Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 375 posts

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#301

Post by bcheung »

zug_zug wrote: post #101
asaph wrote: post #3

> “If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly. And you wonder: ‘Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a medium has been built?’” How exactly is breaking up the tech giants going to solve this problem?

Suppose tech companies were no longer legally allowed to use the network effect (i.e. they had to provide open-access to their public data via API). Then this would enable alternative front-ends on twitter. This would then enable me to filter messages by positivity, or whichever criteria I choose (e.g. non-Russian-bots, non-shills). This is turn would then change the whole ecosystem. It would remove the perverse ince…

I'd be curious to see what effect this has on business models.

A lot of useful features are free because they can make money on the backend or through paid promotions (search, email). Take away that ability and a lot of the services people enjoy will be forced to be paid or have annoying amounts of advertising.

I agree there is serious concern and we need to have discussions. I would consider breaking up companies a last resort though.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#302

Post by bcheung »

dkonofalski wrote: post #222
nine_k wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that people have an (almost) unalienable power, very strong, and pretty underused. It's the power of walking away. If you find an environment toxic, leave it, and ask your friends to leave it, too. Yes, you have to research alternatives first, and make compromises, at least temporarily. Lately this somehow worked for Facebook. I bet they are going to see that on their bottom line. So, if you dislike the outra…

This is the part that I don't understand. Facebook, in the grand scheme of things, is still an incredibly new development for people. Most users (at least those who abide by the age limit) have spent most of their lives not being on Facebook. What grand utility does Facebook provide that makes it so difficult to stop using it? I cancelled my Facebook account a few years ago and the only time I ever even thought about…

It's not so much utility as it is addiction. A lot of the popular platforms are implemented to take advantage random reinforcement / variable reward schedules, social approval, ego validation, etc.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#303

Post by nybble41 »

PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #36
choko wrote: post #16

"But social media, Berners-Lee said, was still being used to propagate hate." This is one of the side effects of an open web, and one I feel we should live with in the interests of freedom. The only alternative of which I am aware is to police speech through some kind of authority. I'm not sure that there is an authority in existence that I would trust with that level of power. In a perfect world, we would be able to…

>In a perfect world, we would be able to de-platform those that incite violence against others (for any reason) Should we really do it for any reason? Are there not some groups of which a certain level of violence (enforced by the state) is good? I can think of many groups of people who engage in actions which we agree it is good to respond with some violence to enslave them in cages. Well, that is one interpretation…

There's nothing wrong with inciting or carrying out justified violence—which is to say, a violent response to similar violence practiced by others. Your examples of murder and theft, for example. A murderer cannot rationally object to being put to death; a thief cannot argue against being fined without self-contradiction.

The problem is unjustified violence. And I agree with you that most proposals for new laws (including the subject of this article) are advocating for unjustified violence.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#304

Post by davemp »

ilovecaching wrote: post #294
davemp wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incredibly fatalistic. Why can't technology be created with human nature in mind? Forms of democracy with checks and balances became so dominant because it acknowledged the deficiencies in human nature. We can certainly blame companies for producing bad/harmful technology just like we can blame forms of government for producing bad outcomes for its citizens. --- On a side note, based on influence and entrench…

> Forms of democracy with checks and balances became so dominant because it acknowledged the deficiencies in human nature. And those systems have tons of flaws as well. Have you seen the voter turn out in the U.S.? How many Americans are making informed voting decisions. You're shifting the blame back to the technology. I get it, as a technologist we'd like to think it must be a mistake in the product. But the realit…

Compare the U.S. government to Feudalism or a similar form of government--not the U.S. government to Utopia. You're not seeing the point.

This is actually the exact opposite of idealism. Try to account for the reality of human nature in systems and they will have much better results for the humans they affect.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#305

Post by cabalamat »

dkonofalski wrote: post #222
nine_k wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that people have an (almost) unalienable power, very strong, and pretty underused. It's the power of walking away. If you find an environment toxic, leave it, and ask your friends to leave it, too. Yes, you have to research alternatives first, and make compromises, at least temporarily. Lately this somehow worked for Facebook. I bet they are going to see that on their bottom line. So, if you dislike the outra…

This is the part that I don't understand. Facebook, in the grand scheme of things, is still an incredibly new development for people. Most users (at least those who abide by the age limit) have spent most of their lives not being on Facebook. What grand utility does Facebook provide that makes it so difficult to stop using it? I cancelled my Facebook account a few years ago and the only time I ever even thought about…

> What grand utility does Facebook provide that makes it so difficult to stop using it?

For example, all your friends might be on it, and organise events via it. Then, if you don't use FB, you don't find out about events you might have wanted to go to.

This is the power of network effects, whiuch causes monopolies. The monopolies would be broken up if social networks had to use open protocols to allow interoperability.

