Item — HN Reader

I read, and re-read the article and I am yet to understand how a protocol will help what the author describes in the first few paragraphs. (BTW very nicely walked around that hot bowl of mess!)

First, Usenet was just as much of a dumpster fire as Reddit et al. in some branches (alt. I am looking at you). The rest (comp. soc. sci. etc) were heavily self moderated.

Second, I am not sure the author is clear on what is the primary product of social media, as I see it. We, the users are the product. By moving to a protocol, there is little to no opportunity to capture private information about the product. (Not complexity, too big, or filter bubble.)

Why would a platform give up such income stream?

Am I misunderstanding what the author means by protocol here?

3 comments

I don't think zero-moderation is possible, at a minimum you'll have to ban bots and spam. The larger problem is concentration of communities in 3-4 big providers, there was heavy moderation before, but it was easy to move to a different community if you didn't like it.

The whole idea of protocols instead of platforms is that there's no central owner to turn evil or foot the bill (having to make money to scale up to user growth can create a conflict of interest). Users aren't as locked-in as they would be on a closed platform.

I wrote about this in detail last night: https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication...

Users aren't necessarily the product in social media; this is only true of mainstream centralized networks.

What is to stop the inevitable roll up from a protocol into a platform?

The protocol is presumably quite open, searchable and crawlable. Any platform would simply start with a client, then improve upon it and eventually users would orbit the platform rather than the protocol.

Long comment ahead. TLDR: This is a really good point; I'll need some time to think about this issue, and might even make a follow-up to my WhatsApp blog entry addressing it.

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It looks like there are two ways this can happen: 1) transformation and 2) migration.

1. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: keep adding proprietary bits on top of the protocol until everyone's using what is essentially a proprietary platform.

2. A full migration. This is what happened to IM platforms that were once built atop Jabber/XMPP, like Google Talk.

I think the best way to keep this from happening is to make the open protocol robust enough to cover others' needs, and to get a large user base using different compliant client/server implementations to connect with each other. This is what's keeping Google's grip on email from growing more than it already has, and what prevented Microsoft from doing an EEE on the Web through Internet Explorer.

When diversity drops, an open platform can grow closed and allow domestication. Independent email providers must reckon with Google's spam filters, and non-Chromium browsers (Gecko-based, and to a lesser extend, Webkit-based browsers) are often treated as second-class citizens.

I might expand this into a follow-up article. While this article was an attempt at raising awareness and getting people to change their decision-making process when choosing platforms, my next article could be a call to action in which I encourage technical users to try clients/servers outside the mainstream and recommend good ones to their friends/families.

Thanks for your feedback, and for possibly inspiring my next post.

He's advocating for the users to move away from the platforms, not for the platforms to change (or surrender) their business model.