Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I also strongly encourage him to look at state of wikipedia moderations. Specially in a country like India. Lot of pages related to political content is moderated by people who are deeply partisan and have no respect for facts.
As I've tried to point out elsewhere: Mr. Sanger departed from the Wikipedia project in 2002, and, in the time since, has been openly critical of the project. He really isn't in much of a position to make changes to the project he departed from 17 years ago.
"India: Fake News and Agitprop": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0LgwL6rMPk
Recently google sponsored data journalism award was given to one of the most partisan website. And new think tanks which are sponsored by unknown forces come up all the time. One of the recent ones which I am investigating is called equality labs which recently did a dubious study claiming that there is absolutely no abuse of a majority group on Internet by a minority group. A simple search can disapprove that in seconds.
Fake news is not the same as partisan news.
> One of the recent ones which I am investigating is called equality labs which recently did a dubious study claiming that there is absolutely no abuse of a majority group on Internet by a minority group.
Link to the study?
Also to elaborate - if you are claiming to be doing data driven journalism, but are ignoring with malice all the data which does not fit your narrative, that seems more like fake news than just partisanship to me.
I'm glad others are keeping an eye on this issue. It is incredibly ironic to me that anyone in a leadership role at Wikipedia would criticize Zuckerberg or Dorsey. It's not even just political content, it's getting to the point where history is being actively re-written and re-interpreted to match a radical narrative.
In some sort of temporal example of humour, I've gone back to recommending people use Britannica as a starting point and for surface level reading.
According to (ironically) Wikipedia[1], Sanger left the project in 2006^W the early 2000s:
> Frustrated by sustained content battles and feeling he had a lack of support from Wales, Sanger eventually left the project.
There is an article about economics, obviously. And in its "criticism" section there is a long paragraph about criticism of economics from a feminist point of view.
However wikipedia also has an article about feminist economics. Which is almost equal in length to the article about economics in general. And if you go to the feminist economics page - there is no criticism section. But you can open the talk page, and there is a discussion, where editors argue that criticism hurts the neutrality of the article and should not be added there.
It just doesn't seem impartial to me.
A lot of articles in Wikipedia are inside the battle ground for politics. I like to talk about it and point it out. But would rather stay a safe distance away.
I agree with you that wiki-style projects depend on neutral volunteers to succeed. But you and me are not wiki-style projects. Our knowledge can be gathered from several differently biased sources and then combined, in hopes to get closer to "neutral".
Also it might just be the case that it was too early to praise Wikipedia as success. When it started people had precisely these doubts in mind - how could a "democratic" platform aim at truth. Maybe critics were right, just the down-spiral effect was delayed. And at first it was delayed because there was a technical barrier at being an editor. Then various groups began to train people in editing Wikipedia, and here we are.
Also see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20371610
What I do personally for subject that feel a bit controversial is: 1) read the Wiki article 2) read the Talk page 3) look for edits that were made earlier (special before the 2016 USA election) 4) look for primary sources when feasible.
As another commenter mentioned here - editing articles in Wikipedia is a waste of time now, because there are interest groups that control a lot of "touchy" subjects. As an example (and I am adding it because I know the subject matter, having read 5 books by the author) compare the leading abstract of "Julius Evola" before 2016, and after:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Julius_Evola&oldi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Julius_Evola
What changed? Evola was one of the authors that Steve Bannon mentioned in one of his interviews. So editors tried to turn Evola into a misogynist + racist + fascist, just to smear the Bannon guy.
I acknowledge that making ones edits pass by other interested editors (especially those with more time or numbers than you have) is exhausting. But it is worth it, considering Wikipedia gets first place in Google's search results.
Nitpick: Sanger is not part of Wikipedia or the WMF as far as I know.
> t's not even just political content, it's getting to the point where history is being actively re-written and re-interpreted to match a radical narrative.
Mind giving some examples?
> In some sort of temporal example of humour, I've gone back to recommending people use Britannica as a starting point and for surface level reading.
In what way could Britannica possibly be better than Wikipedia. It is usually based on a single viewpoint, instead of Wikipedia's thousands.
> Mind giving some examples?
Google can help you with these questions, to your own satisfaction.
This is not a winnable debate, but differing views exist.
