[nopenopenopeno]

Universally necessary services like communication, healthcare, and social media (the digital plaza) can never be justly managed by private companies. It is an inherent structural contradiction that has failed and will continue to fail our society until we are willing to organize resistance beyond the realm of consumer choice.

[maxbond]

I'd like to point out something my sibling commenters seem to be missing; nopenopenopeno never suggested that the _government_ run these services instead. They said that private companies were incapable of doing this, and that competition was not a suitable mechanism for achieving the necessary outcomes.

It is quite possible that neither the state nor private industry can do this, and that we need _something else_. I don't know what this is, it seems apparent to me that Mastodon-style, self hosted solutions are not tenable either, or perhaps their time has simply not come yet. But let us not limit our imagination to two broken options.

[ajb]

Absolutely.

As engineers, we don't reduce the world to a choice between two mechanisms, to be battled over with no hope of improvement. We are not divided into mongoites and postgresists, we are interested in new solutions and improvements.

We should think of institutional design in the same way. How do institutions work? What are the options and how do they fit together? How do they affect the affordances and limitations of each?

Politics should be limited to goals, it is a crap way to decide about methods.

[nopenopenopeno]

Yes! But analyzing private companies is little use because ultimately they are authoritarian. That will somehow have to change.

[nopenopenopeno]

I appreciate your comment and I don’t mind putting my cards on the table: I am a Marxist. I believe in democratic institutions by the people and for the people. Capitalist states will never suffice. Social democracy is good, but unsustainable. Soviet Communism was a failure, but a single failure. Capitalism is a necessary step in human progress, but it cannot last. Libertarian solutions, as you propose, are no more idealistic than mine, but I don’t put my faith in them because ultimately we are social beings. We all live in a society, and we must attend to it as such. We need institutions by the people and for the people, and the great leaps in technological developments made by capitalist state funded programs in the past century (private companies did very little in comparison) give us a chance to reimagine a new future, but that can only happen by acknowledging the old one is dying, and already dead for for an increasing proportion of the working class.

My only issue with Mastadon is that regular busy working people with families to raise on depressingly low wages cannot justify the effort to participate. If if can’t work for all of our society, it can’t work for our society. Period. So, if we can figure out how to make it work for everybody, then it sounds like the answer to me. I suggest we start by fighting for a national universal healthcare program to undermine the first of the private interests that control our public goods. It will also incentivize development of democratic institutions of the working class and save millions of lives.

[im3w1l]

> My only issue with Mastadon is that regular busy working people with families to raise on depressingly low wages cannot justify the effort to participate. If if can’t work for all of our society, it can’t work for our society. Period.

That's assuming it doesn't get simpler and cheaper over time. I don't think being hard to use is inherent rather it is because the technology is not yet mature.

[nopenopenopeno]

I’m not necessarily assuming that! But I guess IRC still isn’t simple and cheap enough, and how long has that been around?

[im3w1l]

Irc is controlled by greybeards that love it just the way it is. They love their setups with bouncers and bots and scripts and how it can run in a terminal. Irc isn't getting better because they don't want it to.

New kid on the block Matrix might become eventually become a good choice for regular people.

[jokethrowaway]

We disagree a lot but I really like your post.

Capitalism is a natural behaviour which emerge in human interactions. As you say, we're social animals and we interact with one another.

The problem lies with the "capitalist" states which are not capitalism but crony capitalism, aka just socialism with extra steps. When a state with regulatory monopoly and a monopoly of violence exists, you can't have pure capitalism. Big businesses will just corrupt the government and you'll end up in a system where the top dogs can keep everyone else poor and under control - while still believing their democratic vote is worth anything.

I don't think Marxism is a solution, for the simple reason that human beings are not perfect: they are corruptible and as soon as you end up having an institution with the power to do something for a large number of people, you'll have power and corruption. Marxism is great in theory, but in practice it just devolves to the same system we live in where top dogs eat small dogs.

The shift we really need is decentralisation. No centralised governments. People trading with people and exchanging services and goods with no third parties stealing a part. Healthcare and protection (and private protection agencies offering different sets of laws) being sold and insured like any other services. Voluntary charity to help those in needs instead of mandatory taxes.

We need to have the smallest entities possible so that there won't be someone far away deciding what you can and cannot do. In a world without taxes, big companies won't have ways of avoiding taxes and shift them to the upper middle class, they won't have someone to corrupt to prevent innovation.

The answer for social networks is, again, decentralisation. The systems we have now (eg. mastodon) are still immature but, unless Facebook pay some government to introduce even more laws to comply with (GDPR comes to mind), a good decentralised competitors is going to come up, eventually.

