Jack Dorsey has regrets about building Twitter
twitter.com
twitter.com
Though I'm not entirely sure it matters much which one of those is the case here. The difference between cynical exploitation and illconceived idealism isn't much when assessing the results.
For example, here they do heating of historical buildings (old castles etc - necessary for preservation of wall paintings and other artefacts) with BTC mining. That's good for environment because without the additional funds they would have to burn coal.
There are renewable energy projects that are economical only thanks to Bitcoin, for example a nearby solar park. Not every place has year round sunshine, so you must overbuild significantly - but that costs a lot of money and also destabilizes the electrical grid when there's too much sunshine in the summer. Solution is simple - use the excess energy for mining, fund half the park with revenue from it. The same is done with wind energy.
Same logic.
No matter how creative you get with the accounting, in the final analysis you're burning a lot of electricity with nothing tangible to show for it.
Electricity costs also scale. You're paying 1/4 the electricity cost to heat your "castle" with a heat pump. That - in itself - is very important.
Unless you know about someone here who would offer this kind of deal with heatpumps, it's passe. The castle does not have enough money to invest, they're using donations from people to at least fix the most important problems - so projects like this are extremely important because every cent counts.
They can't invest $XXk and hope it returns in 30 years because they're never going to have that sum to invest, and if they had, they would use it to fix the castle, not for heat pumps. The castle needs it now, not in 30 years.
Can someone help me describe the rhetorical device being used here? “Pyrrhic victory” comes to mind, which describes a win where the cost was so severe it outweighs the benefits, like considering “heating old castles” to be an environmental win while the cost of such is running roughshod over the rest of the world’s environment, but that’s the name for a concept that describes this argument, not the rhetorical device.
Not like we want to expand our gas usage anyways as here we buy it all from Russia, right?
Czech electricity companies allow you to choose your energy mix (green/standard).
2) If you really cared, as a society, you'd pay for the (more efficient!) heat pumps through taxes. Funding inefficient heating with Bitcoin just offloads the financial burden to new Bitcoin investors and is unsustainable in the long run anyway. TANSTAAFL.
2) "if you really cared as a society" is not useful when there's simply not enough money in this society. We're not funding anything, this is a private project. The castle is buying some heat from them for a damn good price, that's it.
It's better to use energy at times of overabundance for something economically useful (money to make the renewable project cheaper = affordable), than to just throw the energy away. If Bitcoin can make renewables more economical, we can stop burning fossil fuels faster. And if Bitcoin causes coal to be replaced with anything, that's a win for the environment too - even if it's a net increase of energy usage and heat, it's still a net decrease of greenhouse gas production which is much more important that reducing energy usage.
On the other hand if you can have a green energy project fund itself with bitcoin while being even slightly net positive then I think that's useful, if only because it'll increase funding to green energy producers and that's a good thing (more users should allow for the benefits of economy of scale).
Storing excess clean energy, now that would help the enviroment. Using excess clean energy for BTC means storage needs to compete with BTC, making storage economically less feasible.
So BTC not only uses lots of dirty energy, it also hinders innovation in using excess clean energy. BTC is just terrible for the environment.
What if someone could create some sort of system that would be geographically localized in order to reduce spam? This was sort of how things worked in the BBS days.
Then ask for channels while stating your interests. Probably the fastest way.
'- winning at all cost (bots, paid advertising, spam) '- the loudest / crassest gets the most information
Also he said pgp was good so maybe the whole post should be discounted as bogus...
Why? Says who? If I may assume you’re Catholic based on this, can you show me where in Catholic teaching we (non inclusive “we” as I’m not Catholic) are to hold outsiders to the same standard as fellow Catholics?
If you’re not Catholic, then by what right do you, or does anyone, withhold forgiveness? Forgiveness, in the sense from your quote, can only be given or withheld by a higher authority. Who is the higher authority withholding or giving forgiveness to Jack Dorsey here? And what do you know about this higher authority’s intent to give or withhold forgiveness?
Forgiveness, in the interpersonal sense, is not for the offender but for the offended, and withholding forgiveness in this interpersonal sense is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. In other words, withholding forgiveness is utterly absurd. (I do not say it’s easy to forgive, just that refusing is absurd.)
Unless they're sex workers or queer artists, who are banned from the platform.
Not really, no. The card processors hoist a bunch of restrictions, arbitrary and stupid, on adult businesses, but they do ultimately not have a flat ban on transactions with them. That was Square's decision.
I don't blame him personally on any level but you don't get to have it both ways. You don't get to profit at this level at the expense of society and then make an after the fact moral claim when you try to fix the damage you helped cause.
It’s even easier to say Twitter is bad if you haven’t made millions from Twitter. In fact almost everyone can say Twitter is bad.
