Hacker News Reader

Comment by salmonfamine | Hacker News Reader

I think we're encountering a fundamental conflict between an unregulated free market and a digital economy that doesn't have any notion of scarcity or cost. The old paradigm just doesn't fit. And the result is that a handful of tech employees and billionaires can wield outsized influence over the dominant media channels and public forums of the entire world without any democratic input or regulatory oversight. The fact that anyone on the so-called Left supports the rights of these corporations to wield that influence by appealing to laissez-faire principles -- ("they're private companies, they can do what the want!", "If you don't like Twitter's policies you can go start your own site!") -- is mind-boggling.

I think we need social media to operate as a non-profit like Wikipedia, and I think drastic action is the only way to do so. Building alternatives won't work. A for-profit model is just not compatible with the nature of social media.

View on HN

Lots of worthwhile points here.

> And the result is that a handful of tech employees and billionaires can wield outsized influence over the dominant media channels and public forums of the entire world without any democratic input or regulatory oversight.

This is probably the biggest threat to democracy, and to 90% of the population

> A for-profit model is just not compatible with the nature of social media.

I agree and would add that the same argument stands for the traditional press as well.

I think before the advent of mass-media it probably worked reasonably well. A subscription-based revenue model seems to work ok.

I think a reliance on advertising is what has pushed things to the degenerated state we have now. And social media has practically dictated that reliance.

> I think a reliance on advertising is what has pushed things to the degenerated state we have now. And social media has practically dictated that reliance.

True, but the press relied on an advertising-based business model right from the start. That, in hindsight, was not such a sensible choice.

so how does that work? i cannot think of a workable solution short of an end to the world wide web, and the beginning of a system of national internets and data ports (as in, places you send your data to to export them from one country and import them to another).

otherwise, the democratic oversight will just be whatever the u.s can manage.

the internet is already falling apart; i notice many u.s media sites are inaccessible from europe. i guess national internets are less painful in europe, where almost every country has its own language, than in the anglosphere, where there are many smaller countries that use english.

it solves many problems - it puts an end to cyberattacks, for instance. but is it right? i doubt it.

Yeah, good questions.

I'm not advocating an end to global platforms. And I don't think the democratic oversight should come from the US government. The end goal should be a website like Wikipedia -- non-profit, maintained and perhaps even funded by users.

In fact, I think a lot of the fragmentation of the internet you see abroad is a reaction against the powerlessness of users and governments against the unassailable power of these corporations. Maybe, if we are able to give users some degree of control over the design and policies of these platforms, we might be able to preserve the global internet. Some of that fragmentation -- as you see in the OP article -- is simply a result of governmental authoritarianism, which is a problem either way.

I think the first step would be to re-align some economic incentives by creating digital rights laws. GDPR is a good first step. So establishing something similar in the US. This itself is a hugely complicated step that could go very wrong, and due to the corrupt nature of US politics and the desire for large tech companies for regulatory capture, the potential pitfalls are many.

Then, if we manage to get that right, I think we need to find a way to create legislation that requires these platforms to give their users control regarding how content is presented to them -- essentially, the ability to control their feeds.

I don't know how we would manage to transition these companies to a true non-profit model. As long as they remain for-profit, they will fight and subvert these efforts every step of the way, even after they became law.

However, I think we are increasingly seeing how dangerous and unsustainable the current model is. Perhaps the best way to accelerate data rights is accelerationism -- making the exploits and faults in these platforms as visible as possible by "hacking" them.

> is a reaction against the powerlessness of users and governments against the unassailable power of these corporations

Its about governments powerlessness to control the message from foreign cooperations likely influenced by foreign governments.

Maybe 0.000001% of it is 'protecting users'.

> essentially, the ability to control their feeds

Again, probably 0.0001% of Users will so even if you give them the option.

> making the exploits and faults in these platforms as visible as possible by "hacking" them.

So hurting users even more in the process?

> Its about governments powerlessness to control the message from foreign cooperations likely influenced by foreign governments.

Fair enough, that is also an issue.

> Maybe 0.000001% of it is 'protecting users'.

I think we need to bring in concrete examples here. Consider GDPR -- would you characterize that as a governmental entity protecting its users?

> Again, probably 0.0001% of Users will so even if you give them the option.

I kind of doubt that. Facebook has introduced limited control over certain aspects of your feed and everyone I know has used those features. Even non-technical people I know routinely complain about suggested content, non-chronological feeds, and so on. These are popular (if not nearly-universal) concerns.

> So hurting users even more in the process?

Ok, I was off the mark there. I just mean that there are problems with the current platforms that expose real vulnerabilities into public discourse and democracy that have been exploited, and will be exploited much more thoroughly in the future. So doing nothing is not sustainable.

>Again, probably 0.0001% of Users will so even if you give them the option.

It depends on the implementation. A good example for user control is Pandora. Not hard at all to control what music I'll hear.

> it puts an end to cyberattacks, for instance.

Luckily for infosec professionals - we are never putting the lid back on that particular box. International businesses need the internet, just as it needs encryption. It'll only be proles facing restrictions.

I can't help but echo that I'm simply grimly fascinated by how far and fast the standard of discourse has fallen, however. And a decent chunk of that political interference, gaslighting and general verbal abuse and toxicity is from the US - "progressive" and "conservative" regions alike.