This is an incomplete list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_o...
https://www.quora.com/Am-I-the-only-frustrated-former-Wikipe...
etc.
The dubious nature of wikipedia's editing is recorded within books and articles from over the last decade that are casually discoverable from google. AFAIK, anyone who implies they aren't aware of the biases of editors, are either willfully ignorant (since this is covered under multiple topics within wikipedia itself) or trolling.
All the criticism of Wikipedia that you raise is valid, but there are some things implied in your posts that are dubious:
* That there exists an encyclopedia better than Wikipedia (or some other Wikimedia project).
* That Wikipedia can just be ignored.
Considering the placement Wikipedias currently have, it is hard to imagine a better or more influential project being created, so we might as well try improving what already exists.
A human tradition dating back to the origin of storytelling. But at least now it comes packaged with a version history.
I think that the solution is similar to what he's proposing for the social networks: decentralization. One example would be to take hint from github, and allow articles to be forked when they reach some threshold of editing warfare. Embrace and aggregate partisan takes rather pursuing the noble but chimeric goal of neutrality.
RationalWiki is not, and I'm not sure why you mentioned it. It's not a Wikipedia fork or alternative. It's not even trying to be one, it has completely different goals. The only thing they have in common is the fact that they are both wikis, but there's thousands of those around.
I remember watching a BBC documentary about the history of the American Revolution -- it was very different than what I was taught in the USA.
Read Ishmael as well. Similar take on, according to some, all of history.
The "noble but chimeric goal of neutrality" is core to Wikipedia's content policies [1]. Abandoning it would be an abdication of their mission.
Better put, because everyone is on the internet now, the real world's problems are now the internet's problems. It used to serve as an escape, true. It has made the world a smaller place, where problems from a distant state or country can reach me and I can't help but be aware of them. I may even be affected by them.
Is that good or bad, for us as individuals or as global citizens? That's heavy stuff.
From day one, life has been about letting in certain elements, and keeping out others. Without this selection, development and differentiation are impossible. Similarly we don't (and shouldn't) let every person into our homes, or our countries, or our servers. Why is it seen as an obvious truth that we should allow every single person onto the Internet, without ever being able to remove them?
For the same reason it's seen as an obvious truth that everyone should be allowed to use a telephone, or send a letter in the mail. The internet is a communications platform, by definition it belongs to anyone who wants to use it.
The internet being used by everyone no more makes the development or differentiation between cultures impossible than the planet Earth being used by everyone does.
Also, because the anarchist hacker ethos that led to the internet was about liberating humanity from the constraints of gatekeepers - the systems of governance and proprietary control over access to information and freedom of expression that divided the world between the elite and the serf.
What we're seeing now is not that model breaking down, but only beginning to come into its true potential.
Yes, there may be negative effects to the ability of the internet to remove the barriers between cultures and communities, even states, but the world would be a lot worse still if it had never left the confines of a few universities simply to keep the normies out. The value of the transformative nature of the internet on civilization itself is greater than the value of the internet monoculture whose relevance it no longer recognizes.
With respect to ownership, I assume you’re referring to a “right of use” rather than ownership of the underlying physical assets and services. Rights however, derive from somewhere and most rights carry an implicit purpose defining or otherwise informing the scope of the right. For example, the second amendment (right to bear arms) is not a free pass to commit murder or to otherwise use those arms to infringe on the legitimate rights of others. (Note, I’m not mentioning this in order to start a flame war. I’m making no statement regarding gun rights or related topic). Therefore I’d question where or how you believe this “ownership/use” right has arisen.
With respect to the “anarchist hacker ethos” leading to the internet (and as someone old enough to have mostly been there), I’d suggest that no such thing occurred. You are assuming a single philosophy on the part of a great many people and organisations (such as the military) who contributed to the key infrastructure of the internet. What exactly is this hacker ethos? My definition likely differs significantly from ESR’s which may or may not differ from yours. Nevertheless you state a purpose, “liberating humanity from the constraints of gatekeepers”. I’d humbly suggest that the vast majority of users of these commons are not even aware that this is the intent, let alone agree with it, other than that their own ability to use this commons as they wish, even to the detriment of others, be uninfringed.
