6 ms·

Let's knock down social media's walled gardens – Tim Berners-Lee

113 points by walthamstow 2y ago

gnabgib 2y ago
https://archive.is/4Vvms https://archive.is/4Vvms Related Tim Berners-Lee Wants the Internet Back (24 points, 4 months ago, 10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42171823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42171823
blindhippo 2y ago
"Let's knock down social media's walled gardens..." Links to pay wall trying to get me to pay for some subscription service I've never heard of and would never want to sign up for sight unseen. mmmhmmm
- biophysboy 2y ago
  The financial times is well known and subscriptions are journalism's only viable model today
  - wetpaws 2y ago
    [dead]
  - jwr 2y ago
    But it's not necessarily good hacker news material. We get links that do not work, publishers get free promotion without providing anything. We will say something about viable models, and then somebody will post an archive.org link, bypassing the paywall and the viable model. I flag links that do not work, not because I'm opposed to subscriptions (I subscribe to some online publications), but because I think Hacker News should only link to articles that are actually on the internet.
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    Journalism, sure. But most people are happy with entertainment news. I'm a FT subscriber. I just know 99% of people aren't, and lots aren't even aware it exists or its reputation.
  - bryan_w 2y ago
    If you have to tell people that it's well known, it's not well known.
    - nickthegreek 2y ago
      Just an internationally known 137 yr old news outlet that is ranked #3 for Finance news in web traffic... Not knowing about FT says alot more about the poster than FT.
- hiddencost 2y ago
  FT is one of the most prestigious journals going. This article is designed to be read by the elite, especially in Europe.
  - saghm 2y ago
    So no walled gardens outside the castles, essentially?
- dkh 2y ago
  His thoughts and opinions are not related to FT's and so while the combo of his article title + a paywall might appear ironic, in reality it's just happenstance, with no deeper meaning or hypocrisy. The "walled gardens" that he and others speak about in this context do not refer to sites/apps that cost money, they have a massively different meaning. But perhaps it wouldn't be fair to expect you to know this if the paywall prevented you from reading the article. Fear not, now you can: https://archive.ph/4Vvms https://archive.ph/4Vvms
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
porcoda 2y ago
I'm all for this more open internet without the walled gardens, but skeptical that we'll get there simply by creating open alternatives. Not only is there a massive amount of inertia behind the walled garden networks that exist now, but you need people to build these complex things. Given how focused most engineers are on compensation (e.g., the obsession with FAANG as the pinnacle), I don't see how open things that likely don't have such a gigantic mountain of money behind it can compete for the necessary resources to execute the vision. Compensation will probably always pull the people who build stuff to the walled garden companies and the alternative will have trouble providing a competitive alternative. Plus, it seems inevitable that if some entity DOES start to build an open alternative to the walled gardens, at some point they'll feel the itch to grow, and slowly but surely I expect little tiny walls will begin to subtly sprout. Email is a bit of a bad comparison since the protocols existed BEFORE the big companies we see today, and that sort of meant they all interoperated from the start. Had we not had email in 1990 and different companies had to come up with their own messaging systems, we'd probably not see the clean interoperability we see today.
- bxhx7 2y ago
  They will be turned into public utilities. Especially messaging. One country will start. Others will follow. After which majority that doesnt need the levels of constant Attention the social media addicted free content manufacturing minority does will leave. And social media will face major issues. Cuz when ever growing Content chases finite non growing eyeballs you cant keep increasing Ad prices every quarter and report profits for ever. This is zuckanomics which is utter shit. Analysts are already seeing those limits being hit but since they havr seen time and again when limits get hit corporate robots like zuck then do layoffs, buy the competition, capture regulators, avoid tax, sell more personal data, inject more ads etc etc they still see scope for parasitic growth. But parasitic growth comes with predictable and unpredictable cost. And they will build with time. Just like Jurassic Park. And we know how that story ends. Human Attention cannot be exploited at population scale or there will be chaos.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > will be turned into public utilities. Especially messaging. Honestly, yes. It's working for China. With America doing its thing right now, it makes sense for e.g. the EU and Canada to look at whether handing communications and social media to American companies makes sense.
