11 ms·

Nicholas Carr on how to fix social media

50 points by conanxin 5y ago

new_guy 5y ago
1, It's extraordinarily American-centric. Most everything the author wrote doesn't apply to the hundreds of other countries or non-American social sites in the world 2, before people criticise social media™ they should come from a position of experience having run their own site or even just a forum That's the basic issue, an ignorant American jabbering on about something they have zero experience on.
dane-pgp 5y ago
> As the dominant informational networks of the twenty-first century, they need to be accountable for the content they broadcast, whatever its source. The article seems to be arguing that social media companies need to be judge, jury and censor over every message that is "broadcast", i.e. sent to more than a few close friends. It admits that defining a "public interest" standard is basically impossible, but assumes that this ambiguity won't be exploited by whichever side is in control of whichever body gets to punish the social media companies for under- or over-censoring. If someone tweets "Click here to read my 400 page manifesto about what is wrong with America", would Twitter need to assign lawyers the task of scouring that document for "problematic" passages like "defund the police" or "give more power to ICE"? Perhaps if there were a workable system in place for silencing extreme and misinformed voices on the TV and radio, we could try applying it at scale to the internet too, but right now that's like trying to run before you can crawl.
- sharpener 5y ago
  I am not a lawyer, but... a public interest clause might not be the right tool, since public interest can be interpreted as restricted to information that would affect a person's voting preferences and nothing broader. In the UK TV broadcasters get their licences and general charter terms from the government, based on standards previously contested in law and, I believe, broadly enshrined in statute and/or regulations. One of those terms is a crucial clause to the effect that broadcasters are not allowed to broadcast anything that would make ordinary people throw up over their TV dinner or grannies die of apoplexy, etc. Various entities, people or single issue political parties for instance, have attempted to get broadcasters to show films containing grisly stuff, and when they meet refusal have attempted to sue broadcasters on free speech grounds. However, the right to free speech does not allow a legal entity or person to compel some other party to shout out noxious views on their behalf. So broadcasters in the UK can exercise their rights against such compulsion and filter out extremal horrors if they wish. The tests they use are designed to maintain the same two or three standard deviations of a normal distribution curve that maximises their customer base and matches the same standards civil law requires to maintain order on the civil scale anyway. In that context, what are social media companies if they are not media intermediaries between legal entities? Thus they can not be compelled to relay anyone's content to anywhere else if they don't want to. Their T&Cs typically say so anyway. Folks worried about censorship of their partisan or minority views on such platforms don't seem to get what rights those intermediary companies have. They play nice relaying messages because they like mass market incomes. So really the issue might be purely about how many messages could MetaFB/Twitter afford to kill off and still be popular enough to survive?
bobobob420 5y ago
My 2 cents on how to fix social media, maybe it is stupid but to ban any political discussion. People LOVE talking about politics especially in their personal community (echo chamber). I swear this is the most fun political people have had on the internet in 20 years. It’s too bad it just becomes an echo chamber. We had a community group for our town on Facebook, all it was was fake accounts and people talking shit about Democrats and the occasional left wing person talking shit back. Recently they banned political discussion and anything not directly related to our town. Thank the fucking lord. People will still slip in some political bullshit but it’s miles better.
- ksec 5y ago
  I think every social media will grow until it reaches politics, stock / investment or pornography. And you would think having a special channel for those would fix it, but no, it always creeps back in. It is sort of strange to continue see the same pattern over and over again. Personally I think we have a human nature problem, and not a technology problem looking for market fit.
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    In my social group, I ask that politics be contained to a specific channel. Anyone is free to join the channel, no limitations or anything, just an opt-in. Rule is posted obviously and we remind people frequently. I've lost 4 people because they were upset that this rule is enforced against everyone, out of a group of maybe 20. They wanted their politics to be everywhere and not constrained to one channel. I never thought this tiny little policy was going to cause such a mess. It has dramatically improved the rest of discussions - you can actually just talk about stuff without people jumping in with their political takes - but it's been an upsetting policy in ways I did not anticipate.
- anonuser123456 5y ago
  You realize that under your proposal, your own proposal would be banned right? You are advocating policy. That’s politics.