Historically, gatekeepers have been few. On the internet however, much like in lawless towns past, the good burghers are forming posses of their own to protect the use of their little patch of the internet, via mechanisms such as moderating, rating, voting and karma based systems. Irrespective of the efficacy of such approaches, online communities are increasingly adopting them to filter out or limit the actions of bad citizens. Effectively, communities themselves are becoming the gatekeepers. And from my perspective, good on them. Because however imperfect these attempts might be, I’d much rather HN with its voting system than without (for example).
I don’t support keeping the “normies” out, but I do support the right of each community to decide for itself whether and how they want to keep the arseholes out.
[That's not the kind of gatekeeping I meant, but to your statement...] According to whom? That's one social philosophy, I suppose, but I'd call it more anti-social.
From day one, [human] life has been about sticking together to accomplish more than the sum of our parts. Outcasts aside, the idea that we have to keep others out to continue our way of life is dangerous and wrong, morally and practically.
From day-one, humans have had to deal with the very real threat of other humans trying to kill them. Unless you subscribe to a social-Darwinist belief that the strongest tribe can rightfully wipe out or absorb every one of its enemies -- and the weaker tribes deserve to go -- your morality must reckon with the real problem of inter-tribal agression.
Perhaps this is what you meant by "Outcasts aside, ..." But if so, then your argument reduces to "we shouldn't keep people out, except for those that we should."
Obviously, we should keep people out that want to end our way of life, but that isn't where this conversation should be going. The original comment was talking about the privilege of early internet usage and escapism. And so to bring it back around, I can understand the nostalgia but I think wishing that the "rest" of the world would stop messing up "our" internet is a terrible thing to wish.
We mustn't disregard that other people are applying the dangerous-tribe mentality to their reasoning about the Internet. There are extant fears of hackers and terrorists organizing and funding their operations online, right alongside the bake sales and peaceful marches. Some of those fears may be justified, and the actors may represent a danger to our way of life. But even if they were all boogeymen, the fear is real, and people act dangerously and irrationally when they are afraid. The existence of an open forum where even boogeymen can converse, itself, leads to a general unease and reactionist policy making.
Balance is needed in these discussions, but we can't achieve that without acknowledging that there may be a few Vandals in our midst who've already made it past the gates. If we pretend otherwise, we will be constantly talking past each other.
* You have to negotiate what cooperation means. And this essentially defines the boundaries of a community.
* It's disastrous if "cooperate" is your only approach, because even a fraction of defectors choosing a predatory approach can become a significant problem.
Please explain warring tribes and city states.
Because it is obvious. Everyone should be able to access the internet.
Now, do the various internet communities have a right to ban people they don't want around? Yes. Absolutely.
However, that's not "gate keeping", it's more accurately called Freedom of Association and the government is implicitly restricted from denying you such freedom via the First. (Provided you are in the US.) And, yes, Freedom of Association is wonderful. That's why we're not subjected to child porn, or nut jobs gunning down little old jewish and black ladies at worship, or 7 year old girls being disemboweled. Etc etc etc. If those people want to share their content, they can, they just need to do it in their own community where the rest of us don't have to see it. Because they are, mercifully for the rest of us, generally banned from our general communities.
I guess I'm just hoping that what you meant was that people should be able to remove others from their community. Not that people should be able to remove others from the internet. (Although a lot of that stuff, I mean, I wouldn't lose any sleep if it became unavailable tomorrow. I'd probably cheer in fact.)
But I'm not American... So I guess I'm just surprised. It's thankfully illegal where I'm at.
But yes, there are people in the US who post the video of their pet terrorists blowing away some old lady in a church or temple or mosque or what have you. It is not strictly speaking, illegal here. Neither are the death videos no matter how objectionable. To make matters worse, most of these low-lifes tend to congregate in the same well known places, which also host, you guessed it, child porn. So a community of real winners all around.
All I was saying was that people like that should be kicked out of communities that aspire to cater to regular people. But they should not be kicked off the internet. As disgusting as their proclivities may be, they do still have Freedom of Speech. I just don't want them speaking in the places I frequent, and thankfully, the proprietors of those places agree with me in that regard.
That's why Freedom of Association in a place like the US is extremely important. People and organizations have to be free not to be associated with that sort of content. It's as important as Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Expression actually.
All very well and good until one day society decides you are one of the people that needs to be removed.