jeromie 2y ago
The irony
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
How does knocking down walled gardens work when different countries have different regulations / censorship? Wouldn’t those countries ban anything decentralized that doesn’t uphold their requirements?
- dkh 2y ago
  Well, how does it work now? Do you think the only solution to this problem is the one we have now--a centralized, primarily profit-focused, zillion-dollar business entity? An enormous centralized business does not possess magical fairy dust that negates the problems of international compliance. The underlying solutions to this are technical and social. Big business is merely able to get them done faster and more effectively because their profits are in jeopardy if they do not. But there are plenty of ways to design applications and protocols such that different groups of people have different featuresets and limitations. We already kind of see that now with things built on top of ActivityPub, ATProto, etc., just not for this reason. For instance, there are some broad-scoped, full-featured social networks running on ActivityPub, but other platforms that just do microblogging and nothing else. They are both built on ActivityPub but can do very different things. You could apply this same concept to different countries and regulations, where the client/network someone uses only does the things that region allows, and then enforce it at the network level. (Do I love that idea? No, but my point is, it's definitely not a technical impossibility.)
slowtrek 2y ago
"One way to do this is to mandate that social network platforms follow new standards. Another is to quietly build an alternative world using these standards and let people realize that it is better — just as they did when leaving restricted online services AOL and Prodigy for the freedom of the web." We would all have to take on the role of the evangelist in a serious way. I really love that he wrote this article.
cyberax 2y ago
One thing that these efforts seem to miss: payments. The ads are there not just for fun, but they provide an income stream to content creators and for the networks themselves. In essence, ads work as a micro-payment infrastructure. But then you need to drive up visits to increase the number of ad impressions. And this leads to the spiral of ever-radicalizing media. What can be done? I don't know. Something like "basic attention token" but without shady crypto, perhaps?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > What can be done? I don't know Literally the article.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    Literally not. The article has zero answers about what to do with ads. You can't build a sustainable model without having an income. And ads are the only way to get it right now, because subscriptions can't scale down to the level of individual sites.
- k310 2y ago
  AFAICT, content is "rated" not on quality, but on quantity, as in popularity and virality; essentially all the things that advertisers love. Now, that's not to say that popularity and quality are mutually exclusive; only that popularity is the only measure that I can see in operation. I actually do pay for quality, but not on the internet, partly due to the lack of tokens, and the rather nasty risk of using one's credit card at countless sites. Each one increases the already too-high risk of hacking by some factor unknown to me, and I limit internet payments as much as I can. I'm not a fan of pre-paid credit cards. I use Apple Pay to conceal the credit card info, though that's not a foolproof system. Apple too often asks for a passcode when I am shopping, and in sight of shoulder surfers and surveillance cameras.
- washadjeffmad 2y ago
  The ideal is be able to reduce to effectively noncommercial at-cost operations, perhaps by distributing through services that are paid for but underutilized. Some people think that adtech has to be intrusive and violating for it to be effective, but that's not true - we're just competing against highly vertical monopolies with total dominance, from browser to industry. I think sponsorship models might be good alternatives, with service provided through municipal providers like amateur radio bands. There would have to be some strict rules, but it could be available to anyone within a certain address space who is a private citizen operating in either a non-commercial or limited commercial capacity (and limited external connectivity, like a local LAN), managed like the CB crowd does against unauthorized usage. If you want to peer with the town over and they're dominated by a private ISP who won't allow it, maybe it'll give them something to think about.
sapphicsnail 2y ago
Am I missing something? He wants to make an app where you put all of your data and then an AI to act on it? Can someone smarter than me explain why this is a good idea?
readthenotes1 2y ago
