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> Or, at least, get rid of the centralized massive ones. Herein lies the rub. How do you decide what the threshold is? Who gets to decide what that threshold i
by beAbU 2y ago
> Or, at least, get rid of the centralized massive ones.
Herein lies the rub. How do you decide what the threshold is? Who gets to decide what that threshold is, and how do you do it without inviting accusations of regulatory capture?
If you make it blanket all social networks, then things like discord and even public slack orgs will inadvertently become collateral damage. If you make it focussed on only a few large ones, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, then something else will pop up to take it's place. It'll become a game of whack-a-mole. Users are supposedly already migrating in droves to some other TikTok clone.
I'm not really sure what the solution is though. Regulate the shit out of it to the extent where it becomes a government-provided utility or something?
The reality is people want social media because they are addicted to it. Getting rid of social media will be like the war on drugs: completely ineffective. The danger here is that the drug is very easy to create, impossible to control and extremely lucrative.
- matthewdgreen 2y agoRequire human moderation. That naturally limits scale.
- mmcdermott 2y ago> Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale. Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted? You can certainly send letters without them going through a human moderator. Only what is flagged by a scanner? What if nothing is flagged? What should be flagged?
- rad_gruchalski 2y ago> Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted? You can certainly send letters without them going through a human moderator. Because those are two orthogonal things. You aren’t sending a letter to be displayed by everyone and their dog on this planet to see.
- mmcdermott 2y agoYou can also print flyers, pamphlets, books, posters, and all such things without submitting them to a human censor (c.f. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/publishing/censorship.html https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/p... for this usage).
- rad_gruchalski 2y agoYes. To one address at a time. If you do a mass send, you'll get regulated at some point, too.
- arccy 2y agogreat way to burn out people and scar them for life, look at all the stories of facebook moderators etc.
- johnisgood 2y agoNah, they would use AI, and as such, would not really limit scale.
- conductr 2y agoIt raises the cost of the service therefore the need of user data monetization, I feel like this would backfire. I’d limit the revenue via bans on ads and data monetization.
- conductr 2y agoMy passing thought is to prohibit advertising and user data monetization and it might solve itself. We also have regulations on usage, like truck drivers can only drive X hours a day, force some type of consumption limit the networks are required to enforce. We have similar laws regarding where, when, and how people can consume things like alcohol so could also do something like that. Some amount of it is ok, but as you say we’ve now learned it’s so addictive we need to force people into moderation of their consumption.
- mrsilencedogood 2y agoHonestly this is probably the most realistic solution. The only reason all the shit ragebait addictive content is so bad is because it drives ad revenue. I do think there's one exception/problem: youtube. While there's a lot of pregnant spiderman-elsa crap on it, there's also tons of historical, educational, investigative journalism, etc etc etc content there that strikes me as distinctly more valuable than literally anything that's ever existed on facebook, tiktok or even twitter. And in addition to the backlog, there's an economics problem. Having good, free, easy, available video hosting is a huge good. It's also ridiculously expensive (videos are big, and you have to render multiple qualities of them, and store them forever) and a hard engineering (network and software) problem (what tiny % of video upload constitutes 90% of the actual network traffic? but you also have to brace for videos from nobodies going viral and needing to be served to the entire globe). So how do you fund something like this? Normally I'd say, well, damn, this sounds like a utility. But given the political climate we're going into for the next 4 years, and the fact that even healthcare is privatized (well, the part of it that can generate a profit... unprofitable customers are of course pushed to the taxpayer)...
- conductr 2y agoI think we'd have to carefully define what a 'social network' is. In my opinion, YT is not a social network. The UGC parts of Amazon.com, like reviews, do not make it a social network either. YT is a broadcast / streaming service with some small layer of UGC (I say small because, honestly, if the entire comment section was eliminated I don't think anyone would miss it, it's meme worthy bad in most cases.) Or maybe it's just me and don't use it that way and others do? I subscribe to some things, watch a lot of videos mostly has a lurker and almost never even dip into the comments. I have exactly 0 connections with people I know on YT. It's more of a modern television channel than anything in my case.
- msabalau 2y agoI was interpreting the poster as saying "you, yourself, the reader will be better off cutting this out of your life" in which case your questions are irrelevant. Of course, it is possible they meant to come up with a holistic plan for improving society in three short sentences, as your reply assumes. Which would, I suppose, indirectly make the case that social interactions online tend to be pointless and a little silly.
- pmontra 2y agoMy social network is WhatsApp and Telegram: 1-to-1 messages and some groups where I usually know everybody in them. That's the threshold.
- TRiG_Ireland 2y agoIn the US, at least, a government-run social media site would be impossible to moderate, because of the First Amendment. It becomes a Nazi bar immediately.
- tshaddox 2y agoGet rid of behavioral advertising. You'll find that most or all of the negative things people have in mind when they say "ban social media" go away.