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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

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.
    - OrderlyTiamat 8y ago
      Many people don't use facebook. I thinks WhatsApp is a better example, it's even more ubiquitous, though I'm sure there are still people who don't use it. Heck, I'm personally thinking of stopping, it's just that everyone is there. Two of my recent orders were negotiated by WhatsApp. It's used almost universally.
      - mishac 8y ago
        I think that depends on what country you're in. The only people I know who are on whatsapp are immigrants who use it to talk to family in the old country.
      - davidcbc 8y ago
        WhatsApp isn't even close to as ubiquitous as Facebook. WhatsApp has about 1.5 billion monthly active users compared to Facebook's 2.1 billion. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly... https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthly-active-whatsapp-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthly...
        OrderlyTiamat 8y ago
        Interesting, Doesn't match my experience. I'm wondering what the age distributions are on those. Thanks for correcting me!
    - stupidbird 8y ago
      Yeah precisely, we need some middle ground between "don't use it at all" or "have 0 control over your data"
- 908087 8y ago
  Not using twitter/facebook/google/etc doesn't exempt you from experiencing the negative effect they have on the internet and the world around you, though.
- MattGrommes 8y ago
  A lot of people don't really have this option since their audience is on twitter. Many artists would lose basically their entire livelihood if they just stopped using twitter and stopped being able to communicate about their work. You may have this option but it's not true for everybody.
- thomasz 8y ago
  You can be negatively impacted if you do not have an account, even if you do not read tweets at all.
benbenolson 8y ago
How would providing open access to their public data disallow them from using the network effect to their advantage? I'm not really following. I get how it would enable alternative front-ends, but just looking at other platforms, these clients don't get used nearly as often as the official clients, so their existence wouldn't have much of an effect on the overall system. Look at Discord, Telegram, etc.; only a tiny percentage uses anything but the default client. Plus, you can already filter messages like that, but in a much simpler manner: just follow people that feed into the "outrage-attention machine." If you get upset when you read a certain person's tweets, just unfollow them, and only try to follow people that you either personally know or really respect. One of the things that I've realized is that I become more unhappy when constantly buffetted with bad news that I can't change. Things like country- or international-level news, international forums that feed off of negativity, etc; they all feed off of a number of views, or upvotes, or replies, or whatever, so they constantly have negative news. And because I can do nothing personally about the vast majority of these news stories, they simply make me frustrated or unhappy for no reason. TL;DR following less people (or not having an account at all) fixes Twitter, not access to a public API.
RickS 8y ago
There's so much right with your take here, IMO. It flies in the face of so much opposition from reality – much of it credible – like how the hell do you make money when you eschew walled gardens, engagement boosters, and adtech friendly practices? Do people even want to make the tradeoffs they'd have to? Is regulation too heavyhanded? Will it be that for as long as these systems can be turned into money machines, old money will use them to print new money? Perhaps. But the mentality of "open at all costs, profits be damned" feels like one we in the tech industry have gradually let slip from our ethos, and it's so core to the old web. I miss it.
- CalRobert 8y ago
  "like how the hell do you make money " Well, you could charge for it. But of course you wouldn't be able to compete with free - you'd have to have competitors who needed to charge too. They do exist but are pretty niche. The WELL comes to mind. www.well.com If it's any help I applaud every newspaper that puts up a paywall, and more are doing it. It only came about when the industry was (is) about to be completely wiped out and there weren't really alternatives though. But if you're not paying your journalists, someone else is paying them to tell you what to think. I miss the old internet too :-( . It had so much promise.
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    >Well, you could charge for it. But of course you wouldn't be able to compete with free - you'd have to have competitors who needed to charge too. Are you sure about that? Twitter's annual revenue is 2.4 billion dollars, and they have 300 million users. $0.55/month per user is all it would take to match their current revenue. Sure, when a service is getting up off the ground, you can't beat free, but for one that's established, like Facebook or Twitter, the subscription fees can be made miniscule. As long as the advertising model is used, a set of perverse incentives exist that encourage social platforms to treat advertisers as more important than users, to inflate their user numbers, to lie about views, to tolerate fake accounts and harassment, and to close their APIs. A $1 premium ad-free option with 50% adoption would increase twitter's revenue and remove the perverse incentives.
francisofascii 8y ago
How about a time limit on how long they can have exclusive rights to the network? Like a patent.
- nine_k 8y ago
  How about a limit on how long you have exclusive rights on a house you built, and did not sell? Okay, how about the exclusive rights on your blog that attracted a million subscribers? Should a government agency regulate what you post there? I'm afraid this is a slippery slope leading to things far more dangerous than we have now.
  - francisofascii 8y ago
    I agree it could be a slippery slope but we are nowhere near it today. A published work copyright expires 70 years after the author dies, or something similar. That would probably apply to a blog post. 70 years post death is pretty reasonable. Not sure what a reasonable number for a network would be, but I think "forever" is excessive in the other direction.
CalRobert 8y ago
One thing that could help is more client-side tools to enable this. It's remarkable what you can get away with individually that would be blocked en masse. Social fixer, for FB years ago, made the feed much better and was purely client side. Personally, I got sick of the real estate websites where I live and just made my own frontend for them, crawling with Scrapy. I haven't gotten a 403 yet. Not sure how to make money off of it, though - short of selling people software in exchange for money.
734786710934 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). Facebook and Twitter have public APIs.
- elcomet 8y ago
  Come on. Facebook and twitter APIs are so restricted you can't even build a usable alternative client (look at all twitter clients that we had a few years ago, they are all gone now).
  - freehunter 8y ago
    Facebook won't even let you read public events through their API anymore, public events created by businesses that want the public to attend, that are visible to anyone even if they're not logged in, that are easily searchable through Google. But that's probably because the same day they removed that events API, they launched the Facebook Local app that shows all the events around you. Can't have anyone competing with your app.
stale2002 8y ago
I do love the idea of Twitter's API being public but I like it for the opposite reason. The opposite reason being that it would allow people to eliminate censorship if they so choose.
nine_k 8y ago