"Changing the algorithm to make it benevolent rather than polarising is easy for those who control the platforms." What bubble does the author live in that tells hen that "benevolence" is easy? The values of the cultures most of us have regular contact with are very different.
- BrenBarn 2y ago
  There are lots of things that are easy but still aren't done.
- dkh 2y ago
  It is easy in a physical and technical sense, and it also probably be easy in the other senses if the power to make that decision was held by a different group of people than those who currently do. Nobody is saying that it is "easy" to mean that there's no friction preventing it and that it's astounding that it hasn't been done. On the contrary--the fact that certain beneficial things are very easy in a logistical sense but incredibly difficult in a power/cultural/social structure sense is the core of the problem. And it's worth reminding people about.
jijji 2y ago
The most ironic thing about this story is that 1) it is a story about the problems with walled gardens, and 2) it is hosted on a site that actually is a walled garden and will not let anyone read the article until you pay them
nashashmi 2y ago
Can we have an alternative to walled off ad system instead?
charcircuit 2y ago
>When the web started, you could make your own website so long as you had a computer and an internet connection (admittedly back then this was a big proviso). You could get a domain name like abc.com and put whatever you liked there. You could blog, and link to other blogs. You were part of an incredibly valuable thing from which you seemed to contribute a tiny bit and gain a great deal. >That feeling of personal empowerment we sometimes call digital sovereignty has since been lost. It hasn't been lost with the rise of social media. If someone wants to blog their thoughts they still only need a computer with an internet connection, but now it's even easier than before. They can register an X account, for example, for free compared to spending double $xx per year for a domain. Instead of having to build a whole website and finding a server to host it X makes it easy for you. For blogging X is a more attractive platform than the web is for the average person. Just because there are aspects that are decentralized, that doesn't mean it's better. It's not like you are free to talk about anything on the web. In practice DNS is centralized. The server's upstream is centralized. Instead of making reports to X, they make reports to registrars and ISPs. If you want to fix the danger of being cut off you need to do it via the legal system as it's not something decentralization can entirely fix. >This is the system that we already have for email — that’s why you can have an email group that includes people using different providers such as Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo. Sure email exists, but in practice consumers prefer to chat using centralized platforms. The federated nature of email made it stagnant which made it fail to compete with other messaging platforms.
bustling-noose 2y ago
What Tim Berners Lee doesn’t know or understand - Social media is like fentanyl or cocaine for the masses. It’s preying on people’s stresses and poor mental health by providing temporary relief or disconnecting from the real world. Social media being a place to connect and maybe even run a small business is like 1% of it. It’s a place for attention seeking people filling their loneliness with fake connections and content while content consumers are trying to achieve the same buy consuming instead. Ive seen people unable to get out of instagram. Their fingers are constantly twitching and scrolling. This is just like drugs and controlled substances. The government punishes the dealers and is trying to control but failing cause there are plenty of corrupt people willing to bypass this. Same goes with social media. Zuckerberg is probably worse than Escobar. Social medias promise of social connections was really just the same as what drug dealers offer, the good stuff for new consumers and then once they are hooked give them the cheap stuff. They really don’t care about ‘social’ part of it because the addiction potential is so high. Start doing mass studies on cognitive problems created by instagram and TikTok. Publish them in big journals and show how social media can go from social to addictions so quickly. People already consider phones as part of their body, I won’t be surprised if people also consider their instagram account more valuable than their health.
- hackernewsdhsu 2y ago
  I wonder if he knows he posted a compliant about walled gardens behind a paywall.... Another form of walled garden.
  - CaffeineLD50 2y ago
    Oh the irony.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Start doing mass studies on cognitive problems created by instagram and TikTok. Publish them in big journals This has already happened. We didn't kick Big Tobacco by publishing research and just talking about it. We got them with bans. I don't see America doing it. But now would be a good time for e.g. the EU to start regulating social media like a utility.
dehrmann 2y ago
