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One of the core problems with "social media" in 2021 is the default assumption that it should be monetised and a business. There is a difference between provid

One of the core problems with "social media" in 2021 is the default assumption that it should be monetised and a business. There is a difference between providing infrastructure for social connection and farming/harvestings/leveraging the information gathered from what is constructed on that infrastructure. The current situation is akin to if AT&T had listened in on all phone conversations (assuming no technical barriers) and sold ads based on what you said to friends and family. Before you made a call you would need to listen to a personalised ad on your reciever. Before facebook or myspace or twitter there were blogs/personal websites, forums, email and instant messaging. All these options worked for expressing one's self online and none of them were under a centralised, for-profit entity. Wikipedia is a good example of a decentralised social network although it appears to be increasingly infected with the reddit/twitter virus.

jefftk 5y ago
What do you mean that Wikipedia is infected?
- morpheos137 5y ago
  Originally wikipedia did not condone advocacy or propaganda now it does as long as it can be attributed as a "fact" because it has been published by a "reliable source." Who decides what is a reliable source? The same sort of clique that moderates /r/worldnews or /r/politics. Reddit is an Orwellian cancer.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    Wikipedia's policies on this are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability These are the same policies Wikipedia has had for over a decade, with only relatively minor changes. Are you saying they're being interpreted differently? Could you give an example?
    - LegitShady 5y ago
      practice is how policy is applied, and wikipedia in practice is not the same as wikipedia policy by rote.
      - temp8964 5y ago
        Exactly. Policy is implemented by people. Eventually those who put extraordinary amount of time online will takeover editor/moderator positions and win editor wars. Most of those people are definitely not real experts in the field. Because real world experts wouldn't have time / motivation to engage in online fight.
      - jefftk 5y ago
        Can you give an example of how you see this changing?
        morpheos137 5y ago
        For one thing all media sources should be on equal footing. Let the community decide what is bullshit. It is ridiculous that BBC is considered a reliable source but RT is not. Both have a specific point of view that they promote, reliably, Wikipedia is not supposed to have a point of view. If BBC is allowed but RT is banned then Wikipedia POV will tend toward BBC simply because a contrasting POV is censored. Same would hold for allowing an Israeli newspaper but banning an Iranian one as an unacceptable source. All media outlets should be on equal footing.
        xg15 5y ago
        Bellingcat and Radio Free Europe are considered reliable sources, while Wikileaks is not...
        FreeSpeech 5y ago
        Bellingcat participated in a covert UK foreign-office funded program with the BBC to "weaken Russian": https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-office-russian-media/ https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-of... Anyone suggesting Bellingcat is more reliable than Wikileaks is regurgitating establishment talking points.
CityOfThrowaway 5y ago
Blogs, personal websites, forums, email, and IM all still exist and are still large platforms. It’s clear based on user behavior that users like the experience that centralized, for-profit social media networks provide. That experience invariably is very expensive to deliver… Dramatically more expensive than serving Wikipedia, for example, and the costs grow faster as the number of users increase. So, in order to deliver the user experience that real people have demonstrated their preference for, one of the key inputs is exceptionally large (and increasing) amounts of money. In order to be sustainable, that money has to come from somewhere. Targeted ads aren’t the only option, but no viable competitor has been discovered. The reason why targeted ads are so productive here is because the value of the network grows non-linearly (up to a point) with each additional user. If you charge an entrance fee to each user, your network will be smaller and therefore outrageously less valuable than any network that does not charge an entrance fee. Therefore, so long as any social network is willing to make their network free to enter, effectively no network with a comparable service can charge for usage. Importantly, not only will the free social network be more valuable than the paid social network in relative terms, it will also be more valuable in absolute terms – both in terms of value received per user and number of users receiving value. So, it may be possible to regulate free social networks out of existence, but doing so would necessarily destroy a lot of user value in the process. Perhaps there is some type of patronage or donation-based model that could both enable the free entry price and avoid the pitfalls of the ads-based business model. However, an organization like this is unlikely to attract the technical talent necessary to build competitive products. Of course, like both of us mentioned, other models and competitive ecosystems exist. Centralized social networks have not killed email or instant messaging or blogs or websites. Those things are, by every measure, actually way bigger than they ever have been. So in a sense, the thing you’re hoping for is already here, it’s just not the dominant modality chosen by other people. There are fair questions to ask about the power that ownership and control of a centralized social network imbues. Though, I think those are orthogonal concerns to the question of funding mechanisms. In sum, I think the world you’ve expressed desire for does, indeed, already exist. It happens to co-exist with the world that you have expressed distaste for. While I am empathetic to your distaste for social media’s influence and business model, I think it’s important to recognize both why it exists and the ways in which it’s existence is not strictly zero sum.
cvwright 5y ago
