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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

#351

Post by nenolod »

treelovinhippie wrote: post #302
sonofgod wrote: post #48

yay, blockchain. :( https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766085037248512 "Finally, new technologies have emerged to make a decentralized approach more viable. Blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization. Much work to be done, but the fundamentals are there."

All blockchains fundamentally do not scale. Global universal consensus and a global centralized datastore (ledger) is an anti-pattern found nowhere in nature. If the Twitter team go for a blockchain stack, they're doing so for the mass surveillance and control feature. P2P is the way: see Holochain, Scuttlebutt etc.

Actually a hybrid approach is the way. Nobody wants to wait hours to download GBs of new gossip to get started. Streaming the gossip is necessary to make the technology viable.

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

#352

Post by BlueTemplar »

edf13 wrote: post #104
ilaksh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its mostly about egos but rather about money. Something like Ethereum offers a potential profit model which ActivityPub does not. Also ActivityPub relies on servers/federated rather than p2p.

It's been tried before on Eth... can't recall the name now but the biggest issue is the Gas price/cost to post any update. As with all(Most) Blockchains ~ it simply is too expensive to store data. Especially at any scale.

Depends... are decentralized version control systems like git "blockchains" or not?

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

#353

Post by paulddraper »

nine_k wrote: post #343
espadrine wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, this is why HTML, CSS, HTTP are all dead as open standards, right?

It is controlled by an oligarchy of browsers.

Which is converging on a monarchy.

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

#354

Post by BlueTemplar »

save_ferris wrote: post #288
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.

Totally agree. The lack of configurability around recommendations is really frustrating. So often, the next video that plays is something tangentially related to what I'm watching, but still not what I want to watch. I'd love a feature that defaults the next video to the newest unwatched video in a given channel or something like that, but we all know why it won't be built.

People don't immediately disable next video autoplay?!?

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

#355

Post by anderspitman »

weego wrote: post #215
pat2man wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Matrix is mostly built around chat rooms, not feeds like Twitter. I would assume any new system would take some parts of Matrix and some parts of ActivityPub but not the entire thing.

Once you strip the perceptive differences from the UI isn't twitter just a bunch of chat rooms and private conversations that update less 'live' than you'd expect a chat room to do. I wrote a toy twitter clone using a discord server as a data source and it worked pretty coherently

Twitter has nothing to do with functionality and everything to do with scale/audience reach.

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

#356

Post by specialist »

floatingatoll wrote: post #271

Twitter and Facebook and Google and others share one common concern that, if addressed, would see their staffing budgets massively reduced (and thus profits increased): Human moderators. Each grudgingly uses human moderators to squash the worst of the problems on their platform, and does a terrible job of it. Each underspends on human beings, using contractors without sufficient mental health care to ensure their wel…

The problem is online social networks. There is no fix.

Any medium supported by ads is toxic. This predates online social networks.

Any news feed (recommenders) is intrinsically toxic. Such feedback loops are just outrage machines.

It's highly doubtful that likes and ratings can be redeemed either. I'm fresh out of goodwill, so I don't care to try.

So what's left? The graph. Maybe that could be useful.

Meanwhile, it's hysterical that anyone tainted by Twitter imagines they have anything constructive to contribute. Now were he to completely renounce the whole effort, acknowledges it's deleterious impact on democracy and society, turn it off, and beg for our forgiveness. Well. That'd be a good start.

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

#357

Post by Teknoman117 »

I'm curious about their motives here.

One of the massive "troubles" that social media has been having to deal with in recent years is the whole fake news problem. (in quotes, because it also has driven social media engagement, and thus revenue from ad impressions up, so from a business perspective it's a boon with the right narrative) Admittedly, it isn't a new problem, it just it's perceived impact has grown to the point of catching the public eye.

Twitter's response is that they're banning political speech entirely, to try and get out of the fake news domains that people care the most about.

Now, they're pushing a decentralized social media system that by it's very definition will be hard to control content on. In being a client for said open standard, they are certainly free to block whatever comes in that suits their fancy, but to me, it feels more than they're using this as a way to shift blame with regulation looking like it's on the horizon. It'd be an awful conveinent excuse to say "but Mr/Mrs/Miss regulator, we're just an aggregator, other entities are responsible for this content."

Maybe they really do believe the best approach to combatting this is to serve as a principled (by someone's definition) client of a sewer of public content, or maybe this is a strategic move to shift responsibility. I wonder which it'll be...

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

#358

Post by nathanvanfleet »

I am worried that ultimately this means that the twitter of the future will be something where people can't be deplatformed. It's been pretty effective in the past to deplatform some outrageous individuals who have stoked racial hatred and violence. They get deplatformed, and their audience disappears. There are a lot of places where hate speech is illegal. And I know that Twitter has had huge problems when called to censor things and making it completely decentralized would allow them not have to.

Also it's weird but Jack follows Cernovich.

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

#359

Post by paggle »

nathanvanfleet wrote: post #358

I am worried that ultimately this means that the twitter of the future will be something where people can't be deplatformed. It's been pretty effective in the past to deplatform some outrageous individuals who have stoked racial hatred and violence. They get deplatformed, and their audience disappears. There are a lot of places where hate speech is illegal. And I know that Twitter has had huge problems when called to…

Well others of us are sick of deplatforming regardless of the speaker.

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

#360

Post by nl »

jp555 wrote: post #176
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…

I thought the W3C has been captured by corporations?

W3C has suffered a much worse fate: capture by academics. See their multi-year detour into the cul-de-sac of the semantic web.
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