> We believe that all humans are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of their gender identity, religion, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, or beliefs.
> If you do not agree with this principle, Post is not for you. We believe in freedom of speech and will oppose any government's attempt to censor speech on our platform. However, we have rules, which we plan to rigorously enforce via content moderation, with the help of our community.
These all seem like lofty goals, as they themselves characterize it, but how exactly is any of this going to be accomplished? This is just a list of want-to-haves. Having these goals doesn't make you unique. What tech, tools, and processes you have to make them a reality is what makes you unique. What exactly are those here?
If you want to recreate "fun social media", focus on the things that made it fun in the first place and remove everything else. And you'll be too late, because plenty of apps (TikTok the most notable one, and others like BeReal, Gas, Snapchat) are doing that very well today.
If the goal is to create a "fun" political discussion forum, well then best of luck with that. They are going to need a lot more than just goals and prayers.
Nail on head right here.
I was never big on social media, got into StatusNet (later ActivityPub) back in 2017 because it seemed cool technically.
So for years it was a very nice place where people mostly discussed very niche topics like computers and art.
Then Elon decided to stir the pot by trying to buy twitter and two huge waves of twitter users came over in 2022.
Now it's toxic, and I honestly believe it's because of the political and news discussions. Well they go hand in hand because people link to the news about what's going on in politics, and this is the catalyst.
Maybe the scientific approach to manufacturing and maintaining adoption and the ways to do it was part of the issue.
Experiencing this early way expanded your mind and viewpoints, instead of feeding your more on the track you are to keep you scrolling. It wasn’t as much as everything was new, only that there were so many different things being experienced by others.
Unfortunately, things went towards depth instead of breadth and folks doubled down instead of discovering and being often to viewpoints and things they didn’t know anything about.
Still, maybe there’s a path forward to have a better self discovery service that’s focused on growing throw exposing to new ideas instead of doubling down on what you are today and cementing that in place.
The primacy effect is powerful for good things as much as not.
teenagers still experience it the same way.
That just isn't possible. If you try and "oppose any government's attempt to censor speech on our platform" you'll just be arrested on terrorism charges and face 25 years in jail unless you take your site down or give backdoor access.[0]
I fucking HATE these people with zero experience coming along and saying "oh we're free speech", you can bet your ass they'll cave on the first DMCA/GDPR/takedown/door kicked in notice they get.
Note. I'm not in anyway condoning "hate speech" or any other abuses of free speech, but I'm just annoyed that these kind of people shit out these meaningless words without any understanding of what "true" free speech entails. And there's a lot more bad than good in actually supporting it.
[0] personal experience
Uhh, can you elaborate?
No thanks. I already see where this one is going. Chronology and non-personalizing has become a good litmus test over the last decade of social.
I'll get my news, viral and not, on Mastodon instead. It's such a relief to be there. Like being able to breathe fresh air, not a stale echo chamber that is built for me.
The people on the server are somehow all like minded people. There is rarely any disagreeing going on. The missing exposure to diverse perspective makes mastodon boring to me, and is the reason why I stopped using it.
Maybe I used it wrong ¯\(°_°)/¯
Examples of echo chamber behaviour on Mastodon: all differing replies are labelled as “replyguys”, but agreeing replies are allowed. Defederation is common due to drama between administrators. Debates are discouraged and free speech is commonly villianised.
Examples of outrage behaviour on Mastodon: Check out the Fediblock hashtag (don’t), which has a big “outrage of the week” tone, everything from Hive to Raspberry Pi to journalists.
I’ll try to add a bit of value to my comment. The way I’m resolving this is to recognise this and filter them out actively. This is one place where algorithms do indeed make it harder (because it can “sneak back in”). Particularly, I filter out all political posts and any anger posts, especially anger posts about an out-group (“us vs them”).
Is this creating an echo chamber as well? Maybe. But I can try rationalising this by saying that an echo chamber of neutrality is better than an echo chamber of a particular side, political or otherwise.
