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>This is a cycle we can expect for any platform that has the bills. I am not surprised to hear this sentiment so frequently in this startup minded space, but t

>This is a cycle we can expect for any platform that has the bills. I am not surprised to hear this sentiment so frequently in this startup minded space, but there is another approach to the problem. IMO, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc are technically "simple" (once you strip them down to what the end user actually needs from the service) and they provide incredibly valuable services to the world (well I think Twitter is incredibly lame, but I guess I am alone in this opinion). Why aren't there non-profit (or benefit corporation) versions of these services? Enshitification requires the profit motive.

noirscape 3y ago
Because the problem isn't technical, it's well, human. As it turns out, when we're given a slight bit of anonymity (in the "my name and face aren't attached to this" sense, not in the "no consistent identity" sense, aka "crypto won't solve this either"), the barrier to being an asshole becomes significantly lower[0]. Someone needs to moderate those spaces and Masnicks Theorem states that any form of content moderation at scale doesn't properly work[1] because nobody can agree on what "bad behavior" even is outside the blatantly obvious like automated spam. (And just to head this off - automated techniques like karma and "votes" sound great in theory but in practice enable all sorts of abuse. - the problem isn't technical and can't be technically solved.) The problem is simply scale - there's plenty of niche communities for various interests who are likely to not fall victim to the process due to either being non-profit or existing perpendicular to a business' actual revenue stream[2]. Those communities will keep existing until they simply burn out (the natural lifecycle) and the last couple mods just quietly close the place down. Twitter/Facebook/Reddit attempted to unnaturally cannabilize those communities by moving everything in their walled gardens (alongside a lucky break due to Tapatalk killing the ability for traditional forums to move to mobile) and then trying to extract money from them. Their state is honestly more unnatural than you'd think, but it's what most users gravitated towards. The closest we have right now as a solution to marry the self-managed forums of old with centralized services is the fediverse, but explaining it to people is often considered to be difficult enough that it probably won't grab mainstream appeal. And y'know... Maybe that's alright? Centralized social media that tries to appeal to everyone may just have been a mistake to begin with. [0]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InternetJerk https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InternetJerk (formerly known as GIFT or Greater Internet Fuckwad Theorem.) [1]: https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/ https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-t... [2]: HN being the latter, mostly existing to market YC startups and because paulg wanted a discussion forum.
- wintermutestwin 3y ago
  >Because the problem isn't technical, it's well, human. I agree wholeheartedly. We are no longer at the point where the core end user services provided by FB/Reddit/Twitter require serious technical innovation. They require a massive amount of moderation though. And Reddit shows that there are volunteers out there who will do it for free, but they need to feel that they are valued and supported by the organization that runs the show. What better org structure to support volunteers than a non-profit?
  - noirscape 3y ago
    I mean, technically that's how most old-school forums operated in practice. You had one guy/girl who operated the entire thing, asked for maybe 100-200 bucks a year to keep the server lights on and the community would fund that and it'd stay in the air. The main problem is that I don't think a non-profit could realistically meet the cost required to actually run a platform like this. It's really expensive to run a general purpose platform (not to mention difficult since Masnick's Impossibility Theorem), to the point where I'd call it almost inherently unsustainable. It can work easily for smaller communities, it just won't work for massive ones. -- To give you an idea, I've been a mod on-and-off on several communities for the past decade (not Reddit, mostly small Discord servers for homebrew projects and a couple of IRC chats) - for the most part, "being a mod" just translates to "check recent userlog to ban obvious spam, tell people to stop butting heads constantly, be welcoming to the newbies". If you think being a mod is enjoying power... well you might have only reddit/discord mods (and their bloated mod teams) for reference. In practice, you're closer to a kindergarten teacher than to the "landed gentry". Usually doesn't take more than 10 minutes a day in experience, if the tooling you have is good enough. The problem is... the communities I moderated only had 2-3k users in total at most, and only 30 or so were active at any one day. This is very much how smaller communities work (and should work) in practice. But... that doesn't even come close to the total userbase of something like Reddit, even less with platforms that don't at all segment their users like FB and Twitter. Those sites service millions of users each day and their larger communities have thousands of new posts to deal with every day. Reddit mostly mitigates it by splitting it up to volunteer mods who all control a smaller portion of that community, but with FB and Twitter it just... doesn't work since the platforms are opposed to such a notion by design since their entire selling point is "talk with everyone, everywhere, all at once". Moderation on such a platform just cannot work unless you pour as much cash into it as FB/Twitter (used) to do and no non-profit comes even close to that degree of income (nor can you really obtain it without becoming as privacy-invasive as those two platforms are). Reddit completely gave up on global moderation if I understand it correctly and now only bans users for breaking the law or if they risk damaging the PR of the company.
johnfernow 3y ago
> Why aren't there non-profit (or benefit corporation) versions of these services? From a quick search, it seems that the operating costs for Meta in 2022 was USD $87.66 billion. Twitter was $5.6 billion in 2021. Reddit's is a mystery but it has 192 million more monthly active users than Twitter (not that they necessarily post the same amount of content or that the content is as expensive to store/serve, but in any case it's not going to be cheap either.) So to run something like Facebook, you'd have to have one of the best-funded non-profits ever. Non-profit doesn't mean it has to be a charitable foundation (so you could run ads and sell services, which you'll need to, because you're not getting $87.66 billion through donations), but even non-profit companies with a decent amount of revenue do not come close to that amount. I don't think it's impossible to create an ethical, non-profit alternative to Facebook, but I understand why one hasn't been created (there are non-profit social networks, but most seem to be distributed/federated social networks, which are a very different experience for most users.) Even if you created something with perfect feature-parity of Facebook, it'd still be extremely difficult to convince users to switch. For messaging platforms, there is a non-profit organization that has a secure and private messaging app (Signal) but few people use it compared to Facebook Messenger, Telegram and KakaoTalk (which by default don't use end-to-end encryption) or even Snapchat (doesn't use E2EE for messages aside from photos) (WhatsApp at least always uses E2EE, not sure about Line.) > Enshitification requires the profit motive. Not really. Firefox killed support for WPAs: that alone is enough reason for some to switch to a Chromium-based browser. They've done several questionable UI redesigns that their users don't seem to like (people like a consistent UI.) They're also starting a bad trend of adding new features that they're killing within a year or two (their password manager, their E2EE file sharing service, their encrypted notes.) I personally didn't use any of those features, but for any user who used those new features that they promoted, having to switch a year or two later is a good way to turn them off your products. Google is obviously far worse with this with their various services, but the point is that quality can decrease even when their is no profit motive. I'll agree with you that it's certainly more likely to happy when there's a profit motive though.
- wintermutestwin 3y ago
  >operating costs for Meta in 2022 was USD $87.66 billion How much of that actual cost is related to running a simple social blogging/connecting tool vs anything that is ad/surveillance/manipulation/etc? Also, how much are they paying to moderate? Imagine the power of volunteer moderation when supported by a non-profit volunteer-focused organization that values its volunteer assets... >perfect feature-parity of Facebook All I wanted was a place to share baby pictures with grandma and they bolted on the panopticon... >it'd still be extremely difficult to convince users to switch. Even grandma knows that FB is evil now. She keeps asking me why the baby pics are on Facecrook, but I don't have any good solution for her today.

