delegate
3 hours ago
Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?
Why do the users agree to the limits imposed by them and let the platform decide who gets to see the content they posted ?
Because they're offering the infrastructure. The tech for such a network is now within reach of many, but these apps are heavily dominated by network effects and that makes it impossible for competing apps to take hold.
This is negative for society.
Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
People who don't have an account are not getting vital information because the company decided to restrict access to the entire network.
This needs to be regulated somehow. At least for public services and major news outlets - as a tax for the network effect these apps benefit from.
xnorswap
2 hours ago
Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation.
Even FINGER had .plan files, where you could get status updates from people.
But how are you going to query whose plans you want to read, and who is going to moderate without centralisation?
It's the moderation in particular that dooms most federalised efforts. The web itself is only really moderated through the relative lack of discoverability, with Google and hosting providers having become a form of gatekeeper to remove the very worst of the web.
Twitter in the early days took off because it did solve a technological problem of the time. You only had your SMS enabled phone, no WAP or smartphone, and wanted to provide updates. They gave you a number you could text, which would post updates. Hence the character limit ( less than the SMS limit, to leave space for your credentials ).
Plenty of alternatives exist for getting information out, people just don't know where to look for it.
That technical problem disappeared, but it had by then grown to provide a service to rapidly get updates from people, one that had a sense of authority and the moderating effect and discoverability of centralisation is impossible to ignore.
bigfishrunning
2 hours ago
The requirement for strong moderation only exists *because* of centralization. If I'm looking at a linear feed of content, it has to be curated by someone. In the old days, content on the internet was mostly links between webpages -- the "web" if you will. If i like the content on a page, it'll link to other pages i may like, and I'm free to follow those links at will, and no third party moderation is required.
Contrast with modern social media, where everything is condensed into a single list of algorithmically curated content, and we've implicitly eroded a lot of freedom (and handed control to Big Tech)
All this to say: bring back webrings.
cestith
an hour ago
You’re right to a point. The Internet is much older than the Web. Content on the Internet was largely FTP sites, Gopher sites, and Usenet long before the Web existed. We also had MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, talkers, chat rooms, BBSes, and more over Telnet well before the web was widespread.
Telnet 1969, standardized 1983
FTP 1971
UUCP 1979
SMTP 1981
RSH 1983
TCP/IP v4 1984
NNTP 1986 (the successor to UUCP for newsgroups)
IRC 1988
Archie 1990 (search engine for ftp sites)
Gopher 1991
WWW 1989 first published 1991
Veronica 1992 (search engine for Gopher sites)
SSH 1995ahknight
33 minutes ago
And in parallel we had FIDONet. Mustn't forget that magical place and source of many a late night and large phone bill.
trompetenaccoun
2 hours ago
There is a strong demand for censorship coming from not just governments and corporations but most regular people. It's not only big tech.
In the old days, most of the world wasn't online. The average internet user was a male Westerner in a tiny ideological bubble that represented not even 5% of the world's population. I fully agree with you that the old open web was better but the internet is more mainstream and monitored now and the average human isn't libertarian, to put it mildly. Corporations like X actually censor less than user moderated platforms such as Mastodon instances or most Reddit subs. Go on there to voice opinions that are unpopular with the moderators and you'll be banned in no time.
It's Eternal September.
strenholme
37 minutes ago
To be fair here, X also engages in moderation: I had my account on X suspended multiple times, for supposedly “posting spam”—something which never has happened with any other social media account I ever have had (and I have had them since the days of MySpace).
As far as I can tell, it’s because I posted evidence refuting the misogynistic lie widely spread on Twitter/X that 80% of the women sleep with only 20% of the men.[1] This would anger the kinds of Incel/RedPill men who were determined to believe this lie, facts be damned, and they would report my account.
[1] I detail how this is a lie at https://samboy.github.io/blog/80-20-myth.html
echelon
34 minutes ago
I mentioned on r/technology that watermarks on AI content were bad and would lead to pervasive content tracking. Coupled with attestation and ID requirements in the US and EU, and we'll find ourselves in a 1984-type scenario where only images and video from approved software and devices (with deep tracking claws) will be allowed to be posted.