One comment here called out content junk food, another called out the complexity of the replacement. It's both. People generally don't want thoughtful, quality content, and they certainly don't want to pay for it. Also funny to see the article behind the FT paywall, but that's an audience that actually does pay for quality content.
nromiun 2y ago
Easier said than done. Social media companies have virtually unlimited money to promote their platforms.
jsemrau 2y ago
If only Google would stop indexing social media and start linking to blogs and sources of real people the world would be better off. Maybe we need a humanity score for the search results and not an engagement score. Do I really need to see Reddit, Quora, Twitter here?
rglover 2y ago
It's interesting that the proposed solution to this problem is more often than not "add another layer." The solution as far as I see it is to just go back to the zero algorithm version of social media. You follow people, you see their stuff in your feed. At best, you get recommendations of who to follow, but there's zero compulsion to follow or look at anything. No AI, no fancy algorithms, just good ol' fashioned CRUD. Wrap the whole thing up in a nice UI/UX and, most importantly, take a 100% neutral stance on politics and other "faction building" modes of thought. The chaos really didn't start until the algorithms (and by extension, the low-quality content they elevate) and politics came in. All of the alternatives so far have implemented some of the above ideas, but the juiciness of taking a political/ideological stance has been too attractive.
- standardly 2y ago
  Yep. I agree. And, the last thing we need are more echo chambers... The current trend is really dangerous.
6510 2y ago
https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2017/12/20/paradigm-shifts-for-the-decentralized-web/ https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2017/12/20/paradigm-shifts-f...
tbrownaw 2y ago
> Changing the algorithm to make it benevolent rather than polarising is easy for those who control the platforms. I probably don't want a feed where someone else decides what's good for me to see. > When the web started, you could make your own website so long as you had a computer and an internet connection (admittedly back then this was a big proviso). Substack, Medium, GitHub pages, Blogger, several WordPress places, etc. Or a $2.50/mo VPS and a $10/yr domain name, or some of the big cloud providers probably have things they scale down even further. > We did not insist that we could share our Facebook photos with our LinkedIn colleagues, for example. Nor did we insist that we could use the same identity and transfer the same friend list from Instagram to X and then to Reddit. I specifically do not want all sites to be views onto a single global space with global identities and relationships. > Another is to quietly build an alternative world using these standards and let people realise that it is better Has ActivityPub managed to eat the world yet?
- vdqtp3 2y ago
  > I probably don't want a feed where someone else decides what's good for me to see. I agree, but today you have a feed where someone else has decided what's good for THEM for you to see. Neither are good.
udev4096 2y ago
Honestly, this feels so underwhelming. Nothing in this article mentions anything new, there are quite a lot of decentralized and p2p protocols already which have proven to work at scale. The web is far more complex now and from the looks of it, Tim is failing to grasp it
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Thing is, for awhile now, "social media" is the RSS feed. The social networks are the feed to access the content in the various gardens beyond the wall. As in the POSSE approach. Happy for more ppl to publish on their own sites but we need the social networks to provide the launching point, the syndication point to get to that content. And as along as the networks offer that "following" view so I can see most of the content from those I choose to follow, I'm also ok with some algorithm showing me other stuff related/beyond/curated. The network effect is a bonus and keeps the fresh content and viewpoints beyond what's immediately in front of me and that's healthy and useful somewhat.
metalman 2y ago
simple. mandate that each human gets as owned, non saleable property, a full digital domain, web space for personal and business activities,including hosting video and other media, email, phone, text, as birthrights. guaranteed private and protected from warantless search and guaranteed copyright to media created by each indivual, with this provisio, that greater traffic would be scrutenised, and past a certain point would be considered public, or in need of incorporating etc, ie private peer to peer, at the human level, and perhaps some record of networks, where people convicted of serious crimes enabled by and useing digital comunication could be exposed and have there "networks" examined. platforms would still exist, but would be bound to include personal links if so desired. impose this, and empower, everybody

