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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

#281

Post by sixstringtheory »

criddell wrote: post #189
choko wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on how technically savvy you are. You may be able to post a video to your server and have a script automatically email all your relatives. Less technical people will record a video, choose the share action to post it online, then all the people that are following will see it in their feed.

If the feed algorithm surfaces it to them. I’d wager many social media users only consume content though the feed and not by going directly to people’s profiles to see what they’re up to, so may never see everything.

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

#282

Post by baccheion »

In my opinion, 43 (1 CEO + 6 managers/executives + 6 * 6 individual contributors) is the optimal employee count. It becomes a still-reasonable 259 (1 CEO + 6 executives + 6 * 6 managers + 6 * 6 * 6 individual contributors) if reality is factored in. Any company larger inevitable becomes a stagnating drain. That is, one way to somewhat clip power and improve overall (intracompany and economic) efficiency may be to limit company size to a maximum of 259-585 employees.

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

#283

Post by rusk »

beambot wrote: post #273
rusk wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think I made my point kind of stupidly. Email is just "there" at this stage. Your emails appear in your inbox and you're not really constrained by a provider. I was taking aim more at the comparison with twitter and facebook which require constant engagement. With email you just get it the way you want it, on your terms mostly.

> With email you just get it the way you want it, on your terms mostly. Sounds pretty perfect.

Email is far from perfect.

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

#285

Post by sas2000 »

baccheion wrote: post #282

In my opinion, 43 (1 CEO + 6 managers/executives + 6 * 6 individual contributors) is the optimal employee count. It becomes a still-reasonable 259 (1 CEO + 6 executives + 6 * 6 managers + 6 * 6 * 6 individual contributors) if reality is factored in. Any company larger inevitable becomes a stagnating drain. That is, one way to somewhat clip power and improve overall (intracompany and economic) efficiency may be to lim…

ok this is the hottest take in here

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

#286

Post by Sileni »

nine_k wrote: post #203
Sileni wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the comment you're replying to is trying to strengthen that ability. Now you don't have to convince some critical mass of your friends to switch over; you just switch over to the new platform, which everyone is connected to via some open source API/protocol, or the company running the data service is not running a front end to present the data. You continue to get the data from your friends and family while u…

My point is exactly not having to impose regulation. The power to move away is already in the people's hands. You can do it at any moment, without a governmental mandate. The point is to use this power. But first people have to recognize their power, and learn to use it a bit.

No. That's just more software engineer hand waving to avoid taking responsibility for the way their products have changed the emotional landscape for real people in the last couple of decades.

It's like saying the CIA wasn't trying to destroy communities when they were handing out crack, because "moral people wouldn't have taken it". Every single person building these platforms knew how addictive they were. It was the entire reason these companies were valued from the start. It was the end goal.

Yeah, a junkie can decide not to go find another needle. But if that is your response to the drug epidemic, you then have marginalized people who you've decreed "not worth saving". And I don't like what that has looked like over the last 60 years.

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

#287

Post by mattmaroon »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #262
mattmaroon wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither do the people above. Apple isn't acquiring any other phone makers. Google isn't acquiring any other search engines. The breakups you suggested would make them slightly smaller companies but wouldn't solve any of the problems. the problem with Google if there is one is that it's the only search engine anybody uses. It's 90% of the market. Taking away YouTube doesn't change that. Instagram isn't really a compet…

> Instagram isn't really a competitor with Facebook Of course it is. Facebook is losing certain demographics to Instagram. If they were separate companies, Facebook would be under far greater shareholder pressure.

I don't think that's true. I think Facebook is losing customers due to its own downsides, and Instagram is gaining customers on its own Merit. I don't think that there is a zero-sum competition between the two

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

#288

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

krapp wrote: post #38
gambler wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't. But it will limit effects of bad actors, give users a bit more control over their environment and probably stop some emergent behaviors.

The web is designed to make limiting the propagation of information (and any emergent effects from that) impossible. How will the effect of 'bad actors' be limited when they can just move elsewhere? You don't need sites of the scale of Facebook or Twitter to have emergent, viral or culturally relevant effects occur. What makes the big sites like Facebook and Twitter isn't their size per se but their capture of networ…

>The web is designed to make limiting the propagation of information (and any emergent effects from that) impossible.

Are you unaware or ignoring the censorship of thought that Google and Facebook have been doing lately?

You are acting like it’s 2005 internet, and it’s not.

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

#289

Post by criddell »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #281
criddell wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how technically savvy you are. You may be able to post a video to your server and have a script automatically email all your relatives. Less technical people will record a video, choose the share action to post it online, then all the people that are following will see it in their feed.

If the feed algorithm surfaces it to them. I’d wager many social media users only consume content though the feed and not by going directly to people’s profiles to see what they’re up to, so may never see everything.

That's a good point. Likewise, with email there's always the chance that the spam filter could hide the message and lots of people never check their spam folders.

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

#290

Post by TangoTrotFox »

travmatt wrote: post #225
nine_k wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that people have an (almost) unalienable power, very strong, and pretty underused. It's the power of walking away. If you find an environment toxic, leave it, and ask your friends to leave it, too. Yes, you have to research alternatives first, and make compromises, at least temporarily. Lately this somehow worked for Facebook. I bet they are going to see that on their bottom line. So, if you dislike the outra…

Or we could support strong regulation and not have to passively accept being pushed into a false dichotomy!

And whom do you suppose would be writing those regulations? Of course the answer to this question is the very same reason that the tech giants will not be split up. We have a mountain of rules and regulations and anti-competitive behavior, price fixing, and all other sorts of stuff. And then we have Time Warner/Comcast openly agreeing to not compete, charging arbitrarily high prices, and the FTC apparently deciding there's no such thing as a merger that might lead to reduced competition. Then you have the head of Comcast golfing, partying, and most importantly fundraising like a fiend for the former president.
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