4 ms·

You misunderstood. Don’t require users to build their bubbles, but have providers offer bubbles for a user to choose from. You could even have external bubble p

You misunderstood. Don’t require users to build their bubbles, but have providers offer bubbles for a user to choose from. You could even have external bubble providers that offer different technologies and qualities of filters. Just don’t have one centralised overlord.

greesil 4y ago
we have a centralized overlord?
- eitland 4y ago
  Several: - Google (including GMail) - Twitter - Meta (Facebook, Instagram)
  - greesil 4y ago
    And discussion outside of these platforms is impossible?
    - cmoscoso 4y ago
      Yes.
    - sfifs 4y ago
      Not impossible. Insignificant in volume.
      - cguess 4y ago
        He said on a platform that's controlled by any of those organizations.
        senorrib 4y ago
        They certainly did not.
        cowtools 4y ago
        It's controlled by Ycombinator, who uses the forum to showcase their own interests.
        drewrv 4y ago
        The number of people here who claim to hate moderation blows my mind. If someone thinks far right content is reasonable and good it would be refreshing to hear that take. Instead people bend themselves into logical pretzels to oppose the idea of moderation for supposedly “content neutral” reasons. It’s tiresome.
        kortilla 4y ago
        “I’m flabbergasted these strawmen I’m attacking exist!”
        greesil 4y ago
        Do you have a link to these strawmen?
        revscat 4y ago
        Echoing the sibling to this, this is not a viewpoint I have seen expressed before. Do you have a link?
        greesil 4y ago
        A link to their own opinions? Huh?
        Karunamon 4y ago
        It would be equally refreshing to see "moderation" advocates acknowledge that it's not just the "far right" being bullied and censored off of mainstream platforms. That straw man incinerated and replaced with "mainstream conservative content", you still are not going to get any examples because the one providing that will be voted/flagged into invisibility, or if not that, the resulting discussion will be derailed into quibbling about the specific example rather than the much more important general principle. It would be not at all honest to imply that this forum is anything but generally hostile to the American right, regardless of how extreme or not the take is. With that in mind, it is no surprise that specific positions are only ever mentioned indirectly, or negatively.
      - evrydayhustling 4y ago
        So free speech = free access to a high volume of people?
        infotogivenm 4y ago
        “I’ve been sending the Times a list of headlines to publish every week, and so far they’ve all been censored your honor!”
        cowtools 4y ago
        Email and other Internet infrastructure is more analogous to the phone company than news publishing, because you do not need to "peer" with other newspapers to get published. Imagine if Bell was touchy about letting "undesirables" use their service.
        infotogivenm 4y ago
        Oh I 100% agree, if this argument were about the ISPs, which control access to the infrastructure via local monopolies. It’s not. It’s about individual private publishers, of which there are potentially infinite. That is the beauty of the internet.
        cowtools 4y ago
        The internet infrastructure is completely controlled via local monopolies and bureaucracies, and this extends beyond ISPs. The entire DNS and PKI system for example is simply a racketeering scheme for registrars and CAs. In general the internet (from the hardware to application-level) is structured in such a way that is weak to sybil attacks, and this requires central (usually corporate) entities to discriminate on traffic. EMail is one such example: there is no meaningful way to filter spam, so the peering relationships between mail providers break down unless they each implement some sybil-proofing on their own side. The end product is that everyone is forced to use a provider like Google, and play a corporate-political game to stay in good favor with their peers. This is because there is no spam-resistance on Email application level We've seen a similar situation this week with a controversial forum called KiwiFarm taken down by DDoS. They need to maintain a political relationship with their DDoS-protection provider, CloudFlare, who also controls a massive chunk of the internet infrastructure. This is all so that there can be a central entity that discriminates on the traffic, as there's no spam resistance features on IP level. https://secushare.org/broken-internet https://secushare.org/broken-internet
      - scarface74 4y ago
        You mean like Truth Social?
    - ekianjo 4y ago
      Ask Parler
fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
> providers offer bubbles for a user to choose from How is this different from the current internet?
- infogulch 4y ago
  The platform is tied to the bubble. GP is proposing decoupling them, so the user can choose the platform and choose the bubble separately. > Tying (informally, product tying) is the practice of selling one product or service as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product or service. In legal terms, a tying sale makes the sale of one good (the tying good) to the de facto customer (or de jure customer) conditional on the purchase of a second distinctive good (the tied good). Tying is often illegal when the products are not naturally related. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
  - monetus 4y ago
    Is the implication that you would have a Netflix/Hulu/Disney dynamic of... Social media subscriptions?
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
    The bubble must by necessity have some sort of interface associated with it in order to get the content to the user. There’s a generic platform (HTTP, browser/mobile APIs) and then the “bubble service” implements against those to reach the user. Seems like a completely natural form of tying to me. Are you proposing we force another layer of middlemen to be added in between there?
    - infogulch 4y ago
      I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that the problems surrounding platforms regarding their control of censorship & free speech would be largely resolved if that aspect were decoupled. You may also think that the tying that bell and the railroads did with their respective infrastructure is 'natural', but that was made illegal and those platforms were forced to break up, so I don't think its appropriate to dismiss this issue offhand. I'm not interested in hashing out a complete argument and coming to a vacuous conclusion with some other random on an internet forum, I'm just saying that there seems to be a reasonable argument to be had in this direction.
nmstoker 4y ago
This seems like it could be substantially better than current systems. It could be effectively a crowdsource / peer recommended model where you opt in to aspects of the bubbles. So my elderly parents could get some of the safety guidance mirroring mine (eg weeding out conspiracy thought or spam) but then also picking up aspects that mirror older peers (eg reflecting their more traditional tastes) Right now there's a remarkable amount of undesirable content that gets through that ought to be easy to filter. On Twitter you see it a load with searches for regular terms that show up inappropriate content for the term, yet you don't want to set content filtering or it cuts things that are genuinely interesting but edgy!
ericbarrett 4y ago
If this case law holds, would it be extended to filter providers?
hiram112 4y ago
I can already imagine how these totally neutral "providers" like Google and Twitter would implement this, much like Microsoft abuses their OS monopoly to ensure 90% of non-tech-savvy users will eventually be using Edge. Sign up for Twitter. Immediately you're greeted with a list of "suggested filters" that will pop up again and again, using dark patterns eventually, until you either give in or are tricked into adding Twitter's highly recommended "safe filter plus package" that uses the exact same shadow bans and biased algorithms used by default today.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  Good, and then we'll get the government to start banning dark patterns. Actually, I suspect that such a law would be on even shakier First Amendment grounds, but here's a test that might bring this regulation into the realms of competition law rather than regulating speech: Whenever a (sufficiently large) platform makes a UI change about which the FTC receive multiple negative comments, that platform is required to run a poll of (some random subset of) its users, with a wording specified by the FTC, asking the users if they like the change or they find it manipulative. If most users think that the change is negative, then that's a de facto / prima facie case of the platform abusing its monopoly power to the detriment of its users, since if there were a free market then those users would simply move to a competing platform.
ItsMonkk 4y ago
uBlock Filters, but for email. uBlock Filters, but for Twitter. uBlock Filters, but for ... Just let us choose which ones we can activate, and if we want to see the unfiltered list we'll turn it off and refresh.

