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The internet's “town square” is dead
- anotherhue 3y agoI assume this is about USENET
- codetrotter 3y agoIt’s talking about Twitter, Threads, and things like that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gonzo41 3y agoEverything is fine. From time to time the town square has had riots, been made brick dust by war and been really peaceful and fun. Swings and round abouts. Lets just warm ourselves by the glow of 44Bn dollars burning right now.
- seydor 3y agoThe internet IS the town square. Social clubs are like VIP (or more pedestrian) popular pubs
- r00fus 3y agoTo abuse the analogy further, the Internet is the infrastructure on which town squares can be built. Also most decently sized European cities have multiple “town squares” each with their own vibe (based on the stores/restaurants that have storefronts there). Unless I’m not getting the authors drift, I see no problem with the bifurcation as long as town square owners don’t put up unreasonable barriers.
- jakelazaroff 3y agoThis! A thousand times this! Even if every single social network vanished tomorrow, we would still have a space where anyone can say whatever they want and instantly distribute it to every corner of the Earth.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoThat's not a town square though. That's someone shouting out their window.
- jakelazaroff 3y agoAt the risk of stretching this analogy even further past its breaking point, what do you think a “town square” is?
- JKCalhoun 3y agoA common area where people gather to shout/listen.
- jakelazaroff 3y agoThe Internet (or really the Web) is a common area. You tweet something, I write a blog post and embed your tweet in it, Alice emails my post to her friends, Bob writes a post in response and links back to me, Charlie submits Bob’s post to Hacker News or Reddit, David and Eve discuss in the comments, etc.
- the-printer 3y agoWindows do not have URLs.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- haswell 3y agoTown squares emerge where people gather. In the physical world, this happens out of necessity, and due to the incentives of our economic system. But I don’t think the internet version of this analogy holds up if you were to just erase social networks tomorrow. Depending on one’s goals, starting your own site on some corner of the internet is akin to opening a store in the middle of nowhere. I can do it, but no one is coming here unless I find the place that people gather and tell them about my new shop in mountains. The fabric of internet does enable this, but if I want to build a store, I’m going to do it somewhere where people gather, or I’m still going to rely on the places that people already gather to spread the word. If I’m ambitious, what I really need to do is build a new town so that a square can emerge. But now I’m Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. Analogies between the Internet itself and the town square have always been shaky, and the deeper one goes, the more stark the differences. I’d argue that the internet is closer to the world stage — a place in which anything can happen, but more like the raw environment in which town squares emerge than a town square itself.
- pityJuke 3y ago> The “town square” analogy for social media is another one of those crap ones that somehow got traction. No one actually wants a town square. They want a cafe at the edge of the town square where they can chat to their mates and watch the world go by. They don’t want some bloke with an amplifier in the middle of the square screaming about how Jesus saves. [1] A take that I'm pretty agreeable to. [1]: https://mastodon.xyz/@ianbetteridge@writing.exchange/110677525416011009 https://mastodon.xyz/@ianbetteridge@writing.exchange/1106775...
- vacuity 3y agoWouldn't it be great if there was an underlying messaging framework that allowed anyone to host any kind of site or forum, with built-in interoperability, flexible curation, and the ability to impose moderation? Then anyone (with servers, perhaps) could make their own blog (only they send messages, except perhaps comments), Twitter, Hacker News, Element, whatever. Pipe dream?
- giantrobot 3y agoThis is my exact take on the whole "town square" concept. It's just fucking stupid. For one a town doesn't have a hundred thousand people let alone a million or hundred million. So a "town square" with even a hundred thousand people is already a broken concept. A real town also doesn't have a hundred cardboard cutouts controlled by marketers, spammers, and spy agencies brigading around purporting to be real people. If Twitter or anyone else wanted to even start pretending to be a "town square" there would be no algorithmic feeds and you'd only ever see posts from your friend list. No one goes to the "town square" to be bombarded with street preachers and guys with trench coats trying to sell you cheap watches. Twitter uses "town square" to evoke images of Mayberry when it more resembles 1970s Times Square.
- Pannoniae 3y agoSocial media should be regulated like utilities. They are the "public square" now in all but name - they should be regulated the same way, with free speech enshrined in law just as in public spaces. Their defence is always "we are private companies so we do whatever they want" - which wouldn't fly if they were a water company refusing service arbitrarily.
- jakelazaroff 3y agoYes, because you very literally need water to live. You won’t die if you go three days without posting on Twitter.
- hooande 3y agoI thought that regulation was based on the idea that it's difficult to start new, competing social networks. But the market seems to be taking care of that. Why regulate twitter if any miscellanous billionaire can start a competitive service? Regulation means that companies have to follow arbitrary rules, including rules that you may not like. Wait until every social site is legally required to ban you if you violate a given rule. The social networking space seems to be working itself out It's just a slow process.
