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Comment by Tenoke | Hacker News Reader

>Why the hell does one company get hold so much power in the world? More to the point, why does Mark Zuckerberg, an apparently immoral man-boy, get to make decisions like this?

It's a communication platform that some are using to communicate good things and some bad. People seriously talk like Zuckerberg is sitting in his office deciding which country to bring genocide to when it's absurd to think he has made a decision to that effect.

At this point I'm glad nobody owns email (officially) since people here would be calling for it to be censored and for email's CEO to stop causing human rights abuses, too.

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> Zuckerberg is sitting in his office deciding which country to bring genocide to when it's absurd to think he has made a decision to that effect

I don't find it absurd at all that one of the most powerful people on earth would make such decisions.

The point is not to give one person such power, not for us to decide if he is just an awkward mostly harmless geek (as portrayed in a movie) or not.

Genocides have happened countless times sans Facebook.

Your Honor, I did not steal that car because theft happened countless times without me.

I think the issue is more deep seated, we should sanction TCP

Propose a solution.

If decentralized, how will you stop incitement to genocide?

If government run, how will you stop political censorship and risk of authoritarian takeover?

If privately run, what changes are you suggested to the current approach?

I don't have a full solution, but as much as possible we need direct democratic control over how the algorithm works and tools to verify that it follows the agreed rules. Social networks should not be owned by "some guy" just as the court and the police, rather work according to the rules of society.

Zuckerberg should probably be compensated for the wealth he created, but he is not entitled to this level of control over sociaty.

Any sort of public control over ranking algorithms will create a situation where the spammers and scammers win. Even sites that rank by timeline suffer from this (Craigslist). I don't see a situation where there is enough control for external people to understand the intricacies, without suffering from spam and eliminating any usefulness.

As an example, check out social competitors like this Holonis (www.holonis.com). They are just pure spam and self-promotion - what naturally happens when people who are incentivized to figure out the algorithm for profit are given more clear mappings between inputs and outputs.

I imagine participation being tied to verifiable (but potentially private in some contexts) real world identity. This is needed for voting to make sense too. In such arrangement it seems not difficult to discourage spamming. As I see spamming strives in circumstances where it is possible to create lots of untraceable identities almost freely.

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