Everyone should have their own server with their own data and communicate with other users on their own servers.

[kylebyproxy]

> as soon as you end up having an institution with the power to do something for a large number of people, you'll have power and corruption

Honest question: What would lead you to this conclusion?

I hear this sentiment often, but I've never understood how anyone could think so little of other people and (evidently) themselves.

It sounds like you're saying you can't even trust yourself to resist corruption in a position of power, which strikes me as pure cynicism.

Moreover, you seem to have made the assumption that factoring corruption out of government at a structural level is impossible. If that's the case, I think you're being unimaginative.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Honest question: What would lead you to this conclusion?

A person's incentive to pay attention to something is proportional to their ability to do something about it. If you have an organization meant to represent hundreds of millions of people, each individual has effectively ~zero control over it, and so pays little attention.

Meanwhile, the larger the organization it is, the more resources it can extract from its base, the larger it can become. With size comes complexity. Complexity means there are more things for people to pay attention to.

In combination the little attention people pay is spread thin over a large number of things. This makes corruption unlikely to be noticed and punished, which attracts corrupt people.

> Moreover, you seem to have made the assumption that factoring corruption out of government at a structural level is impossible. If that's the case, I think you're being unimaginative.

Which existing large government is free of corruption?

Note that states with lower corruption scores like Denmark and Singapore are less than 5% of the size of the United States and have less corruption, not none.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

>>>> as soon as you end up having an institution with the power to do something for a large number of people, you'll have power and corruption Honest question: What would lead you to this conclusion?

Honest answer : With respect, because that's real-life works. Look around you. A senatorial campaigns will always amass millions in campaign contributions. The local comptroller candidate will be lucky to raise 100K. The more people are impacted by a single individual, the more power that single individual has. The more power is as stake, the more corrupt attempts to usurp that power.

>>>>It sounds like you're saying you can't even trust yourself to resist corruption in a position of power,

No. It means that money will color all your decisions and edge cases will tend to resolve in a particular way because a decision favored by your moneyed supporters will be easier to justify.

Take for example a doctor treating a heart attack patients with prior has cold-like symptoms . The doctor is marking the cause of death. The doctor has seen many doctors get laid off due to pandemic. Waiting rooms are overcrowded with patients dying due to lack of doctors & COVID. There's no money coming in - the state has suspended the traditional hospital cash cow: elective surgery. The hospital medical director looks like a ghost, and has been urging staff to not forget to label patients with COVID-like symptoms as COVID-positive, to obtain government fund support.

The doctor is sure the patient didn't die of COVID. The doctor is not even sure the patient had COVID. But there's no time to check. There are no tests, ICU is packed, and he's worried about other patients needing medical attention, plus the doctor knows his assessment could be wrong. So he puts down cause of death: COVID.

Is the doctor corrupt ? No. The doctor is human.

So are politicians. (particularly unvirtuous humans at that, unlike doctors)

[cheschire]

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

How do you create a self-reinforcing decentralized system that actively prevents centralization, to the point where no individual nor stand-alone complex can rise up?

We have so much fiction produced talking about the capacity for life to find a way around limitations, artificial or natural. I cannot imagine anything other than utopian fantasy where full decentralization succeeds long term.

[dsego]

I don't think it can work, it seems to naturally devolve into feudalism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTN64g9lA2g

[thethrowaway87]

Are you an anarchist? That sounds a lot like the ancap proposal, and I think this was one of the best pitches I've read for it. Respectful but also pretty convincing.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Libertarian solutions, as you propose, are no more idealistic than mine, but I don’t put my faith in them because ultimately we are social beings.

Libertarianism is not opposed to organizations, it's opposed to coercion. If you want to get together with ten million of your closest friends and create your own not for profit Facebook to be run in the public interest, libertarians would not stand in your way unless you try to force everyone to use it or pay for it etc.

That means if you want to build something you have to convince people to support it, and not everyone will. But that stands in the way of what you want to do no more than saying that the US can't fund development of the internet without people in China paying US taxes.

You don't need everyone, you just need enough people to exceed the price of doing what you want to do. If you can convince the majority of Americans (<5% of world population) to raise their taxes by $5 to fund something, how is it any different than convincing any other arbitrary ~5% of the world population to bring it into existence voluntarily by contributing the same amount? You were already doing it using a small minority of everyone. It doesn't always have to be the same set of people.

> My only issue with Mastadon is that regular busy working people with families to raise on depressingly low wages cannot justify the effort to participate.

This is the fundamental problem with all of it. It's the same reason they can't self-beneficially participate in the political process -- no time to become informed, so too easy to make self-harming decisions. And then you get heuristics like "always vote for X party instead of Z party" that most certainly do not actually fix it.

