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Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

reuters.com

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Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#151

Post by 734786710934 »

zug_zug wrote: post #101
asaph wrote: post #3

> “If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly. And you wonder: ‘Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a medium has been built?’” How exactly is breaking up the tech giants going to solve this problem?

Suppose tech companies were no longer legally allowed to use the network effect (i.e. they had to provide open-access to their public data via API). Then this would enable alternative front-ends on twitter. This would then enable me to filter messages by positivity, or whichever criteria I choose (e.g. non-Russian-bots, non-shills). This is turn would then change the whole ecosystem. It would remove the perverse ince…

> Suppose tech companies were no longer legally allowed to use the network effect (i.e. they had to provide open-access to their public data via API).

Facebook and Twitter have public APIs.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#152

Post by OrderlyTiamat »

celticninja wrote: post #140
stupidbird wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at a certain rate of adoption doesn't that kind of become like "stop using email"

I don't use Facebook, I presume thats the level of adoption you are talking about.

Many people don't use facebook. I thinks WhatsApp is a better example, it's even more ubiquitous, though I'm sure there are still people who don't use it. Heck, I'm personally thinking of stopping, it's just that everyone is there. Two of my recent orders were negotiated by WhatsApp. It's used almost universally.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#153

Post by criddell »

choko wrote: post #92
criddell wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people in the entertainment business are expected to be able to promote stuff via their social media channels. For example, if two actors are up for a role and one has a hundred followers and the other has a million, the more followed actor may have an edge. On a more personal level, you might not see your nephew's piano recital.

Lots of people don't use social media and don't miss their nephew's piano recitals. You have many other options for communicating with friends and family that aren't social media. That means the true value of social media is as a channel for advertising?

Why call somebody on the phone when you can write them a letter?

> the true value of social media is as a channel for advertising?

That's probably too narrow. The value for me would be as a channel of communication.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#154

Post by drawnablank »

nakedrobot2 wrote: post #68

They don't have to be broken up, they need to stop being morally bankrupt. Nothing about Facebook's size dictates that they needed to: - Allow their platform to be abused by misinformation campaigns, because it pays well (thereby allowing Trump to win) - Allow hate groups to flourish - Allow anti-vax groups to grow and flourish - Allow nutty conspiracy groups to flourish - Help dictatorships with their genocide It's…

I don't think that enforcing the arbitrary restriction of views and opinions is the correct path to the morality you accuse them of being without.

Once upon a time, Copernicus and Galileo would have been viewed as "nutty conspiracy" theorists, the latter of whom the church tried combat, purely for having different views.

'First they came' and all that...

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#155

Post by acjacobson »

john37386 wrote: post #147

Maybe these social networks could be manage by the community. A bit like HN. Here if you post crap, people can downvote your crap to the bottom so that no one can see it. If you want to be seen and red, you need to post quality and gain reputation. People with bad reputation will slowly lose visibility. It might not work, but clearly it seems that quality is a prime factor on HN and it's one of the reason why I trust…

Reddit has had mixed results with this - it entirely depends on the community and moderators. Some subreddits are much better managed than others.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#156

Post by stale2002 »

zug_zug wrote: post #101
asaph wrote: post #3

> “If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly. And you wonder: ‘Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a medium has been built?’” How exactly is breaking up the tech giants going to solve this problem?

Suppose tech companies were no longer legally allowed to use the network effect (i.e. they had to provide open-access to their public data via API). Then this would enable alternative front-ends on twitter. This would then enable me to filter messages by positivity, or whichever criteria I choose (e.g. non-Russian-bots, non-shills). This is turn would then change the whole ecosystem. It would remove the perverse ince…

I do love the idea of Twitter's API being public but I like it for the opposite reason.

The opposite reason being that it would allow people to eliminate censorship if they so choose.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#157

Post by stupidbird »

celticninja wrote: post #140
stupidbird wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at a certain rate of adoption doesn't that kind of become like "stop using email"

I don't use Facebook, I presume thats the level of adoption you are talking about.

Yeah precisely, we need some middle ground between "don't use it at all" or "have 0 control over your data"

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#158

Post by ar-nelson »

john37386 wrote: post #147

Maybe these social networks could be manage by the community. A bit like HN. Here if you post crap, people can downvote your crap to the bottom so that no one can see it. If you want to be seen and red, you need to post quality and gain reputation. People with bad reputation will slowly lose visibility. It might not work, but clearly it seems that quality is a prime factor on HN and it's one of the reason why I trust…

This is the result of manual moderation, not community voting.

Reddit relies on voting, and it doesn't have the same level of quality. With the exception of subreddits with well-thought-out rules and moderators who consistently enforce those rules.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#159

Post by elcomet »

734786710934 wrote: post #151
zug_zug wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose tech companies were no longer legally allowed to use the network effect (i.e. they had to provide open-access to their public data via API). Then this would enable alternative front-ends on twitter. This would then enable me to filter messages by positivity, or whichever criteria I choose (e.g. non-Russian-bots, non-shills). This is turn would then change the whole ecosystem. It would remove the perverse ince…

> Suppose tech companies were no longer legally allowed to use the network effect (i.e. they had to provide open-access to their public data via API). Facebook and Twitter have public APIs.

Come on. Facebook and twitter APIs are so restricted you can't even build a usable alternative client (look at all twitter clients that we had a few years ago, they are all gone now).

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#160

Post by TimJYoung »

I think the solution may lie with changes to, or removal of, Section 230 of the CDA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

I suspect that forcing those that host 3rd party content/discussion to actually moderate and control the discussion will keep the size of such online communities smaller, which is good. Or, they will simply need increase revenue so that they can properly moderate them. Either way, the toxic nature of a lot of the internet goes away pretty quickly, and companies will be forced to clean up their act.

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