> If the original Twitter crew had been about 30% less overtly willing to censor news, language, people, or ideas they didn’t like, Musk probably wouldn’t have bought the company, and the blues would still be in control of Twitter
The author makes the same mistake Elon made when he bought Twitter, namely, thinking that Twitter management was hellbent on pushing leftist propaganda, when really they were apolitical operators trying to make as much money as possible. And their masterstroke was convincing someone to overpay for their company by an enormous amount.
The reason is that Conservative/Republican users of Twitter also tended to break the rules more often. Particularly in regards to sharing misinformation.
Depending on which side of the aisle you lean, it's very easy to spin this one way vs the other.
> the best way to dismiss misinformation is to let it shine under the light of scrutiny
That has been tried many times and it does not work at scale. Generating and distributing information is orders of magnitude easier, faster, and cheaper than generating and distributing refutations of that misinformation.
This isn't a law. This is an opinion by someone who can't stand being told that something he might think is correct isn't and when pushed on it can't argue in good faith because his position isnt as good as he thought.
Also considering who came up with it, it's another prime example of someone who is an expert in one area assuming he has expertise in another that he has zero expertise in.
"refute" is more than just saying "I don't think it's true". You have to provide evidence, or I suppose in some cases an incredibly solid justification to refute.
I say "desantis is actually running for president to sell off Texas to the Mexicans".
Took me about 4 seconds to write that. You have an order of magnitude to refute it - about 40 seconds. God speed.
Information wants to be free. I can't believe I have to say this on a site like this.
I'm glad Elon bought Twitter because it allows for disinformation to be exposed and discussed.
The more you suppress it, the more people seek it out.
The petty tyrants out there with opinions like yours deserve the freedom of speech they get because it shows that some stuff you think is valid isn't actually as valid as you think it is.
> Information wants to be free...I'm glad Elon bought Twitter because it allows for disinformation to be exposed and discussed.
Is this the same Elon who disallowed links to competitor sites? Who announced that the term "cisgender" would be classified as hate speech? Who suspended accounts for criticizing him? Who closed the site so it could be viewed by logged-in users only?
I understand advocating for free speech, but seeing that vision realized in Elon's management of Twitter requires willful blindness.
> Information wants to be free. I can't believe I have to say this on a site like this.
This is a tech-startup website that exists to monetize SV-style start-ups. The whole point is to make as much money as possible, and any FOSS love is wholly incidental.
And I don't think he cares because he has more money than sense at this point.
Like I said elsewhere, you can now pretty much say whatever you want on Twitter within reason.
Masks do reduce the spread of particulates by some amount. Reducing the spread of particulates by some amount has a negligible impact on the spread of COVID 19 and other respiratory viruses. To believe otherwise is, again, misinformation.
The most obvious and trivial answer is that countries implementing mask mandates have seen COVID become endemic. That masks provide 'some' impact is obvious. That said impact is negligible is also obvious. We are still waiting, years and years latter, for that curve to finally be flattened.
You're making a basic logic error that I've seen so many times from your camp: "if it doesn't work 100% it doesn't work at all". Why do you think this is a logical requirement?
So no data, cool. I will no longer believe Johns Hopkins and will instead defer to you for medical advice because obviously you’ve made a seriously compelling argument.
You could maybe argue they weren't pushing a leftist agenda, sure. But they conveniently didn't fight for freedom of speech either. They were just very comfortable so long as the prevailing opinion on the wider media matched their beliefs. The "right" doesn't have this luxury.
Even the fringe left or far-left have a media "free pass" that they enjoy. And no one seems to understand this part of the criticism of the media by the right.
The means by which Twitter could make money is by catering to advertisers, and those advertisers often had strict political biases. Musk complains about this often.
What about one that allows concessions outside, though? How might a vendor be able to set up shop, maybe for a small fee? Or should the public conversation be a designated no-enterprise zone?
Ideally, ethics would prevent us from mixing business with politics and pleasure, but maybe there is a balance that would allow for a way to fund these social projects we say we value so highly, but turn out our pockets when it's time to drop a dollar into the plate as it gets passed by.
I'm tired of watching democratic institutions shrivel and die only to be replaced by plastic replicas.
Seemingly fundamental forces keep tearing down our Towers of Babel, and I wonder if we'll ever learn that the best organizational patterns for humanity are smaller groups responsible to and holding responsible the state. Whenever we try to do things bigger than that, we end up getting all authoritarian and creepy.
It's not like their original comment is that opaque, but here's my attempt to break down (translate?):
Are we going to continue to allow capitalist enterprise to have a say in public policy conversation (concessions stands outside the town square)?
Ideally no from an ethics perspective, but then we as a populace need a way to and habit of contributing directly ourselves to fund social services ("dropping a dollar in the plate" - reference to collecting tithe during Catholic services).
They're tired of seeing public services starved of funding, then privatized and replaced by corporate, profit-driven ("plastic") replicas.
Basics of human nature keep undermining our attempts to build giant organizations together. We need to make and keep government a local, small-scale, accountable practice we all participate in, rather than one giant federal tent nobody is connected to - that gets Orwellian.
Hope that helps and hope I represented it faithfully.
I was thinking specifically journalism and newspapers, which acted as our national "town squares" up until social media killed it. Advertisers would pay for a portion of the page and we would paste in their business card alongside the news and opinions.
That's how we used to fund public debate. Now we fund it by watching advertisements scroll past tweets by journalists and politicians, debating and sharing memes. Meta and Twitter reap those profits now.
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." –A.J. Liebling
I just think it would be cool if the public had some kind of ownership over the debate, rather than someone else who gets to determine the terms under which it occurs. The internet was supposed to be our public square.