For example, maybe everybody should be able to read the President's tweets.
But should Twitter necessarily be such that everybody can reply to the President's tweets? At this point in time, replies to the President, or to journalists, &c seem to be used to engage with other people reading the President's tweets, not with the President.
As a result, Twitter's design is that everybody can interact with each other, whether they like it or not.
I think there are many middle grounds between "Everybody can access the Internet," and, "Only some people can access the Internet." One such middle ground is, "Everybody can access the Internet, but not everybody has near-frictionless ability to engage with strangers."
The ability to directly and freely communicate with leaders (and for them to communicate with one another) is incredibly revolutionary. It is unfortunate that Twitter, of all places, a site whose entire purpose is top-of-mind contextless microblogging, is where this revolution is taking place, and that the President in question is basically a shitposting troll, but I suppose beggars can't be choosers.
I still kind of love that the President of the United States can say something stupid on Twitter, and a million people, including other world leaders, can respond with scathing criticism, rebuttals and stupid memes, and no one gets sent to the camps, or gets a nuke dropped on them.
> "Everybody can access the Internet, but not everybody has near-frictionless ability to engage with strangers."
That's something to be implemented by any particular site as it sees fit, not the entire platform. As far as the internet is concerned, everybody should have near-frictionless access to everything and everyone if they want it, and if someone provides a platform for it. Universality of access, both to ideas and to people, is kind of the entire point.
Regardless of medium, many-to-one communication using freeform text doesn't scale. If you structure it, it's basically a poll.
I agree with you, but why do you believe the discourse is so bad?
Twitter really isn't designed for discourse, and definitely not for complex discourse, but for immediate engagement and virality. The way the platform works almost encourages piling on and hostility. More than anything, I think the appearance of retweeted and replied-to content in your feed from people you don't even follow contributes to this.
And I'm trying to put this in as non-partisan a way as I can... Trump's personality, his addiction to the platform, the polarizing nature of his Presidency and his loose relationship with the truth just adds fuel to the fire. I suspect this is just what mainstream political discourse looks like when a lot of people are genuinely angry about the state they find the country in. It provides a catharsis, if nothing else.
I like the idea of citizens communicating with their representatives, but that isn’t what happens when people reply to Trump, or Kamala Harris, or whomever.
We all see those replies, so the incentive is to basically spam those Tweets with stuff that people want amplified on DJT’s coattails.
I’d be delighted if Twitter hid replies from people I don’t follow, but that’s not how it works, and it’s not how they want it to work.
And in my opinion, it doesn’t work. JM2C.
[1] He'd probably get banned very quickly. And the limited number of downvotes before a comment gets killed would be a hindrance. Still, the idea has a lot of charm...
Why is it seen as an obvious truth that we should allow every single person onto the Earth, without ever being able to remove them?
What you speak about is tribalism and is a genetic trait that used to help us survive. But we can rise above our animal instincts and be better.
Anecdotally, an example is ladies tea events in social circles. If you ask women who are in to this, there is a different atmosphere by having only women present.
Do guys want to join? Sure, but that's too bad. Not everything has to be for everyone.
What does it mean to deny someone?
If an OS provider, browser provider, internet provider, and website all agree to give someone the tools necessary to access a given website, why should you get involved?
At the same time, if you want to run your own site who limits who can join, you should be free to do so. Many communities I'm a part of do this already (normally by limiting behavior, for example a forum for a given game only allows discussions related to that game, someone who keeps bringing up unrelated topics will find themselves under a series of increasing lengthy bans).
If you want to build your own protocol and only let those you deem the cool kids use it, then you are free to do so.
>Why is it seen as an obvious truth that we should allow every single person onto the Internet, without ever being able to remove them?
Put simply, we never had the choice because we didn't build the internet. The ones who did have the choice choose to open it up as wide a technically feasible. We don't get a say in this case, but we are free to make our own case where we can have a say.
> “The internet wouldn’t have been created by people like Mark Zuckerberg, or any of the sort of corporate executives in Silicon Valley today,” he said. “They wouldn’t be capable, they don’t have the temperament, they’re too controlling. They don’t understand the whole idea of bottom up.”