pjerem 5y ago
Can't we just go back to the era where the "feed" or the "wall" was just the posts of our friends / the people we follow sorted by posting date and not this horrible algorithm made to show you infinite content ?
- ghaff 5y ago
  While very desirable that probably means that social media sites would have to be paid for at least in part by subscription fees.
  - prepend 5y ago
    Or it means they reduce costs to what’s supportable by just inserting ads into RSS feeds every x items. This isn’t very likely. But it’s more likely than someone charging to aggregate IM statuses and put them in chronological order.
- d--b 5y ago
  Unless someone regulates it, no! Of course FB has no interest in that… One has to realize that FB is only optimizing for profit (and Zuck not going to jail). The only times they curbed was when bad PR was threatening their profits (and Mark’s freedom).
- josefresco 5y ago
  Twitter stays closer to this idea than Facebook. I basically see only posts from people I follow. I can even turn off retweets. Not perfect but it's not "endless".
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  You only have to convince your friends to join you. Technically it is certainly still possible. I would expect most Fediverse applications don't have much of a ranking algorithm yet, or at least it should be configurable.
- samlevine 5y ago
  I do this in Twitter with lists. They don't make it obvious, but lists actually make it quite usable once you've set them up. Facebook (or Instagram) don't seem to have good options for this so for the most part I don't use them. Discord works chronologically, for now at least, and as long as it does I'll be happy to keep chatting with my friends there.
PrinceRichard 5y ago
New laws mean forcing others to conform to our expectations of their behavior. This is only acceptable when there is a broad social consensus about the necessity of the law. There is no such consensus regarding how social media should operate.
- mistermann 5y ago
  As far as I know, there hasn't even been an attempt at having a serious, ~fact based discussion on the matter that involves the public. Where/how would such a discussion even take place? The way the world operates in 2021 is a mess, unfortunately this is normal so few people seem to notice.
GodKronos 5y ago
Delete it?
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
I don't think free speech was meant to only defend "private communication". What a weird article.
jimbob45 5y ago
I've yet to see compelling evidence that social media itself is a problem in and of itself (outside of teens but IIRC FB/Insta disallow kids until 13 to use their service per TOS). I see a lot of stuff like, "Terrorists use the platform to organize and plan attacks!", which is true...but that seems like you should be solving that by solving the reasons people want to be terrorizing, not by attacking the mediums they use. If you want to attack mediums, then you'd be just as justified wiping away USPS as you would FB/Insta. It just seems like FB is being used as a scapegoat for lawmakers to avoid actually solving problems instead of pretending to solve them.
- callmeal 5y ago
  >I've yet to see compelling evidence that social media itself is a problem in and of itself You might be interested in this: https://www.wired.com/story/jargon-watch-rising-danger-stochastic-terrorism/ https://www.wired.com/story/jargon-watch-rising-danger-stoch... stochastic terrorism: the use of mass media to incite attacks by random nut jobs—acts that are “statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.”
samlevine 5y ago
I don't want social media to censor me, people I want to communicate with or people I don't ever want to communicate with. I want tools that help me communicate with other people. Learn things, get exposed to new ideas. And we can't have that with a huge system designed to prevent people from saying the wrong things. Our ability to communicate and learn freely is dependent on the ability for people we disagree with to also have this ability. You will be censored if you want other people censored.
- bastardoperator 5y ago
  Funny, I'm not censored on any platform. Then again I don't make violent threats, spread misinformation, use racist language, or harass people. I feel free to have these discussions, and I do all the time. What's the problem? You can communicate freely, but that doesn't mean there isn't consequences for things you speak and nobody has to host you while you're broadcasting it. I find this type of argument devolves into "I want to be a crappy person and not be judged for it or face consequences", which just isn't the reality we're living in.
  - jimkleiber 5y ago
    I was thinking about this the other day: in public physical spaces, we often have police who step in when someone says something that breaks the law. In private physical spaces (e.g., a restaurant, store, bar, or house), we either have owners, managers, or private security who step in when someone starts breaking store policy or law. However, in public (or pseudo-public) digital spaces and private digital spaces, some of us seem to rebel strongly against any type of norm enforcement. I mean, I can see how sometimes the internet seems to promise even more freedom of speech than in physical spaces and also that sometimes there are not very clear written laws or policies for those digital spaces, paired with unclear or unfair enforcement of those laws and policies. Makes me wonder what the future of digital governance will look like. Do we have the digital equivalent of cops roaming semi-public spaces like Twitter and Facebook? If so, by whose consent are they governing? Do these orgs hire the equivalent of private security guards or bouncers? Have they already done so through moderators and such? Anyway, just got me thinking about some of the challenges in the governance of digital spaces.
