Social media and the concentration of power | Hacker News Reader

Social media and the concentration of power

ethz.ch

67 pointsarnocaj10 comments

Any centralization of power, at large enough a scale, will escalate to such problems, it's not limited to social media.

One tech field where this kind of centralization is now at similar levels with social media is cloud computing, where a handful of giant actors (AWS, Azure, GCE) hold 99% of the market, providing cheap solutions at the hidden cost of an increased centralization of power.

I believe the paradigm shift on social media cannot operate on the application layer if it is not also met with a similar paradigm shift on the platform layer, otherwise it will only transfer this power to hidden entities. Decentralization is becoming more than a buzzword, especially with net neutrality under assault.

> providing cheap solutions

Wut?

I mean, otherwise yout point still stands, and I agree, but I think it's even stranger with "cloud" stuff, in that it's very much not cheap.

It depends on the point of view, for startups looking for a tech solution at a small scale to test their products, these solutions are usually much cheaper than doing everything by yourself. It's only when you start to scale that you realise the financial impact and the lock-in that the platform have upon you, and at this stage it's too late for the paradigm shift to operate.

Cheaper than building your own datacenter, or buying your own server space and paying a dedicated engineering team to monitor a cluster for you. I can do things on my own or with a small team that would be well out of my reach without AWS or GCE.

The funny thing is that when it comes to governing online discussions, it seems like hardly anyone wants power? We would rather that someone else handle the tough calls about spam prevention, moderation, and abuse. This then gets handled partly automatically, but mostly outsourced to large teams of workers.

We are unlikely to see a large-scale movement towards self-reliance by users, or any government in the U.S. or Europe taking this on directly. Instead they will penalize companies until they do it.

So the companies that got big are ending up with the governance job because nobody else wants it. Mostly they started with semi-libertarian philosophies until they found that social media does not work that way and someone needs to handle the filth. And a lot of companies that started out with online forums (like newspapers) decided that it's not worth it and shut down their forums, so there are fewer players.

This makes it convenient for scapegoating. We can blame the big tech companies when they get it wrong, because we don't want to do the work ourselves.

> it seems like hardly anyone wants power

It's a little bit more complex. Everyone wants the profit, no one wants the liability. Everyone wants data they can sell to advertisers, no one wants responsibility for handling it.

One could think of their predicament like middle management, the big companies had some skill at delivering content which is how they got so big. So society also promoted them into the job of moderating content, a job which they were unskilled at doing. Maybe this is a case of companies, like people, rising to the level of their incompetence and staying there because of lack of ability(the appropriate tech) or will(customer/employees revolting against a policy) to move upwards.

There's a lesson about political organizing in here, which is that whoever cares the most about controlling discussions is going to end up doing it, even if it costs them money. Whether it's being a government official or NGO executive who can pressure tech companies, going on a moderation career track inside a big tech company that might not be the most remunerative, or just starting your own online community, actually acquiring said power will beat appealing to principles every time.

Who would be the right people to initiate a paradigm shift? Celebrities? Influencers?

I think the governments have to enforce an open standard which would allow intercompatibility between different social networks.

Open standards are unenforceable. It's obvious what would happen: although the standard is 'open', most people would still continue to use exactly one provider. Perhaps it won't be facebook, and perhaps -- in the time it takes to recentralize -- there will be social media nirvana, but ultimately, the nature of the web means we will -- in the end -- see the emergence of a singular central player.

Sure, some die-hards would continue to use the smaller ones, but most people would sign up on the biggest.

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