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Comment by cjs_ac | Hacker News Reader

By 'architecture of the internet', the authors mean the nature of social media feeds.

The problem is more specifically "algorithmic feeds" which isn't require by or exclusive to social media. For example, news sites and media sites like Youtube and Spotify (which arguably have social aspects, but most people don't use them like social media) also contribute in similar ways. The root problem is the algorithm optimizing for attention mixing with human nature that tends to make negative reactions more powerful than positive reactions which causes the algorithms to create a sort of polarization death spiral.

If we are going to be pedantic, let's do it correctly. The specific, direct problem is advertising, where the money flows. Algorithmic feeds are designed to capture attention, and the reason for attention capture is eyes on advertisements.

Having identified the true root of the problem, I would recommend directing resources towards dismantling advertising. Focusing on anything else is wasted effort.

That’s not the root. The root is capitalism’s need for constant growth. You can still create a successful business via advertising without the need to turn to algorithmic attention maximizing feeds if the only goal was serving customers and keeping workers employed. The problem is that whoever put up the capital to start the business is unlikely to be satisfied with that. This is why independent media and worker owned media is seeing a rise in popularity. Sustainability is obviously much easier to achieve than perpetual growth.

That’s not the root. The root is the human drive for survival.

We can stop any time, now. Money was already a satisfactory root cause.

You can't have perpetual sustainability without perpetual growth.

Also, capitalism doesn't need perpetual growth either (anymore than other system, that is). Independent and worker-owned media are still facets of capitalism, for starters.

> You can't have perpetual sustainability without perpetual growth.

That sounds self-contradicting. How do you define «sustainability» in that case?

The property of preserving/sustaining itself.

Okay. Do you then consider an equilibrium to be inherently unsustainable?

If you take «growth» to be defined as d(something)/dt>0, I’d posit that any equilibrium by definition has zero net growth, whether it’s a static or dynamic equilibrium.

For social systems, yes.

That said, in long run, there's both a tendency for most growth to fall and for basically nothing to be sustainable.

And, as usual, "risk/threat to democracy" is used to mean "support for parties I don't like"

It wasn't long ago that the Twitter shoe was on the other foot, and many of those complaining now were quite happy to endorse the right of private companies to promote/suppress speech at will (with no hint of irony regarding their alleged ideological views on private companies)

What I don’t get about these centrist takes is that even if you believe this, can you not recognize the difference in motivation and intention of the speech? For example, to me it’s wild to equate something like Democrats wanting to promote Covid safety and Republicans wanting to promote the idea that Californian elections are fraudulent. One is an earnest attempt for public good and the other is a cynical attempt to undermine democracy.

It's hard for me to get a grip on, and I'm putting thoughts into other peoples' minds here, but many Republicans genuinely saw Covid safety protocols as a cynical attempt to undermine democracy. They see stories like this:

https://www.9news.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/weld-c...

as evidence of that. I think now they feel like they're just responding in kind.

The only reason you see differences of motivation and intention is because you're in one of the groups.

My take is leftist (and I don't mean American liberal), anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist, anti-genocide, and I don't think there's any difference of motivation and intention in the US. The "bad" group voters (D or R) feel they're protecting the poor, the kids, the families, etc., while the other was attempting to undermine democracy.

To talk only of speech, the Democrats were in charge when the demonisation and criminalisation of anti-genocide protests started in earnest, they were in charge when TikTok was banned for Israel, they were enthusiastically in charge when cancelling/censoring/fining for "hate-speech" (== whatever the gov wants it to be) became a legal gray area (and was then adopted by liberals the world over, see UK). Every other problem the Rs are criticised for (war, corruption, poverty, genocide!!!) was started/facilitated/ignored by the Ds, but people forget it instantly. Except, of course, paying lip service to identity politics.

I have no reason to believe the world would have been much different today had Democrats stayed in power. Look at how the "leftest" Dems vote. Actually, criticising the US as a leftist would have been harder: you'd be instantly viewed as a Nazi.

Both groups are sides of the same coin when it comes to keeping power and subjugating others to it, more or less violently.

Edit: to avoid posting empty criticism, what I mean is that to find a left party, or a party actually attempting to make life better for the poor and disenfranchised and not wanting to kill those who happen to be located near oil and Israel, you have to look away from the Rs and the Ds.

Much agree on this. The article is clearly biased. But one thing it mentions is that even when disabled people don't change their mind. Perhaps some politicals views are more rational and sound. Can the reverse be true? We don't know.