And crypto of course slots neatly into that same Wired/Jaron-Lanier/early-Burning-Man sect. I think this is a case of the simplest explanation being the likeliest: He's telling the truth, and he's a huge dork.
Tristan Harris gave a compelling talk a couple of years ago that dug into this question without assigning moral blame on us. [0] He's identified several principles, probably familiar to most of us and seemingly innocent, that he says have led us to where we are now:
* Give users what they 'want'
* Disrupt everything
* Technology is neutral
* Who are we to choose what our userbase does with our platform?
* Value growth at all costs
* Design our interfaces to convert users
* Obsess over metrics
Tristan is part of the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit that, in my opinion, deserves more of our attention.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQh2FQ7MZdA&t=22m51s ; timestamped for the specific question, but the whole talk is worth a watch
If OKR A reaches B, we'd be valued at C, which would mean my stock option would be worth D.
That's what everyone was, is, and will be thinking.
I think the trick is that most people don't want to feel like the bad guy. They have to be able to convince themselves that what they're doing isn't harmful in order to avoid internal moral conflicts. The principles we hear about tech & neutrality give us enough leeway to feel okay about our actions even if the outcomes are toxic. (Which, to your point, lets us cash in when we hit our targets.)
Twitter (the technology) is okay. It turns out people work poorly when you put them all in the same room and let them shout at each other.
What's not fine is people: they prefer to be in a place in which they can yell at each other about how much more virtuous they are than their villains.
It feels good to vilify somebody. It feels good to verbally punch a nazi.
I don't know what we can replace Twitter with that will make people less interested in public displays of virtue as they stand up to their ideological enemies.
When Reddit is hosting racists, it's easy to blame Reddit (and, more specifically, easy to put pressure on them to deny those users a forum on Reddit's servers). When such content is on a distributed, federated system, it's up to individual service providers how much of a tolerance they'll have for speech others consider completely unacceptable. Some will choose not to host it, some will perhaps choose to host it (and others can choose to peer with them or not)... But in general, there will be more variety of opinions represented in what is "acceptable behavior" when there are many distributed systems instead of a few centralized ones. This does, of course, increase the complexity of accessing them...
... honestly, this probably mirrors societal development as a whole. In a town of frontiersmen, you barely have enough time to worry about what goes on in your neighbor's house. In a city, where you can hear your neighbor through the walls (and have deeply-intertwined interdependency networks through which pressure can be applied), you both have more reason to care and more tools to pressure someone to conform.
... all of that having been said, to take a step back from the mechanical and consider the philosophical, I'm not sure it's an inherently virtuous thing that my frontier neighbor could be out there doing Texas Chainsaw Massacre stuff and there's little structural pressure that can be applied to get him to cut it out...
You mean the guy who has a Netflix documentary AND has been on Joe rogan? I literally can’t think of bigger audience coverage in 2022 than those two
If you try to imagine early Twitter it seemed like something people liked. Surely microblogging was easier to get into than microblogging. And the centralisation made it easier for friends to follow each other. I don’t think it was particularly obvious how it might go wrong. For example there wasn’t much of an algorithm for a while (feeds were chronological) except for a ‘trending’ section. But HN has a trending-like section – the front page – and it seems to work out ok.
Basically, I claim that ‘we’ thought they were a good idea and that they fitted in with the optimistic world-connecting zeitgeist of the early internet. I don’t really know what else people were thinking (well obviously there was some level of ‘we think these numbers correspond to a good service for our users and investors so we want to make them go up’ and ‘we sell ads to make money’)
This isn’t to say that the results were good but I think the efforts were generally serious and well-intentioned. If you look at something which is ‘anti-Facebook’, the GDPR, I think a similar thing can be said: the law was carefully written with deliberate goals and it’s authors seemed to seriously believe it would achieve them. I think we’ll find it didn’t work as well as intended but I hope I won’t browse HN in 2032 and see someone saying ‘what were lawmakers thinking when they drafted these terrible data-protection laws?’
Reports like this were incredibly common back in 2009. Few heeded these warnings. Now, outlets like The Washington Post depend on the whims of billionaires in order to survive, some huge chunk of the U.S. population incorrectly believe the last election was stolen, and our data is legally harvested to further manipulate the population.
In any case, it certainly seemed like a bad idea to me personally - and the point is more that there were indeed many people yelling "stop!"
As for whether employees could have done anything - I just really don't think they have as much influence as you suggest. Most jobs you have a boss, they say what your tasks are and very little is actually up for negotiation. Obviously there are exceptions, and I assume some rather lofty idealistic founders in the valley may offer individual start-up employees more influence. In general though, that isn't what happens at the average job.
edit: also - Hacker News probably isn't the best place to sample from if you're trying to get a read on the pulse of society. Comments tend towards reactionary, dismissive, and shallow. Further, you're basically just sampling from (mostly) wealthy male programmers and aspiring founders. This spectrum ranges from "I just do my job and go home" to "how could our platform be causing issues? it connects so many people!" Zuckerberg-esque naivety.
