Let's knock down social media's walled gardens – Tim Berners-Lee
ft.com
ft.com
Related Tim Berners-Lee Wants the Internet Back (24 points, 4 months ago, 10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42171823
After which majority that doesnt need the levels of constant Attention the social media addicted free content manufacturing minority does will leave. And social media will face major issues.
Cuz when ever growing Content chases finite non growing eyeballs you cant keep increasing Ad prices every quarter and report profits for ever. This is zuckanomics which is utter shit.
Analysts are already seeing those limits being hit but since they havr seen time and again when limits get hit corporate robots like zuck then do layoffs, buy the competition, capture regulators, avoid tax, sell more personal data, inject more ads etc etc they still see scope for parasitic growth.
But parasitic growth comes with predictable and unpredictable cost. And they will build with time. Just like Jurassic Park. And we know how that story ends.
Human Attention cannot be exploited at population scale or there will be chaos.
Honestly, yes. It's working for China. With America doing its thing right now, it makes sense for e.g. the EU and Canada to look at whether handing communications and social media to American companies makes sense.
Related and very relevant paper: https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ujvharkk/release/1
Attention is being exploited at scale. It's continuing, and evolving, and might soon manifest as other things (like intention).
I am not sure your predictions are accurate, but I at least would like a couple of them to be. I have thought a lot about the idea of certain ubiquitous and permeating things like social media as utilities, or at least non-profits with a public oversight and standards/requirements to comply with that are substantial, limiting, and entirely designed around what is good for the public rather than what is good for a business. Not sure this will ever actually happen, as time goes on, I only find more arguments for why it should, not less.
That’s why I’m currently most excited about ATProto (Bluesky)… bootstrapping a protocol as a centralized service that has already hit critical mass, and that can now be fully decentralized on an opt-in basis… feels promising.
It isn't easy to create alternative, but it should not be created as alternative to Facebook for example, but an alternative space for people to connect and express themselves. That will work more then just create another copy.
No it isn't.
The initial team came from a bunch of activist projects (typically p2p) and the thing we concluded was that activism requires a theory of change. How is your new technology going to get adopted across the world? The software world still largely operates by markets. Startups are the vehicle for distribution. So we need to behave like a startup while still accomplishing the technical/mission work.
The incredible gift was the initial funding and awareness, which Dorsey deserves a lot of credit for^1. That gave us about 10 months to do protocol work prior to commercialization, which was less than we wanted but just enough to get it done.
ActivityPub deserves a lot of credit too for its progress under an entirely different model, which I tend to describe as communitarian. What both projects did correctly was connect the protocol to an initial application that drives that distribution. Whether either get to "mass" adoption (greater than centralized services) is now the big question.
^1 Apologies for teeing up the inevitable "Dorsey left" conversations.
The solution as far as I see it is to just go back to the zero algorithm version of social media. You follow people, you see their stuff in your feed. At best, you get recommendations of who to follow, but there's zero compulsion to follow or look at anything. No AI, no fancy algorithms, just good ol' fashioned CRUD.
Wrap the whole thing up in a nice UI/UX and, most importantly, take a 100% neutral stance on politics and other "faction building" modes of thought.
The chaos really didn't start until the algorithms (and by extension, the low-quality content they elevate) and politics came in. All of the alternatives so far have implemented some of the above ideas, but the juiciness of taking a political/ideological stance has been too attractive.
We would all have to take on the role of the evangelist in a serious way. I really love that he wrote this article.
What bubble does the author live in that tells hen that "benevolence" is easy?
The values of the cultures most of us have regular contact with are very different.
Nobody is saying that it is "easy" to mean that there's no friction preventing it and that it's astounding that it hasn't been done. On the contrary--the fact that certain beneficial things are very easy in a logistical sense but incredibly difficult in a power/cultural/social structure sense is the core of the problem. And it's worth reminding people about.
>That feeling of personal empowerment we sometimes call digital sovereignty has since been lost.
It hasn't been lost with the rise of social media. If someone wants to blog their thoughts they still only need a computer with an internet connection, but now it's even easier than before. They can register an X account, for example, for free compared to spending double $xx per year for a domain. Instead of having to build a whole website and finding a server to host it X makes it easy for you. For blogging X is a more attractive platform than the web is for the average person.