austincheney 5y ago
The solution is simple. Exchange the client/server model for a peer-to-peer model. By peer-to-peer and I mean literally IP to IP and not something like instant messenger that bounces messages through a central server. Only then can you assure a fix to interference. This requires: * Routes - both parties to be on IPv6 or either party to have something like port address translation on a IPv6 interface. * Identity - This will require a combination of CA and STUN. The certificate from the CA and corresponding key pair associated with that certificate ensures a user is who they say they are and their keys are respectable. The corresponding key exchange ensures the data is confined to the two parties. The STUN server correlates the unique user ID, such as that which is certified by the certificate, to an IP address. Anything less is just another game for some media company to use you as a product.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >The solution is simple. Exchange the client/server model for a peer-to-peer model. By peer-to-peer and I mean literally IP to IP and not something like instant messenger that bounces messages through a central server. Only then can you assure a fix to interference. This is my go to response as to "what to do about social media." And I opine|rant|blather on about it whenever I see folks complaining about or claiming that some rules|regulation|policy will "fix" social media. And such tracts are becoming more and more common (cf. this article[0][1], entitled OK, but What Should We Actually Do About Facebook? I Asked the Experts. from today). But, as in the article linked, no one ever suggests decentralized communications. I'm not sure why, but there certainly are barriers to making decentralized "social media" work. Those same barriers are what make centralization of much of our digital universe necessary and hugely profitable. Those barriers are primarily (there are other issues, but are mostly part of the result rather than the cause) related to the ways in which end-users are provided access to the Internet. I'm specifically referring to asymmetric internet links. Most internet links are $X Mb/sec download and ($X / 25 or so) Mb/sec upload. What's more, there are often policy restrictions on "consumer" internet links that block them from "running servers," whether that be port blocking or throttling. This keeps decentralized communication from being viable. Other than these artificial barriers, there's nothing stopping folks from hosting their own cat/family/meme photos/videos and/or other content. There are plenty of decentralized platforms that can do so with minimal set up and configuration. However, if you can't serve more than a couple of concurrent connections at a reasonable speed, that breaks the whole decentralized/P2P paradigm. Because my upload bandwidth is the limiting factor in being able to host content. If, on the other hand, you have a link with symmetric bandwidth without policy restrictions, serving your own content is a no-brainer. As such, my "solution" for addressing the "censorship" of the centralized "social media" platforms is to make them irrelevant by eliminating the entire reason for their existence -- asymmetric bandwidth favoring download vs. upload on internet links. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/facebook-experts.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/facebook-experts.... [1] (same as [0], just from archive.md): https://archive.md/qpNtV https://archive.md/qpNtV Edit: Added title of linked article in the comment.
14 5y ago
My dad always talked about George Carlin the guy is a legend. My dad always told me a story about when Carlin was “not” allowed to say certain things on the air and made comment to that fact. I am now betting it was because of this case. Supposedly Carlin turned to the camera and said something along the lines of “f&@k all you stupid lip readers out there” except he only lipped it never actually said it. I’m not sure if it was live or they producers just didn’t understand what he did but they aired the show. It made a lot of deaf people mad apparently. I have not been able to find the clip or any reference to it but believe my dad’s account.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  I like Carlin too. Here's my choice quote “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” I don't trust people to make good decisions. Admittedly incredibly paternalistic, but I've met a lot of people, and most of them are just making one bad decision after another.
djoldman 5y ago
> ...A few large companies, free to set their own rules, wield control over public and private communications. This statement seems to have always been technically true. What does control mean? > Conversation and correspondence, far from being treated as confidential, are rifled through by marketers to extract sensitive personal data. It seems that the public doesn't really care about this. > Propaganda, lies, and defamatory attacks get broadcast to the masses, often by sources that can’t be traced. This statement also seems to have always been technically true. > Rather than promoting an informed public, social media has promoted polarization, extremism, and, all too often, ignorance. I guess the questions is whether Americans want the government to tell them what they can and can't read or look at. Should that right be taken away? Shouldn't informed adults be able to make their own choices about whether or not they want to spend time on their Twitter or Facebook feeds?
