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When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

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Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#31

Post by j45 »

dylan604 wrote: post #8
diebeforei485 wrote: post #5

It's important to have your own website, so you can post updates there. Use Meta to let people know that there is an update on the site.

Having your own site on someone else's corporate service is no less of a risk of being shut out of your account. Free speech is only as free as the service you are using thinks it is.

Web hosting is much, much, much more independent that posting on social media.

Social media is a web app and mobile app.

A website is just a website. Somehow being shut out of your own hosting is something else entirely.

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#32

Post by j45 »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #21
dylan604 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having your own site on someone else's corporate service is no less of a risk of being shut out of your account. Free speech is only as free as the service you are using thinks it is.

There's risk and then there's RISK. A corporate service in the form of a simple VPS is cheap and can be had from a 1000 providers anywhere in the world. Very simple to change providers too. Nothing like the quasi-monopoly of FB/X/YT.

VPS providers are many orders of magnitude simpler and smaller corporate services than social media companies.

Remotely trying to correlate or compare them defies any reasonable semblance of comparability.

You can mail your own server to a co-location service if you want to host the metal yourself.

If you need to go a step further and not rely on one host, it's inexpensive enough to get multiple hosts.

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#33

Post by j45 »

bestouff wrote: post #14
Zak wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web hosting is, or can be a commodity. An organization that gets dropped by its web host can just get another.

Sure, but as long as you own you domain name you're a DNS update away of moving it elsewhere.

As long as? I'm not sure if there's a common way, largely practiced by many people where they don't own their own domain name that they can point anywhere?

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#34

Post by j45 »

electric_muse wrote: post #4

Content is one thing. But it gets me really concerned about these kind of appeal processes when it comes to more critical things like your identity or proof of personhood. It is not hard to imagine getting a black mark in some invisible proprietary profile that determines if you can access Uber Eats, LinkedIn, etc. and have no recourse to fix it or get another chance.

The online "sign in with X/Y/Z" services are a digital identity provider.

We are citizens of private corporations that are social networks.

There are not many laws there for recourse or communication.

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#35

Post by EGreg »

Don't y'all see?

Every other day a story comes out about a centralized platform either:

1) Extorting for money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887

2) Canceling accounts: https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way...

3) Has their algorithms choose what you see and hear: https://x.com/i/grok/share/NwPcWVxZiHQytvGs8MONRdpCi

4) Deplatforms you anytime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming

5) Demonetizes you, after taking over half to begin with: https://podcastle.ai/blog/how-much-money-do-youtubers-make-p...

6) Allows governments easy surveillance and even hacking your account: https://natlawreview.com/article/even-hacking-field-governme...

7) Sends your information to advertisers, etc. etc.

8) Makes everyone increasingly depressed, angry and distrustful of others https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

Now I ask you, why do people put up with this, especially content creators with large audiences?

Because they have no viable open alternative that they can host easily themselves.

And why is that? Here is what it would look like if they did: https://qbix.com/community.pdf

I think it's because just like in Web3, the incentives of Web2 are to make a lot of money for your early stage investors, the VCs, and very few choose not to sell out after they hit the critical mass and get massive centralized power and network effects. I've seen "indieweb" come and go, "decentralizedweb.net" is down but they used to have TimBL speaking at it. I've seen Diaspora come out 13 years ago and sadly one of the founders killed himself. I've seen Mastodon, which Trump's team forked to make Truth Social (one of the few deplatformed guys who actually got his own platform, had to spend millions on it).

Why do you think there is no good alternative to Big Tech, the way that, say, at least the Incredible Burger is an alternative for people who want to opt of meat?

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#36

Post by Glyptodon »

This is pretty much the case for non-abortion, non-political situations, too. For example, MMI, a small watch company out of Singapore, had their Facebook page removed in the middle of one of their Kickstarter campaigns earlier this year.

To anyone on the outside, it's not clear at all if (a) there really was some kind of issue that consumers would want to know about, or (b) their page shouldn't have been removed to begin with.

It's not only (I'm sure) annoying to the company, which, being small, has responded in a relatively circumspect way, but annoying as a consumer because it's not very easy to interpret the signal.

In the same ballpark, but reverse, my news feed always has one or two posts from maybe fake groups that have seemingly AI-written stories that carefully mention the Tedoo app, and FB is all too happy to let that slide no matter how many times I report it as spam...

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#37

Post by stult »

_-_-__-_-_- wrote: post #16

I lost my facebook account about five years ago--total outright account ban. No recourse at all. It happened to a group of about 10 people that had been administrators of a local non-profit's facebook page and who had managed groups for the organization in the past. Our non-profit was non-denominational and helped local teens with after school type programs. We never knew why our personal accounts were banned. Best w…

The internet has been like this forever. In the 90s I was banned from hotmail for having an inappropriate email address because my last name is Cummings. No recourse for some idiotic regex filter.

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#38

Post by jimbo808 »

linsomniac wrote: post #12

Google, especially Google Corp, is very much that way too. One of my users is currently getting a fair bit of spam because a spammer figured out that if they send a message with envelope sender @google.com, rcpt @gmail.com, google.com MX will accept it, then bounce it with NoSuchUser and gmail will accept it. I spent an hour yesterday looking for a way to contact Google about it, but couldn't find anything. Made hard…

Customer service is for customers, not for products. You are the product.

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#39

Post by kstrauser »

stult wrote: post #37
_-_-__-_-_- wrote: post #16

I lost my facebook account about five years ago--total outright account ban. No recourse at all. It happened to a group of about 10 people that had been administrators of a local non-profit's facebook page and who had managed groups for the organization in the past. Our non-profit was non-denominational and helped local teens with after school type programs. We never knew why our personal accounts were banned. Best w…

The internet has been like this forever. In the 90s I was banned from hotmail for having an inappropriate email address because my last name is Cummings. No recourse for some idiotic regex filter.

Clbuttic.

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#40

Post by fmajid »

jimbo808 wrote: post #38
linsomniac wrote: post #12

Google, especially Google Corp, is very much that way too. One of my users is currently getting a fair bit of spam because a spammer figured out that if they send a message with envelope sender @google.com, rcpt @gmail.com, google.com MX will accept it, then bounce it with NoSuchUser and gmail will accept it. I spent an hour yesterday looking for a way to contact Google about it, but couldn't find anything. Made hard…

Customer service is for customers, not for products. You are the product.

Oh you sweet summer child, Google gives the cold shoulder to everyone, including paying customers.
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