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It's not even clear that there's a solution here beyond let the platforms exercise their best judgement and sort of muddle along.

Ensuring a diversity of platforms with no one/two/three platforms controlling the vast majority of interaction would probably help.

People are free to use whatever platforms they want, you can't force the masses to use alternative platforms. Besides, the landscape is already very diverse, but the most popular platforms will always get the most media attention, it's not like using FB precludes the use of any other platform, most people who are active on social media are active on multiple sites. This just isn't a problem.

> People are free to use whatever platforms they want

8.1 million people wanted to use Parler. Obviously to me they can get a GNU-powered phone and Parler could get ported and they’d be free to use it. >999‰ of them probably have no idea those exist. >99‰ of them probably don’t even know what “jailbreak” means or that it’s legal, and ~900‰ probably don’t know how to do it or that they have the ability to learn it.

I have a Parler account.

I've known about PinePhone, Librem 5, and other variants since their inceptions.

I've jailbroken myriad devices for years.

I don't know where this idea you have that there aren't technical people - extremely technical people - across the political spectrum comes from, but you should probably disabuse yourself of that notion immediately.

What people want is 1) fair treatment regardless of political affiliation or belief and 2) ease of idea transmission.

There's nothing stopping people from spinning up a VM across the thousands of cloud service providers and creating their own little corner of the web, but that doesn't give you nearly the engagement of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. In fact, I'm willing to bet even the most trafficked personal websites don't get one-tenth of their associated YouTube / Snapchat / TikTok accounts.

How many people go to TaylorSwift.com versus her YouTube channel? Her TikTok channel? Her Twitter page?

> How many people go to TaylorSwift.com versus her YouTube channel? Her TikTok channel? Her Twitter page?

Is this something we should care about though? I understand why individuals care about engagement, but why should society care that Taylor Swift gets more views on TikTok vs her personal website? If you think we should care about it, what about all the people that get essentially zero engagement despite having access to those platforms and having something worthwhile to share?

>> why should society care that Taylor Swift gets more views on TikTok vs her personal website?

Because I know what the motive of TaylorSwift.com is. Its to promote Taylor Swift. I don't have to question it, I don't have to ask myself, "Are they promoting Taylor Swift because they like her political ideology, or because she makes a lot of money for TaylorSwift.com, or <insert a million other questions that I haven't asked and a million more I'm not smart enough to think of>?"

Sure, an argument could be made that visitors of root_axis.com aren't being exposed solely to what root_axis has to say, that in fact, root_axis.com is a Latvian honeypot designed to capture users information for the express purpose of Latvian national security interests. But that's a crackpot argument that is far less likely than say, TikTok's purpose is not just to generate money but to gather data about users for the CCP. You'd be more insane not to see that as a byproduct of TikTok, given ByteDance literally has CCP ties through and through.

>> what about all the people that get essentially zero engagement despite having access to those platforms and having something worthwhile to share?

This actually makes my case against the dominance of a platform or monopoly. Why are these people getting zero engagement? Are they bad at SEO? Did they not pay the Google tax? Are they being unfairly targeted because of <insert any potential reason>? Hard to say, nowadays.

>> Is this something we should care about though?

To answer your last question, I don't know. Maybe we shouldn't. I think these are serious problems though, and they're going to require serious thought. Or hey, maybe VisageTome, Honker, PopTalk, DingDong, and Immediapost overtake FaceBook, Twitter, SnapChat, TikTok, and Instagram and it all sorts itself out... who knows?

> Because I know what the motive of TaylorSwift.com is...

For what it's worth, I don't disagree with anything in those two paragraphs, but that's not what I meant. To be more clear, does it really matter if taylor swift has to settle for the engagement afforded her by taylorswift.com or should society view it as a problem that somethingpopular.com has the power to prevent her from engaging on that platform?

> This actually makes my case against the dominance of a platform or monopoly.

It's important to distinguish popularity from "dominance" or "monopoly". If you're using anything akin to MAUs to define dominance then your case is hopeless because you're effectively in opposition to the concept of popularity. Social media users aren't being held at gunpoint, they capriciously engage in any platform that gives them what they want on the internet at a given moment, social media is just one slice of that and is generally regarded as the least productive way to spend your time online.

> Why are these people getting zero engagement? Are they bad at SEO? Did they not pay the Google tax?

It's just the nature of physics, regardless of the factors involved, there are only so many spots available on the front-page. The overwhelming majority of social media users are less than a rounding error in terms of the engagement they will ever receive except for a minuscule fraction that might end up going viral for some reason.

> To answer your last question, I don't know. Maybe we shouldn't. I think these are serious problems though, and they're going to require serious thought.

I don't think it's a problem, it's basically a fight over who should get to be in the popular club. Not that I think there aren't other problems, in my view the ad model is the only problem. If companies that collect PII and track users were forbidden from selling ad space and had to take on a subscription model like netflix, suddenly the incentives would shift and all the bad behavior would stop. For people concerned about deplatforming, these companies would actually lose money in the form of subscriptions when they ban people rather than earn money by purging toxic content to please advertisers.

Ah, I see your arguments a lot more clearly now, and I agree with many of the points you've made.

To address your final points, because I think they're the most salient, yes, we need to move away from "free" services, and the sooner the better I think. Gmail / Hotmail / Whatevermail people are using has perpetuated the idea that email has no real value, but I think that's easily disproven by simply locking someone's account for a month. I guarantee you anyone living in the modern world without email for a month would immediately see the monetary value. This is why I pay for ProtonMail, among other reasons (chiefly privacy).

