers are much more obvious and easily understood. I don't agree with this. In the 90's all the adults in the world were telling kids about the dangers of being online with your real name and all the scary abuse that could come with that. What happened is that the adults forgot this advice. It was already known and it was not a surprise when it happened. > The point is, I think it’s more complex than “obviously it should have always been regulated”. No, I don't think it is. Regulation is simple and useful.
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  You seem to have hand-waved away the main point I made - I don’t think that regulation is simple at all. “They need to be regulated from the day they start work” - what does that even mean? Even if we accept that strong regulation is required - what are you actually proposing we regulate? You say it’s simple - so what is it?

cko 9y ago

> Probably because of the enormous wave of downvotes that follows me everywhere. But look on the bright side: you have way more karma than me, and only one of my comments has been in the grey, ever.