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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

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.

stickfigure 6y ago
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!
- metalliqaz 6y ago
  How exactly do you propose to split up AT&T? ...and so on from there. The real answer is to mandate interoperability and equal treatment of competitor content. Then competition could grow on its own. Personally I would just regulate it into oblivion.
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    AT&T was a monopoly of local phone services. It was split up into geographic regions, each with their own independent physical infrastructure. There's no physical locality to Twitter. You can't put all the California users in one system and all the Washington users in another.
- basch 6y ago
  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.
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    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.
    - basch 6y ago
      >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?
      - jsnell 6y ago
        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.
- Timpy 6y ago
  > I don't like Twitter either, so I don't use it. It's a really effective solution! Schneier's point is the threat of a malicious actor starting a war by hijacking a politician's Twitter is non-zero. People like you and me opting out of Twitter is not an effective solution to that.
  - staycoolboy 6y ago
    If enough people opt, it is a solution. Like littering: if I throw one cigarette butt out the window, is that really an environmental hazard? No. If a hundred million people each throw 20 out the window a day, then you have a problem.
    - Timpy 6y ago
      Alright, well I'm avoiding twitter as hard as I can so I guess any day now the President will stop affecting public discourse via Twitter.
      - staycoolboy 6y ago
        You and me both. I can't tell if you're jibing, but I do think twice before clicking on links that come from certain places, which I guess is "avoiding harder". :)
- bikeshaving 6y ago
  Rather than splitting up Twitter, what if we just stopped the constant process of acquiring and dismantling any company which dares to threaten the big tech companies. Vine should still be around.
- dogfoods 6y ago
  We used to have forums and blogs organised by interest topic or community. An elegant mode of organisation, for a more civilised age.
  - notafraudster 6y ago
    I mean, reddit and Discord are still this. They both graft on cross-community navigation and account systems for user convenience and increasing user retention.
    - dogfoods 6y ago
      No, they are not. Reddit (and even more so Discord) does not have the permanence that forums have and far worse tools for formatting posts, so every subreddit degenerates into 101 questions, circlejerking, and meme shit. There's no way to contain that like you can on a forum. Cross-community navigation is an anti-feature and harmful.
juliend2 6y ago
You seem to talk about monopolies as if it was a bad thing. And I get it that you don't like Twitter being a closed platform. Me neither. It's not ideal, but it's still more user friendly than Mastodon (sadly). I wouldn't shed a tear if Twitter went bankrupt either, but I don't necessarily think it would lead to a better world (Facebook would be a stronger monopoly and that, I think, would make things worse).
- metalliqaz 6y ago
  > You seem to talk about monopolies as if it was a bad thing. guilty as charged
  - juliend2 6y ago
    What's with this dogmatic rhetoric, lol? Monopolies are just companies that enjoy a significant edge over their competitors. What makes monopolistic companies inherently always bad?
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      No, that is not the definition of a monopoly. A monopoly is a entity that holds exclusivity to a good or a service.
      - juliend2 6y ago
        Interesting. So according to this definition, Google doesn't have a monopoly in the market of Search engines since there is also Bing[1]. What is the word for it then? Highly-dominant player? Edit: looks like I'm not alone to have this definition for a monopoly[2]. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23900128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23900128
        jacquesm 6y ago
        De facto monopoly is not a monopoly. It is a dominant player. But a monopoly really is exclusive.
jacquesm 6y ago
Nonsense. I'm as far from libertarian as you're going to get and I really don't see the case for breaking up Twitter. Breaking up Google I can understand, especially given their dominance in both search and advertising but Twitter is by comparison a bit player and all it really does is serve as a relay station. It's as close to a dumb pipe as you're going to get modulo a very small amount of content monitoring. And why would a Twitter hack reflect on Facebook to begin with? It's not as though FB owns Twitter.
- jermier 6y ago
  > especially given their dominance in both search and advertising Google's Search mechanism is merely a trojan horse where their real cash-cow is the advertising business. They use Search to assuage people into thinking they are an ethical company, when we all know by now, they rely on surveillance capitalism and creating large elaborate dossiers on the whole population.