I got 2,000 downvotes ranging from "AI slop" to "typical AI bro". Because somehow it's only used to "filter out AI garbage". As if the AI companies with distribution platforms and intents and government contracts weren't the ones designing it.
The next day I was banned from r/technology and found out my posts were shadow banned in several popular subreddits. I log out, open threads I posted in, and my posts have "disappeared". Shadow banned.
To be fair, they also didn't like when I spoke out a year ago against Meta glasses and said that not only could surveillance be used to control us, but it puts a damper on real human authenticity when we're being recorded 24/7 in every single human interaction. No one will ever be silly or afraid to make mistakes again if it can be rebroadcast for the internet to laugh at.
I hate this internet. It was cooler when it was anti-censorship hackers who wanted to embrace libertarianism and freedom. There were pockets of hate, but there was far more acceptance and positivity.
I want everyone in the world online and connected. But I blame the algorithm for encouraging people to act so mean to each other. And addictive teenage social media for getting the next generation used to being surveilled and having no expectation or appreciation of privacy.
akoboldfrying
2 hours ago
Well, replies to a post also require moderation. In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation.
(Plenty of people don't want that, or would at least prefer interacting only with their explicitly chosen friends if they were forced to choose between that and unmoderated public access. For them, group chats on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram suffice.)
bigfishrunning
2 hours ago
> In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation.
I saw plenty of things pre-social-media that was created by complete strangers. These were mostly things found via search or via recommendations from people I know. Having strangers moderate (and snoop, and have AI train on) the communication I have with people I already know (or people who i meet through them...) is the problem here.
mgbmtl
an hour ago
Most of the forums I participated in, in the past, ended up dying because of a very persistent troll or two. Some of them I knew in person. They were just so arrogant and thought they were doing the right thing. The communities died. A healthy community gives everyone the chance to speak. In person, that's often done subtly by moderators.
akoboldfrying
an hour ago
Fair enough, my claim about ever seeing something by someone you don't know is well countered by your search example. (I think recommendations from people you know is technically another example of that, but not in the sense I intended.)
But I think the case of replies stands. How can replies on a post be handled without moderation, without either showing arbitrarily horrible things to people or restricting to showing replies from explicitly designated friends?
1vuio0pswjnm7
40 minutes ago
"Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation."
Does centralization actually result in moderation
How do we define "moderation" (cf. "curation", e.g., filtering out anything that does not draw sufficiently large audiences for advertising)
Is optimizing information retrieval for data collection, surveillance and advertising "moderation"
Section 230 was supposed to promote moderation
It did not
Instead it allowed a select few websites to grow to sizes where moderation is impractical and, ultimately, bad for "business"
Their "business" is data collection, surveillance and advertising services, not information services. Section 230 did not anticipate this "business model"
They don't work for internet users. They work for advertisers
Having used the internet prior to their existence I am not convinced that the internet is useless without them
Anyone who has made a fortune catering to internet advertisers will of course disagree
That's fine but we have to account for bias
Given what has happened to "search" perhaps more internet users will come to understand that "discoverability" is not a "solved problem" when the "solution" is a middleman that works for advertisers not end users, an easy target for governments that wish to work around limits on their ability to legally conduct data collection and surveillance
anal_reactor
2 hours ago
Open protocols always end up with a "backend engineer doing frontend" situation. Which is okay if end users are other engineers, but not okay when end user is my mom.
ghastmaster
an hour ago
>Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
RSS. Website. Both have been around for a long time. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.
throw0101d
an hour ago
> RSS. Website. Both have been around for a long time. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.
