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> Companies like Facebook and Twitter have so much power because they are so large, and they face no real competition.
I find it hard to take the rest of the a
> Companies like Facebook and Twitter have so much power because they are so large, and they face no real competition.
I find it hard to take the rest of the article seriously when it's talking about Twitter as a giant monopoly that needs to be broken up...
But also the argument seems fundamentally wrong. Account security is a prime example of a place where economies of scale bring a lot of benefit. I would absolutely trust the security of say Facebook, Google or Microsoft above that of Twitter just due to the larger scale. They can afford to spend more on security, since they have more users, and their users are more valuable. Every dollar spent on security applies to the whole user base. And similarly I'd trust Twitter above a 100 person web startup.
If you start regulating for some kind of a minimum security bar, either you're going to be killing a lot of companies, or you're going to be setting the bar laughably low compared to what these companies already do.
> Were there 100 different Twitter-like companies
... they would all be bankrupt.
>> Were there 100 different Twitter-like companies
>... they would all be bankrupt.
Huh? There's over 2,000 Mastodon servers doing just fine
This is very typical of the libertarian streak that underpins HN. I'm always a little turned off by this strange dominate-the-world culture out of SV. I come from a culture that valued open source and interoperable open standards. Where did my people go?
Twitter is clearly and objectively a monopoly or in a duopoly with Facebook/Instagram. At my most charitable, I could include YouTube in the mix. But I'd still say monopoly.
Even though Google and Facebook are much bigger companies, Twitter has clearly cornered the market for online publishing of thoughts and opinions. Only Facebook/Instagram and Reddit come anywhere close, but those platforms are mostly for different types of content.
There's a reason that modern "news" publishes article after article that merely reports on whatever conversation is trending on Twitter. There's a reason that celebs on Reddit provide proof via tweet. There's a reason Trump's YouTube and Facebook accounts are run by staffers.
Could 100 Twitter-like companies all make it? Perhaps not, but we'd be in a better place. Twitter is poison and I'd not shed a tear if it went bankrupt.
How exactly do you propose to split up Twitter? Split the userbase into 100 groups? Who goes in which group? And what happens when people want to switch groups... ultimately coalescing in a single node? Because, you know, network effects.
I don't like Twitter either, so I don't use it. It's a really effective solution!
The reason MSFT, GOOG, etc., have better security is because they have paying customers who have data to protect. So it behooves them to be proactive about security and to take it seriously.
As someone who has run two startups, their security can be completely bonkers. Not saying that all startups are like this but we had a database completely open to employees and would frequent watch them in real time for customer insights.
There's other ways to deal with anti-trust besides breaking the companies apart. Data portability, interoperability, ownership of your own social graph. If these platforms were forced to act more like email, where leaving google for microsoft doesnt mean i can no longer contact my friends, the network effects that give them monopoly-like power diminish.
Imagine how ridiculous email would feel if you need a gmail account to email gmail peeps, a microsoft account to email outlook peeps, and another separate account to communicate with people in every mom and pop community. Imagine not being able to export your address book in an industry standard format. Imagine not being able to use whatever third party client you want to access your own data.
So let's imagine Facebook/Twitter/etc was based on open protocols like SMTP...
* You'd have the same spam and abuse problem that email has.
* You'd have zero control over the information you post to it, just like email. There would be absolutely no way of stopping or even slowing down the Cambridge Analyticas of the world.
"Ownership of your own social graph" is complete and utter nonsense. As soon as you share data with other people through open protocols, they own it. Just like email.
Even email is tending towards centralization, with a few big players that can manage the spam and abuse and still get their messages delivered.
>You'd have the same spam and abuse problem that email has.
Don't you have that already, and they have anti spam measures? How would a facebook post coming from facebook or twitter change what they remove as spam?
What you're basically proposing is a model of spam where only the content of the message is considered. I do not think that would be very effective in practice, in the modern world.
Email spam filtering is already a lot more powerful, since it can consider things such as IP reputation. (IP reputation would be a non-starter for a federated social network, since it would require passing raw IPs along with messages in the federation protocol. And that is just unthinkable from a privacy perspective).