I think that people have an (almost) unalienable power, very strong, and pretty underused. It's the power of walking away. If you find an environment toxic, leave it, and ask your friends to leave it, too. Yes, you have to research alternatives first, and make compromises, at least temporarily. Lately this somehow worked for Facebook. I bet they are going to see that on their bottom line. So, if you dislike the outrage machine, leave it. Consciously ignore it. Do not retweet, do not link to tweets (instead, quote worthy tweets, they are short). If enough people did that, and migrated elsewhere, that would be noted. Speak to companies in the language they understand, that is, the language of money. Their money comes from your attention spent on their property. Vote with your dollar — the dollar not spent by online advertisers for your eyeballs that are not there.
- Sileni 8y ago
  I think the comment you're replying to is trying to strengthen that ability. Now you don't have to convince some critical mass of your friends to switch over; you just switch over to the new platform, which everyone is connected to via some open source API/protocol, or the company running the data service is not running a front end to present the data. You continue to get the data from your friends and family while using a front end that you feel safer in. It would require regulating the companies who hold personal data and divorcing them from the entities that tailor feeds and provide a user experience for the data. I don't think it's that ridiculous of an idea, really.
  - nine_k 8y ago
    My point is exactly not having to impose regulation. The power to move away is already in the people's hands. You can do it at any moment, without a governmental mandate. The point is to use this power. But first people have to recognize their power, and learn to use it a bit.
    - greymeister 8y ago
      Thanks for posting this. It's all too often people (like in this article) want to lean on bureaucracy and legislation to fix their problems as opposed to actually doing something about it. Not using Twitter and Facebook has a positive step for my sanity, much like not watching 24 hour cable news was another positive step. I don't need the government to break up CNN or News Corp to solve that problem.
_cs2017_ 8y ago
This assumes that someone creates a free and easy to use front end that has these filters. I can believe that. This also assumes that a large fraction of Twitter users would use such filters. What makes you think they will? The reason I have doubts is that people who tend to be influenced by evil Twitter posts are not the type of people who are amazingly self aware and look for ways to reduce that influence.
- jtbayly 8y ago
  I haven't been on Twitter in over a year, but lists already exist, don't they? So the filters already exist.
rdsubhas 8y ago
This looks a bit optimistic or underestimating real life tradeoffs. There can be an API, yes. But if you want to filter by positivity, you have to expect the company to actually implement that in the API. Otherwise, do you expect to get all billions of tweets over an API and then add positivity on top? You can't have sustainability, performance and "open for everything" on one single API, there are tradeoffs and constraints involved. Even GraphQL needs certain fields to be filterable even before the API call returns, otherwise one can't just loop over all commits in GitHub universe without exhausting both consumer and provider systems! Atleast that's what I think. Would be happy to be proven wrong.
- alexandercrohde 8y ago
  I think these are good questions. But I also think there are good answers. One solution is for my client to sentiment-analyze as a filter after the api-call and downrank that way (much like reddit/HN downrank controversials). Maybe a more generic solution is to allow parties to "tag" twitter accounts. Clients could then make intelligent deductions based on tags (e.g. "political," "controversial," "satirical," "pg13"). I'm sure many other people have many other smart ideas.
segmondy 8y ago
Will you pay to access that front-end? I'm not a fan of closed systems but I notice that folks want access to other people's system and data without paying for it.
ataturk 8y ago
The censorship is the part that gets me. If these are the modern version of the town commons, having private interests censor "unpopular" (but widespread) opinions, is extremely dangerous. The tech giants are apparently huge echo chambers internally, as is standard in all modern corporotocracies. I would prefer wider society not become like that, it is a step backwards in human achievement. The dangers of a few people being upset is a small price to pay for open exchange of ideas. Let more speech cancel out the hate mongers. Censorship is always a weak hand--it proves that the entity doing the censoring is somehow weak.
bcheung 8y ago
I'd be curious to see what effect this has on business models. A lot of useful features are free because they can make money on the backend or through paid promotions (search, email). Take away that ability and a lot of the services people enjoy will be forced to be paid or have annoying amounts of advertising. I agree there is serious concern and we need to have discussions. I would consider breaking up companies a last resort though.
tensor 8y ago
This feels like a uniquely engineering perspective. My parents won't filter twitter, they also won't go searching for some complicated front end. In my opinion, the problem of hate spreading is not a technical one, but a social one. These platforms are just better exposing it, but if they didn't exist, or were somehow filtered or modified, then the people would just go elsewhere. You already see this with reddit, where they cracked down on a lot of the hate based subs. The result is that new sites popped up to cater to the hate, message boards, news sites, and others. Plus, these hate groups operate locally too. In Canada there have been many cases where they setup outreach groups in person in neighbourhoods trying to recruit. I'm not sure what the solution is, but the core issue is that at this point in time, hate sells. Maybe people have lived in such a good time that they forgot what wars were like. Maybe inequity is at such a high that those not in the top 10% are just filled with bitterness and rage wondering why this sort of divide should exist. But I'm willing to bet strongly that this is people problem, not a tech problem.
- int_19h 8y ago
  Social media is basically gossip. The only difference is scale. You had to be a prolific gossiper to spread a message to several dozen people before. Now, it's one click button away for most of us.
ilaksh 8y ago
I have been suggesting something slightly along these lines. I think that the monopoly companies provide the platform with the large network. This platform is desirable. The monopoly control over it is not. We can replace the monopoly platforms with decentralized peer based platforms running on technologies like Swarm Framework, IPFS, WebRTC, cryptocurrency, etc. Diverse companies can build varied opportunities that leverage the common platform and large network. Its a challenging goal and most distributed technologies haven't been proven at Twitter scale. However I believe it is attainable and should be attempted.
enjeyw 8y ago
I wonder if this is one of those few genuine uses for a blockchain based system. Comments (tweets) would be posted on a very thin layer of technology, which would only support say: - comment id - comment text - datetime of comment - commenting user id - list of [upvoting/downvoting] user id - list of reply comment ids As you say, third parties could then come along and build whatever front-end they see fit. Don't want to show or allow clients to downvote? Go for it! Only aggregate upvotes from user ids over a certain age? Be my guest! The underlying information would never change. Operating costs would be funded by transaction fees, whatever that specific blockchain model may be.
- osrec 8y ago
  But why blockchain?
  - enjeyw 8y ago
    Because the underlying message service wouldn't be controlled by any single entity. This would mean that once the code was out there, you could be confident that no-one would change the service when there was a change of CEO or new censorship laws brought in or something like that; we'd have a neutral piece of underlying infrastructure that anyone could use to build a robust discussion platform on top of.