I don't think the monetization and business aspect is what makes social media so bad. It's more that they're going about it in the wrong way. You make the comparison to AT&T. They charge a lot of money for the service that they provide, and as you mention, they don't do all the shady things that social platforms do. Most other great tech products are provided by businesses. Apple is the prime example of a company that is both (a) massively successful and (b) not hostile to their users' privacy.
jasode 5y ago
>there were blogs/personal websites, forums, email and instant messaging. If you're listing those as Facebook alternatives, you misunderstand the key ingredient that made Facebook get adopted by billions of non-technical mainstream users: the real name identities. The other communications platforms of dial-up BBSs, USENET, Geocities, personal Wordpress, vBulletin/phpBB forums, AOL AIM ... do not have strong real-name identities for non-tech people to find each other. Anonymous/pseudonymous online handles and cryptic login names have too much friction of discovery and are not scalable to a billion users. (Previous comment about the real Rolodex acting as database primary key: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15294086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15294086) Facebook (possibly accidentally) bootstrapped the psychology of users creating logins with their real name in 2004 because Harvard students want to find each other on the service. In turn, as other schools were added on, other students were motivated to use their real names to interact with friends in other schools. The social graph of real names becomes so viable that old high school alumni that were "lost" can now find each other again and grandparents can easily now keep track of grandchildren's baby photos. The fake names of USENET and other forums prevent that from happening. Emails don't work for social network growth because you can't derive an email address from a real name you know. Someone has to tell you the exact spelling of their email address. With Facebook, you can just find them by their real name (or their real phone number) and send a "friend request". >All these options worked for expressing one's self online The secret sauce to Facebook's dominance is its accumulation of real identities and not because it gives Facebook users a way to "express themselves". E.g. A lot of grandparents following grandchildren photos don't post anything. Consider direction of cause & effect: - easier evolution of platform: a bunch of users login with real names to follow/poke each other --> easy to build on that network into groups for discussion, shared calendar events, share news articles, etc - harder to grow platform: start with discussion forum software with fake names --> impossible to build a giant sticky social network graph from that base Facebook & Linkedin built on real names. WhatsApp growth built on real phone numbers. Platforms built on real identities will naturally centralize because nobody has come up with a viable decentralized alternative for a universal identity database. Ideas like web-of-trust, blockchain, keybase.io, etc don't accomplish the same thing as Facebook's real_id database. [To downvoters, if you have a better explanation of how Facebook got mass adoption by non-tech people in ways that didn't happen with USENET and vBulletin web discussion forums, please reply with your thoughts.]
egypturnash 5y ago
I very much agree with this. I run a Mastodon instance for myself and some friends. It's got about 250 accounts total. The hosting costs are about evenly split between myself and friends willing to throw me some money via Patreon. It is not making me money and I do not want it to make me money because then it would probably require a lot of my time to deal with moderating it. I don't want to have to do that or hire anyone to do it. I run it to have a space that's free from the bullshit corporate social media does in the name of "increasing engagement" to make more profit off of ad views. I like that I can visit my instance, catch up on the local timeline and the stuff I'm personally following, and then be done with it for most of the day, versus opening up a corporate site that's had tons of very smart people sink a lot of time and effort into figuring out how to keep me there for hours on end, whether or not I'm better off for it.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
All true. The value is in the network infrastructure, not the so-called "tech companies" operating on it as middlemen, spying on internet users as a so-called "business". We as users already pay for that infrastructure. We pay for an internet connection. The network infrastructure is already monetised. That network infrastructure is worth something even if every single tech company ceased to exist. Would you stop paying for internet access just because some website went offline. The large websites many people are using are 100% user-generated content, much of it being in the form of human communication. That so-called content is not going to disappear if tech companies stop spying for money. (We often hear of tech company users losing their content when the companies discontinue so-called "service". Not surprising since the companies serve advertisers, not users.) The tech companies are not the content creators. Generally, users do not pay tech companies for service and tech companies do not pay users for content. Tech companies are middlemen. "Tech" companies want you to believe "This is how it must be. There is no other way." They want you to believe they are "the internet". But the menu is not the meal. The map is not the territory. The middleman has no inherent value. He must leech to survive. People online often comment that "Facebook" (not to mention many other tech company websites) could be written, for free, in a weekend, and what makes Facebook so popular is not the people who write PHP for Zuckerberg, it is the network effects, the fortuitous timing and luck that Facebook has enjoyed to become so large. What has been done to date can be replicated by others, but Big Tech wants people to accept another "default assumption": massive scale, all under single ownership, is a requirement. AT&T was broken up and we did not lose telephone service. Around the world, customers of one telephone company are able to call customers of other telephone companies.
- saimiam 5y ago
  I honestly tried to understand what you were saying but there were so many randomly quoted words and phrases that I lost track of your overall point.

