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.
I feel what you feel, and I agree with the dehumanizing comparison, but it is what it is. I just can’t understand the mentality of the herd because it highlights a completely different set of priorities from that of good social media environment. So I hold that comparison to all its negative contempt.
Threads comes up with minimal advertising and people join it without really caring what it does and how well it does. It comes with many of the same usability and content discoverability issues that Twitter had on a its worst of days. The hierarchy of sponsored content vs follower content vs follower interaction vs follower-of-follower content vs whatever the hell further down this clown parade Threads openly does is just completely whack. And it is still just as obfuscated as the rest in terms of being favored by its algorithm, plus monetization of content is a complete question mark. And yet people still join, and not any random person, but the every-person and the famous and the political. AOC herself ignores Mastodon and makes up an excuse, but is on Threads day one.
And Why? Why join a mediocre, underbaked, and by the numbers platform that basically doesn’t even innovate on the previous one? Because of the promise.
The promise it could be “The Next Big Thing”.
Not saying I’m above it. Not saying there’s superiority in standing to opposition to this or anything. For every thing I care about here, there will be many other things I don’t and where I frustrate someone. But it still does make me overall more jaded about the world regardless.
A trickle always precedes a flood :)
Once the herd settles, they’ll suffer just about anything to avoid having to move.
As the late great Thomas Jefferson once wrote:
all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed
Funny how we keep seeing this same tendency play out in soooo many ways in so many contexts.
I don’t like the farm animal comparisons because it’s dehumanizing and mean, but
If the yoke fits…
Love Doctrow, but this is a loooong article. I’ve used AI to summarize it:
- Big tech companies grew explosively due to network effects, but are now too big to govern effectively.
- Social media platforms in particular are poorly suited to moderate billions of diverse users and are prone to failure and scandal.
- Governments and regulators have failed to rein in big tech, often protecting companies rather than users.
- Low switching costs mean that tech companies’ growth could rapidly reverse if people leave the platforms.
- However, tech companies use acquisitions, lobbying, and legal threats to lock in users and block competitors.
- Instead of trying to fix inherently flawed large platforms, we should make it easy for people to leave them.
- If we could export networks of relationships from platforms, people would have the power to migrate based on companies’ practices.
- Allowing people to easily leave would force platforms to respect users and address problems to retain them, or else face implosion.
- The alternative is an endless cycle of scandal, ineffective reform, and accumulating ‘fire debt’ that eventually erupts in crisis.
- 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."
This is great. What AI did you use?
This was done with Claude.
Wow, thanks for this! Still giving the link a click.
Using an AI to summarize the article is likely something he would dislike. There’s a whole host of issues with putting AI between us and the written word and asking it to interpret it for us.
Like…just read, people.
I’m a fairly slow reader. I figure I’ve got something like a mild dyslexia, if I read too fast the words get all jumbled up in my head. Never was diagnosed with anything when I was in school, though looking back at it now it seems odd the way I was shadow-banned from the speed reading class in High School.
So, anyway, I’m all about getting some summaries. Yes, I realize it’s really hard for writers to condense things, and sometimes the journey of a story lifts the point. So, I’m gonna use the tools to help me out.
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 remember using StarOffice 4 and being able to edit Word and Excel files with nary a problem, and that was in 1997. Apple’s best office product at the time was AppleWorks, which had a lot of trouble with office docs, if it opened them at all
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.