As Irina Bolychevsky and James Moulding put it ( https://newsocialist.org.uk/do-we-really-need-a-statebook/ ):

> Can you imagine using WhatsApp to chat to your friends on Reddit or share photos from Flickr to Facebook and still see likes and comments? That’s the power of open protocols.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#306

Post by tensor »

zug_zug wrote: post #101
asaph wrote: post #3

> “If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly. And you wonder: ‘Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a medium has been built?’” How exactly is breaking up the tech giants going to solve this problem?

Suppose tech companies were no longer legally allowed to use the network effect (i.e. they had to provide open-access to their public data via API). Then this would enable alternative front-ends on twitter. This would then enable me to filter messages by positivity, or whichever criteria I choose (e.g. non-Russian-bots, non-shills). This is turn would then change the whole ecosystem. It would remove the perverse ince…

This feels like a uniquely engineering perspective. My parents won't filter twitter, they also won't go searching for some complicated front end.

In my opinion, the problem of hate spreading is not a technical one, but a social one. These platforms are just better exposing it, but if they didn't exist, or were somehow filtered or modified, then the people would just go elsewhere.

You already see this with reddit, where they cracked down on a lot of the hate based subs. The result is that new sites popped up to cater to the hate, message boards, news sites, and others. Plus, these hate groups operate locally too. In Canada there have been many cases where they setup outreach groups in person in neighbourhoods trying to recruit.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but the core issue is that at this point in time, hate sells. Maybe people have lived in such a good time that they forgot what wars were like. Maybe inequity is at such a high that those not in the top 10% are just filled with bitterness and rage wondering why this sort of divide should exist.

But I'm willing to bet strongly that this is people problem, not a tech problem.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#307

Post by Ibethewalrus »

cabalamat wrote: post #305
dkonofalski wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the part that I don't understand. Facebook, in the grand scheme of things, is still an incredibly new development for people. Most users (at least those who abide by the age limit) have spent most of their lives not being on Facebook. What grand utility does Facebook provide that makes it so difficult to stop using it? I cancelled my Facebook account a few years ago and the only time I ever even thought about…

> What grand utility does Facebook provide that makes it so difficult to stop using it? For example, all your friends might be on it, and organise events via it. Then, if you don't use FB, you don't find out about events you might have wanted to go to. This is the power of network effects, whiuch causes monopolies. The monopolies would be broken up if social networks had to use open protocols to allow interoperabilit…

Can’t a Google calendar invite provide the same functionality?

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#308

Post by almost_usual »

dragonwriter wrote: post #184
almost_usual wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bots will be able to function just as easily. If anything one would expect reduced scale would increase the difficulty of handling a very large scale adversary like a state actor. It would only seem to disadvantage smaller players. FAANG companies are incredibly bad at detecting bots. It’s not how they make money so they don’t invest much in it. There are companies that specialize in this that are used _everywhere_…

> FAANG companies are incredibly bad at detecting bots. It’s not how they make money Providing confidence to advertisers that the ads they pay for reach particular humans (which requires providing at least as much confidence that they reach actual humans) is exactly how the F and the G, but not the AAN in between, make money; detecting bots (or, perhaps more precisely, detecting humans and excluding bots) is obviousl…

>(or, perhaps more precisely, detecting humans and excluding bots) is obviously part of that

Detecting humans is not the same as detecting bots. The algorithms are different, running a simple "negate human" clause isn't how it works. It's well known Facebook has a bot problem and is now working on addressing it.

>G is somewhat well-known for it's tools for this, including at least one that is widely used by lots of other actors on the web.

G's captcha solution is a great freemium service but any sophisticated attacker will spend the time and money to bypass it. If it solved the bot problem the paid services wouldn't exist (they're definitely not cheap). The other issue with G's service is that the automated garbage is still hitting your compute resources. So even if you captcha you're spending money on automated bad traffic.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

#310

Post by krapp »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #288
krapp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is designed to make limiting the propagation of information (and any emergent effects from that) impossible. How will the effect of 'bad actors' be limited when they can just move elsewhere? You don't need sites of the scale of Facebook or Twitter to have emergent, viral or culturally relevant effects occur. What makes the big sites like Facebook and Twitter isn't their size per se but their capture of networ…

>The web is designed to make limiting the propagation of information (and any emergent effects from that) impossible. Are you unaware or ignoring the censorship of thought that Google and Facebook have been doing lately? You are acting like it’s 2005 internet, and it’s not.

>Are you unaware or ignoring the censorship of thought that Google and Facebook have been doing lately?

Google can only censor Google, and Facebook can only censor Facebook. Neither of them can censor Twitter, which can't censor 4chan, which can't censor Voat, Gab, etc. No one controls the entire network, and no one can censor the entire network.

>You are acting like it’s 2005 internet, and it’s not.

It actually still is, people have just gotten so cynical that they've forgotten how to see the forest for the trees. Being popular on the internet is not the same thing as having authority over it beyond one's own domain.

Post reply on HN