jefftk 5y ago

What do you mean that Wikipedia is infected?

morpheos137 5y ago
Originally wikipedia did not condone advocacy or propaganda now it does as long as it can be attributed as a "fact" because it has been published by a "reliable source." Who decides what is a reliable source? The same sort of clique that moderates /r/worldnews or /r/politics. Reddit is an Orwellian cancer.
- jefftk 5y ago
  Wikipedia's policies on this are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability These are the same policies Wikipedia has had for over a decade, with only relatively minor changes. Are you saying they're being interpreted differently? Could you give an example?
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    practice is how policy is applied, and wikipedia in practice is not the same as wikipedia policy by rote.
    - temp8964 5y ago
      Exactly. Policy is implemented by people. Eventually those who put extraordinary amount of time online will takeover editor/moderator positions and win editor wars. Most of those people are definitely not real experts in the field. Because real world experts wouldn't have time / motivation to engage in online fight.
    - jefftk 5y ago
      Can you give an example of how you see this changing?
      - morpheos137 5y ago
        For one thing all media sources should be on equal footing. Let the community decide what is bullshit. It is ridiculous that BBC is considered a reliable source but RT is not. Both have a specific point of view that they promote, reliably, Wikipedia is not supposed to have a point of view. If BBC is allowed but RT is banned then Wikipedia POV will tend toward BBC simply because a contrasting POV is censored. Same would hold for allowing an Israeli newspaper but banning an Iranian one as an unacceptable source. All media outlets should be on equal footing.
        xg15 5y ago
        Bellingcat and Radio Free Europe are considered reliable sources, while Wikileaks is not...
        FreeSpeech 5y ago
        Bellingcat participated in a covert UK foreign-office funded program with the BBC to "weaken Russian": https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-office-russian-media/ https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-of... Anyone suggesting Bellingcat is more reliable than Wikileaks is regurgitating establishment talking points.

CityOfThrowaway 5y ago

Blogs, personal websites, forums, email, and IM all still exist and are still large platforms. It’s clear based on user behavior that users like the experience that centralized, for-profit social media networks provide. That experience invariably is very expensive to deliver… Dramatically more expensive than serving Wikipedia, for example, and the costs grow faster as the number of users increase. So, in order to deliver the user experience that real people have demonstrated their preference for, one of the key inputs is exceptionally large (and increasing) amounts of money. In order to be sustainable, that money has to come from somewhere. Targeted ads aren’t the only option, but no viable competitor has been discovered. The reason why targeted ads are so productive here is because the value of the network grows non-linearly (up to a point) with each additional user. If you charge an entrance fee to each user, your network will be smaller and therefore outrageously less valuable than any network that does not charge an entrance fee. Therefore, so long as any social network is willing to make their network free to enter, effectively no network with a comparable service can charge for usage. Importantly, not only will the free social network be more valuable than the paid social network in relative terms, it will also be more valuable in absolute terms – both in terms of value received per user and number of users receiving value. So, it may be possible to regulate free social networks out of existence, but doing so would necessarily destroy a lot of user value in the process. Perhaps there is some type of patronage or donation-based model that could both enable the free entry price and avoid the pitfalls of the ads-based business model. However, an organization like this is unlikely to attract the technical talent necessary to build competitive products. Of course, like both of us mentioned, other models and competitive ecosystems exist. Centralized social networks have not killed email or instant messaging or blogs or websites. Those things are, by every measure, actually way bigger than they ever have been. So in a sense, the thing you’re hoping for is already here, it’s just not the dominant modality chosen by other people. There are fair questions to ask about the power that ownership and control of a centralized social network imbues. Though, I think those are orthogonal concerns to the question of funding mechanisms. In sum, I think the world you’ve expressed desire for does, indeed, already exist. It happens to co-exist with the world that you have expressed distaste for. While I am empathetic to your distaste for social media’s influence and business model, I think it’s important to recognize both why it exists and the ways in which it’s existence is not strictly zero sum.

cvwright 5y ago

I don't think the monetization and business aspect is what makes social media so bad. It's more that they're going about it in the wrong way. You make the comparison to AT&T. They charge a lot of money for the service that they provide, and as you mention, they don't do all the shady things that social platforms do. Most other great tech products are provided by businesses. Apple is the prime example of a company that is both (a) massively successful and (b) not hostile to their users' privacy.

