I agree that regulation could solve some problems, but I keep thinking about other solutions.
Many people do not decide in detail what their communication infrastructure looks like. They choose one of the existing solutions, and sometimes all simple solutions suck.
For example, I wanted to have a blog. Decades ago, I tried to program my own content management system in PHP, which in hindsight was incredibly stupid. I wasted lots of time creating a barely working product with minimum functionality. I should have spent that time writing the articles instead, even if I’d have to post them as HTML pages with no interaction. It took me months of works, with fewer than 10 articles total.
Then I decided to switch on an existing system instead of creating my own. There was a newspaper that included a blogging section open for everyone, so I created by blog there. My writing productivity increased by an order of magnitude. Now I didn’t have to write and maintain the code, only to write the text and add a few pictures. But the framework was no longer under my control. If the owners wanted to display ads next to my article, or track my readers, there was nothing I could do about that. (A few years later I have abandoned the system; not because of any of these reasons, but because I was not allowed to moderate the comment section, and it got too bad for my taste.)
Today I have a blog on Substack. There are no automatically playing ads and similar things. There may be other annoying things, such as the buttons telling you to subscribe. Whenever these annoyances are optional, I avoid them.
My point is, doing everything myself is too much work, and when I use someone else’s system, I don’t have the control. My blog on Substack is much better than my previous blog, but it’s not because of me. It is because I now have an option, infrastructure, that I didn’t have previously. However, if tomorrow Substack decided to add automatically playing videos under my articles, my options would be to either give up, or try finding another imperfect solution.
If someone could create something like Substack, but technically better, and less annoying and more respecting of privacy, I would be happy to move there. Similarly, if someone invented a less annoying version of Facebook, that would still be simple enough for my mother to use.
But these things cost money, and are typically created with a profit motive. And once you do something with a profit motive, it is tempting to start profit maximizing… and then you get all the bad things.
A possible solution would be to create a non-profit organization for creating alternative infrastructure. Simple to use, so that a person with almost zero tech skill could start using it in five minutes. Perhaps with some way to make money (e.g. I think it is fair when Substack takes a fraction of the subscriber money; generally, if you help people make money, taking a cut not exceeding 30% sounds fair), ideally to make just enough money to support the development and maintenance of the system. Make a better version of Substack, and a better version of Facebook, perhaps both of them, integrated. Avoid all the features that maximize engagement. I think this could still work, if you could get some good bloggers to move there, then a few people would start debating under their articles, then they would create their own timelines… and gradually the network would grow.
Making this as a non-profit that explicitly tries to do the right thing sounds to me more reasonable that playing whack a mole with profit-maximizing organizations—trying to ban specific problematic things, while they keep inventing new ones.
I agree that regulation could solve some problems, but I keep thinking about other solutions.
Many people do not decide in detail what their communication infrastructure looks like. They choose one of the existing solutions, and sometimes all simple solutions suck.
For example, I wanted to have a blog. Decades ago, I tried to program my own content management system in PHP, which in hindsight was incredibly stupid. I wasted lots of time creating a barely working product with minimum functionality. I should have spent that time writing the articles instead, even if I’d have to post them as HTML pages with no interaction. It took me months of works, with fewer than 10 articles total.
Then I decided to switch on an existing system instead of creating my own. There was a newspaper that included a blogging section open for everyone, so I created by blog there. My writing productivity increased by an order of magnitude. Now I didn’t have to write and maintain the code, only to write the text and add a few pictures. But the framework was no longer under my control. If the owners wanted to display ads next to my article, or track my readers, there was nothing I could do about that. (A few years later I have abandoned the system; not because of any of these reasons, but because I was not allowed to moderate the comment section, and it got too bad for my taste.)
Today I have a blog on Substack. There are no automatically playing ads and similar things. There may be other annoying things, such as the buttons telling you to subscribe. Whenever these annoyances are optional, I avoid them.
My point is, doing everything myself is too much work, and when I use someone else’s system, I don’t have the control. My blog on Substack is much better than my previous blog, but it’s not because of me. It is because I now have an option, infrastructure, that I didn’t have previously. However, if tomorrow Substack decided to add automatically playing videos under my articles, my options would be to either give up, or try finding another imperfect solution.
If someone could create something like Substack, but technically better, and less annoying and more respecting of privacy, I would be happy to move there. Similarly, if someone invented a less annoying version of Facebook, that would still be simple enough for my mother to use.
But these things cost money, and are typically created with a profit motive. And once you do something with a profit motive, it is tempting to start profit maximizing… and then you get all the bad things.
A possible solution would be to create a non-profit organization for creating alternative infrastructure. Simple to use, so that a person with almost zero tech skill could start using it in five minutes. Perhaps with some way to make money (e.g. I think it is fair when Substack takes a fraction of the subscriber money; generally, if you help people make money, taking a cut not exceeding 30% sounds fair), ideally to make just enough money to support the development and maintenance of the system. Make a better version of Substack, and a better version of Facebook, perhaps both of them, integrated. Avoid all the features that maximize engagement. I think this could still work, if you could get some good bloggers to move there, then a few people would start debating under their articles, then they would create their own timelines… and gradually the network would grow.
Making this as a non-profit that explicitly tries to do the right thing sounds to me more reasonable that playing whack a mole with profit-maximizing organizations—trying to ban specific problematic things, while they keep inventing new ones.