This was inevitable. All the above-mentioned services are funded - in large part - by ads. When it came to choosing between serving the users vs. the advertisers the latter would always win in the long run because they were the paying customers.

What's needed is some sort of "public" space on the internet that's not controlled by corporate (and increasingly advertising) interests. Non-profits like Wikipedia and archive.org come close, but aren't meant for real time communication. Ironically, technologies like SMS are also somewhat neutral because they were conceived before advertising became the dominant business model on mobile and have no hooks for "curation" and "engagement".

Unsustainable situations always seem to go on for longer than you expect, but I wonder if we're finally getting to be just a year or three out from Adpocalypse, when the ad-supported internet companies finally end up having to face head on that you can not serve two masters.

I wonder if there's going to be a market developing for services that look like current services, but actually cost money somehow. Probably a billion-dollar-level opportunity for figuring out how to charge for a Facebook or Google or Twitter a couple of bucks a month.

(If you are seriously inclined to take this on, which I would support, bear in mind that the answer to these questions, for all sorts of reasons, is never "It's just Facebook, with a subscription." Facebook, to take one example, has been deeply structured around advertising for years now. You can't take the end result and just remove advertising from it. You need to start back at the beginning and rethink the whole thing, figuring out how to get people to spend some money on it. And I can all but promise "It's Facebook, but cares about your privacy" is a dead letter too, as that has been tried. I don't know what the answers are, just some of the problems. It'll take some serious thought to solve this.)

You're really overestimating people's willingness to pay for a service that's already free and convenient. There's really no good comp for tens of millions of users switching from a free service to a paid service just to avoid ads/conspiracy theories.

Did you miss my last paragraph?

I mean, if "just reconceptualize the entire idea of a social network" sounds easy to you, well... go for it. But it doesn't sound easy to me, which is why I said "It'll take some serious thought to solve this."

No.

>It'll take some serious thought to solve this.

I disagree. No amount of serious thought is going to come up with a solution to reroute an established aspect of modern human nature. The only way this happens is a black swan event that (by definition) nobody is going to see coming.

Even completely free you can be profitable just selling 'credits' to send e-gifts etc. Facebook is functionally crippled, they still don't even have a dislike button.

Would you care to tell us more about this/these ??

A lack of a dislike button is functionally crippled? Please stop with the hyperbole. They have reasons for this and have rolled out other reaction types a while ago, and all of this is a miniscule amount of the functionality they offer to billions of people.

Isn't the current state of the average person's use of the Internet completely contradictory to this?

That's brilliant.

It can't come fast enough for me, but I highly doubt that's only 3 years away. It will also be remembered as the .com crash 2.0.

I mean, I personally already do (in the form of various services, such as usenet), but I'm talking about larger portions of the internet. I think maybe the exclusivity via paywall of the right service might actually draw users in.

Perhaps the federal government could find a budget every year to fund a website that provides exactly this, and that those managing it are not employees of the government.

The first thought I had was that maybe UN should run something like this, but still, there's an issue that affects us regardless of who is running the service - social media are heavily network-effect-dependent. Unless you're willing to literally have a law against using privately-owned social media and forcing people into government-provided services, any attempt of building such a service will likely fail simply because Twitter, FB and Reddit are already there, and regular people won't have any strong incentive to jump ship.

(http://www.eternal-september.org/ if you want your own free text-only feed)

He who believes these companies exist as a way for the mass population to voice their opinion and as a way to exercise democracy should rethink what these companies are all about.

Note: I do not necessarily agree with that they do, just pointing out what they are all about.

There was a brief and short-lived outrage against Pepsi for a distasteful commercial where a (generic, but people attribute it to BLM) riot was ended by giving a police officer a can of Pepsi.

Or at least, that's what I gathered from reading about it on random comments from unrelated threads on Reddit because I'm out of the loop myself.

E:

Twitter? Meant Reddit. Unimportant change.

By all means, curate your own back yard however you want. But misleading your users as to the nature of that curation should be actionable somehow. Enforced echo chambers are fine and dandy, so long as they are disclosed as such.

