[anyonecancode]

Unless and until we come up with a different economic model for social media, we'll always have Facebook (or Twitter, or whatever successor toxic social media site comes next).

Plenty of people here on HN have argued that the real problem is centralization, and I agree. Take whatever specific issue one might have with FB -- let's say disinformation, for instance. We have all these debates about censorship vs free speech vs accountability etc. But in fact, if FB wasn't the behemoth it is, much of this would be moot. In a world where there were _only_ smaller, more niche social media sites, fears around things like online radicalization would be much less, and any well-founded suspicions of actual criminal conspiracies would lend themselves to much more targeted warrant-backed investigations rather than privacy-destroying giant electronic dragnets. And if this example doesn't work for you, pick another one and think through how a world of smaller, less influential sites would change what you see as the problem with social media.

But you can't brute force your way to that world -- that's pushing against a very strong current. So long as the economic model is to create a large, targetable advertising market, you're going to have very strong incentives for centralization and invasion of privacy.

Contrast this with non-digital social hubs -- say, a pub. People come for the socialization, but the actual product being sold is food and drink. Social space becomes a side effect, one that complements and enhances the business model (a pub with a reputation as a good place to meet friends gets more business), but the business model isn't data-mining your audience.

I think a social media network that focused on extending offline hubs into social spaces, where the economic model is attracting an audience to gather and chat and then _selling them something_, would mitigate the incentives to centralization and invasion of privacy. We need to tie social media to the selling of actual products; users need to be customers, not the actual product.

[mawise]

I'll go even further and say that so long as the platform is run for-profit, this continues to be a problem.

I'm pursuing the idea of trying to better enable self-hosting of your online social presence with Haven[1], but it's difficult to get a framing that resonates quickly with people--in spite of the prevalence ofthese types of news stories.

[1] https://havenweb.org

[anyonecancode]

I actually do think that in most cases it should be for-profit -- I just think that the profit can't be derived from your audience. For instance, a cafe that does online and in person orders and ALSO has an online social media hub, where people gather and interact and are also able to purchase goods from the cafe, I think would work because it's a social hub where the users are truly customers.

I think some institutions might work -- a forward-thinking library whose website isn't just an announcements and catalog site, but an actual social media hub -- but I think that'd be rare.

I don't think, by and large, private individual sites as social hubs would really work, as there's not enough draw to bring in a sufficiently large userbase to become a social hub.

[phone[phone]]

>a cafe that does online and in person orders and ALSO has an online social media hub, where people gather and interact and are also able to purchase goods from the cafe, I think would work because it's a social hub where the users are truly customers.

This sounds like an even-more Disney-fied hellscape than the current Internet is.

[gizmondo]

> In a world where there were _only_ smaller, more niche social media sites, fears around things like online radicalization would be much less

How so?

[dredmorbius]

Scale matters.

Coordinated large-scale propaganda (or advertising, but I repeat myself), as well as censorship, surveillance, and targeted manipulation, all benefit tremendously by a monopoly. These are in fact integral features of an information, communications, or media monopoly:

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771470)

I'm not entirely sure what the consequences of a bunch of smaller, freestanding forums and discussions would be, but my sense is that it would be better at generating different specific subculures and beliefs (many of which could well independently be poorly-grounded in reality or factual basis) ... but it wouldn't be as subject to the degree of mass propaganda, surveillance, and targeted manipulation.

There's the risk though that such a system might well be asymmetric as to decentralisation. If it's structured such that adversaries could utilise the system but defenders / the general public cannot enact sufficient defences, then what exists is a false decentralisation. Arguably, this is presently the case with FB, where advertisers and propagandists have far more effective tools and capabilities than those defending against them. I'm concerned that this could also effectively be the case with more distributed protocols --- Usnenet, the Fediverse, Diaspora*, etc. (All of which I use / have used in the past.)

[wintermutestwin]

>a different economic model for social media

Non-profit would work great. The core functionality that people flock to these platforms for could be replicated on a shoestring budget as the stalker stuff is where the high $ engineering talents are focused (and pissing away our "best and brightest" on negative social outcomes).

[tooltower]

You can generalize even further. Acquisition of businesses, consolidating them into behemoths, they are all economically incentivized. Removing just that one aspect could solve many of these other issues, even outside of tech.