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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

If you want to fix most of the garbage of social media, and actually turn it into a marketplace of ideas, slow the speed at which information spreads through it.

Put a hard cap on a post's re-tweets/shares, and aggressively ban bots that try to copy&paste to circumvent this.

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This is one of those ideas that sound good in theory but then immediately causes bad effects.

The problem with cutting and pasting isn't bots, it's people. Uncle Joe posting 5 links a day from <bad news source> is completely allowed under your system, and yet if there are a million Uncle Joes on your network (and there definitely is a large portion of the population like that), then you'd just be back to square one.

Uncle Joe is unlikely to have thousands of followers. And if he does, those followers are again, unlikely to each have thousands of followers.

Remember spam chain e-mails back in the 0's? There were a lot of stupid viral ideas going around in them, but their reach was rather limited, and they were, generally speaking, not very successful in breaking into the social zeitgeist.

"15 million people liked this" is a lot of social proof. "Uncle Joe + a few dozen other people liked this" is not nearly as much social proof... And viral ideas live and die by the amount of social proof they have.

It's quite possible that what I suggest may not be the best possible fix. In fact, I'll go so far to say that it's not. But I have a hard time imagining that we currently live in the best possible world, such that no amount of tweaking the parameters of these sites will result in improvement. The current outcomes are horrible.

I think some version of this idea has promise. It's kind of like social distancing and COVID-19.

Everyone wants to limit what other people can read and write because they want to impose their beliefs onto the rest of the world. No. Your ideas aren't the "correct" ones. Just censor your personal information instead. Stop looking at all the crap and it'll be as if it doesn't exist. Almost everything I see on Twitter or Facebook is either interesting technical things, advertising, real people's daily lives, and the odd cat video.

This is wrong on so many levels.

1. Bad ideas spreading does, in fact, harm me. For instance, bad ideas, in the vein of 'COVID is a hoax created by Bill Gates and Soros' and 'Wearing masks is tyrrany' are currently killing people, and are causing economic damage.

2. If speech is so meaningless that ignoring it makes it's impact on my life go away, why do people care about having free speech? How can it both be so meaningless, and so important at the same time?

3. It takes an incredible amount of privilege to ignore politics. Even if you don't care for it, politics cares deeply about you. When politics stops caring about me, I'll stop looking at 'the crap'.

This is easily one my favorite arguments against 5G. Why exactly do we need more mobile bandwidth? Is anyone doing anything useful with it?

Watching movies

Talking face to face with friends and family

That is anti-free speech. Not that social networks are bound by the First Amendment, but it's literally preventing me from saying something freely by my own volition if too many people before me already said the exact same thing. Hard pass.

It is my understanding that Telegram and Whatsapp are currently actively doing this kind of thing, to stop the spread of misinformation and disinformation, according to the companies. I still disagree with this practice on principle. The effects of free speech on free people is increased freedom. If those using free speech are not themselves free, less optimal results may occur; freedom is an inherent good; free actions are judged on their merits and their effects.

If you go to a bar or a park and play loud music over everyone, or amplify your voice loudly enough to try to have a conversation with everyone simultaneously, then they can kick you out. These locations can define their range of acceptable behavior, and that usually includes a lot of norms about socializing and letting people in their own subgroups be free from egregious distractions. Social media can similarly construct and define its own norms. No single location or specific social media site has a monopoly on speech. We have a large choice between them, and especially online, the barriers to creating your own space are low.

Already on Facebook, I generally can't make a post that's shown to other people automatically who are disconnected from my friend group. Is Facebook limiting my free speech by doing that already? Hypothetically, if Facebook did stuff like decreasing the volume, er, show rate, to far-away people if my post is re-shared from my friends and so-on to very far outside of my immediate friend group, is that then censorship?

On social media, people choose who to listen to so nobody can "play loud music" to those who don't want to hear it. Censorship is to protect people from wrong-think that they want to hear, not to protect them from what they don't want to hear.

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