Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?
Why do the users agree to the limits imposed by them and let the platform decide who gets to see the content they posted ?
Because they're offering the infrastructure. The tech for such a network is now within reach of many, but these apps are heavily dominated by network effects and that makes it impossible for competing apps to take hold.
This is negative for society.
Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
People who don't have an account are not getting vital information because the company decided to restrict access to the entire network.
This needs to be regulated somehow. At least for public services and major news outlets - as a tax for the network effect these apps benefit from.
>Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
RSS. Website. Both have been around for a long time. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.
Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation.
Even FINGER had .plan files, where you could get status updates from people.
But how are you going to query whose plans you want to read, and who is going to moderate without centralisation?
It's the moderation in particular that dooms most federalised efforts. The web itself is only really moderated through the relative lack of discoverability, with Google and hosting providers having become a form of gatekeeper to remove the very worst of the web.
Twitter in the early days took off because it did solve a technological problem of the time. You only had your SMS enabled phone, no WAP or smartphone, and wanted to provide updates. They gave you a number you could text, which would post updates. Hence the character limit ( less than the SMS limit, to leave space for your credentials ).
Plenty of alternatives exist for getting information out, people just don't know where to look for it.
That technical problem disappeared, but it had by then grown to provide a service to rapidly get updates from people, one that had a sense of authority and the moderating effect and discoverability of centralisation is impossible to ignore.
The requirement for strong moderation only exists *because* of centralization. If I'm looking at a linear feed of content, it has to be curated by someone. In the old days, content on the internet was mostly links between webpages -- the "web" if you will. If i like the content on a page, it'll link to other pages i may like, and I'm free to follow those links at will, and no third party moderation is required.
Contrast with modern social media, where everything is condensed into a single list of algorithmically curated content, and we've implicitly eroded a lot of freedom (and handed control to Big Tech)
You’re right to a point. The Internet is much older than the Web. Content on the Internet was largely FTP sites, Gopher sites, and Usenet long before the Web existed. We also had MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, talkers, chat rooms, BBSes, and more over Telnet well before the web was widespread.
Telnet 1969, standardized 1983
FTP 1971
UUCP 1979
SMTP 1981
RSH 1983
TCP/IP v4 1984
NNTP 1986 (the successor to UUCP for newsgroups)
IRC 1988
Archie 1990 (search engine for ftp sites)
Gopher 1991
WWW 1989 first published 1991
Veronica 1992 (search engine for Gopher sites)
SSH 1995
Well, replies to a post also require moderation. In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation.
(Plenty of people don't want that, or would at least prefer interacting only with their explicitly chosen friends if they were forced to choose between that and unmoderated public access. For them, group chats on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram suffice.)
> In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation.
I saw plenty of things pre-social-media that was created by complete strangers. These were mostly things found via search or via recommendations from people I know. Having strangers moderate (and snoop, and have AI train on) the communication I have with people I already know (or people who i meet through them...) is the problem here.
Most of the forums I participated in, in the past, ended up dying because of a very persistent troll or two. Some of them I knew in person. They were just so arrogant and thought they were doing the right thing. The communities died. A healthy community gives everyone the chance to speak. In person, that's often done subtly by moderators.
There is a strong demand for censorship coming from not just governments and corporations but most regular people. It's not only big tech.
In the old days, most of the world wasn't online. The average internet user was a male Westerner in a tiny ideological bubble that represented not even 5% of the world's population. I fully agree with you that the old open web was better but the internet is more mainstream and monitored now and the average human isn't libertarian, to put it mildly. Corporations like X actually censor less than user moderated platforms such as Mastodon instances or most Reddit subs. Go on there to voice opinions that are unpopular with the moderators and you'll be banned in no time.
Open protocols always end up with a "backend engineer doing frontend" situation. Which is okay if end users are other engineers, but not okay when end user is my mom.
> Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
Government agencies have communicated to their citizens long before twitter has existed. There's a myriad of ways they can use today: websites (with or without RSS), email newsletters, text updates, other social networks (bluesky, threads, etc).
Choosing to give critical updates only on Twitter is definitely a choice and they are deliberately ignoring a very large segment of their population that doesn't have a twitter account.
Did websites and RSS stop working and I missed it? With more people doing AI searches a website is even more viable now, it's better for AI scraping than x.com.
It's 100% the endorsement I think it is, someone searching for "is there a fire near me" wants an answer. The main issue with websites (and why Twitter grew) is it became easier to colocate information and get real(ish) time updates. For sites that don't care about actual traffic being able to surface that data to AI bots is perfect. If it reinforces a loop of "oh [site] is the actual source of information" even better.
Why not? I'd much prefer if I can just send my agent to gather info among these sites than have to sign up for some Twitter clone, enable Javascript, then click around through a sea of algorithm bait.
