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> In a world where there were _only_ smaller, more niche social media sites, fears around things like online radicalization would be much less How so?
by gizmondo 5y ago
> In a world where there were _only_ smaller, more niche social media sites, fears around things like online radicalization would be much less
How so?
- dredmorbius 5y agoScale matters. Coordinated large-scale propaganda (or advertising, but I repeat myself), as well as censorship, surveillance, and targeted manipulation, all benefit tremendously by a monopoly. These are in fact integral features of an information, communications, or media monopoly: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e506 https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771470) I'm not entirely sure what the consequences of a bunch of smaller, freestanding forums and discussions would be, but my sense is that it would be better at generating different specific subculures and beliefs (many of which could well independently be poorly-grounded in reality or factual basis) ... but it wouldn't be as subject to the degree of mass propaganda, surveillance, and targeted manipulation. There's the risk though that such a system might well be asymmetric as to decentralisation. If it's structured such that adversaries could utilise the system but defenders / the general public cannot enact sufficient defences, then what exists is a false decentralisation. Arguably, this is presently the case with FB, where advertisers and propagandists have far more effective tools and capabilities than those defending against them. I'm concerned that this could also effectively be the case with more distributed protocols --- Usnenet, the Fediverse, Diaspora*, etc. (All of which I use / have used in the past.)