Even better if the public can profit from all the money that gets generated from selling our attention. We can use that for public services, like you mention.
I guess I don't understand how newspapers running ads against opinion pieces is any different from social networks running ads against posts. Also, that hasn't gone away? The Internet has changed how news publications work, but they definitely still exist!
But also, insofar as "town square" means that everyone can contribute, it's a better analogy for the Internet than it ever was for newspapers. There are no gatekeepers! Social media companies may have big megaphones, but they absolutely do not set the terms of acceptable discourse.
Like, what is it about the Internet that doesn't fit your description?
Well, as far as I can see, the only options are for-profit, charity, and government-run. Of those, charity is undependable, and government-run has an obvious conflict of interest. For-profit worked for a couple of centuries in the form of newspapers. (Letters to the editor was the only part that was really a "town square", and that was subject to the whims of the editors. But for much of that time, there was competition between newspapers, so they tended to allow most viewpoints to be heard at least every now and then.)
So for-profit worked... and then it didn't, at least in the form of newspapers. Twitter also worked, but it's even-handedness is in question, and there isn't good competition if you don't trust it to be honest.
Taken down a website? Perhaps never. Now, what about a US government-run website? Do you trust them to keep that an open forum for criticism of Biden? Or Trump? Or the Congress that appropriates money to fund the website? I don't.
My point is that, if the government makes a "town square", you can't trust them to let it be an honest town square. Sure, you can make one yourself. But then it's either for-profit, or charity; it's not government.
So you're answering something, but it's not what I said.
People are nostalgic for the days of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers when people were fine debating their opposing views in the papers without dropping the hammer down on one side for being morally repugnant.
Who is “people”? Do Black people miss the days when you could pick up the paper and read people arguing for Jim Crow? My life would definitely not be improved if I had to listen to people telling me how Jews control the banks.
People like Musk who self identify as classical liberals, or whatever the faddish term for that happens to be.
Going by surveys, a lot of black people are against increasing immigration. Openly crossing that line is often justification for dropping the internet hammer. One gets the sense that, at some point, the hammer was used with more restraint.
Or it was just used against other people. You know, exiling gay kids from their families and friends has been a longtime tradition. Is that not “the hammer?”
It's not the same hammer I'm discussing. The equivalent would be censorship of pleas made in favor of homosexual causes, which the US is not particularly known for.
Fredick Douglass owned and published a newspaper that was not censored - when you look at abolitionist articles or early drafts from the Seneca Falls Convention, you are not likely to find a bunch of scribble marks or other equivalents to the [deleted] tag that litters the internet today.
> Fredick Douglass owned and published a newspaper that was not censored
He was the owner and publisher, and his viewpoint, while not exactly establishment, was well within the Overton Window where it was published.
> when you look at abolitionist articles or early drafts from the Seneca Falls Convention, you are not likely to find a bunch of scribble marks or other equivalents to the [deleted] tag that litters the internet today.
Because their weren't user content platforms with the owner exercising post-publication editing, for technological reasons. The ideas that were censored were just never published (sometimes because those holding them were murdered for expressing them), not published and then edited partially after the fact.
>Because their weren't user content platforms with the owner exercising post-publication editing, for technological reasons. The ideas that were censored were just never published (sometimes because those holding them were murdered for expressing them), not published and then edited partially after the fact.
There were cases of this happening, often in the South, but in many other places it was not common practice.
The consolidation of much conversation onto 'platforms' with the internet makes the act of censorship a lot more obvious, and tends to set people's 1984 alarms off more. We mocked China for deleting scores and scores of Weibo comments, but here we are doing the same.
No, “we” are not doing the same. In China the state compels private companies to hold and enforce certain positions toward certain speech. That’s exactly what the “anti-censorship” lobby is asking for, and it’s not at all what is happening today in the US.
Today, you have private companies managing content on their own platforms according to their own policies. The government can and does ask for certain actions and, unlike China, companies are more than welcome to decline those requests.
Indeed, the relationship of the state and business does differ in China. In the US it is more decentralized.
To the person who considers the outcome of something like Weibo covered in deleted comments and only having survivors parrot narrow lines, this is a bad thing, even if the cause differs.
I’m not an expert on censorship in China, so I won’t weigh in on that, but in the US it’s a non-issue. If you can’t discuss some conservative view on Twitter, move over to Truth Social or Gab or the many Mastodon instances that exist explicitly to host that content.
“X group wasn’t censored because I can find an instance of X that wasn’t censored” is quite the argument.
You know you can find plenty of racist and sexist scribbles all over the internet, not [deleted]. According to your logic: proof that they are not censored!
When you want to track censorship in those days, you'd typically look for lawsuits. The US had blasphemy laws in local areas for a long time, but those were rarely enforced or taken to court, for example.
This is a total non-sequitur and ends up being a self-defeating argument anyway.
You’d look for people who couldn’t get business loans, couldn’t rent a storefront, couldn’t find a lawyer who would work for them to file lawsuits around their censorship, couldn’t leave their captor’s estate, couldn’t look at someone the wrong way without getting beaten to death, etc etc.
I actually struggle to imagine a worse way to track censorship than looking for lawsuits lol.
The NAACP and other organizations existed at the same time as Jim Crow. The reality was that the extent of the racial oppression varied considerably based on geography. Many find the idea of current censorship more intimidating because it exists everywhere within the US and many places outside of it, so there would be no good way of escaping it - while many blacks instead had the option of fleeing northward.
Got it. Social media sites moderating content is at least as bad as Jim Crow. Truly striking argument, though probably in the opposite way as intended.