I'm still honestly surprised that government entities didn't already solve this problem for themselves. We have means to mail, call, and even email our representatives, but technology seemingly stalled out 20 years ago and didn't keep up with the idea of having a digital forum. There are even multiple channels of verification to integrate, so such governmental forums could verify who is a constituent.
But that's not the end results. Senators have youtube channels, representative posts tweets and even tiktoks to update people, and emergency broadcasts post on Facebook. I'm not opposed to the expanded reach, but when that's their only official channel, it feels like something failed.
Recent years have only now made some non-US entities be pushed to start building away from this dependency, but it's a shame it had to get this far ingrained to begin with.
Bluesky attracted socialist progressives, furries, and kink-positive folks early on.
I'm not making any value statements, and there's nothing wrong with the userbase, but this is what dominates the feed for new users.
A lot of people are turned off by that when they see it as their first experience with the platform. Or they're actively turned away upon interaction. That's not how you build a big social network.
Mastodon is the exact same.
These platforms are also not winning people over by calling them "toots" and "skeets".
It's like Gimp refusing to adopt a Photoshop style UI for years and not changing their name.
Despite stated intentions, I think these platforms want to stay small and niche and non mainstream. If they wanted to grow big, they'd behave much differently. They'd try to get the Kardashians and would welcome posts about handbags and guns and sports.
Mastondon/the fediverse feels even worse. Super lefty, super kinky, furry etc. Super weird. Fine that people have their bubbles, but as a normal person you feel totally alienated. X became a nazi dumpsterfire.
> Despite stated intentions, I think these platforms want to stay small and niche and non mainstream.
I think that's essentially it, whether they are doing it intentionally or not.
Running a social network is like curating a party or conference. Who you do and don't let participate, and who you do and don't promote above others, is essentially the product. And that is a lot of work.
Open protocols don't solve any of these problems, and people who care about open protocols don't tend to be the same people interested in curating giant parties and conferences for a mass audience.
I found this post from Nostr. I find it a saner alternative to fediverse, particularly because the identity is just a server-free public-private key pair
But I don't know when if ever we will have a significant mass there.
The competing app is e-mail. You can subscribe to important information by e-mail and send out important information to mailing lists.
> This needs to be regulated somehow.
Of course, this is HN so regulation is always the solution to all problems. Instead of making the people who are responsible for doing stuff and are getting paid for it get off their asses. They can easily post updates on government alert websites, on e-mail lists, and on social media and everywhere else to get the attention of the public.
I believe that sentiment started to die out around the time people realized a Nazi gained control over the world's centralized communication hub. Whether that says more about the communication, the nazi, or the people is a question for the ages.
>Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ?
Because it is a private enterprise that you signed up for. You don't have a right to Twitter. You don't have a right to Facebook. If you don't like it, leave. The entitlement is massive here. These sites are poison in so many ways. Stop feeding the beast.
Regulation over communication channels is not only common through the ages, but expected and needed. There may not be literal landlines to worry about in the modern age, but the general idea of communication being an important medium that shouldn't be squandered by competition remains.
I prefer everyone to simply leave Twitter and to let it crash and burn, but I see the arguments to have stronger regulations on channels central enough for governmental entities to be using it as a communication hub.
Twitter has gone from relatively open to instagram / facebook level of closedness where I can't even share a video with my friends because it asks them to log in. I had to rely on nitter and xcancel for that... Now that no longer works either
I have one niche that I use twitter for. If it wasn't for that - would have deleted my account long time ago. Things like this push me towards that direction, though.
I actually paid for their dumb monthly subscription only so that I could download videos within the app to share with my friends who don't use X. Only after paying did I realize that by "download videos" it means "cache videos locally inside the app for offline playback". It still would not allow me to save the video to my local device. Misleading, tacky, possibly even desparate.
Just go ahead and quit! I had a niche use case for FB, but I decided to quit nevertheless because I didn't want to support the platform anymore. Today I don't miss it a single bit. (I never had a Twitter account in the first place.)
I know it is Meta-owned and is just as algorithmic, but Threads is a breath of fresh air in terms of access - the website is pratically the same in terms of UX as the app, and it does not require an account to browse at all. Just thought it'd be worth mentioning.
There are many already. The code is not why people use those sites. In the case of Meta specifically, it's basically in spite of the user-hostile, garbage code.
The network effect / entrenchment means that any replacement has to be massively better in every dimension to have a chance. Otherwise people just stick to what they know, and then other people stick to it because the other people do. And so on.
I personally think Musk is a garbage-tier human who represents everything wrong with culture wars, and his brain is long blasted into a mush of worthless racist noise and stupidity by drug abuse, so I deleted my X account. Loads of others are too cowardly/selfish to do so.
I believe Musk might be a decent person. He is obviously smart, but perhaps he fears foreigners too much.
