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This comment just feels like you are only pointing fingers at large corps while ignoring the massive numbers of smaller niche websites (like forums) run by peop

This comment just feels like you are only pointing fingers at large corps while ignoring the massive numbers of smaller niche websites (like forums) run by people with small pockets, which allow differing amounts of diversity of discussion. The Facebook/Twitter backlash is pretty far along and some people have migrated to Gab, Parler, Truth, etc. They are low SNR for me, so I don’t care to join them, as much of the US hasn’t either. This country was founded 2000 years before the modern internet and discourse was fine back then. People can invite others to their houses. There is still a town square concept, although it is increasingly private property (because governments are outsourcing lots of their functions). There is almost no barrier to entry to create a news/media company from scratch. But even then people were ostracized from communities/families and people were kicked out of bars/homes or arrested or sued for their words — I get the feeling that those who advocate for maximum freedom don’t have a good understanding of history of the USA. Yes, large corps can affect discourse, but it is because humans are averse to using the scarce attention / memory they have. We don’t like the cognitive load of changing social media platforms every 2 weeks.

throwawaygh 5y ago
> This comment just feels like you are only pointing fingers at large corps Good to know. That's not my intent. I am distinguishing between platforms and forums, not big vs. small. Platforms tend to be large corps, but there are many smaller players in the platform space. You named a few. I think all of those should be forced to be public benefit corps as well. The line between forum and platform is weird, but I think I'd roughly define it using something like Section 230. Forums are for cohesive groups. > I get the feeling that those who advocate for maximum freedom don’t have a good understanding of history of the USA. I tend to agree. My current stance on social media issues comes from walking around Boston during the pandemic and thinking about exactly this topic. > This country was founded 2000 years before the modern internet 2,000 years? Damn straight! Jesus was white as a pearl, 'Murican as you or I, and died for our freedom! (Let's not forget to laugh ;-))
- thephyber 5y ago
  > 2000 years Heh. One too many zeros. x.x Personally I think the solution is to have some sort of downward pressure on clauses in ToS contracts. Right now, those things could grow nearly infinitely long and clients would have to tolerate it. If corps had a significant reason to minimize the restrictive clauses, there would be a little more freedom for all.
tick_tock_tick 5y ago
The barrier to entry for making you're own twitter is building you're own damn internet. How can you say no barrier to entry when every major tech company will act in lockstep to refuse to do business with you? Hell even there datacenter started to refuse to do business; at that point you need to build a parallel world which is a pretty damn big barrier.
- thephyber 5y ago
  The barrier for making your own “Twitter clone” is low, unless it actually has to scale to Twitter’s perf. The barrier to making a “Twitter clone which has absolutely zero moderation” (which is close to what Parler said) means that you are unlikely to be able to find any vendors in the USA which will accept those contract terms or want to accept the liability. Analogy: try couch surfing to minimize paying rent. A person with a good reputation and good roommate habits can easily find a place to stay and it will likely be cheap with lots of options for places to stay. But if that person starts to consume the food that was bought by and marked for others, doesn’t do their part of the chores, starts arguments with roommates and guests, doesn’t pay their rent on time, disrespects the property, violates norms of conduct, then they cause harm to the responsible parties living in that home. Don’t be surprised when they get evicted and their social credibility (like AirBnB ratings) fall off and no one wants to host them. This is remarkably close to what happened when Parler was kicked off of the App Stores and then lost their CDN, DNS, and hosting. They aren’t acting “in lock step”, they are all equally afraid of the consequences of hosting a high liability client and are looking for a contractual reason to cut their liability. Have you seen the death threats a Plumber in Texas got because his truck was sold then ended up in ISIS in Syria/Iraq with his company logo on it? Branding and association have real world costs. It’s also not clear if upstream providers have zero liability if they allow content that is blatantly illegal. I seem to remember that DHS / FBI will just barge into data centers with a warrant and pull servers off the rack with little concern for the other clients that are co-hosted on that physical hardware. The collateral damage of being a client in an unmoderated data center is far more than being in a data center where the moderation rules weed out the riskiest clients.

throwawaygh 5y ago

> This comment just feels like you are only pointing fingers at large corps Good to know. That's not my intent. I am distinguishing between platforms and forums, not big vs. small. Platforms tend to be large corps, but there are many smaller players in the platform space. You named a few. I think all of those should be forced to be public benefit corps as well. The line between forum and platform is weird, but I think I'd roughly define it using something like Section 230. Forums are for cohesive groups. > I get the feeling that those who advocate for maximum freedom don’t have a good understanding of history of the USA. I tend to agree. My current stance on social media issues comes from walking around Boston during the pandemic and thinking about exactly this topic. > This country was founded 2000 years before the modern internet 2,000 years? Damn straight! Jesus was white as a pearl, 'Murican as you or I, and died for our freedom! (Let's not forget to laugh ;-))

thephyber 5y ago
> 2000 years Heh. One too many zeros. x.x Personally I think the solution is to have some sort of downward pressure on clauses in ToS contracts. Right now, those things could grow nearly infinitely long and clients would have to tolerate it. If corps had a significant reason to minimize the restrictive clauses, there would be a little more freedom for all.

tick_tock_tick 5y ago

The barrier to entry for making you're own twitter is building you're own damn internet. How can you say no barrier to entry when every major tech company will act in lockstep to refuse to do business with you? Hell even there datacenter started to refuse to do business; at that point you need to build a parallel world which is a pretty damn big barrier.

thephyber 5y ago
The barrier for making your own “Twitter clone” is low, unless it actually has to scale to Twitter’s perf. The barrier to making a “Twitter clone which has absolutely zero moderation” (which is close to what Parler said) means that you are unlikely to be able to find any vendors in the USA which will accept those contract terms or want to accept the liability. Analogy: try couch surfing to minimize paying rent. A person with a good reputation and good roommate habits can easily find a place to stay and it will likely be cheap with lots of options for places to stay. But if that person starts to consume the food that was bought by and marked for others, doesn’t do their part of the chores, starts arguments with roommates and guests, doesn’t pay their rent on time, disrespects the property, violates norms of conduct, then they cause harm to the responsible parties living in that home. Don’t be surprised when they get evicted and their social credibility (like AirBnB ratings) fall off and no one wants to host them. This is remarkably close to what happened when Parler was kicked off of the App Stores and then lost their CDN, DNS, and hosting. They aren’t acting “in lock step”, they are all equally afraid of the consequences of hosting a high liability client and are looking for a contractual reason to cut their liability. Have you seen the death threats a Plumber in Texas got because his truck was sold then ended up in ISIS in Syria/Iraq with his company logo on it? Branding and association have real world costs. It’s also not clear if upstream providers have zero liability if they allow content that is blatantly illegal. I seem to remember that DHS / FBI will just barge into data centers with a warrant and pull servers off the rack with little concern for the other clients that are co-hosted on that physical hardware. The collateral damage of being a client in an unmoderated data center is far more than being in a data center where the moderation rules weed out the riskiest clients.