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.
  - OrderlyTiamat 8y ago
    Many people don't use facebook. I thinks WhatsApp is a better example, it's even more ubiquitous, though I'm sure there are still people who don't use it. Heck, I'm personally thinking of stopping, it's just that everyone is there. Two of my recent orders were negotiated by WhatsApp. It's used almost universally.
    - mishac 8y ago
      I think that depends on what country you're in. The only people I know who are on whatsapp are immigrants who use it to talk to family in the old country.
    - davidcbc 8y ago
      WhatsApp isn't even close to as ubiquitous as Facebook. WhatsApp has about 1.5 billion monthly active users compared to Facebook's 2.1 billion. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly... https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthly-active-whatsapp-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthly...
      - OrderlyTiamat 8y ago
        Interesting, Doesn't match my experience. I'm wondering what the age distributions are on those. Thanks for correcting me!
  - stupidbird 8y ago
    Yeah precisely, we need some middle ground between "don't use it at all" or "have 0 control over your data"
908087 8y ago
Not using twitter/facebook/google/etc doesn't exempt you from experiencing the negative effect they have on the internet and the world around you, though.
MattGrommes 8y ago
A lot of people don't really have this option since their audience is on twitter. Many artists would lose basically their entire livelihood if they just stopped using twitter and stopped being able to communicate about their work. You may have this option but it's not true for everybody.
thomasz 8y ago
You can be negatively impacted if you do not have an account, even if you do not read tweets at all.