* Advertising
* Massive inequality
Preferential attachment creates winner-takes-all outcomes. aka Power law distribution of attention. It's something like a law of nature. The stuff Harris lists are second order effects, at best.
Twitter and others did two things:
First, they reduced transaction costs. Discovery, foraging, communication. All the costs fell thru the floor. Every one, including me, thought this was a great idea, and expected great outcomes. Not until Clay Shirky do I even recall a concern or criticism about this.
Second, recommenders accelerated winner-takes-all. Given the high stakes and shortened shelf lifes, gaming the system became all out war.
@jack wrote:
> centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet.
The only part right here is forfeiting a core pillar of civil society -- authenicity (identity) -- to a paper clip maximizing corporation that has no regard for or responsibility to that society.
We let the fox guard the hen house.
There's a way to undo the harm he's already done, but I don't know if he can make that sort of change at this point.
A community is a generous thing to call a bunch of Discord channels. Twitter Inc could have had a seat at the table with the W3C federated social web peeps but decided to ignore everything and do its own thing.
In 2008, Evan Prodromou himself gave us something the cool kids will use anyway (the Fediverse), despite what gets cooked up at bs web <dot> xyz.
EDIT: Bluesky is an embodiment of anti-competitive Not-Invented-Here Syndrome. It should be shunned. If you want to develop open protocols, the proper channels would be to play within the friendly confines of a group like the W3C. If you want to know how I really feel, I feel like Bluesky is destined to fail due to its untrustworthy origins (no offense to the people involved, Golda is an amazing person and has been doing her best so far).
By opening the door, diffusion can take place over time.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eus-digital-markets-act-adop...
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2012/tweets-still-must-flow
I've been on the internet since the 90s, and centralization was inevitable from the start and visible from the early days.
Independent bloggers started blog rolls where they link to other bloggers. And soon you could find this copycat behavior where everybody linked to the same "top" bloggers, establishing hierarchy. All traffic to a handful, the rest gets nothing.
In absence of search engines, we had portals with links. But the real estate is limited, so again hierarchy is established. All traffic to the head, none to the tail.
Then we "democratized" it with things like Digg.com, but not really. A handful of people (at one point in fact only one user) decides what gets on the homepage.
Now things are far worse even with influencers snowballing into power and algorithms promoting what plays on our emotions.
You'll see this pattern everywhere you go.
And now Google requires a phone number to create an email?
I know that there are services like https://www.gmailnator.com and https://www.receivesms.org/us-numbers/us/, but it doesn't always work.
Running a basic email server is relatively easy. Running a mail server with good deliverability guarantees is very hard. You can end up blacklisted just because someone in the same IP block as you is sending spam. Your only solution will be to change IPs repeatedly until you get one with a good reputation, up until someone starts spamming again. You can be blacklisted because your domain or IP simply don't have enough historical data to determine whether it's likely spam.
Often there won't be a clear answer to why you're blacklisted. If Gmail sends your stuff to the spam box, good luck getting Google to tell you why.
It's not insurmountable; you can do it, but be prepared to invest an absurd amount of time setting it up and trying to set up automated delivery tests to make sure you haven't been blacklisted since you set it up.
Yeah, they make it hard to get an email address semi-anonymously and then when you create your own server, they block you for "spam"
What I'm trying to say here is that we can get email or other identities other than the ones we make on our own. Perhaps we should be doing this identity-tying more often? Many people get email addresses from their employer and aren't expected to move those addresses around when they change jobs.
For example
I had address@email-hosting.com and after a few years I stopped using it
after some years I tried to sign into my account and realized that it doesn't exist
and to my shock I was able to create account with that address again!
Email in my opinion lacks of "broadcast account being closed" option or something like that
It's good. we dont need perfect systems, neither should an email be tied to our real existence or our whole existence . "Real name" identities was a mistake. Semi-anonymous, expendable identity is better
usenet, irc, email with PGP... these still exist, and many people still use them.
Using proper indexers and *arr software make using Usenet a breeze.
What changed/evolved was the profit motive to operate and control the internet.
I think mastodon and the other reimplement-just-not-centralized projects struggle because they don’t have a low/non profit central patron. But no one really does software platform as a public service much anymore. Even something like GitHub, which starts out feeling that way, gets bought, and then starts to drift towards profit feedback motives.
People don’t care how it really works or who are the people behind it. People just want money and ultimately want to forget their problems through it.
