6 ms·

Twitter set out to be the public square, the place where matters of importance are discussed by the people. I think JD was serious about that, still is. The pr

by netcan 6y ago

Twitter set out to be the public square, the place where matters of importance are discussed by the people. I think JD was serious about that, still is. The problem is that Twitter is a private public square. That contradiction is not something JD can accept, because "his salary depends on his not understanding it.” It isn't reconcilable. We don't have many examples, in modern times, of of non-companies filling roles like Twitter of FB fill. But, that doesn't mean they can't exist. The WWW itself is a platform for speech and is a "public square." Wikipedia is another example. A really good example, if you think about it. If wikipedia was a commercial company, imagine the issues they'd be facing... all that authority as an information source. Meanwhile, we really need to consider the economics of companies like twitter & facebook. Does FB really need 50k employees and a $70bn budget to provide the world with facebook? This isn't a question you could ask about Toyota. If Facebook fell off the edge of the disc, we would very quickly have a replacement. People wouldn't lack for social media. If Toyota fell off the disc, we would have fewer cars. Rebuilding that capacity would require real resources.. Until then, we'd lack for cars. This last part is key. Commercial viability is nearly a non-issue. Social media can be viable on a tiny fraction of its current revenue. This explodes the number of possible actions. I really hope we're not heading for a regulatory shitshow... I hope, but I can't say I'm optimistic.

