dotandgtfo

Not only are you shown content that you react the strongest too, people create content that they react strongly too, continuing the cycle.

A user with a balanced interpretation and somewhat neutral feelings about a topic generally won't feel like they want to add something to a discussion. A user with strong opinion will more likely engage with someone with posts with the opposite viewpoint or the same viewpoint.

HN is a bit of an exception because the community is reasonably high quality. But major platforms? The people who bother to write out long and neutral posts learned there is nothing to gain from doing that years ago.

Great essay, I want to highlight a particularly relevant part from it.

> Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group. This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

In my experience with the GDPR it's selectively enforced on large companies and not small mom and pop shops unless they are handling unusually sensitive data. The legal system can only handle a couple of cases at a time, spending that on small shops with inconsequential signal effects isn't their MO.

The position you have about this topic serves the status quo of corporations and advertisers deciding on what speech is acceptable. That is the status quo today with the major tech platforms. Personally I find it detestable. And you'd find your viewpoints a bit extreme in countries around the world. Nazi speech in Germany is banned for a good reason and is popular with the populace.

And sharing quotes by long dead authors is hardly relevant to the systems we've built today which reward inflammatory speech for the sake of monetizing eyeballs. Personally I find that more dystopian than setting some rules for engagement about how you discuss sensitive topics, like we have here on HN. But that's expensive to do so these platforms just deplatform such content no matter how inflammatory or neutrally it is presented.

This is one of the most important parts of the EUs upcoming digital services act in my opinion. Platforms have to share data with (vetted) researchers, public interest groups and journalists.

Steam takes a cut of the sales price and a cut of microtransactions done through the Steam wallet. But they don't force developers to use the Steam wallet. I wouldn't be surprised if that last point is what will ultimately matter.

The AI act I won't comment on as I'm not that well read on it and it's not been codified yet. I agree that some parts are more wishful thinking then others.

The belief that if EU removed their regulation a big tech sector would pop up is absurd libertarian propaganda. I'm not saying you believe that, but some people do. Norms, values and the insanity of scaling a business across 20+ languages are way bigger factors for why companies settle into local geographical maxima's. Try managing 3 different marketing agencies, 3 different websites, 3 different app languages. Imagine doing an A/B test on this and maintaining different winner variants across geographies. Congratulations you've just scaled to 20 million people in Norway, Denmark and Sweden. I deal with this everyday - it's horribly inefficient. I think that's the main factor hindering the European B2C tech sector. It's easier to just scale in the US.

This article is about the DSA so I'll stick to that.

> Do you know that Meta, Google, etc have to hire literally tens of thousands of people exclusively to keep up with EU regulations?

A platform serving billions of users needs thousands, if not tens of thousands of moderators. Hell even a forum with hundreds of users need a couple of moderators to keep things in check. Unmoderated platforms turn into self-destructive cesspools without exception.

Facebook and Twitter scaled to other countries with the wishful thinking that algorithmic moderation would scale. Turns out it doesn't. It was a risk they took while moving fast and breaking things and now they're cashing in their check.

The DSA in large parts revolves around transparency around how platforms are dealing with moderation. Did you know that Twitter only has one polish speaking moderator? Do you think that's enough for the 14 million MAUs they have? [1]

In Germany it's illegal to show nazi symbolism. It's also illegal to "harm someones reputation". In Norway the Sapmi ethnic population is a protected class. In Denmark you can't burn the Quran. This are real codified laws and preferences that a foreign company can't just ignore. And you have. There's thousands of examples and a decade of cases. There's a reason the entirety of Europe is standing together to do something about it - and it's not to seek a measly billion euros or five in fines.

While you may be ideologically or philosophically opposed to the "limiting of speech" you'll find that this varies wildly across cultures and across topics. Just because the US has laws and norms around "free speech" and "safe harbour laws" doesn't mean that other countries must be forced to be imposed these rules from American tech giants who put no or a marginal effort into following laws behind extremely opaque platforms with zero accountability.

When doing business in another country you follow their laws, it's as easy as that. If the cost of the fine is less then the cost of following the law it won't be followed. If the cost is too high to bear, it opens room for local competition who will follow the rules. That's fine. American tech can do whatever the hell they want in the US, that's not our right to influence.

