Why the Open Social Web Matters Now

I'm not against subscriptions per se, but I do think a one time entry cost is really all that's needed to achieve many of the desired effects. I'm probably in the minority as someone who'd rather pay $10 one time to enter a community once than $1-2/month to maintain my participation, though. I'm just personally tired of feeling like I'm paying a tax to construct something that may one day be good, rather than buying into a decently polished product upfront.

But network effects seems to be a natural phenomenon of people wanting to establish a familiar routine. I look at Steam as an example here, where while it has its own shady schemes behind the scenes (which I hope are addressed), it otherwise doesn't engage in the same dark patterns as other monopolies. But it still creates a strong network effect nonetheless.

I think the main solace here is that you don't need to be dominant to create a good community. You need to focus instead on getting above a certain critical mass, where you keep a healthy stream of posting and participation that can sustain itself. Social media should ultimately be about establishing a space for a community to flourish, and small communities are just as valid.

Yes. But I see curation more as a 2nd order problems to solve once the bases are taken care of. Moderation focuses on addressing the low quality, while curation makes sure tye high quality posts receive focus.

The tools needed for curation, stuff like filtering, finding similar posts/comments, popularity, following, are different from those needed to moderate, or self moderate (ignore, down voting, reporting). The latter poisons a site before it can really start to curate to its users.

>This is a completely independent problem from spam.

Yeah, thinking more about it, it probably is a distinct category. It simply has a similar result of making a site unable to function.

>It's not clear what these are but they sound like kind of the same thing again

I can clarify. In short, posting transparency focused more on the user and good faith verification focuses more on the content. (I'm also horrible with naming, so I welcome better terms to describe these)

- Posting transparency at this point has one big goal: ensure you know when a human or a bot is posting. But it extends to ensuring there's no impersonation, that there's no abuse of alt accounts, and no voting manipulation.

It can even extend in some domains to making sure e.g. That a person who says they worked at Google actually worked at Google. But this is definitely a step that can overstep privacies.

- good faith verification refers more towards a duty to properly vet and fact check information that is posted. It may include addressing misinformation and hate, or removing non-transparent intimate advice like legal/medical claims without sources or proper licensing. It essentially boils down to making ensuring that "bad but popular" advice doesn't proliferate, as it it ought to do.

>they sound like elements in the authoritarian censorship toolbox which you don't actually need or want once you start showing people the posts they actually want to see

Yes, they are. I think we've seen enough examples of how dangerous "showing people what they actually want to see" can be if left unchecked. And the incentives to keep them up are equally dangerous in an ad-driven platform. Being able to address that naturally requires some more authorian approaches.

That's why "good faith" is an important factor here. Any authoritarian act you introduce can only work on trust, and is easily broken by abuse. If we want incentives to change from "maximizing engagement" to "maximizing quality and community", we need to cull out malicious information.

We already give some authoritarianism by having moderators we trust to remove spam and illegal content, so I don't see it as a giant overstep to make sure they can also do this.

Yeah, that's how you create echo-chambers where people truly believe vaccines cause autism, immigrants commit the most crimes, etc.

When these people are inevitably showing at ballot, other people will call for more moderation. So no, this doesn't solve "moderation."

Yes, this is a good system. It'll work particularly well at filtering spam because people largely agree what it is. One thing that will happen with your system is people will separate into cliques. But that's not the end of the world. Has anyone implemented Anthony's idea of using followees' likes to rank posts?

And how did you discover those feeds in the first place? Or find new ones?

I know people have tried to have a relatively closed mesh-of-trust, but you still need people to moderate new applicants, otherwise you'll never get any new idea of fresh discussion. And if it keeps growing, scale means that group will slowly gather bad actors. Maybe directly by putting up whatever front they need to get into the mesh or existing in-mesh accounts. Maybe existing accounts get hacked. Maybe previously-'good' account-owning people have changed, be it in opinion or situation, to take advantage of their in-mesh position. It feels like a speedrun of the internet itself growing.

Since a community requires posting and an access point, spam is pretty much inevitable.

Wut ? Moderation at Bluesky is fantastic: users build their block lists and share them for others to subscribe to - moderation à la carte... Power to the users !

But human or machine, open or closed, moderation will always be biased. Each community will have its culture, and moderation will reflect that.

A community of Nazis will moderate out stuff that many places would welcome. Some communities would moderate anything not cats on Roombas.

HN is one of the best-moderated communities I’ve ever seen, yet, it has its biases. Organic moderation reflects cultural biases. I’m not always happy about what gets put on the chopping block, but I usually can’t argue with it, even if I don’t like it, or am cynical about why it’s nuked. I stick with HN, because, for the most part, I don’t mind what gets moderated. The showdead thing lets me see what gets nuked, but I usually like to leave it off. I’m not really one for gazing into the toilet.

The main thing that an open fediverse can bring, is transparent moderation, so folks will know when stuff is being blocked, and can use that knowledge to decide whether or not to remain in the community, or advocate for change.

Some UX decisions even attempt to "passively moderate" content, which unfortunately also deter some from actively using the platform as they don't get the as much the feel for the "crowd". For example, not showing the amount of "likes" of a post unless you interact with said post goes a long way in preventing mob-like behaviour.

Little stuff like this adds up. But it is hard to sell...

This is true, of course. I'm here interacting with strangers. But, for me, HN is about discovery not community like what the article talks about. I'd be just as content not posting if the ability wasn't there. I just don't agree that social media is that important.

I personally think what the article talks about is already available in the form of group chats on platforms like signal. My impression, from the article, is the author is extremely politically motivated and seems to believe social media is somehow a good thing, as long as the people they don't like can't control it , and likely can't use it? That last point might not be true.

I wish this was true. Far too many people mistake the content of social media for some kind of truth.

All of my friends do this on instagram or snap.

Once language became a strategy of cybernetic and then cog-sci regimes (which is what all computer science is modeled from), the basic principle of control-deception in language became electronic through its perceptions of socialization, which comp sci totally mistakes as information (see above) and then control, accelerated and now automated. The entire point of computer science operating socialization is completely off the rails mindblowingly simple-minded and damaging to us. Algorithms a/b tested to succeed are in essence, suicidal to the survival of our species. We're not optimized to horizontalize communication of this type: arbitrary metaphors and symbols. Language wasn't built for speed, horizontalization or decentralization.

Now read the above again. To call Donna Haraway the great theorist/historian of cyborg studies and the development of science into cog science pseudo in any way reveals you have never grasped anything deep and resonant about human computer interaction.

>You can apply the concepts the author talks about to _literally_ any group

The presentation could have been modified to avoid alienating people if the author had focused on champinioning how open social media allows for the ability to solve these problems.

>I have no idea what niche political agenda you're talking about

Search the page for "Why should anyone care?", and you'll see it. Thos section of the talk he complains that the political situation of America doesn't match his views. Then in the next section, "The capitulation of social media", he complains about how other social media sites don't match his politics. Then in the next section, "The decline of journalism", the talker tries to argue his political opinion that journalists are a good thing. Then in the next section, "The problem is global", he explains that more places than just America don't share his political view.

I'll stop here, but it goes on further, even to the very last sentence. I thought this was supposed to be a technology keynote, but this talker turned it into a place for him to complain about the political situation of the world.

For this to be long-term sustainable though, it needs to be implemented in such a way that non-tech-savvy folks can also participate very easily, without needing to learn anything about P2P, relays, decentralized or edge computing, etc.