If you could guarantee the problems are limited to social media moderation, it would be no issue. But the kinds of people who cause bad social media moderation also have their pies in many other kinds of policies, and they want blood. The end result of this would be worse than Jim Crow because it would be applied nationwide.
I mean, people were blacklisted in the 50s for allegedly being communists, right? People were actually killed for opposing Jim Crow. We had codes about what you were allowed to show in movies and comics.
I don’t get the sense that the hammer was ever used with more restraint. Rather, I get the sense that the people complaining didn’t care about the hammer when it was only wielded against others, and have decided to speak up now that it’s finally being used against them.
Slavery wasn't a new thing when the Constitution was written. The divide between the North and the South was noted by several founding fathers as a nasty issue, and it was probably a mistake to unite the two territories in such a way to begin with.
Hmm it was only on the fringes of culture that people were strongly against slavery around the founding of the country. Then there was a “moral awakening” via the Quakers that made it less and less culturally viable until culminating in open warfare.
So culture shifted underneath the issue, just like is happening today with all sorts of issues of moral repugnance.
The moral shift played a part in galvanizing enthusiasm for the war, but the Civil War ultimately was started by Northern statists who were adamant about maintaining a firm control over the North American heartland. Recall that the Emancipation proclamation came three years into the war.
The CSA seceded for the State's Right to Own Slaves. That much is obvious. The Northern response, as stated by Lincoln and understood by the majority of volunteers, was to Preserve the Union. That much is also obvious. Total abolitionism emerged only three years into the war. If the Northern population did not have a strong desire to Preserve the Union and only relied on abolitionist forces, then there would hardly have been a Civil War at all.
Northerners wanted control of the new territories because of slavery. Because at that point it was something most northerners did not want expanded across the rest of the continent as, again, a moral concern borne of a recent moral awakening.
It was an economic, political, and a moral concern. Free Soilers wanted the land for their own purposes. Expansion of slave states would mean expansion of a Senate group that would be in favor of reducing taxes and tariffs, an issue that almost caused a civil war to happen 40 years prior.
You’re not wrong about the advertisers but I wouldn’t cède the point they’re trying to refute either. People claim that executives are are purely motivated by money, but that just doesn’t hold up with the advertisers or with Twitter itself. They have their own political agendas, and time and again they are willing to sacrifice short term profit for long term political victories.
Money is power. People who want power want to use it. They’re not just dragons sitting on their hoards.
If you go down that road of thinking, you'll end up noticing that those with the most power usually aren't the most rich. Power is power, and it usually involves some butter, but more guns.
The whole feed based "internet town square" concept is flawed, if anyone have seen an actual European town square you would have noticed that it's nothing like Twitter or similar. In a good town square, you have people minding their own business and the public activities are actually curated(a few agendas that fit in the physical location) and people visit those if they they are interested in.
People don't actually participate in 100 different activities all the time and they are very annoyed if someone is trying to grab their attention.
Also, although there are all kind of people at the town square, those who scream "if evolution is real why the monkey in the forest don't become human" are nuisance for those who already went through the evolution theory and know why monkeys are not becoming human still.
Therefore, the whole concept of discovering different kind of people and being exposed to different ideas is not analogous to a feed with christian fundamentalist and atheists screaming to each other because people have different knowledge levels and some are more up to speed than the others on different topics.
A true town square are the forums where you can actually browse topics and participate in those who are at your level. Reddit is a closer analogy to a town square than Twitter.
it me, missing the purpose of reusing a concise term that suggests a basic notion of a public setting where varying people interact for its failing to exactly mimic the interaction patterns of such a setting in physical european cities
metaphors are impossible. never use them. they are meaningless.
You have to “control speech” to be able to have a community that doesn’t devolve into toxicity. All healthy communities do it, either implicitly or explicitly. Including Hacker News, which actually has a really good community as a result! Healthy communities are easier to destroy than create. They need protection. It’s not a political thing.
Yyy. Put another way, the "town square" concept doesn't scale.
And arguably, even at small scale, town squares don't lead to decency or better decision making. Things that "sound good" are judged as correct without research, data collection or analysis, with the predictable results.
Yup. We already have a variety of
institutions and organizations designed for intellectual collaboration, debate, and decision-making. Twitter isn’t one of them. Never has been.
> Healthy communities are easier to destroy than create. They need protection.
"Healthy" doesn't seem like the word to use to describe something that requires constant and intentional intervention/manipulation by some external party merely to exist.
At least some relatively high degree of inherent self-sufficiency, resilience, and robustness should be present for something to be considered "healthy".
> "Healthy" doesn't seem like the word to use to describe something that requires constant and intentional intervention/manipulation by some external party merely to exist
“Healthy” is not some absolute end state, but an ongoing process and a destination that is never reached permanently. Physical health is a useful analogy here: attaining it is the result of constant and intentional intervention. Ceasing to intervene results in an automatic trend towards unhealthy.
> some relatively high degree of inherent self-sufficiency, resilience, and robustness should be present
The existence of these properties in humans does not automatically lead to healthy outcomes. The entire self help industry exists on the basis of our struggles with using these properties to our advantage.
When you look at social media as a manifestation of human thought and behavior, I think a similar conclusion can be drawn: healthy communities will only emerge where deliberate actions are taken on an ongoing basis to maintain health. The existence of tools and inherent properties to enable this endeavor are necessary but not sufficient in and of themselves. Humans are always the complicating factor.
You need some form of moderation. In the real world we interact with few enough people that we just ignore and don't be around people who don't contribute to the conversation.
The internet doesn't allow this, you are talking with what a hundred posters in a single thread sometimes? Going across multiple threads it will be thousands of not tens of thousands even if you tend to focus on niche threads.
Thus somebody needs to filter.