I think the only people who want to use the internet in a decentralized, bottom-up way are engineers. The vast majority of people need a simple experience that doesn't require them to learn anything new or to make too many choices. That's not exactly the opposite of bottom-up, of course, and it's possible to have both sometimes. But optimizing for bottom-up vs optimizing for simplicity leads to very different outcomes. Sometimes when I hear engineers talk about how much they hate how popular websites like Facebook and Twitter work, it sounds like they don't care very much about whether their ideal internet would be useful for normal people.
I even think there's some of this going on in the privacy debate. Yes, normal people care about privacy a lot. But they mostly care about it when it impacts their life directly in ways they can understand, like traffic cameras or identity theft. It's hard for a normal person to engage in the debates about the Snowden leaks or the Cambridge Analytica scandal, because the details are technical, and the impact on most people's lives is indirect. Now, of course it's normal for people with a technical background to make decisions and judgment calls in their area of expertise, for the benefit of the public, without waiting for an informed public debate about all the little details. The world is complicated, and that's how everything works. But I think a lot of humility is called for in those situations, because you're mixing together questions of what people would value with questions of what they should value or of what you personally value. I worry about this when I hear engineers say things like "abolish Facebook". Like yes, many engineers would rather starve than give up their data privacy. But that really isn't how most people feel, and if you waved a magic wand and made everyone in the world an expert on cookies and IP addresses and databases, it's not at all clear to me that they'd feel the same hate for Facebook that many engineers do.
Why is gatekeeping something that one can be dangerously close to?
I gatekeep who my friends are. We gatekeep who our employers are. We gatekeep what actions we find acceptable from our children.
Gatekeeping is a form of discrimination, and while that has become a four letter word due to specific forms of discrimination that have caused massive amounts of harm, every day we engage in extremely reasonable forms of discriminating. Every day we make value judgments based on the information provided. Every day we use stereotypes that were built off of incomplete data but work well enough.
When I'm picking up cookies at the cookie store, I don't judge the individual cookie on its own merits. I stereotype it based on who produced it. Yes, this current batch could be horrendous, but without the ability to sample that batch directly there isn't any better information than judging it based on past experiences of similarly branded cookies from the same bakery.
Yes, sometimes our stereotypes and judgments we make based on incomplete information hurt others. We need to be guarded against it to ensure we don't cause others undue harm. But if I and others want to form a small community where only people who understand the joke "There is no place like 127.0.0.1." can join, is there really a problem with that?
The new internet does this as well, but along with it is the modern scarlet letter: the plague of judgement, outrage, and moral hysteria. It's a technological "Scarlet Letter" or "Rape of the Lock." Importantly, it's not just that I personally might want to escape these things, it's that society as a whole is being transformed by them. Is it good that people can apparently easily be manipulated in Burma by Facebook groups? For sure, there is some good with the bad. I'm not suggesting that the modern internet doesn't do any good for people. But, it brings with it all the problems of society.
I think we made a big mistake trying to convince everyone that the digital life is like real. E.g. you can have real conversations etc. (they are real but not the same, maybe our discussions online are too real idk), please bear with me ...
IMO there has been a huge interest by Tech to make everyone believe that Online life is very much like real life, for some of us it even did become so (SecondLife, gaming, etc). And there are many calls to enforce real-name policies and to outlaw anonymity in Tech. The theory is that this will improve authenticity, get rid of trolls ("if only we could back this with more security, root of trust", etc).
But when I just judge from myself, how I use the web ... I am not actually "really me" in the same sense. Even posting under my real name I often catch myself having provided some kind of snapshot of my inner state of mind or general feeling, and which to my horror shouldn't be taken at face value (yet it is because I said it and it is written).
When speaking pseudonymously it allows me to air half-baked thoughts and feelings so that I can get feedback (in a safe way) and then allows to improve my thinking on the subject.
I wonder would I say the same things under my real identity ? and the scary answer is sometimes I accidentally do. And I guess others also make these mistakes. Compartmentalizing is really hard and once I said shit the cat is out of the bag ... what was written may haunt me forever.
