Looking back, it's quite surprising how stagnant, in some sense, the social media space has become. How centralised and how... lame.
The big hitters really did pillage and burn. Now, between moderation norms becoming increasingly sensitive and the hard turn the web took away from open... It's hard to see any new form take off.
That said, perhaps that means it's a perfect time.
Groups/Usenet has its limitations. Features invented over the last 30 years have value. Usenet can't be our YouTube or Facebook. But.. I refuse to believe open protocols got so much of the job done for so long, but the last mile requires a unicorn to platformize it.
There aren't that many hurdles to taking social media back. Login/identity. HN demonstrates that this can be relatively simple. Hosting. Not quite as simple, apparently. Moderation. Thats a stickier problem, but volunteer/community tends to be better... imo, than organisational moderation anyway.
There must be a way. Why not have freedom in social media again?
> There must be a way. Why not have freedom in social media again?
Because any kind of social media, especially when it allows binary assets, will be abused by CSAM and piracy spreaders, by Holocaust deniers, by scammers, by spammers shilling dick enlargement pills, questionably "legal" drugs, questionable dietary supplements or all kinds of other stuff, by trolls bullying people right up to suicide "for the lulz", or as we're seeing in the wake of the Russian invasion by enemy propaganda.
> Moderation. Thats a stickier problem, but volunteer/community tends to be better... imo, than organisational moderation anyway.
Nope. Reddit's various cesspools, from lolicon to the_donald [1], show that any platform needs centralized moderation lest it became overrun by any of the groups listed above.
Honestly while not good "lolicon to the_donald" are the least of Reddit's problems and why it's gone crazy.
The moderation of /r/politics /r/new and other massive/default subreddits combined with how the admins now step in on random communities to impose whatever moral view they happen to have that week has effectually caused the site to diverge hilariously far from reality. If anything Reddit is an example of how more moderation can make a community more extreme rather then less.
First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread on twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other stuff.
Second, consider Wikipedia. Freer than almost anything web, and THE juiciest target in narrative and informational war's. It's had far fewer major disasters than any of the major commercials. Held up very well. Runs on <1% of their budgets and is under constant criticism for being spendy.
Reddit is, meanwhile and example of a lot of things. The variety there makes it a good place for examples. But, Reddit was a commery startup that got bought many moons ago into a media conglomerate. It's not the examle of free.
Lol what? Wikipedia has EXTREME moderation, from locking contentious articles, to hyper nerds spending all their free time browsing edit histories to revert dumb changes middle school kids made, to active efforts to undo the work that literal nation-state actors have done, to having to ban the offices of American politicians and political contractors who OFFER SERVICES TO REMOVE YOUR CONTENT FROM WIKIPEDIA
It hasn't been "anyone can edit anything" since like 2008!
I mean if you want to say vaccines cause autism, yeah, you're going to get shut down by the moderators. But if you, as an "anyone" who is a railway engineer who's able to write effectively about electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes, or are a person living in, say, I don't know, East Palestine, Ohio, or now, Springfield, Ohio, and want to add things to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Ohio_train_derailment, you can just click the edit button and add stuff.
Anyone with an Internet connection can go to their website or load up their app and hit [edit] and make changes, and it's been that way since 2001. There's not even a user account required for most. There are those that get caught up by wide IP-based blocks against middle schooler spam, and they do have to create a user account.
Except you can’t. That stuff will often get reverted summarily. There are a group of abusive admins who will defend certain editors no matter how awful they are.
Sure. It's an encyclopedia. It's heavily edited. Sometimes it's conflucted. There are cliques. Etc.
But.. they produce an encyclopedia. It's actually free. It's transparent. It's very high quality.
It's a working system. Whatever the fairness grievances people have with "censorship," on Wikipedia, they are nowhere near as bad as they are on any commery platform.
Yet... whether it's Wikipedia's finances, moderation or anything... Wikipedia attract more need rage than any of them.
Imo, this is the biggest barrier to freedom online. Freedom and transparency make people insanely critical and hostile.
I am not sure Wikipedia is a social network, in the sense that most users aren't there to have discussions or earn followers or do other typical social network things. Also, Wikipedia is very much moderated.
Wikipedia is unlike the original Wikiwiki Web (https://wiki.c2.com/) which had discussion threads on the same page as articles, and feels more like a social network. On this page:
> First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread on twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other stuff.
Islamist content gets rigorously moderated on all networks you mention, for years now. The far-right was similarly acted against, but at least in the case of Twitter Musk reversed a lot of their bans, with the expected result of people spreading Nazi vocabulary or Holocaust denialism right afterwards.
> Second, consider Wikipedia. Freer than almost anything web, and THE juiciest target in narrative and informational war's. It's had far fewer major disasters than any of the major commercials. Held up very well. Runs on <1% of their budgets and is under constant criticism for being spendy.
Most of Wikipedia's moderation is done by unpaid volunteers, sans legal issues which are handled by WMF via executive actions. They run a dead simple tech stack, with most being served out of highly optimized caches.
Mastodon is social media, not a platform, and Gab (or Truth social), despite being bigger than all the other of its servers, haven't managed to "overrun" it.
Do tell, where exactly is the left engaged in hate speech campaigns that come even close to the amount of abuse from the right wing? Not to mention domestic terrorism?
Both in the US and Germany, the answer is "an utterly dominant majority comes from the right wing".
Are you just blanking out on the whole of the 1965-1980? Domestic terrorism has always been the wheelhouse of the left for the USA. It's only very recently the right has been getting involved and still has a long way to go to get close. Once we start getting monthly bombings we can call it "even" and then push it father to get to "an utterly dominant majority comes from the right wing" what revisionist history.
People seem to have forgotten just how much political violence used to happen in this country. I can't see any other reason you'd make such a ridiculous assertion.
It was one of the politically violent periods that people are still alive, and it happened recently enough still working, from. I really don't think using the most extreme period in very recent history is ceding any point....
Well it is if we're talking about online abuse and the role of social media in enabling real life violence. Last I checked there weren't too many social media users back in 1965-1980.
Some twat in Berkeley swatted blindly at a vaguely sympathetic individual with a bike lock, and combined with the perception of a condescending attitude towards rural Americans, I guess that means the non-entity “antifa” has forfeit some moral high ground to push back on the multi-million collection of assault weapons right-wing militias wield with little to no formal training and at best a tenuous grasp on American history and/or objective reality, or the never ending smorgasbord of violence and trauma it causes.
You pulled that out of mschuster91's profile as an own, but actually I think that means they're probably pretty chill. I probably wouldn't have known that about them otherwise, thanks for sharing it!
Because freedom is moderation. A place without moderation turns into a spam, gore, cp, racist, sexist shithole where no discourse happens. You may be nostalgic for usenets groups but that was a different time when a very small slice of society used those.
The big hitters really did pillage and burn. Now, between moderation norms becoming increasingly sensitive and the hard turn the web took away from open... It's hard to see any new form take off.
That said, perhaps that means it's a perfect time.
Groups/Usenet has its limitations. Features invented over the last 30 years have value. Usenet can't be our YouTube or Facebook. But.. I refuse to believe open protocols got so much of the job done for so long, but the last mile requires a unicorn to platformize it.
There aren't that many hurdles to taking social media back. Login/identity. HN demonstrates that this can be relatively simple. Hosting. Not quite as simple, apparently. Moderation. Thats a stickier problem, but volunteer/community tends to be better... imo, than organisational moderation anyway.
There must be a way. Why not have freedom in social media again?