Maybe the solution is greater specialization. Instead of everyone funding everything and then having neither meaningful control nor understanding of any of it, have different people choose what they care about. A million people decide they want to support cancer research, and so they spend real time figuring out who is doing the best work and then give all of what would've been their tax dollars to that. A different million people decide they want to support development of communications technology, so they take the time to understand how communications technology works, and they're the ones to support that with their time or money.

In principle the amount of funding that goes to each thing is the same as it would be if everyone is funding everything, but instead of 100M people each paying $1 to a hundred things, you have a million people each paying $100 to one thing and a different million people each paying $100 for another and so on. And then it becomes self-balancing, because if a problem gets worse, more people start paying attention to and caring about solving it.

And don't say nobody would do it, or explain why a government would fund research instead of letting some other government do it. People do it because they want to live in the world where it happens. Or they don't, but then why would they vote for it either?

[hutzlibu]

Non profit organisations could fill that gap. If proper financed directly by its users, otherwise they will go down the same path, if they get their money directly or indirectly from advertisement.

[cousin_it]

It's not about private companies. I have an account at a private bank and am not afraid of something like this happening at all. Because to the bank I'm not just an abstract "username and password": the account is tied to my real world identity, so in the last resort I'll prove to the bank that I'm me using state provided means. I'm getting more and more convinced that online accounts important to people's livelihood (like gmail where you have tons of important stuff) should work the same way, as a contract tied to your real world identity, and in doubt resolve things by webcam call or personal appointment.

[650REDHAIR]

I see you haven't been a victim of identity theft yet.

It doesn't take much to hijack a bank account and eventually you will regain access, but it isn't as simple as you might imagine and a fair amount of damage can be done in a short period of time.

[bduerst]

Most banks/CUs/payment processors automatically have insurance for these types of bad actors, even if it takes months to claw back your identity. Credit reporting typically takes much longer to fix but GP was referring to their bank.

[astura]

I mean... banks are the worst in this case.

Banks are known to irreversibly close accounts if they think you triggered some random algorithm, you have the same name as a terrorist, you have the wrong job, they don't like how you're using your account, or any other completely random reason. The decision is final they'll usually even refuse to tell you why they closed your accounts.

I had a bank (BMO Harris) close an account because the only transactions I had for about a year or so was "received directly deposited paycheck -> transfer entire amount to other bank account." At least they actually told me the reason.

[withinboredom]

Banks have to report accounts with low balances after a certain number of days (45 IIRC). That reporting costs them money unless they’ve gotten it 100% automated.

[pchangr]

That is until the bank happens to be 100% online.. they can’t verify your identity so they close your account and you can’t access your account nor contact the bank because you don’t have an account so you try to create an account to inquiry about your other account and they tell you you already have an account so they can’t open you an account and now you’re stuck with no way to contact the bank and no funds and noone able to help you. This is an extremely common scenario with banks in Germany.

[iypx]

This only works if you fit that stereotypical definition of what a "normal" person looks like or does. As soon as you deviate even a little from the norm, suddenly you got problems.

I had to do two interviews with a bank to open an account in UK because their automated systems were giving them "errors", apparently, when they're trying to check me. Normal people have to complete an online form (5 minutes) and will receive everything through post.

A year later I had to phone paypal support four times as it wouldn't accept neither of my two cards. On my 4th try I finally managed to get an actual English guy to answer my phone, who finally managed to understand every word I was saying without having me to spell anything letter by letter..

Last week I wanted to buy a plane ticket. I had no problems doing that until now (I had an old laptop with windows 7). Now, since running Linux, I open the website, as soon as I click search to find a flight, suddenly captcha! Every 3-5 minutes a new captcha...

This is a nightmare!

[nopenopenopeno]

All of these things work well for the rich, but the number of unbanked working Americans is astronomical. They cash their checks for fees. Try visiting the customer service counter at a rural Walmart in the U.S. on a Friday and you will see what I mean. The line snakes back to the rear of the store.

[scarface74]

Exactly how does commerce happen without banks at any scale? Banking has been around a lot longer than social media.

[throwaway946513]

The unbanked Americans are people who either are unable to open an account, or have been denied opening accounts. To cash their checks, keep their income, etc..., they have to pay much more in fees.

Historically (in the U.S.) it was rooted in racism post-U.S. civil war. Now, less so. The history is still there, and the inability of poor people to obtain an account still exist. It excludes people from getting mortgages, loans, investing, etc. Cash App has become a digital bank for many of the unbanked. Before Cash App, decades ago, we had the U.S. Postal Service providing some banking services to Americans. (No, the USPS attempting to help Americans in this manner is not new, we've done it before)

[astura]

I know a few "unbanked" people.

