3 ms·

I agree with you. We need gatekeepers, not unsubstantiated nonsense from the lowest common denominator.

chroem- 5y ago
If democracy is a system where the average citizen controls the government through voting, how will we "protect democracy" by intentionally trying to control the opinions and actions of voters, with the implication that their current opinions are wrong? That kind of electorate shaping seems akin to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, where everyone still votes, but it's always influenced to be in favor of the Kim regime.
- gremloni 5y ago
  It’s a fine balance that doesn’t work well with hyperbolic extremes like you’re painting. We don’t let people buy materials to make bombs but we don’t prevent farmers from buying fertilizer either. The answer is somewhere in between.
  - chroem- 5y ago
    Where are the checks and balances to prevent that from happening? The public discourse is the system of checks and balances in a democracy that prevents that kind of authoritarian subversion. If you prevent people from speaking out and shape their opinions, who is able to say something when it goes too far? This is not an effort to aid democracy, it's a direct attack against it.
    - lsiebert 5y ago
      Facebook isn't a public discourse, more of an algorithmically curated news feed. How it curates it's news feed is a business practice, and unethical business practices should be curtailed by regulation.
- _ink_ 5y ago
  We don't use democracy in the correct way. The true form of democracy does not use voting to determine the leaders, but a raffle. The voting was added some time around the french revolution, when people learned that having power is great and they wanted to increase their probability to not lose it.
- invalidname 5y ago
  Facebook is the one doing the controlling. You don't see the majority in the newsfeed. They pick the extreme and pump that to you so it looks like all your friends agree with you and all your enemies are awful people. This promotes engagement and silos. It's an inadvertent global re-education scheme on a massive scale whose results we see every day. There was political collaboration and discussion in the past. Facebook essentially made that a non-starter. If the news feed was closer to what people said or even like reddit where the majority vote goes up then there wouldn't be a problem.
ipaddr 5y ago
Gatekeepers are corruptable usual by money. The web was great previously because we lost the gatekeepers. Now we have 3-5 gatekeepers..facebook, twitter, google..
- gremloni 5y ago
  We need gatekeepers… just not a handful of them. Thousands of gatekeepers, not millions of sources for chaff
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  This. A tiny group of powerful gatekeepers will have a tendency to slide towards clique. That is just human nature, and that is why we used to have anti-trust legislation with teeth.
- cageface 5y ago
  They're not gatekeepers, they're amplifiers. You can still make your own website and post whatever you want. The problem is what the amplifiers are amplifying.
CaptArmchair 5y ago
> We need healthy journalism Fixed that for you. Healthy as in: well supported and properly diversified. It's hard to run an editorialized outlet if you don't retain enough paying subscribers, or - yes - advertising. Good, critical, well-thought journalism can't happen for free. As news outlets moved to the Web in a bid to reach larger audiences, they stumbled across three major roadblocks. The first is cost structure, where building and maintaining a digital infrastructure to gather news, manage the editorial process and publish turns out to be quite expensive. The second is that most people expect the Web to provide / share information for free. While that's an original core philosophy that pushed the Web during it's infancy, it falls flat in today's commercialized context. Both problems are within control of a news outlet. With proper strategic planning, it's not impossible to build a flourishing news outlet. And third / most important: discovery on the Web isn't equitable. Facebook, Google et al don't write / make the news. They make it discoverable. And no matter how you do it, which criteria and which methods are used, making content discoverable is at heart a process of curation. Discovery is everything. And the basis for that is the hyperlink. If others don't link to your news outlet, well, then you might as well not exist. You might be yelling into the void as you keep on churning out articles on your website. The act of creating a hyperlink between two websites isn't neutral: it conveys intent, endorsement, recognition of authority and so on. "Sharing", "Posting a link" or "liking a post" aren't neutral actions in that regard, there's multi-layered human complexity that explains why a link got posted. The cardinal sin committed by social media is choosing to strip away that complexity and replace it with overly simple, yet utterly empty metrics such as "engagement" which have steered the design of functionality, affordances and behavior of "news walls" and "timelines". As a result, journalism has suffered for without the ability to be discovered by potential audiences, you can't survive. Many small outlets have disappeared over the past years. And many others of changed the tune of their content just to ensure their articles generate enough hyperlinks on social media to drive potential readership. Democracy suffers without good and diverse journalism. The "marketplace of ideas" ought to be a shared place build on common understanding. Not walled gardens fostering the emergence of echo chambers as an externalized cost due to their drive for more "engagement".