A "foo-announce@" or "foo-alerts@" mailing list.
rjzzleep
an hour ago
Acquire and extinguish with google mailing lists and RSS
alightsoul
an hour ago
No one spends their time on websites.
scientifik
an hour ago
And yet here we are
Crosseye_Jack
37 minutes ago
There are people still using IRC, but the popularity of Discord can't be denied.
alightsoul
15 minutes ago
We are outcasts
swexbe
34 minutes ago
I'm using an app
vaylian
2 hours ago
> are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
The fediverse is a viable alternative. But most non-tech people don't know about it.
threetonesun
2 hours ago
Did websites and RSS stop working and I missed it? With more people doing AI searches a website is even more viable now, it's better for AI scraping than x.com.
vaylian
2 hours ago
RSS still works. But it doesn't offer writing comments like twitter/mastodon. Depending on the use-case this might be desired though.
alightsoul
an hour ago
Yes, the average user has either never used a website, or migrated to social media.
chipotle_coyote
32 minutes ago
"The average user has never used a website"? Really? The average user has never once, ever, opened their browser and gone to a website? Never read a newspaper online? Gone to LinkedIn or Facebook, done banking, made a doctor's appointment, found an AC repair shop on the web rather than through an app? Because I don't know what your definition of "average user" is, but I know a bunch of non-technical folks in ages ranging from thirty-something to eighty-something who do that all the time.
(Also, they sign up for mailing lists all the time, often whether they want to or not because everybody wants you to be on their damn mailing list. Email is absolutely still a viable broadcast medium, despite all the pundits declaring "email is dead" before they go back to, you know, checking their email.)
alightsoul
16 minutes ago
The average user has never once, ever, opened their browser and gone to a website? Never read a newspaper online? Gone to LinkedIn or Facebook, done banking, made a doctor's appointment, found an AC repair shop on the web rather than through an app?
Yes exactly. The difference is that you live in the us where you grew up with the concept of an information superhighway in the 90s. In most of the world the internet as websites never existed, it arrived with smartphones and thus social media apps and by extension some other apps. The things you mention were all done in person or via messaging apps until other apps were introduced. Actually most of the world still does those things in person or via WhatsApp. Well of course not Facebook, LinkedIn or online banking because they arrived with smartphones too.
busywaiting
2 hours ago
> a website is even more viable now, it's better for AI scraping
That's not necessarily the endorsement you think it is.
threetonesun
an hour ago
It's 100% the endorsement I think it is, someone searching for "is there a fire near me" wants an answer. The main issue with websites (and why Twitter grew) is it became easier to colocate information and get real(ish) time updates. For sites that don't care about actual traffic being able to surface that data to AI bots is perfect. If it reinforces a loop of "oh [site] is the actual source of information" even better.
weberer
an hour ago
Why not? I'd much prefer if I can just send my agent to gather info among these sites than have to sign up for some Twitter clone, enable Javascript, then click around through a sea of algorithm bait.
johnnyanmac
2 hours ago
I'm still honestly surprised that government entities didn't already solve this problem for themselves. We have means to mail, call, and even email our representatives, but technology seemingly stalled out 20 years ago and didn't keep up with the idea of having a digital forum. There are even multiple channels of verification to integrate, so such governmental forums could verify who is a constituent.
But that's not the end results. Senators have youtube channels, representative posts tweets and even tiktoks to update people, and emergency broadcasts post on Facebook. I'm not opposed to the expanded reach, but when that's their only official channel, it feels like something failed.
Recent years have only now made some non-US entities be pushed to start building away from this dependency, but it's a shame it had to get this far ingrained to begin with.
carlos22
2 hours ago
And it has much less users, I would say its max 1-5% of X users.
ben_w
40 minutes ago
In the context of:
Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
For comparison, I have NINA installed on my phone, a German government app for exactly this category: https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Warn-App-NINA/wa...
Number of users? Google play story says "10M+", same as the Bluesky app.
90% of an app like this (broadcast, one-way, no comments, no need for moderation system because only governments get to push content) was already for the most part a piece of piss to write before LLMs came along. The 10% part that's hard is going to be backup infrastructure that X also won't help much with, because the first two items in the list of hazards icons is "Attack on IT systems" then "Attack with nuclear weapons". (4 is "IT system outage", 6 is "Telephone line outage").
vaylian
2 hours ago
That doesn't mean that it's not viable for posting public announcements
echelon
2 hours ago
> The fediverse is a viable alternative
Bluesky attracted socialist progressives, furries, and kink-positive folks early on.
I'm not making any value statements, and there's nothing wrong with the userbase, but this is what dominates the feed for new users.
A lot of people are turned off by that when they see it as their first experience with the platform. Or they're actively turned away upon interaction. That's not how you build a big social network.