X is decent for getting the latest news. The comment sections often seem to be filled with garbage, even worse so than Reddit. Ads are hard to distinguish from normal posts. There is a lot of bots in the comments.
People really do not want to give up the reach once they have tasted it.
It’s a shame: I remember when people would be so excited to get 100 strangers visiting their blogs but in a month, but now someone blogging for an audience like that would seem a little crazy, maybe paradoxically even overly grandiose.
Also, the harm from using X is complex. It basically comes from endorsing the site and encouraging other people to come there where they’ll be exposed to a cesspit of bigotry and right-wing ideas. It’s easy to tell yourself that what you’re doing there outweighs the cons, and that other sites are just as bad, etc.
An anonymous group of devs should host the source on Radicle (over Tor) and the app itself on an onion site. Bonus, it may discourage some scrapers who can’t be bothered with setting up a Tor gateway.
If the operators are in the US, they probably don't want to risk it if they were anything less than very careful in not having their personal info attached to any of the data.
I've always found it baffling that more projects by folks that disagree with copyright, access controls, etc aren't hosted in places where the cease and desist won't work.
It's like, you're doing something to annoy a large company with lots of legal resources, and you host everything in the US? Why?
"Elites" of both left and right stay because no matter how much they hate Elon they still need to be in the same country club with other elites. That always takes precedence.
I use Nitter/Xcancel entirely because I don't have an account, and Twitter is now unusable without one. There's still content of some value there. People still link to it and now I can't read what they shared with me.
Maybe it's just me, but I think it's time to stop giving any sort of traffic to the CSAM generator website operated by the guy who quotes the Turner Diaries, agrees with antisemitic tweets, and throws Nazi salutes at the inauguration.
If you were using these proxies, just move on. If you still have a Twitter account, well... C'mon, champ. Today's the day. Time to delete your account.
Why do the users agree to the limits imposed by them and let the platform decide who gets to see the content they posted ?
Because they're offering the infrastructure. The tech for such a network is now within reach of many, but these apps are heavily dominated by network effects and that makes it impossible for competing apps to take hold.
This is negative for society.
Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
People who don't have an account are not getting vital information because the company decided to restrict access to the entire network.
This needs to be regulated somehow. At least for public services and major news outlets - as a tax for the network effect these apps benefit from.
RSS. Website. Both have been around for a long time. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.
A "foo-announce@" or "foo-alerts@" mailing list.
Even FINGER had .plan files, where you could get status updates from people.
But how are you going to query whose plans you want to read, and who is going to moderate without centralisation?
It's the moderation in particular that dooms most federalised efforts. The web itself is only really moderated through the relative lack of discoverability, with Google and hosting providers having become a form of gatekeeper to remove the very worst of the web.
Twitter in the early days took off because it did solve a technological problem of the time. You only had your SMS enabled phone, no WAP or smartphone, and wanted to provide updates. They gave you a number you could text, which would post updates. Hence the character limit ( less than the SMS limit, to leave space for your credentials ).
Plenty of alternatives exist for getting information out, people just don't know where to look for it.
That technical problem disappeared, but it had by then grown to provide a service to rapidly get updates from people, one that had a sense of authority and the moderating effect and discoverability of centralisation is impossible to ignore.
Contrast with modern social media, where everything is condensed into a single list of algorithmically curated content, and we've implicitly eroded a lot of freedom (and handed control to Big Tech)
All this to say: bring back webrings.
(Plenty of people don't want that, or would at least prefer interacting only with their explicitly chosen friends if they were forced to choose between that and unmoderated public access. For them, group chats on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram suffice.)
I saw plenty of things pre-social-media that was created by complete strangers. These were mostly things found via search or via recommendations from people I know. Having strangers moderate (and snoop, and have AI train on) the communication I have with people I already know (or people who i meet through them...) is the problem here.
In the old days, most of the world wasn't online. The average internet user was a male Westerner in a tiny ideological bubble that represented not even 5% of the world's population. I fully agree with you that the old open web was better but the internet is more mainstream and monitored now and the average human isn't libertarian, to put it mildly. Corporations like X actually censor less than user moderated platforms such as Mastodon instances or most Reddit subs. Go on there to voice opinions that are unpopular with the moderators and you'll be banned in no time.
It's Eternal September.
Government agencies have communicated to their citizens long before twitter has existed. There's a myriad of ways they can use today: websites (with or without RSS), email newsletters, text updates, other social networks (bluesky, threads, etc).
Choosing to give critical updates only on Twitter is definitely a choice and they are deliberately ignoring a very large segment of their population that doesn't have a twitter account.
The fediverse is a viable alternative. But most non-tech people don't know about it.
That's not necessarily the endorsement you think it is.
