171–180 of 375 posts
I suggest the title be changed to remove “Father of Web”. “Tim Berners-Lee says…” is better.
Yeah. Honestly after his advocacy for the EME/DRM stuff it's hard for me not to be skeptical out-of-hand to any of his suggestions.
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or just stop using twitter?
at a certain rate of adoption doesn't that kind of become like "stop using email"
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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…
How about a time limit on how long they can have exclusive rights to the network? Like a patent.
I'm afraid this is a slippery slope leading to things far more dangerous than we have now.
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Companies benefit from protections given to them by society. E.g. limited liability, copyright, patents and lots of others. So I think it's prudent to ask ourselves as a society from time to time if these privileges are still useful or maybe should be modified or revoked. I agree that for a lot of research you need to be of a certain size but I don't think you need to be a multi-hundred-billion dollar company. Apple…
Well, you don't think the society benefits from the companies? Where else would you get all the stuff we use for everything? Where do you get the factories? Where do you get the machines? Where do you get the software? If you don't think companies bring societal value, ask yourself what the alternatives are. There were a bunch of attempts in the 20th century, however it never ended good for the population.
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There's so much right with your take here, IMO. It flies in the face of so much opposition from reality – much of it credible – like how the hell do you make money when you eschew walled gardens, engagement boosters, and adtech friendly practices? Do people even want to make the tradeoffs they'd have to? Is regulation too heavyhanded? Will it be that for as long as these systems can be turned into money machines, old…
"like how the hell do you make money " Well, you could charge for it. But of course you wouldn't be able to compete with free - you'd have to have competitors who needed to charge too. They do exist but are pretty niche. The WELL comes to mind. www.well.com If it's any help I applaud every newspaper that puts up a paywall, and more are doing it. It only came about when the industry was (is) about to be completely wip…
Are you sure about that? Twitter's annual revenue is 2.4 billion dollars, and they have 300 million users. $0.55/month per user is all it would take to match their current revenue.
Sure, when a service is getting up off the ground, you can't beat free, but for one that's established, like Facebook or Twitter, the subscription fees can be made miniscule.
As long as the advertising model is used, a set of perverse incentives exist that encourage social platforms to treat advertisers as more important than users, to inflate their user numbers, to lie about views, to tolerate fake accounts and harassment, and to close their APIs.
A $1 premium ad-free option with 50% adoption would increase twitter's revenue and remove the perverse incentives.
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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.
Social media isn't faster or more efficient than email though. In fact it might be slower due to the amount of clutter and ads encountered when using facebook. The comparison between phones and post doesn't really hold up.
What reality are you living in that Twitter is slower than email?
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> 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).
But that's probably because the same day they removed that events API, they launched the Facebook Local app that shows all the events around you. Can't have anyone competing with your app.
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Well, you don't think the society benefits from the companies? Where else would you get all the stuff we use for everything? Where do you get the factories? Where do you get the machines? Where do you get the software? If you don't think companies bring societal value, ask yourself what the alternatives are. There were a bunch of attempts in the 20th century, however it never ended good for the population.
I said "companies of a certain size". Don't make this into a socialism vs capitalism issue. Yes, companies benefit society. But I believe trillion dollar companies are a negative for society. They get way too powerful.