Some know don't have a bank account because they simply don't trust banks. They want to have access to 100% of their money 100% of the time.

Some don't have a bank account because they don't have income (adult dependents)

One didn't have a bank account because she was a minor and there was no adult around willing or able to open one for her to use.

When I was a kid I knew of a few adults who had bank accounts closed on them for check kiting, including my parents - I know of this because I overheard people talking about it quite a lot. I don't know what ended up happening after that, if they were able to open a new account or what. I know you probably wouldn't be able to open a new account nowadays with Chexsystem and the like. Of course, check kiting also isn't a thing anymore either.

[zxcvbn4038]

I don’t blame them, places like Citibank and Chase exist to dip into your account as frequently as possible. Do you think it really costs $45 to handle a bounced check? It’s a completely automated process, costs them a fraction of a cent if you agreed to electronic documents, the rest is pure gravy.

However if your in the US and having trouble with the banks I’d recommend looking for “millennial” banking which is usually zero fee, but you can’t write paper checks and they are remote only.

My wife was paying almost a thousand a month in fees at a regular bank, after I moved her to one of the millennial banks she really prospered. She can’t overdraw the account anymore - and it’s not really an issue since the bank is no longer taking half her paycheck.

[throwawayboise]

I call BS. Anyone with proper ID and payroll income can open a bank account. Most big employers (e.g. mine) will even require it -- payroll is made by direct deposit.

There may be minimum balance requirements and/or fees but if you shop around a bit (look especially at local credit unions) they are not onerous and are almost certainly lower than what check-cashing services will charge. They do demand a bit more management and responsibility compared to a wad of cash in one's pocket, but that's the way life is.

[iypx]

By "proper ID" you mean the right kind of country ID, I assume?

Cause I've been denied by two banks, the third bank even had two countries blacklisted.. that's right, on their official website they wrote: "we are currently unable to accept government issued IDs from X and Y" or something along those lines.

[bduerst]

That's the history, but you're missing the context of today. Many "unbanked" americans are immigrants voluntarily trying to avoid reporting and stay off the grid.

The solution lay in busting bias and fixing immigration laws though, not banking.

[withinboredom]

I take it you didn’t go to the rural Walmart on a Friday. Otherwise you’d know that isn’t anywhere near true.

[elliekelly]

The bank doesn’t do that for you. The bank does that because regulators require them to as a condition of being in the banking business.

[jtbayly]

Banks would have ceased to exist centuries ago if they couldn't be trusted to do this in general. Regulations have very little to do with it.

[Shared404]

To be fair, until comparatively recently, bank runs were a real and problematic thing.

[bko]

You're assuming that public organizations would run a more secure responsive network. My interactions with public institutions makes me doubt this assumption, especially for something as vast and complicated as facebook's network.

[ygjb]

I will point out that in Canada, many of our telecoms were run by privately operated, publicly owned organizations (Crown Corporations) that operated at arms length. Until they were sold for pennies on the dollar by governments looking to score a quick win for "fiscal responsibility" and "small government", these organizations operated with a high degree of public scrutiny, and had the goal of offering low cost, reliable services.

By most accounts the quality of service in relation to the price has been awful in most places in Canada, and the few places that still have Crown Corp delivered telecoms are among the happiest customers in that sector.

This same scenario has played out across multiple sectors including oil & gas, electricity and hydroelectric services, and here in BC, transportation services (BC Ferries).

Everyone likes to take a dump on public run services, but practically speaking, they have more oversight and accountability than privately run services.

[b112]

FYI, corps like Bell Canada, Telus, BCttel were not government owned, department or crown corp.

They were just highly protected by government regulation. The only ones allowed to do certain things, along with mandated Canadian ownership requirements. They had a defacto monopoly.

[ygjb]

Yeah, I am talking about Crown Corporations like MTS, Petro-Canada, BC Ferries, and such that were taken private, not the telecoms protectionism that is currently screwing over consumers in Canada, they are quite different.

I don't object to open markets, but I also think there is a space for crown corporations with a mandate to operate competitively (which strong oversight) for the benefit of Canadians (or citizens of $your_nation)

[b112]

There is. I found Petro Canada to be a fascinating use case too.

Inject yourself into an absurd market, with price fixing, to force competition.

And in the long term, it profited us quite well, including as we sold it off.

[scarface74]

So just imagine what happens when the government controls the communications. What happens when “they” get into power and start censoring and controlling communications that you don’t agree with?