Not sure what that's supposed to mean. Would it be OK for a food company to use expired ingredients if it increased their profit, or for FedEx trucks to run over people if it helped their bottom line? Private corporations have various degrees of responsibility to the general public, depending on how much harm they can inflict. Twitter has become a major platform for public discourse and it's not like people can move their followers elsewhere. Using Twitter's power to suppress certain kinds of (otherwise acceptable) public statements should be a big no-no.

http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/inside-bostons-expired-food-...

I used to go into a small store when I was a kid and ask for the expired bread. They'd come out of the back with and entire friggin garbage bag full of bread that 'expired' yesterday. That bag was $1.

FedEx truck running over people is illegal whereas Christian bookstores only stocking pro-Christian material is perfectly legal and good business.

Twitter is mostly incentivized to keep eyeballs on their site no matter what. If that means using highly sophisticated machine learning algorithms to lock people in a soft, warm filter bubble in which they are eternally flattered for their opinions and never encounter a reason to leave, so be it.

In fact arguably Silicon Valley's biggest social-media challenge they are facing right now is that the world is trying to force them to recognize that not everybody wants to be locked in the same bubble that a Silicon Valley liberal does, a lesson that they are still trying to resist. It would probably be worth billions for Facebook and Twitter to give up on that dream and instead help people into their own custom soft warm filter bubble. If they don't do it, somebody else will.

I'm not celebrating this, simply observing that every month the money gradient Facebook, Twitter, and so on are facing to head down this road is going to get steeper.

A better analogy might be to a broadcaster, who because of a monopoly on a scarce public resources, does have certain responsibilities.

But Twitter isn't a broadcaster (nor are they a public utility), and their value is in their network, which they literally have spent billions of dollars creating. It's theirs to do with as they see fit.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-rakes-in-45-billion-from-wirel...

You feel justified in controlling the behavior of a public company, not through the commercial code or any legal basis, but because you ex post decided the terms of service everyone agreed to upset you.

I don't think you should take for granted that this is true. Even privately owned things still must abide by the law of countries they operate in, and even that is just the most crude level of regulation and responsibility a public service has.

Yes, public service is still public even if privately owned. Anything operating open to the general public in this way has certain responsibilities (above and beyond the law) that go along with that. We live in a civic society and we depend on participants in that society living up to their responsibilities as citizens (including corporate citizens).

A lot of the problems we have in our society now result from the abdication of those responsibilities by the people (and corporations) that act in public without taking responsibility for those actions.

edit, for clarification:

my point is that private ownership does not remove a thing from social responsibilities. I understand that some people disagree with this, but it astonishes me that they do. The basic premise of civilization is finding ways to live together in ways that are a net-benefit.

Such as?

the current state of governance as well is strongly impacted by the pathologies of shareholder capitalism, which leads to businesses seeking to increase their private profits at the expense of literally everything else, including a scorched earth approach to legal regulation that serves the public benefit. the financing of climate-change denial propaganda campaigns by the coal industry is a very good example of this. another good example would be the private prison industry, and its associated lobbyists seeking to increase rates of incarceration.

this applies to individuals as well though, not just corporations. in many places, people have abdicated their responsibilities to their communities, seeking to live in walled off communities that have no interaction with "others" outside the barricades.

I could go on. I think you get the idea.

Sure, the government might not be spying on every word I say, but if the only way for me to connect to the internet is through for-profit companies, who are obligated to spy on every word I say to maximize shareholder value, is there any practical difference from living in a surveillance state?

Sure, the government might not be able to send goons after me in my home or my friend's home, but if the only way to get between the two is a private transportation company that asks for the government's goons, is there any practical difference from living in a police state?

Sure, the government might not be able to control the media, but if the media has the freedom to campaign for whatever candidates they like and send their own leaders to work for the government, and non-compliant media is threatened with the inability to access stories that they need for profit, what is the difference from living in a place with state-controlled media?

I absolutely agree with the understanding that private companies can, and often should, do whatever they want. I am also the sort of person who will argue that Twitter or some Twitter-like service should be censoring violent viewpoints (I am pretty supportive of mastodon.social's Terms of Service, for instance). But that's rooted in the same belief: we need to actively make sure that our society is the society we want it to be. It's not enough to make sure that our government is the government we want it to be, and treat everything between the government and the common man as an uncontrollable inevitability.

Fighting for the government to give freedom to corporations to do whatever they wish is very different from fighting for freedom for people.