save_ferris 6y ago
I don't fully understand what you're trying to argue here. > Meanwhile, we really need to consider the economics of companies like twitter & facebook. Does FB really need 50k employees and a $70bn budget to provide the world with facebook? Are you saying that if FB had a smaller headcount or budget, they'd be less influential? A company's headcount and budget are largely a function of the market, and the market highly values FB. If you have a problem with the economics of FB, you have a problem with the market forces that created it. But you end with: > I hope we're not heading for a regulatory shitshow If you're not happy that the market created conditions for companies like FB to grow to the size that they are, and you're also not happy that regulation is possibly in the future of these companies, then how would you like to see this scenario play out?
- fendy3002 6y ago
  Imo the party which makes the values of FB high is the problem. It isn't just some companies that want to put advertisements for their products. The companies want to dominate the market and shut down their competitions, even to the point that our privacy start to be intrused. The best scenario is for FB to stay at early 2000 version, where our feeds full of friend's stories, games and some ads. Now it's full of media, arguably some pushes political agenda, intrusive advertising (tracking ads), and a few of friend's feed. Then imo, not all regulations are good. Because fb is a political platform, the regulation for sosmed is more likely full with political agenda too.
- netcan 6y ago
  To the first part, I meant that the range of possible worlds is very broad. Resources aren't a limiting factor. Facebook could continue to do facebook regardless of financial burdens placed on them. If not, someone else can. This wasn't the case for most monopolies of the past. In the past, there was a real concern of "oops. We killed smelting. No more steel." To the second part... I don't have full answers. I would like this scenario play out to a free media outcome. Decentralisation, and ideally, a lot of commercialisation too. More wikipedias, WWWs. Fewer FBs. Disintermediation. Commodification of bottlenecks like youtube has... owning the relationship between video maker and video watcher. The ideals that made the internet work in the first place. That's not something a politician can give us though. No one decided that wikipedia or WWW would win. It happened. What I want from politicians is a laundry list: (1) Trustbusting. The Facebook's acquisitions of whatsapp & IG should never have happened, for example. Youtube should be split from Google (and adwords from search... off topic). Also, modern antitrust needs to recognize the economic realities of these businesses. This isn't a railroad monopoly or Bell. There are no capital costs and there is no major danger of harming the public interest by sinking the industry. Social media will exist whether or not FB is worth $1trn. That money does not represent "capital" in the productive capacity sense, it just represents earning potential. (2) Different rules for giant companies. Rules should apply only to designated giant companies. The biggest problems are size related. Be explicitly skeptical of size. Data laws. Copyright enforcement. User content liability. Fairness requirements. etc. A normal regulator will enforce the monopolies which create the underlying problems. We need an explicitly "large company" set of rules, including tax rules. (3) Much stronger fair use and public domain rules. A complete rethinking. Eg, if a politician gives an interview... this should be public domain or under extremely strong fair use protection. This is another area where we need to consider modern economic realities. For said political interview, you could preserve most of the financial value (and incentive) with a copyright limited to one week. (4) Non-consumer rights in regards to monopolies. If facebook, youtube or amazon ban you, this is a public matter. It's more akin to blackballing than "please leave this bar." Everyone needs protections from monopolies, especially non consumers. Once companies are in that size range, they need to (5) Data use transparency laws. FB political advertising is an extreme example. Half the shit they do wouldn't stand the light of day. Some of it is borderline treason. Shine that light. Full data dumps of ads, targeting criteria, etc. Publish ad matching algorithms. Give the public access to everything the advertiser has access to... ... the list gets long.
dexen 6y ago
Excellent post, one nitpick: >Wikipedia is another example [of the public square] Quite the opposite; Wikipedia is explicitly based on published reliable sources. They have a specific rule[1] excluding information that was not published in such way. There are certain advantages to this rule, and its utility has been validated through Wikipedia's long, and ongoing, run. Nonetheless this cathedral mindset cannot be compared to a public square in any way other than being a very opposite. In particular the published reliable sources rule excludes general blogs and public forums and the likes, thus excluding the majority of discourse & voices on the internet. Even expert sources, if self-published, can only be used in limited way and with caution. -- [1] "If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
- jfk13 6y ago
  Naturally, there's a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
  - dexen 6y ago
    The citogenesis xkcd is right, but could & should take one more step and say openly: Wikipedia has became part of the media ecosystem, not much different from any other part of the media ecosystem. Journalists at typical outlets are also engaged in re-publishing -edited or verbatim- content from other outlets. Among those practices, churnalism [1]. -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism
    - jan_Inkepa 6y ago
      Why do you say that? Wikipedia is vastly different from anything I’d normally recognise as news media(I guess that’s what you mean?). It puts content up front (except when asking for donations). It shows how the sausage is made (you can look at talk pages if you really want to). It sources claims. I guess at some point it’ll take a turn for the worse, but it’s nowhere close to there yet from what I can see. Am I missing something? I guess you could say that it’s part of the ecosystem in that it trusts it and news sources are an integral part of its fact-checking process, but I don’t see that that makes it resemble too closely the sources it uses for fact-checking. And companies use it for PR\allow-washing, which isn’t great. And subject-experts express frustration in getting their edits reverted by idiots. But, it’s still recognisably wikipedia from the old days. I don’t see how you get to “not much different from any other part of the media ecosystem”.
engineer_22 6y ago
You've got an interesting take on it and one that's bound to be unpopular on HN. I think your discussion of the economics hints at Facebook's monopoly.
dgellow 6y ago
If someone else is always confused by the use of acronyms, "JD" here is for "Jack Dorsey" (twitter co-founder and CEO).
SiVal 6y ago
Twitter and FB could be replaced quickly, because their technology is not their primary asset. Their primary asset is their hundreds of millions of users who are there mainly because of the other hundreds of millions of users. Not surprisingly, network effects are pervasive on the network, and with everything moving to the network, network effects will dominate almost everything unless something is done to deal explicitly with network-effect-based monopolies. Just imagine email if you couldn't email anyone who didn't have an email address at the same company you have yours. Almost all email would begin to consolidate in the winning company, which would then begin telling people what could and couldn't be said in email. They could cut you off from email and destroy businesses for violating whatever "terms of service" they felt like imposing or even accidentally. Too bad for you. I think the answer to network-effects monopolies is to force them to switch to an open protocol once they crossed a threshold of a certain number of users. They could then continue to offer services, but other companies and agencies could also put you on "the network". Companies could stay small and retain full control or grow and be forced to open so their competitors and users couldn't be locked out (or in).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- smt88 6y ago
  It is not easy to run the infrastructure for a Facebook clone, even with 10M users. Technology is absolutely part of their entrenchment.
  - thephyber 6y ago
    Part, yes. But not a majority. I worked at a large social media company (not large by modern tier 1 social media network standards). We handled well over 10M users, but the company is dying / died. The technology still works, but the mindshare was lost and users jump ship faster when the network effect stops being an asset.
xxpor 6y ago
I don't get why people are so quick to replace private authoritarianism with government authoritarianism. At least with the first version you have the theoretical option of escaping.
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  > I don't get why people are so quick to replace private authoritarianism with government authoritarianism. At least with the first version you have the theoretical option of escaping. I’d like to run the numbers on how long fugitives escape justice when they’re targeted by bounty hunters, placed on most wanted lists or other red notices, or both. It’s not always good innocent guys getting caught by good innocent law enforcement, either. Entrapment and parallel construction exist. Ideally the crimes or criminal intent to justify all this apparatus actually exist too, right? Some people may not care about justifications; feels over reals, basically. The people involved may believe they are correct to work for private authoritarian companies, or public ones; I guess that’s hypercapitalism for you.
tmaly 6y ago
> Twitter is a private public square So ABC, NBC, CBS are all private companies and they are much older than Twitter. How is it that they can be regulated by the FCC?
- astura 6y ago
  FCC only regulates broadcasts that go over the public airways; cable TV isn't regulated by the FCC.
  - tmaly 6y ago
    is LTE not public airwaves?
    - thephyber 6y ago
      Your cell company that directly controls the LTE transmission is regulated by the FCC, not every small website you may interact with on TCP/IP on your smartphone over LTE.
threatofrain 6y ago
Does this point to a social media platform which is publicly funded, publicly funded internet infrastructure, and publicly funded web access? Do we not want a public square?
- godshatter 6y ago
  I don't trust governments not to coopt such a system and make it political in one way or another. I'd prefer we go a federated route, like Mastodon. That way the servers are private, but the system as a whole is not controlled by a central authority. Can't find a server that will let you express what you want to express? Roll your own. Don't want to hear about Emacs ever again, join a vi-only server, or a never-emacs server.
thephyber 6y ago
> fell off the edge of the disc What in the flat world... ? /s
thephyber 6y ago
> The problem is that Twitter is a private public square. What were the public public squares and the private public squares before Twitter was developed? Understanding the historic context of these forums is pretty important. I would argue there have only been remarkably few public public squares since property became privatized.
- netcan 6y ago
  so... jericho?