Just because there are aspects that are decentralized, that doesn't mean it's better. It's not like you are free to talk about anything on the web. In practice DNS is centralized. The server's upstream is centralized. Instead of making reports to X, they make reports to registrars and ISPs. If you want to fix the danger of being cut off you need to do it via the legal system as it's not something decentralization can entirely fix.
>This is the system that we already have for email — that’s why you can have an email group that includes people using different providers such as Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo.
Sure email exists, but in practice consumers prefer to chat using centralized platforms. The federated nature of email made it stagnant which made it fail to compete with other messaging platforms.
I probably don't want a feed where someone else decides what's good for me to see.
> When the web started, you could make your own website so long as you had a computer and an internet connection (admittedly back then this was a big proviso).
Substack, Medium, GitHub pages, Blogger, several WordPress places, etc. Or a $2.50/mo VPS and a $10/yr domain name, or some of the big cloud providers probably have things they scale down even further.
> We did not insist that we could share our Facebook photos with our LinkedIn colleagues, for example. Nor did we insist that we could use the same identity and transfer the same friend list from Instagram to X and then to Reddit.
I specifically do not want all sites to be views onto a single global space with global identities and relationships.
> Another is to quietly build an alternative world using these standards and let people realise that it is better
Has ActivityPub managed to eat the world yet?
I agree, but today you have a feed where someone else has decided what's good for THEM for you to see. Neither are good.
The ads are there not just for fun, but they provide an income stream to content creators and for the networks themselves. In essence, ads work as a micro-payment infrastructure. But then you need to drive up visits to increase the number of ad impressions. And this leads to the spiral of ever-radicalizing media.
What can be done? I don't know. Something like "basic attention token" but without shady crypto, perhaps?
Literally the article.
You can't build a sustainable model without having an income. And ads are the only way to get it right now, because subscriptions can't scale down to the level of individual sites.
Now, that's not to say that popularity and quality are mutually exclusive; only that popularity is the only measure that I can see in operation.
I actually do pay for quality, but not on the internet, partly due to the lack of tokens, and the rather nasty risk of using one's credit card at countless sites. Each one increases the already too-high risk of hacking by some factor unknown to me, and I limit internet payments as much as I can. I'm not a fan of pre-paid credit cards. I use Apple Pay to conceal the credit card info, though that's not a foolproof system. Apple too often asks for a passcode when I am shopping, and in sight of shoulder surfers and surveillance cameras.
Some people think that adtech has to be intrusive and violating for it to be effective, but that's not true - we're just competing against highly vertical monopolies with total dominance, from browser to industry. I think sponsorship models might be good alternatives, with service provided through municipal providers like amateur radio bands.
There would have to be some strict rules, but it could be available to anyone within a certain address space who is a private citizen operating in either a non-commercial or limited commercial capacity (and limited external connectivity, like a local LAN), managed like the CB crowd does against unauthorized usage.
If you want to peer with the town over and they're dominated by a private ISP who won't allow it, maybe it'll give them something to think about.
Also funny to see the article behind the FT paywall, but that's an audience that actually does pay for quality content.
Social media is like fentanyl or cocaine for the masses. It’s preying on people’s stresses and poor mental health by providing temporary relief or disconnecting from the real world. Social media being a place to connect and maybe even run a small business is like 1% of it. It’s a place for attention seeking people filling their loneliness with fake connections and content while content consumers are trying to achieve the same buy consuming instead.
Ive seen people unable to get out of instagram. Their fingers are constantly twitching and scrolling. This is just like drugs and controlled substances. The government punishes the dealers and is trying to control but failing cause there are plenty of corrupt people willing to bypass this. Same goes with social media. Zuckerberg is probably worse than Escobar.
Social medias promise of social connections was really just the same as what drug dealers offer, the good stuff for new consumers and then once they are hooked give them the cheap stuff. They really don’t care about ‘social’ part of it because the addiction potential is so high.
Start doing mass studies on cognitive problems created by instagram and TikTok. Publish them in big journals and show how social media can go from social to addictions so quickly. People already consider phones as part of their body, I won’t be surprised if people also consider their instagram account more valuable than their health.
