Nicholas Carr on how to fix social media

The way the world operates in 2021 is a mess, unfortunately this is normal so few people seem to notice.

Do you agree or disagree with the notion that since the electromagnetic spectrum is a limited resource, actual broadcast (using the spectrum) needs to be regulated?

However, I feel Carr has made a mistake with his attempt to differentiate between private communication and broadcasting based on "number of followers".

I think the better distinctions looks something like:

  private communication is anything delivered ONLY to people to whom it is addressed or who have actively opted-in to receive communications from the sender. some authentication must be implied before they can read what I have delivered.

  any other communication, regardless of the medium, number of followers, etc. is considered to be public.

If I post something on my own private blog that requires a subscription to read, that's private communication. If I post the same thing on a medium where it can be read by anyone, that's public.

If I email my family about something, that's private; if I post a comment on a tiny open wordpress site with less readers than I have cousines, that's public.

This differentiation says nothing about what the difference in regulation between public and private should be. There are good arguments for many different schemes, some of which involve zero regulation for either form. But to discuss the merits of them, we need a clear distinction between private & public communication, and I think Carr's is wrong and mine is (roughly) right.

This is my go to response as to "what to do about social media."

And I opine|rant|blather on about it whenever I see folks complaining about or claiming that some rules|regulation|policy will "fix" social media.

And such tracts are becoming more and more common (cf. this article[0][1], entitled OK, but What Should We Actually Do About Facebook? I Asked the Experts. from today). But, as in the article linked, no one ever suggests decentralized communications.

I'm not sure why, but there certainly are barriers to making decentralized "social media" work. Those same barriers are what make centralization of much of our digital universe necessary and hugely profitable.

Those barriers are primarily (there are other issues, but are mostly part of the result rather than the cause) related to the ways in which end-users are provided access to the Internet.

I'm specifically referring to asymmetric internet links. Most internet links are $X Mb/sec download and ($X / 25 or so) Mb/sec upload.

What's more, there are often policy restrictions on "consumer" internet links that block them from "running servers," whether that be port blocking or throttling.

This keeps decentralized communication from being viable. Other than these artificial barriers, there's nothing stopping folks from hosting their own cat/family/meme photos/videos and/or other content.

There are plenty of decentralized platforms that can do so with minimal set up and configuration.

However, if you can't serve more than a couple of concurrent connections at a reasonable speed, that breaks the whole decentralized/P2P paradigm. Because my upload bandwidth is the limiting factor in being able to host content.

If, on the other hand, you have a link with symmetric bandwidth without policy restrictions, serving your own content is a no-brainer.

As such, my "solution" for addressing the "censorship" of the centralized "social media" platforms is to make them irrelevant by eliminating the entire reason for their existence -- asymmetric bandwidth favoring download vs. upload on internet links.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/facebook-experts....

[1] (same as [0], just from archive.md): https://archive.md/qpNtV

Edit: Added title of linked article in the comment.

Also, the tools exists on all of these social media products to actually go and check on your friends' pages where you can see their updates. Nothing stops you from doing that and consuming the content you wish.