4 ms·

This isn't a situation we accept out of other industries. You water provider doesn't get to pipe you sewage every now and again because its too expensive to mod

• strogonoff 1y ago
  If everybody on social media was an actual paying customer of social platforms, like we pay mobile providers (I originally wrote “water providers”, which was in fact a somewhat unfit analogy), we could demand better service and switch away to a competitor who offers it. Unfortunately, we are robbed of our ability to pay with our wallets.
  • HPsquared 1y ago
    You don't generally get to choose who pipes the water to your house.
    • dahart 1y ago
      Would it help if you could? Hasn’t the bottled water industry demonstrated lower standards and more scams and marketing FUD than the EPA?
      • malfist 1y ago
        Water in the pipes is higher standards precisely because we don't accept that the water utility can pump sewage to us 10% of the time.
        • strogonoff 1y ago
          The problem with this analogy as I see it is that water supply is heavily regulated and uncompetitive due to exactly the fact of it being impossible to switch. For this to work for the likes of Meta, it would mean elevating Meta’s services to some sort of country-wide public utility, which I’m sure would create probably an even stronger moat than network effects, hindering any competiton. However, is there such a constraint in case of social media? There are mechanisms and open standards that could allow interoperability between providers who implement them. It seems that it should be possible to leave it up to market forces and competition, but for that we have to have competition and be able to vote with our wallets.
    • strogonoff 1y ago
      That is true and it makes my analogy not so fit. Oh well.
  • kelvinjps10 1y ago
    We can pay with our attention, if we stopped using social media that takes advantage of us and use others that don't. They will change the way, they act.
  • the_snooze 1y ago
    "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." It's an outdated way of looking at tech. Many classes of paid products (e.g., cars, streaming services, IoT, operating systems) double-dip into tracking and advertisement. Why would a business actually want to do the hard work of serving user needs when they can hedge their bets with ad revenue? Line must go up.
    • Workaccount2 1y ago
      They aren't double dipping, they are subsidizing the cost with ads.
      • malfist 1y ago
        When ford deployed LexusNexus tracking to my F150, they didn't refund any of my purchase price. Samsung isn't refunding any of their $3k fridges that now have mandatory ads
        • 9rx 1y ago
          They didn't need to offer a refund. It was already priced in. You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates while standing starry-eyed at the impossibly low price it was being offered at, but they knew it was coming. After all, appropriately specced hardware to be able to do it was already onboard.
          • noir_lord 1y ago
            This is the most HN of HN takes. Saying it's your (the consumers) fault because you didn't read the crystal ball for what was coming in the future. The price a product is offered at is the price for the product at that time, you don't get to say well I sold it for $10 but it's worth $20 so I'll just sell your data until I recoup that $10 I "lost".
            • 9rx 1y ago
              > the price for the product at that time Exactly. The necessary hardware to enable the tracking was installed at the time of purchase. It is not like 10 years later someone dreamed up the idea and decided to stealthy in the night start bolting on new components to every vehicle they could find. It was a feature that was there at the time of purchase and the sale was priced accordingly.
  • Workaccount2 1y ago
    We weren't robbed, we voluntarily gave it up. Nebula is youtube that works for you. But the conversion rate from youtube-ad-viewer to nebula-subscription-payer is <1%.
    • strogonoff 1y ago
      I have heard of Nebula and Floatplane. Is Nebula good? My issue is that in presence of one large player who does it for free competition is already impossible: $2 is twice as much more than $1, but $1 is infinity/NaN times more than $0. It’s one of the many problems with the fact that it is legally allowed.
      • mrguyorama 1y ago
        >Is Nebula good? Nebula is good in that it properly allows me to pay the people who's content and reporting and art I like and support them without giving the toxic sludge of Youtube a dime. It also allows them to focus on doing their job: Making the good videos I want and that they want to make, rather than play some absurd algorithm games. Floatplane is similarly better aligned with what artists and creators want to do. The guy from DankPods is much happier on that platform than something like Twitch which gave him constant problems. The GunTubers and "Current military events but from former soldiers who act like they know what they are talking about in reference to geopolitics" have created their own platform and I hope that succeeds too. I do not agree with a lot of the politics from some of these people (and believe some others are liars) but diversity is good. Armchair Historian also created their own platform. That might not have panned out though, they had financial troubles that led to them abandoning another project. IMO, the best platform is Patreon linking to a bunch of MP4s on S3 (or whatever cheaper medium exists). Nebula started out just using a "Youtube copycat" whitelabling service.