by netcan 6y ago

save_ferris 6y ago

I don't fully understand what you're trying to argue here. > Meanwhile, we really need to consider the economics of companies like twitter & facebook. Does FB really need 50k employees and a $70bn budget to provide the world with facebook? Are you saying that if FB had a smaller headcount or budget, they'd be less influential? A company's headcount and budget are largely a function of the market, and the market highly values FB. If you have a problem with the economics of FB, you have a problem with the market forces that created it. But you end with: > I hope we're not heading for a regulatory shitshow If you're not happy that the market created conditions for companies like FB to grow to the size that they are, and you're also not happy that regulation is possibly in the future of these companies, then how would you like to see this scenario play out?

fendy3002 6y ago
Imo the party which makes the values of FB high is the problem. It isn't just some companies that want to put advertisements for their products. The companies want to dominate the market and shut down their competitions, even to the point that our privacy start to be intrused. The best scenario is for FB to stay at early 2000 version, where our feeds full of friend's stories, games and some ads. Now it's full of media, arguably some pushes political agenda, intrusive advertising (tracking ads), and a few of friend's feed. Then imo, not all regulations are good. Because fb is a political platform, the regulation for sosmed is more likely full with political agenda too.
netcan 6y ago
To the first part, I meant that the range of possible worlds is very broad. Resources aren't a limiting factor. Facebook could continue to do facebook regardless of financial burdens placed on them. If not, someone else can. This wasn't the case for most monopolies of the past. In the past, there was a real concern of "oops. We killed smelting. No more steel." To the second part... I don't have full answers. I would like this scenario play out to a free media outcome. Decentralisation, and ideally, a lot of commercialisation too. More wikipedias, WWWs. Fewer FBs. Disintermediation. Commodification of bottlenecks like youtube has... owning the relationship between video maker and video watcher. The ideals that made the internet work in the first place. That's not something a politician can give us though. No one decided that wikipedia or WWW would win. It happened. What I want from politicians is a laundry list: (1) Trustbusting. The Facebook's acquisitions of whatsapp & IG should never have happened, for example. Youtube should be split from Google (and adwords from search... off topic). Also, modern antitrust needs to recognize the economic realities of these businesses. This isn't a railroad monopoly or Bell. There are no capital costs and there is no major danger of harming the public interest by sinking the industry. Social media will exist whether or not FB is worth $1trn. That money does not represent "capital" in the productive capacity sense, it just represents earning potential. (2) Different rules for giant companies. Rules should apply only to designated giant companies. The biggest problems are size related. Be explicitly skeptical of size. Data laws. Copyright enforcement. User content liability. Fairness requirements. etc. A normal regulator will enforce the monopolies which create the underlying problems. We need an explicitly "large company" set of rules, including tax rules. (3) Much stronger fair use and public domain rules. A complete rethinking. Eg, if a politician gives an interview... this should be public domain or under extremely strong fair use protection. This is another area where we need to consider modern economic realities. For said political interview, you could preserve most of the financial value (and incentive) with a copyright limited to one week. (4) Non-consumer rights in regards to monopolies. If facebook, youtube or amazon ban you, this is a public matter. It's more akin to blackballing than "please leave this bar." Everyone needs protections from monopolies, especially non consumers. Once companies are in that size range, they need to (5) Data use transparency laws. FB political advertising is an extreme example. Half the shit they do wouldn't stand the light of day. Some of it is borderline treason. Shine that light. Full data dumps of ads, targeting criteria, etc. Publish ad matching algorithms. Give the public access to everything the advertiser has access to... ... the list gets long.

dexen 6y ago

Excellent post, one nitpick: >Wikipedia is another example [of the public square] Quite the opposite; Wikipedia is explicitly based on published reliable sources. They have a specific rule[1] excluding information that was not published in such way. There are certain advantages to this rule, and its utility has been validated through Wikipedia's long, and ongoing, run. Nonetheless this cathedral mindset cannot be compared to a public square in any way other than being a very opposite. In particular the published reliable sources rule excludes general blogs and public forums and the likes, thus excluding the majority of discourse & voices on the internet. Even expert sources, if self-published, can only be used in limited way and with caution. -- [1] "If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources

jfk13 6y ago
Naturally, there's a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
- dexen 6y ago
  The citogenesis xkcd is right, but could & should take one more step and say openly: Wikipedia has became part of the media ecosystem, not much different from any other part of the media ecosystem. Journalists at typical outlets are also engaged in re-publishing -edited or verbatim- content from other outlets. Among those practices, churnalism [1]. -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism
  - jan_Inkepa 6y ago
    Why do you say that? Wikipedia is vastly different from anything I’d normally recognise as news media(I guess that’s what you mean?). It puts content up front (except when asking for donations). It shows how the sausage is made (you can look at talk pages if you really want to). It sources claims. I guess at some point it’ll take a turn for the worse, but it’s nowhere close to there yet from what I can see. Am I missing something? I guess you could say that it’s part of the ecosystem in that it trusts it and news sources are an integral part of its fact-checking process, but I don’t see that that makes it resemble too closely the sources it uses for fact-checking. And companies use it for PR\allow-washing, which isn’t great. And subject-experts express frustration in getting their edits reverted by idiots. But, it’s still recognisably wikipedia from the old days. I don’t see how you get to “not much different from any other part of the media ecosystem”.

engineer_22 6y ago

You've got an interesting take on it and one that's bound to be unpopular on HN. I think your discussion of the economics hints at Facebook's monopoly.

dgellow 6y ago

If someone else is always confused by the use of acronyms, "JD" here is for "Jack Dorsey" (twitter co-founder and CEO).