In this case “they” are the party with policies that you don’t agree with. There was a study in the US that the government fails to pass policies that 80%+ of the population agrees with.

One easy example is making cannabis legal federally. People who vote Republican and Democrat both support it by an overwhelming majority. But it couldn’t pass.

[ygjb]

Some of us still live in functioning democracies. Also, it's worth pointing out that relying on privately owned or publicly traded corporations is not an effective strategy for preserving freedom; those businesses will only do that as long as they can justify it to their shareholders (private or public), and are subject to whatever laws apply in the jurisdictions they reside in (kind of the reason alot of 'western' companies prefer to either not do business, or conduct business via arms length entities in countries like Russia, China, and other places).

[scarface74]

So the US has the highest incarceration rate of any western country. The police routinely stop and harass minorities for no other reason than the color of their skin, the judicial system routinely hands out harsher punishment for the same crime when the defendant is minority, etc.

Even when you take race out of the equation, when you look at the congressional make up in the US and compare it to the party more people actually voted for, it’s just the opposite. The last president didn’t win the popular vote.

Private corporations don’t have the power of the state to coerce me to do anything. The government does. Why would I want to give the government more power? We see both dudes trying to control communications.

Apple is definitely not working with China at arms length. Neither is Microsoft. Google still makes the little hardware it does in China.

As far as functioning government you mean Europe where laws were passed like the GDPR that only led to cookie warnings on every web page?

[ygjb]

I don't know what to tell you. The people of the United States have continuously ceded power to their government, and the corporations that wield influence over it, while being spoonfed lies about what freedom actually means by government and media.

The right to bear arms supercedes the right to live in safe communities (and as a former infantry man, I can assert that more weapons in the hands of untrained civilians does not make communities more safe).

The right to an health care (abortion) is superceded by so called "religious freedoms".

The right to vote is superceded by politicians who rewrite election laws and electoral districts to choose their constituents.

Freedom to discriminate is beginning to supercede the right to freedom from discrimination.

These problems aren't unique to the United States, and in Canada we have our own issues.

> Private corporations don’t have the power of the state to coerce me to do anything.

* blinks in private law enforcement, the radical expansion of surveillance by private corporations, and lack of accountability of tech companies *

Uh, yeah, that's by design, but on a global basis, the design is breaking. There are more and more exceptionally wealthy individuals and corporations that are wielding power and working in domains that have typically been the purview of states and governments.

We need stronger regulation of corporations globally, and strong treaties that unify global regulation and information sharing of how that regulation occurs, or we will continue to cede freedom and governance to the whims of corporations that will wield significant influence over elected officials. One thing going for unelected government, they generally DGAF about the whims of corporations, and we have seen what some countries are willing to do in order to preserve influence over corporations (I would love to hear an honest, unbiased tell all from Jack Ma for example).

[jokethrowaway]

@ygjb a few points:

> The right to bear arms supercedes the right to live in safe communities (and as a former infantry man, I can assert that more weapons in the hands of untrained civilians does not make communities more safe).

True, they need training. In 1966 the city of Orlando trained women to shot and the number of rape incidents dropped 90%.

> The right to an health care (abortion) is superceded by so called "religious freedoms".

That's not health care, that's killing another human being. Your freedom ends where the life of another human being begins.

> The right to vote is superceded by politicians who rewrite election laws and electoral districts to choose their constituents.

Are you referring to forbidding criminals to vote and democrats paying what's due for them so they can vote (presumably left)? I can't say I feel too strongly about that because voting is pretty useless. Rich people will anyway buy the government whether that's right or left.

> Freedom to discriminate is beginning to supercede the right to freedom from discrimination.

This is a massive problem, I agree. Positive discrimination and allowing companies to favor women and minorities (excluding asians, they're doing good enough on their own) is pure racism / sexism.

[jokethrowaway]

> Some of us still live in functioning democracies.

Where I am now I need to show a QR code to buy food and there is a curfew at 10pm. None of these measures had been discussed in the latest elections and they even violate existing laws.

I don't know how you can call most of the world a functioning democracy.

[ygjb]

Yep, vaccine passports suck, and I say that as a supporter of them. I am not going to argue the merits or flaws of them with a throwaway account, but they have not been found to violate laws, and no jurisdiction in Canada that I am aware of has had to use exception powers (not withstanding clause, or reasonable limits under Section 1 of the Charter).

As for not being discussed in the latest elections, "if we are elected, we will implement vaccine passports" was largely the premise for the last Federal election in Canada, and while they didn't win in a landslide, Canadians voted in a government to implement them.

