[meowface]

This is the inevitable, unavoidable course of human progress. Letters to telegram to telephone to TV to email to blogs to social media. Eventually we'll all have some wearable device and constantly sharing one-to-many in that way, and later it'll be driven by neural implants.

The more you connect people and enable one-to-many communication and information distribution, the more you increase the chance of "viral" ideas propagating, be they (in one's view) good or bad ones. The harm imposed by Facebook mostly has to do with the fact that they're a for-profit company, and particularly a for-profit company that doesn't charge users, causing them to acquire revenue in ways that are extremely prone to perverse incentives.

More people gaining the capability to be exposed to more information from more people isn't the problem. I mean, sure, it causes problems and isn't what we're evolved to properly handle, but it's not inherently a bad thing or something that necessitates megamayors policing the distribution streams. (Barring some exceptions in extreme scenarios where death has a high chance of being imminent.)

At some point we'll probably have at least one popular decentralized P2P communication medium / social media platform, backed by cryptography, and there'll be no central authority able to control communication in any way, besides governments arresting people or taking other security measures. Zuckerberg-like figures will be irrelevant in these systems, but they'll still exhibit the same properties you describe. It won't be possible for anyone to redesign these systems to mitigate what you see are issues inherent to unrestricted democratization of communication and information.

Shouldn't we prepare for this eventuality and accept that this is the asymptote of human civilization, rather than asking gatekeepers to clean things up during this interregnum where the gatekeepers happen to hold a lot of power? It's like growing up with helicopter parents you cling onto despite the fact that you're going to have to face the world on your own when you turn 18.

[keenmaster]

"At some point we'll probably have at least one popular decentralized P2P communication medium / social media platform thing, backed by cryptography, and there'll be no central authority able to control communication in any way"

There's not a chance that would ever get traction with a majority of people. The "normies" would be revolted by what they find on there, and trolls would have no one to troll but other trolls. Only the biggest trolls enjoy trolling other trolls. That's what 4chan is for. What you described is a more sophisticated version of 4chan which will have such gruesome content that half of 4chan's userbase would turn away in shock.

[meowface]

Will it happen in the next 10 years? Probably not. But will something like this exist within 100 years, especially as the public grows increasingly wary of shady for-profit social media companies? I think it probably will, and I think it'll probably be used by at least 30% of the population, and perhaps much more.

I'm not suggesting this would function like an anonymous imageboard (though there'll still be plenty of things like those for people who want them), either. Imagine using the app Signal without having to rely on Signal's servers or having to own a mobile phone. You'd use it just like you do now; there'd just be no middlemen between you and the people you talk to. The same can be true of Twitter or anything else. People would still have some control over what they see and don't see; they're not going to see everything from everyone at all times, unless they specifically decide to use such an app. We just need to wait a few decades for those alternatives to become much more polished and user-friendly for the average person.

The trend towards mesh-like, blockchain-like, decentralized, distributed, P2P networking seems pretty clear. I think the majority of things will probably still remain centralized even in a century, since there are many advantages to centralization, but these alternative mesh worlds are only going to get bigger and bigger.

It's definitely a complex issue, and many of these future decentralized apps may end up re-implementing some aspects of centralization through elections of volunteer moderators or some other kind of democratized system, but in those cases at least the mayors will actually be elected and have limited terms and could be recalled, unlike Zuckerberg.

[keenmaster]

I think we can both agree that we can't shoehorn all discussion regarding social media's current flaws into a "Free speech vs. Censorship" paradigm. The amplification of post-truthy discussion, whether nefarious or otherwise, is problematic. If you were the CEO of a corporation and you found that some of your employees were addressing corporate work in a post-truthy way, you would want to promptly address the issue. A company run in a post-truth way wouldn't be in business for long. Facebook is no exception.

Imagine the following discussion between Zuckerberg and his director of engineering:

Zuckerberg: "Hey why did we miss the deadline for making a new Tiktok-style app?"

Director: "well, we were going to code it in React Native, but then I realized that React Native is Illuminati George Soros trash so we started from scratch again. Also, deadlines are just a construct, you can never truly know how long it will take to complete something"

Zuckerberg: "have you lost your mind? This company played a large part in creating React Native and it has always worked well for us. And deadlines are indeed a construct, but they are a very useful one!"

Director: "I'm not sure you deserve to be CEO. I believe you are a satanist."

Zuckerberg: "Watch your mouth."

Director: "Free speech, I can do what I want. You said so."

Zuckerberg: "You're fired."

Director: "Am I really fired? I can't be fired by an invalid CEO."

Zuckerberg: "I can tell you what's real: Those guards behind you whom will escort you out of the building. The money you will no longer make. And the restraining order I will file if you report back for your now non-existent job. Goodbye."

If only Facebook tolerated pervasive post-truth for its userbase to the same degree that it tolerates post-truth in Menlo Park...

[meowface]

Reddit staff probably aren't sharing porn with each other all day, but their users are, and that's not an issue. If I were CEO of Facebook and a director was playing Farmville all day instead of working, I would fire them, but it wouldn't matter at all if users were doing the same thing. Reddit and Facebook are platforms, not publications. How their customers use their product to talk to others has no relation to how they might run themselves.

Additionally, it shouldn't be their job to nanny their users and judge what things they say are true or untrue and remove the untrue things, unless something's both untrue and likely to cause direct and imminent harm (like saying drinking bleach is proven to prevent COVID-19). Allowing third-party fact checkers to add commentary to consequential political posts is a reasonable and balanced compromise on Zuckerberg's part.

"Post-truth" is meaningless and completely subjective; impartial analysts should be able to address potentially true or false claims based on the evidence. "Post-truth" is "whatever you claim to be true and I claim to be not true". Truth isn't subjective, but judgment of truth is. One can cherry-pick cases where some surrogate says something clearly false and defends it with "we have a different view of what the facts are", but in the general case, having different views of the facts is the natural state of humanity and discourse.

I like Snopes, but I definitely do not want Zuckerberg to start acting like he's Snopes or enforcing what content can exist based on what Snopes says. I think (99.9% of) conspiracy theories are absurd and a scourge of society, but I don't think they should be classified as thoughtcrime or removed. I would fire an employee who was a zealous conspiracy theory proponent, but I would never sanction a user for being one, or for holding any other view I disagreed with or considered ridiculous. Snopes' voice should be given exposure but opposing voices shouldn't be kept from exposure unless there are extreme circumstances.

In my opinion, we should be asking ourselves how we could possibly improve the general public's epistemological faculties and approaches, rather than trying to tug-of-war-style yank their epistemological conclusions away from them. The former will help unite the US and the latter will continue to further divide it. Let's work at the meta level instead of the object level.