And before somebody brings up OPs broken "if everybody talks we will be fine" argument the simple reality is that isn't true.
The reason is filtering doesn't just happen on a person to person level. Much more importantly it happens on a site level.
If people find what they are discussing isn't valuable they will leave the site.
Once a group forms of those who want to cause chaos they will push away normal users.
Thus your choices are choosing who you leave on your platform blocking those who would push away your user base, segregating your user base (ideally in a way that allows some cross pollination) to allow the chaos to be isolated from most users, or becomes just pure chaos ala 4chan.
Note I am not saying you can't have good discussion without moderation. Certainly you can. It just isn't what the majority of content becomes.
> "Healthy" doesn't seem like the word to use to describe something that requires constant and intentional intervention/manipulation by some external party merely to exist.
The healthiest imaginable individual has an immune system constantly fighting off infectious agents. Their liver and kidneys are filtering toxins that their own bodies are generating. You're healthy if all your defense and maintenance mechanisms are constantly doing their job. Health is an ongoing process.
All communities have norms that are actively applied implicitly or explicitly. Some through technical constraints. Some through moderation. Some by general community reaction. Just because you’re not aware of them doesn’t mean they’re not there. Healthy communities take work. They’re not just a crowd of people screaming whatever they feel like at one another. (Unless that’s specifically what that community wants.)
Then have toxicity. You only say that because your preferred side controls the speech. It is a political thing 100%. You only need protection because your position is indefensible, and without it, you lose.
Also, the idea that Twitter (or any individual social network) is somehow The Public Town Square is flawed from the start. Such a thing doesn’t exist. There are online communities of varying sizes that have different sets of rules that their members (explicitly or implicitly) agree to adhere to. Calling Twitter (or Threads) a “town square” is marketing or corporate fantasy as much as anything. Most people don’t use these services or even really care about them.
(I think of these services more like bars: They’re public places where people go to cavort and socialize, but there’s an expectation of what behaviors are acceptable and an owner, bartender, and bouncer willing to make sure those rules are adhered to. Don’t like it? Find another bar. There are tons.)
It's not even marketing, it's a dog whistle and a means of justifying hosting garbage posted by people with too much time on their hands and too little empathy.
And a way to make their own participation seem somehow grander (and not like 99% of the site was utterly toxic 140-character pissing matches and bad faith posturing).
To abuse the analogy further, the Internet is the infrastructure on which town squares can be built.
Also most decently sized European cities have multiple “town squares” each with their own vibe (based on the stores/restaurants that have storefronts there).
Unless I’m not getting the authors drift, I see no problem with the bifurcation as long as town square owners don’t put up unreasonable barriers.
This! A thousand times this! Even if every single social network vanished tomorrow, we would still have a space where anyone can say whatever they want and instantly distribute it to every corner of the Earth.
Town squares emerge where people gather. In the physical world, this happens out of necessity, and due to the incentives of our economic system.
But I don’t think the internet version of this analogy holds up if you were to just erase social networks tomorrow.
Depending on one’s goals, starting your own site on some corner of the internet is akin to opening a store in the middle of nowhere. I can do it, but no one is coming here unless I find the place that people gather and tell them about my new shop in mountains.
The fabric of internet does enable this, but if I want to build a store, I’m going to do it somewhere where people gather, or I’m still going to rely on the places that people already gather to spread the word.
If I’m ambitious, what I really need to do is build a new town so that a square can emerge. But now I’m Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
Analogies between the Internet itself and the town square have always been shaky, and the deeper one goes, the more stark the differences. I’d argue that the internet is closer to the world stage — a place in which anything can happen, but more like the raw environment in which town squares emerge than a town square itself.
This all seems fine to me, though? If you want to open a store in the mall, you need to obey the mall rules. If you don’t want to obey the mall rules, you need to open your store somewhere else.
My point is unrelated to the rules of operating on a particular platform, but about the broader claim that platforms aren’t needed at all, because anyone can start their own site if they want to.
A mall is unnecessary to open a store in an existing town, and may even be undesirable depending on the nature of my business. And many towns (thankfully) don’t have malls.
The point was that opening a store is very much reliant on people living nearby, and that the analogy “the Internet is the town square” is not a very good one.
I mean, I think the “town square” analogy is bad in general, so let’s dispense of it.
I don’t understand your point though. The Internet is a communication medium, so of course the goal is for other people to interact with your site. But why are platforms necessary for that to happen? People like them, which is fine, but why does it follow that anyone is entitled to access them?
> But why are platforms necessary for that to happen?
A "gathering place" is not the de facto state of the Internet. Whether it's a "platform", or some as-of-yet undefined structure, the ability to have conversations with a group of folks potentially interested in what I have to say or want to sell depends on there being some gathering mechanism.
My point was that if you remove all major social networks tomorrow, what is left behind is not such an environment [0], and the fact that I can spin up a domain is not a replacement for the utility provided by such networks.
This is not a claim that such networks are only good, or that I like them, and whether or not it's possible to build such a place without just recreating the issues that plague the current platforms is a different question entirely. But the utility is pretty obviously there. The toxicity and misinformation is the obvious problem, but this doesn't imply that there aren't a host of positive outcomes as well.
If we could hypothetically remove them all tomorrow, there are a myriad of use cases that aren't strictly arguing with each other about contentious topics that have no place to go. Municipalities share updates with their communities, National Parks with their visitors, city transit services with their ridership, etc. In years past, this kind of communication would have happened in other ways - physical bulletin boards, printed newspapers, talking to John at the general store, but have all been supplanted by various social media accounts.
Going back to a "pre-social" Internet overnight does not account for these externalities.