noirscape 3y ago

Because the problem isn't technical, it's well, human. As it turns out, when we're given a slight bit of anonymity (in the "my name and face aren't attached to this" sense, not in the "no consistent identity" sense, aka "crypto won't solve this either"), the barrier to being an asshole becomes significantly lower[0]. Someone needs to moderate those spaces and Masnicks Theorem states that any form of content moderation at scale doesn't properly work[1] because nobody can agree on what "bad behavior" even is outside the blatantly obvious like automated spam. (And just to head this off - automated techniques like karma and "votes" sound great in theory but in practice enable all sorts of abuse. - the problem isn't technical and can't be technically solved.) The problem is simply scale - there's plenty of niche communities for various interests who are likely to not fall victim to the process due to either being non-profit or existing perpendicular to a business' actual revenue stream[2]. Those communities will keep existing until they simply burn out (the natural lifecycle) and the last couple mods just quietly close the place down. Twitter/Facebook/Reddit attempted to unnaturally cannabilize those communities by moving everything in their walled gardens (alongside a lucky break due to Tapatalk killing the ability for traditional forums to move to mobile) and then trying to extract money from them. Their state is honestly more unnatural than you'd think, but it's what most users gravitated towards. The closest we have right now as a solution to marry the self-managed forums of old with centralized services is the fediverse, but explaining it to people is often considered to be difficult enough that it probably won't grab mainstream appeal. And y'know... Maybe that's alright? Centralized social media that tries to appeal to everyone may just have been a mistake to begin with. [0]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InternetJerk https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InternetJerk (formerly known as GIFT or Greater Internet Fuckwad Theorem.) [1]: https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/ https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-t... [2]: HN being the latter, mostly existing to market YC startups and because paulg wanted a discussion forum.

