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"After a decade or so of the general sentiment being in favor of the internet and social media as a way to enable more speech and improve the marketplace of ide

• metalliqaz 6y ago
  I'm shocked (/s) that Silicon Valley's brand of libertarianism led to five companies dominating everything and then pulling up the ladder behind them by abandoning open standards in favor or proprietary silos.
  • pixl97 6y ago
    Expect to be down voted for speaking such heresy on HN.
    • dalu 6y ago
      Yup. Ivory tower circle jerk HN.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • wizzwizz4 6y ago
      It's the sarcasm, not the heresy.
  • ardy42 6y ago
    > I'm shocked (/s) that Silicon Valley's brand of libertarianism led to five companies dominating everything and then pulling up the ladder behind them by abandoning open standards in favor or proprietary silos. That's kind of to be expected, since that's what libertarianism is about: empowering those with property in proportion to their property, and disempowering everyone else in proportion to their lack of it. Of course, it's not usually stated that way (usually the focus is on rights and liberties for private property holders and ripping on competing institutional forms), but that's what it is.
  • tannhaeuser 6y ago
    "Pulling up the ladder" - thanks, that was the metaphor that didn't come to me as non-native speaker when I was last criticising the modern web and the process leading to its overcomplication by which browsers vendors shut the door behind them. With folks standing by and cheering, and self-proclaimed puppet "standardization bodies" in for job security.
• HotVector 6y ago
  If you look at it that way, then what Facebook was advocating for starts to look noble. They wanted ultimate transparency so that if anyone said anything stupid, it would get instantly knocked down, preventing the spread of misinformation, but obviously they failed really badly.
  • wussboy 6y ago
    I don't think they failed at all. They also realized that this "stupid" conversation was very profitable, and the more they pushed it to other people, the more money they made. If there is a failing, it is that Facebook is still claiming the moral high ground while they have ground our public discourse in to the manure.
• jrumbut 6y ago
  I look at it this way: 10-15 years ago many of us were complaining the web was being turned into TV. I think that was basically right, and now social media is rediscovering the other things that made TV work, which is that you can't just continually show the most upsetting/titillating media 24/7. And with the benefit of hindsight, I don't believe Twitter/Facebook have the obligation to be the venue where we exercise our freedom of speech. They tried and it turned out they were very bad at it. It's time to move on and use those services for keeping in touch with old classmates or whatever they are good at and develop platforms that are good for holding serious conversations.
  • naravara 6y ago
    > It's time to move on and use those services for keeping in touch with old classmates or whatever they are good at and develop platforms that are good for holding serious conversations. The challenge is, there's no money in that. The money is in serving ads, which depends on serving up upsetting/titillating media 24/7. Paywalls can't work because the barrier to entry keeps you from getting a sufficient network effect. You can have a small community that way, but you can't do a global "connecting everyone" thing. Such services will simply be outcompeted by the Facebook model. I think the headlining article's point on open protocols might be the only way to square that circle and I'm not even very optimistic about that working. I think the real disjunction happens when we merge news with a general social feed of every random person's opinion. If you stream your facts and porthole into the broader world through the same framework that you stream advertizing and deranged soapbox rants, then you're conceptually putting all those things in the same box and blurring the lines between them. News articles present themselves more like ads (e.g.". . .and you won't believe what happens next"). Conversations start to resemble ads too, with people throwing out provocative statements to get attention and likes instead of engaging in a more genuine/1to1 way.And the ads start to try looking like news or advice from a 'friend' (read: influencer) to slip past your "this is marketing BS" filter. The context collapse is what's unsustainable. In the olden days, when forums ruled the web, people got links and memes shared in forums, but the people sharing those things were getting them from other forums or they were finding them in blogs or pages via an RSS reader or just a daily roll of bookmarked sites they would go through. This maintained some cognitive difference between when you're seeing a blog written by an irascible and opinionated shock jock versus a piece in The NYTimes. Even if the person sharing had the point of an article go over their heads or ends up 'eating the onion' on something whatever harebrained aspect of it remains sequestered in whatever subforum they're in if it doesn't get fact checked there. The collapse makes the consumer stop being aware of the distinctions, and it cuts off the small-scale testbeds these things have to go through before they go truly viral. It also drives the producers to not care. So now the NYTimes hires irascible shock jocks as editorial columnists too because nothing matters anymore.
