This is meant to be a serious discussion, where hopefully we can get people who are knowledgeable enough here on the tech issues to comment and have discussion. So can we please keep the partisanship out of it?
No matter what side we fall on with the issue of free speech…it’s obvious the big centralized platforms like Twitter and Meta have major problems…they can moderate, and be sure to piss people off…they cannot moderate, and piss off advertisers and make the problems worse.
Or, as this author suggests, social media can go back to its roots, and use the decentralized platforms that were the way social media got started on the Web, where you were in control of your own data, and you used the open protocol system to determine who and what could connect up with your data.
The reason Twitter and Facebook faith their centralized platforms first arose is because it was notoriously difficult to monetize the decentralized model…so new features, bug fixes and upgrades lagged because there was no way to pay to do it, and after a while the volunteers who used to do it realized they had to make money to eat.
Anyhow, this author thinks we can solve those problems, and he outlines the issues with the big platforms, why the speech issue is unlikely to ever be solved by them, and how we can go back to the open decentralized protocol approach (I believe Mastodon is one such decentralized model).
I first link a short blog article for those who want to quickly get caught up with this author’s ideas. The longer article, written a few years ago, is linked within that blog…but I also link it here as the second link.
What do people think…pros and cons?
PS Decentralized platforms would also make it more difficult for government and/or large corporate entities to interfere.
I get what you are saying…but please take that further and talk about how that can be applied to designing social media differently as this author suggests.
Otherwise all you’ve done is identify a problem and not how to address it. And maybe that cannot be addressed simply through change of platform design…that can be a discussion angle as well.
Goals and capabilities[edit]
LifeLog aimed to compile a massive electronic database of every activity and relationship a person engages in. This was to include credit card purchases, web sites visited, the content of telephone calls and e-mails sent and received, scans of faxes and postal mail sent and received, instant messages sent and received, books and magazines read, television and radio selections, physical location recorded via wearable GPS sensors, biomedical data captured through wearable sensors. The high level goal of this data logging was to identify “preferences, plans, goals, and other markers of intentionality”.[2]
Another of DARPA’s goals for LifeLog had a predictive function. It sought to “find meaningful patterns in the timeline, to infer the user’s routines, habits, and relationships with other people, organizations, places, and objects, and to exploit these patterns to ease its task" [2][3]
The LifeLog program was canceled on February 3, 2004 (one day before the launching of Facebook), after criticism concerning the privacy implications of the system.[4][5]
Generically, the term lifelog or flog is used to describe a storage system that can automatically and persistently record and archive some informational dimension of an object’s (object lifelog) or user’s (user lifelog) life experience in a particular data category.
News reports in the media described LifeLog as the “diary to end all diaries—a multimedia, digital record of everywhere you go and everything you see, hear, read, say and touch”.[6]
And boy have they succeeded beyond any expectations, even managing to get people to pay for and install listening devices in their homes.
I’ve been on twitter for over 10 years with a large following base. After musk took over, I started getting posts on my timeline the likes of which I would never subscribe to. It was awful just opening up the app every morning. I left twitter and found many of my followers on Mastodon, my new social media home. I now see posts of interest to me and I don’t have to worry about one individual having the power to determine what I should or should not see. Also, no ads, no “promoted” tweets. Even with the extreme influx of new users, Mastodon servers are up to the task.
That’s not going to happen any time soon because whether we want to believe it or not, we cannot maintain our status as a geopolitical/economic hegemon without a “security apparatus” being a part of it.
I’m not saying this with either a positive or negative spin…I’m saying it as a thing that is reality.
So this is why I’m focused solely on the pros/cons of moving away from centralized platforms as a way of protecting speech the best we can.
I’ll be happy to give any assistance you may need. It’s very much like the old IRC networks of the 80s, with a lot more sophistication. Find yourself a server that interests you and jump on in.
They aren’t going to allow you to ruin their set up, if you do manage something secure that they can’t control they will say it facilitates crime, child porn, terrorism etc and shut it down.
So my proposed solution starts with a modern day Church committee.
I havent had time to read the articles yet but it seems like we’ve already walked through this problem with major media companies and their news networks. We used to have fairly neutral news in the form of the three networks back in the day. You could say they were Left leaning but it wasn’t very apparent. Then CNN came in which also tried to offer a straight down the middle approach.
Then…Fox. And soon you had a clearly Right leaning network that elevated opinion over straight news. CNN aped that approach and NBC spun off MSNBC which is the Left’s version of Fox.
Finally with the internet you have extraordinarily biased right and left slanting outfits so that pretty much everything is available.
I do see the same thing happening with social media. FB, Twitter, Insta, etc all tried to appear as straight down the middle in terms of moderation but obviously appeared to be biased to a certain degree to the Left. This has led to failed alternatives (Gab, Parler, Truthsocial) to create the Rights version of social media.
The problem is that these are so reactionary and uncensored that advertisers don’t want any part of them and are fleeing so the experiments fail.
What the Right is looking for…is the Fox version of social media. It would lean to the Right quite a bit but not enough to scare all the advertisers so that it can be profitable. Like Fox, it also needs to diversify into a lot of areas (sports, entertainment) to draw more eyeballs.
I think someday the Right will create that. They just haven’t done that yet and Musk is failing at doing so because of his personality.