wintermutestwin 3y ago
>Because the problem isn't technical, it's well, human. I agree wholeheartedly. We are no longer at the point where the core end user services provided by FB/Reddit/Twitter require serious technical innovation. They require a massive amount of moderation though. And Reddit shows that there are volunteers out there who will do it for free, but they need to feel that they are valued and supported by the organization that runs the show. What better org structure to support volunteers than a non-profit?
- noirscape 3y ago
  I mean, technically that's how most old-school forums operated in practice. You had one guy/girl who operated the entire thing, asked for maybe 100-200 bucks a year to keep the server lights on and the community would fund that and it'd stay in the air. The main problem is that I don't think a non-profit could realistically meet the cost required to actually run a platform like this. It's really expensive to run a general purpose platform (not to mention difficult since Masnick's Impossibility Theorem), to the point where I'd call it almost inherently unsustainable. It can work easily for smaller communities, it just won't work for massive ones. -- To give you an idea, I've been a mod on-and-off on several communities for the past decade (not Reddit, mostly small Discord servers for homebrew projects and a couple of IRC chats) - for the most part, "being a mod" just translates to "check recent userlog to ban obvious spam, tell people to stop butting heads constantly, be welcoming to the newbies". If you think being a mod is enjoying power... well you might have only reddit/discord mods (and their bloated mod teams) for reference. In practice, you're closer to a kindergarten teacher than to the "landed gentry". Usually doesn't take more than 10 minutes a day in experience, if the tooling you have is good enough. The problem is... the communities I moderated only had 2-3k users in total at most, and only 30 or so were active at any one day. This is very much how smaller communities work (and should work) in practice. But... that doesn't even come close to the total userbase of something like Reddit, even less with platforms that don't at all segment their users like FB and Twitter. Those sites service millions of users each day and their larger communities have thousands of new posts to deal with every day. Reddit mostly mitigates it by splitting it up to volunteer mods who all control a smaller portion of that community, but with FB and Twitter it just... doesn't work since the platforms are opposed to such a notion by design since their entire selling point is "talk with everyone, everywhere, all at once". Moderation on such a platform just cannot work unless you pour as much cash into it as FB/Twitter (used) to do and no non-profit comes even close to that degree of income (nor can you really obtain it without becoming as privacy-invasive as those two platforms are). Reddit completely gave up on global moderation if I understand it correctly and now only bans users for breaking the law or if they risk damaging the PR of the company.

johnfernow 3y ago

> Why aren't there non-profit (or benefit corporation) versions of these services? From a quick search, it seems that the operating costs for Meta in 2022 was USD $87.66 billion. Twitter was $5.6 billion in 2021. Reddit's is a mystery but it has 192 million more monthly active users than Twitter (not that they necessarily post the same amount of content or that the content is as expensive to store/serve, but in any case it's not going to be cheap either.) So to run something like Facebook, you'd have to have one of the best-funded non-profits ever. Non-profit doesn't mean it has to be a charitable foundation (so you could run ads and sell services, which you'll need to, because you're not getting $87.66 billion through donations), but even non-profit companies with a decent amount of revenue do not come close to that amount. I don't think it's impossible to create an ethical, non-profit alternative to Facebook, but I understand why one hasn't been created (there are non-profit social networks, but most seem to be distributed/federated social networks, which are a very different experience for most users.) Even if you created something with perfect feature-parity of Facebook, it'd still be extremely difficult to convince users to switch. For messaging platforms, there is a non-profit organization that has a secure and private messaging app (Signal) but few people use it compared to Facebook Messenger, Telegram and KakaoTalk (which by default don't use end-to-end encryption) or even Snapchat (doesn't use E2EE for messages aside from photos) (WhatsApp at least always uses E2EE, not sure about Line.) > Enshitification requires the profit motive. Not really. Firefox killed support for WPAs: that alone is enough reason for some to switch to a Chromium-based browser. They've done several questionable UI redesigns that their users don't seem to like (people like a consistent UI.) They're also starting a bad trend of adding new features that they're killing within a year or two (their password manager, their E2EE file sharing service, their encrypted notes.) I personally didn't use any of those features, but for any user who used those new features that they promoted, having to switch a year or two later is a good way to turn them off your products. Google is obviously far worse with this with their various services, but the point is that quality can decrease even when their is no profit motive. I'll agree with you that it's certainly more likely to happy when there's a profit motive though.

wintermutestwin 3y ago
>operating costs for Meta in 2022 was USD $87.66 billion How much of that actual cost is related to running a simple social blogging/connecting tool vs anything that is ad/surveillance/manipulation/etc? Also, how much are they paying to moderate? Imagine the power of volunteer moderation when supported by a non-profit volunteer-focused organization that values its volunteer assets... >perfect feature-parity of Facebook All I wanted was a place to share baby pictures with grandma and they bolted on the panopticon... >it'd still be extremely difficult to convince users to switch. Even grandma knows that FB is evil now. She keeps asking me why the baby pics are on Facecrook, but I don't have any good solution for her today.