- _Algernon_ 3y agoRegulation as a utility could focus on data ex-changeability. Ie. the "utility" is a certain standard all social media need to support which allows users to interact with people on other platforms, and move their data and identity between them. This would reduce network effects by a lot, thereby increasing competition.
- ghusto 3y ago> I thought that regulation was based on the idea that it's difficult to start new, competing social networks. Tried it? Difficult is an understatement. As you point out though, "miscellaneous billionaire(s)" can try. That's hardly the same thing as the first days when Twitter started. > Regulation means that companies have to follow arbitrary rules, including rules that you may not like. I'm going to presume your use of the word arbitrary there is a result of a lack of faith in government. As little faith as _I_ have in government though, I wouldn't call regulations arbitrary. Anyway ... > Wait until every social site is legally required to ban you if you violate a given rule. Fine with me. There are plenty of laws I don't agree with, but follow because the rule of law is more important than getting laws right (aligned to my opinion). This is not least because we can do something about those laws we disagree with in a civil way. I'm fairly certain I'd get punished on these sites if the current social justice trends became law. That works well, because then we'd be able to go through an established public process to change them — rather than a private company deciding their own laws, with no recourse.
- afavour 3y agoPeople will say “good riddance, Twitter was always trash”. Personally I disagree (I’ve been happily using it for years, I just don’t get involved in political shitfights) but even if it is true I will think it’s a notable lesson. Scaling human interaction up to internet size just doesn’t seem to work. Reddit just about held it together but only because it functioned as a collection of mini communities you could dip in and out of. Almost all larger communities have always been a mess. I’m not totally sure what the lesson is here but I am very curious where we’ll be in fifty years time. I hope somewhere good, I fear not.
- Guvante 3y agoIt also doesn't help that making a profit is hard especially from user driven content which advertisers are uncertain about. You can try making your platform advertiser friendly but stuff that isn't advertising friendly tends to be the best way to hook users...
- nickjj 3y agoIn my mind IRC fills the role of a town square. There's channels with dozens to hundreds of people gathered to chat about 1 specific topic in a mostly unmoderated way (within reason).
- j45 3y agoI initially saw Twitter as an inverted IRC, except you post a message to multiple hashtags (irc channels) instead of just one, or none at all, and you can view all messages in all hashtags/channels at once, plus everyone’s direct posts outside of any hashtag/channel… or just one hashtag/channel. Maybe the next town square just uses irc as it’s backend. Might be an unpopular opinion: Kind of how slack started using irc as it’s back end and ultimately to be a more modern incarnation of an irc client (and no longer using irc as it’s backend)
- c_crank 3y agoThe town square of the internet is failing at the same time that real life town squares are getting uglier. Food for thought.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoI'm in the camp that believes that one is causing the other.
- MrStonedOne 3y ago[dead]
- andsoitis 3y ago> a single overarching internet is impossible I don't understand how the author concludes this from their analysis of social media sites.
- TehCorwiz 3y agoBetween the Archivists working torrent sites and file sharing communities, the corporate interests feeding the masses need for gladiator sports and rage inducing news, the hungry motivated silver spoon poor yearning for their own slice of the pie, the Tor gnomes pretending that a rubber hose and hammer can be avoided with clever message passing, the sectarians (racists, xenophobes, isolationists, and mercenaries) bent on dividing and conquering, the influencers scrabbling for dropped pennies and demanding jewels; there is no consensus here. We all contribute to the cacophony of disjointed murmurations seething and bleating, demanding to be heard, acknowledged, respected. We cheer and battle and annoy each other eternally in a Babel of confusion and misunderstandings. No sir. The internet cannot not has it ever been unified. Because the oddities that inhabit it aren’t themselves unified. Humanity isn’t unified why would the internet change that?
- Nursie 3y ago> ”I think Zuckerberg’s so-far successful introduction of its competitor, Threads, which rapidly feels like the other global town square, presages one of the last gasps of the united internet” Twitter was never “the united internet. It’s been a collection of noisy, fractious groups constituting a minority of internet users
- stcroixx 3y agoUnless you were 'on the team', it was a bleak place where authoritarians promoted their lies using what power they had to silence dissenters. COVID vaccine never prevented infection, but saying this would get you banned. Discussing lab leak would get you banned. Threads will never be able to deliver to them this power to control others because people are free to discuss what they like elsewhere now.
- Nursie 3y agoYes, because that's what the world needs, more places for misinformation and conspiracy bullcrap to spread.
- stcroixx 3y agoYou mean places where the truth can be discussed. COVID vaccine never prevented infection. The 'misinformation' aka lie that it did was promoted on the previous platform.