I tend to think a pre-social Internet would actually be a better place, but to get there requires new thinking about solving the problems that are currently only handled by social media.
> but why does it follow that anyone is entitled to access them?
I see. I don’t agree! The municipalities, national parks, etc, could communicate just as well on their own websites as they do on social media.
As for the Internet as a “gathering place”, I don’t think I can put it better than I did elsewhere in this thread [1]:
> The Internet (or really the Web) is a common area. You tweet something, I write a blog post and embed your tweet in it, Alice emails my post to her friends, Bob writes a post in response and links back to me, Charlie submits Bob’s post to Hacker News or Reddit, David and Eve discuss in the comments, etc.
> The municipalities, national parks, etc, could communicate just as well on their own websites as they do on social media.
Most of them already do. My argument is not that these entities can’t use their own sites, but that doing so is not a sufficient replacement for the utility afforded by social media today. They use social media because it’s the place that people go to get information.
In the physical town analogy, this is like posting your services on the front door of your building. Sure, people who know where you are can now get this information, but they had to know you were there to begin with.
The pre-social world had literal bulletin boards, shipped 3 inch thick phone books to every door, and would rely on the proximity of a new location to attract users who were already in the same area.
What you’re describing is a limbo state where we no longer have the old tools or the new replacements.
> Charlie submits Bob’s post to Hacker News or Reddit
Exactly. And this tends to be where engagement happens. I personally rely pretty heavily on HN as a community of people who are interested in the same things I am. I wouldn’t be aware of 99% of the smaller blogs shared here otherwise.
Ask yourself where we’d be having this discussion if we erased the Internet’s gathering places tomorrow. Unless you think HN should be exempt, which raises a whole new set of objections to the thought experiment.
> Most of them already do. My argument is not that these entities can’t use their own sites, but that doing so is not a sufficient replacement for the utility afforded by social media today. They use social media because it’s the place that people go to get information.
I don't agree with this. They could use RSS, email, push notifications… we are not lacking in tools to disseminate information.
>> Charlie submits Bob’s post to Hacker News or Reddit
> Exactly. And this tends to be where engagement happens.
Again, I disagree! You're calling out the last step here as somehow distinct from the others, but I think every step of the chain I mentioned is engagement. Sharing a tweet in a blog post or an email is not fundamentally different than doing it with another tweet. The goal is human interaction, not a particular set of features.
Yes, people use social media because it's convenient. But the point of this thought experiment is not "if all social media vanished, we would be totally unaffected" — that's obviously not true. The point is that we would still have our digital gathering place. I'm not saying that we wouldn't lose anything valuable; I'm saying that we wouldn't lose anything fundamental.
> But the point of this thought experiment is not "if all social media vanished, we would be totally unaffected" — that's obviously not true.
This all started with:
> "Even if every single social network vanished tomorrow, we would still have a space where anyone can say whatever they want and instantly distribute it to every corner of the Earth"
I'm glad for the clarification. I think what confuses this is continuing to make claims like:
> Sharing a tweet in a blog post or an email is not fundamentally different than doing it with another tweet. The goal is human interaction, not a particular set of features.
The difference is in the outcome, and can be summed up with one word: reach. And I agree, human interaction is the goal. Features are just things that help humans achieve that goal. But features also modulate what is possible, and how effectively that goal will be reached. Features matter insomuch as they enable outcomes, and not all outcomes are equal across the various ways you could imagine a set of features.
If you believe that publicly sharing a tweet on a platform filled with people who are there to read other tweets - is not different than me sending you a personal email, I don't think there's any way for us to get on the same page.
And I guess I don't understand the point of what you're arguing at this point, because while sure, the Internet continues to exist, it would seem odd to say something like: "Well, the town got blown away by a tornado, but reality still exists, so nothing has really changed".
At this point let's just agree to disagree and move on, since I don't think we're really arguing about the same things.
The Internet (or really the Web) is a common area. You tweet something, I write a blog post and embed your tweet in it, Alice emails my post to her friends, Bob writes a post in response and links back to me, Charlie submits Bob’s post to Hacker News or Reddit, David and Eve discuss in the comments, etc.
In my mind IRC fills the role of a town square. There's channels with dozens to hundreds of people gathered to chat about 1 specific topic in a mostly unmoderated way (within reason).
I initially saw Twitter as an inverted IRC, except you post a message to multiple hashtags (irc channels) instead of just one, or none at all, and you can view all messages in all hashtags/channels at once, plus everyone’s direct posts outside of any hashtag/channel… or just one hashtag/channel.
Maybe the next town square just uses irc as it’s backend.
Might be an unpopular opinion: Kind of how slack started using irc as it’s back end and ultimately to be a more modern incarnation of an irc client (and no longer using irc as it’s backend)
> ”I think Zuckerberg’s so-far successful introduction of its competitor, Threads, which rapidly feels like the other global town square, presages one of the last gasps of the united internet”
Twitter was never “the united internet. It’s been a collection of noisy, fractious groups constituting a minority of internet users
Unless you were 'on the team', it was a bleak place where authoritarians promoted their lies using what power they had to silence dissenters. COVID vaccine never prevented infection, but saying this would get you banned. Discussing lab leak would get you banned. Threads will never be able to deliver to them this power to control others because people are free to discuss what they like elsewhere now.
You mean places where the truth can be discussed. COVID vaccine never prevented infection. The 'misinformation' aka lie that it did was promoted on the previous platform.
People will say “good riddance, Twitter was always trash”. Personally I disagree (I’ve been happily using it for years, I just don’t get involved in political shitfights) but even if it is true I will think it’s a notable lesson.