jasode 5y ago

>there were blogs/personal websites, forums, email and instant messaging. If you're listing those as Facebook alternatives, you misunderstand the key ingredient that made Facebook get adopted by billions of non-technical mainstream users: the real name identities. The other communications platforms of dial-up BBSs, USENET, Geocities, personal Wordpress, vBulletin/phpBB forums, AOL AIM ... do not have strong real-name identities for non-tech people to find each other. Anonymous/pseudonymous online handles and cryptic login names have too much friction of discovery and are not scalable to a billion users. (Previous comment about the real Rolodex acting as database primary key: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15294086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15294086) Facebook (possibly accidentally) bootstrapped the psychology of users creating logins with their real name in 2004 because Harvard students want to find each other on the service. In turn, as other schools were added on, other students were motivated to use their real names to interact with friends in other schools. The social graph of real names becomes so viable that old high school alumni that were "lost" can now find each other again and grandparents can easily now keep track of grandchildren's baby photos. The fake names of USENET and other forums prevent that from happening. Emails don't work for social network growth because you can't derive an email address from a real name you know. Someone has to tell you the exact spelling of their email address. With Facebook, you can just find them by their real name (or their real phone number) and send a "friend request". >All these options worked for expressing one's self online The secret sauce to Facebook's dominance is its accumulation of real identities and not because it gives Facebook users a way to "express themselves". E.g. A lot of grandparents following grandchildren photos don't post anything. Consider direction of cause & effect: - easier evolution of platform: a bunch of users login with real names to follow/poke each other --> easy to build on that network into groups for discussion, shared calendar events, share news articles, etc - harder to grow platform: start with discussion forum software with fake names --> impossible to build a giant sticky social network graph from that base Facebook & Linkedin built on real names. WhatsApp growth built on real phone numbers. Platforms built on real identities will naturally centralize because nobody has come up with a viable decentralized alternative for a universal identity database. Ideas like web-of-trust, blockchain, keybase.io, etc don't accomplish the same thing as Facebook's real_id database. [To downvoters, if you have a better explanation of how Facebook got mass adoption by non-tech people in ways that didn't happen with USENET and vBulletin web discussion forums, please reply with your thoughts.]

egypturnash 5y ago

I very much agree with this. I run a Mastodon instance for myself and some friends. It's got about 250 accounts total. The hosting costs are about evenly split between myself and friends willing to throw me some money via Patreon. It is not making me money and I do not want it to make me money because then it would probably require a lot of my time to deal with moderating it. I don't want to have to do that or hire anyone to do it. I run it to have a space that's free from the bullshit corporate social media does in the name of "increasing engagement" to make more profit off of ad views. I like that I can visit my instance, catch up on the local timeline and the stuff I'm personally following, and then be done with it for most of the day, versus opening up a corporate site that's had tons of very smart people sink a lot of time and effort into figuring out how to keep me there for hours on end, whether or not I'm better off for it.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

All true. The value is in the network infrastructure, not the so-called "tech companies" operating on it as middlemen, spying on internet users as a so-called "business". We as users already pay for that infrastructure. We pay for an internet connection. The network infrastructure is already monetised. That network infrastructure is worth something even if every single tech company ceased to exist. Would you stop paying for internet access just because some website went offline. The large websites many people are using are 100% user-generated content, much of it being in the form of human communication. That so-called content is not going to disappear if tech companies stop spying for money. (We often hear of tech company users losing their content when the companies discontinue so-called "service". Not surprising since the companies serve advertisers, not users.) The tech companies are not the content creators. Generally, users do not pay tech companies for service and tech companies do not pay users for content. Tech companies are middlemen. "Tech" companies want you to believe "This is how it must be. There is no other way." They want you to believe they are "the internet". But the menu is not the meal. The map is not the territory. The middleman has no inherent value. He must leech to survive. People online often comment that "Facebook" (not to mention many other tech company websites) could be written, for free, in a weekend, and what makes Facebook so popular is not the people who write PHP for Zuckerberg, it is the network effects, the fortuitous timing and luck that Facebook has enjoyed to become so large. What has been done to date can be replicated by others, but Big Tech wants people to accept another "default assumption": massive scale, all under single ownership, is a requirement. AT&T was broken up and we did not lose telephone service. Around the world, customers of one telephone company are able to call customers of other telephone companies.

saimiam 5y ago
I honestly tried to understand what you were saying but there were so many randomly quoted words and phrases that I lost track of your overall point.