>it solves many problems - it puts an end to cyberattacks, for instance. but is it right? i doubt it.

I think it's right. Countries have sovereignty over their physical territory and they ought to have sovereignty over their digital territory, that's the basis of any democracy and self-determination.

Of course it produces awful results in Turkey because Erdogan is an autocrat, and autocrats use power to enact dumb policies, in this case censoring something because his family was insulted.

However in democracies it is necessary to not be defenseless and to maintain values. Here in Europe I've always felt that we're pretty much exposed in the digital sphere to either American norms due to sheer size, and nowadays more and more to negative campaigns by countries like Russia and China as they've learned to weaponize cyberspace.

I think cultural defensiveness is a strange phenomenon. The musical tradition that grew into jazz survived centuries of the most brutal slavery, but now it's the basis of most of what we hear in our day-to-day. Ultimately, cultural values that work will win out, and art that is beautiful will shine through. No amount of political pressure, violence, boundaries and borders can change that. You can't mandate that people should buy bratwurst, or read Horace, or go to church - but equally, if your values are good values, they can only be suppressed for some time, before they spring up in new forms and new places.

In China, they are conducting a great experiment in suppressing and controlling culture. Perhaps it will work - perhaps not, but I think you could only really achieve such a goal with such means, and moreover, I think such means are far more insidious and corrupting than any kind of foreign influence. Sheltered culture becomes irrelevant, then idiotic, then it becomes something only idiots and fossils can believe in.

> You can't mandate that people should buy bratwurst, or read Horace

of course you can. Do you know why the Breton language in France is reduced to 200k speakers and the Académie française gets to determine how French is spoken? Because the state stamped out every regional language during the creation of the Republic, and that was that.

Are the native cultures of the new world almost gone because they're worse cultures? No, it's because they were defenseless. Did Chrisitanity and Islam spread because they "worked?" No, they were spread by sword or settlement.

China's experiment isn't new, it's not even an experiment really. how do you think the Romanization of large parts of the old world happened, or the Russification of much of Eastern Europe? Is Finland 'idiotic' for defending its culture? Are they actually just living in a worse culture and haven't realised it yet?

What a terrible might makes right logic.

>Because the state stamped out every regional language during the creation of the Republic, and that was that.

They had signs on the walls in Breton schools telling that "it's forbidden to spit on the ground, or speak Breton".

Malaysia, a former British colony, stopped teaching English in schools for the past 2 generations out of local pride.

Ironically, the generation older than that can still speak English, and roll their eyes when they have to translate for their adult kids who can't engage in tourism or trade.

>I think drastic action is the only way to do so. Building alternatives won't work

It sounds like you're calling for jackbooted thugs to go and shut down newspapers. This has historically not been a sign of a society headed in a good direction.

I am not. Thanks though.

Then what kind of drastic action against for profit media are we talking about?

My reading is that they're calling for jackbooted thugs to go and shut down the advertising driven parts of the software industry.

> A for-profit model is just not compatible with the nature of social media.

Agreed. I think we need to transition to something like Scuttlebutt, where no one controls the network. It solves the problems of profit incentives, government intervention and policing of content all at once. I've been writing about this a lot recently at https://adecentralizedworld.com

So what? You want to ban all websites with a comment section that are for profit? What about non-profits that make the founders rich by simply paying out a huge wage? Do you mean it should only be allowed to run on donations?

What if the US bans them, and Britain does not. Do you want the US government to systematically control the internet to prevent US citizens from using that British websites?

The things you say are easy to say, but hard to actually make in the real world without running into many more complications.

> So what? You want to ban all websites with a comment section that are for profit? What about non-profits that make the founders rich by simply paying out a huge wage? Do you mean it should only be allowed to run on donations?

No, I'm just pointing out that a for-profit structure necessarily clashes with the public value that these platforms produce. The only platform that escapes this conflict and functions quite well is Wikipedia. I don't think that's an accident.

> The things you say are easy to say, but hard to actually make in the real world without running into many more complications.

Yes, of course. My point is that we need to start thinking of solutions. If doing nothing had no consequences, I would be heavily in favor of doing nothing. But I believe it's clear that things are going quite wrong.

> What if the US bans them, and Britain does not. Do you want the US government to systematically control the internet to prevent US citizens from using that British websites?

I don't want anything to get banned. I don't want any government to unilaterally control the internet. I just want people from every country to have some democratic input into the massive tech platforms that heavily impact their daily lives. Perhaps international data rights legislation is the solution. I don't know. But we need to start taking these problems seriously and discussing real solutions -- not just creating federated Twitter clones that offer an unwieldy UX that the average user will never adopt.

Democratic input and regulatory oversight over discourse is in the same category as total surveillance: a perfectly benevolent operator would certainly be able to produce a better world with it, but we cannot trust anyone with that kind of power.

But we have before, at least in the US. It worked pretty well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

Just because there would be some democratic input doesn't mean there would be total democratic control. I think that's a pretty un-substantiated slippery slope.

The allocation of RF spectrum is unavoidable. It can be done in either time domain or frequency domain; the FCC opts for both.

Similar issues appear for the internet with respect to backbone capacity and video streaming, but political speech mostly doesn't encounter the kinds of scarcity problems that justify such a heavy hand.

Convert them into utilities

Reply on news.ycombinator.com