• mfer 6y ago
  Technology shapes conversations and changes in the way technology works has changed the way the conversations have happened. > 10 or 15 years ago people looked at web 1.0, saw many good communities and valuable conversations and said "we need to protect free speech". Look at how the conversations happened. They were in places like forums and forums were often around topics. I belonged to many forums on topics and the general conversation was around those (with some water cooler). This is worthy of protecting. Just this week I ended up in a forum on a topic because I was trying to figure out how to repair something and there was discussion around people on it. Very valuable. > Today people looks at Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit, see mismanaged cesspools and declare that we need centralized speech control. These are general conversation channels with the exception of Reddit. They are also paired with targeted ads. They tend to be short form. In a forum I see all the things and navigate it. In Twitter/FB/etc I see what they put in front of me. They control the flow of information. The platforms the conversations are happening on are shaping the conversations themselves. This cannot be discounted.
  • z3t4 6y ago
    I think the problem is that most people use mobile phones, rather then computer workstations. In the 90's everyone had a proper PC workstation. But now people have touch screens instead. You wont type long blog posts or participate in lengthy forum discussions using a touch screen. If you would put a graph with PC sales vs pads and phones showing the last 30 years you would see where it shifted from creating/consuming to passive/consuming. There are still normal PC users, it's just that the number have now grown much, while the number of touch screen users has grown exponentially.
    • mfer 6y ago
      I've read that there are books composed in the form of text messages. People like the short style. The impact of this is that people who read that way end up with lower literacy. Full length books are hard for them to read. The shift in screen size is an interesting one. The technology influences the content and even the way we think. It's not a passive element.
  • 6y ago
• WClayFerguson 6y ago
  The left wing is still not wanting to rise up against censorship because they believe it's still benefiting them, since BigTech (+M5M) is their leftist ally...for now. What they need to realize is that once you give Tyrannical Control over to your leaders (governments, or BigTech censors), because you consider them benevolent today, it's foolish because they won't be benevolent forever. Our founding fathers knew power corrupts, but today's 20-somethings seem quite unaware. They think we can create a system where all forms of "bad" speech are stopped. But the problem with that is you end up having to define "bad". My definition of "patriotic speech" might be your definition of "mean speech", so unless you appoint power-wielding dictators to make the final decision, the only solution is to just say everyone is free. Once you allow dictators they'll always become corrupt and self-interested. The left thinks they're in a war against evil and meanies, but really the only opponent they're fighting is freedom itself.
  • betterunix2 6y ago
    "The left" is for democracy. There was once a time when that sentiment was shared across the political spectrum, but lately it seems that "the right" remains undecided about whether or not it is acceptable to threaten the lives of politicians who refused to overturn the results of an election. I still remember a time when both the left and right celebrated the strength of American democracy and the fact that people in America do not turn to violence when their side loses an election. The fact that right wing activists are crying "censorship" when platforms react to an attempt to use violence to overturn the results of an election by banning the terrorists who organized that attack speaks volumes about how far America has fallen. It was not all that long ago that right wing activists were joining left wing activists in demanding that tech companies stop providing service to ISIS. Where were all these cries of censorship back then? It is only now that the right wing of American politics has aligned itself with terrorists that they have started whining about "free speech" and calling for increased regulation of tech companies that dare to kick terrorists off their platforms.
    • WClayFerguson 6y ago
      The entire summer long while buildings burned, and entire cities looted by violent murdering thugs it was called "peaceful protests". Then when some actual peaceful protesters go to a legitimate politically organized rally in clown outfits in Washington brandishing American flags and are literally ushered into the buildings by security it's portrayed by the lying media as serious military coup attempt. To quote Biden: "Gimme a break man."
• newswasboring 6y ago
  > Advocating for more of it means you're advocating for giving more power to the companies who fucked up the system in the first place. You mean that in the current framework right? Because in the proposed framework in the article more speech does not lead to more power to the companies.