    • immibis 1y ago
      Nebula is missing discovery, also comments, also the network effect of course. I can open YouTube at any time, and probably see something interesting within a few scrolls of the homepage. Nebula would be as good if I consistently wanted to watch a particular creator - say, if I consistently listened to LegalEagle on my train ride to work - but I don't. And the channels that are good enough to consistently watch do not upload regularly enough to be spotted on a chronological feed and I'm sure that's no accident. Nor, I suspect, do they upload regularly enough to be eligible for a partnership with Nebula. I have a subscription to Nebula because I want to support them and the idea and their future competitors other than YouTube, but I don't actually use it.
  • swiftcoder 1y ago
    I don't know very many people who have a choice of water providers. Generally you are stuck with whoever owns the pipes to your home. And since you don't have a lot of choice, the government tends to regulate the shit out of water providers - and I don't see we have any other real choice when it comes to too-big-to-fail social media providers either.
    • vladms 1y ago
      I can choose not to use a social medial platform, it is kind of hard to choose not to drink water/wash/etc. I do not use much social media platforms, while I try to stay social, like posting one picture a month and sending a message here and there, watching a cat video sometimes, etc. I think social networks are much more similar to drugs - you can try to regulate to prevent people hurting themselves, but people will find a way if they can't refrain themselves. Scams existed before social networks, and maybe is a bit easier using them, but I do not feel it is a fundamental shift. Along the ages people were taught/encouraged "to believe (without checking)" into a multitude of subjects (state, church, horoscope, etc.), now seems a bit hypocritical to be amazed that they do just that.
      • swiftcoder 1y ago
        > I can choose not to use a social medial platform, it is kind of hard to choose not to drink water/wash/etc. I don't think that's actually true for WhatsApp in a lot of countries - it's the default communication for many, to the point I'm not sure I could get parcel deliveries reliably here in Spain if I didn't have WhatsApp. Ditto for communicating with the entire generations who moved onto Facebook after we all abandoned it. I could delete Facebook entirely, but then I'd spend every family gathering hearing the chorus "why aren't you on Facebook? Your cousins are all on Facebook. They all know the family drama" (instead I keep Facebook off the homescreen of my phone, and check it about once a month).
  • energy123 1y ago
    We could demand it either way. There's no iron law of the universe that says otherwise. The application of the law is supposed to be objective but the contents are just made up by those with the power to do it.
    • strogonoff 1y ago
      Not enough people would demand it for it to be actionable, and not having to pay is part of the reason. Why would we spend effort on actively demanding things when we are spending not a cent on this in the first place, and can instead passively-aggressively deploy adblockers while waiting for the next iteration of this arms race (which something makes me think might involve LLMs)?
  • monknomo 1y ago
    I pay good money for phone calls and I get so much spam I don't like to answer the phone. The paying relationship is not sufficient for these technologies that are required
  • xp84 1y ago
    And don’t forget it was the EU regulators who threw away the opportunity to try to establish social media as a paid service as a thing, when they slapped Meta for trying to even offer it as an option. And yes, I realize they rejected it when it was raised as the alternative to data collection, preferring the regulators’ plan of making it still universally $0 and funding the whole operation on rainbows and wishes.
• gosub100 1y ago
  I had a similar thought regarding OS'. Especially in they heydey of malware in the early 2000s when 3rd party apps were the only way to remove it. You don't buy a truck and accept that its wheel falls off every time you hit a bump. Therefore Microsoft should have been civilally liable for all the costs of software removal and loss of enjoyment of computers that ran Windows (along with OEMs that sold them).