Getting judged by a prospective employer wading through our social media footprint is already reality, and before entering some countries I have to unlock my phone now. None of this is supposed to be like that IMO because we humans don't compartmentalize our thoughts the same way when we are online as we do when we have a conversation IRL
What tricks us into thinking that "just because we say it we should stick to it", because we use the written form. By saying it in our head and WRITING IT DOWN, it becomes very hard to take a step back and retract our position. Writing things down is one of the keys in how we commit to something according to Robert Caldini[1]. And because we usually write online our not well thought out positions (spitballing), we end up making these spitballs our personal hills to die on. This is something we haven't yet realized: ONLINE != IRL, yet we want to force people to believe it is the same.
[1] Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Rober...
I use forums like these as a way to pressure-test crazy ideas, or ways I tell a story. My post history is probably full of crazy shit as a result. In no way will I ever link this account to my real name; in fact I’ll probably abandon it in a few months and start another.
As a result, I also tend to take online argumentation to be more of an academic exercise than one capable of changing opinions. You can also argue the opposing side of an issue to understand the nuance there.
But the net takeaway is that the online world does not represent reality; it represents all the possibilities of reality — which can sometimes be horrifying.
Things that are written may not just haunt us forever, but things that we read may as well. Mental health is something culturally we don't have strong controls on, and yet evidence backs that our physical health is strongly correlated to our mental health.
I think the thing we haven't yet realized is not just that online != "real life" but that online is worse than real life: it's a Fairy space. Anything we can imagine can become real enough online that it affects our real life (health, wealth, etc). On the surface it is shiny and whimsical, and underneath it is full of monsters (of our own creation, most likely). We exist in a time where nearly everyone has a magic mirror to a fairy space in their pocket, and old fairytales tell us we should be frightened and proceed with huge amounts of caution.
Yes it is, but maybe its an example of the effect of the economical system we are in. Most of the negative stuff that pop up are driven by money making. Even filter bubbles could be classified as a vector for making money.
Personally I try to avoid all the shitty parts that come with modern internet and reap the benefits of it.
That seems to be what the kids are into nowadays.
The big change was that after 2008 advertising on the Internet slowly emerged as a real thing. It’s the ad driven models that made the Internet hell.
It's probably much the same online. Those ads blaring someone else's name, even in what is "kinda" your own personal lawn/profile/whatever, does a lot to remove a sense of ownership. Likewise in hope of getting more engagement, what would be a smaller conversation is likely to end up massively broadcasted for those ad views.
But you are confusing nostalgia with genuine concerns Such as privacy and addiction fed and perfected by ml and massive amounts of personal data.
These niche places are great exactly because they're hard to find, and the community there grows organically.
I'm on HN now because slashdot was flailing years ago, and a friend I knew IRL mentioned it ....
I probably spend less than five minutes a day on traditional social media which feels toxic in comparison.
It's a relatively small site, but it's a model for how social networks should work. Because it's built around a shared interest that people spend money on, the site can sell ad slots instead of relying on real-time bidding based ad networks.
If we give the HN hug to enough niche sites, maybe they'll pick up their SEO game, improve the ranking and start optimizing for the big ad dollars :)
I seriously had that thought today. I do believe journalists report the facts and are not 'fake' news. But boy, is news opinionated nowadays. Every channel you go to, its all about selling you outrage. The CNN YouTube channel is especially cringe worthy for me. To see a respected news channel turn to click bait titles and circling pictures makes me kind of sad. I wish they didn't do that.
Something new will pop up in a few years, limited within hacker circles, perhaps in a medium beyond computers/phones. It'll have all the nice qualities that we seek such as privacy, encryption, anonymity, pro-free-speech etc, except that none of those things will last for very long. It too will have it's own eternal September, followed up ad-tech/media/government screwing things up. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Any new kind of "internet" that depends on traditional infrastructure that is under the control of states/corporations will end up being exactly like the one we have now.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise, decentralised or federated versions of all kinds of things on the web exist, and work, today... Just no one uses them of course.
The problem is none of these ideas seem to be able to obtain dominance, because that's not in their nature, that is in the nature of capitalism at the deep end, and it already has a grasp on the things that most decentralised tech is trying to replace.
The exceptions are decentralised tech that has no corporate competition, e.g bittorrent. I think that's a very useful observation, it's a classic "make a better horse" scenario, it's difficult to see the future when you are focused on present technology - I think the way to make the centralised web obsolete is not to merely decentralise the existing manifestation of it, but to make something entirely, fundamentally different, because corporations don't innovate in that dimension, so they can't compete, and can't dominate early enough to monopolize it.
