Technology

That was an excellent if somewhat overwrought read (it's Medium that's almost expected). And it's hitting on a fear I've had about the current state of the internet for a while now.

I think we do need to acknowledge, though, that a lot of this has to do with people. The "average users", they simply don't care enough about any of this. I don't like the farm animal comparisons because it's dehumanizing and mean, but it really is very unfortunate how many patterns of user behavior reveal a majority of users that are just as easy to corral.

We can talk all we like about the corporate machinations of Zuckerberg, but at the end of the day, Facebook killed Myspace for one very simple reason: people follow other people. Centralization is the end result of humans searching out the social part of social media, which means they gather, and tend to stay put unless everyone else moves as well, at the same time.

Platforms gain incredible power if the herd settles in their lands, and become virtually immune to pushback from poor decisions until they hit Musk level insanity. It should not have taken this long for people to seek a Twitter alternative, or a Reddit one for that matter. Once the herd settles, they'll suffer just about anything to avoid having to move.

And I don't know if there's a good answer to this problem. Especially now that competition is so sparce and alternative platforms barely see a trickle of active use compared to the giants.

Love Doctrow, but this is a loooong article. I've used AI to summarize it:

1. Big tech companies grew explosively due to network effects, but are now too big to govern effectively.
2. Social media platforms in particular are poorly suited to moderate billions of diverse users and are prone to failure and scandal.
3. Governments and regulators have failed to rein in big tech, often protecting companies rather than users.
4. Low switching costs mean that tech companies' growth could rapidly reverse if people leave the platforms.
5. However, tech companies use acquisitions, lobbying, and legal threats to lock in users and block competitors.
6. Instead of trying to fix inherently flawed large platforms, we should make it easy for people to leave them.
7. If we could export networks of relationships from platforms, people would have the power to migrate based on companies' practices.
8. Allowing people to easily leave would force platforms to respect users and address problems to retain them, or else face implosion.
9. The alternative is an endless cycle of scandal, ineffective reform, and accumulating 'fire debt' that eventually erupts in crisis.
10. It's time to stop trying to perfect huge tech companies and instead give people the means to choose alternatives.

"Companies cannot unilaterally mediate the lives of hundreds of millions — or even billions — of people, speaking thousands of languages, living in hundreds of countries.The real problem is that no one should have that job. That job shouldn’t exist. We don’t need to find a better Mark Zuckerberg. We need to abolish Mark Zuckerberg."

"Rather than passing laws requiring Threads to prioritize news content, or to limit the kinds of ads the platform accepts, we could order it to turn on this Fediverse gateway and operate it such that any Threads user can leave, join any other Fediverse server, and continue to see posts from the people they follow, and who will also continue to see their posts."

"Tech companies are even more concerned with criminalizing the things you want to do to them.

Frank Wilhoit described conservativism as “exactly one proposition”:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

This is likewise the project of corporatism. Tech platforms are urgently committed to ensuring that they can do anything they want on their platforms — and they’re even more dedicated to the proposition that you must not do anything they don’t want on their platforms."

Doctorow is the man

The vibes on Threads are bad. Have you ever been high/drunk and you walk into a CVS and the security guard is staring at you? That’s what Threads is.

What a fantastic evisceration of a platform.

Bit of a nitpick, but the comparison with the reversing of the MS Office formats is a bit tenuous, and somewhat revisionist.

Competitors and open-source applications were reverse-engineering the Office file formats long before Apple iWork was a thing, and arguably no-one really gets it right because in order to get it perfect you'd have to reproduce the Office application layouting engine exactly, bug-for-bug. Even Microsoft doesn't get it 100% from release to release.

I enjoyed that parallel

A bit strained perhaps with the argument that the giants are perpetually on fire. Or maybe it's just me missing the point.