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> “If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly. And you wonde

• supercanuck 8y ago
  lower the barriers of entry for competition.
  • themagician 8y ago
    There is no barrier. There are OSS alternatives that are just as good as the real thing which you can spin up on an AWS instance in like 15 minutes. The cost to entry is $10 for a domain and a $1 credit card authorization to get started with AWS.
    • maxxxxx 8y ago
      There is no barrier to entry. But there is a huge barrier to grow and establish something new. Whatever a smaller competitor comes up with Facebook can quickly copy and dominate the market just by sheer size. There is a reason why so many startups get acquihired by one of the big companies and shut down their product instead of establishing themselves on the market.
  • enitihas 8y ago
    Aren't there already some competing social media platforms out there? Twitter, facebook(Whatsapp and Instagram too), Snapchat, G+ used to be a thing. You may say they do not compete head on to each other, but which one of them was immune to this problem? The fact that any internet based social platform will have a very large connectivity and will provide people a very easy way to communicate to an exponential amount of other people, that fact won't change by lowering barriers. The fact that all the people reading something online neither have the time nor the patience to research everything is not going to change.
  • kodablah 8y ago
    The size of the barrier is unrelated to anonymous human nature, which is what I read is the unfixable problem.
  • adventured 8y ago
    I think it's inevitable that Google EU will be split off from Alphabet and Google US, into a stand-alone entity that the Europeans will regulate and mold as they see fit. It's the only possible positive end to the way Europeans largely view Google today (an abusive, dominant, foreign invader they can't compete with). After this many years, it's obvious the EU can't mount a competitive threat to Google's search monopoly, leaving only the alternatives of trying to cripple/restrict it through increasing targeted taxation & regulation (bad for the EU in the end, cutting their own nose off) or forcing a split-off that retains all the core capability & technology and can better adjust to what the Europeans want it to be (their culture, preferences, etc). The Google US and Google EU would then compete globally. Google EU would be operated from the various offices Google has planted around Europe. It would also immediately become Europe's largest technology company, surpassing SAP. I suspect that it would quickly begin having a ripple effect across the EU's tech landscape, in terms of investment and spurring more development. Short of search becoming a lot less important soon... we had the baby bells, we'll have the baby Googles. The same goes for Facebook.
    • thrower123 8y ago
      In some ways, Google is already more powerful than the EU. I am not totally sure that the EU could ultimately force Google to do anything it didn't want to do; many of the things that have been implemented putatively to limit the Goog have had the (un?)intended consequences of raising the costs and barrier to entry for new competitors and further cementing their dominance...
    • cyphar 8y ago
      Google controls what 3 billion people see when they search for things -- what information they are exposed to. This is more control than any government of any sovereign nation in the history of humanity (more than the top 3 governments today combined) has ever had. And please note that there are well-known processes by governments are held accountable by countries' constitutions and courts. A user of Google has no such recourse. I don't think it's unreasonable that a company with impact larger than any single government in the history of humanity (yes, even larger than the EU) should have more than a little accountability. (Honestly, I think the Google board of directors should be elected at this point -- just like we elect leaders of governments -- but I know that's going to be a contentious view.)
  • ekianjo 8y ago
    Network effects are hard to tackle when there are established players. The easiest thing is to wait until Twitter and Facebook lose the coolness factor and the next generation is hungry for something else.
    • learc83 8y ago
      The problem is that if Facebook and Twitter are large enough, they can buy the next thing that becomes cool before it has time to beat them--like Facebook did with Instagram and WhatsApp.
      • elisaado 8y ago
        This is the reason why breaking them up will help.
        • jhall1468 8y ago
          Yeah, that worked so well for for the bells. 8 is now, what 3? And while there was some network effect for telecom, it was nowhere near the same degree as with social networks. No open API's means you're never going to see splits have any desirable effect, as the consumers will simply flock to 1 or 2 platforms.
    • solarkraft 8y ago
      Network effects could maybe be fought via regulation. Force the companies to let others participate in the networks.
      • asaph 8y ago
        Network effects are valuable to users too. Are we sure we want to stifle them?
        • solarkraft 8y ago
          Are most users happy to be locked into a network? What are the positives?
• gambler 8y ago
  It won't. But it will limit effects of bad actors, give users a bit more control over their environment and probably stop some emergent behaviors.
  • krapp 8y ago
    The web is designed to make limiting the propagation of information (and any emergent effects from that) impossible. How will the effect of 'bad actors' be limited when they can just move elsewhere? You don't need sites of the scale of Facebook or Twitter to have emergent, viral or culturally relevant effects occur. What makes the big sites like Facebook and Twitter isn't their size per se but their capture of network effect and discoverability... they are content aggregators (among other things) and so the content they aggregate can by definition be found elsewhere. If those sites are broken up, then users have to put in more effort at discoverability (which was the case with the "old" web), but that problem can be solved by smaller sites, other aggregators, other search engines, apps, etc. It's like the Force in Star Wars.. the light side or dark side doesn't matter, the Force doesn't seek good or evil, only balance. With the web, you can't reduce the propagation of information, or bias it effectively towards one moral or political alignment or another, just distribute or centralize discoverability. Either way the web will still find a balance.
    • SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
      >The web is designed to make limiting the propagation of information (and any emergent effects from that) impossible. Are you unaware or ignoring the censorship of thought that Google and Facebook have been doing lately? You are acting like it’s 2005 internet, and it’s not.
      • krapp 8y ago
        >Are you unaware or ignoring the censorship of thought that Google and Facebook have been doing lately? Google can only censor Google, and Facebook can only censor Facebook. Neither of them can censor Twitter, which can't censor 4chan, which can't censor Voat, Gab, etc. No one controls the entire network, and no one can censor the entire network. >You are acting like it’s 2005 internet, and it’s not. It actually still is, people have just gotten so cynical that they've forgotten how to see the forest for the trees. Being popular on the internet is not the same thing as having authority over it beyond one's own domain.
• nikk1 8y ago
  >“Before breaking them up, we should see whether they are not just disrupted by a small player beating them out of the market, but by the market shifting, by the interest going somewhere else,” Berners-Lee said. The implication is that maybe some of the tech giants will one day fall due to their own Achilles Heel. For example, Twitter's case that you cited.
  • asaph 8y ago
    And if that doesn't happen then he proposes breaking up the tech giants, which solves the problem how?
    • jonathlee 8y ago
      It's harder for 100 companies to collude undetected/unchallenged with no viable alternative than for 1-5 massive/politically-savvy companies to tweak results/ban users to fit their political biases. The larger a company is, the easier it is for it to blow-off any lawsuit losses over bad behavior (or simply have bad customer service) and continue those bad practices.
• throwaway5752 8y ago
  Yes, just look at how well this worked out with Gab.
  • Kaveren 8y ago
    Gab is such a great example of this. You have a new player in social media (yet we apparently need to break up the big tech companies because you can't enter the market anymore). It operates in a successful niche. And it also is home to many far-right actors who hate Jews and minorities. Yet the claim is that breaking up the tech companies would help stop hate. Tim Berners Lee has no salient point here whatsoever, and I don't think anyone would care about what he's saying if he wasn't who he is. Not to mention he's calling for government regulation of tech companies at least partially to cut down on hateful speech (which is very much against the right to free speech).
    • bilbo0s 8y ago
      >Not to mention he's calling for government regulation of tech companies at least partially to cut down on hateful speech... This is the most troubling aspect of his call. "There's too much hate speech, so let's take action against platforms until it goes away." I'm tired of all the terrorist attacks too, but to my mind, you handle that by having your counter-terror people do what they do. It's not like the terrorists would go away if you break up Twitter.
    • strken 8y ago
      Gab (and Voat, and, er, Hatreon) were open attempts to create far-right versions of existing websites. I don't think they're good examples of the inevitability of hatred. I'd hazard a guess that many more people are angry about hate speech on Reddit than about hate speech over email. The difference is that one is a company and the other is a federated standard. If I've understood Tim Berners-Lee correctly, he wants to replace Twitter with a million Mastodon instances rather than a hundred different versions of "Twitter, but for the far-right/far-left/radical-centrists".
      • hannasanarion 8y ago
• rickjr85 8y ago
  Perhaps what we are seeing is not a problem with technology but a problem with the human condition?
  • WC3w6pXxgGd 8y ago
    Maybe it's not a problem.
    • icelancer 8y ago
      I think this theory gets buried with zero thought. It is widely assumed that we are worse off because of social media and mass communication. I don't think this has been even close to being proven correct. People have rose-colored glasses about the past and how progress is actually made. It is never smooth or without severe argumentation and usually violence. Maybe the magnitude is larger, but that doesn't make it worse. It may make it simply faster.
  • batmanbury 8y ago
    It's perfectly both. Hatred is basic - complex emotions break down to something more direct and blunt when your message gets boiled down to X number of characters. Then take interpretations of that message in mass, again each one distilled to simpler tones: most will mirror or concentrate the negativity.
    • bilbo0s 8y ago
      Still, rickjr85 is right. Even in your response you implicitly concede that the root problem is human nature. You're implying that if we get rid of Google, or Twitter, that there is some kind of alternative technological method, (which you haven't elucidated on), by which we can mitigate the effects of the root problem.
      • rashkov 8y ago
        violence is a part of human nature, too, but the technology of the atom bomb multiplies the danger for us all. So too with these newsfeed algorithms, which favor engagement above everything else, no matter how base and degraded the content is. I've been thinking a lot about this interview with Jaron Lanier, and I'll just share an excerpt because I think it provides some insight: "The problem, however, is that behind the scenes there are these manipulation, behavior modification, and addiction algorithms that are running. And these addiction algorithms are blind. They’re just dumb algorithms. What they want to do is take whatever input people put into the system and find a way to turn it into the most engagement possible. And the most engagement comes from the startle emotions, like fear and anger and jealousy, because they tend to rise the fastest and then subside the slowest in people, and the algorithms are measuring people very rapidly, so they tend to pick up and amplify startle emotions over slower emotions like the building of trust or affection." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/delete-your-account-a-conversation-with-jaron-lanier/# https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/delete-your-account-a-co...!
