Now I want a counter factual story about Yahoo acquiring Facebook, which then never flourishes into the influential network it became. What happens to society? Would we have the same political climate?
The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion. Meta are a particularly bad example of this, but as long as there's money to be made by providing a platform for polarising politics and fake news, then I think someone will do so.
Who knows, maybe in that alternate universe you'd be posting "if Yahoo hadn't made such savy choices, I wonder if we would have the political climate we have today?"
This has always been the case for as long as society has been consuming the news. “Business tycoons” have bought up newspapers and media outlets since forever to push their narrative.
I think one component that has changed is the sheer volume and diversity of media makes competition for your attention (clicks) all the more fierce. Enter The Algorithm and optimizing for metrics above all else.
I dunno. That doesn’t invalidate anything about the original question about what present day would be like without Facebook. Would something else similar have replaced it? Is Facebook really “the problem” or is it algorithmic content because algorithmicly driven content was going to happen facebook or not.
It was only applicable to broadcast media, and rarely enforced. Nearly all of the enforcement was on behalf of private individuals wanting free airtime to respond to negative new stories about them.
In my opinion it's a very bad idea to want political appointees to decide when an issue hasn't been given fair news coverage. The very idea that there is only 2 sides to an issue reinforces the two party system that has made media so biased in the first place
America has always been polarized - institutions just never gave them a voice.
For all of unregulated news's flaws, government controlled news would be worse.
Ironically, we (the UK) have the BBC which is fairly literally, government funded (not controlled) news. It's much more even handed than a lot of commercial news.
Then through basically an ongoing refusal to engage with political realities they've managed to transition to the number 5 and dropping economy in nominal terms and, realistically, probably don't have the industrial oomph to back up the paper numbers. There was political debate recently over whether the country should even be able to produce steel. Per capita the picture is a bit worse, and on a PPP basis they're actually a hair below the European average. They've also managed to become relatively politically isolated because no view seems to have gained ascendancy over what their foreign policy should look like.
Now it'd be unfair to blame it all on the present crop given the huge amounts of damage done in WWII, but it is a bit difficult for me to accept the trendlines of the UK compared to the recovering USSR countries or China/Taiwan while believing that there is a healthy political discourse. The high performing countries have done amazing things even from a standing start in the 70s, 80s and 90s. From such a dominant starting position, with the momentum of the old empire and technically being on the winning side of pretty much every major conflict and ideological UK politics seem to have done rather badly. The country is wildly average for somewhere that was so ahead of the game relatively recently and with so many opportunities to succeed in the interim and such poor quality of candidates allowed to hold power.
We're seeing the opposite, though. As the traditional media companies declined and the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own views, polarization increased.
As someone who tries to avoid the news and politics, it's pretty easy to avoid the companies selling them. But I keep running into them because there are lots of users on Hacker News/Reddit/etc. who try to interject it into every discussion they can . Invariably, these people don't come at it from the point of view that they might be wrong and the other side might be right; they act like zealous crusaders on a mission to vanquish evil.
It is the bot farms voicing opinions IMO. For regular people one account equals one human, and it is a difficult feeling to uproot for many people.
Believe in flat Earth? Are you a holocaust denier? Think the moon landing is fake? Is the government gang stalking you? Welp you are in luck, there's thousands of other people just like you and here is a forum.
Kinda wild when you think about it.
Yes, but, would they be any where near the level of what FB achieved? Take Truth Social as an example. It started because people wanted a place they get out of the larger group to dedicate to like minded. In this Philip K Dick style rewriting of history where FB was created by those behind Truth, would it have ever achieved critical mass?
Just because someone else attempts to fill in the vacuum of something else not being there does not mean that it will succeed in filling the void. Truth only survives on the cult of personality, not because people really want to be using it or because it's like a good product
Not at all. It started because Trump was banned from Twitter. That’s it. The whole point was to give Trump a platform. There is nothing organic or natural about Truth Social and if it is the symptom of anything, it’s that some people just have too much money.
As a let down as it is for readers interested in how the author handles and solves time paradoxes (it is better than the insipid and sloppy multiverse solution, though) - Time Patrol are mostly history-focused action stories - this theory makes sense to me. At some point the world gets "ready" to discover things because all the pieces of the puzzle are in its hands. In the case of Facebook, I believe it is not an accident or "because Zuckerberg"; a massive social network had to emerge, in particular due to network effects.
Why are people acting like this is ancient history when my still living parents grew up in the segregated south and as recently as 2014 there were cities that still had segregated proms?
This happened in 1985
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WErjPmFulQ0
This is no media exaggeration. Forsyth county was notorious for this until the early 2000s. I (a Black guy) had a house built here in 2016 and sold it just last year when I relocated. While my son was one of the five Black guys in his entire school, we never experienced any issues so I don’t want to cast any aspersions toward Forsyth as it exist today.
One analogy is local news media ecosystems across the US, which have generally looked pretty similar though not 100% identical over the past ~125 years or so, suggesting some determinism based on broader culture and technology.
If Facebook had stumbled, something else would have gotten the next microgeneration of college students and then their parents and grandparents.
It’s possible to me that an independent Instagram would have filled Facebook’s niche a few years later, and something like Snapchat would have taken the current Instagram niche. Maybe Twitter would have played a different role.
It’s also possible a web 2.0 answer to classmates.com would have grabbed the older crowd, and we’d have a slightly more profound age split.
But ultimately I think we’d end up where we are — a set of platforms algorithmically curating feeds of user-generated content — with a few cosmetic differences.
Twitter: all the journalists and elected officials signed up and decided the stuff that went on there Mattered and was News. The shitposts that showed up in their feed became social trends.
It is a widespread failure, but if we had to pick a thread that we should call the start of that part of the unraveling, I’d point at Twitter. I mean, that’s just the social media bit. Social media didn’t cause, like, Afghanistan or whatever.
A different MySpace clone takes over the same niche.
that's exactly where my thoughts went