Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?
blog.paulbohm.com
Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?
1–10 of 109 posts
Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?
#2Coming up next on Hackernews: Should Twitter be owned by anyone other than its users? (jacobin.com)
Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?
#3Coming up next on Hackernews: Should Twitter be owned by anyone other than its users? (jacobin.com)
Do you have an actual critique of replacing centralized companies with decentralized protocols?
Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?
#4Coming up next on Hackernews: Should Twitter be owned by anyone other than its users? (jacobin.com)
Do you have an actual critique of replacing centralized companies with decentralized protocols?
Such responses are typical from those emotionally invested in the perpetual Twitter schadenfreude brigade. They are too emotional to have an objective answer at the moment.
The main difficulty is the network effect which Twitter has entrenched for decades. We're talking about 220M+ active users on the platform. Daily.
Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?
#5Coming up next on Hackernews: Should Twitter be owned by anyone other than its users? (jacobin.com)
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?
#6There's a lot of consideration of if we could, and previous little of if we should. Unmoderated sites inevitably become breading grounds for harassment and worse, especially as more mainstream platforms get better at driving this content away. I would be terrified to live in a world where kiwifarms and its ilk cannot be shut down
Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?
#7The tricky bit is kind of hand-waved away here:
> throw The One Ring (Twitter) back into the volcano from which it was forged
What does content moderation and that whole thorny problem look like on this new system? I don't want to hang out in a bar with a drunk nazi and his buddies screaming at everyone.
Yeah, it's tricky and there are all kinds of difficult considerations and tradeoffs and it's all quite imperfect, but for any new platform, I want to have some idea of how they imagine it all working.
Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?
#8The tricky bit is kind of hand-waved away here: > throw The One Ring (Twitter) back into the volcano from which it was forged What does content moderation and that whole thorny problem look like on this new system? I don't want to hang out in a bar with a drunk nazi and his buddies screaming at everyone. Yeah, it's tricky and there are all kinds of difficult considerations and tradeoffs and it's all quite imperfect,…
Author here. You get to have all the moderation, filtering, etc. that is implemented on the servers you use.
I'm sure there will be servers that very closely try to approximate what Twitter is/has been doing. Servers also can share any and all information needed to effectively moderate.
Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?
#9There's a lot of consideration of if we could, and previous little of if we should. Unmoderated sites inevitably become breading grounds for harassment and worse, especially as more mainstream platforms get better at driving this content away. I would be terrified to live in a world where kiwifarms and its ilk cannot be shut down
OP here. I don't expect these servers to become unmoderated. I think a lot of them will moderate as strictly or stricter than Twitter currently is.
Re: Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?
#10The comparison to email (SMTP) is telling.
I'm old enough to remember how SMTP almost collapsed beneath the first wave of spam in the nineties. These days, it's effectively centralized by an ogliopoly consisting of Gmail, Outlook, AWS, and whatever Apple calls its iCloud offering. If, like me, you run your own `maild`, you basically have to work incredibly hard to keep the ogliopols happy. You are always one bad DKIM keypair away from death. And the system is set up like this because, back when it was truly decentralized, it nearly collapsed. Centralization saved email. As much as I hate the ~ Big Corporations ~, they have preserved my ability to send and receive email.
And what's more, I'm old enough to remember how NNTP (usenet) did, in effect, collapse, despite Google's attempts to rescue it.
The dream of somehow doing away with: central banks; central social media; central servers, etc. is deep in the Internet's DNA.
So is the pragmatism that comes from having tried all that.