• wowamit 8y ago
  It will prevent the hatred to be easily propagated to a large population — control the reach of the polluting voices. Scale of Twitter has given a microphone to these voices which they are exploiting. Hope is with the power split, it will just not be a problem in the first place.
• alexandercrohde 8y ago
  Suppose tech companies were no longer legally allowed to use the network effect (i.e. they had to provide open-access to their public data via API). Then this would enable alternative front-ends on twitter. This would then enable me to filter messages by positivity, or whichever criteria I choose (e.g. non-Russian-bots, non-shills). This is turn would then change the whole ecosystem. It would remove the perverse incentives of outrage-attention machine.
  • foolfoolz 8y ago
    or just stop using twitter?
    • pnloyd 8y ago
      I've used this strategy consistently for things I don't like, works great! Don't understand why more people don't consider it.
      • dcow 8y ago
        I know, right? The only time I encounter Twitter is when others link me to it. I’m okay with that and sometimes I share forward, but I’m not fed a daily stream of tweets. I left google services a few months ago. It was a long weekend of work, but I’m happier than I was before with otherwise no noticeable impact (except the emails that write themselves for you in gmail). I exported all my data from Facebook around the same time but I’m still mulling over how to resolve deleting 10 years of my digital life against my core principle that things I’ve said and done should not be allowed to disappear even if my 30 years future self would look back in disgust.
    • stupidbird 8y ago
      at a certain rate of adoption doesn't that kind of become like "stop using email"
      • celticninja 8y ago
        I don't use Facebook, I presume thats the level of adoption you are talking about.
• xoa 8y ago
  Yeah, a dedicated actor can trivially just make meta-posting frameworks and tools for any number of services. It's not as if any of them are magic, at the end of the day it still all boils down to https/POST/GET and such, even if no official API is provided. The exact same message could be posted to as many places as desired for the same amount of effort. Bots will be able to function just as easily. If anything one would expect reduced scale would increase the difficulty of handling a very large scale adversary like a state actor. It would only seem to disadvantage smaller players. And the article also lumps together wildly divergent companies in the same bucket while ignoring where scale is necessary. If you're talking about Apple for example that necessarily means talking hardware since they're primarily a hardware company, but hardware capex is getting ever higher. What's the plan for getting technologies to market where combined upfront expenditures are in the many billions of dollars? Fabricators and state of the art SOC design aren't getting cheaper. Neither are blue sky but critical next generation technologies like future display improvements (microled, direct retinal projection, or whatever). I mean, a lot of this can be argued as a failure of government. Ideally there would be way more basic R&D happening there with way less red tape with the results then available for all. Government (at least in a democracy) is the natural place to be doing public service security help, and to handle authentication services when two strangers want to have a trusted identity foundation between them. But in reality government is not doing a great job of any of this, nor does it seem set to do in the near future, but we need it anyway. I don't even think giant scale corps have actually been all bad by any means for things like privacy vis-a-vis government, because while sometimes they can cooperate they can also oppose and be impossible to trivially knock down. Would a bunch of tiny random generi-phone corps really have been more effective then Apple at opposing the FBI for example? Our system is very, very far from perfect. But it's also got us some frankly amazing and wonderful stuff. I think everybody should be instantly and inherently suspicious of "revolution" type change proposals. There is a real risk of tossing the good with the bad and unintended consequences and even opening the door for something way worse. Incremental, focused changes with clear specific goals in mind and then seeing how they work (auto sunset would be nice to see more) normally seem like the more effective way to go.
  • almost_usual 8y ago
    >Bots will be able to function just as easily. If anything one would expect reduced scale would increase the difficulty of handling a very large scale adversary like a state actor. It would only seem to disadvantage smaller players. FAANG companies are incredibly bad at detecting bots. It’s not how they make money so they don’t invest much in it. There are companies that specialize in this that are used _everywhere_ behind the scenes and are growing quickly. You’re not going to see that kind of development in house. You’ll see a new market for protection which actually already exists.
• loceng 8y ago
  Yeah, this specifically is quite the top down approach. The realization to have is that social media/the internet is a tool, and how it's used (or becomes most popularly used) is simply a symptom, a sign, a reflection of the current state of society; yes, if we are reactive and not responsive with reasoning, critical thinking, then propaganda can flourish more easily.
• johndubchak 8y ago
  I doubt breaking them up is targeted to solve this problem at all. I believe the only problem breaking these companies up allows is the emergence of competition and innovation. As it stands today, it seems that any new technology company with a decent idea/product/service, is heavily incentivized to exit the market by being acquired and left to languish. Nest comes to mind and is only a single example. Another one: I was at ARMTechCon2018 and an up-and-coming RISC-V competitor of ARM was trying to be swallowed by, you guessed it, ARM. The giants are truly monopolies and there are some of them that are capable of influencing entire economic market segments. Do we want that to continue? EDIT: Grammar...I sometimes suck at it.