Scaling human interaction up to internet size just doesn’t seem to work. Reddit just about held it together but only because it functioned as a collection of mini communities you could dip in and out of. Almost all larger communities have always been a mess.
I’m not totally sure what the lesson is here but I am very curious where we’ll be in fifty years time. I hope somewhere good, I fear not.
> The “town square” analogy for social media is another one of those crap ones that somehow got traction. No one actually wants a town square. They want a cafe at the edge of the town square where they can chat to their mates and watch the world go by. They don’t want some bloke with an amplifier in the middle of the square screaming about how Jesus saves. [1]
This is my exact take on the whole "town square" concept. It's just fucking stupid. For one a town doesn't have a hundred thousand people let alone a million or hundred million. So a "town square" with even a hundred thousand people is already a broken concept. A real town also doesn't have a hundred cardboard cutouts controlled by marketers, spammers, and spy agencies brigading around purporting to be real people.
If Twitter or anyone else wanted to even start pretending to be a "town square" there would be no algorithmic feeds and you'd only ever see posts from your friend list. No one goes to the "town square" to be bombarded with street preachers and guys with trench coats trying to sell you cheap watches. Twitter uses "town square" to evoke images of Mayberry when it more resembles 1970s Times Square.
Wouldn't it be great if there was an underlying messaging framework that allowed anyone to host any kind of site or forum, with built-in interoperability, flexible curation, and the ability to impose moderation? Then anyone (with servers, perhaps) could make their own blog (only they send messages, except perhaps comments), Twitter, Hacker News, Element, whatever. Pipe dream?
Last time I checked, the town square is where a majority of the netizen congregate to throw around ideas. Not some place a journalist conjures up in his mind.
The internet's town square will not exist no more because quasi-normal people will divide themselves by their usage of some brand of microblog thing? What a stupid take.
A great portion of thought diversity got out of Twitter (be it for quitting or reduced usage or using it thinking of the optics) between 2015 and 2017, and hasn't been regained at all during the Tumblr porn ban.
I instead infer that, for that same reason, the Internet's global flamewar arena is dead for now.
Everything is fine. From time to time the town square has had riots, been made brick dust by war and been really peaceful and fun. Swings and round abouts. Lets just warm ourselves by the glow of 44Bn dollars burning right now.
Social media should be regulated like utilities. They are the "public square" now in all but name - they should be regulated the same way, with free speech enshrined in law just as in public spaces.
Their defence is always "we are private companies so we do whatever they want" - which wouldn't fly if they were a water company refusing service arbitrarily.
Anyway, I think you can have freedom of speech and moderation. I don't think it's a violation of freedom of speech to have certain areas dedicated to specific topics, in which off-topic posts get removed. As long as all speech has somewhere it can be posted (e.g. by allowing users to create their own sub-forums where they decide the rules for themselves).
Eh, the bans are trivial to get around unless you have a static IP, you have to really spam to get a rangeban or rangerestrict (e.g. can't make threads) and the common "moderator" is literally called a janitor and routinely mocked across all boards. Disdain for moderation is one of the core tenants of the site culture.
For instance one of the (board specific) rules of /int/ is to respect other cultures and people but half the (non-general) threads are either blatant bait or arguing about how other people in country/region X cannot suffer.
Not just anyone can start a water company. The capital investment is massive and it’s a natural monopoly unless you want five redundant networks of pipes.
At this point a few competent programmers who knows web tech and can either use cloud or set up their own operations on cheap bare metal servers can start a social network. The bar only gets lower over time as it gets cheaper and easier to run large Internet services.
The barrier is even lower if you include running your own simple web forum, board, or a fediverse node. Anyone who knows a little sysadmin and can afford a $20/month VPS can do that.
I do agree that there should be regulations around net neutrality that prevent ISPs and backbone carriers from discriminating against any legal form of traffic since those are more like the water company, but the fact that everything is encrypted these days makes that kind of discrimination hard anyway.
Sure, the barrier isn’t infrastructure (like a water company) or technical skill, its network effects. You can build what would, with a critical mass of users, be a competitive social network, the hard part is getting users, which is why Threads (bootstrapping from IG) is so advantaged over other new alt-Twitter options.
The days of One Big Social Network are clearly coming to an end. We are in an unbundling and diversification phase in that space.
As with most open systems, big social is succumbing to spam. In the case of social the primary form of spam is outrage porn and similar lizard brain engaging material. The bigger a social network is and the less moderated it is, the more this material dominates.
If you try to moderate you drive people away toward niche networks. If you don’t try to moderate, all the toxic rage bait and trolling drives people away to niche networks. This is how big social dies.
The future is niche networks with niche moderation policies, private boards and chat rooms, and the fediverse which is actually thousands of niche social networks in a trenchcoat.
I thought that regulation was based on the idea that it's difficult to start new, competing social networks. But the market seems to be taking care of that. Why regulate twitter if any miscellanous billionaire can start a competitive service?
Regulation means that companies have to follow arbitrary rules, including rules that you may not like. Wait until every social site is legally required to ban you if you violate a given rule.
The social networking space seems to be working itself out It's just a slow process.
> I thought that regulation was based on the idea that it's difficult to start new, competing social networks.
Tried it? Difficult is an understatement. As you point out though, "miscellaneous billionaire(s)" can try. That's hardly the same thing as the first days when Twitter started.
> Regulation means that companies have to follow arbitrary rules, including rules that you may not like.
I'm going to presume your use of the word arbitrary there is a result of a lack of faith in government. As little faith as _I_ have in government though, I wouldn't call regulations arbitrary. Anyway ...
> Wait until every social site is legally required to ban you if you violate a given rule.