Mastodon is the exact same.
These platforms are also not winning people over by calling them "toots" and "skeets".
It's like Gimp refusing to adopt a Photoshop style UI for years and not changing their name.
Despite stated intentions, I think these platforms want to stay small and niche and non mainstream. If they wanted to grow big, they'd behave much differently. They'd try to get the Kardashians and would welcome posts about handbags and guns and sports.
RamblingCTO
2 hours ago
Mastondon/the fediverse feels even worse. Super lefty, super kinky, furry etc. Super weird. Fine that people have their bubbles, but as a normal person you feel totally alienated. X became a nazi dumpsterfire.
ageitgey
2 hours ago
> Despite stated intentions, I think these platforms want to stay small and niche and non mainstream.
I think that's essentially it, whether they are doing it intentionally or not.
Running a social network is like curating a party or conference. Who you do and don't let participate, and who you do and don't promote above others, is essentially the product. And that is a lot of work.
Open protocols don't solve any of these problems, and people who care about open protocols don't tend to be the same people interested in curating giant parties and conferences for a mass audience.
shakna
2 hours ago
Is that not precisely how Twitter built their original social network...?
doodpants
35 minutes ago
> Bluesky attracted socialist progressives, furries, and kink-positive folks early on.
> I'm not making any value statements, and there's nothing wrong with the userbase, but this is what dominates the feed for new users.
As someone who's never joined Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc., I find it weird that this would be the case. If I join as a new user, why would my feed not be empty, until I choose who to follow? If I don't want to see furries and kink, I'll never follow such users, so I'd expect that content will never show up the first place. But if these services pre-populate new users' feeds with random people's posts, well, that's just bizarre to me.
chipotle_coyote
27 minutes ago
They don't pre-populate the feed, no. I believe they suggest users to follow (on Mastodon that's a per-instance choice based on the administrator), and have sort of generic popular feeds. If you want to see what that looks like on Bluesky, just open up "bsky.app" when you're not logged in. You absolutely do not see a parade of kinky socialist furries.
raverbashing
2 hours ago
You're right
I'd say Mastodon at this point is mostly people talking in a vacuum (even more than BlueSky)
No mainstream discussion or debate comes from Mastodon, you don't see screenshots around (and you do see skeets around)
As much as SpaceXAi lost audience, there's a lot of discussion still going around there
arrowsmith
2 hours ago
Whatever happened to "Twitter can do what it wants, it's a private platform"?
hamdingers
44 minutes ago
Have you heard of the Goomba fallacy?
johnnyanmac
2 hours ago
I believe that sentiment started to die out around the time people realized a Nazi gained control over the world's centralized communication hub. Whether that says more about the communication, the nazi, or the people is a question for the ages.
electriclove
34 minutes ago
I agree with you. I hope you've had similar outrage for Facebook over the last 20 years.
strenholme
23 minutes ago
The Facebook of 20 years ago is very different from the Facebook of today. 20 years ago, one’s Facebook timeline was filled with whatever your friends were posting. These days—and I think this started about a year ago when AI made it really easy for “influencers” to post AI Slop—one’s Facebook feed is filled by random AI Slop accounts posting nonsense like, as just one of many examples, 80% of the women sleeping with 20% of the men. [1]
I am now using a project called Facebook Clean My Feeds [2] which cleans out all of this AI Slop, so that my timeline is like the timeline I had, say, five years ago, with only posts from friends, accounts I follow, and ads. The only problem I see with this plugin is that it is a Greasemonkey script, so I have to trust it to not do anything nefarious.
[1] This isn’t actually true, as I detail at https://samboy.github.io/blog/80-20-myth.html
[2] https://github.com/Artificial-Sweetener/facebook-clean-my-fe...
digikar99
2 hours ago
I found this post from Nostr. I find it a saner alternative to fediverse, particularly because the identity is just a server-free public-private key pair
But I don't know when if ever we will have a significant mass there.
Hacker News 100 on Nostr: https://njump.to/nprofile1qqsfexztjz4sq05j972pv5h3s9w0gaqvay...
sajithdilshan
an hour ago
Because it’s either this or tax payers money and corruption. Maintaining infrastructure and human labour is not free.