Nasrudith 5y ago
Stop trying to fix or demolish it already. You don't own it and have no right to control everybody else. Think for a minute about how every proposal and precedent could be used against you. The pattern of "Lets do away with due process because I am angry! Wah my lack of due process!" has been repeated too damn many times.
kodah 5y ago
> While the government can’t police private conversations, it can regulate the content of broadcasts to protect the public interest. I've never agreed with this idea and I don't think I'm alone in that. Possibly "public interest" is the wrong word. > It’s worth remembering that Congress’s decision to license radio operators after the Titanic disaster was about more than just allocating scarce spectrum. It was about bringing those who speak to the masses out of the shadows and into the daylight of the public square. It was about making broadcasters, whether individuals, businesses, or other organizations, visible and accountable. We may not need to establish a formal licensing program for social media, but we do need to bring the spirit of the common good back to broadcasting. Except operating in the clear is a well-known danger as well. People using the words "accountability" and "consequences" almost never want to discuss the upper and lower limits of such ideas. If the concept of "punching up" is any indicator, it's at least partially a dog whistle for who it's okay to abuse these days. Such a system would need to be private as well, instead of operating in full transparency to prohibit the litany of performative exercises people will undergo these days to make their point. The author seems to try to assuage that only "powerful private interests" would take issue with the proposed system. > An ambitious Digital Communications Act along the lines sketched out here would be complicated and controversial. It would be resisted by many powerful private interests. It would not be a panacea. But we can no longer pretend that social media will fix itself. At the core of social media problems is bad human behavior of all persuasions. Some people just manage to learn or detach themselves. Personally, I partially blame public API concepts for most of this mess. Whether you're talking about limitless graphs for sharing "information" (in its most general definition) or API's which can be enumerated. Their legitimate use is finite and at worst it's entirely extractive. Better regulation, to me, would be the government regulating what sort of information you allow to be open and possibly the use/limits of virality.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > I've never agreed with this idea and I don't think I'm alone in that. Possibly "public interest" is the wrong word. Do you agree or disagree with the notion that since the electromagnetic spectrum is a limited resource, actual broadcast (using the spectrum) needs to be regulated?
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
It's a long article with an admirable examination of history. However, I feel Carr has made a mistake with his attempt to differentiate between private communication and broadcasting based on "number of followers". I think the better distinctions looks something like: private communication is anything delivered ONLY to people to whom it is addressed or who have actively opted-in to receive communications from the sender. some authentication must be implied before they can read what I have delivered. any other communication, regardless of the medium, number of followers, etc. is considered to be public. So, if I tweet about something, since anyone could read my tweets, they are all public. If I DM someone on twitter, that's private. If I post something on my own private blog that requires a subscription to read, that's private communication. If I post the same thing on a medium where it can be read by anyone, that's public. If I email my family about something, that's private; if I post a comment on a tiny open wordpress site with less readers than I have cousines, that's public. This differentiation says nothing about what the difference in regulation between public and private should be. There are good arguments for many different schemes, some of which involve zero regulation for either form. But to discuss the merits of them, we need a clear distinction between private & public communication, and I think Carr's is wrong and mine is (roughly) right.
Gepsens 5y ago
Seeing the comments in this thread makes me think about only one place in not so distant history : puritan England.
RNCTX 5y ago
For decades it was "common knowledge" that the War of the Worlds broadcast caused mass hysteria, when in fact if you look back on the newspaper articles at the time and compare them to criminal and hospital records you find no such thing. It would be more accurate to say that the newspaper industry was upset with the radio industry. An article from a professor publishing via W.W. Norton about the internet is cut from the same cloth as newspaper vs radio, imo.