Fine with me. There are plenty of laws I don't agree with, but follow because the rule of law is more important than getting laws right (aligned to my opinion). This is not least because we can do something about those laws we disagree with in a civil way.
I'm fairly certain I'd get punished on these sites if the current social justice trends became law. That works well, because then we'd be able to go through an established public process to change them — rather than a private company deciding their own laws, with no recourse.
Regulation as a utility could focus on data ex-changeability. Ie. the "utility" is a certain standard all social media need to support which allows users to interact with people on other platforms, and move their data and identity between them. This would reduce network effects by a lot, thereby increasing competition.
It seems like the group of people who can start a competitive service is small enough, and homogeneous enough, that we risk a case where we can choose between the site where you can use the word "cis" and the site where you can use the word "retard", but can not find a platform where tracking the political activity of billionaires is OK.
> if any miscellanous billionaire can start a competitive service?
Can they really?
At least on Zuckerberg's side Threads' competitiveness would have been impossible without piggy backing on the back of Instagram. He was willing to possibly cannibalise an existing product in the Meta portfolio, to hopefully take away share from a competitor's product. I'm not sure how well that strategy works, and there will surely be organic growth, but will be talking about Threads in 2 years or will it be a Google Circles?
I'm also sure they factored this in at Meta. Perhaps they determined that one Threads user will be more valuable than one IG user, so even if it were a 1:1 cannibalisation, it would be worth it. I'm really curious what the Threads roadmap looks like, because if they are truly going after Twitter, Musk has been fairly clear that Twitter is to be an everything app, a la WeChat.
Demanding "Free speech" is just a lever for people on the fringe to bully for promotion via recommendation algorithms. It has nothing to do with values and everything to do with achieving objectives.
Absurd. Social media platforms are banal entertainment sites, the idea that they need to be enshrined in our society as utilities makes absolutely no sense.
Not to say you’re entirely wrong … but regulated by which government(s), which have (ideally) previously demonstrated that they understand social media well enough to write net-positive regulations, then do a decent job of enforcing those?
Free speech is not enshrined in law the way you think it is. Try yelling how the Holocaust didn't happen in a German town square.
It also has consequences. You are literally saying things to people's faces, they can see yours. So if you start spouting your protected "kill all n*** and kikes" speech, they can follow you back home. Social media is populated by bots, sock puppets and impersonators, very different.
Yeah and
1. "Kill all X" is almost nowhere protected legally as speech. That's calls for violence, which falls under either terrorism or hate speech laws.
2. "Following you home" is in best case harassment, worst case assault. Don't legitimise lynch mobs, please.
Elsewhere you state a preference for "least restrictive free speech laws". However, you do seem to suggest that there should be some limits? Hate speech laws are seen by some as an unnecessary intrusion on freedom of speech.
Part of the town square is actually being accountable for what you say, which the on-line troll world avoids. How to align free speech with unaccountability?
I think those people are nutjobs (who say threats of violence should be protected speech)
Yes, there should be limits, but those should be way less restrictive than most modern social media (ban on anything controversial)
Also, I think accountability shouldn't be confused with lynch mobs - calling people to be fired or deplatformed isn't "natural consequences/accountability", it's using harassment to hurt someone else.
Between the Archivists working torrent sites and file sharing communities, the corporate interests feeding the masses need for gladiator sports and rage inducing news, the hungry motivated silver spoon poor yearning for their own slice of the pie, the Tor gnomes pretending that a rubber hose and hammer can be avoided with clever message passing, the sectarians (racists, xenophobes, isolationists, and mercenaries) bent on dividing and conquering, the influencers scrabbling for dropped pennies and demanding jewels; there is no consensus here. We all contribute to the cacophony of disjointed murmurations seething and bleating, demanding to be heard, acknowledged, respected. We cheer and battle and annoy each other eternally in a Babel of confusion and misunderstandings.
No sir. The internet cannot not has it ever been unified. Because the oddities that inhabit it aren’t themselves unified. Humanity isn’t unified why would the internet change that?
Trust cannot be bought or ordered. With oppressing behaviour of centralised power, naturally we'll go back to decentralised, local way of communication.
We just need to reuse town squares we have in real life.
Mastodon isn't a single thing. It's many different town squares all trading their posts around. Gab is actually a part of it, despite what most instance operators want - if you REALLY want to be "on Mastodon" and "on Gab" at the same time, you can self-host and do that[0]. Truth Social isn't "on Mastodon" only because Trump's goons turned off federation and blatantly violated AGPL.
I suppose that both disproves and proves the original author's point. Technically speaking, Mastodon is still a "town square". But its users do not want that, because at scale, town squares become endless voids of shouting and toxicity. Even a decade ago on Twitter I was already unfollowing people and tailoring my timeline based on my political preferences. Pre-Musk Twitter's censorious behaviors were almost certainly a reflection of the users' own desires and not some kind of diktat sent down from on high onto an unwilling user base.
[0] I have no guarantee that you would want to stay on both at the same time.
Internet, not internet. Democratic, not democratic. Yes the town square is dead, killed by Democrats and elites like Mark Zuckerberg, killed by Y mods, killed by lockdowns, US and EU government censorship. Without free speech there is no Republic, no freedom, I am a slave.
In forums for simulated user interaction, it’s important to recognize the conversations as inauthentic and censored. The ideas that are censored are deemed by the censors to be likely to prevail in a free marketplace of ideas and thus threatening. So, the censored ideas are the ones more likely to be true.
> The ideas that are censored are deemed by the censors to be likely to prevail in a free marketplace of ideas and thus threatening
You're right. Except that you seem to be implying that the "marketplace of ideas" optimizes for worthwhile ideas, rather than ideas that simply make people feel good - despite being terrible in practice, overly simplistic, fallacious, logically incoherent, etc.
