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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.

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.
- auganov 6y ago
  > "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).
  - ssivark 6y ago
    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.
    - auganov 6y ago
      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.
- baddox 6y ago
  > 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).
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.

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.
auganov 6y ago
> "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).
- ssivark 6y ago
  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.
  - auganov 6y ago
    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.
baddox 6y ago
> 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).

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.