This has already happened. We didn't kick Big Tobacco by publishing research and just talking about it. We got them with bans. I don't see America doing it. But now would be a good time for e.g. the EU to start regulating social media like a utility.
Not really. The TikTok ban was rooted in national security concerns. The coalition that brought it forward would not be useful for regulating social media as the drug analog it is.
I don't see a brilliant move in America. (There is an a brilliant opportunity in the EU, Canada and Mexico to recapitulate the TikTok bill's rhetoric and structure, aiming it at both China and America.)
It really wasn't. But I agree that this was a popular take. (Funnily enough, the rumor helped shore up the bill's polling among Republican-leaning voters. And once it was up, like, yes, rule number one of politics is you generally don't say no to votes.)
The EU going after Instagram and Twitter would find its own stable of bizarre conspiracy theories.
They could just actually enforce the existing GDPR which already makes most of these addiction-based models unsustainable.
It would be ill advised without a popular mandate. Remember the conspiracy theories the TikTok ban prompted? You don't want to yank the neo-Nazis' Twitters on a bureaucratic point.
A ban on non-consensual data collection (or rather, the enforcement of existing rules) is not only much easier to define (the laws are already written in fact) but also very straightforward to understand.
Social media is welcome to continue to exist at a loss, but the removal of the financial incentive for greater "engagement" should make it much less toxic.
I worked on the TikTok bill. Nobody reads the details when you threaten to take their toys.
Like, play it out. EU says Twitter, quit it. Elon says fuck off. Now what? You fine him. Great. Elon says fuck off. You start, what, raiding the Ireland office? Seizing bank accounts? If he takes Twitter dark, do you think its users will be differentiating between non-consensual data collection and a ban? We haven't even geopoliticised it yet!
The same suspicions that would animate a ban (or regulation) will animate starting to enforce GDPR now. For this to work, it has to be bottom up. The only way I see that happening is a rally to the flag move by European leaders and a show of force with a targeted new bill.
If you're unwilling to put a ban on the table, the law is toothless and will be flouted. Maybe not forever. But the EU's ability to enforce its will on American companies is already tentative at best.
It shouldn't be the only viable option because we have no other legal mechanism with which to regulate these platforms before they have become enormous and powerful and spiral out of control.
If it needs to be done, it should be done for the right reasons. (Not that a TikTok ban would be bad, or that it's not a sensible move geopolitically, but in the context of the discussion in this thread, a TikTok ban is definitely not on the table because we've agreed that society is harmed by addiction to a centralized social media platform, or whatever. Any side-effects in those areas as a result of the ban would just be collateral.)
I would just prefer a ban never needing to come into play because we don't let things get bad
You need to be ready to ban because you're playing against folks who are willing to play that card. If Brussells doesn't want a ban because it's unsure it would be popular, that constrains their ability to regulate these platforms. Because they know, based on the same logic, that they can cut the cord and blame it on the EU to force back anything they don't like.
Is social media pure evil like tobacco OR is it a necessity like a utility?
How can it be both?
EU pretends it is both while getting backdoor access.
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/economy/2024/6/20/orwellian-eu...
Banning social media in public spaces is something I would support, but HOW?
[0]: Leung, L. (2004). Net-generation attributes and seductive properties of the internet as predictors of online activities and internet addiction. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 7(3), 333-348.
There is a massive amount of very high-quality compelling (and damning) studies on this subject, with more coming in all the time, and very little that contradicts the premise of "yeah this stuff can be really bad for us".
But what's next? The social media companies aren't going to do anything about it. They will fight fight any attempt to admit it, discuss it, legislate it. And unfortunately it just so happens that these same companies and social networks are also most often the conduits by which people try to spread information to the masses, to make things known and to get people to care about them. Quite a predicament
This is a little to cynical of a take and ignores how social media really evolved. Facebook and myspace were actual social places where we interacted with each other.
You need to look at the evolution (which mostly happened organically) where businesses started joining as people and eventually social media stopped being social and turned into a one direction communication platform. The only non-organic evolution i think is the change from chronological timeliness to algorithim
He knows, he uses, he understands more than you think.