These two qualities used to be in much closer alignment when the Internet was dominated by logical types who would at least try to get to the truth of things, modulo that everpresent lure of feeling superior by knowing something that bucks the common narrative.
But at this point we've devolved to full on Gresham's law as applied to ideas. Anything that carries the slightest bit of nuance or reservation demands analysis (slow path) rather than simple team allegiance (fast path). This is multiplied by the dynamic of sharing things verbatim - either quoted or by reference (URL) - which allows one to effortlessly propagate memes while disclaiming attachment to their own reputation.
Presupposes a monolithic marketplace. Locker rooms and scientific journals self-sort. Who decides which ideas are “worthwhile”? We are what we are, indeed what we were meant to be, deplorable as we may be in the eyes of the “elite.”
No I'm not presupposing some monolithic marketplace, rather just the idea that ideas themselves can be judged and compared - the essence of reason. I think therefore I am. Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I'll move the world.
Self sorting directly supports the dynamic I described, because feel-good terrible memes don't fool everyone uniformly. Look at both political herds - each baited with acknowledgement of specific real problems, and then mostly misdirected into avenues that rage against nonsensical bogeymen. It's utterly anti-productive and often self-harming, but it sure makes the participants feel good.
Why would such transcendent elites sully themselves with we unwashed fools wallowing in our cesspits of dopamine soaked fora? Surely such angelic figures mingle among the gods with their levers moving worlds. Can the most high not suffer us peons the fleeting comfort of our ignorant commiseration in our own vulgar impotence? We cattle promise to return to productive obeisance to your wise direction when our brief respite in collective reverie is through, if only we might be allowed to say our piece to our ugly equals.
I'm not an "elite". And no, I will not condone you wallowing in your self-harming coping memes, of which an overfocus on "elites" is most certainly one.
The "elites" want you to move in their preferred direction, yes. But much of that bearing is just common sense - so pushing in the exact opposite direction out of spite puts you further behind and suits them just as well.
If you actually want to actually assert your own independence, you have to do the excruciating work of using reason to figure out the right direction to push that actually represents your own self interest.
As a broad heuristic I think this fails because posts get downvoted or removed for a variety of reasons. One common reason is that it’s a cryptocurrency scam. Are those “more likely to be true?”
Cryptocurrency scams aren’t ideas in the sense of the marketplace of ideas. Vaccine efficacy, election integrity, causes of unrest in France, traditional analysis of gender - those are examples of topics around which we discuss ideas. Try to discuss them in a simulated user forum. As an experiment, vary the viewpoint of your remarks, pro-X vs. anti-X. Observe what happens. You can learn from the censorship profile what the censors are worried about.
I suppose that’s a way of learning about what upsets people. But why they’re upset is another question. Maybe it’s not the idea, but its presentation?
Also, what set of ideas are you drawing from? There are a lot of uncontroversial and true ideas. (Or if you negate them, obviously wrong.) Why aren’t they “more likely?” I don’t know how you decide on the set of ideas to test without bias.
And how do you evaluate the results? To tell whether ideas that are “likely to be true” are more likely to make people upset, you need to already know whether they are true. Otherwise you’re just sorting by controversial.
Contrarians run against the grain of common thought, not censors. It is precisely the value of censored ideas which necessitates their censorship. That is, were they allowed to persist they would become accepted but for the censorship.
Let's say we're in an astrophysics forum. Flat earthers keep coming into other topics and posting about how astrophysicists are all wrong, and flat earth is true. According to you that means flat earthers are correct and astrophysicists are wrong. Do you see where your logic breaks down?
Of all the possible takes that is, charitably, the dumbest. Your basic assertion is that contrarians are always right which begs the question that all orthodoxy must be a conspiracy.
Sometimes contrarians are right about things. But when they are they bring receipts. They have evidence, repeatable experiments, falsifiable hypotheses, and general academic rigor.
Flat Earthers aren't intimidating to anyone. They're tiring. Like all good conspiracy theories Flat Earth conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable. The Flat Earthers' lack of evidence is defended by them as evidence of some sort of orthodox conspiracy. Evidence contrary to their stupid ideas, including empirical observations, are also just labeled as some orthodox conspiracy.
It's not edgy, funny, or even interesting. It's just fucking stupid. It's a handful of bad faith trolls and a lot of scientifically illiterate boobs that decided to wrap their identities around Internet memes.
Would you like to try seriously engaging with my previous message?
In case you think this was a good or logical response - I brought up a counter argument. You should try to engage with this argument instead of pointing back at your previous argument and extrapolating from there.
Meta succeeded in cloning Twitter only because it picked up engineers who were let go after Musk acquired the company.
Dead weight, albeit dead weight who understood how Twitter works under the hood (the timeline data structure has confounded every would-be Twitter competitor until now, which is circumstantial but probable cause that the former engineers have transferred Twitter's fundamental trade secrets to Zuckerberg).
How does this idea even pass your bullshit detector? Threads is an Instagram post without a picture attached. Something that's existed for a decade.
Twitter trotting that accusation out was just stupid but people believing it and repeating it, that's just amazing. A timeline data structure confounded Twitter competitors? You're seriously fucking suggesting that? A timeline. Yikes.
Fundamental trade secrets... like how to build a large social network platform. Yes, it would surely be impossible for the Facebook and Instagram folks to build another platform without stealing “trade secrets” from Twitter. /s
The author makes the same mistake Elon made when he bought Twitter, namely, thinking that Twitter management was hellbent on pushing leftist propaganda, when really they were apolitical operators trying to make as much money as possible. And their masterstroke was convincing someone to overpay for their company by an enormous amount.