SiVal 6y ago

Twitter and FB could be replaced quickly, because their technology is not their primary asset. Their primary asset is their hundreds of millions of users who are there mainly because of the other hundreds of millions of users. Not surprisingly, network effects are pervasive on the network, and with everything moving to the network, network effects will dominate almost everything unless something is done to deal explicitly with network-effect-based monopolies. Just imagine email if you couldn't email anyone who didn't have an email address at the same company you have yours. Almost all email would begin to consolidate in the winning company, which would then begin telling people what could and couldn't be said in email. They could cut you off from email and destroy businesses for violating whatever "terms of service" they felt like imposing or even accidentally. Too bad for you. I think the answer to network-effects monopolies is to force them to switch to an open protocol once they crossed a threshold of a certain number of users. They could then continue to offer services, but other companies and agencies could also put you on "the network". Companies could stay small and retain full control or grow and be forced to open so their competitors and users couldn't be locked out (or in).

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
smt88 6y ago
It is not easy to run the infrastructure for a Facebook clone, even with 10M users. Technology is absolutely part of their entrenchment.
- thephyber 6y ago
  Part, yes. But not a majority. I worked at a large social media company (not large by modern tier 1 social media network standards). We handled well over 10M users, but the company is dying / died. The technology still works, but the mindshare was lost and users jump ship faster when the network effect stops being an asset.

xxpor 6y ago

I don't get why people are so quick to replace private authoritarianism with government authoritarianism. At least with the first version you have the theoretical option of escaping.

aspenmayer 6y ago
> I don't get why people are so quick to replace private authoritarianism with government authoritarianism. At least with the first version you have the theoretical option of escaping. I’d like to run the numbers on how long fugitives escape justice when they’re targeted by bounty hunters, placed on most wanted lists or other red notices, or both. It’s not always good innocent guys getting caught by good innocent law enforcement, either. Entrapment and parallel construction exist. Ideally the crimes or criminal intent to justify all this apparatus actually exist too, right? Some people may not care about justifications; feels over reals, basically. The people involved may believe they are correct to work for private authoritarian companies, or public ones; I guess that’s hypercapitalism for you.

tmaly 6y ago

> Twitter is a private public square So ABC, NBC, CBS are all private companies and they are much older than Twitter. How is it that they can be regulated by the FCC?

astura 6y ago
FCC only regulates broadcasts that go over the public airways; cable TV isn't regulated by the FCC.
- tmaly 6y ago
  is LTE not public airwaves?
  - thephyber 6y ago
    Your cell company that directly controls the LTE transmission is regulated by the FCC, not every small website you may interact with on TCP/IP on your smartphone over LTE.

threatofrain 6y ago

Does this point to a social media platform which is publicly funded, publicly funded internet infrastructure, and publicly funded web access? Do we not want a public square?

godshatter 6y ago
I don't trust governments not to coopt such a system and make it political in one way or another. I'd prefer we go a federated route, like Mastodon. That way the servers are private, but the system as a whole is not controlled by a central authority. Can't find a server that will let you express what you want to express? Roll your own. Don't want to hear about Emacs ever again, join a vi-only server, or a never-emacs server.

thephyber 6y ago

> fell off the edge of the disc What in the flat world... ? /s

thephyber 6y ago

> The problem is that Twitter is a private public square. What were the public public squares and the private public squares before Twitter was developed? Understanding the historic context of these forums is pretty important. I would argue there have only been remarkably few public public squares since property became privatized.

netcan 6y ago
so... jericho?