113 points by walthamstow 2y ago

https://archive.is/4Vvms https://archive.is/4Vvms Related Tim Berners-Lee Wants the Internet Back (24 points, 4 months ago, 10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42171823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42171823

blindhippo 2y ago

"Let's knock down social media's walled gardens..." Links to pay wall trying to get me to pay for some subscription service I've never heard of and would never want to sign up for sight unseen. mmmhmmm

biophysboy 2y ago
The financial times is well known and subscriptions are journalism's only viable model today
- wetpaws 2y ago
  [dead]
- jwr 2y ago
  But it's not necessarily good hacker news material. We get links that do not work, publishers get free promotion without providing anything. We will say something about viable models, and then somebody will post an archive.org link, bypassing the paywall and the viable model. I flag links that do not work, not because I'm opposed to subscriptions (I subscribe to some online publications), but because I think Hacker News should only link to articles that are actually on the internet.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  Journalism, sure. But most people are happy with entertainment news. I'm a FT subscriber. I just know 99% of people aren't, and lots aren't even aware it exists or its reputation.
- bryan_w 2y ago
  If you have to tell people that it's well known, it's not well known.
  - nickthegreek 2y ago
    Just an internationally known 137 yr old news outlet that is ranked #3 for Finance news in web traffic... Not knowing about FT says alot more about the poster than FT.
hiddencost 2y ago
FT is one of the most prestigious journals going. This article is designed to be read by the elite, especially in Europe.
- saghm 2y ago
  So no walled gardens outside the castles, essentially?
dkh 2y ago
His thoughts and opinions are not related to FT's and so while the combo of his article title + a paywall might appear ironic, in reality it's just happenstance, with no deeper meaning or hypocrisy. The "walled gardens" that he and others speak about in this context do not refer to sites/apps that cost money, they have a massively different meaning. But perhaps it wouldn't be fair to expect you to know this if the paywall prevented you from reading the article. Fear not, now you can: https://archive.ph/4Vvms https://archive.ph/4Vvms
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

porcoda 2y ago

I'm all for this more open internet without the walled gardens, but skeptical that we'll get there simply by creating open alternatives. Not only is there a massive amount of inertia behind the walled garden networks that exist now, but you need people to build these complex things. Given how focused most engineers are on compensation (e.g., the obsession with FAANG as the pinnacle), I don't see how open things that likely don't have such a gigantic mountain of money behind it can compete for the necessary resources to execute the vision. Compensation will probably always pull the people who build stuff to the walled garden companies and the alternative will have trouble providing a competitive alternative. Plus, it seems inevitable that if some entity DOES start to build an open alternative to the walled gardens, at some point they'll feel the itch to grow, and slowly but surely I expect little tiny walls will begin to subtly sprout. Email is a bit of a bad comparison since the protocols existed BEFORE the big companies we see today, and that sort of meant they all interoperated from the start. Had we not had email in 1990 and different companies had to come up with their own messaging systems, we'd probably not see the clean interoperability we see today.

bxhx7 2y ago
They will be turned into public utilities. Especially messaging. One country will start. Others will follow. After which majority that doesnt need the levels of constant Attention the social media addicted free content manufacturing minority does will leave. And social media will face major issues. Cuz when ever growing Content chases finite non growing eyeballs you cant keep increasing Ad prices every quarter and report profits for ever. This is zuckanomics which is utter shit. Analysts are already seeing those limits being hit but since they havr seen time and again when limits get hit corporate robots like zuck then do layoffs, buy the competition, capture regulators, avoid tax, sell more personal data, inject more ads etc etc they still see scope for parasitic growth. But parasitic growth comes with predictable and unpredictable cost. And they will build with time. Just like Jurassic Park. And we know how that story ends. Human Attention cannot be exploited at population scale or there will be chaos.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > will be turned into public utilities. Especially messaging. Honestly, yes. It's working for China. With America doing its thing right now, it makes sense for e.g. the EU and Canada to look at whether handing communications and social media to American companies makes sense.