If democracy is a system where the average citizen controls the government through voting, how will we "protect democracy" by intentionally trying to control the opinions and actions of voters, with the implication that their current opinions are wrong? That kind of electorate shaping seems akin to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, where everyone still votes, but it's always influenced to be in favor of the Kim regime.

gremloni 5y ago
It’s a fine balance that doesn’t work well with hyperbolic extremes like you’re painting. We don’t let people buy materials to make bombs but we don’t prevent farmers from buying fertilizer either. The answer is somewhere in between.
- chroem- 5y ago
  Where are the checks and balances to prevent that from happening? The public discourse is the system of checks and balances in a democracy that prevents that kind of authoritarian subversion. If you prevent people from speaking out and shape their opinions, who is able to say something when it goes too far? This is not an effort to aid democracy, it's a direct attack against it.
  - lsiebert 5y ago
    Facebook isn't a public discourse, more of an algorithmically curated news feed. How it curates it's news feed is a business practice, and unethical business practices should be curtailed by regulation.
_ink_ 5y ago
We don't use democracy in the correct way. The true form of democracy does not use voting to determine the leaders, but a raffle. The voting was added some time around the french revolution, when people learned that having power is great and they wanted to increase their probability to not lose it.
invalidname 5y ago
Facebook is the one doing the controlling. You don't see the majority in the newsfeed. They pick the extreme and pump that to you so it looks like all your friends agree with you and all your enemies are awful people. This promotes engagement and silos. It's an inadvertent global re-education scheme on a massive scale whose results we see every day. There was political collaboration and discussion in the past. Facebook essentially made that a non-starter. If the news feed was closer to what people said or even like reddit where the majority vote goes up then there wouldn't be a problem.

ipaddr 5y ago

Gatekeepers are corruptable usual by money. The web was great previously because we lost the gatekeepers. Now we have 3-5 gatekeepers..facebook, twitter, google..

gremloni 5y ago
We need gatekeepers… just not a handful of them. Thousands of gatekeepers, not millions of sources for chaff
inglor_cz 5y ago
This. A tiny group of powerful gatekeepers will have a tendency to slide towards clique. That is just human nature, and that is why we used to have anti-trust legislation with teeth.
cageface 5y ago
They're not gatekeepers, they're amplifiers. You can still make your own website and post whatever you want. The problem is what the amplifiers are amplifying.

CaptArmchair 5y ago

> We need healthy journalism Fixed that for you. Healthy as in: well supported and properly diversified. It's hard to run an editorialized outlet if you don't retain enough paying subscribers, or - yes - advertising. Good, critical, well-thought journalism can't happen for free. As news outlets moved to the Web in a bid to reach larger audiences, they stumbled across three major roadblocks. The first is cost structure, where building and maintaining a digital infrastructure to gather news, manage the editorial process and publish turns out to be quite expensive. The second is that most people expect the Web to provide / share information for free. While that's an original core philosophy that pushed the Web during it's infancy, it falls flat in today's commercialized context. Both problems are within control of a news outlet. With proper strategic planning, it's not impossible to build a flourishing news outlet. And third / most important: discovery on the Web isn't equitable. Facebook, Google et al don't write / make the news. They make it discoverable. And no matter how you do it, which criteria and which methods are used, making content discoverable is at heart a process of curation. Discovery is everything. And the basis for that is the hyperlink. If others don't link to your news outlet, well, then you might as well not exist. You might be yelling into the void as you keep on churning out articles on your website. The act of creating a hyperlink between two websites isn't neutral: it conveys intent, endorsement, recognition of authority and so on. "Sharing", "Posting a link" or "liking a post" aren't neutral actions in that regard, there's multi-layered human complexity that explains why a link got posted. The cardinal sin committed by social media is choosing to strip away that complexity and replace it with overly simple, yet utterly empty metrics such as "engagement" which have steered the design of functionality, affordances and behavior of "news walls" and "timelines". As a result, journalism has suffered for without the ability to be discovered by potential audiences, you can't survive. Many small outlets have disappeared over the past years. And many others of changed the tune of their content just to ensure their articles generate enough hyperlinks on social media to drive potential readership. Democracy suffers without good and diverse journalism. The "marketplace of ideas" ought to be a shared place build on common understanding. Not walled gardens fostering the emergence of echo chambers as an externalized cost due to their drive for more "engagement".