benbenolson 8y ago

How would providing open access to their public data disallow them from using the network effect to their advantage? I'm not really following. I get how it would enable alternative front-ends, but just looking at other platforms, these clients don't get used nearly as often as the official clients, so their existence wouldn't have much of an effect on the overall system. Look at Discord, Telegram, etc.; only a tiny percentage uses anything but the default client. Plus, you can already filter messages like that, but in a much simpler manner: just follow people that feed into the "outrage-attention machine." If you get upset when you read a certain person's tweets, just unfollow them, and only try to follow people that you either personally know or really respect. One of the things that I've realized is that I become more unhappy when constantly buffetted with bad news that I can't change. Things like country- or international-level news, international forums that feed off of negativity, etc; they all feed off of a number of views, or upvotes, or replies, or whatever, so they constantly have negative news. And because I can do nothing personally about the vast majority of these news stories, they simply make me frustrated or unhappy for no reason. TL;DR following less people (or not having an account at all) fixes Twitter, not access to a public API.

RickS 8y ago

There's so much right with your take here, IMO. It flies in the face of so much opposition from reality – much of it credible – like how the hell do you make money when you eschew walled gardens, engagement boosters, and adtech friendly practices? Do people even want to make the tradeoffs they'd have to? Is regulation too heavyhanded? Will it be that for as long as these systems can be turned into money machines, old money will use them to print new money? Perhaps. But the mentality of "open at all costs, profits be damned" feels like one we in the tech industry have gradually let slip from our ethos, and it's so core to the old web. I miss it.

CalRobert 8y ago
"like how the hell do you make money " Well, you could charge for it. But of course you wouldn't be able to compete with free - you'd have to have competitors who needed to charge too. They do exist but are pretty niche. The WELL comes to mind. www.well.com If it's any help I applaud every newspaper that puts up a paywall, and more are doing it. It only came about when the industry was (is) about to be completely wiped out and there weren't really alternatives though. But if you're not paying your journalists, someone else is paying them to tell you what to think. I miss the old internet too :-( . It had so much promise.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  >Well, you could charge for it. But of course you wouldn't be able to compete with free - you'd have to have competitors who needed to charge too. Are you sure about that? Twitter's annual revenue is 2.4 billion dollars, and they have 300 million users. $0.55/month per user is all it would take to match their current revenue. Sure, when a service is getting up off the ground, you can't beat free, but for one that's established, like Facebook or Twitter, the subscription fees can be made miniscule. As long as the advertising model is used, a set of perverse incentives exist that encourage social platforms to treat advertisers as more important than users, to inflate their user numbers, to lie about views, to tolerate fake accounts and harassment, and to close their APIs. A $1 premium ad-free option with 50% adoption would increase twitter's revenue and remove the perverse incentives.