When all entities posting messages on a social network are managed by the same identity provider, and the identity provider can share information about the account with the social network, you get yet another layer of increase in power. You can, for example, tell whether the account is newly created or not. Or whether it was bulk-created along with 10 other accounts posting similar spam. Or a dozen other account reputation signals which let you classify accounts into organic vs. abusive, and use that to inform the classification of messages from those accounts. And again, the only way this happens is if the identity provider and the social network are one and the same. If they were separate companies, it'd be inexcusable for either party to share detailed information with the other.
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> There would be absolutely no way of stopping or even slowing down the Cambridge Analyticas of the world.
They wouldn't be as much of an issue in the first place, because there isn't a single company with a single collection of data to siphon through a single API with a single entity that has to give you access in order to collect whatever you want. A Cambridge Analytica that has to separately try to get data from O365 and GMail and FastMail and ProtonMail is much less dangerous.
> "ownership of your own social graph"
What would that mean?
> If these platforms were forced to act more like email
Who decides who's "following" who?
Say I decide to use a competitor. Do I then get to "take" my Twitter followers and can still broadcast to them on Twitter from a different app? Under what conditions can Twitter block your activity? Either they will have to let a lot of spam in or they'll have to ban most non-Twitter activity from coming in.
How do we define interoperability? Do we make Twitter as it is right now a government mandated standard? How do we introduce new features?
I just don't see how you can do all this or how it makes sense at all.
Although email does certain things well it's not without issues. Running your own server is tough. Even many fairly mainstream services have deliverability issues.
Spam is rife. And it's especially a big problem when running your own or using a small provider.
Email is terrible for initiating unsolicited interactions (in some places might even be illegal).
All this is actually worked out in some detail (search keywords federated/indie web). Check out the PubSub model, and the ActivityPub protocol as an example, and Mastodon as a working proof-of-concept.
As a starting point, imagine email & RSS and work forward from there. I'm not saying it's trivial, but it's also not insurmountable.
I did actually do a lot of reading on ActivityPub yesterday and it's exactly the mess I would have imagined it to be.
The standard doesn't define all that much. Arbitrary undocumented JSON fields are perfectly fine and used heavily. Just following the standard you wouldn't get too far, would need to follow Mastodon's implementation to be truly compatible [0].
Many instances have already banned each other, some client apps have outright hard-coded blacklists in. So again would the government forbid that? But then what do you do about unruly instances?
The whole model IMO is pretty wrong in favoring instances over individuals. Twitter is a free-for-all, this model is completely different in optimizing for small groups of like minded people.
Secure private DMs are pretty much impossible in AP.
Rate limiting, spam protections etc are left completely up to the implementer. So would the government define that under an anti-trust scheme?
Now if one considers it to be just some low-level building block for distributed social then okay, maybe it's fine. The idea is basically social-related stuff in JSON over HTTP. Okay. But it doesn't really solve much of anything in practice. It offers a strictly worse experience in name of decentralization. This is exactly why I'd be afraid of the government stepping in and forcing these kinds of decisions on companies.
[0] And then it only gets you compatible with other Mastodon-style instances (and most seem to use the exact same implementation, just different themes). There are other ActivityPub apps that operate under a completely different UX/UI scheme. Which is both nice and weird in that the standard has obviously been written with Twitter-like stuff in mind.
> Imagine how ridiculous email would feel if you need a gmail account to email gmail peeps, a microsoft account to email outlook peeps, and another separate account to communicate with people in every mom and pop community.
Maybe this is the problem you’re hinting at, but I expect it would be very rare for me to ever run into someone I couldn’t email because they’re not using Gmail (especially if we include G Suite).
This does seem like a genuine problem, and there are already signs of this happening in the Fediverse. Perhaps it needs a name, so that people can notice when it is happening, and discuss potential solutions to it. The name I propose is "Federator's Dilemma", as it seems like a game theoretic problem.
As for a solution, my intuition is that the first step might be to create a Sybil-proof voting system for determining how popular individual services are. If a service is refused federation by other services which collectively contain 90% of user accounts, then that's a sign that the service doesn't do enough to stop its users from posting objectionable content. Similarly, service A could report to service B how many abuse reports it is getting from its users about people on service B, with a clear rule about when service B would be blocked.
This isn't a perfect system, and I admit that a Sybil-proof global anonymous distributed voting system might be harder than just solving the Federator's Dilemma more directly, but I think it's worth considering, not least because such a voting system would be useful for countless other applications online.