Then again, I was very much into mischief and that’s how I grew up. Social media is low-level stuff that bores the hell out of me because it serves no tangible purpose no matter how hard you try.
Those days had meaning to them because of many factors, but mostly because everything felt new, fresh, and not filtered through hundreds of opinions or social norms.
There was a really good opportunity to create communities and really bring on unified connections between blogs.
But big money really wanted to centralize it and monitize it.
Today, there is no technical barrier to publishing things on the web, which has been facilitated in part by corporations like Twitter.
I think the second is a lot more what Tim Berners-Lee envisioned, as the "read-write" web [1].
However I also think much of the second is awful.
Twitter uses AI to boost inauthentic activity.
Perhaps if Twitter had adopted Square's strategy from the start, its current market cap would be more comparable.
Perhaps it's for the best to save everyone from themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ
In the last 3 years, what exactly did he do? Nothing. The situation got significant worse.
Worse yet, because of their size they are 'too big to fail' and so they flagrantly allowed to break the law and violate free speech? Section 230 liability protections limits their ability to censor. Twitter is certainly in violation of Section 230. They simply need to stop doing this. That's it. Fire any twitter employee who isn't a free speech absolutist.
Eventually Twitter will hit the wrong topic to censor and they will collapse so rapidly just like digg and how many others. I am very surprised it hasn't happened to date.
Hunter Biden's laptop is real now? Censored on Twitter because it's 'hacked' or illegitimate or whatever. How many Trudeau Tyranny trends have been censored for no valid reason. We are counting.
Meanwhile, the givesendgo hacked information of freedom protest donors was not only allowed... it was bumped up into trending. CBC covered it widely. Government then used hacked data to seize people's bank accounts.
I dont see parler/mastodon/gab as true alternative to twitter yet. Twitter can fix themselves. They can move into compliance with Section 230. They can return free speech to their platform. If someone comes along to hostile takeover twitter and makes this change... they are going to be worth a trillion $.
How would that change anything.
How do you handle the things you regret in life??
He's a schmuck.
Freedom of speech doesn’t imply the freedom to be heard. It just means you shouldn’t go to jail for saying something stupid. But now we have a million stupid people demanding the right to scream at us. And they are using that right for their own material betterment, at the expense of everything, most especially the truth.
It’s how the rest of it played out.
1. Easy to setup on various tech helping unbanked as well. 2. To use it for payouts / fiat KYC and AML needs to be performed. 3. Tied to a person similar to a phone / email but not to a specific device.
Now since he left, he is doing the same thing but for crypto.
The grift continues.
There are upsides to the new world though. That filter wasn't exclusively good. Computers were a lot more expensive. Poorer communities lacked access. People without tech savvy are often still pretty smart and have good points to make.
There was a period of time where social media was just starting out where the filter has essentially been removed (anyone can easily join and start producing & consuming content) but harmful content wasn't yet encouraged. Social media was about keeping up with your friends' content, and while I'm sure harmful & divisive content was present, you had to explicitly seek it out (by liking/following the right accounts).
Nowadays all social media uses algorithms that promote content that will yield the maximum amount of "engagement" on your part so you increase the time spend on the platform and the amount of ads watched.
Engaging in civil discourse on a hot topic typically ends with one side being accused of something heinous. That’s not harmful. That’s blatant censorship.
Currently, the algorithm will prioritize content that produces the most "engagement", including even content that you otherwise have no link with and don't follow the user who posted it. Divisive, outrageous, hateful or blatantly fake content will typically generate tremendous amounts of engagement (as people start arguing over it) as opposed to mundane content such as updates from your friends.
There's also no way to have "civil discourse" when the algorithm prioritizes the hottest takes as opposed to more reasonable arguments.
But social media live on ads. They tend to promote contents that cater to wide audiences.
If I'm only interested in a few niches, social media are a big waste of time. The contents and the discussions around them.
If anything, maybe the algorithm should do the opposite and discourage arguments?
Prior to social media there was usenet, specialized forums, imageboards such as 4chan, and mass use of IRC. The average social media user would recoil in horror at the 'divisive' content that was common to that time period. REAL neonazis spread their message with impunity, anarchists gathered and distributed tutorials on how to make homemade weaponry, illegal pornography was rampant, and mass shooters were glorified. The 'divisive' content of today is quite tame and is focused primarily on promoting the interests of one of a handful of relatively similar political parties over the others. My point being that social media has amplified the voices of billions, but the money machine behind it has toned the violent poltical rhetoric of the net down to a dull roar. Anyone claiming otherwise is either misinformed or has something they want to sell you. </rant>
Imo the danger of modern social media’s algorithmic feeds is that it draws in otherwise perfectly normal people, who would never voluntarily seek out the divisive content that gets promoted on their feeds. So now we have the worst of both worlds: platforms with violent political rhetoric are still highly available to those who would seek them out, and more average folks are drawn to seek them out by the “dull roar” that draws them in on the major social platforms.
