For nearly 10 years I have referenced this thread in various forums I’ve moderated. While I never entirely agreed with every aspect, it has mostly held up well as a lodestar over the years.
Until recently.
And now, with the benefit of enough sequential observation over time, I am comfortable describing what I believe is a major hidden assumption, and thereby weakness, in this entire argument:
For the concept of “walled gardens” relating to online communities to succeed and thrive, there must exist an overlay of credibly alternative platforms. Or, more directly, there must exist fair and healthy competition among and within the media upon which the discussion are taking place.
This argument was created largely before the “sciences” of social media were refined. Today, we are living with the consequences of intersecting sciences of human psychology, sociology, computer science, statistics and mathematics. Dense, voluminous texts have been penned which describe precise models for determining how to create, manage and extract-value from “online communities”. Some of those models even go so far as to involve manipulation of human physiological responses—i.e., intentional mechanisms within the platforms designed specifically to trigger release of chemicals in the human brain.
There exists an analogue for this maturity curve within television advertising. As both the medium and techniques matured, the need to evaluate how we, as a society, managed its impact fundamentally changed.
Today, in late 2018, there effectively exists no credible “public town square” whereby free speech exists as it was intended (within the intention of the US Constitution). What exists in its place is a de facto oligopoly of media companies posing as tech companies who have divided up the horizontal market and who exercise overwhelming “market power” (as in HSR power) over would-be competitors. Those competitors are then relegated to competing as “free speech purists”, which leads to the traps outlined by the original argument: a cesspool of fools and insults.
This situation allows the dominant players to then, in turn, point to the worst aspects of their would-be competitors whenever they feel threatened by them—or are otherwise politically or economically motivated. Using catch phrases like, “hate speech” or whatever “ism” catches the gestalt, the oligopolists then pressure the supply-chain of would-be competitors, forcing them out of business. They eliminate their ability to process payments. They cut off their upstream bandwidth providers. They remove their ability to be routed or resolved. They eliminate all possibility of collecting advertising revenues.
And they do all this with the virtuous facade that they, the incumbent giants, are safeguarding a “well kept garden”. All while conveniently forgetting that they only rose to such dominance by exploiting the very freedom of speech—including an early tolerance for the opinions they now so self-righteously claim to oppose.
There are various academic ways to describe this type of situation. But the solution is the same: largely unrestricted free speech and a renewed focus on one’s personal responsibility in selecting herself in or out of conversations.
There is more than a single solution to this problem. Yes, one solution is to enforce First-Amendment style free-speech requirements on the oligopolistic giants that control the majority of the discourse that happens on the Internet. Another solution would be to address the fact that there are oligopolistic giants.
My solution to the above problem would be to force tech companies to abide by interoperability standards. The reason the dominant players are able to keep up their dominance is because they can successfully exploit Metcalfe’s Law once they grow beyond a certain point. You need to be on Facebook/Twitter/etc because everyone you know is on that social network, and it requires too much energy to build the common knowledge to force a switch to a better competitor.
However, the reason it’s so costly to switch is because there is no way for a competitor to be compatible with Facebook while offering additional features of their own. I can’t build a successor social network which automatically posts content to Facebook while offering additional features that Facebook does not. If there were an open standard that all major social networks had to adopt, then it would be much easier for alternative social networks to start up, allowing us to have both well-kept gardens and relative freedom of speech. “Well-kept gardens” and “free speech” are only in apparent conflict because market forces have limited us to three or four gardens. If we allowed many more gardens, then we wouldn’t have the conflict.
For nearly 10 years I have referenced this thread in various forums I’ve moderated. While I never entirely agreed with every aspect, it has mostly held up well as a lodestar over the years.
Until recently.
And now, with the benefit of enough sequential observation over time, I am comfortable describing what I believe is a major hidden assumption, and thereby weakness, in this entire argument:
For the concept of “walled gardens” relating to online communities to succeed and thrive, there must exist an overlay of credibly alternative platforms. Or, more directly, there must exist fair and healthy competition among and within the media upon which the discussion are taking place.
This argument was created largely before the “sciences” of social media were refined. Today, we are living with the consequences of intersecting sciences of human psychology, sociology, computer science, statistics and mathematics. Dense, voluminous texts have been penned which describe precise models for determining how to create, manage and extract-value from “online communities”. Some of those models even go so far as to involve manipulation of human physiological responses—i.e., intentional mechanisms within the platforms designed specifically to trigger release of chemicals in the human brain.
There exists an analogue for this maturity curve within television advertising. As both the medium and techniques matured, the need to evaluate how we, as a society, managed its impact fundamentally changed.
Today, in late 2018, there effectively exists no credible “public town square” whereby free speech exists as it was intended (within the intention of the US Constitution). What exists in its place is a de facto oligopoly of media companies posing as tech companies who have divided up the horizontal market and who exercise overwhelming “market power” (as in HSR power) over would-be competitors. Those competitors are then relegated to competing as “free speech purists”, which leads to the traps outlined by the original argument: a cesspool of fools and insults.
This situation allows the dominant players to then, in turn, point to the worst aspects of their would-be competitors whenever they feel threatened by them—or are otherwise politically or economically motivated. Using catch phrases like, “hate speech” or whatever “ism” catches the gestalt, the oligopolists then pressure the supply-chain of would-be competitors, forcing them out of business. They eliminate their ability to process payments. They cut off their upstream bandwidth providers. They remove their ability to be routed or resolved. They eliminate all possibility of collecting advertising revenues.
And they do all this with the virtuous facade that they, the incumbent giants, are safeguarding a “well kept garden”. All while conveniently forgetting that they only rose to such dominance by exploiting the very freedom of speech—including an early tolerance for the opinions they now so self-righteously claim to oppose.
There are various academic ways to describe this type of situation. But the solution is the same: largely unrestricted free speech and a renewed focus on one’s personal responsibility in selecting herself in or out of conversations.
There is more than a single solution to this problem. Yes, one solution is to enforce First-Amendment style free-speech requirements on the oligopolistic giants that control the majority of the discourse that happens on the Internet. Another solution would be to address the fact that there are oligopolistic giants.
My solution to the above problem would be to force tech companies to abide by interoperability standards. The reason the dominant players are able to keep up their dominance is because they can successfully exploit Metcalfe’s Law once they grow beyond a certain point. You need to be on Facebook/Twitter/etc because everyone you know is on that social network, and it requires too much energy to build the common knowledge to force a switch to a better competitor.
However, the reason it’s so costly to switch is because there is no way for a competitor to be compatible with Facebook while offering additional features of their own. I can’t build a successor social network which automatically posts content to Facebook while offering additional features that Facebook does not. If there were an open standard that all major social networks had to adopt, then it would be much easier for alternative social networks to start up, allowing us to have both well-kept gardens and relative freedom of speech. “Well-kept gardens” and “free speech” are only in apparent conflict because market forces have limited us to three or four gardens. If we allowed many more gardens, then we wouldn’t have the conflict.