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Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

2018 is the year that we learned that complex social problems can not be solved by technology. From the political weaponization of social media to the collapse of the ICO market we've seen that the techno-utopian dream is largely just that, a dream. Social change takes hard work and the slow building of consensus, not just clever code. We have seen, however, that we can do a lot of damage to the social fabric with poorly thought out technology so I think the era of the unregulated internet is sadly coming to a close. We really have nobody to blame but ourselves.

The next generation of internet startups is going to have to be a lot more savvy about how technology interacts with society.

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I think that the biggest issue is frankly bullshit. Bullshit in the sense of complete lack of sensitivity to the truth so long as it leads to the outcome they want. Technology isn't at fault here but bullshit is on so many levels it isn't funny.

The stupid internet rumors and social media manipulation? Bullshit because they want to influence people - they don't care if it is true or not. Company valuations? They don't care if it is productive or useful - they just want it to make money which leads to the new Tulip craze. Security theater and claims that they need to spy on everything? Bullshit to justify their positions and cover their asses. It isn't a technology - it is the social black art old as dirt that keeps being used. It causes problems everywhere because it exists on a nearly fractal level.

We see plenty of people blaming tech companies for their problems and calling for regulations? Do they care if it is true or have any idea for specific regulations in mind? And the few that are trotted out turn out to be trivially unworkable or contrary to the given purpose on so many levels like encryption bans. Because it is all bullshit - what they want is to protect their own vested interests and they don't want the truth in the same building of a skyscrapper, much less the same room because they will lose in a discussion of facts.

I would be very skeptical of anyone who claims that we need regulation on the internet - because so far all of the pushers are shoveling more bullshit.

We're going to see a lot of bullshit regulation on the internet and a lot of opportunists taking advantage of the current chaos to push their own agenda. Unfortunately we handed them the weapons they need to push these arguments by building toxic (or at least very naive) platforms like Facebook and Bitcoin. It's a shame really but the tech community has itself to blame for a lot of this.

The power struggles that have gone on in human societies for our entire existence are now starting to play out online. We should have seen this coming.

In the spirit of this thread, putting "toxic" or "hate" in front of things you don't like IS bullshit.

No it's not. He is making a very pertinent and truthful criticism of a trend that is swallowing up the Web and turning it into a terrible marketing cesspool.

'Toxic' and 'hate' are at very least abusable just like 'fake news'. We need to be careful and verifiable about how something is 'toxic' or 'hate' - since as seen by any marketing slogan with soundalikes to defined terms undefined terms will mean what they want them to nothing more.

Toxic should have a meaning and something /explainable/ in detail why it is toxic so that it can at least be a seed for discussion. Say for instance that League of Legend's gameplay is a breeder of toxic interactions due to its dependence on unknown teammates, anonymity, and the ability to allow disgruntled or incompetent actors to deliberately throw the game above and beyond under-performance by giving XP to the other team deliberately.

Even if one disagrees with the reasoning it can lead to actual counter reasoning and it is less readily abusible as it needs a rationale for why something is toxic.

As opposed to toxic as in 'pointing out that beloved approach X doesn't seem to work that well' just because it is disagreed with.

It is for this reason why I personally think hate speech is an ambiguous term that should generally be defined more fully if it is used in a context where the definition will matter. Saying that you dislike this platform because it is full of hate speech is fine - it is a matter of personal opinion. Saying that the law should do something about hate speech needs to be well defined.

Hate crimes are recognized and respected as a doctrine because they highlight an additional and separate aspect that makes it more heinous than just the initial crime. If someone burns an innocent man alive they are a horrible person who should be charged for the horrific murder. If someone burns a given person alive as an example to all of their class (minority, sexuality, religion) - they have committed two crimes - both the grisly murder and what may be termed 'ethnic intimidation' - it was a threat to the victim's whole class of people as an additional party wronged.

What does Bitcoin, certainly the most self-sovereign internet platform, have to do with the corporatization of the web? If anything, it seems to me like a move in the exact opposite direction.

I feel pretty justified describing Facebook in its current form as toxic. It may be accidental to some degree but Facebook as it is exists today preys on people's weaknesses and insecurities, privileges fake and alarming content, encourages habituated, addictive usage, and undermines normal face-to-face human interaction.

I think it's possible to design social media platforms without those qualities so I feel it's fair to call Facebook, like junk food or cigarettes, toxic.

So "open" = "toxic"?

Or is it another aspect of Facebook and Bitcoin that you're criticizing? I fail to see another common characteristic.

Openness is not the issue. I think algorithmic feeds are the root of a lot of the problems. They tend over time to favor sensational and negative content because that's the easiest way to drive engagement. Valuing "engagement" over all other metrics has caused a lot of the problems with this generation of social platforms IMO.

I guess I'd describe Bitcoin as more naive than toxic. The failure of its designers to see that it would mostly be used as a platform for money laundering is more a liability of an excessive faith in technology to solve human problems than it is the kind of cynical exploitation of human nature that drove Facebook.

Getting off-topic, but don't you think it's interesting how parallel the main problem of modern "democracies" is? The quinquennial election game is purely about engagement, over all other metrics.

To come back to Bitcoin, I certainly agree that it is naive, but I don't see it as a failure.

It's too simplistic to be a replacement for fiat currencies or be the new world currency™, yes. But it had to be simple. Before even thinking about macroeconomics or social impact, it had to prove it could function at all as a trustless medium of exchange. It did so very well for a long time, now scaling the model to the world is another problem.

> The failure of its designers to see that it would mostly be used as a platform for money laundering

Is there a source on this? I have a hard time believing that's what it's "mostly" used for.

Indeed. I found GP's comment quite insightful until it suddenly called for regulation on the internet.