BobAliceInATree
an hour ago
> Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
Government agencies have communicated to their citizens long before twitter has existed. There's a myriad of ways they can use today: websites (with or without RSS), email newsletters, text updates, other social networks (bluesky, threads, etc).
Choosing to give critical updates only on Twitter is definitely a choice and they are deliberately ignoring a very large segment of their population that doesn't have a twitter account.
alightsoul
an hour ago
It's time to repost content on bluesky
hsuduebc2
25 minutes ago
I do not use this garbage product made only to make your day miserable because it's ragebaiting algorithm. It's not essentiall by any means, it's only designed so you feel that way.
brynnbee
21 minutes ago
Mine rarely shows rage bait and when it does I just block everyone involved or add words to mute list. I think people who see this a lot are in fact baited and it creates a cycle. Which isn't to say it's a good system, more that it's easily avoided
21asdffdsa12
an hour ago
Finally some variety by those who want to take over via social control-cults. It used to be all about protecting the children.
carlosjobim
an hour ago
The competing app is e-mail. You can subscribe to important information by e-mail and send out important information to mailing lists.
> This needs to be regulated somehow.
Of course, this is HN so regulation is always the solution to all problems. Instead of making the people who are responsible for doing stuff and are getting paid for it get off their asses. They can easily post updates on government alert websites, on e-mail lists, and on social media and everywhere else to get the attention of the public.
gloosx
an hour ago
I don't believe updates on X is an exclusive channel for vital alerts in Spain.
This just doesn't make any sense, maybe what they are posting on X is just some typical SMM slop.
To send nation-wide or localised alerts for forest fires, floods or natural disasters, Spain seems to be using an entirely different system called ES-Alert via cellular broadcast technology which makes a lot of sense.
parineum
2 hours ago
> Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?
Because that's not what happened.
Why have users given control over their content to X?
thinkingtoilet
2 hours ago
>Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?
Because it is a private enterprise that you signed up for. You don't have a right to Twitter. You don't have a right to Facebook. If you don't like it, leave. The entitlement is massive here. These sites are poison in so many ways. Stop feeding the beast.
delegate
an hour ago
Of course I don't have a right to Twitter.
But I do have the right to the public information posted by people who intend it to be public information.
They're not posting 'on X', they're posting to the public and the only reason they do it on X is because there are no alternatives due to the network effect intrinsic for such services.
The 'network effect' part needs to be defined and taken into account by regulators and then regulate the companies such that they make the information available to the public if the poster intends so.
thinkingtoilet
an hour ago
It's not public. It's on Twitters private servers. And the people who posted it agreed to the terms. You have no right to any of this and you know it. You just want to have a right to it.
strenholme
18 minutes ago
You’re talking to the wrong person. You need to be explaining this to the government officials who use Twitter/X to post important updates, so that said officials use something more open than Twitter, such as, I don’t know, Mastodon.
johnnyanmac
2 hours ago
>You don't have a right to Twitter.
Regulation over communication channels is not only common through the ages, but expected and needed. There may not be literal landlines to worry about in the modern age, but the general idea of communication being an important medium that shouldn't be squandered by competition remains.
I prefer everyone to simply leave Twitter and to let it crash and burn, but I see the arguments to have stronger regulations on channels central enough for governmental entities to be using it as a communication hub.
Supermancho
an hour ago
This pattern is exceedingly common:
Multiple government agencies have a gap in capability. Larger government body chooses to leverage a popular (private) company Z solution over trying to develop an internal system. This is often because it's already been done in smaller jurisdictions. Z becomes head of agency/regulatory capture cartel. Z abuses the position to curtail the government actions/enable further corruption/abuse.
kova12
25 minutes ago
I recently came to conclusion that x is deliberately used for psyops. After I made a couple of posts questioning the benefits of data centers on X, account was suspended for "inauthentic behaviors", restored, then suspended again, restored, and now X won't let me access it until I install an app on my phone and jump through hoops. In other words, doxx myself, it will not work with app on throwaway phone. X is clearly not a beacon of free speech it pretends to be