[1]https://transparency.twitter.com/dsa-transparency-report.htm...

> Unable to stop literally anything bad from happening as a side effect of their actions

That's neither what I said nor the stated goal of this regulation.

Theres tons of externalities ranging from increased political polarisation, mental health issues, increasing social isolation to the decimation of the traditional publishing sector. These socio-technical systems are some of the most complex ever built and we are barely scratching the surface of the challenges they are causing. It doesn't help that these platforms actively stop the collection of data on their platforms for research purposes (as they probably know it'll reflect poorly on them).

The platforms themselves have identified their content as a legitimate existential risk. Mostly due to how advertisers don't want to be affiliated with certain types of content. See the multiple rounds of demonitizations done by Google in the adpocalypse or Elsagate. Or Meta's crackdown on content post 2016/Brexit. Or Elon's current YOLO which has killed their advertising revenue.

The current status quo is that platforms govern their platform content through advertisers threatening to pull advertising budgets. I'd say you Americans are mildly crazy for regulating the reach of speech through informal negotiations by big advertisers and big tech, but it does sound on-brand for you guys. I find it pretty disgusting though, and I bet a lot of you Americans do too.

Anyways, the DSA in it's current form is largely revolves around increased transparency into data for researchers and mandated reporting processes around moderation decisions. More informed decision making can be made in the future while not relying exclusively on leaked documents from whistleblowers like Frances Haugen.

Yes I concur /s. Don't use Google search. Don't use websites with Google Analytics. Don't use websites with Google Ads conversion tracking. Don't use Android phones. Don't send SMSes to android phones. Don't use YouTube. Don't use websites that embed YouTube. Don't use Chrome. Don't use gmail. Don't send email to gmail addresses. Oh yes, and I also don't use news media sites who monetise through Google adsense either.

Yes, I agree that the first DSA investigation targeting X obviously has more of a populistic bent due to Elon. But he's drawn a pretty good target on his own back including but not limited to firing the election integrity team [1] while the DSA clearly states that VLOPs have to do risk assessments before elections.

Honestly, American big tech has shown close to zero ability to self-regulate the externalities of their platforms, especially abroad, and especially in smaller countries.

If the consequence of this regulation is that American tech companies pull out of hard to serve European markets I wouldn't mind that one bit. That would open up markets for local competition closer aligned to their audience. Norway doesn't use Meta as the dominant messaging app because people like it. We use it because network effects creates unassailable moats, lock-in and network effects. Most people absolutely hate Meta and loathe Google - but we can't exactly not use them without it costing us greatly.

I'm happy to live here and the actions being done by the EU with GDPR, DSA and DMA are in my honest opinion critically needed as American-centric, free-market, "free-speech" norms are misaligned with other cultures in a way that foreigners would never understand without delving deep into a countries culture. Not just through naive metrics-driven technology scaling engagement at all costs. This is warping and killing culture, media environments, advertising ecosystems and political communication in the name of profit for a select few massive tech companies which aren't even taxing to the countries they're siphoning advertising budgets out of.

X is nothing special. The only reason there isn't another Twitter is because these markets mostly have room for one platform. If Twitter disappeared in Europe there'd be a local replacement in less than a year or two. And honestly it would probably be better.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/28/elon-musk...

Yes, and it creates huge problems for the whole world when an arbitrary multi-billion dollar organisation can "impose rules on content moderation" and "privacy" with zero accountability while skirting local laws. Non-american countries should form a bloc and force them to be reasonable.

Chat control was struck down last month and was never going to go through anyways as just having a cursory understanding of technology is enough to understand that banning end to end encryption is infeasible.

And chat control being struck down was in part on the grounds of respecting rights around private correspondence so you're just spreading factually wrong information for no good reason.

Thanks! I was logged into count so I just got sent straight to my homepage as well. Seems interesting

Your link probably doesn't lead where you want it to btw.

Nada? It's made huge changes in how businesses use ad tech. And yes, I work as a martech consultant.

Pre-2018 nobody cared about sharing data with third parties. Today nobody wants to be this company. https://www.nrk.no/kultur/nettapotek-delte-med-facebook-at-d...

Ymmv, but nada is categorically wrong.

Unanimous support in the Norwegian subreddit as well.