I don't think "most of the world" is a functioning democracy, but in Canada, our democracy is functioning, if continuing to be undermined by our political parties. Democracy around the world is at risk, and spreading misinformation about actual election outcomes and unpopular, but legal policies doesn't really help.

[unionpivo]

> I don't know how you can call most of the world a functioning democracy.

At lest where I live the (sometimes silent) majority supports such actions. We are having elections in few months and its not a big issue because most but few fringe parties and people support such actions.

That's the democracy for you. And most of the time it works, except when it doesn't :) (As far as I know nobody came with a better system jet.)

[tluyben2]

But I can go to a desk and, talk to someone, and, eventually, possibly after a very long time, someone will act. With canned response AI private corps I don’t have this. Also, at least where I live, if you make more of a stink at the office of the public org in question, you get helped faster and often better.

[pchangr]

Case in point:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30053549

[bko]

> But I can go to a desk and, talk to someone, and, eventually, possibly after a very long time, someone will act.

Ever tried to get a pothole filled?

[tluyben2]

Yearly, after the winter rains. That is actually not very hard here.

[dylan604]

Exactly. Imagine your DMV experiences but applied to this. Then again, based on stories like this, private seems to be even worse. Even the DMV has human interaction possible after demoralizing wait times unlike shouting into blackholes that is FAANG support

[throwaway946513]

Missouri resident here. DOR (Department of Revenue is also the DMV in Missouri) wait times while long recently, haven't been anywhere as terrible as everyone makes it out to be. Appointments are available (can truly only speak for my local office, which is in the largest city in the state) and my wait time never exceeded fifteen minutes. Additionally, to process said paperwork only took five minutes when I was at the counter.

Each of the people at the DMV have been helpful for me when I got custom plates, titled a car, renewed my license, etc. Only one time did I have to make a trip home to get missing documentation due to extenuating circumstances.

[NikolaNovak]

I love to doodoo on dmv / dot experience out of habit and cultural inertia, but in reality, my local Service Ontario is GREAT. Most of the time line ups are manageable; but most importantly, I get to talk to somebody who is obligated and typically willing to help me out and point me in right direction. Worst case scenario, I can come again and talk to another person.

It is THAT final resort that's not even an option with so many large companies. Sure there are people who will t fall through cracks, legitimate horror stories, but at least there's an option and obligation and intent.

[dylan604]

I never said the human interaction part of the experience was bad. I specifically stated the wait times. Since everyone wants to share personal anecdotes, then in my neck of the woods in Texas, the state has moved from small regionally located DMV offices in favor of centralized extremely large megastore types of places that they push people to visit. Even when making an appointment online, you still wait an incredibly long amount of time in this massive incubator of a holding area. The last time I visited was before COVID, and I was already concerned about the petri dish level of experiment that was the waiting area.

The DMV trope exists for reasons. Sadly, you may not be able to relate, but it doesn't diminish the validity for those that do. (sadly, here, being used ironically)

[_jal]

Tangent, but using the DMV as a horror-cliche anchor is very state-specific.

I have experience with DMVs in six states. Five of those have always been perfectly fine, nothing to complain about. If I'm competent enough to get my paperwork right, it is just a 15 minute process. New York and California even take appointments, no waiting.

I got my license way back when in Tennessee, and they were incompetent jerks, and that's because Tennessee's entrenched political class goes out of its way to make sure government services suck.

[technothrasher]

The Massachusetts RMV used to be horrendous, but they've cleaned themselves up a lot. I've had little issue getting things done over the past decade or so. Now that they've instituted appointments because of covid, it's even quicker. I hope they never go back. The only thing that is still really broken is their phone system. It's so hard to get anybody on the phone, it's really not worth even trying.

[oauea]

> Tangent, but using the DMV as a horror-cliche anchor is very state-specific.

And very America-focused. Never had any issues at all with our local equivalent.

[dylan604]

assuming "our" is non-American, but non-American is a really large place. ;-) care to narrow it down?

[JJMcJ]

California used to be bad, but the appointments have really helped.

Also, the people who actually work at the DMV are pretty helpful, but they are way overworked. Once again, this is in California.

[nopenopenopeno]

The United States government, as well as the provincial state governments within it, are governed more by corporate boards than by the citizens who think they are participating in a democracy. This is not a secret. There is no such thing as a public institution in the United States.

[nkrisc]

Nothing is secure, so it’s not about that. It’s about accountability .

[nopenopenopeno]

Public institutions governed by a democratic state not bought by private companies would absolutely do a better job. Realize we don’t have any public institutions in the United States. Our entire government works for multinational corporations, not the people living here.

[scarface74]

There is nothing “democratic” about the US government. Between gerrymandering and the Constitutionally architected 2 Senators per state, the US is very much ruled by the minority.

