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Comment by bsenftner | Hacker News Reader

We have an evil cabal of enshitification enforcers in the form of the entire advertising and marketing industry. They enforce the group think impressed on society, and will not put any energy into anything not following the current zeitgeist of shitty exploitation and only the legally required (reluctant) fair treatment of their consumer and their employees. Our society voices, both journalism and advertising/marketing, are owned by the Orwellian Capitalists and only what they allow get through... which is a declining human society.

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I think you've missed the point of the parent comment. The point is that the entire model only exists in symbiosis with what you call "enshitification enforcers". There is no mass market social media without the "evil cabal... of the advertising and marketing industry". There is no other model that can pay the bills for a site with hundreds of millions of active users posting their own content with mostly no restraint.

The closest to an alternative model that works here is wikipedia. They achieve it by having a different default for user generated content - that it doesn't remain unless it is strictly on topic (you can't just write your random thoughts and shitposts in an article) - and by having a social mission that attracts donations. (They also run incredibly lean, which other mass market sites could definitely learn from.)

Another alternative model being pursued is the federated approach. I like this approach in principle but I don't think it will ever reach the mass market hundreds of millions of active users position of the mainstream social media products. Its solution to the problem is that some subset of power users will self-host and absorb the costs, either via individual altruism or something, or by developing some other model. I think this will end up centralizing, with a small number of nodes hosting most of the usage, and probably eventually falling back to advertising to cover costs. But I dunno, we'll see, maybe this will work.

Another more successful model is to just not be mass market at all, like HN and other various message boards. This reduces costs both for hosting and moderation and can then be justified by some non-financial benefit (like tacit advertisement for YC in the case of HN, or by tight community camaraderie for niche message boards).

Then another model that works is subscriptions. This drops the active user count massively and generally makes it harder to get traction, but I think it works the best of any of these when the stars align. I'd rather be Netflix or the NYT than Twitter or Reddit.

"There is no other model that can pay the bills for a site with hundreds of millions of active users posting their own content with mostly no restraint."

The government can. These companies could be nationalized, or the government could make their own competing sites if they were interested in doing so. But they're just not.

It takes more than just the means. It takes a will to do it.

I blogged about this yesterday after seeing a similar post on HN

https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/

Though I am not sure the political will exists.

Government funding of generic user generated content hosting is a terrible idea, IMO.

But I do quite like your proposal for how it could be accomplished technically through federation. It at least sidesteps the problem of the government building it through their fundamentally broken technology "procurement" processes.

Sure that's an option.

In essence that's a user ( indirectly through taxes ) supported model.

In the UK, the BBC follows that model ( the license fee is in effect a tax in all but name ) - and it's model is constantly under attack from certain quarters.

Indeed the BBC has being doing pilots in the social space - with SOLID and data pods.

See https://www.bbc.co.uk/taster/pilots/together-pod

The key question here is any of this stuff actually important enough for centralized funded.

Let's not forget, there is also the spectre of government control - you know the government security services will have full access.

I’m curious - have you used SOLID? Either as a developer or a consumer?

I found myself struggling with Linked Data for quite some time now, and I have struggled with the idea that perhaps part of the problem with adoption of Linked Data is existing mental interia of RMDBS or other systems.

No not used it ( at least not knowingly ).

I like the idea - kinda back to a decentralised web of peers like it was in the early days.

However the complexity of the technology is certainty off-putting - I'm not enough of an expert to tell how much of that complexity is adherence to a tech stack ( like RDF, SPARQL ) and how much is simply the complexity of the underlying problem.

I would say the guys behind it seem fairly pragmatic. As an example while the technology allows you to self host, they acknowledge that most people won't be able/want to - and are looking to enable providers as well.

I think one of the problems with the LD/RDF community is it can attract the type of person that things 'we just need a single well defined data model for the universe'.

I think trying to get one schema to rule them all is doomed to failure - for two reasons

- for ontologies to be effective all the users of that ontology have to have a shared understanding of the ontology - simple a written down definition isn't enough.

- the world can be viewed from multiple angles - even if you could agree one view, it's not going to be optimal for all use cases.

However as I said, the SOLID project doesn't appear to be falling into that trap - it appears very focused and pragmatic.

Interesting. I personally found the whole defining your schema up front to feeling like trying to construct the universe up front.

I’ve been trying to work on an alternative solution to SOLID, but I’m always double checking myself just to make sure that I’m not just simply failing to grasp the concepts.

The government can afford to do this. In every single other way, this is a terrible idea.

Why? At least in the case of democratic governmwnts, there is more control and oversight than there is in case of Meta, Twitter or Google.

Just went into more detail on this in a different comment. Basically I think this would suck in the same ways that public meetings inevitably suck, but times a million.

The government did: the Internet itself, eh?

Exactly. Well put.

The model that isn't sustainable is a permanently investor funded one.

Often when these products launch - they have zero advertising, zero features to make money - they are totally aimed at growing market share - totally focused on the user.

Then it's inevitably downhill from there - whether it's people not being prepared to pay ( eg Blue ticks ) or complaining about advertising or scrapping of data.

One of the damaging effects of the large amount of investor funded products is that it makes it very difficult for the user supported ( paid ) ones to thrive.

Perhaps the current state is because we are not at equilibrium - and as regulation, and the market matures it will become a bit more sane.

I’m curious - do you see a path forward for “public” social media?