And it's not just privacy on the internet, but in meatspace too. Thankfully I'm still from a part of the world that hasn't gone completely digital, but there are annoying advances like absolutely needing a phone to have a bank account. Or having my face scanned for certain things.
You don't. What I mean is that problems like privacy, censorship, centralized control etc, can all be solved with technology. And although you can't get everyone to care enough to switch to a facebook alternative, you can get everyone to "switch" to something completely new that makes facebook irrelevant, that breakthrough concept in combination with decentralization and privacy built in from the start means there is no "switch" to a competitor, it's just a "new thing".
It's all a bit vauge, but if it wasn't, it would already exist... and maybe there is no better alternative to social networks, perhaps this is it, and perhaps it's just a phase that society has to push through. But I have hope that there are better things, more fucking exciting things than scrolling through pictures of other peoples food and holidays that we have yet to dream of that will simultaneously make facebook as irrelevant as chemistry made alchemy.
California could regulate companies within its borders, but it would stand to lose that sweet tax revenue on shares and RSU's when they move to a different state.
I partly put the blame on late 90s web developers for this. Instead of developing web /browsers/, the industry should've built web /communicators/ (one would think Netscape could've figured this out).
That is, we should've been using tools that make publishing content on the web as easy as consuming content[1].
If that mindset had been cultivated then and we had user friendly tools to support it, public mentality about sharing content would be different, and after years of improvement we might have a more balanced internet today where each user has full control over their data.
Unfortunately, we built web browsers for consumption only, the advertising industry took hold of our business models, which naturally created silos that grew richer and more powerful.
We can build and have built better tools, but the inertia of how things work today makes it difficult for alternative platforms to take off.
It still makes no sense to me that we use powerful computers to run web clients that send data somewhere on the internet where it is served for me, when the computer I'm using can serve this data just fine (assuming some infrastructure is in place to handle this).
[1]: This is something Opera attempted much later in 2009 with Unite (https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands...), but abandoned it shortly later. I imagine they were missing a lot of network infrastructure and it being too confusing for end-users to make this a success. Are there previous attempts of this in a consumer browser?
It doesn't mean 'privacy-focused', because the internet is decentralized, and your privacy isn't inherently guaranteed by it. It doesn't addess how to fund online products, which is what drove the systems we have today. It doesn't describe how we're supposed to convince the world to build products that don't exploit people, and aren't used by the powerful against us.
Saying we need the web to be more decentralized is like saying we need more transparency in politics. Sounds great, but even if it's more transparent, that doesn't mean more legislation is going to get done, or done better. We need more concrete goals, and to focus less on the means of getting there.
I'd rather enjoy having a social platform managed for the greater good, by a not-for-profit organization. The Mozilla or Wikimedia of social networks.
I think the question is different: is a decentralized social network possible (with the same features of a centralized one)?
Also, some people might know but might have forgotten or had their attention shifted to something else. It's good to periodically bring it back.
There will always, always be a need to inform people. Providing information and good/better arguments for one's position will always be a valid and valuable service.
Acting constructively on that information is also needed, of course, but they're not mutually exclusive.
What Facebook did to MySpace, may happen to Facebook soon when a good decentralized social network pops up.
Tinder worked very well for 20-somethings as well because they had figured out that 20-somethings are usually not looking for a deep, meaningful relationship right out of the gate. So they required you to tell your story in pictures, and they eliminated the 3000-word deep and meaningful profiles that people still dating in their 30s and 40s are using. So it almost immediately excluded your dad from using it. And it had a lot of cachet because of that exclusivity.
The thing that made Google+ not cool was that its major enthusiasts were the kind of insufferable tech dweebs that would take pictures of themselves wearing Google Glass in the shower with their Pixel phone. That's very much a dad thing to do, and it's the wrong kind of exclusivity.
So if we want a really good social network to replace Facebook, it has to A) not be full of insufferable tech dweebs, and B) be exclusive by way of not being full of parents on day 1. I'm certainly too old to start something meeting those requirements.
This is a decent writeup of some of the issues:
Wikipedia is really poorly governed. Past admins say that the most common solution to any dispute is the "status quo". They just hope that problems go away. That's not progress.