francisofascii 8y ago

How about a time limit on how long they can have exclusive rights to the network? Like a patent.

nine_k 8y ago
How about a limit on how long you have exclusive rights on a house you built, and did not sell? Okay, how about the exclusive rights on your blog that attracted a million subscribers? Should a government agency regulate what you post there? I'm afraid this is a slippery slope leading to things far more dangerous than we have now.
- francisofascii 8y ago
  I agree it could be a slippery slope but we are nowhere near it today. A published work copyright expires 70 years after the author dies, or something similar. That would probably apply to a blog post. 70 years post death is pretty reasonable. Not sure what a reasonable number for a network would be, but I think "forever" is excessive in the other direction.

CalRobert 8y ago

One thing that could help is more client-side tools to enable this. It's remarkable what you can get away with individually that would be blocked en masse. Social fixer, for FB years ago, made the feed much better and was purely client side. Personally, I got sick of the real estate websites where I live and just made my own frontend for them, crawling with Scrapy. I haven't gotten a 403 yet. Not sure how to make money off of it, though - short of selling people software in exchange for money.

734786710934 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). Facebook and Twitter have public APIs.

elcomet 8y ago
Come on. Facebook and twitter APIs are so restricted you can't even build a usable alternative client (look at all twitter clients that we had a few years ago, they are all gone now).
- freehunter 8y ago
  Facebook won't even let you read public events through their API anymore, public events created by businesses that want the public to attend, that are visible to anyone even if they're not logged in, that are easily searchable through Google. But that's probably because the same day they removed that events API, they launched the Facebook Local app that shows all the events around you. Can't have anyone competing with your app.

stale2002 8y ago

I do love the idea of Twitter's API being public but I like it for the opposite reason. The opposite reason being that it would allow people to eliminate censorship if they so choose.

nine_k 8y ago

I think that people have an (almost) unalienable power, very strong, and pretty underused. It's the power of walking away. If you find an environment toxic, leave it, and ask your friends to leave it, too. Yes, you have to research alternatives first, and make compromises, at least temporarily. Lately this somehow worked for Facebook. I bet they are going to see that on their bottom line. So, if you dislike the outrage machine, leave it. Consciously ignore it. Do not retweet, do not link to tweets (instead, quote worthy tweets, they are short). If enough people did that, and migrated elsewhere, that would be noted. Speak to companies in the language they understand, that is, the language of money. Their money comes from your attention spent on their property. Vote with your dollar — the dollar not spent by online advertisers for your eyeballs that are not there.

Sileni 8y ago
I think the comment you're replying to is trying to strengthen that ability. Now you don't have to convince some critical mass of your friends to switch over; you just switch over to the new platform, which everyone is connected to via some open source API/protocol, or the company running the data service is not running a front end to present the data. You continue to get the data from your friends and family while using a front end that you feel safer in. It would require regulating the companies who hold personal data and divorcing them from the entities that tailor feeds and provide a user experience for the data. I don't think it's that ridiculous of an idea, really.
- nine_k 8y ago
  My point is exactly not having to impose regulation. The power to move away is already in the people's hands. You can do it at any moment, without a governmental mandate. The point is to use this power. But first people have to recognize their power, and learn to use it a bit.
  - greymeister 8y ago
    Thanks for posting this. It's all too often people (like in this article) want to lean on bureaucracy and legislation to fix their problems as opposed to actually doing something about it. Not using Twitter and Facebook has a positive step for my sanity, much like not watching 24 hour cable news was another positive step. I don't need the government to break up CNN or News Corp to solve that problem.

_cs2017_ 8y ago

This assumes that someone creates a free and easy to use front end that has these filters. I can believe that. This also assumes that a large fraction of Twitter users would use such filters. What makes you think they will? The reason I have doubts is that people who tend to be influenced by evil Twitter posts are not the type of people who are amazingly self aware and look for ways to reduce that influence.

jtbayly 8y ago
I haven't been on Twitter in over a year, but lists already exist, don't they? So the filters already exist.