I don't think Tesla's will be as popular in the future. They've greatly damaged their brand through these actions already.

Ok, it's just such an absurd position I wanted to make sure. So essentially you're arguing about semantics?

What are you stating? I genuinely don't get the point. Are you saying that screens/apps don't cause addiction?

The demo is neat. How did you do the backend? As far as I see your offering is only related to the UI components. What databases and backends are you seeing users have success with?

Seconding this Edit: Happened again. Might not be related.

I don't disagree fully, but I don't believe that Omegle is comparable to the bench scenario entirely either. The numbers are pretty wild.

> There is evidence that Omegle has improved its moderation practices. In 2019, Omegle made 3,470 reports to NCEMC, which increased to 20,265 in 2020 and 46,924 in 2021 (NCMEC, 2020, 2021, 2022). In 2022, Omegle filed 608,601 reports of child sexual exploitation to NCMEC (NCMEC, 2023), a 1197% increase on the previous year. This figure is higher than the reports made by very popular social media applications including TikTok (288,125) and Snapchat (551,086) (NCMEC, 2023). When queried by a journalist about this increase, an Omegle spokesperson reiterated the website's ethos of personal responsibility but indicated that their moderation efforts had been augmented. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26338076231194451

I don't support the business model of scaling up social networks while skimping on moderation to make it profitable. The user LTVs are so low that moderation costs are probably prohibitive for a service like this. While I deeply respect Omegle and their increase in moderation, maybe some business models are just unsustainable and not worth the externalities.

IMO the real life analog is more akin to organising a festival with hundreds of thousands of visitors while only having a guy at the gate making sure you've signed a release agreement. This doesn't fly in meatspace, and it seems more likely it won't fly in the digital sphere either in the future.

I feel like it's pretty obvious the bill wouldn't pass. It's just so off-base from all other EU tech policy. Banning end to end encryption is both ineffective and practically impossible. And sending "CSAM" (in a lot of cases teenagers/young adult nudes) to a presumably American tech company for manual screening is just so unequivocally wrong on a privacy level.

It seems like a lot of money went into making this get to the vote. My impression is that lobbyists have worked for this through the European commission - which is distasteful as it should never have been proposed. But it never stood a chance in the parliament. There seems to be checks and balances.

I have to credit the great work of people like Patrick Breyer and everyone who has demonstrated and organized across the EU these last months. Passivity leads to the worst outcomes.

That's the point, it's not. But many people (me included) seem to be under the impression that his views will lead to this end-game.

Particularly points like:

> We believe in market discipline. The market naturally disciplines – the seller either learns and changes when the buyer fails to show, or exits the market. When market discipline is absent, there is no limit to how crazy things can get. The motto of every monopoly and cartel, every centralized institution not subject to market discipline: “We don’t care, because we don’t have to.” Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.

Are pillars of his argument while being complete horseshit (the monopoly part in particular). When he thus argues that regulations and market control are bad he does implicitly argue for this.

He isn't arguing for the benefits of the many short term. He's arguing for the benefit of the many through "abundance" at some point in the distant future. But for the moment - he'll get filthy rich off of this flavour of libertarian anarcho-capitalism. And if you're optimistic too maybe you'll get rich in a couple of decades through trickle-down technological development too! wink wink

You seem to think that the article is against technological development. It's not. It's a critique against the libertarian hyper-capitalist model that a16z argues for in his manifesto which arguably brings downsides with it in technological advancement.

You seem to be completely missing what the article is arguing. It's not about technology, it's about responsible technological development - where the value from these developments don't end up in the hands of a centralised few at the cost of the many. Which is pretty much what a16z is arguing for.

Not to mention that Booking.com is a European company that has explicitly been targeted by the upcoming digital markets act.

In some cases yes. In a lot of cases no. Take barbers for instance. Acquiring new customers used to be somewhat "automatic" and organic through Google. You'd set up a website. You'd set up a Google my business listing. And if you did an average job people could start finding you through search and Google Maps.

Now the digital competition is way fiercer. There are way more advertisers. They've improved their craft, websites and copy. Any random barber can't go into the Google marketplace and expect results without either being really good at CPC advertising and CRO (which 99% aren't) or pay top dollar to an agency.