>And, as usual, "risk/threat to democracy" is used to mean "support for parties I don't like"

It can also mean highly influential support for ideologies I don't like - like fascism, authoritarianism and ultranationalism.

> many of those complaining now were quite happy to endorse the right of private companies to promote/suppress speech at will

A few years ago, bog-standard content moderation was limiting the reach of enormously+reasonably unpopular ideologies like fascism, authoritarianism and ultranationalism. Groups who were profoundly unhappy with these limits would bullhorn complaints of intentional suppression and censorship.

With the release of the Twitter Files (which exposed content moderation), it became clear that many folks were unable to differentiate between actual, long-established content moderation methods and actual directed suppression and censorship.¹

This deep misinterpretation seemed to flow from the ignorance of what content moderation looks like at scale. That core misunderstanding was often amplified and made worse when historically-moderated individuals filled in that vacuum with their long standing preconceptions.

The upshot are today's efforts to raise the visibility of far-right viewpoints thru coordinated crafted messaging² and thru actual suppression of non-right viewpoints thru new controls over platforms and thru often unaccountable misuse of governmental powers.

Our present conditions seem to well reflect and align with the article author's analysis.

¹ https://www.techdirt.com/tag/twitter-files/

² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwA4k0E51Oo

This might be a "yes, and" moment, but the article specifically points the largest feeders of contemporary thought leaning algorithmically in one direction. It doesn't matter if that direction is left or right, either way shaping thought in one direction is anti-democratic and that's what should worry all of us.

So the question isn't "Do I like this party?" The question is "Are democratic institutions, elections, courts, and constitutional limits being respected?" That's a standard that can be applied to anyone, regardless of party. Both siding things because the biden admin made people mad about twitter is frankly disgusting.

> The question is "Are democratic institutions, elections, courts, and constitutional limits being respected?" That's a standard that can be applied to anyone, regardless of party.

The thing is, sometimes the decisions of (other) democratic countries can be pretty braindead. The UK and its age verification nonsense, Spain and its holy crusade against La Liga stream pirates, the US and anything to do with abortions/LGBT/Black people/whatever the book ban lunatics are trying to push today, Germany's infamous "Pimmelgate" and "Mehrzweckeier" scandals...

Suddenly, the question really is, whose laws to follow to what degree.

I don't think that is the question, and in the absence of algorithmic social media feeds I don't think anyone would consider it to be. Pimmelgate was a dispute for Germans to resolve under German law; it's absurd if anyone outside of Germany feels entitled to have an opinion about it.

No, it isn't - the US doesn't really have strong anti-discrimination laws and is not enforcing them with the current administration, the EEOC is mostly toothless, and I repeat, both siding things like "DEI" or "age verification" as bad as "throwing out elections" is disgusting and are not comparable.

I think there’s too much focus on the internet and social media here. We should look back to the printing press as the origin and mass media, and trace the development through to radio and television. The risk for democracy is not social media per se, but mass media.

The thing about mass media is that there were gatekeepers due to constraints on the amount of content.

This didn’t necessarily mean the content was good or neutral, but it generally limited how “out there” stuff could be especially since you need a fairly broad audience and everyone had to see the same things.

With social media everyone can choose their own adventure, and create their own alternate realities, and that doesn’t prevent the social media companies from scaling.

With social media everyone can choose their own adventure

isn't the issue that you can't actually choose yourself, but that it is chosen for you?

Well that and people tend to seek out information they agree with rather than information that challenges their views.

Hence if you throw enough lines, you can catch almost anyone and lead them towards garbage.

> Well that and people tend to seek out information they agree with rather than information that challenges their views.

I don't think this is necessarily true. A while ago, I read a study which found that right-leaning people have the greatest media diversity, i.e. they also consume media from their political opponents. The problem here is less that people are being in a filter bubble or pick their information selectively, and more that people weight information differently depending whether they trust the source, or not.

A while ago, I read a study which found that right-leaning people have the greatest media diversity, i.e. they also consume media from their political opponents.

Statistics say the opposite: left leaning persons in the US have a broader spectrum of media they consume and trust. From the selection of ~30 media presented, people on the right basically chose 1: Fox News https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/democrats-trust-more-news-...

before mass media we had the priests and the Church which decided what is truth and what is not.

I've come to understand religion as simply a way to share a stabilized consensus reality in the high dimensional space of all possible beliefs.