I would submit that they are no longer highly available or their core userbase has moved on to the "dark web". The genius of the centralized social media platform is that it lives on advertising dollars. The advertisers will pull back whenever a platform becomes too uncontrolled. This was the case when Pewdiepie's accidental Nazi reference video was released. A massive pullback in advertising dollars 'forced' YouTube to reconsider its previously lax content policies and policing. That's not to say that YouTube is some pleasant walled garden, but rather that those creating videos and making real money from the site are incentivized to police their own behavior and rhetoric. Most people talking about 'divisive' content are talking around the Trump/QAnon fiasco. Which is very different from the internet I grew up on where even on a 'kids site' you would often see users calling for outright genocide of specific racial groups.
Given the amount of content out there, there's potential to be stuck in a local maximum where there's enough harmful content to cause negative externalities, but not enough to be seen as the majority of the content. This is reinforced by algorithmic feeds and targeted advertising where there's just no way for someone (whether the advertisers themselves or an independent watchdog) to tell what's actually going on, since their feed will be significantly different from someone stuck in an echo chamber full of harmful content.
> Most people talking about 'divisive' content are talking around the Trump/QAnon fiasco
Not even Trump per-se. The problem goes far beyond Trump and his political party when he - the supposed "leader" - gets booed by his own crowd. QAnon is just one example of terribly harmful content out there, but there's plenty more, from the Covid vaccine conspiracies, alternative "medicine", or just plain racism/nationalism and neo-Nazism.
> where even on a 'kids site' you would often see users calling for outright genocide of specific racial groups.
The forum software wasn't promoting said content though, so they were likely to remain a minority, which is both easier to control and explain away ("there are bad people on the Internet, learn to ignore it"). Facebook on the other hand will happily keep feeding you more and more of said content if it sees that you engage with it.
The content was segregated and you explicitly had to seek it out. Not to mention, there was no algorithm to ease you into it, so even someone whose political views would lean towards a particular affiliation might recoil in horror at the craziness they'd see on one of those "specialized forums", where as Facebook will happily ease you in bit by bit until the craziness appears normal, even if you originally had no intention of reading about/discussing politics and just wanted to keep up with your friends' holiday pictures.
> is focused primarily on promoting the interests of one of a handful of relatively similar political parties over the others
I disagree. I believe the vast majority of divisive content nowadays is created & promoted by random people who don't benefit financially from it; in fact there's no single source (political party, etc) that would pay to originate this stuff, instead Facebook and other social media just use any divisive content to increase ad impressions, regardless of the political affiliation of said content. I'm sure political parties sometimes benefit from these "useful idiots" but even they don't actually fully control the narrative.
There are private firms working in cahoots with state actors to influence opinion and shape narrative all across the internet and especially on social media.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica...
You're both wrong, and you're both right. Facebook isn't focused on promoting the interests of any particular political party. But there are political forces abusing Facebook's algorithms to promote their message. Most recent example: https://apnews.com/article/china-tiktok-facebook-influencers...
Today...well, for more than a decade now, to do moderation at scale and emerge content you have to automate it, and Internet is now a giant business, so the incentives are totally different and so are the outcomes. There can be still a few happy islands where life is good as it was, and by number of users they are probably even bigger than ~2000 Internet, but they are now minority.
This was stuff you had to look for. I certainly looked for it and found it, but it was also trivially avoidable.
> REAL neonazis spread their message with impunity
Still plenty of "real" neonazis on the internet, and a lot more friendly venues for them if they stick to those ideas of theirs that have become more popular since they were once ghettoized on Stormfront, and keep the master race talk to coded memes and oblique references.
I agreed with this until I started seeing more information about how much divisive content there is on whatsapp, which isn’t algorithmic or driven by anything other than people, similar to old email forward chains.
We don’t like the algorithmic feeds and everything else because they’re a big mirror that just reflects back how humans act, and we don’t like what we see. The algorithms themselves aren’t the problem IMO.
I would say that Whatsapp is a big mirror, not of how humans act, but of how humans behave in other social media.
I think this narrative has been blown out of proportion.
The “algorithm” has become an easy stand-in to blame nebulous programmers for people choosing to view content they want to see.
The “algorithm” isn’t literally a model trained to recognize divisive content and promote it to as many people as possible. It doesn’t have motives or intentions. It’s literally just a recommendation engine that suggests similar content to people.