To be more clear, Twitter's customers are corporations and special interest's groups, not regular non-paying end-users.

The number of meaningful tweets I see these days is just drowned out by people discussing global brands or whatever manufactured controversy is running around this week (that stupid Pepsi commercial for example).

Also, the news media is lazy and doesn't research stories anymore; they just look at trending topics on Twitter (which is honestly a really, really bad barometer for any sort of public sentiment given how much of Twitter is controlled by bots).

But yeah, I agree with you. Unless you're paying to get tweets removed, you're the product.

Twitter is not a natural monopoly, not a monopoly, and it's not even clear that it will remain the incumbent leading platform.

Do you believe every website should be shut down if they don't have a comments section on every page? Should Google be forced to abandon PageRank because it censors shitty content?

Perhaps the core problem is that the "comment box" is a fundamentally unscalable tool. Instead of putting up a piece of content and letting everybody slap whatever they want on the end of it, maybe everybody needs to be given their own space, with no comment box. Maybe people should have to active seek out "comments" without having it pushed into their face. If "someone" built a system around that idea instead, perhaps we'd get a more stable structure.

(This, incidentally, harmonizes nicely with my other post that if you want to make money on this, you need to fundamentally rethink the whole situation and the entire incentive structure, not just create "X, but without ads!")

The mall owners probably like free speech as a concept and may even be anti-abortion themselves, but people yelling and waving objectionable banners around upset the other customers and are interfering with the business the mall owners are trying to operate.

> and you can't easily move your followers

So you mean people will keep using Twitter even if they delete some tweets?

Gonna have to roll my eyes pretty hard at this. These are privately owned servers, they can delete whatever content they want off of them, if you don't like it, you're totally free to host your own server and content.

You're obviously still seeing the world through this fanciful lens of Mom And Pop corporate libertarianism. But there's more to that story. The more power you pour into Mom and Pop, the less they resemble their usual run-of-the-mill town grocer, and the more they become The Town itself in their own right.

Corporations are graduating from companies and becoming as powerful or more powerful than many nations.

While you roll your eyes, many of us are seeing the greater trend of a world no longer run by countries and constitutions, but by companies and contracts. Worlds where you can't turn around without being faced once again with the company you think it's so easy to just "leave".

You say "get out".

It's oddly reminiscent of those saying "get out" to those who are upset that their party lost in a contentious political election.

Compare this with something like the ISPs, where consumers have to choose between one and often no alternative options in order to access internet services which are critical for participation in the economy. Unlike any individual ISP, If twitter disappeared overnight, it would have a minimal impact on the economy, society, or even the internet community in general, as most people would immediately shift over to one of the many alternatives like facebook, snapchat, or the explosion of competitors that would hit the scene or suddenly gain traction within days.

Twitter is not powerful, it is a popular messaging app where celebrities post publicly. The government isn't necessary here because consumers are not harmed by twitter sucking.

This statement is weirdly detached from reality. The value of a social network is the ability to connect to people. Unless you're, like, Oprah, you cannot unilaterally decree that everyone you follow and everyone who follows you is going to move to another social network. So yes, there is a huge thing stopping most Twitter users from moving to another platform.

This is kind of like saying, "There's nothing stopping you from eating sand." It's technically true, but eating sand will not yield the same results as eating food.

I think that statement is the one that is detached from reality; the reality where twitter is of negligible importance beyond shitposting with famous people.

> This is kind of like saying, "There's nothing stopping you from eating sand." It's technically true, but eating sand will not yield the same results as eating food.

You're comparing a choice between messaging apps with the choice between eating food (necessary to survive) and dirt, and I'm the one that is detached from reality? Nobody needs to use twitter. Let me repeat that again because it is the fundamental point that you and many others in this thread seem to be missing

Nobody needs to use twitter.

You won't die if you won't don't use it. You won't lose your job if you don't use it. You will still be able to communicate with your family, friends, and everyone you care to know online if you don't use it. There are tons of other social networking apps and websites out there. People use twitter because they like it. If the twitter userbase has a problem, they can start a trending hashtag or an internet petition or something else to get twitter to change its behavior, but twitter has no obligation to listen besides the obligation they have to corporate shareholders, because they provide their services for free and nothing prevents those users from moving to another platform.