50 points by conanxin 5y ago

1, It's extraordinarily American-centric. Most everything the author wrote doesn't apply to the hundreds of other countries or non-American social sites in the world 2, before people criticise social media™ they should come from a position of experience having run their own site or even just a forum That's the basic issue, an ignorant American jabbering on about something they have zero experience on.

dane-pgp 5y ago

> As the dominant informational networks of the twenty-first century, they need to be accountable for the content they broadcast, whatever its source. The article seems to be arguing that social media companies need to be judge, jury and censor over every message that is "broadcast", i.e. sent to more than a few close friends. It admits that defining a "public interest" standard is basically impossible, but assumes that this ambiguity won't be exploited by whichever side is in control of whichever body gets to punish the social media companies for under- or over-censoring. If someone tweets "Click here to read my 400 page manifesto about what is wrong with America", would Twitter need to assign lawyers the task of scouring that document for "problematic" passages like "defund the police" or "give more power to ICE"? Perhaps if there were a workable system in place for silencing extreme and misinformed voices on the TV and radio, we could try applying it at scale to the internet too, but right now that's like trying to run before you can crawl.

sharpener 5y ago
I am not a lawyer, but... a public interest clause might not be the right tool, since public interest can be interpreted as restricted to information that would affect a person's voting preferences and nothing broader. In the UK TV broadcasters get their licences and general charter terms from the government, based on standards previously contested in law and, I believe, broadly enshrined in statute and/or regulations. One of those terms is a crucial clause to the effect that broadcasters are not allowed to broadcast anything that would make ordinary people throw up over their TV dinner or grannies die of apoplexy, etc. Various entities, people or single issue political parties for instance, have attempted to get broadcasters to show films containing grisly stuff, and when they meet refusal have attempted to sue broadcasters on free speech grounds. However, the right to free speech does not allow a legal entity or person to compel some other party to shout out noxious views on their behalf. So broadcasters in the UK can exercise their rights against such compulsion and filter out extremal horrors if they wish. The tests they use are designed to maintain the same two or three standard deviations of a normal distribution curve that maximises their customer base and matches the same standards civil law requires to maintain order on the civil scale anyway. In that context, what are social media companies if they are not media intermediaries between legal entities? Thus they can not be compelled to relay anyone's content to anywhere else if they don't want to. Their T&Cs typically say so anyway. Folks worried about censorship of their partisan or minority views on such platforms don't seem to get what rights those intermediary companies have. They play nice relaying messages because they like mass market incomes. So really the issue might be purely about how many messages could MetaFB/Twitter afford to kill off and still be popular enough to survive?

bobobob420 5y ago

My 2 cents on how to fix social media, maybe it is stupid but to ban any political discussion. People LOVE talking about politics especially in their personal community (echo chamber). I swear this is the most fun political people have had on the internet in 20 years. It’s too bad it just becomes an echo chamber. We had a community group for our town on Facebook, all it was was fake accounts and people talking shit about Democrats and the occasional left wing person talking shit back. Recently they banned political discussion and anything not directly related to our town. Thank the fucking lord. People will still slip in some political bullshit but it’s miles better.

ksec 5y ago
I think every social media will grow until it reaches politics, stock / investment or pornography. And you would think having a special channel for those would fix it, but no, it always creeps back in. It is sort of strange to continue see the same pattern over and over again. Personally I think we have a human nature problem, and not a technology problem looking for market fit.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  In my social group, I ask that politics be contained to a specific channel. Anyone is free to join the channel, no limitations or anything, just an opt-in. Rule is posted obviously and we remind people frequently. I've lost 4 people because they were upset that this rule is enforced against everyone, out of a group of maybe 20. They wanted their politics to be everywhere and not constrained to one channel. I never thought this tiny little policy was going to cause such a mess. It has dramatically improved the rest of discussions - you can actually just talk about stuff without people jumping in with their political takes - but it's been an upsetting policy in ways I did not anticipate.
anonuser123456 5y ago
You realize that under your proposal, your own proposal would be banned right? You are advocating policy. That’s politics.