jeromie 2y ago

The irony

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

How does knocking down walled gardens work when different countries have different regulations / censorship? Wouldn’t those countries ban anything decentralized that doesn’t uphold their requirements?

dkh 2y ago
Well, how does it work now? Do you think the only solution to this problem is the one we have now--a centralized, primarily profit-focused, zillion-dollar business entity? An enormous centralized business does not possess magical fairy dust that negates the problems of international compliance. The underlying solutions to this are technical and social. Big business is merely able to get them done faster and more effectively because their profits are in jeopardy if they do not. But there are plenty of ways to design applications and protocols such that different groups of people have different featuresets and limitations. We already kind of see that now with things built on top of ActivityPub, ATProto, etc., just not for this reason. For instance, there are some broad-scoped, full-featured social networks running on ActivityPub, but other platforms that just do microblogging and nothing else. They are both built on ActivityPub but can do very different things. You could apply this same concept to different countries and regulations, where the client/network someone uses only does the things that region allows, and then enforce it at the network level. (Do I love that idea? No, but my point is, it's definitely not a technical impossibility.)

slowtrek 2y ago

"One way to do this is to mandate that social network platforms follow new standards. Another is to quietly build an alternative world using these standards and let people realize that it is better — just as they did when leaving restricted online services AOL and Prodigy for the freedom of the web." We would all have to take on the role of the evangelist in a serious way. I really love that he wrote this article.

cyberax 2y ago

One thing that these efforts seem to miss: payments. The ads are there not just for fun, but they provide an income stream to content creators and for the networks themselves. In essence, ads work as a micro-payment infrastructure. But then you need to drive up visits to increase the number of ad impressions. And this leads to the spiral of ever-radicalizing media. What can be done? I don't know. Something like "basic attention token" but without shady crypto, perhaps?

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> What can be done? I don't know Literally the article.
- cyberax 2y ago
  Literally not. The article has zero answers about what to do with ads. You can't build a sustainable model without having an income. And ads are the only way to get it right now, because subscriptions can't scale down to the level of individual sites.
k310 2y ago
AFAICT, content is "rated" not on quality, but on quantity, as in popularity and virality; essentially all the things that advertisers love. Now, that's not to say that popularity and quality are mutually exclusive; only that popularity is the only measure that I can see in operation. I actually do pay for quality, but not on the internet, partly due to the lack of tokens, and the rather nasty risk of using one's credit card at countless sites. Each one increases the already too-high risk of hacking by some factor unknown to me, and I limit internet payments as much as I can. I'm not a fan of pre-paid credit cards. I use Apple Pay to conceal the credit card info, though that's not a foolproof system. Apple too often asks for a passcode when I am shopping, and in sight of shoulder surfers and surveillance cameras.
washadjeffmad 2y ago
The ideal is be able to reduce to effectively noncommercial at-cost operations, perhaps by distributing through services that are paid for but underutilized. Some people think that adtech has to be intrusive and violating for it to be effective, but that's not true - we're just competing against highly vertical monopolies with total dominance, from browser to industry. I think sponsorship models might be good alternatives, with service provided through municipal providers like amateur radio bands. There would have to be some strict rules, but it could be available to anyone within a certain address space who is a private citizen operating in either a non-commercial or limited commercial capacity (and limited external connectivity, like a local LAN), managed like the CB crowd does against unauthorized usage. If you want to peer with the town over and they're dominated by a private ISP who won't allow it, maybe it'll give them something to think about.

sapphicsnail 2y ago

Am I missing something? He wants to make an app where you put all of your data and then an AI to act on it? Can someone smarter than me explain why this is a good idea?

readthenotes1 2y ago

"Changing the algorithm to make it benevolent rather than polarising is easy for those who control the platforms." What bubble does the author live in that tells hen that "benevolence" is easy? The values of the cultures most of us have regular contact with are very different.