[mrguyorama]

And yet when you need free money for elder or disabled care, you get to call my girlfriend and she has to personally walk you through managing the right documents and getting all the info you need to get literally thousands of tax funded dollars a month until you die.

Where the fuck is facebook's phone number?

[scarface74]

Now try the same thing in a state that opposed the ACA or during the prior administration when it tried to purposefully cripple people accessing it.

We saw the same thing with the consumer protection bureau when it was run by someone who supported payday loans during the last administration.

I’m not trying to get overly political. But whether government “works” is completely dependent on which party is in charge and whether they champion parts of government that you need.

Just to be fair, government didn’t work too well under the Democratic administration during the eviction moratorium for landlords.

How much easier do you think it is to get a gun license in a red state or register to vote in a blue state?

[nopenopenopeno]

That was my point. Was that not clear?

[scarface74]

You are attributing to the multinational corporations. I am saying because of the makeup of the government - mandated by the Constitution - the government will statistically not be representative of the people. That being said, why would I want the government to have more power?

Has government control of communications ever ended up working out well?

[comrh]

You have legal recourse at least to file a FOIA request and force them to respond.

[scarface74]

Until it gets held up by an administration that doesn’t want you to have the information and supported by judges appointed by the administration.

[NaturalPhallacy]

I would say it's another one of those things like private health insurance and no public option. It's not failing, it's working exactly as intended for our domestic oligarchy.

Much like having two parties that are mostly the same on major foreign and economic policy, having the digital plaza be managed by mostly a few big companies that are all politically aligned, and cozy with the government is a great way to pretend to have free and open discourse when the reality is we have no idea what's happening behind the scenes and it's all a-okay according to some because they're "private businesses".

While it's true that the first amendment only applies to the US government, the concept of free speech predates the US constitution by about 2200 years and is still important.

[quickthrower2]

The problem is the expectation that these services are gratis to users. If users are prepared to pay, this metal community for example would be on its own domain with a PHPBB or similar. Many people do this by the way. Even for non technical topics.

People pay a lot for internet access both through mobile and land connections but are less willing to pay for things on the internet or maybe its the hassle of setting up a site (comparable to the hassle of say buying a car: a hassle but not insurmountable for anyone).

[tomcooks]

The "digital plaza" ownership and total control on one's own community is a literal 2.99 euro/month VPS running mastodon away.

Shitposting one's thoughts by arranging pixels on a public forum is NOT a necessity, it's a luxury. If you value it as a necessity consider funding your own for yourself and others you care about, it would end up costing about 7 euro/year if you find even just 4 other like-minded persons.

[TameAntelope]

Social media is in no way on the same level as healthcare, are you kidding me?

You do not need Facebook to survive, nor do you need Facebook to participate in your community.

Unreal. Just… unreal.

[adventured]

Facebook pages are no more important today than the yellow pages were yesterday, or classified ads, or newspapers. Very little of which was publicly operated.

If your local newspaper blockaded you out of their advertising section 50 years ago (eg they dislike you), it could have been devastating too. There are a lot of scenarios like that. You can't get around those potential problems by saying everything should be run under National Socialism; instead of dealing with Verizon you'll be dealing with a board of vicious bureaucrats with direct political power - they can have you shot or imprisoned at will in a more developed Socialist system - that will eventually want bribed to let you continue to exist.

[Jolter]

The yellow pages were absolutely run by state-owned telecom operators, less than 25 years ago, all over Europe.

[emteycz]

Only because of the communist past. Most states privatized these operators and the yellow pages continued to be published by them as private companies without any need for regulation.

[Jolter]

Ah, yes, the famously communist France. (Pages Jaunes are operated by Orange, previously state monopoly France Telecom.)

Just as you say, these monopolies are all deregulated and sold off. But they were all developed and operated by monopolies for many decades, successfully.

Your attempt to call non-communist things communist is a bit annoying. You could benefit from using the same terminology as the rest of the world when you discuss politics. It would help your arguments.

Anyway, I was pointing out that the paragraph I responded to was a falsehood: “Facebook pages are no more important today than the yellow pages were yesterday, or classified ads, or newspapers. Very little of which was publicly operated.”

[emteycz]

You picked one example where it doesn't fit while there are at least 8 EU countries that did exactly what I said. BTW yes here in Central/Eastern EU we deem France very very leftist, just few small steps away from full-on socialism.

[MrsPeaches]

Famously communist UK as well. BT (British Telecom) was the state owned telecom provider that also ran the phone books.

