Eventually we'll have to reconcile a few key issues:
- People deserve to consensually communicate between themselves however they see fit, as long as just laws are not being broken.
- The world wide web now represents a dominant form of communication.
- The "web" as the average, non-tech person perceives it, predominantly consists of a mixture of large tech conglomerates with major conflicting interests between what's best for their users and what's best for their shareholders.
- These tech conglomerates have adopted a strange combination of conservative politics, liberal politics and an extremely restrictive and prudish system of rules for what kind of communication may take place. Navigating this system is entirely arbitrary and once you're out, you're out, with no recourse, unless you engage in further TOS-breaking by creating alternate accounts.
- Switching to an open platform is not enough; if none of your peers are on the platform, or it doesn't support open protocols, then you still can't communicate with them.
Without some form of (people-led!!!) government intervention I see no way to reconcile all of these issues. Perhaps it involves tax breaks, or only applies to platforms meeting certain thresholds, such as conglomerates or subsidiaries of them. The details can be worked out, but the fact remains that something needs to be done.
I don't see how you require a private entity to broadcast communications without getting rid of the first amendment.
That's where all the whinging is, people want to require Facebook or Twitter to show whatever stupid thing they said to lots of others, they aren't mad that Facebook blocked their private messages with their mom.
It's a problem they created themselves, so it's moot. They wanted walled gardens and a larger slice of the ad pie. I have zero sympathy for these tech conglomerates who dare to rule public discourse with an iron fist. They have not earned it. They colonized the world wide web and systematically attacked old ways of communication.
If the choice is between preserving freedom of speech for a individual and for a corporation, it's not a head scratcher. You favor the individual, almost universally.
The "whinging" is completely warranted. Gone are the days when I can easily email a phone number, or use XMPP to talk with Facebook users.
And now these companies have the audacity to lean on "you posted it on our platform, so we reserve every right but copyright" and systematically make the internet opaque to search engines in order to muscle some AI money from other companies. They're openly eviscerating the public forum, after intentionally killing off forums by employing sickening addiction-bolstering algorithms and dark UX patterns.
We are openly engaged in information warfare with the modern, digital equivalents of the East India Tea Company, and again, I have zero sympathy and will not let them hide behind "muh freedom of speech" when they actively undermine multiple universal human rights as recognized by the US Constitution. They undermine your freedom of speech, your right to due process, right to decline unwarranted search and seizure, and more.
We have had this same exact issue swelling with landlords for decades. As citizens increasingly are forced into lifelong rentership instead of home ownership, they are finding their rights slowly eroding. First, it happened with the poor and disenfranchised. A landlord can enter their home at any time, and force all sorts of rules that inhibit freedom of expression and reduce privacy, increasing government reach. The experiment worked, and now we're seeing it manifest in what's left of the middle class. And I feel zero sympathy for landlords and property management groups over this, as well. None. All of these user-hostile companies, these artifacts of late-stage capitalism, they are causing societal harm that may end up being irreparable if something is not done.
We made phone lines neutral. Mark Zuckerberg can keep his rights just as we can, but Meta The Company is not a human.
I mean all of these issues basically boil down to that these services and platforms that now constitute whatever can vaguely pass as if you squint your eyes enough a third place, though if you analogize it to a park, it's a park where like 6 marketing people follow you around and make note every time you stop to look at a flower, but that's a different conversation.
People are entitled to express themselves in any way that's not illegal per the first amendment, but because all these companies are entirely, 100% beholden to advertisers to continue to exist, that expression is necessarily limited to suit the tastes of those advertisers. Perfect example is Twitter. They've adopted much looser restrictions on content and as a result, the company is worth about a fifth what it was when it was purchased by Musk, and the ads in that time have shifted significantly from prominent, respected brands and being... ubiquitous, but not to an extent that it felt so, to being virtually every third or fourth post, and completely unknown companies hawking all manner of unimpressive goods, crypto schemes, dude wipes, and of course weight loss drugs and dick pills. Basically the exact kinds of ads you'd expect to find on crank conspiracy websites circa 2010 (and probably today) and a shitload MORE of them, because they're trying desperately to keep the company financially solvent.
The government intervention would probably be something like these various networks (or a new one) that is owned and operated by the public, like a utility.
It's an interesting problem because we do see innovation from private companies (tech, scaling, UX, etc) that I don't think we'd see in a publicly/government-owned platform. But the fact that it comes at the cost of hiring the world's top minds to figure out how to generate more ad clicks at any cost (mind control, teen suicide, etc.) is just unacceptable.
Whatever way out we might choose, I hope that it doesn't impact indie hackers and people who want to try new things. We have to make sure that the root of the problem, advertising, is properly captured in the letter of the law, and that any legislation doesn't get disemboweled by corporate interests on the way out the door.
> It's an interesting problem because we do see innovation from private companies (tech, scaling, UX, etc) that I don't think we'd see in a publicly/government-owned platform.
I don't see any reason to suspect this. Even a blurrier incentive is still incentive.
Secondly a lot of that innovation has been bad. Consider the disappearance of a chronological timeline, or ads themselves. There's nothing inherently positive about the concept of innovation but profit motivates every type (as it stands). It just tends to happen faster with private enterprise and without any say from the users.
You're right, I just mean more on the UX and tech side of things. Government software UX is typically atrocious. Some of it is well-founded and just outdated, though.
But, there are some nice efforts taking place within the government to modernize and standardize tech and UX. digital. Digital.gov is killing it lately. https://designsystem.digital.gov/
I mean, UX is atrocious across the board really, at least in my experience. I can't remember the last time I used a tech product and didn't have at least one moment of bafflement as to how anyone thought this was how this should be designed.
> It's an interesting problem because we do see innovation from private companies (tech, scaling, UX, etc) that I don't think we'd see in a publicly/government-owned platform.
I mean, would you need half of that scaling if not for the demands of surveillance capitalism? How much of Google's tech stack is built around, for example, delivering email, and how much of Google's tech stack is built around harvesting user data for Adsense? I'm sure gmail runs on something that would be as far from a standard email server as anything I could imagine, but I feel like there's a natural ceiling in terms of the sheer amount of compute you could reasonably bring to bear to accomplish the task of mail transfer, whereas I could easily see the demands of running intensive, page-by-page analytics on a variety of websites and apps all at the same time easily demanding an absolutely stressful amount of server traffic and compute, let alone the delivery of the ads after that work is finished.
And, that also presumes that gmail as a service is made better by being run on the infrastructure of a hyper-scaler. Running it across datacenters worldwide. Is it? Is the experience meaningfully better for the end user in the bargain, or is it everything around that service that requires such vast resources?
Like, genuinely, how much electricity could we save if we just turned off user data collection tomorrow?