• dalbasal 6y ago
  Reactionary perhaps. Irrational is unfair, I feel. We, anyone who knows what an article titled "Protocols, Not Platforms" is probably about... our discussions have failed to have enough impact outside of niche. People see there is a problem. "Marketplace of ideas" is somewhat of a hard sell . As you say... mismanaged cesspits, but also monopolies. Also, "marketplace" is more euphemism than metaphor when referring to a handful of click-optimizing algorithms. I'm on the fence, but don't tend to think whatever the current politics does give more power to those companies who fucked up the system in the first place. Facebook and Twitter were already in an uncanny valley of free speech. It has been, Free speech at their discretion all along, and this wasn't a theoretical problem. At least now it is clear what we are looking at. In any case, this post in on point. It's disheartening that decades into this discussion we have not had enough impact that politicians even know what the hell we are talking about. Twitter doesn't need to be regulated. It just needs to die. Twitter does not need to be a company. It's already basically a protocol. Free the protocol. Discard the company. They are not needed.
• majormajor 6y ago
  > 10 or 15 years ago people looked at web 1.0, saw many good communities and valuable conversations and said "we need to protect free speech". But these places almost all had "speech control". The exceptions were (in)famous. It was decentralized, which has a lot of benefits compared to having fewer, huge platforms, but the control existed and was essential. The "don't let platforms moderate anything but illegal content" argument is extremely disingenous. That's not how you get back to the "good old days" - or how you keep current smaller places like HN alive. If there are problems created specifically by the big platforms being too big, target their size specifically. Regulating advertising and privacy and data tracking might be one way to start, reduce the incentive and rewards for being huge; but I think more likely, you'd want specific taxes, fees, or actions, based on userbase size.
• fareesh 6y ago
  I remember watching a very strange segment on American news about a man who owns a mattress and pillow company who was banned from Twitter because he continuously expressed his disbelief in the legitimacy of the election result of 2020, and was organizing various events along this theme. From what I recall the 2016 election was frequently attributed to some vague accusation of hacking from Russia but the same standard was not applied at the time, nor is it applied today. The people espousing this view were eventually proven inconclusive in all the different inquiries into the matter, and they were far more influential than a man who sells pillows. There seems to be a very disproportionate level of enforcement towards offenders on the social media platforms, and this seems to stem from the personal politics of the people working there. If the employees at these companies had the opposite politics, I am quite sure the rhetoric around this issue would be framed in terms of authoritarianism. Are you not allowed to criticize your government anymore in the USA? I find that to be quite incredible.
  • lallysingh 6y ago
    Well there was the attempt at violent overthrow of a government... That's one difference.
    • throwaway894345 6y ago
      Personally I think it's a security problem that Pillow Man's LARPer mob constituted a credible threat to our National Security. This doesn't seem like cause to restrict speech. (Of course, Twitter is technically a private platform, but it's also the de facto public square as I discussed elsewhere in this thread, and the property we ought to care about is that free speech is protected in the public square).
      • lallysingh 6y ago
        I think the Free Speech problem is really a problem of automatic amplification by platforms that have motivations sometimes opposed to the well-being of the speakers or listenrrs.
• unishark 6y ago
  > 10 or 15 years ago people looked at web 1.0, saw many good communities and valuable conversations and said "we need to protect free speech". > Today people looks at Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit, see mismanaged cesspools and declare that we need centralized speech control. ...In other words people are completely taking all the amazing things we have today for granted.
  • mcguire 6y ago
    Or perhaps realizing that those amazing things really aren't all that wonderful. Very few things are an unalloyed good.
    • unishark 6y ago
      Someone views a glass as half empty, I point out it can be viewed as half full. Your someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet counter is that, no, it is half empty? Thanks for the contribution.
• tomatotomato37 6y ago
  The problem is that this speech control isn't just used for cleaning the cesspool but is now demonstrably used to protect the elite. Just this week we have escalated from just blocking hate speech and violence to blocking people who are inconveniencing Wall Street.
• Pxtl 6y ago
  Basically, we've learned that the current laws against threats, defamation of character, slander, fraud, false advertising, etc. fail catastrophically at handling those crimes/torts when they occur in large decentralized online communities. Governments have no idea how to tackle the problems, so it's either private corporations that directly host these communities do it or nobody does. And that means going more years with a growing population that is getting radicalized by the above false information.