I think people really need to get into the mindset of paying for social media services as well. I don't think anyone can argue that Facebook has real, tangible value. It not only connects you to your friends and family, but the storage of media (videos, pictures, etc.) is also useful. I know some people whose entire family photo albums exist only on Facebook's servers. I don't know what kind of pricing would be reasonable... maybe as little as $1 a month for basic services, and then you pay more to unlock more storage for your photo uploads or something, but its a model that I think a lot of people might be interested in, if Facebook respected your privacy, etc.

Once again, I don't claim to know the answers, but I do know that we need to move away from the "free" model. My older brother told me 20 years ago, "If you go to a website, and you can't tell what the product is - you're the product." Seems as true now as it was then.

Parler is fine, they are in the process of switching to new hosting and already have the site running for top posters. Check the website. Beyond that, the vast majority of Parler users continue to use Facebook and Twitter they just follow the rules, same as you have to on Parler.

> Amazon algorithms for instance recommend "adult" fiction (with provocative cover art)

amazon publishes way more than that, NSFW, google "chuck tingle". The famous author of "space raptor butt invasion", and who can forget the literary masterpiece "pounded in the butt by my own butt"

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=chuck+tin...

WTF is even real life. There are hundreds of them. https://www.amazon.com/Chuck-Tingle/e/B00SF2MTYK

One of my favorite titles is "Creamed In The Butt By My Handsome Living Corn"

> and who can forget the literary masterpiece "pounded in the butt by my own butt"

Don't forget the meta-level 'Pounded in the Butt by My Book "Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt"'

I'm waiting for "Pounded in the Butt by the Sexy Seattle Amazon Product Recommendation Algorithm"

Well, ultimately the law is interpreted by humans, concepts like "good-faith effort" and "bona fide" exist despite those not being something you can exactly define in a law. But judges know it when they see it and it's not actually a problem in practice.

This is ultimately one of those things where computer scientists (specifically) freak out because the real world isn't zeroes and ones like they're used to, it's all shades of grey, but if you act in good taste it's probably not going to be a problem. Ban the cartel murderporn, show the aftermath of the bombing (or not, at your discretion), ban the nudists, but allow breastfeeding (or not, at your discretion), all of that sounds fine to me and we don't need to code an exact line into law.

This is really a common thread in HN threads discussing anything touching on laws or regulation, because computer touchers just can't wrap their head around the idea that the law isn't absolutely precisely defined in a state machine and the judge and jury are going to apply human reasoning. But that's how the legal system works.

I'm going to note that there is of course a degree of self-servingness in insisting that there be an exact line drawn. It's a way for Facebook to punt on actually having to moderate their platform and push that responsibility onto the courts, because they don't want to pay humans to deal with what is ultimately a human problem that needs to be solved in human ways. The nature of the world is that there are grey areas and some stuff in the grey area is fine and some stuff shouldn't be there, and it will take human intervention to decide which is which.

If you don't want to pay to do that, and you want to be 100% on the green side of the line, then you will have to default to very aggressive censorship that will probably annoy users, but that's the price of being on a free platform that doesn't want to pay for adequate moderation.

I think what you're missing is that FB does employ an army of content moderators to decide if something passes their bar or not. And these are low wage, button clicking jobs along the lines of the AWS mechanical turk where without very explicit clear guidelines, you fall flat on your face.

For context, reviewers apparently typically spend ~0-3 seconds to determine if a piece of content (mostly pictures) is acceptable. Given the pace of content creation, I'm amazed they even get that long, I assume algorithms do a lot of the heavy lifting as well.

Even if you have extremely smart reviewers, if your guidelines aren't clear and you leave it to the reviewer's interpretation, you'd likely get extremely inconsistent results and that feels like a worse product experience than having no moderation at all.

So either have the govt decide these guidelines (esp. on political speech) and let them eat humblepie or let the platform do it and don't complain when they ban the POTUS.

I address this in another top comment as well. Just additional perspective.

You can't predict the future, so you have to find the one thing(s) to protect in all cases. And like you say, it can not be subjective. In Gov't Tech Acquisitions regulation the single objective is to protect and enable small and disadvantage businesses.

Perhaps it could be the same with platforms that propagate info, but there is risk in creating a competitive environment without some form of formal trust system. It does seem ambitious / hard to think about.

> So yeah, I think Zuck will be more than happy to say, please tell us what to allow on the platform and we'll follow it to the letter and deflect the blame to the regulators.

He would never do that. He needs regular users to stay on the platform. The censorship isn't to appease government regulators, it's to keep from alienating regular people who don't want to be exposed to it. Deflecting blame to the regulators wouldn't stop users from leaving and heading to a platform that did more effective damage control.

He's been saying that pretty consistently for several years though.. too lazy to dig up the links.

Regular users might be somewhat impacted (if their bill gates is tracking us through vaccines post gets removed for example) but most people I'd say just want to post their breakfast / travel photos on Facebook than deal with QAnon conspiracies.

>... you need a team of lawyers to exercise judgement on if content is allowed or not allowed on a platform.

No you don't. The platform is private property, they can decide whether or not they want such content, no lawyers needed. When someone gets banned or flagged on HN, does anyone mention lawyers getting involved? Of course not.