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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

#361

Post by detaro »

nl wrote: post #360
jp555 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has learned from those times, as much as you can even talk about "W3C" as an entity doing coherent things. Individual working groups have can have very little overlap with other groups, and have a lot of freedom in how they work. Which means they can putter about in ivory towers, or do effective work, as they wish.

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

#362

Post by dcolkitt »

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…

Even if you think the current usage of deplatforming has been positive, it poses a huge black swan risk. If our major communication platforms expose a centralized censorship mechanism, that becomes a deliciously tempting target to be leveraged by authoritarian regimes.

Even if I trust the Twitter mod team, what's to stop tomorrow's jack-booted thugs from shooting the Twitter team and seizing control of the servers? I'd much rather we as a society move to decentralized censorship-resistant networks while we still have the freedom to openly build and advocate for them.

I really doubt that banning Hitler's social media accounts in the 1920s would have done anything to stop the Nazi rise to power. Whereas in the 1930s, rest assured that centralized platforms would have made the Gestapo's life a hundred times easier.

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

#363

Post by ibly31 »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #354
save_ferris wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?!?

He didn't say anything was auto played. Just the next recommended video. YouTube always highlights one, it's at the top of the list

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

#364

Post by darkwizard42 »

dcolkitt wrote: post #362
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…

Even if you think the current usage of deplatforming has been positive, it poses a huge black swan risk. If our major communication platforms expose a centralized censorship mechanism, that becomes a deliciously tempting target to be leveraged by authoritarian regimes. Even if I trust the Twitter mod team, what's to stop tomorrow's jack-booted thugs from shooting the Twitter team and seizing control of the servers? I…

Then people stop using Twitter...

The solution to your problem is quite simple. The network will die off.

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

#365

Post by hi5eyes »

pat2man wrote: post #155
Arathorn wrote: post #129

For what it’s worth, Matrix is trying to be the protocol that Jack describes here - complete with relative reputation systems ( https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos... ) and an open standard ( https://matrix.org/docs/spec ) and even an open governance process and foundation ( https://matrix.org/foundation ) - and with work progressing towards fully decentralised p2p matrix. Rather than buildin…

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.

> chat rooms, not feeds like Twitter

Twitter is a global chatroom

what i think jack/twitter is moving towards is a model thats catering to the direction the youth are headed, with twitters implementation of topics, its akin to discords (gamer chat app) interest servers

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

#366

Post by thinkloop »

> A third-party Twitter client might be prettier and more functional than Twitter’s own client — shout out to Tweetbot! — but it certainly would not be more profitable.

I never understood this, why can't the API/firehose serve ads that would be presented in the 3rd-party apps?

Additionally 90% of users would naturally gravitate to the default app regardless, leaving 3rd-parties for cool/interesting/advanced/innovative use-cases. I still feel this was a mistake - not as some hippy idealogue - but from a ruthless capitalist perspective. This was their like button.

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

#367

Post by floatingatoll »

specialist wrote: post #356
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'…

Would a social network, where every post is moderated, have the same issues?

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

#368

Post by nl »

detaro wrote: post #361
nl wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It has learned from those times, as much as you can even talk about "W3C" as an entity doing coherent things. Individual working groups have can have very little overlap with other groups, and have a lot of freedom in how they work. Which means they can putter about in ivory towers, or do effective work, as they wish.

Perhaps.

I agree that sounds good, but can you point to something that they have actually done lately?

The ActivityPub process is a good example - yes, it got there, but much of the difficulties around the standardisation process seem related to the W3C process, not standardisation itself.

I was involved around the edges of the Atom standardisation process[1]. There's a reason that went through the IEFT and not the W3C[2].

[1] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt

[2] https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/06/10/AtomIETFY...

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

#369

Post by make3 »

randomsearch wrote: post #331
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.

Ok so write your own. Mine YouTube URLs from the web, take the context they arise in, and use that to build a recommendation engine.

without user history to build a video similarity embedding with PCA from the user to video click matrix (or word2vec like click prediction), you would have to build something like .. topic based page rank.. and then show the highest ranked videos per topic.. that would require a fucking lot of mining

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

#370

Post by zanny »

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?

Email is only federated and thus interoperable between operators because to not federate would be to not have email.

Many, many private money grabs were made trying to establish a proprietary replacement to web standards, including ActiveX, Flash, and NaCL.

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