But that's not the end results. Senators have youtube channels, representative posts tweets and even tiktoks to update people, and emergency broadcasts post on Facebook. I'm not opposed to the expanded reach, but when that's their only official channel, it feels like something failed.
Recent years have only now made some non-US entities be pushed to start building away from this dependency, but it's a shame it had to get this far ingrained to begin with.
Bluesky attracted socialist progressives, furries, and kink-positive folks early on.
I'm not making any value statements, and there's nothing wrong with the userbase, but this is what dominates the feed for new users.
A lot of people are turned off by that when they see it as their first experience with the platform. Or they're actively turned away upon interaction. That's not how you build a big social network.
Mastodon is the exact same.
These platforms are also not winning people over by calling them "toots" and "skeets".
It's like Gimp refusing to adopt a Photoshop style UI for years and not changing their name.
Despite stated intentions, I think these platforms want to stay small and niche and non mainstream. If they wanted to grow big, they'd behave much differently. They'd try to get the Kardashians and would welcome posts about handbags and guns and sports.
I think that's essentially it, whether they are doing it intentionally or not.
Running a social network is like curating a party or conference. Who you do and don't let participate, and who you do and don't promote above others, is essentially the product. And that is a lot of work.
Open protocols don't solve any of these problems, and people who care about open protocols don't tend to be the same people interested in curating giant parties and conferences for a mass audience.
I'd say Mastodon at this point is mostly people talking in a vacuum (even more than BlueSky)
No mainstream discussion or debate comes from Mastodon, you don't see screenshots around (and you do see skeets around)
As much as SpaceXAi lost audience, there's a lot of discussion still going around there
But I don't know when if ever we will have a significant mass there.
Hacker News 100 on Nostr: https://njump.to/nprofile1qqsfexztjz4sq05j972pv5h3s9w0gaqvay...
> This needs to be regulated somehow.
Of course, this is HN so regulation is always the solution to all problems. Instead of making the people who are responsible for doing stuff and are getting paid for it get off their asses. They can easily post updates on government alert websites, on e-mail lists, and on social media and everywhere else to get the attention of the public.
Because that's not what happened.
Why have users given control over their content to X?
Because it is a private enterprise that you signed up for. You don't have a right to Twitter. You don't have a right to Facebook. If you don't like it, leave. The entitlement is massive here. These sites are poison in so many ways. Stop feeding the beast.
Regulation over communication channels is not only common through the ages, but expected and needed. There may not be literal landlines to worry about in the modern age, but the general idea of communication being an important medium that shouldn't be squandered by competition remains.
I prefer everyone to simply leave Twitter and to let it crash and burn, but I see the arguments to have stronger regulations on channels central enough for governmental entities to be using it as a communication hub.
I have one niche that I use twitter for. If it wasn't for that - would have deleted my account long time ago. Things like this push me towards that direction, though.
Then scaling and paying for it is the hard part.
The network effect / entrenchment means that any replacement has to be massively better in every dimension to have a chance. Otherwise people just stick to what they know, and then other people stick to it because the other people do. And so on.
I personally think Musk is a garbage-tier human who represents everything wrong with culture wars, and his brain is long blasted into a mush of worthless racist noise and stupidity by drug abuse, so I deleted my X account. Loads of others are too cowardly/selfish to do so.
I believe Musk might be a decent person. He is obviously smart, but perhaps he fears foreigners too much.
X is decent for getting the latest news. The comment sections often seem to be filled with garbage, even worse so than Reddit. Ads are hard to distinguish from normal posts. There is a lot of bots in the comments.
It’s a shame: I remember when people would be so excited to get 100 strangers visiting their blogs but in a month, but now someone blogging for an audience like that would seem a little crazy, maybe paradoxically even overly grandiose.
Also, the harm from using X is complex. It basically comes from endorsing the site and encouraging other people to come there where they’ll be exposed to a cesspit of bigotry and right-wing ideas. It’s easy to tell yourself that what you’re doing there outweighs the cons, and that other sites are just as bad, etc.
https://mastodon.social
how well they hold up under stress of bad actors/govts remains to be seen
there's still a lot of info you can only find on twitter
It's like, you're doing something to annoy a large company with lots of legal resources, and you host everything in the US? Why?
Remember the uniparty.
Elmo really has ruined it.
Once Elonified and walled, was already a clear bye bye years ago.
why there would be still the need to have an account and post stuff there?
boycott is the answer.
loosing and having few users is the biggest pain, let them drain into the void.
Before AI or whatever reason for being closed again he actually opened it back.
I mean, even the name already is the perfect symbol of what goes wrong in people's brains, right?
Xcancel should be about cancelling X. Not about adding another pipe to it. ;)
But yeah, people will never become smarter, I guess... Jusz their glasses do.
If you were using these proxies, just move on. If you still have a Twitter account, well... C'mon, champ. Today's the day. Time to delete your account.