Shivetya 6y ago
Twitter's power comes fro being nearly integrated into main stream news. the danger therein has been seen with the platform used to shame those who put forth the wrong opinion, spin a story in a manner not acceptable, or associate with someone who has done the same. how this came about is hard to place but I would not doubt the executives at Twitter cultivated their position along with very adept targeting of celebrities. How do you split up something which is embedded into the media, specifically the news?
- basch 6y ago
  Correct, it is more a thought monopoly than one of numbers. Its a lifeline between everyone who has a megaphone. I'm not sure one platform that all journalists choose to prioritize falls under traditional antitrust concerns, based only on that fact, nor does that fact alone really strengthen other antitrust concerns. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/06/twitters-influence-beyond-user-numbers.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/06/twitters-influence-beyond-us... https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/journalists-on-twitter-study.php https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/journalists-on-twitter-s...
- thephyber 6y ago
  You seem to be making a few separate claims as if they are the same. > Twitter's power comes fro being nearly integrated into main stream news. You are using "integrated" (a word which has a specific meaning and is related to monopolies) in a way that doesn't apply here. News makers tend to use Twitter because it's a rapid-fire way for them to see what others in their cohort are talking about. They did the same thing before Twitter, but it was on slower news cycles (daily newspapers, evening TV news, etc). > the danger therein has been seen with the platform used to shame those who put forth the wrong opinion I'm completely fine with shaming. We need more of it. It's always been a part of how societies regulate the outliers (including species other than humans). Since 2016 we've seen what happens when a person exhibits no shame whatsoever in a society that had been established with lots of norms rather than laws to steer behavior. I suspect you are talking about the actions that go beyond shaming (boycotts, calling for people to be fired, book publishers dropping books, forums dropping speeches, etc). I agree we shouldn't burn heretics or witches. But that shouldn't prevent us from applying some modicum of social penalty if the speech or actions warrant it. > how this came about is hard to place News makers already had incentives to watch each other's work. They "keep their finger on the pulse" of news. Twitter made this possible. News makers have always tried to get a story to market first -- that's the incentive that capitalism provides. I was contracting at a major regional newspaper when Michael Jackson died. For 4 hours, all news sources in the world were quoting a TMZ tweet because that was the only source. The other news outlets were now reporting a derivative of news -- that "TMZ has tweeted that X happened". For me, that's when Twitter became a significant cog in the news ecosystem. We've also seen independent reporters in countries like Syria and Yemen get carried by international news outlets because there was no alternative. News is changing because the old way was inefficient and insufficient in some ways. Twitter exists. It's not the best app, but it's an app that is large enough at the right time. > How do you split up... And should we? And what are the consequences if we do?
thephyber 6y ago
This comment is rife with hyperbole to the point I can't take it seriously. > Twitter has clearly cornered the market for online publishing of thoughts and opinions. What? Last I heard, Twitter only had about 22% of the USA active on the site[1] compared to 69% using Facebook. Also, the term "cornering the market" was used when there was a scarcity of a good. I would argue Twitter and FB are very good at dominating time and attention away from other online platforms, but that doesn't make them monopolies or an oligopoly. Have newspapers ceased to publish OpEds? Has Medium.com been M&Aed by Twitter? Have individual blogs been outlawed? Have the scrappy startups (Gab, Parler) somehow been prevented from competing by some vertical or horizontal integration that Twitter/FB/Google have? You are doing significant mental gymnastics to limit the scope of what you want to be "the market" when you are making this monopoly case. I don't much like who I am when I'm on Twitter or Facebook so I try to minimize my time on both. But I don't pretend like there are no alternatives or that those companies have any significant control over the "posting of ideas and opinions" market. They have gravity, but that changes quickly as their users ore finicky -- Friendster and MySpace and my former employer (smaller social media company) can tell you that. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/02/10-facts-about-americans-and-twitter/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/02/10-facts-ab...