Flying is such a wild experience as you can always see the person in front of you constantly scrolling. One time I saw a young gal pay $20 for internet on a 3 hour flight and would scroll Facebook for a minute or two, switch to Instagram for a minute or two, then back to Facebook… for 4 straight hours (boarding + flight + landing). I was genuinely appalled.
I don't think it's necessarily worse than people reading a book! But it is certainly widespread.
Even from a young age I thought it was strange how much they bounced these stories back and forth off of each other and how good they were at finding more stories about celebrities or local figures who had problems with alcohol to support their case.
It was also fascinating how self-congratulatory it all become. They weren’t simply sharing stories to earn each other away from a trap, they were sharing stories to reaffirm their own superiority as people who saw through the sham and wisely chose against it. The worse they made it sound, the more superior they could feel about being on the outside.
I get the exact same vibes when I read internet posts like this, which take the situation to such an extreme that they think comparisons like this are accurate and profound:
> Zuckerberg is probably worse than Escobar
Then there’s the idea that social media can’t be used for socializing, and anyone claiming otherwise is lying:
> Social media being a place to connect and maybe even run a small business is like 1% of it. It’s a place for attention seeking people filling their loneliness with fake connections and content
Yet many of us are out here using social media to keep up with friends without spending 99% of our time doing this fentanyl-like addiction that everyone tells us is inevitable.
I’m not saying that people don’t get addicted to social media, just as there are people who get addicted to alcohol (obviously). I’m merely pointing out that, like alcohol, the vast majority of people who participate aren’t degenerate addicts who lose control. This weird rhetoric about Zuckerberg being worse than Escobar or implied calls for government to treat it like drug dealers are fodder for the self-congratulatory people who want extra validation for their decision to stay off social media (defined in a way to exclude Hacker News, Reddit, and other social sites), but they’re hardly accurate. It’s weird to see these hyperbolic takes being so popular on, oddly enough, social commentary sites.
if i see people who are obese as lesser than me, and that hypes me up to exercise every day until im 80, is that really so bad?
it may not make me a saint, but it would make me healthy.
The point being, social media can be bad for your health even if it doesn't ruin your life.
Even some of my family members who preached the bad of smartphones and internet are addicted to Facebook/Youtube and mindlessly scroll away while I observe the insanity.
It is sad and unimaginable for those of us who can resist the claws of the addiction, but for the rest 99%, it is just escaping the boredom/loneliness/social disconnect.
Social media wanted to connect people to genuine interactions over long distances, instead it has created a whirlwind of addiction media supply. Most people’s feed are very insignificant portion of their real connections and dominant following of content farms, celebrity gossips, meme, media misinformation, polarisation and of course 66% of ads trying to sell them something related to the most common trend of their feed at that hour.
Of course there are many people who use social media purely for distraction. Which if used chronically is going to have an overwhelming negative impact.
In social media’s current for profit model it benefits from negatively impacting people. Which is a shame given if it wanted to, it could focus on the wellbeing of all its users.
An example I can give is the Reddit app that used to give a warning if a user used it for over a certain amount of time. These days it encourages it’s users to stay engaged with badges.
That's effectively what happened to social interaction on the internet. We had all the connection before, but none of the addiction. So I just don't buy the argument that the hyper addictive variants of social media are a net good.
Humans are driven by pleasure. We are all pleasure seekers. If scrolling social media is an addiction then maybe exercise self control.
I don’t care what someone tells me is an addiction. Either control yourself or shut the fuck up
First, I've a similar expression I've used for years which is Social Media is addictive electronic heroin.
I agree strongly with your comment and from my observations I've little doubt what you say is essentially correct. The evidence is everywhere; whenever I'm out and about I inevitability come across people staring transfixed at their phones, some whilst walking, others motionless, and still others walk across busy roads oblivious to traffic. These people are so engaged they really haven't a clue what else is going on around them.
(OK, critics would argue engaging in Social Media isn't all that people do on their phones and clearly that's true. But I'd counter that by saying Social Media is a large aspect of a broader addiction to electronic tech.)