And famously communist Germany with Deutsche Telekom (Formerly part of the national post system, privatised in 1995) that also made telephone books. Also worth noting that the German government still has a significant stake in Deutsche Telekom.

Oh and famously communist Netherlands with KPN the state run post and telecoms provider.

And famously communist Spain with Telefonica being previously majority owned by the state (under Franco no less).

I mean most of European telecoms seem to have been state owned until the early 90s.

[dokem]

Construction is private and buildings don't fall down and are incredibly safe. Food production is private and people don't get spoiled or poisonous products. I think this is reductive.

[user_7832]

Both have regulations written in blood, though. Lives have been lost which is why rules exist in these fields.

[adventured]

The argument by the parent is clearly not against regulations in a market economy, they didn't say anything implying that. The argument is against the necessity of government ownership and operation.

[user_7832]

Yeah that's a fair point.

[chrisBob]

Construction and food are great examples of how the government keeps us safe. Building codes and food regulations are wonderful things.

[throwaway946513]

> People don't get spoiled or poisoned products.

I'm quite sure that this still happens only to lesser extents. Compare European food regulations to U.S. food regulations. American food while not explicitly killing people outright still has some ghosts in its past that are present in today's foods. See the Coca-Cola, Sugar companies, and 'fat-free' corporate lobbying of the FDA, as well as the huge advertising for terrible food has affected Americans.

The U.S. has food deserts, where fresh produce and food is either too expensive or impossible to find with substitutes being boxed goods laden with sugar and grains from the whale of corporations like General Mills and Kellogs.

[scarface74]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse

[scarface74]

Social media is not a “necessity”. He could have used his Facebook page to steer his community to his own hosted site and forum.

Do you really trust giving more power to the government?

[ed25519FUUU]

Plenty of absolutely horrible kafkaesque experiences with the state. This is definitely not exclusively a “private company” problem.

[BoxOfRain]

I think it's a 'large bureaucracies in general' problem, there seems to be a critical mass in any kind of organisation beyond which dealing with them in any capacity becomes like pulling teeth. I don't think public services are necessarily flawed because it's the state providing them, I think it's more that the state is also an enormous bureaucratic organisation and subject to the same issues. When the state creates groups that are enpowered to cut through the internal politicking it can be very effective, for example the gov.uk site that's been praised a lot on HN.

Just look at rail in the UK, it was the butt of contemporary comedy when it was nationalised and it's still a dog's breakfast thirty years after privatisation. It's not the ownership that's the problem, it's the nature of the organisations responsible for providing that particular service. I think the public/private dichotomy is a bit of a false one when it comes to quality of service a lot of the time.

[emteycz]

Facebook page is not necessary communication. That's telephone and mobile networks. Healthcare is successfully managed by private companies all around the world - even in Europe (the funding is organized by law but still the hospitals are private companies and half of EU countries have private health insurance companies). The horrors of publicly managed social media were already tested here in Europe too and we never want to go back.

[throwawaysea]

Social media is just a basic telecom utility service. Most of societal communication takes place on it. It’s fundamental enough that most individuals, businesses, celebrities, and government officials participate in it. I don’t understand the distinction you’re making - to me it seems fairly fundamental and it also seems like social media depends on network effects, which justifies regulating the biggest ones.

[adventured]

> Social media is just a basic telecom utility service.

No it's not, not even close. Facebook is very different from TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter, Reddit and Snapchat. They're quite obviously not some manner of the equivalent of an universal pipe or utility.

If your premise were correct, you'd be able to swap them out for eachother; you'd be able to just run TikTok on Facebook and nobody would care about the difference. Instead, none of them fulfills that premise of basic utility, none of them makes all of the other social media platforms possible or irrelevant (Facebook can't do what Pinterest does; Facebook can't actually do what TikTok does, even if it would like to; and everybody would notice if all the other social networks vanished, precisely because Facebook can't do what they do).

Facebook is less important thank people have been hyping it to be (for their own ideological agenda reasons). TikTok has more than demonstrated that, and the thriving nature of all the rest of the social media landscape has also nicely demonstrated that. In fact the only real problem is that Facebook owns Instagram, otherwise it'd be out there as another separate mega platform. Facebook also can't do what Instagram does, which is why they had to buy them and are terrified of having to spin it off (another case where Facebook is clearly not a utility).

Just because Facebook can potentially store the same bits that Instagram does, doesn't mean it can provide the same service (first of all, you can't get users to go along with that for all sorts of reasons). Those are two very different things. Otherwise Google would have successfully built a juggernaut social platform, instead of failing repeatedly at it.

[vorpalhex]

Most individuals and celebrities also eat sushi, but that doesn't make sushi a "fundamental right".