pjerem 5y ago

Can't we just go back to the era where the "feed" or the "wall" was just the posts of our friends / the people we follow sorted by posting date and not this horrible algorithm made to show you infinite content ?

ghaff 5y ago
While very desirable that probably means that social media sites would have to be paid for at least in part by subscription fees.
- prepend 5y ago
  Or it means they reduce costs to what’s supportable by just inserting ads into RSS feeds every x items. This isn’t very likely. But it’s more likely than someone charging to aggregate IM statuses and put them in chronological order.
d--b 5y ago
Unless someone regulates it, no! Of course FB has no interest in that… One has to realize that FB is only optimizing for profit (and Zuck not going to jail). The only times they curbed was when bad PR was threatening their profits (and Mark’s freedom).
josefresco 5y ago
Twitter stays closer to this idea than Facebook. I basically see only posts from people I follow. I can even turn off retweets. Not perfect but it's not "endless".
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
You only have to convince your friends to join you. Technically it is certainly still possible. I would expect most Fediverse applications don't have much of a ranking algorithm yet, or at least it should be configurable.
samlevine 5y ago
I do this in Twitter with lists. They don't make it obvious, but lists actually make it quite usable once you've set them up. Facebook (or Instagram) don't seem to have good options for this so for the most part I don't use them. Discord works chronologically, for now at least, and as long as it does I'll be happy to keep chatting with my friends there.

PrinceRichard 5y ago

New laws mean forcing others to conform to our expectations of their behavior. This is only acceptable when there is a broad social consensus about the necessity of the law. There is no such consensus regarding how social media should operate.

mistermann 5y ago
As far as I know, there hasn't even been an attempt at having a serious, ~fact based discussion on the matter that involves the public. Where/how would such a discussion even take place? The way the world operates in 2021 is a mess, unfortunately this is normal so few people seem to notice.

GodKronos 5y ago

Delete it?

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago

I don't think free speech was meant to only defend "private communication". What a weird article.

jimbob45 5y ago

I've yet to see compelling evidence that social media itself is a problem in and of itself (outside of teens but IIRC FB/Insta disallow kids until 13 to use their service per TOS). I see a lot of stuff like, "Terrorists use the platform to organize and plan attacks!", which is true...but that seems like you should be solving that by solving the reasons people want to be terrorizing, not by attacking the mediums they use. If you want to attack mediums, then you'd be just as justified wiping away USPS as you would FB/Insta. It just seems like FB is being used as a scapegoat for lawmakers to avoid actually solving problems instead of pretending to solve them.

callmeal 5y ago
>I've yet to see compelling evidence that social media itself is a problem in and of itself You might be interested in this: https://www.wired.com/story/jargon-watch-rising-danger-stochastic-terrorism/ https://www.wired.com/story/jargon-watch-rising-danger-stoch... stochastic terrorism: the use of mass media to incite attacks by random nut jobs—acts that are “statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.”

samlevine 5y ago

I don't want social media to censor me, people I want to communicate with or people I don't ever want to communicate with. I want tools that help me communicate with other people. Learn things, get exposed to new ideas. And we can't have that with a huge system designed to prevent people from saying the wrong things. Our ability to communicate and learn freely is dependent on the ability for people we disagree with to also have this ability. You will be censored if you want other people censored.

bastardoperator 5y ago
Funny, I'm not censored on any platform. Then again I don't make violent threats, spread misinformation, use racist language, or harass people. I feel free to have these discussions, and I do all the time. What's the problem? You can communicate freely, but that doesn't mean there isn't consequences for things you speak and nobody has to host you while you're broadcasting it. I find this type of argument devolves into "I want to be a crappy person and not be judged for it or face consequences", which just isn't the reality we're living in.
- jimkleiber 5y ago
  I was thinking about this the other day: in public physical spaces, we often have police who step in when someone says something that breaks the law. In private physical spaces (e.g., a restaurant, store, bar, or house), we either have owners, managers, or private security who step in when someone starts breaking store policy or law. However, in public (or pseudo-public) digital spaces and private digital spaces, some of us seem to rebel strongly against any type of norm enforcement. I mean, I can see how sometimes the internet seems to promise even more freedom of speech than in physical spaces and also that sometimes there are not very clear written laws or policies for those digital spaces, paired with unclear or unfair enforcement of those laws and policies. Makes me wonder what the future of digital governance will look like. Do we have the digital equivalent of cops roaming semi-public spaces like Twitter and Facebook? If so, by whose consent are they governing? Do these orgs hire the equivalent of private security guards or bouncers? Have they already done so through moderators and such? Anyway, just got me thinking about some of the challenges in the governance of digital spaces.