All the while Google is increasing their profits by skimming off what originally was organic search results and moving it into paid results. Through new Ad placements on Google Maps. Shitty placements provided through the "Performance max" placements. Or just even more ads at the top of the SERP.

On top of this the ad bidding system is inherently set up to be extractive. In a perfectly measurable market the price you pay for an acquisition through CPC ads will increase until it has extracted all the profit an advertiser can reasonably give.

This distorts the economy greatly. It concentrates power to those who are the best at digital - at the cost of the average business owner who has no resources, interest or skills in learning it.

This goes for barbers, bakeries, restaurants and all kinds of brick and mortar stores. In a lot of these cases it's a zero sum game where Google has inserted itself in the perfect position to be extractive.

Not to mention the advertising dollars that used to go to the local newspaper is now going to a California behemoth.

Skimming through your previous posts I think we differ too fundamentally to have a reasonable discussion about this.

I'll state that I'm happy that your libertarian/anarcho-capitalistic views on regulations, taxes and government is an extreme position here and not the status quo.

I don't think you understand GDPR as it is about protecting privacy. It is however true that a nice side-effect of GDPR is giving legislators the opportunity to rip into businesses that don't comply with it. 10/10, can't wait until the DMA and DSA gets kicked into gear too.

Are you saying that you liked how Facebook and Google could cross-site track every single (logged-in or not) European and use that for targeted ads as well as share it with the NSA?

Thank GDPR (and Apple) for stopping that around ~2018.

Yes, this may have happened anyway. Yes, Facebook is not fully responsible. But I disagree with you. The lines are clear.

Facebook de facto became the internet in a country of ~50 million people through subsidising their platform through free data access.

Their platform was developed in order to further their own goals - through maximising engagement and monetisation.

The second order effects of their own personal ambition was enabling people like Wirathu to reach hundreds of thousands of people with hate speech and calls for genocide.

Facebook were informed of this multiple times and allegedly, did nothing about. During this time they had 1 Burmese speaking moderator.

Stating that they have no moral responsibility for the consequences of their actions is in my opinion horseshit. But it does align with certain aspects of the current American zeitgeist of entrepreneurship, free speech and platform "safe harbour" regulations.

This is not a view shared everywhere and should not be assumed when American tech companies scale out of the US. Thankfully this dogmatic approach is being regulated by the likes of the EU and other countries so these platforms are more aligned with their own moral frameworks.

Personally, I find Facebook absolutely morally responsible for parts of this. Just through the simple fact that provided a platform for tens of millions of people - with severely lacking moderation - all in the chase of growth and profits.

This isn't exporting "freedom and democracy" to the world like the good old days. This is abhorrent profit maximisation with no regards for the consequences of their actions, hidden behind a thin veneer of moral rationalization.

It's less of an equation and more of a counter example for how absurdly oversimplified and privileged the position of "just ignore it" is.

>Yes the solution to racist speech is to just ignore it.

Citation needed. As a foreigner living in Germany it's pretty obvious they've drawn different conclusions than that.

I'll also point out that there is nothing obvious about how free speech is defined (by Americans). There's obviously limits to speech, it's just been delineated into the constitutional "free speech" and the colloquial notion of "free speech". Which you seem to be conflating (or assuming that I care about). The OP is squarely about the more colloquial understanding of the word.

This reads like chatGPT generated rubbish. And based on your post history (historically short comments, and then lately more longer-form content like this) I guess that is the case.

While I do agree on most of the points, the conclusion "Tell People That All They Have to Do Is to Not Listen" does not follow and is borderline offensive. Are you really saying that the solution to racism and discrimination is to just ignore it?

Here's some points I grabbed from ChatGPT.

Complexity of Speech: While the idea of 'just don't listen' might sound simple in theory, it does not consider the nuanced complexities of real-life situations. There are circumstances where hateful or harmful speech can incite actual physical harm or can propagate harmful stereotypes.

The Impact on the Vulnerable: Telling people to simply 'not listen' can be especially problematic for vulnerable groups or minorities who are often the target of hate speech. For them, it's not just about ignoring the speech; it's about navigating the real-world implications and potential threats that come with it.

A Shared Responsibility: While individuals can choose to 'not listen', it's important to note that platforms, corporations, and societies also play a role in moderating and guiding the discourse.