greesil 4y ago

we have a centralized overlord?

eitland 4y ago
Several: - Google (including GMail) - Twitter - Meta (Facebook, Instagram)
- greesil 4y ago
  And discussion outside of these platforms is impossible?
  - cmoscoso 4y ago
    Yes.
  - sfifs 4y ago
    Not impossible. Insignificant in volume.
    - cguess 4y ago
      He said on a platform that's controlled by any of those organizations.
      - senorrib 4y ago
        They certainly did not.
      - cowtools 4y ago
        It's controlled by Ycombinator, who uses the forum to showcase their own interests.
      - drewrv 4y ago
        The number of people here who claim to hate moderation blows my mind. If someone thinks far right content is reasonable and good it would be refreshing to hear that take. Instead people bend themselves into logical pretzels to oppose the idea of moderation for supposedly “content neutral” reasons. It’s tiresome.
        kortilla 4y ago
        “I’m flabbergasted these strawmen I’m attacking exist!”
        greesil 4y ago
        Do you have a link to these strawmen?
        revscat 4y ago
        Echoing the sibling to this, this is not a viewpoint I have seen expressed before. Do you have a link?
        greesil 4y ago
        A link to their own opinions? Huh?
        Karunamon 4y ago
        It would be equally refreshing to see "moderation" advocates acknowledge that it's not just the "far right" being bullied and censored off of mainstream platforms. That straw man incinerated and replaced with "mainstream conservative content", you still are not going to get any examples because the one providing that will be voted/flagged into invisibility, or if not that, the resulting discussion will be derailed into quibbling about the specific example rather than the much more important general principle. It would be not at all honest to imply that this forum is anything but generally hostile to the American right, regardless of how extreme or not the take is. With that in mind, it is no surprise that specific positions are only ever mentioned indirectly, or negatively.
    - evrydayhustling 4y ago
      So free speech = free access to a high volume of people?
      - infotogivenm 4y ago
        “I’ve been sending the Times a list of headlines to publish every week, and so far they’ve all been censored your honor!”
        cowtools 4y ago
        Email and other Internet infrastructure is more analogous to the phone company than news publishing, because you do not need to "peer" with other newspapers to get published. Imagine if Bell was touchy about letting "undesirables" use their service.
        infotogivenm 4y ago
        Oh I 100% agree, if this argument were about the ISPs, which control access to the infrastructure via local monopolies. It’s not. It’s about individual private publishers, of which there are potentially infinite. That is the beauty of the internet.
        cowtools 4y ago
        The internet infrastructure is completely controlled via local monopolies and bureaucracies, and this extends beyond ISPs. The entire DNS and PKI system for example is simply a racketeering scheme for registrars and CAs. In general the internet (from the hardware to application-level) is structured in such a way that is weak to sybil attacks, and this requires central (usually corporate) entities to discriminate on traffic. EMail is one such example: there is no meaningful way to filter spam, so the peering relationships between mail providers break down unless they each implement some sybil-proofing on their own side. The end product is that everyone is forced to use a provider like Google, and play a corporate-political game to stay in good favor with their peers. This is because there is no spam-resistance on Email application level We've seen a similar situation this week with a controversial forum called KiwiFarm taken down by DDoS. They need to maintain a political relationship with their DDoS-protection provider, CloudFlare, who also controls a massive chunk of the internet infrastructure. This is all so that there can be a central entity that discriminates on the traffic, as there's no spam resistance features on IP level. https://secushare.org/broken-internet https://secushare.org/broken-internet
    - scarface74 4y ago
      You mean like Truth Social?
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    Ask Parler

fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago

> providers offer bubbles for a user to choose from How is this different from the current internet?

infogulch 4y ago
The platform is tied to the bubble. GP is proposing decoupling them, so the user can choose the platform and choose the bubble separately. > Tying (informally, product tying) is the practice of selling one product or service as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product or service. In legal terms, a tying sale makes the sale of one good (the tying good) to the de facto customer (or de jure customer) conditional on the purchase of a second distinctive good (the tied good). Tying is often illegal when the products are not naturally related. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
- monetus 4y ago
  Is the implication that you would have a Netflix/Hulu/Disney dynamic of... Social media subscriptions?
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
  The bubble must by necessity have some sort of interface associated with it in order to get the content to the user. There’s a generic platform (HTTP, browser/mobile APIs) and then the “bubble service” implements against those to reach the user. Seems like a completely natural form of tying to me. Are you proposing we force another layer of middlemen to be added in between there?
  - infogulch 4y ago
    I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that the problems surrounding platforms regarding their control of censorship & free speech would be largely resolved if that aspect were decoupled. You may also think that the tying that bell and the railroads did with their respective infrastructure is 'natural', but that was made illegal and those platforms were forced to break up, so I don't think its appropriate to dismiss this issue offhand. I'm not interested in hashing out a complete argument and coming to a vacuous conclusion with some other random on an internet forum, I'm just saying that there seems to be a reasonable argument to be had in this direction.

nmstoker 4y ago

This seems like it could be substantially better than current systems. It could be effectively a crowdsource / peer recommended model where you opt in to aspects of the bubbles. So my elderly parents could get some of the safety guidance mirroring mine (eg weeding out conspiracy thought or spam) but then also picking up aspects that mirror older peers (eg reflecting their more traditional tastes) Right now there's a remarkable amount of undesirable content that gets through that ought to be easy to filter. On Twitter you see it a load with searches for regular terms that show up inappropriate content for the term, yet you don't want to set content filtering or it cuts things that are genuinely interesting but edgy!

ericbarrett 4y ago

If this case law holds, would it be extended to filter providers?

hiram112 4y ago

I can already imagine how these totally neutral "providers" like Google and Twitter would implement this, much like Microsoft abuses their OS monopoly to ensure 90% of non-tech-savvy users will eventually be using Edge. Sign up for Twitter. Immediately you're greeted with a list of "suggested filters" that will pop up again and again, using dark patterns eventually, until you either give in or are tricked into adding Twitter's highly recommended "safe filter plus package" that uses the exact same shadow bans and biased algorithms used by default today.

dane-pgp 4y ago
Good, and then we'll get the government to start banning dark patterns. Actually, I suspect that such a law would be on even shakier First Amendment grounds, but here's a test that might bring this regulation into the realms of competition law rather than regulating speech: Whenever a (sufficiently large) platform makes a UI change about which the FTC receive multiple negative comments, that platform is required to run a poll of (some random subset of) its users, with a wording specified by the FTC, asking the users if they like the change or they find it manipulative. If most users think that the change is negative, then that's a de facto / prima facie case of the platform abusing its monopoly power to the detriment of its users, since if there were a free market then those users would simply move to a competing platform.

ItsMonkk 4y ago

uBlock Filters, but for email. uBlock Filters, but for Twitter. uBlock Filters, but for ... Just let us choose which ones we can activate, and if we want to see the unfiltered list we'll turn it off and refresh.