BrenBarn 2y ago
There are lots of things that are easy but still aren't done.
dkh 2y ago
It is easy in a physical and technical sense, and it also probably be easy in the other senses if the power to make that decision was held by a different group of people than those who currently do. Nobody is saying that it is "easy" to mean that there's no friction preventing it and that it's astounding that it hasn't been done. On the contrary--the fact that certain beneficial things are very easy in a logistical sense but incredibly difficult in a power/cultural/social structure sense is the core of the problem. And it's worth reminding people about.

jijji 2y ago

The most ironic thing about this story is that 1) it is a story about the problems with walled gardens, and 2) it is hosted on a site that actually is a walled garden and will not let anyone read the article until you pay them

nashashmi 2y ago

Can we have an alternative to walled off ad system instead?

charcircuit 2y ago

>When the web started, you could make your own website so long as you had a computer and an internet connection (admittedly back then this was a big proviso). You could get a domain name like abc.com and put whatever you liked there. You could blog, and link to other blogs. You were part of an incredibly valuable thing from which you seemed to contribute a tiny bit and gain a great deal. >That feeling of personal empowerment we sometimes call digital sovereignty has since been lost. It hasn't been lost with the rise of social media. If someone wants to blog their thoughts they still only need a computer with an internet connection, but now it's even easier than before. They can register an X account, for example, for free compared to spending double $xx per year for a domain. Instead of having to build a whole website and finding a server to host it X makes it easy for you. For blogging X is a more attractive platform than the web is for the average person. Just because there are aspects that are decentralized, that doesn't mean it's better. It's not like you are free to talk about anything on the web. In practice DNS is centralized. The server's upstream is centralized. Instead of making reports to X, they make reports to registrars and ISPs. If you want to fix the danger of being cut off you need to do it via the legal system as it's not something decentralization can entirely fix. >This is the system that we already have for email — that’s why you can have an email group that includes people using different providers such as Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo. Sure email exists, but in practice consumers prefer to chat using centralized platforms. The federated nature of email made it stagnant which made it fail to compete with other messaging platforms.

bustling-noose 2y ago

What Tim Berners Lee doesn’t know or understand - Social media is like fentanyl or cocaine for the masses. It’s preying on people’s stresses and poor mental health by providing temporary relief or disconnecting from the real world. Social media being a place to connect and maybe even run a small business is like 1% of it. It’s a place for attention seeking people filling their loneliness with fake connections and content while content consumers are trying to achieve the same buy consuming instead. Ive seen people unable to get out of instagram. Their fingers are constantly twitching and scrolling. This is just like drugs and controlled substances. The government punishes the dealers and is trying to control but failing cause there are plenty of corrupt people willing to bypass this. Same goes with social media. Zuckerberg is probably worse than Escobar. Social medias promise of social connections was really just the same as what drug dealers offer, the good stuff for new consumers and then once they are hooked give them the cheap stuff. They really don’t care about ‘social’ part of it because the addiction potential is so high. Start doing mass studies on cognitive problems created by instagram and TikTok. Publish them in big journals and show how social media can go from social to addictions so quickly. People already consider phones as part of their body, I won’t be surprised if people also consider their instagram account more valuable than their health.

hackernewsdhsu 2y ago
I wonder if he knows he posted a compliant about walled gardens behind a paywall.... Another form of walled garden.
- CaffeineLD50 2y ago
  Oh the irony.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Start doing mass studies on cognitive problems created by instagram and TikTok. Publish them in big journals This has already happened. We didn't kick Big Tobacco by publishing research and just talking about it. We got them with bans. I don't see America doing it. But now would be a good time for e.g. the EU to start regulating social media like a utility.