Platforms without algorithms are still full of divisive content which spreads virally. Some of the worst content on the internet won’t be found on Facebook or other moderated platforms at all. You have to work to get to it, and people do the work to get there. No algorithms to blame, just people.
We really need to stop giving people a pass and stop piling our complaints on to the “algorithm”. People who make bad choices and consume bad content are doing so on their own volition, and we need to treat it as such if you want to make progress on the solution. Railing against faceless personifications of algorithms isn’t going to get us anywhere on solving these social problems.
Mostly agreed, though I don't believe "similarity" is the only factor - "engagement" is also a factor, likely a big one considering the business model of the company.
Yes, the algorithm doesn't have intentions or political bias (yet?), however it doesn't take a genius to infer that divisive content will generate more engagement than other, mundane content, and even more so when the algorithm has been deployed to production and there's real-world data to prove this.
> Platforms without algorithms are still full of divisive content which spreads virally.
Without algorithms the only way this content would spread is for people to explicitly re-share it to their friends - it will not pop up "organically" otherwise. You will need to explicitly attach your name to it if you were to share it, and be ready to defend it and bear the risk of being ostracized from your group. This also means that as long as you choose your Facebook "friends" carefully, you can curate your feed and keep craziness or other irrelevant content at bay.
> Some of the worst content on the internet won’t be found on Facebook or other moderated platforms at all. You have to work to get to it, and people do the work to get there. No algorithms to blame, just people.
And thankfully that worst content has (yet?) to make it to my non-technical friends' Facebook feeds, so it seems like the system is working as designed? Twisted people will keep finding & producing said content, but it's contained and will not make its way onto mainstream platforms without explicit efforts from those people and everyone else on the network to re-share it multiple times.
> People who make bad choices and consume bad content are doing so on their own volition
Disagreed. People went onto Facebook (or other social media) to keep in touch with their friends & family, but over time, the algorithm was locking them into an echo chamber full of whatever divisive, harmful, false or outright crazy content it could find as long as it was driving "engagement" numbers up.
If you could travel back in time and ask some of the people that stormed the Capitol or are forever lost in the QAnon conspiracy whether they thought they would do so when they initially joined Facebook, I bet they would call you crazy. In fact, I bet a large chunk of those people are old enough to know the "old" Internet and yet didn't turn to extremism until the craziness was delivered to them in a nice, harmless-looking format.
A buddy of mine worked for a big tech company in the early 2000's when a fantastic resume came across his desk from an applicant for a developer job (this would've been around 2003-2004). My friend googled him and very quickly found that this guy ran a white supremacy forum (the candidate made no effort to conceal his true identity on the forum and his profile included a photo). Talk about a different time.
My friend didn't really know what to do because he feared a discrimination lawsuit if he outright rejected the candidate so he reached out to some folks for advice. They eventually found another good candidate so they got to play the "we found someone better" card, even though they had no intention of hiring the first guy.
You have to look for them just like you would have to look for a good IRC/Forum/Blog back then. The bar of entry is discoverability and what your interests are. I highly doubt that finding dedicated beekeeping community is harder now than it was 20 years ago...
- Reset their Facebook password
- Use more than 1 password for all of their accounts, social media, email, and banking included
- Use their TV if an HDMI device switches it to an unfamiliar input
- Stop (or start) push notifications for any app on their phone
The filter didn’t get lower, but a lower on-ramp was build that’s just low enough to let a 75yo create a Facebook account with their Hotmail.
But they also made the Internet so much more diverse and non-tech centered. Which is really beautiful.
For example, a brief excursion to the nearest Geocities archive will immediately demonstrate that access to the Internet was by no means something exclusive to tech nerds and academics even around year 2000.
Plus, the notion that "access" is even the right thing to measure is nonsensical. It's pretty obvious that big tech employees want to get a pat on the back for the fact that every homeless drug addict in US probably has a smartphone now. The real question is whether this "access" is actually beneficial to the poor or just creates a larger pool of individuals for big tech to parasitize and profiteer from.
I have similar periods where I nostalgically remember the old internet through my favorite memories.
But whenever I look at old archives or use the Wayback Machine to revisit old websites I remember that the old internet had a huge amount of trolling, vitriol, and otherwise low-effort and toxic content. It’s easy to forget just how bad the flame wars could be or how toxic some of the internet spaces could become.
Even today, some of the most vitriolic and toxic online communities can trace their lineage back to the early 2000s internet scene. Facebook and Twitter get a lot of bad press, but the most toxic content I’ve seen comes from places like Reddit, 4Chan, and various offshoots.
Reddit is perhaps the perfect example of this dichotomy. Mention Reddit in a negative way and it’s defenders will quickly jump in to explain that it’s “not that bad if you pick the right subreddits”. Yet the front page is always full of misinformation and Reddit has a famous history of hosting a lot of subreddits that sexualized minors until they were reluctantly forced to make a policy against it due to negative news coverage.
