Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
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Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#2What all this says to me, in total, is that greater competition where you have a bunch of potentially medium sized companies or smaller but no clear massive (50%+ market share) leader that power can’t congregate means they have both incentive to provide a better experience and having multiple targets makes it harder on negative actors, effectively.
Thats my takeaway here is that we should as a matter of regulation / spirit of market competition lean on incentivizing creating medium (mid?) size companies worth collective $100 billion+ than a few giant trillion dollar corporations, as it relates to majority software companies.
I think with hardware it’s A bit different when it comes to economies of scale so I don’t know how that could break down and I don’t want to include that for the sake of argument but there could be something there too
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#3> I started seeing a lot of comments claiming that you need scale to do moderation, anti-spam, anti-fraud, etc., around the time Zuckerberg, in response to Elizabeth Warren calling for the breakup of big tech companies, claimed that breaking up tech companies would make content moderation issues substantially worse
Well Zuckerberg is correct in context. Politicians don't mean moderation as in everyone is being civil with each other or garbage results. That isn't a political issue. They mean things like supporting the local censorship regime which is usually country-specific. So from a political perspective, more centralisation is the only way to successfully implement moderation. Because moderation doesn't mean "behave to community standards" - it means "comply with politician's standards". Ie, moderating what people can say as part of their legal and political engagement with society.
I recall when Australia had a suppression order about Cardinal Pell, high ranking official in the Catholic church who was convicted of various sex offences. And in fairness the case was a political football so the order was reasonable. It was eventually overturned but reputational damage was done because, unfortunately for the courts, there are too many foreign news organisations so the block failed miserably and it was major news in Australia without any official Australian news sources covering it.
It would be relatively easy to enforce that sort of block if the major foreign distributors were just Facebook or YouTube. They'd probably cooperate with the Australian authorities on request.
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#4> I started seeing a lot of comments claiming that you need scale to do moderation, anti-spam, anti-fraud, etc., around the time Zuckerberg, in response to Elizabeth Warren calling for the breakup of big tech companies, claimed that breaking up tech companies would make content moderation issues substantially worse Well Zuckerberg is correct in context . Politicians don't mean moderation as in everyone is being civil…
This “cooperation” with the state is a huge problem though.
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#5> I started seeing a lot of comments claiming that you need scale to do moderation, anti-spam, anti-fraud, etc., around the time Zuckerberg, in response to Elizabeth Warren calling for the breakup of big tech companies, claimed that breaking up tech companies would make content moderation issues substantially worse Well Zuckerberg is correct in context . Politicians don't mean moderation as in everyone is being civil…
This “cooperation” with the state is a huge problem though.
Not when talking to Elizabeth Warren. It wasn't that much later that all the Hunter Biden laptop thing happened and showcased what Zuck was getting at. In context it was a straightforward, informative and correct answer for this audience. They won't be able to moderate the debate if the internet is made up of smaller companies; the coordination is much easier with just a few majors.
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#6What all this says to me, in total, is that greater competition where you have a bunch of potentially medium sized companies or smaller but no clear massive (50%+ market share) leader that power can’t congregate means they have both incentive to provide a better experience and having multiple targets makes it harder on negative actors, effectively. Thats my takeaway here is that we should as a matter of regulation /…
Otherwise summed up as "Monocultures suck"
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#7The real "economy of scale" in these platforms is not actually providing any support , moderation, fraud prevention. It's not that they scale it better, it's just that they don't do it and get away with it through market power.
If I provide Andy's small town taxi service and have a customer service issue, I deal with it personally and properly or I go out of business. If I'm uber I just ignore it. It has nothing to do with efficiency, it's just getting the monopoly power to treat your customers badly and get away with it.
Which, of course combined with the larger attack surface, is why bigger platforms do so much worse on spam/fraud/support.
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#8Amazon selling obviously fake SD cards / flash disks is baffling. It’s super easy to spot and fake disks cost users data, so you’d think they’d take that seriously.
https://a.co/d/auXcxrZ ($29 for 1TB as their “overall pick”)
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#9The real "economy of scale" in these platforms is not actually providing any support , moderation, fraud prevention. It's not that they scale it better, it's just that they don't do it and get away with it through market power. If I provide Andy's small town taxi service and have a customer service issue, I deal with it personally and properly or I go out of business. If I'm uber I just ignore it. It has nothing to d…
>If I provide Andy's small town taxi service and have a customer service issue, I deal with it personally and properly or I go out of business.
In a very small town, you won't go out of business because you'll be the only taxi service in town. Everyone can establish their 'monopoly power' in a small enough area.
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#10Way back in 2014 when Jeff Atwood (aka codinghorror) switched from Stack Overflow to creating Discourse, he gave a talk about it (see notes [1], sadly I can't find a live link to the recording anymore). He gave a pithy little explanation of why they built the Discourse trust levels system the way they did that stood out to me:
> The only thing that scales with the community is the community.
The point being, you have to grow users into moderators. Any other way of acquiring moderators is unsustainable.
[1]: http://discourse.bridgefoundry.org/t/link-to-jeff-atwood-tal...