  • bryanlarsen 1y ago
    GM is not liable when your wheels fall off because a criminal removed the nuts.
    • gosub100 1y ago
      Then why do they have locks on the doors? They know there are these things called criminals. MSFT did nothing to stop spyware for at least a decade.
      • bryanlarsen 1y ago
        Most locks are trivially defeatable and easy to force. Heck, there's often a large window right beside a suburban door. Break the glass, open the door. Locks are only there to deter crimes of opportunity and make it more likely you'll actually notice a theft in a timely fashion.
        • gosub100 1y ago
          And Microsoft didn't even bother to do that much. Spyware was able to embed itself in any windows installation for a solid decade, just by visiting a website. removing it required at least 30m of updating and installing specialized tools and was well out of reach of the average user.
      • 9rx 1y ago
        > Then why do they have locks on the doors? Because the customer eventually decided it was worth paying for. Emphasis on eventually. It took over 30 years from the first car having optional door locks to locks becoming a standard feature. > MSFT did nothing to stop spyware for at least a decade. More like half a decade. The first real instance of spyware was recognized in 1999. Microsoft began working on their anti-spyware software in 2004.
• montroser 1y ago
  Social media is hardly a public utility. Regulation could be part of the picture, but at some point the nanny state is the greater of evils.
  • swiftcoder 1y ago
    There's a pretty big gulf between what Facebook is currently permitted to do, and the nanny state
• noir_lord 1y ago
  It's just another form of "socialise the costs, privatise the profits". In any sane world we'd regulate big tech far more rigorously than we do (we'd tax them more as well but that's a separate issue).
  • philipallstar 1y ago
    This is totally backwards. We "socialise" the profits and leave the risk and losses to the private sector.
• willvarfar 1y ago
  (An aside, there is a lot of scandal in the UK about how the privatised water providers have been basically shitting on the public and environment, and literally discharging raw sewage because its too expensive to moderate!)
• foft 1y ago
  Yes. If you haven’t yet read it Cory Doctorow’s new book Enshittification is well worth a read. I am still reading it but it certainly explains some of the bad practices by these major advertising/spying giants and the resulting market distortion. We need to up our game as technologists and hold our employers to account.
• zoeysmithe 1y ago
  Water, power, etc infrastructure regulations and things like the environmental movement happened when there was more working class solidarity and the working class had more power over the capital owning class. Now the working class have been propagandized to believe "regulations bad" and have been depowered as capitalism decays and the capital owning class further takes and consolidate power. The regulations you want are impossible in this political climate and probably impossible without an extremely radical reform movement or some mass resignation or revolution of government. I mean, lets face it, no government that makes hard right turns and has intense corruption like the USA just goes back to being a proper liberal democracy. Most likely things will get a lot worse before they even get better and on a timescale thats unpredictable. We may be talking 20+ years before any sort of baby steps towards liberal reforms are even possible on the federal level. The right has the gerrymandering, scotus, the courts, the media machine, etc. Pro-working class regulations are just not going to happen like they did in the 60s and 70s for a very long time if history is any guide. Its so odd to me people just have a "dont worry we'll got back to normal next election." To get back to what we had during those times of pro-worker regulation will take many, many, years if not decades of work now. At the very least until many in SCOTUS retire or pass away from old age. That just isnt happening anytime soon.
• brians 1y ago
  The permitted number of rat parts per pound of breakfast cereal is not zero.
  • warkdarrior 1y ago
    Rat parts are in RFK Jr's food pyramid for America.
• mmmlinux 1y ago
  Water providers in Flint,MI disagree.
  • tristor 1y ago
    I'm sure it felt good to write something pithy like that, but the Flint, MI case is not one of a water utility screwing up, or causing harmful contaminants to enter the water. It's a story of the city switching providers, and that other provider having different water chemistry that was incompatible with the existing piping in the city which caused harmful contaminants to be introduced into the water. Neither water provider had failed to provide what they were intending to provide, the city failed to plan ahead and test things before moving the source of their water.
• herbst 1y ago
  Is there any reason you accept it then? Facebook and all their platform is a danger to people, there is nothing to add there.