Unless HN counts as one, I've no Social Media accounts—not even a Google account—so it's not surprising I'm a little curious about what so occupies those who do.
This raises questions about why so many engage in Social Media and I reckon you've answered that to a tee, it also raises the matter of why people like me find Social Media repulsive yet I've still no problem participating in forums such as HN.
Clearly, Social Media is having a large impact on human behavior and much of it negative but where's the proof and what's to be done about it? Social Media is now so entrenched that regulating it is essentially impossible.
It seems to me we need much more research into the effects of Social Media on human behavior before we can arrive at any definitive conclusions, and the most likely way to determine that is through a large longitudinal study—and that might take years.
Unless there's watertight scientific evidence that certain aspects of Social Media are having negative effects on behavior then nothing will happen to correct the problems—as commercial pressures to maintain the status quo will just quash any attempt to correct the situation.
That common problem is the voting system—likes/dislikes, up/downvoting. There are multiple problems here and there's much to say about it, but perhaps the worst is that it's polarizing. Frankly, I'd like to see it either eliminated or the rules substantially modified. For instance, downvoters are anonymous and they affect the outcome without ever having to say why they disagree†. That's not a good system, if one disagrees one ought to have the guts to argue why.
Of course, those who run the show would disagree as fewer people would participate.
† On HN, if, say, a poster receives 10 upvotes and 10 downvotes neither the poster nor others are aware of the fact. Effectively, a controversial topic where opinion is split down the middle turns out to look like it's a matter of little interest to anyone. That doesn't make much sense.
HN is horribly broken.
Although Reddit is a very low bar.
If you like your opinions strong and you think for yourself and you resent being signaled which way to respond and think, you'll be down voted and treated with condescending comments by those who like echo chambers of agreement.
It's not the downvoting that's the problem it's that they often do so anonymously without comment. For example, as I've mentioned my post above stands at zero votes after oscillating as high as +3 (although it might have been higher without me knowing about it).
I believe in debate and if they disagree that's completely fine but I want them to explain why as by doing so things move forward. HN's system doesn't encourage that.
In this instance I neither know why they downvoted nor how many votes there were in total. In politics this matters. If say I get 3 votes for and 3 against it's reasonable to assume I've made a reasonably balanced commentent on a rather unimportant matter. If I get zero votes after 3k have voted for and 3k against then the matter is important to many but neither I—the poster— nor readers are adware of the fact.
When votes oscillate around zero I take it that my comment is pretty neutral, essentially a statement of fact. Shooting the messenger is a well-known phenomenon.
Incidentally, something I've noted is that I'll often get downvoted days after the main activity stops. Vote stats therefore should be timestamped. It occurred to me HN could do an analysis of voters together with their actual posts. Anonymous stats like that could tell us much about why Social Media is in such a mess.
Links to pay wall trying to get me to pay for some subscription service I've never heard of and would never want to sign up for sight unseen.
mmmhmmm
I flag links that do not work, not because I'm opposed to subscriptions (I subscribe to some online publications), but because I think Hacker News should only link to articles that are actually on the internet.
I'm a FT subscriber. I just know 99% of people aren't, and lots aren't even aware it exists or its reputation.
The "walled gardens" that he and others speak about in this context do not refer to sites/apps that cost money, they have a massively different meaning. But perhaps it wouldn't be fair to expect you to know this if the paywall prevented you from reading the article. Fear not, now you can: https://archive.ph/4Vvms
An enormous centralized business does not possess magical fairy dust that negates the problems of international compliance. The underlying solutions to this are technical and social. Big business is merely able to get them done faster and more effectively because their profits are in jeopardy if they do not.
But there are plenty of ways to design applications and protocols such that different groups of people have different featuresets and limitations. We already kind of see that now with things built on top of ActivityPub, ATProto, etc., just not for this reason. For instance, there are some broad-scoped, full-featured social networks running on ActivityPub, but other platforms that just do microblogging and nothing else. They are both built on ActivityPub but can do very different things. You could apply this same concept to different countries and regulations, where the client/network someone uses only does the things that region allows, and then enforce it at the network level.
(Do I love that idea? No, but my point is, it's definitely not a technical impossibility.)