stickfigure 6y ago

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!

metalliqaz 6y ago
How exactly do you propose to split up AT&T? ...and so on from there. The real answer is to mandate interoperability and equal treatment of competitor content. Then competition could grow on its own. Personally I would just regulate it into oblivion.
- stickfigure 6y ago
  AT&T was a monopoly of local phone services. It was split up into geographic regions, each with their own independent physical infrastructure. There's no physical locality to Twitter. You can't put all the California users in one system and all the Washington users in another.
basch 6y ago
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.
- stickfigure 6y ago
  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.
  - basch 6y ago
    >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?
    - jsnell 6y ago
      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.
Timpy 6y ago
> I don't like Twitter either, so I don't use it. It's a really effective solution! Schneier's point is the threat of a malicious actor starting a war by hijacking a politician's Twitter is non-zero. People like you and me opting out of Twitter is not an effective solution to that.
- staycoolboy 6y ago
  If enough people opt, it is a solution. Like littering: if I throw one cigarette butt out the window, is that really an environmental hazard? No. If a hundred million people each throw 20 out the window a day, then you have a problem.
  - Timpy 6y ago
    Alright, well I'm avoiding twitter as hard as I can so I guess any day now the President will stop affecting public discourse via Twitter.
    - staycoolboy 6y ago
      You and me both. I can't tell if you're jibing, but I do think twice before clicking on links that come from certain places, which I guess is "avoiding harder". :)
bikeshaving 6y ago
Rather than splitting up Twitter, what if we just stopped the constant process of acquiring and dismantling any company which dares to threaten the big tech companies. Vine should still be around.
dogfoods 6y ago
We used to have forums and blogs organised by interest topic or community. An elegant mode of organisation, for a more civilised age.
- notafraudster 6y ago
  I mean, reddit and Discord are still this. They both graft on cross-community navigation and account systems for user convenience and increasing user retention.
  - dogfoods 6y ago
    No, they are not. Reddit (and even more so Discord) does not have the permanence that forums have and far worse tools for formatting posts, so every subreddit degenerates into 101 questions, circlejerking, and meme shit. There's no way to contain that like you can on a forum. Cross-community navigation is an anti-feature and harmful.

juliend2 6y ago

You seem to talk about monopolies as if it was a bad thing. And I get it that you don't like Twitter being a closed platform. Me neither. It's not ideal, but it's still more user friendly than Mastodon (sadly). I wouldn't shed a tear if Twitter went bankrupt either, but I don't necessarily think it would lead to a better world (Facebook would be a stronger monopoly and that, I think, would make things worse).

metalliqaz 6y ago
> You seem to talk about monopolies as if it was a bad thing. guilty as charged
- juliend2 6y ago
  What's with this dogmatic rhetoric, lol? Monopolies are just companies that enjoy a significant edge over their competitors. What makes monopolistic companies inherently always bad?
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    No, that is not the definition of a monopoly. A monopoly is a entity that holds exclusivity to a good or a service.
    - juliend2 6y ago
      Interesting. So according to this definition, Google doesn't have a monopoly in the market of Search engines since there is also Bing[1]. What is the word for it then? Highly-dominant player? Edit: looks like I'm not alone to have this definition for a monopoly[2]. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23900128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23900128
      - jacquesm 6y ago
        De facto monopoly is not a monopoly. It is a dominant player. But a monopoly really is exclusive.

jacquesm 6y ago

Nonsense. I'm as far from libertarian as you're going to get and I really don't see the case for breaking up Twitter. Breaking up Google I can understand, especially given their dominance in both search and advertising but Twitter is by comparison a bit player and all it really does is serve as a relay station. It's as close to a dumb pipe as you're going to get modulo a very small amount of content monitoring. And why would a Twitter hack reflect on Facebook to begin with? It's not as though FB owns Twitter.

jermier 6y ago
> especially given their dominance in both search and advertising Google's Search mechanism is merely a trojan horse where their real cash-cow is the advertising business. They use Search to assuage people into thinking they are an ethical company, when we all know by now, they rely on surveillance capitalism and creating large elaborate dossiers on the whole population.