How much value I personally assign to it is irrelevant. The bottom line is that it is not a necessity.

> You can't take one of the people I follow and substitute an arbitrary person and assume I'll get equal value. The people I follow are on Twitter, and are mostly not on "other social networking apps and websites out there.

Great. It sounds to me like you use twitter because you like to read posts from certain individuals who also prefer to post on twitter (and not some other site). Those people aren't forced to use twitter, and it isn't anything more than an inconvenience if YOU decided not to use twitter because YOU have objections to how twitter operates their core business. You want to use twitter because you want to stay up to date on "the people you follow". That is not a description of a dystopia. Being able to follow your favorite celebrities is not important (except to you personally).

Maybe we should get the government involved in regulating League of Legends balance changes since they have 100 million+ customers most of which actually spend money to use the service.

No matter how much value you derive from the specific individuals that compose your twitter feed, you are not entitled to any of it because you never entered into an agreement with twitter where you compensated them in exchange for certain guarantees, barring that or something illegal, the government has reason to get involved in what kind of content twitter choose to allow on their site, period.

Charge first leveled against the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the 17th century. Of course when push came to shove, they were nationalized by the government. But the trope has far outlasted any of the companies its been pointed at.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business....

"In social networking, there is a huge advantage to have scale. You can find almost anyone on MySpace and the more time that has been invested in the site, the more locked in people are".

None of that changes the fact that twitter is still free to do whatever they want with their own code and servers, and you're free to do the same with yours.

Social conformity is far more subtly persuasive than outright violence in this day and age.

"Choosing" to opt out of corporate ownership is equivalent to a de facto excommunication from society.

Not using twitter isn't an excommunication from society, that's absurd hyperbole that might be a sign you're living in a bubble. I don't use twitter, most people I know don't use it, I'm willing to bet most people on this forum don't use it, which is all totally anecdotal, but the effect size is massive.

Obviously not, which is why I said "opt[ing] out of corporate ownership" which includes but is not limited to Twitter, Facebook, Google, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Microsoft, Apple, Elsevier, etc.

Twitter is an incredibly important communication medium; as an example, it almost certainly was instrumental in electing Trump to the presidency. Just because it's privately owned doesn't mean we should be content to have it run like a petty authoritarian regime.

(That being said, IMHO, this is truly shortsighted means to collect a couple of bucks today, and a good way to diminish the value of the network over the long term.)

Competition & the market is all well and good, but it's not a panacea. It's very easy to reach a "local minimum" where there are globally bad things happened that cannot be remedied by competition, because it's too expensive/hard/impossible for a competitor to come into existence.

Perhaps, but that's not an inherent property of twitter itself, it just happens that people are there now, but the same could be said about Digg 6 years ago, or myspace 12 years ago or ICQ 20 years ago, people move around the web as trends come and go. Maybe your competitor will be the next big one, but you're not entitled to a network effect just because you don't like twitter, and neither are you entitled to dictate twitter's prerogatives just because twitter happens to be popular as of April 2017.

I don't believe in the idea of "entitled to" or not "entitled to" as absolute moral truths. We come up with a set of rules as a society and entitlements come from those rules.

It's perfectly reasonable to imagine various combinations of rules and try to guess which combination will give us the society we like most.

One possible rule is "private companies should be able to do whatever they want under all circumstances," which is what you and several others seem to be arguing here. I'm sympathetic to that viewpoint in the small, but once corporate entities reach a certain scale and omnipresence, I think it ceases to be reasonable -- in the limit as a corporate entity grows large and powerful, it becomes a government. As it approaches that limit, it should be similarly constrained.

Let me give you an example that will probably make you agree with me. Let's say Twitter decides -- since, hey, it's a private entity and can do whatever it wants with its product -- to delete any accounts that some machine-learning algorithm has identified as belonging to racial group X.

Cool or nah?

There are also many more people online now than ever before, but nothing fundamental has changed.

> Many reporters basically live on Twitter; it's at the center our media world.

You mean they "use" twitter? So what? Real journalists are outside chasing down stories in the real world, not retweeting crap on twitter as literally anyone is capable of. If a journalist "basically lives on Twitter", they're a crap journalist. Feel free to paste a few twitter feeds from famous journalists and incredulously ask me "so is THIS person a crap journalist?". I'll maintain, if they're not a crap journalist, any work that has elevated them to the status of renowned journalist has absolutely nothing to do with twitter. As far as content goes, almost everyone agrees that twitter is crap, it just happens that a lot of famous people crap there as well.

