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Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

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Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#201

Post by mathgenius »

lucideer wrote: post #73
mathgenius wrote: post #57

"the value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention" I really wish I could hack on the youtube recommendation algorithm. It seems to be tuned for zombie viewing pleasure, and totally not for finding surprising new content. Even just having several "personas" would be a big help.

The problem is the revenue model. Zombie viewing is more profitable than surprising new content. If you were asked to hack on YouTube's algorithm, any modifications you'd produce, no matter their merit, would be tested against the status quo for their ability to generate revenue.

I'm sure that is what they tell themselves at youtube HQ. But I'm not convinced. Why should one A.I. fit everyone? It just seems like laziness, ie. corporate inertia, to me. If they could open up an API for third party recommenders this would really be interesting.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#202

Post by espadrine »

mathnmusic wrote: post #28

They should at the very least evaluate ActivityPub. It's a W3C standard that reached "Recommended" status almost two years ago, is flexible enough for future use-cases, and already has multiple implementations like Mastodon. In fact, any app can be made to act as a source, sink or both of ActivityPub events. I recently added ActivityPub support to learnawesome.org so that reviews can be consumed in any ActivityPub cl…

Three reasons why not: operational, business, and technical.

Operational: they don’t control features; adding them by contributing to the standard would leak planned features, and without contributing, would be seen as embrace-extend-extinguish.

Business: it would contribute work to their competitors.

Technical: implementing global search on it is implausible.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#203

Post by ookdatnog »

buboard wrote: post #69
d--b wrote: post #13

How is decentralized twitter supposed to solve misinformation? It mostly makes moderation (or censorship) impossible.

I m surprised every time i see people here asking for the evil that is censorship. Dorsey wants a decentralized system exactly because he won't be held liable for not censoring people. It makes sense business-wise and it's a win-win for humanity. Twitter has become a trigger-happy-people-fest because each group knows they can weaponize censorship against each other. With systems that are uncensored , nobody complaint…

All moderation is censorship, to some degree. Even a voting system like HN's has censorship-like qualities: it is specifically designed to make unpopular comments less visible than popular ones. And that is fine, I wouldn't want to only have forums or social media with zero moderation.

Censorship only becomes a problem when it is _unavoidable_, that is, you cannot choose to live outside of some entity's censorship influence. This is where things get complicated when you have giant entities like Facebook or Twitter, which are for many people difficult to avoid (and there certainly isn't an alternative to them).

The problem arises when these entities need to choose which messages to show you. Even without putting any conscious bias in this algorithm, there is a system there which prioritizes some messages over others in a completely opaque way, which is often game-able (bad-faith actors can abuse the system to spread their propaganda, for instance). So moderation is not merely necessary but _unavoidable_, simply because there is more content than you can be presented with, and unfortunately the huge power of moderating large social media networks rests in the hands of a handful of engineers.

Decentralization is an interesting solution here because it would make the social graph and the recommender system separate entities, with clients being able to choose which recommender/moderation system they subscribe to. The need for censorship wouldn't be gone, but with people being able to choose their own censor, the massive power imbalance is not quite as bad.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#207

Post by laksmanv »

kick wrote: post #159
kick wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess. I'll ping you on yours so you can say whatever; I don't keep mine in my profile (mostly out of laziness).

Actually, I can't tell which you're actively using at this point. Your recent comments use one while your profile uses another.

recent, laksman [at] stanford [dot] edu

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#208

Post by kick »

lucideer wrote: post #189
kick wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of that was to note that the W3C doesn't care about the user. John Sullivan had a great tweet about this: https://twitter.com/johns_FSF/status/909931688641400839 Fundamentally, the W3C does not work in the interest of the user, and shouldn't be trusted. Get some of the Scuttlebutt guys or the Diaspora guys to contribute! Don't get the W3C, no one who's part of the W3C should have a say in anything. Twitter…

> Twitter making a standard would at least result in something not stupidly broken. Agree with most of your comment, but I can't see where this is coming from. I would be shocked if any "standard" coming from Twitter would be anything but broken. Again, you're saying W3C doesn't work in the interests of the user, but ignoring that Twitter works actively against the interest of the user. W3C isn't ideal, but the alter…

I agree with the spirit of your comment, but:

The alternative being discussed is Twitter appointing a different neutral party: if they're bending to the W3C, they're already appointing a "neutral party" to do the work for them, the only difference is changing who they trust from another giant organization that's very clearly apathetic about user interests to one that does: the SSBC would be perfect, for example.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#209

Post by auiya »

panarky wrote: post #106

ActivityPub? Who cares about what JSON schema gets adopted? Much more interesting is the why, not the how. #1 reason to decentralize: "Centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people." #2 reason: "The value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendat…

> "social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than conversation which informs and promotes health."

This seems to run anathema to the concept of social media platforms being run by for-profit companies. Monetization absolutely mandates the need for controversy and outrage, as opposed to social welfare.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#210

Post by save_ferris »

arthurcolle wrote: post #133
thisisbrians wrote: post #125

Cool idea, sure. Maybe they should have had the marketing team look at the banner image before going live. Definitely undermines the perceived legitimacy of the effort in my opinion: https://twitter.com/bluesky

I love that little creature. Why don't you?

I personally get really strong uncanny valley vibes from that thing. I might dig a cartoon version of it, but that banner image seriously creeps me out.
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