- Nursie 3y agoNo, I meant what I said. I hope one day you'll be more at ease with reality rather than duped into reactionary conspiracy.
- mrtksn 3y agoThe whole feed based "internet town square" concept is flawed, if anyone have seen an actual European town square you would have noticed that it's nothing like Twitter or similar. In a good town square, you have people minding their own business and the public activities are actually curated(a few agendas that fit in the physical location) and people visit those if they they are interested in. People don't actually participate in 100 different activities all the time and they are very annoyed if someone is trying to grab their attention. Also, although there are all kind of people at the town square, those who scream "if evolution is real why the monkey in the forest don't become human" are nuisance for those who already went through the evolution theory and know why monkeys are not becoming human still. Therefore, the whole concept of discovering different kind of people and being exposed to different ideas is not analogous to a feed with christian fundamentalist and atheists screaming to each other because people have different knowledge levels and some are more up to speed than the others on different topics. A true town square are the forums where you can actually browse topics and participate in those who are at your level. Reddit is a closer analogy to a town square than Twitter.
- fivre 3y agoit me, missing the purpose of reusing a concise term that suggests a basic notion of a public setting where varying people interact for its failing to exactly mimic the interaction patterns of such a setting in physical european cities metaphors are impossible. never use them. they are meaningless.
- chasing 3y agoYou have to “control speech” to be able to have a community that doesn’t devolve into toxicity. All healthy communities do it, either implicitly or explicitly. Including Hacker News, which actually has a really good community as a result! Healthy communities are easier to destroy than create. They need protection. It’s not a political thing.
- asah 3y agoYyy. Put another way, the "town square" concept doesn't scale. And arguably, even at small scale, town squares don't lead to decency or better decision making. Things that "sound good" are judged as correct without research, data collection or analysis, with the predictable results.
- chasing 3y agoYup. We already have a variety of institutions and organizations designed for intellectual collaboration, debate, and decision-making. Twitter isn’t one of them. Never has been.
- markusde 3y agoThat's a good way to put it! Town squares sound great, but every city square I've been in is full of yelling and pickpockets.
- musicale 3y agoTimes Square seems to have scaled up pretty well - some 300K visitors per day (still down 20% from 2019 though.)
- VancouverMan 3y ago> Healthy communities are easier to destroy than create. They need protection. "Healthy" doesn't seem like the word to use to describe something that requires constant and intentional intervention/manipulation by some external party merely to exist. At least some relatively high degree of inherent self-sufficiency, resilience, and robustness should be present for something to be considered "healthy".
- chasing 3y agoAlso, the idea that Twitter (or any individual social network) is somehow The Public Town Square is flawed from the start. Such a thing doesn’t exist. There are online communities of varying sizes that have different sets of rules that their members (explicitly or implicitly) agree to adhere to. Calling Twitter (or Threads) a “town square” is marketing or corporate fantasy as much as anything. Most people don’t use these services or even really care about them. (I think of these services more like bars: They’re public places where people go to cavort and socialize, but there’s an expectation of what behaviors are acceptable and an owner, bartender, and bouncer willing to make sure those rules are adhered to. Don’t like it? Find another bar. There are tons.)
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoIt's not even marketing, it's a dog whistle and a means of justifying hosting garbage posted by people with too much time on their hands and too little empathy.
- jmye 3y agoAnd a way to make their own participation seem somehow grander (and not like 99% of the site was utterly toxic 140-character pissing matches and bad faith posturing).
- medler 3y ago> If the original Twitter crew had been about 30% less overtly willing to censor news, language, people, or ideas they didn’t like, Musk probably wouldn’t have bought the company, and the blues would still be in control of Twitter The author makes the same mistake Elon made when he bought Twitter, namely, thinking that Twitter management was hellbent on pushing leftist propaganda, when really they were apolitical operators trying to make as much money as possible. And their masterstroke was convincing someone to overpay for their company by an enormous amount.
- c_crank 3y agoThe means by which Twitter could make money is by catering to advertisers, and those advertisers often had strict political biases. Musk complains about this often.
- jakelazaroff 3y agoThat’s fine, though. Why do we take for granted that the “town square” should be able to exist as a for-profit enterprise?
- c_crank 3y agoPeople are nostalgic for the days of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers when people were fine debating their opposing views in the papers without dropping the hammer down on one side for being morally repugnant.
- jakelazaroff 3y agoWho is “people”? Do Black people miss the days when you could pick up the paper and read people arguing for Jim Crow? My life would definitely not be improved if I had to listen to people telling me how Jews control the banks.
- c_crank 3y ago
- DarkmSparks 3y agoeveryone knows the world was always run from the shady confines of the backrooms of the gentlemans club, speakeasy, bar or bonded warehouse. not and never the town square. Threads is no more interesting or useful than twitter was afaict. And anyway. all the half decent feeds went to telegram 2 years ago.