It made me realize that some people truly do not think critically about the impact of their work. I think Facebook inadvertently selects for those kinds of people (or at least filters out people on the other end of the spectrum).
There are internal discussions into ethical/moral consequences of decisions. Large organizations dedicated towards privacy, security, and integrity are given power to ensure the company operates ethically. It’s not perfect but it’s a hell of a lot more than most do.
I hate this moralization of companies btw. Companies are not good or bad, but they are capable of causing harm or good. Instead I see it often used because person X decides that they hate company Y, so in their mind they label the company as “evil” or “bad”. But of course they ignore harmful behaviors that their own company are making.
I’ve heard it all from folks in industry. Customer data leaking into Slack channels, data security being non-existent, no audit trails available in investigations, implementing only SMS MFA because it’s quicker and let’s them focus on more “impactful” projects. Ignoring verified accounts being sold on marketplaces. Making decisions which ultimately make the company a juicy target for attackers, without a discussion of trade-offs. Promoting culture which prioritize the company’s goals over the safety of users. Taking the “well that will never happen here” stance because their employees have “ethics” compared to those dirty FAANG employees. Promoting messaging platforms to children without proper safety protocols in place. Treating decentralization as the thing to fix all things, when historically the internet has been responsible for amazingly disgusting things long before the days of social media. The list goes on and on and on and on.
I try to write about this on HN to combat the popular narrative but I’m slowly thinking that this isn’t the place to do it. But alas here is another one.
Also, what’s wrong with moralization of a company? All companies cause some good and some harm, it’s worth determining what the net is and judging the company appropriately. I don’t think it’s too far off to call a company (subjectively) “bad” if their net impact is (subjectively) “bad”.
Golden handcuffs will blind you to the atrocities you are building. Or maybe the company has fully siloed off the teams. Maybe the worker drone doesn't know his/her project is actually being used to create these monsters. Either way, I have been resigned to not work for F(M)ANG companies. The engineering is beautiful, but the use of their work by the business is not.
I've worked at a few large social media platforms. The number one thing you realize is content moderation is hard. It doesn't scale well, human moderators aren't necessarily better than AI, and you're going to make people mad at you one way or another. Mental health issues of users are also complex. Different people might find the same content empowering or triggering.
To Dorsey's point, I understand how people miss smaller, federated communities of the early internet, but those don't scale. If you want a platform with the potential to reach everyone with an internet connection, it's going to get dumbed-down, and so will the conversations. Or you can build federated echo chambers.
90% of the criticisms you hear are armchair quarterbacking that's easy to ignore.
You might be missing the problem people have with AI moderation. People generally aren't upset that AI moderation gets it wrong. The problem is when AI moderation gets it wrong, there are no humans to review the process. A good example of this is every "Google closed me account and I don't know why" post on the front page of Hacker News every other week.
In my 40s now, I've had recent reflections about the small, golden friendship group of my university years. What they were then, vs the kind of life they pursued, and where they ended up. This little group of harmlessly rebellious nerds, playing computer games, smoking the odd joint and listening to heavy metal full of lyrics against The Establishment[1], etc. Playing our guitars and inwardly sneering (or more likely, laughing - we weren't really the sneering types) at the corporate world. [1]term used tongue-in-cheek, but I'm sure you know what I mean!
20 years later, and of the half dozen, I'm probably the only one left outside The Establishment.
Among the others, we notably (and disappointingly) have the aloof senior professional fully integrated into the Old Boy's Club of his industry, think Mason-y power conglomerates which run their local region for the profit of a few; and the commerce professional who regularly and gleefully spams LinkedIn with info about his latest Salesforce certifications, alongside Likes for Boris Johnson content.
Do they think they're "the bad guys"? (and in fact, if we're going to be really honest - ARE THEY the bad guys?). The answer to both may well be Probably Not. They have their own justifications and reasoning just as we all do.
I can't help being somewhat disappointed, but as the odd-one-out, who am I to say what's normal and good?
Facebook, Twitter, and Google, all had alternative paths where they make significantly less money but are much more of a positive influence on the internet and society at large. They chose money - and here we are. I struggle to think of a single organization (even Mozilla) in their class of company that did NOT choose the money. And it makes me think the financial structure of all these companies forces them from conception to use the money path.
I kind of feel like they made their decisions based on Jobs’ hardware profit margins strategy that worked well before service or data profit margins.
Also, although not a company I feel like Apache has turned down multiple opportunities to sell out and kept to their principles.
When I talked with him about his founding of Twitter in 2006, I thought he had a conscience back then, and was one of the nicest people I’ve ever had the opportunity to meet. 99% of the criticism against him as a person is FUD from his competitors.