dehrmann 2y ago

One comment here called out content junk food, another called out the complexity of the replacement. It's both. People generally don't want thoughtful, quality content, and they certainly don't want to pay for it. Also funny to see the article behind the FT paywall, but that's an audience that actually does pay for quality content.

nromiun 2y ago

Easier said than done. Social media companies have virtually unlimited money to promote their platforms.

jsemrau 2y ago

If only Google would stop indexing social media and start linking to blogs and sources of real people the world would be better off. Maybe we need a humanity score for the search results and not an engagement score. Do I really need to see Reddit, Quora, Twitter here?

rglover 2y ago

It's interesting that the proposed solution to this problem is more often than not "add another layer." The solution as far as I see it is to just go back to the zero algorithm version of social media. You follow people, you see their stuff in your feed. At best, you get recommendations of who to follow, but there's zero compulsion to follow or look at anything. No AI, no fancy algorithms, just good ol' fashioned CRUD. Wrap the whole thing up in a nice UI/UX and, most importantly, take a 100% neutral stance on politics and other "faction building" modes of thought. The chaos really didn't start until the algorithms (and by extension, the low-quality content they elevate) and politics came in. All of the alternatives so far have implemented some of the above ideas, but the juiciness of taking a political/ideological stance has been too attractive.

standardly 2y ago
Yep. I agree. And, the last thing we need are more echo chambers... The current trend is really dangerous.

6510 2y ago

https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2017/12/20/paradigm-shifts-for-the-decentralized-web/ https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2017/12/20/paradigm-shifts-f...

tbrownaw 2y ago

> Changing the algorithm to make it benevolent rather than polarising is easy for those who control the platforms. I probably don't want a feed where someone else decides what's good for me to see. > When the web started, you could make your own website so long as you had a computer and an internet connection (admittedly back then this was a big proviso). Substack, Medium, GitHub pages, Blogger, several WordPress places, etc. Or a $2.50/mo VPS and a $10/yr domain name, or some of the big cloud providers probably have things they scale down even further. > We did not insist that we could share our Facebook photos with our LinkedIn colleagues, for example. Nor did we insist that we could use the same identity and transfer the same friend list from Instagram to X and then to Reddit. I specifically do not want all sites to be views onto a single global space with global identities and relationships. > Another is to quietly build an alternative world using these standards and let people realise that it is better Has ActivityPub managed to eat the world yet?

vdqtp3 2y ago
> I probably don't want a feed where someone else decides what's good for me to see. I agree, but today you have a feed where someone else has decided what's good for THEM for you to see. Neither are good.

udev4096 2y ago

Honestly, this feels so underwhelming. Nothing in this article mentions anything new, there are quite a lot of decentralized and p2p protocols already which have proven to work at scale. The web is far more complex now and from the looks of it, Tim is failing to grasp it

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Thing is, for awhile now, "social media" is the RSS feed. The social networks are the feed to access the content in the various gardens beyond the wall. As in the POSSE approach. Happy for more ppl to publish on their own sites but we need the social networks to provide the launching point, the syndication point to get to that content. And as along as the networks offer that "following" view so I can see most of the content from those I choose to follow, I'm also ok with some algorithm showing me other stuff related/beyond/curated. The network effect is a bonus and keeps the fresh content and viewpoints beyond what's immediately in front of me and that's healthy and useful somewhat.

metalman 2y ago

simple. mandate that each human gets as owned, non saleable property, a full digital domain, web space for personal and business activities,including hosting video and other media, email, phone, text, as birthrights. guaranteed private and protected from warantless search and guaranteed copyright to media created by each indivual, with this provisio, that greater traffic would be scrutenised, and past a certain point would be considered public, or in need of incorporating etc, ie private peer to peer, at the human level, and perhaps some record of networks, where people convicted of serious crimes enabled by and useing digital comunication could be exposed and have there "networks" examined. platforms would still exist, but would be bound to include personal links if so desired. impose this, and empower, everybody