- NX9mqsSv8 3y agoIn forums for simulated user interaction, it’s important to recognize the conversations as inauthentic and censored. The ideas that are censored are deemed by the censors to be likely to prevail in a free marketplace of ideas and thus threatening. So, the censored ideas are the ones more likely to be true.
- skybrian 3y agoAs a broad heuristic I think this fails because posts get downvoted or removed for a variety of reasons. One common reason is that it’s a cryptocurrency scam. Are those “more likely to be true?”
- NX9mqsSv8 3y agoCryptocurrency scams aren’t ideas in the sense of the marketplace of ideas. Vaccine efficacy, election integrity, causes of unrest in France, traditional analysis of gender - those are examples of topics around which we discuss ideas. Try to discuss them in a simulated user forum. As an experiment, vary the viewpoint of your remarks, pro-X vs. anti-X. Observe what happens. You can learn from the censorship profile what the censors are worried about.
- skybrian 3y agoI suppose that’s a way of learning about what upsets people. But why they’re upset is another question. Maybe it’s not the idea, but its presentation? Also, what set of ideas are you drawing from? There are a lot of uncontroversial and true ideas. (Or if you negate them, obviously wrong.) Why aren’t they “more likely?” I don’t know how you decide on the set of ideas to test without bias. And how do you evaluate the results? To tell whether ideas that are “likely to be true” are more likely to make people upset, you need to already know whether they are true. Otherwise you’re just sorting by controversial. Here’s a fun story about that: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
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- Timber-6539 3y agoLast time I checked, the town square is where a majority of the netizen congregate to throw around ideas. Not some place a journalist conjures up in his mind.
- glroyal 3y agoMeta succeeded in cloning Twitter only because it picked up engineers who were let go after Musk acquired the company. Dead weight, albeit dead weight who understood how Twitter works under the hood (the timeline data structure has confounded every would-be Twitter competitor until now, which is circumstantial but probable cause that the former engineers have transferred Twitter's fundamental trade secrets to Zuckerberg).
- Timon3 3y agoMeta states that no former Twitter employees worked on Threads: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/twitter-accuses-meta-stealing-trade-secrets-new-threads-app-rcna92946 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/twitter-accuses-meta-... Do you have any proof otherwise?
- giantrobot 3y agoHow does this idea even pass your bullshit detector? Threads is an Instagram post without a picture attached. Something that's existed for a decade. Twitter trotting that accusation out was just stupid but people believing it and repeating it, that's just amazing. A timeline data structure confounded Twitter competitors? You're seriously fucking suggesting that? A timeline. Yikes.
- kstrauser 3y agoFundamental trade secrets... like how to build a large social network platform. Yes, it would surely be impossible for the Facebook and Instagram folks to build another platform without stealing “trade secrets” from Twitter. /s
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kmeisthax 3y agoUgh. So many small things that are wrong here. Mastodon isn't a single thing. It's many different town squares all trading their posts around. Gab is actually a part of it, despite what most instance operators want - if you REALLY want to be "on Mastodon" and "on Gab" at the same time, you can self-host and do that[0]. Truth Social isn't "on Mastodon" only because Trump's goons turned off federation and blatantly violated AGPL. I suppose that both disproves and proves the original author's point. Technically speaking, Mastodon is still a "town square". But its users do not want that, because at scale, town squares become endless voids of shouting and toxicity. Even a decade ago on Twitter I was already unfollowing people and tailoring my timeline based on my political preferences. Pre-Musk Twitter's censorious behaviors were almost certainly a reflection of the users' own desires and not some kind of diktat sent down from on high onto an unwilling user base. [0] I have no guarantee that you would want to stay on both at the same time.
- t0bia_s 3y agoTrust cannot be bought or ordered. With oppressing behaviour of centralised power, naturally we'll go back to decentralised, local way of communication. We just need to reuse town squares we have in real life.
- foul 3y agoThe internet's town square will not exist no more because quasi-normal people will divide themselves by their usage of some brand of microblog thing? What a stupid take. A great portion of thought diversity got out of Twitter (be it for quitting or reduced usage or using it thinking of the optics) between 2015 and 2017, and hasn't been regained at all during the Tumblr porn ban. I instead infer that, for that same reason, the Internet's global flamewar arena is dead for now.
- facia 3y ago[dead]
- jscipione 3y agoInternet, not internet. Democratic, not democratic. Yes the town square is dead, killed by Democrats and elites like Mark Zuckerberg, killed by Y mods, killed by lockdowns, US and EU government censorship. Without free speech there is no Republic, no freedom, I am a slave.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]