However, a lot of people have already had conversions that were not that deep to begin with, and twitter just helped them get more succinct.
To be fair, that only happens because people work around Twitter's character limit by joining multiple tweets into "threads." It kind of works but it's also awkward and obviously contrary to the platform's ergonomics.
Twitter wasn't designed or intended for deep conversations, though. It's meant for microblogging and posting pictures of your food.
Burn in hell.
Suggest solutions.
There's no end to charitable work that can use the funds. He could lobby for affordable housing in San Fran, fighting all those "nimby" interests. He could lobby against the military industrial complex, against the revolving door between Wall Street and the White House, for clean energy, for non-GMO natural foods (and against Bill Gates's soylent projects).
You know, stuff like that. He'd only need to pick one to make a difference.
Or maybe... Lobby for the destruction of the engagement algorithms.
Granted, this would make a great many powerful people very angry, and they'd turn on him like sharks on a wounded school-mate, but it would be more honorable than complaining after the massive payday.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I am amazed Jack Dorsey is arrogant enough to "regret" the enterprise. He must be under a delusion that "he" built Twitter. He's completely ignoring the fact that "his" enterprise was paid for with money, time, and skills of other people. I feel sorry for anyone who trusted him and gave him their time and skills, for the years of their life, which they invested in him and now they can never get back, have been wasted on creating merely a regrettable impact.
I feel like you are ignoring the content of the argument here's which is about the drawbacks of a centralized web, and deflecting by talking about people's feelings.
There are absolutely drawbacks to a centralized web. And we can talk about those drawbacks without worrying about if peoples feelings get hurt.
You don't have to convince me to see the way you do, since I have no interest in blocking your discussion for merits and demerits of decentralized web. I also don't intend to convince anyone to see the way I do. This is just a reaction and a note for myself to never fail my people this way.
I did not ask Jack Dorsey or any other leaders to lie. The idea of 'promoting deceptive behaviors' is a concept that you introduced in this conversation, not me.
Let me know if I misunderstood.
Yeah, no. It is not a failure to anyone, to point out the very real and valid criticisms of the centralized web.
Instead, I would argue that people like you would be failing yourself, your people, and everyone else, by ignoring very real and valid problems with the centralized web, to avoid people's feelings from being hurt.
> weighs more heavily than words of other people.
And if the criticisms are valid, then that is a good thing, and you are the one failing your people by being silent.
An effective leader of an organization will find and fix problems.
Managers far less experienced than Jack Dorsey, in companies larger and smaller than Twitter, are effectively performing this today without hurting morale of the organizations.
I hope you don't feel defensive in response to my comments. I wish to make a more accurate understanding available for you to grab. Whether you grab it is your choice and affects me in no ways.
But if the problems are real, then it is good to point out those problems. You cannot just ignore problems, because it hurts people's feelings.
If people are doing bad things, that cause problems, then yes their work should be invalidated, on the basis of the problems that they cause.
If you do bad things, then yes you should feel bad about the bad things that you did. Because bad things are bad, and you should feel bad about them.
And you are letting everyone else down, if you refuse to condemn bad things that are happening.
You absolutely should feel bad about doing bad things, and you should feel like you let everyone else down, because you did those bad things.
> without hurting morale of the organizations.
If you hurt other people, and do bad things, then you absolutely should feel bad and you absolutely should have your morale hurt. Because you did a bad thing. It is good for you to feel bad about doing bad things.
And if you don't then you are letting everyone else down.
But you did not respond to the idea that if someone's work caused bad things to happen, then it should be invalidated.
That is directly related to your objection of work being invalided, which is actually not a problem because bad things should be invalidated.
Apple brought back several ports in the new MacBook Pro series after killing them several years ago. This was done in a confident manner under excellent management and public communication.
But I don't see a problem with denouncing bad things that companies have done in the past. If a company caused lots of problems, then it should deserve the condemnation for the bad things that it caused.
It deserves the condemnation because it caused bad things to happen.
In short, Twitter has had the ability to algorithmically filter white supremacists for years, but they haven't enabled it because GOP politicians are white supremacists.
Twitter isn't the most egregious actor (looking at you, Meta, and you, YouTube team at Alphabet), but the rhetoric of "white supremacists should not be welcomed in the public discourse" is both true and helpful. It's an effective North Star.
"In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil." -Hannah Arendt
There are a few red lines that don't require subtlety or shades of gray or anything. It's the paradox of tolerance.
Twitter's actions are self-interested, but not morally driven. They're not necessarily even rational in any long term way.
You definitely seem to be implying that here. If all components of what you say are true…who is the only group that benefits?
Perhaps I read it wrong.