— It doesn’t really matter if those eyeballs are satisfied or not. There is no transaction taking place.
— Most eyeballs can’t really leave, since service is free and all their friends are here.
— There’s nowhere to leave to anyway, as new companies can’t compete with “free” (unless they are extraordinarily well-funded. As in, by a nation-state).
— If eyeballs complain and make $platform be regulated by the government (forcing some sort of user representation, oversight of habit-forming tech use, etc.), all the better—targeted regulation would lend it the status of a public good, implying approval, solidifying its already almost-monopoly. Meanwhile, business model will find its way as user representatives and lawmakers are lobbied, regulations can’t keep up with the tech, and politics proliferate.
The root problem is that users are tricked into thinking they are customers of a service for which they are not paying. This is at odds with the way the market is supposed to work.
If we take away this trick—the core idea where a platform survives off advertiser money—we might just be able to finally let the market do its job, move towards heterogenous social tech landscape and vote with our wallets rather than being exploited.
That's why governments need to mandate interoperability of social networks, using ActivityPub and similar protocols.
As a consequence:
1) fully-featured third-party cross-platform client software allows users to transition across platforms more easily,
2) platforms start bleeding users,
3) platforms start charging for service,
4) platforms become pipes.
There are implications, though:
1) big tech might find ways to pretend to be smaller entities;
2) this does not guarantee that user data privacy is respected, but ideally this creates a scenario in which the user is free to choose a more ethical provider;
3) client app security & ethics will become paramount, client apps will become valuable targets;
4) downgrade to pipes will end of the age of cool Web 2.0 platforms and grand social startups. Unfortunately, I don’t see any other way—this business model is user- (society-?) hostile yet addictive, and there seems no other way around it apart from WeChat-like nationalization which is objectionable for a whole other chunk of reasons.
Possibly. If FB et al did, they would have to become a lot more responsive to users.
> 4) platforms become pipes.
Not sure what you mean by that.
It sounds nice in theory, but in practice I suspect such a regulation would at best accomplish nothing and at worst would be a disaster. How do you even define a "social network?" The regulation would either be too broad and wind up covering the comments section of HN, or too narrow and easy to evade. In all likelihood the outcome would be similar to GDPR -- the big companies that inspire it would have little difficulty with compliance while startups would find it that much harder to compete.
HN is clearly a social network. What I envisage is a regulation that applies to social networking and user-generated content sites with greater than a certain number of users, e.g. 1 million.
Obviously there shouldn't be onerous regulation on small sites.
"User representation" sounds nice, but I wonder how that would work in practice. After all, there is "citizen representation" in modern democratic governments but most decisions are being architected by closed door committees free from competing ideas as well.
One of the examples that comes to mind is the battle of activists with ICE. ICE is a government agency, so activists, being citizens, at least in theory have a say in how it is run. Instead, one of their main tactics is shaming private companies for cooperating with ICE, which is kind of backwards if you take the idea of "citizen representation" at face value.
Should some kind of democratic process apply to such organisations?
> Should some kind of democratic process apply to such organisations?
I've wondered what would be some effective ways to add more user voice in the ownership and governance process of these platforms. Do you have any ideas?
Also, I think it might be underused right now because it's probably really hard for most people around the world to move to another country for various reasons: financial, social, linguistic, legal, etc.
I agree that moving countries can help people, I think it is currently a huge task for most and ironically, believe that better relationships between countries and an overarching form of governance may make it easier to do.
I agree. I think one of the hardest things for most people when moving from one actual country to another is leaving behind the people and has been the hardest thing for me when I've decided to delete FB or stop visiting certain internet communities.
While there are many definitions of a state, I just learned that Max Weber defines it as "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory" [0]. This makes me think more about what a state would look like if it were a human community organized around a digital territory and what that means for the future (and present).
The obvious answer would seem to be structure them as cooperatives.
Allow service users to purchase shares at a nominal value, and restrict voting rights to one member one vote - that is, shareholder votes are not weighted based on how many shares one has, owning more shares would only enable one to earn more interest on the shares' capital.
Alternatively, all shares (or maybe just 50%+1) could be held in trust for the benefit of the users. Trustees would then have responsibility of taking users' needs in to account.
It's incorporated as a public limited company, but all of its shares are owned in trust.
I'm curious how governance (not just government, but even governance of orgs and other platforms) adapts to a world that more and more abstracts away physical space.
Facebook may have business relationships with other private entities I use, and as a side effect receive some of my information, but Facebook is nothing like the government.
I also think most governments haven't regulated online interaction very much, for better or worse. Which means most online interaction is moderated/regulated/controlled by the platforms that host them. Yes, Facebook won't throw me in physical jail, however they could suspend or even ban my account. If I don't use it, not such a big deal. If it's the only way I communicate with 90% of the friends in my life and I run my business on there, it could be a huge detriment. They could even just tweak the algorithm of posting, without me knowing, and all of a sudden, my friends and family aren't receiving the messages I'm sending, without me knowing. Not just Facebook, but Amazon, Google, Visa, Stripe, Paypal, and many other platforms have huge power over our digital lives.
Is getting banned from Twitter the same as getting thrown in physical jail? Personally, in most cases, I don't think so. However, I still think these platforms can have a lot of power over one's life.
Leaving seems like almost zero representation to me. Now, it doesn't mean zero freedom, yes, people have freedom to leave. I just don't see that as representation.
Honestly, I'm not sure how it would look. I imagine it might feel different. I imagine I might feel a little more hopeful, instead of so helpless. A little more calm, less filled with dread. I imagine I might feel a little more relaxed, believing I have some say in a safety valve to keep the platform going, in case some leader takes it in a direction that most of us don't want.
I don't know if I'd even want direct democracy, where we users vote on feature prioritization and other nitty-gritty details, I may like some type of representative democracy.
I don't know. It may not look different but maybe it would feel different. Does that make any sense?
If Facebook makes you feel "helpless" and "filled with dread", then probably the most empowering choice is to stop using Facebook.
- Ronald Coase's "islands of conscious power"
- Herbert Simon "Organizations and Markets"
- Both of which I discovered via "The People’s Republic of Walmart" by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
A quote from Simon:
"The economies of modern industrialized society can more appropriately be labeled organizational economies than market economies. Thus, even market-driven capitalist economies need a theory of organizations as much as they need a theory of markets. The attempts of the new institutional economics to explain organizational behavior solely in terms of agency, asymmetric information, transaction costs, opportunism, and other concepts drawn from neo-classical economics ignore key organizational mechanisms like authority, identification, and coordination, and hence are seriously incomplete."