Why would that change anything when we just established that not the technology but learned behaviours are the problem?

Maybe 2018 was the year that showed us that we finally need to come to terms with the fact that - yes - there are enough resources for everybody and the people who control the bulk of them still want to treat you as a dumb cog in a machine and we need to cut through all the layers of bullshit they are throwing at us.

To be clear - I'd prefer not to see a new wave of regulation online. I'd much rather see the tech industry clean up its own house and fix its own problems. But since the big companies still seem to be dragging their feet on this after all that's happened I'm pretty sure we're about to get dragged kicking and screaming into the sausage factory that is government regulation.

The market hates regulation but will happily sell you HIV infected blood, then, when they get regulated they cry bloody murder.

And of course regulatory capture is an issue as well.

It is a hard problem because we're dealing with psychopaths.

> but learned behaviours are the problem?

Regulation can codify those bad 'learned behaviours' into illegal practices, no?

Good point. But the problem with regulation, especially in as of yet poorly understood domains, is it's hard to craft laws that target the behaviours you want to have punished without inflicting too much collateral damage on behaviours you still want to enable. And of course the ones best able to defend themselves against these regulations are the companies who can afford armies of lawyers and loophole-seekers.

My suggestion is: Punish bad behaviours by social exclusion.

So, next time one of you runs across Mark Zuckerberg at a coffee shop don't greet him, give him the stink-eye, throw a muffin at him or something :D

People aren't going to spontaneously stop profit seeking at the expense of society. If things are going to change, the change needs to be coordinated. That's what government is for.

The change needs to be coordinated, but how do you coordinate action between multiple actors when some of those actors are nefarious and actually acting against the change?

By punishing them with the force of law, just like we do with everyone else who doesn't follow the rules.

You missed the point where I was describing the Byzantine Generals problem, of which Byzantine Fault Tolerance solves, and BFT solutions are at the core of almost all blockchain protocols. Software imitates life.

There is no need for Byzantine tolerance when there is a single authority that is held responsible, like a bank, or a government.

Byzantine problems rarely occur in real life, they were effective invented by cryptocurrencies and "solved" by cryptocurrencies (by turning luck and wasrefulness into a measure of authority)

>There is no need for Byzantine tolerance when there is a single authority that is held responsible, like a bank, or a government.

Where do you live where a single authority that is held responsible? It must be a very idyllic place. In all seriousness a single authority is both very exploitable and failure prone.

If it was exploitable and failure prone, why is it the standard going back centuries?

If somebody gets into my bank account, what happens? The Bank covers my losses as law enforcement looks into the security breach and tracks down the thief. My life is unchanged, I don't lose anything.

If somebody gets into my bitcoin wallet, what happens? I lose everything I put into it, period. Can't get it back, can't prosecute, can't have my losses covered by federal investment insurance, it's just poof, gone, and no government is going to chase it down because the design of the system prevents any authority from intervening.

Which of these is more idyllic to you? I would much rather live in the world of banks and FDIC and police and courts than to live balancing on the razor's edge in crypto-land, a keystroke away from total ruin.

> I would be very skeptical of anyone who claims that we need regulation on the internet - because so far all of the pushers are shoveling more bullshit.

I agree. Two wrongs won't make it right.

One man's truth is another's opinion.

> 2018 is the year that we learned that complex social problems can not be solved by technology.

I’ve been hearing this notion, asserted with simplicity and exhaspiration, for the past 10 years. I don’t agree. “Technical solutions to social problems”, certainly do exist. Sewer systems that keep people from contracting cholera. Cold chain logistics systems that bring nutritious foods into the hearts of cities. Prosthetic limbs and wheelchairs that give people mobility. Locks which let people keep strangers from attacking them in their homes. Sms networks that let farmers understand the markets for their crops. Do these solutions have problems? Yes. We live in a world of tradeoffs and no matter how terrible the disease, we must balance benefits and harms for every treatment.

Failures reveal failure modes and a vocation kf building things in an increasingly complex world calls us to learn more broadly about the possible impact of our work and the history of systems made of humans. If we are to call engineering a profession, we can’t abandon our calling to solve the complex social ills of our societies.

Maybe it's more accurate to say that complex social problems can't be solved by technology alone. There's been a rarely questioned assumption that a bunch of hackers in a room together can single-handedly disrupt and reshape society in constructive ways. I think we're seeing now that this is a naive and even dangerous point of view.

To elaborate on your examples, things like sewers and wheelchairs benefit us but they depend on a social and legal framework to do so and require coordination, planning and consensus to be useful.

Agreed on all points.

Though I’d add “on-the-ground feedback” alongside coordination and planning.

> ...so I think the era of the unregulated internet is sadly coming to a close. We really have nobody to blame but ourselves.

You had me until there. Who financed the utopian bullshit? We need to regress on this until we can find the culprit and watchlist those (types of) sources of funding.

As founders you can refuse (or be highly critical of) funding by e.g. Saudi Arabia or Russian billionaires. As an early engineer, you can choose not to work for shady outfits.

It all comes down to following the money.

By "ourselves" I mean the tech community as a whole, both engineers and entrepreneurs. The people who financed these problematic platforms bear a lot of the responsibility, of course. But I think we engineers must also accept some of the blame. Many of the best and brightest of my generation devoted their talents to building these things and without those efforts these platforms wouldn't exist.

You can always say that if you don't build it then someone else will but in my opinion that's a cop-out. You can't simultaneously claim that engineering talent is valuable and technology is powerful and that we have no responsibility for the things we build.

>Who financed the utopian bullshit?

That's not a question you can answer on the mainstream open internet these days.

> 2018 is the year that we learned that complex social problems can not be solved by technology.

speak for yourself. not a new realization for at least some.

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