Shivetya 6y ago

Twitter's power comes fro being nearly integrated into main stream news. the danger therein has been seen with the platform used to shame those who put forth the wrong opinion, spin a story in a manner not acceptable, or associate with someone who has done the same. how this came about is hard to place but I would not doubt the executives at Twitter cultivated their position along with very adept targeting of celebrities. How do you split up something which is embedded into the media, specifically the news?

basch 6y ago
Correct, it is more a thought monopoly than one of numbers. Its a lifeline between everyone who has a megaphone. I'm not sure one platform that all journalists choose to prioritize falls under traditional antitrust concerns, based only on that fact, nor does that fact alone really strengthen other antitrust concerns. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/06/twitters-influence-beyond-user-numbers.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/06/twitters-influence-beyond-us... https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/journalists-on-twitter-study.php https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/journalists-on-twitter-s...
thephyber 6y ago
You seem to be making a few separate claims as if they are the same. > Twitter's power comes fro being nearly integrated into main stream news. You are using "integrated" (a word which has a specific meaning and is related to monopolies) in a way that doesn't apply here. News makers tend to use Twitter because it's a rapid-fire way for them to see what others in their cohort are talking about. They did the same thing before Twitter, but it was on slower news cycles (daily newspapers, evening TV news, etc). > the danger therein has been seen with the platform used to shame those who put forth the wrong opinion I'm completely fine with shaming. We need more of it. It's always been a part of how societies regulate the outliers (including species other than humans). Since 2016 we've seen what happens when a person exhibits no shame whatsoever in a society that had been established with lots of norms rather than laws to steer behavior. I suspect you are talking about the actions that go beyond shaming (boycotts, calling for people to be fired, book publishers dropping books, forums dropping speeches, etc). I agree we shouldn't burn heretics or witches. But that shouldn't prevent us from applying some modicum of social penalty if the speech or actions warrant it. > how this came about is hard to place News makers already had incentives to watch each other's work. They "keep their finger on the pulse" of news. Twitter made this possible. News makers have always tried to get a story to market first -- that's the incentive that capitalism provides. I was contracting at a major regional newspaper when Michael Jackson died. For 4 hours, all news sources in the world were quoting a TMZ tweet because that was the only source. The other news outlets were now reporting a derivative of news -- that "TMZ has tweeted that X happened". For me, that's when Twitter became a significant cog in the news ecosystem. We've also seen independent reporters in countries like Syria and Yemen get carried by international news outlets because there was no alternative. News is changing because the old way was inefficient and insufficient in some ways. Twitter exists. It's not the best app, but it's an app that is large enough at the right time. > How do you split up... And should we? And what are the consequences if we do?

thephyber 6y ago

This comment is rife with hyperbole to the point I can't take it seriously. > Twitter has clearly cornered the market for online publishing of thoughts and opinions. What? Last I heard, Twitter only had about 22% of the USA active on the site[1] compared to 69% using Facebook. Also, the term "cornering the market" was used when there was a scarcity of a good. I would argue Twitter and FB are very good at dominating time and attention away from other online platforms, but that doesn't make them monopolies or an oligopoly. Have newspapers ceased to publish OpEds? Has Medium.com been M&Aed by Twitter? Have individual blogs been outlawed? Have the scrappy startups (Gab, Parler) somehow been prevented from competing by some vertical or horizontal integration that Twitter/FB/Google have? You are doing significant mental gymnastics to limit the scope of what you want to be "the market" when you are making this monopoly case. I don't much like who I am when I'm on Twitter or Facebook so I try to minimize my time on both. But I don't pretend like there are no alternatives or that those companies have any significant control over the "posting of ideas and opinions" market. They have gravity, but that changes quickly as their users ore finicky -- Friendster and MySpace and my former employer (smaller social media company) can tell you that. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/02/10-facts-about-americans-and-twitter/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/02/10-facts-ab...