austincheney 5y ago

The solution is simple. Exchange the client/server model for a peer-to-peer model. By peer-to-peer and I mean literally IP to IP and not something like instant messenger that bounces messages through a central server. Only then can you assure a fix to interference. This requires: * Routes - both parties to be on IPv6 or either party to have something like port address translation on a IPv6 interface. * Identity - This will require a combination of CA and STUN. The certificate from the CA and corresponding key pair associated with that certificate ensures a user is who they say they are and their keys are respectable. The corresponding key exchange ensures the data is confined to the two parties. The STUN server correlates the unique user ID, such as that which is certified by the certificate, to an IP address. Anything less is just another game for some media company to use you as a product.

nobody9999 5y ago
>The solution is simple. Exchange the client/server model for a peer-to-peer model. By peer-to-peer and I mean literally IP to IP and not something like instant messenger that bounces messages through a central server. Only then can you assure a fix to interference. This is my go to response as to "what to do about social media." And I opine|rant|blather on about it whenever I see folks complaining about or claiming that some rules|regulation|policy will "fix" social media. And such tracts are becoming more and more common (cf. this article[0][1], entitled OK, but What Should We Actually Do About Facebook? I Asked the Experts. from today). But, as in the article linked, no one ever suggests decentralized communications. I'm not sure why, but there certainly are barriers to making decentralized "social media" work. Those same barriers are what make centralization of much of our digital universe necessary and hugely profitable. Those barriers are primarily (there are other issues, but are mostly part of the result rather than the cause) related to the ways in which end-users are provided access to the Internet. I'm specifically referring to asymmetric internet links. Most internet links are $X Mb/sec download and ($X / 25 or so) Mb/sec upload. What's more, there are often policy restrictions on "consumer" internet links that block them from "running servers," whether that be port blocking or throttling. This keeps decentralized communication from being viable. Other than these artificial barriers, there's nothing stopping folks from hosting their own cat/family/meme photos/videos and/or other content. There are plenty of decentralized platforms that can do so with minimal set up and configuration. However, if you can't serve more than a couple of concurrent connections at a reasonable speed, that breaks the whole decentralized/P2P paradigm. Because my upload bandwidth is the limiting factor in being able to host content. If, on the other hand, you have a link with symmetric bandwidth without policy restrictions, serving your own content is a no-brainer. As such, my "solution" for addressing the "censorship" of the centralized "social media" platforms is to make them irrelevant by eliminating the entire reason for their existence -- asymmetric bandwidth favoring download vs. upload on internet links. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/facebook-experts.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/facebook-experts.... [1] (same as [0], just from archive.md): https://archive.md/qpNtV https://archive.md/qpNtV Edit: Added title of linked article in the comment.

14 5y ago

My dad always talked about George Carlin the guy is a legend. My dad always told me a story about when Carlin was “not” allowed to say certain things on the air and made comment to that fact. I am now betting it was because of this case. Supposedly Carlin turned to the camera and said something along the lines of “f&@k all you stupid lip readers out there” except he only lipped it never actually said it. I’m not sure if it was live or they producers just didn’t understand what he did but they aired the show. It made a lot of deaf people mad apparently. I have not been able to find the clip or any reference to it but believe my dad’s account.

colinmhayes 5y ago
I like Carlin too. Here's my choice quote “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” I don't trust people to make good decisions. Admittedly incredibly paternalistic, but I've met a lot of people, and most of them are just making one bad decision after another.

djoldman 5y ago

> ...A few large companies, free to set their own rules, wield control over public and private communications. This statement seems to have always been technically true. What does control mean? > Conversation and correspondence, far from being treated as confidential, are rifled through by marketers to extract sensitive personal data. It seems that the public doesn't really care about this. > Propaganda, lies, and defamatory attacks get broadcast to the masses, often by sources that can’t be traced. This statement also seems to have always been technically true. > Rather than promoting an informed public, social media has promoted polarization, extremism, and, all too often, ignorance. I guess the questions is whether Americans want the government to tell them what they can and can't read or look at. Should that right be taken away? Shouldn't informed adults be able to make their own choices about whether or not they want to spend time on their Twitter or Facebook feeds?