I had half an idea yesterday on this from HN:

https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/

One of the questions I don't see answered here (and is, IMO, the greatest obstacle, and the reason I've backed out of discussions to set up a similar geographically-oriented node) is who moderates, say, your city's ActivityPub node? If a corporation, we're right back to corporations moderating public speech. But even having governments moderating speech in a public forum feels weird to me since it provides an easy lever to bend the discourse to the interests of the incumbents.

Or maybe to protect against that, there's a strict moderation governance document for that to the effect of "If it's not illegal, it flies". That could still get rough since there's lots of non-illegal content you could put on there which people wouldn't want to see.

Independently hosted nodes still feel like the way to go to me. No hard authority, just people talking with people and moderating to set the tone they want for their community. If the moderators are jerks, moving to a different node should be easy (thus putting the power into the hands of the users to abide by the governance they find most agreeable) and not cause you to exile yourself from your civic community.

This gets at why I think this is fundamentally a terrible idea. I think it would be a legal and social minefield the likes of which I'm not sure the world has ever seen.

You know how community meetings and town halls are awful and fruitless because they're filled to the brim with the noisiest cranks and they can't be kicked out because they're still members of the public after all, and nobody else participates because it's maddening to be around all those noisy cranks? Like that, but web scale.

I'm sure the noisy cranks would love this, but I'm not interested in it.

I want to acknowledge that feedback, because it’s useful.

As a follow question: is this a solvable problem between host moderation and user self moderation?

In other words: Let’s pretend NPR hosts a Reddit-like site whose primary objective is to facilitate discussion on topics shared by NPR.

NPR doesn’t outright ban everything unless it violates some terrible things.

Could user moderation NPR Reddit also expand on this? So long as they fall under the same guidelines?

I ask this question because it seems to me that there does exist some useful moderation: there are well moderated Reddits and for the most part Wikipedia is also pretty well moderated.

Yes, there are private entities with good moderation. A public entity (in the US) with those same moderation policies would have a very hard time avoiding infringement of the first amendment.

Does there exist a medium between host moderators and user moderation the makes this work?

Wikipedia is self moderated and there are well moderated Reddits. The host of the ActivityPub site doesn’t have to do all the moderation, and there doesn’t seem to be a reason that users themselves couldn’t “mute” troublesome posters from their own feeds, right?

If wikipedia were government run, they would have a much harder time legally, with their moderation approach.

> The host of the ActivityPub site doesn’t have to do all the moderation

The person who set up the server doesn't, no, they can appoint moderators that lack administrative privileges. I don't recall at the moment if moderators have the ability to federate/defederate with peers, and that might be an implementation detail anyway. This is probably the way a large well-run node should work - developing a team of moderators from within the community.

> there doesn’t seem to be a reason that users themselves couldn’t “mute” troublesome posters from their own feeds, right?

This is true as far as it goes, but if a node federates with peers that dump a high volume of content onto the network the user doesn't want to see, then the user will find it a headache to manually filter just what they want to see (approximately the feeling of manually filtering out email spam). So some filtering should be done by the host.

Oh sorry I replied to you elsewhere. I think it's a bad idea, but I like your concept for how it could be implemented with federation.

I expect that if federated social media takes off, nobody (among the mass market) will know that it's federated, just like email. It'll just be, like you say, a couple of big sites that happen to enable people to communicate with people on other sites (and also a handful of wizards who self-host).

I think the killer feature of federation in general (particularly in the context of social media) is that it decouples user account administration (and by extension, data collection) from the network effect. I run my own node that just has my account on it, but I can still benefit from the network by federating with other nodes.

I agree that this is what it will look like if it takes off. But then those "couple of big sites" will have all the same incentives / problems as the current mass market sites, and will themselves be enshittified eventually. The model needs to somehow result in distributing the user load and thus the costs across many hosts such that it is a bearable cost for each individual host without requiring any deep pocketed support. But you and I are in agreement that that doesn't seem like the likely outcome.

>advertising and marketing industry

Which today is primarily Google, Amazon, Meta, and yes, even Apple (0)

(0) https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-privacy-analytics-class-act...

> […] and yes, even Apple

I was under the impression that Apple makes most of its money from margins on hardware sales, with services a growing percentage (Apple TV, App Store).

The "advertising and marketing" that is involved with Apple is them spending money on it so people know about what they sell, and not so much Apple taking in advertising and marketing money (which Google and Meta do).

The bad part (from my perspective) is that I pay a premium for iOS/MacOS but still get ads anyways. Why does the App Store show me ads if I'm sponsoring it with every app I purchase? Why does Apple Music show me a pop-up ad when I accidentally auto-launch it with my headphones? Why does Safari still want me to try the new one?

Apple does not live or die off advertisements like some others, but they are definitely a victim of this downward trend. As their margins on hardware shrink, their relationship with China comes under threat, and their monopoly on The App Store becomes less certain, it will be interesting to see how well they resist this pattern.

Part of their advertising IS their hardware. It's definitely good, but it's almost mostly fashion.

Nope, they have an extensive ad network that conveniently continues to track users, even when they opt out of the tracking that Meta and Google fought so hard against:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/10/19/apples-...

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-is-an-ad-company-now

https://9to5mac.com/2022/08/03/apple-ads-expansion/

Actually no. Those companies are the primary service providers to the advertising and marketing industry. But the industry itself predates them and exists (and would continue to exist) independently of them.

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