rdsubhas 8y ago

This looks a bit optimistic or underestimating real life tradeoffs. There can be an API, yes. But if you want to filter by positivity, you have to expect the company to actually implement that in the API. Otherwise, do you expect to get all billions of tweets over an API and then add positivity on top? You can't have sustainability, performance and "open for everything" on one single API, there are tradeoffs and constraints involved. Even GraphQL needs certain fields to be filterable even before the API call returns, otherwise one can't just loop over all commits in GitHub universe without exhausting both consumer and provider systems! Atleast that's what I think. Would be happy to be proven wrong.

alexandercrohde 8y ago
I think these are good questions. But I also think there are good answers. One solution is for my client to sentiment-analyze as a filter after the api-call and downrank that way (much like reddit/HN downrank controversials). Maybe a more generic solution is to allow parties to "tag" twitter accounts. Clients could then make intelligent deductions based on tags (e.g. "political," "controversial," "satirical," "pg13"). I'm sure many other people have many other smart ideas.

segmondy 8y ago

Will you pay to access that front-end? I'm not a fan of closed systems but I notice that folks want access to other people's system and data without paying for it.

ataturk 8y ago

The censorship is the part that gets me. If these are the modern version of the town commons, having private interests censor "unpopular" (but widespread) opinions, is extremely dangerous. The tech giants are apparently huge echo chambers internally, as is standard in all modern corporotocracies. I would prefer wider society not become like that, it is a step backwards in human achievement. The dangers of a few people being upset is a small price to pay for open exchange of ideas. Let more speech cancel out the hate mongers. Censorship is always a weak hand--it proves that the entity doing the censoring is somehow weak.

bcheung 8y ago

I'd be curious to see what effect this has on business models. A lot of useful features are free because they can make money on the backend or through paid promotions (search, email). Take away that ability and a lot of the services people enjoy will be forced to be paid or have annoying amounts of advertising. I agree there is serious concern and we need to have discussions. I would consider breaking up companies a last resort though.

tensor 8y ago

This feels like a uniquely engineering perspective. My parents won't filter twitter, they also won't go searching for some complicated front end. In my opinion, the problem of hate spreading is not a technical one, but a social one. These platforms are just better exposing it, but if they didn't exist, or were somehow filtered or modified, then the people would just go elsewhere. You already see this with reddit, where they cracked down on a lot of the hate based subs. The result is that new sites popped up to cater to the hate, message boards, news sites, and others. Plus, these hate groups operate locally too. In Canada there have been many cases where they setup outreach groups in person in neighbourhoods trying to recruit. I'm not sure what the solution is, but the core issue is that at this point in time, hate sells. Maybe people have lived in such a good time that they forgot what wars were like. Maybe inequity is at such a high that those not in the top 10% are just filled with bitterness and rage wondering why this sort of divide should exist. But I'm willing to bet strongly that this is people problem, not a tech problem.

int_19h 8y ago
Social media is basically gossip. The only difference is scale. You had to be a prolific gossiper to spread a message to several dozen people before. Now, it's one click button away for most of us.

ilaksh 8y ago

I have been suggesting something slightly along these lines. I think that the monopoly companies provide the platform with the large network. This platform is desirable. The monopoly control over it is not. We can replace the monopoly platforms with decentralized peer based platforms running on technologies like Swarm Framework, IPFS, WebRTC, cryptocurrency, etc. Diverse companies can build varied opportunities that leverage the common platform and large network. Its a challenging goal and most distributed technologies haven't been proven at Twitter scale. However I believe it is attainable and should be attempted.

enjeyw 8y ago

I wonder if this is one of those few genuine uses for a blockchain based system. Comments (tweets) would be posted on a very thin layer of technology, which would only support say: - comment id - comment text - datetime of comment - commenting user id - list of [upvoting/downvoting] user id - list of reply comment ids As you say, third parties could then come along and build whatever front-end they see fit. Don't want to show or allow clients to downvote? Go for it! Only aggregate upvotes from user ids over a certain age? Be my guest! The underlying information would never change. Operating costs would be funded by transaction fees, whatever that specific blockchain model may be.

osrec 8y ago
But why blockchain?
- enjeyw 8y ago
  Because the underlying message service wouldn't be controlled by any single entity. This would mean that once the code was out there, you could be confident that no-one would change the service when there was a change of CEO or new censorship laws brought in or something like that; we'd have a neutral piece of underlying infrastructure that anyone could use to build a robust discussion platform on top of.