Nasrudith 5y ago

Stop trying to fix or demolish it already. You don't own it and have no right to control everybody else. Think for a minute about how every proposal and precedent could be used against you. The pattern of "Lets do away with due process because I am angry! Wah my lack of due process!" has been repeated too damn many times.

kodah 5y ago

> While the government can’t police private conversations, it can regulate the content of broadcasts to protect the public interest. I've never agreed with this idea and I don't think I'm alone in that. Possibly "public interest" is the wrong word. > It’s worth remembering that Congress’s decision to license radio operators after the Titanic disaster was about more than just allocating scarce spectrum. It was about bringing those who speak to the masses out of the shadows and into the daylight of the public square. It was about making broadcasters, whether individuals, businesses, or other organizations, visible and accountable. We may not need to establish a formal licensing program for social media, but we do need to bring the spirit of the common good back to broadcasting. Except operating in the clear is a well-known danger as well. People using the words "accountability" and "consequences" almost never want to discuss the upper and lower limits of such ideas. If the concept of "punching up" is any indicator, it's at least partially a dog whistle for who it's okay to abuse these days. Such a system would need to be private as well, instead of operating in full transparency to prohibit the litany of performative exercises people will undergo these days to make their point. The author seems to try to assuage that only "powerful private interests" would take issue with the proposed system. > An ambitious Digital Communications Act along the lines sketched out here would be complicated and controversial. It would be resisted by many powerful private interests. It would not be a panacea. But we can no longer pretend that social media will fix itself. At the core of social media problems is bad human behavior of all persuasions. Some people just manage to learn or detach themselves. Personally, I partially blame public API concepts for most of this mess. Whether you're talking about limitless graphs for sharing "information" (in its most general definition) or API's which can be enumerated. Their legitimate use is finite and at worst it's entirely extractive. Better regulation, to me, would be the government regulating what sort of information you allow to be open and possibly the use/limits of virality.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> I've never agreed with this idea and I don't think I'm alone in that. Possibly "public interest" is the wrong word. Do you agree or disagree with the notion that since the electromagnetic spectrum is a limited resource, actual broadcast (using the spectrum) needs to be regulated?

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

It's a long article with an admirable examination of history. However, I feel Carr has made a mistake with his attempt to differentiate between private communication and broadcasting based on "number of followers". I think the better distinctions looks something like: private communication is anything delivered ONLY to people to whom it is addressed or who have actively opted-in to receive communications from the sender. some authentication must be implied before they can read what I have delivered. any other communication, regardless of the medium, number of followers, etc. is considered to be public. So, if I tweet about something, since anyone could read my tweets, they are all public. If I DM someone on twitter, that's private. If I post something on my own private blog that requires a subscription to read, that's private communication. If I post the same thing on a medium where it can be read by anyone, that's public. If I email my family about something, that's private; if I post a comment on a tiny open wordpress site with less readers than I have cousines, that's public. This differentiation says nothing about what the difference in regulation between public and private should be. There are good arguments for many different schemes, some of which involve zero regulation for either form. But to discuss the merits of them, we need a clear distinction between private & public communication, and I think Carr's is wrong and mine is (roughly) right.

Gepsens 5y ago

Seeing the comments in this thread makes me think about only one place in not so distant history : puritan England.

RNCTX 5y ago

For decades it was "common knowledge" that the War of the Worlds broadcast caused mass hysteria, when in fact if you look back on the newspaper articles at the time and compare them to criminal and hospital records you find no such thing. It would be more accurate to say that the newspaper industry was upset with the radio industry. An article from a professor publishing via W.W. Norton about the internet is cut from the same cloth as newspaper vs radio, imo.