As in, it was easy for us to evolve to see the same physical reality (sight, sound, smell, etc) but we had to evolve spiritual predispositions in order to create arbitrary attractors in value space, which could pull us toward something shared. This, in turn, allowed civilizations to grow larger even as language complexified our imagined world into much higher dimensions (compared to more primitive animal minds)

So spirituality (and it's inevitable scaled system of religions) is both an oppressor and an enabler of getting here. Like a primitive form of governance that we evolved before we were thoughtful enough to invent governance ourselves :)

Yes, but things were more locally information-wise. Every iteration of mass media did not just merely enlarge the infosphere, it did lengthen the distance between the people who shape what you believe and the people who share the consequences of you believing it. The trusted village priest had some skin-in-the-game, and was at least to some degree accountable for what he said because he shared your fate. The influencer, a product of social media, is basically the worst of both worlds.

> The risk for democracy is not social media per se, but mass media.

err not necessarily, mass media like the printing press, radio, television, the internet etc just increases visibility and expands people's understanding of the world, the risk to democracy is destabilizing economic conditions (extreme inequality). Social media just exacerbates this.

mass media influenced and dominated people's understanding. it didn't do as much to expand it. to expand your understanding you had to and still have to do your own research and look at things that do not have mass appeal.

These people believe (as did the ineffectual idiots who ran the Weimar Republic, and the later idiots who destroyed the USSR) that control of information and the social narrative will prevent the population from rebelling in the face of economic decline. They are dead wrong, and they are only making things worse by distorting the feedback loop that could correct bad policy.

It goes beyond that. Even chat platforms can be a problem now. IMO, I'm no sociologist but I'd love the viewpoint of one, human societies were very much non flat in terms of information, and cheap infinite internet collapsed the thin hierarchical nature of information-sharing and communication.

> Even chat platforms can be a problem now.

A problem for whom? If a form of government requires someone, somewhere, to prevent people talking to each other, this form of government is illegitimate. Period. The end.

for the people themselves, i'm not thinking about political power wishing to control minds, simply the way human communication might fail when everything is flat (and again, i'm just a simple nerd, not a researcher). what used to be local is now global, a bad idea in a village can find resonnance in other places, people start to convince themselves. the depth of information is also reduced (see how every puppet candidate is using tiktok snippets to appear charming)

I can’t believe you are downvoted. The enemies of free speech and association are out in force in this thread.

What is even the purpose of a government if not to guarantee the rights of its people?

What? We interfere with terror cells and criminal communication whenever we can. What is this absolute line in the sand you are drawing.

If that's what they mean, fully agreed.

There's no clean separation between those things. The weakness and inadequacy of HTTP(S) and other protocols actively funnels people into the centralised services of big providers. It creates a world where storage is brittle and content is ephemeral, both directly due to its own failings and because it pushes people towards big providers who increasingly like things that way; and so on. Now human nature would be enough to tend to draw a lot of people towards lowest-common-denominator options, but a system which makes the alternatives frictionful and downright painful doesn't help either.

Isn’t the title inappropriate then? Shouldn’t it include “social media”?

I think the implication is that the architecture of the internet inevitably leads to social media companies driving for maximum engagement.

It’s definitely not explicitly stated though.

Thanks, saved me a read.

Don’t thank that. Read it yourself.

I was all ready to read a story about how BGP and TCP/IP are a bad fit for democracy.

I dont care about social media algorithms, as far as I am concerned its settled that they suck. Its also not "The architecture of the internet" in any way shape or form.

“The Internet” is more than its low-level transport layer.

You might be conflating "The Internet" with "The Web" which is common.

And the OP article specifically says "Architecture". The architecture of a building is not a seat at a table inside the building, even if the building contains it.

I’d say “The Internet” includes “The Web” and when someone refers to its “architecture”, it can be a number of different things. If they wanted to be specific about the low level plumbing, they would probably use the proper names for the protocols and systems.

And, sometimes, the architect of a building also designs the furniture and other equipment. Oscar Niemeyer’s headquarters of the French Communist Party is a great example of that, where the architect went on to design the building’siconic chairs.

If someone sent me a link to "The Architecture of Oscar Niemeyer’s headquarters of the French Communist Party" I wouldn't expect the content to be solely about the chairs.

I’m not sure about you, but when people talk about the internet, or use the internet, they are not thinking about IP or BGP.

And the feeds are largely the way they are due to unregulated greed.

There is a different root cause then, perhaps.

And by democracy they mean... people agreeing with each other and voting for the correct parties:

broadband reduced civic participation, eroded social trust, and boosted voting for extreme-right and populist parties in Italy and Germany.

Is the "extreme-right" party in Germany still chaired by a brown lesbian woman?

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