> private companies should be able to do whatever they want under all circumstances," which is what you and several others seem to be arguing here.

I am not arguing anything even remotely close to this. I don't think private companies should be able to break the law, for example. What I'm arguing is that it is the prerogative of a private company to decide what they host and delete from the servers that they pay for and administer. The public is not paying twitter any money, nor are they forced to use twitter, nor is twitter even that important. Just because celebrities use twitter doesn't mean it's an important societal institution. I'll admit that twitter has had an important cultural impact because it is popular, but just because something is popular does not mean the government should regulate it. Once again, nobody needs or is forced to use twitter.

> as a corporate entity grows large and powerful, it becomes a government

I'm sorry but this is totally absurd. Twitter does not have the power to levy taxes or a standing army or literally any influence or authority over your life at all beyond what you give it. Twitter is a glorified messaging app that happens to be popular with celebrities. That's it. The technology isn't even special or unique besides the scaling concerns.

> Let's say Twitter decides -- since, hey, it's a private entity and can do whatever it wants with its product -- to delete any accounts that some machine-learning algorithm has identified as belonging to racial group X.

Is that "cool"? Nah, I think racism is uncool, and it would piss off a lot of twitter users and non-users (like myself), but hosting a racist website is not illegal, and I don't think it should be. At most you should be entitled to your money back, and since you didn't pay any, you're not entitled to anything.

You're never seen a breaking news story come out through twitter in a way that's not possible without instant social media?

> I am not arguing anything even remotely close to this. I don't think private companies should be able to break the law, for example.

Missing the point. This is a discussion about theoretically changing those laws.

> nobody needs or is forced to use twitter

I mean, nobody needs newspapers either. A lot of unnecessary things are very important.

> I'm sorry but this is totally absurd. Twitter does not have the power to levy taxes or a standing army or literally any influence or authority over your life at all beyond what you give it.

Look at walmart. They have half a trillion dollars of money flowing through them. In terms of GDP they would be the ~25th largest country in the world. You think that money doesn't have ridiculous amounts of power just because they don't have a standing army?

> At most you should be entitled to your money back

Imagine for a second that twitter grew to become as important as an ISP. Let's say 90% of the alexa top 10000 required a twitter login to use. Or getting cell phone coverage from a national company required a twitter login. Would you still say they're entitled to discriminate? Is there any threshold of impact on people's lives where you change your mind?

The same thing is possible via facebook or reddit or even yahoo.com which not only gets more traffic than twitter, but has a more homogenized front-page which would have a bigger impact on how many eyeballs see a story.

> I mean, nobody needs newspapers either. A lot of unnecessary things are very important.

And? Should the government force the newspaper to print or remove specific content (outside concerns with the law)? Now that sounds like a dystopia. If you don't like the content of the paper, you can call it a rag, pick up an alternative paper and move on with your day, that is like the quintessential example against your position.

> Look at walmart. They have half a trillion dollars of money flowing through them. In terms of GDP they would be the ~25th largest country in the world. You think that money doesn't have ridiculous amounts of power just because they don't have a standing army?

And? What's your point? Twitter has 2000 employees and can barley turn a profit, Walmart is the largest employer and the largest distributor of foodstuffs and textiles in the U.S. The differences are pretty obvious. Twitter is irrelevant in comparison to walmart.

> Imagine for a second that twitter grew to become as important as an ISP. Let's say 90% of the alexa top 10000 required a twitter login to use. Or getting cell phone coverage from a national company required a twitter login. Would you still say they're entitled to discriminate?

Well that extreme hypothetical is obviously completely different from reality where nobody needs to use twitter for anything. Literally nothing requires twitter, certainly not something as important as getting phone service or having access to literally ANY other website. Your contrived scenario is a great contrast to how irrelevant twitter actually is.

Having your posts deleted from a private forum is about as benign as it gets.

I know Mastadon is trying to do something like this, but IMO I think it has be premised on a centralized platform with direct democratic control if it's ever to gain steam.

That is why things like privately run blogs, forums and email lists are ultimately very important...