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Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse

bombthrower.com

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Re: Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse

#51

Post by zozbot234 »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #39
zozbot234 wrote: post #13

Mailchimp is "big tech" now? Can't these folks just throw a RSS feed together (hosted on the cheapest static webhost around) and tell people to subscribe to it? This is a big fat nothingburger if I ever saw one.

Because to a first approximation everyone understands, and can get, email, while maybe 5% of the population, if that, understand RSS feeds. My 80 year old aunt can read email. While I'm sure I could teach her to use RSS feeds, it would not be a task I would look foward to. And she has me. Most people don't have me, or anyone like me (or, likely, you, or the majority of other users of this site). What you're saying is…

> Because to a first approximation everyone understands, and can get, email, while maybe 5% of the population, if that, understand RSS feeds.

At some point in history, 5% or less of the population understood email. RSS feeds are not inherently more complex than email, in fact they're quite a bit simpler. (And even if you don't grok RSS feeds, you'll probably grok a weblog; RSS is only relevant here because it gives the exact same affordances as something like a Mailchimp newsletter, even though it works differently under the hood.)

Re: Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse

#52

Post by PhasmaFelis »

StuntPope wrote: post #19
jsnell wrote: post #18

There's some chutzpah in an anti-vaxxer pushing fraudulent Covid miracle cures and invoking Semmelweis in the very same post.

Where is the anti-vax material in that post?

The part where he says that being snarky to vaccine deniers is literally just as bad as racism.

> “Covidiots”, “Deniers” these are not rational counter-arguments, they’re slurs. Anybody employing them is not engaging in discourse but rather bigotry and prejudice. This is as inexcusable as racism. Over the past few years many have been challenged to examine their own biases and privilege, in certain contexts for perfectly valid reasons. Anybody engaging in this type of othering toward skeptics and contrarians lacks self-awareness and empathy to the same degree as a racist.

Re: Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse

#53

Post by toiletaccount »

sometimes I wonder how people and politicians would react to a user-friendly decentralized and distributed social network with strong crypto in the right places and no hierarchy.

if such a thing were ever made, it would be very difficult to monitor or moderate.

Re: Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse

#55

Post by varelse »

mancerayder wrote: post #42
varelse wrote: post #8

I remain confused as to why anyone thinks they have unlimited first amendment rights on social media. It sounds a lot like thinking one has first amendment rights at a private employer. Let's clear this up right now. TLDR: you don't unless you explicitly do. https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/setting-the-record-straigh... Edit: keep bringing those freethinker(tm) downvotes. It won't change the law one bit, but I guess…

> Edit: keep bringing those freethinker(tm) downvotes. It won't change the law one bit, but I guess it gives good feels. Freedom to comment is not freedom to not be downvoted into oblivion. You can complain but we'll grey that one, as well. There's lesson in the irony.

And yet still not a single counter argument explaining why you guys don't build your own social media site instead of whining about the old and stupid leading brands. There's lesson in the irony.

Re: Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse

#56

Post by creato »

toiletaccount wrote: post #53

sometimes I wonder how people and politicians would react to a user-friendly decentralized and distributed social network with strong crypto in the right places and no hierarchy. if such a thing were ever made, it would be very difficult to monitor or moderate.

It also sounds difficult to curate (just another kind of moderation), and much of the success of the current social media heavyweights is due to their curation.

Re: Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse

#57

Post by fighterpilot »

varelse wrote: post #8

I remain confused as to why anyone thinks they have unlimited first amendment rights on social media. It sounds a lot like thinking one has first amendment rights at a private employer. Let's clear this up right now. TLDR: you don't unless you explicitly do. https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/setting-the-record-straigh... Edit: keep bringing those freethinker(tm) downvotes. It won't change the law one bit, but I guess…

I have no problem with social media companies kicking off anyone they please. I do have a problem when the lines between government and private get blurred, and a government can indirectly or directly influence the censorship decisions of private companies through threat of regulation, a revolving door, or by explicitly flagging certain posts. That's a grey area 1A violation in my mind.

Re: Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse

#58

Post by PhasmaFelis »

I read the headline and was nodding along.

Then I got to the part where he suddenly rants that content moderators are "probably...teams of purple-haired Millennials with nose hoops and personal pronoun mood-rings."

And calls out the AP for marking a medical claim "false" just because no one has been able to produce any evidence for it.

And says that calling anti-vaxxers nasty names is literally just as bad as racism.

I'm looking at the comment I just typed and it sounds like I'm exaggerating to make him look bad. But I'm not. That's what he's actually claiming.

Re: Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse

#59

Post by evrydayhustling »

zug_zug wrote: post #35

I'm also gonna flag this, after careful deliberation. I'm gonna leave a comment, because I'm not the shadow powers that be, I'm just a dude who thinks this is an incohesive rambling that's a waste of everybody's time and, despite the promising title, ultimately rehashed flame-baity non-tech non-news.

Yep, another day, another random dude who considers himself an expert on what freedom is, what tech platforms are, and the dangers of private businesses refusing to amplify his friends. Even a plumber will refuse to route your sewage back to the public water main...

Re: Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse

#60

Post by psyc »

toiletaccount wrote: post #53

sometimes I wonder how people and politicians would react to a user-friendly decentralized and distributed social network with strong crypto in the right places and no hierarchy. if such a thing were ever made, it would be very difficult to monitor or moderate.

This is one of my favorite thought experiments, except in my version it is guaranteed that nobody can moderate anything, ever. My best guess is: There is a threshold for how much of a problem something can become before congress makes a law prohibiting "access" to this network or running the client, or any analogue thereof. Then there's another threshold at which the government ratchets up resources for real enforcement.

In short, the conclusion I always come to is that no matter what the math and the game theory say, if the legislative, executive, and judicial all agree that it's a big enough problem, it's dead. There's nothing technologists can do about this. At least, this is the conclusion I always run into whenever I've tried to brainstorm technical solutions over the years.

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