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We Can Slay Giants

thehandbasket.co

43 pointsweinzierl20 comments

This particular author is really being hypocritical here.

She has repeatedly petitioned sites to remove legal content she finds objectionable[1], and then is thoroughly confused when her own content is given the same treatment.

She isn't making the argument that mainstream social/media sites have too much power, she is making the argument that her opinions should not be silenced but other people's opinions should.

It is impossible for a rational person to support anyone who wants to silence opposing viewpoints.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-IFF6pyxKkgG3CWuyNmZVE8L...

> "As someone who has used social media to amplify my voice and work for my entire adult life".

I'd like to see a Venn diagram of all the people who use social media, compared to that of people who use social media to amplify their voice. The author may have lost sight of the fact that it's not the fact you've got something to say, it's whether whatever gibberish you want to put up on Facebook is relevant.

While diversity is needed the main issue are the absence laws. There needs to laws to hold spokespersons and engineers accountable. Every provider from tiny to any of the tech giants can hide behind both secrecy and security for their decisions. FTC or FCC need to subpoena or whatever these people and one needs to have an independent (NTSB type) board to evaluate these. The way we are progressing forwards is like the banks. Unless there is any large problem law makers or society dont care about it. For example, I found the CTO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAUpxN-EIgU - just refusing to answer what videos or material was used in openAI's vast learning. (Note I dont mean only openAI, every CEO/C-level from all companies that have influence on common people)

At the end, journalists also need to be tech savvy + socially responsible. There is still a lot of them that just want to make bucks.

It's probably not a popular perspective,1 but to me these are still "just" websites. That's what they are, after all. Under the rules of the www game, anyone can have a website. A billion people could have websites each having less than 100 pages with content created by the website operator, a single website could have a billion pages of content created by other people, and so on. Facebook, Threads, etc. is still one person's website. Sure, there is a corporation behind it; the domain name, the servers, the PHP, etc., the assets required to run a website, are owned by the company, but as the company is set up, one person has _total_ control over it.

1. The problem I see is that some folks think the www only exists as a venue for having popularity contests. And all use of it is 100% commercial. That's wrong IMO. It was never intended to be that way and it does not have to be that way.

The author created her own website. As it should be.

I guess that's exactly the author's point? That the company has too much control.

She isn't arguing about websites, she's arguing that social media networks are too powerful and they'll happily block criticism when they can gey away with it.

None of this is about whether this is just a website or the semantics of it. It's that a company has too much power.

And that's a real problem. A lot of people get their news from Facebook. Meta can (and does) decide what to show to whom

The point is that anyone can create a website and attract users, so it is pointless to call any one website as "too powerful". Remember Myspace? They used to be THE social network, so they no longer are. Facebook's time will pass as well, to be replaced by another website.

The power a website has is only proportional to how many users visit it. Facebook has infinite power on their website, but if users stopped using that website, Facebook's power would disappear.

You are assuming that Facebook can't leverage it's dominant market position to buy every new network that threatens to surplant it (instagram, whatsapp, and ~100 other Facebook acquisitions would like a word)

Sounds anti-competitive.

and TikTok?

I mean, they pivoted all of their major social network platforms to clone tiktok's core feature set pretty much as soon as TikTok started gaining traction. I think it's likely they are betting on the US government not tolerating a foreign-owned social network in the long term.

Well, yeah, kinda. More than kinda even.

Facebook already stole a lot of TikTok's essence [0]; quite successfully too.

And, TikTok is being targeted by Congress, rather clearly because young people are learning too much about Israel's ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing on there [1].

If you consider that Facebook is basically a spy machine for US intelligence [2] and has been for a long time, this can be seen as the US eliminating/buying the competition for them by the power of government seizure.

0 - https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2021/09/29/facebook-...

1 - https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2024/03/14/ti...

2 - https://www.csoonline.com/article/546958/microsoft-subnet-ju...

And how do other people find your website?

I don't have one.

That's a shame. I am reading through this thread because I saw your comments on a NetBSD thread, and couldn't believe there wasn't a place I could go read more in-depth descriptions of what you were saying about how you browse the web over there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37282334 if you've any links or anything to share on the topic, I'm all ears!

You might like this pipelining usage example if have not already seen it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38777921

No browser, no Python, no curl. The later does not work well for piping binary data from the www to other programs. tnftp can do it. nc, tcpclient, etc. can do it with yy054.

Note archive.netbsd.org has been fixed since then. 1.6 is retrievable again.

I have addressed the value (to me) of HTTP/1.1 pipelining in many comments, despite consistent backlash from HN commenters trying to promote new protocols that make surveillance and advertising easier and add needless complexity to information retrieval. I have been sharing the simple, unsophisticated programs I write to perform pipelining outside the browser.

Given that I do not "browse the web" the same way that most HN commenters and programming nerd bloggers/website operators would advocate, it should not be surprising that I also do not subscribe to their idea of websites. (Conglomerations of ads, tracking and resources from disparate IP addresses that require "interaction".) I retain an older, simpler idea of websites: all resources from a single IP address. That allows for easy pipelining to efficiently retrieve information non-interactively.

For communication, i.e., 1-to-1 or 1-to-smallnumber, I have always prefered the idea of peer-to-peer overlay networks, long before they became as "popular" as they are today. Not websites. Why are so many people reading "news" on Facebook, why the large audience. Possibly they are actually using its website to communicate or interact with individuals or small groups and that's why they log in. And here I am submitting this comment while logged in to... a website.

Is this how I think we should be communicating over the internet. Via websites. No. From what I see, it is the source of many problems. But, here we are. Comunicating via someone else's website.

One of the uses I make of HTTP/1.1 pipelining is for retrieving DNS data in bulk via "DoH". Sometime after I started doing this years ago I noticed someone else was implementing pipelining when using "DoT". Not sure what to make of that, if anything.

Another use is for "Web APIs".

Another use is for retrieving bulk HTML via XML sitemaps.

Anytime I want to retrieve and consume data/information efficiently in quantity, HTTP/1.1 pipelining is useful.

Web browsers, whether text-only HTML viewers or media players with Javascript engines, can be useful but I tend to do most "browsing" offline from simple HTML pages I have created using text/html/json that I have retrieved from the www and processed outside the browser. I do not use a browser as the primary means of sending HTTP requests nor do I use Javascript as the means to process text/html/json into a format that I can consume. The preferred formats for me are plaintext, CSV and SQLite3, comprised of 7-bit ASCII if possible. I retrieve the bits from the web using command line programs and then process to those formats, if needed, using small filter programs I write.

Popular web browsers cannot do HTTP/1.1 pipelining. HTTP/1.1 pipelining is not advertising-friendly. Popular web browsers, namely the company/companies behind them, have developed "replacement" protocols that are very advertising-friendly. They tell the public that HTTP/1.1 was a "problem" that needed to be fixed. The question is who was it allegedly a problem for, exactly: for those companies or for www users.

I'm using HTTP/1.1 pipeliing every day for over 20 years. I'm not seeing any ads. Not a problem for me.

My networking knowledge is sub-par, I'm relatively new to all this computer stuff. I can mostly follow what you're saying though, and you've given me many useful avenues for further exploration. Even though I was only somewhat understanding what you're saying, I'm very interested in alternative approaches to "obvious" things, and I love when the curtains get pulled back and you go: "oh wow, it's just that". So I'll be looking into this, and have saved these posts. Cheers.

I mean, this is just factually not the case.

There's a reason the government tells Meta what to allow and what not to allow on the platform. It's because an enormous percentage of Americans get their news on a Meta-owned platform

What is "factually not the case"? That Facebook is a website? That anyone can run a website?

Why is it that HN commenters are opposed to the factual statement: "Facebook is a website." It's like there is some hidden message in that short sentence that only HN commenters can see.

We can look at a list of the Top 100 websites, or Top 1 Million, and Facebook will be listed. It is a website.

If we took away the Facebook website, and required Facebook to "do business" without it, then what would happen.

Facebook is a website.

Meta does not produce news or other content. It is an intermediary, a middleman.

More factual statements that may trigger HN commenters.

It's not "just" a website, it's the major app and social media ecosystem in the US. Frankly I think more people use the app than the website.

It is a website. But the original comment was that Facebook is "just" a website. That's factually incorrect. It is much much more than "just" a website.

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