But for a certain type of software and information retrieval / news exchange, that builds on all this stuff we pay for, hurrah, we dont have to pay, not with money anyway, we just have to relinquish a bit a value (become a transparent, monitored and manipulated object).
Spot the odd business model. A business model that combines obvious amorality and social regression with economic shortsightness: You cannot build the digital society solely on monetizing personal data.
Yes, people will have to pay for journalism in the digital age, just like they have to pay individually for everything else that is not a public good paid collectively via taxes.
How we get there is not so important. No, people cannot be bothered to subscribe to hundreds of individual sources. We need decent intermediares (many of them and competing) that will (for a fee, lets say €10 per month) provide access to a basket of newspapers, journals etc.
The idea is an old one but executing it is difficult when you have to compete against above said aberrant business model. Sometimes politicians and legislators need to grow a spine or otherwise the very system that empowered them will collapse
Keeping in mind that most things which are paid for in this way do not meet the economic definition of a "public good" and therefore could have been provided efficiently by private entities for profit.
"News" is different.
At its core, without external regulations, "information" is not rivalrous: If I know something, that does not preclude you from knowing it. If I make a decision based on that information, that does not preclude you from making other decisions using that information (in contrast, if I eat a particular apple, you cannot eat the same apple).
Further, to the chagrin of many, "information", at its core, is not excludable in that there is always a way in which it can be transmitted which has frustrated and continues to frustrate many who seek to control it.
"News" is different though. Because "news" is usually something that demands attention now. Human attention is a constrained resource both because time is limited and because of cognitive constraints. Therefore, if one wants to understand what to do with this piece of "news", one may not be ability to process the this other one. Further, one can be excluded from receiving "news": Sure, you may get to find out eventually, but only people who pay for X can get the "news" immediately in a digestable way etc.
When private entities try to provide information people value, there will be a variety of them, competing, contradicting etc.
When a non-accountable body is charged with providing information that all must receive with funds collected in a way that is unrelated to what people want from the information they receive, guess what will happen.
Information in its various manifestations (from a song, to a painting, to an answer to a coding question, to a piece of knowledge about the universe, to news updates about states of the human world etc) requires some human effort to be generated but can then be 1) replicated indefinitely at practically zero cost and 2) modified, adapted, integrated, reused in infinite ways using algorithms, to the point of potentially wiping out any original signal in an ocean of digital noise
The impact of this inescapable reality is explosive for all sorts of economic and political assumptions that have dominated practically all our historical experience [0] I see not evidence whatsoever that we are (collectively) coming to terms with this dynamic so the immediate future will continue being "interesting".
The positive scenario is that the zero marginal cost society will somehow find ways to preserve humanistic principles: Find ways to refactor and control all this digital tech so that the focus is once again on humans, their welfare and truthful relations with other humans.
[0] information processing seems to have started with agricultural oligarchies etching cuneiform on stone to keep records of tax and loans
Users are shown a headline, an associated picture, and first 2-4 sentences of an article. Then they can buy the rest for ¢1-5. It feels like something that could be very easily exploited by clickbait. Although it currently does not seem to be.
I do like the current assortment of news. It's not like other social media sites where news content is personalized to the user's likes and dislikes, or biases. Unfortunately, it looks like Post. are looking into news personalization. I just really miss the time when facts like what's relevant in the world were not "personalized".
How can you expect to build a presence in a world with infinite options if you make people wait some indeterminate time to use your app?
Sorry. Might as well not launch until you're ready to take the load. And if moderation is the concern, it's better to build a reputation system that unlocks features over time rather than block it out altogether.
Would you rather be a 1k user app where no one is excluded or would you rather be a 100k user app while excluding 5k people.
Implying what, that other companies don't?
People think social media was freeloading off of newspapers, but the reality imo is that the internet killed classifieds and consolidated the market around a handful of national papers (NYT et Al). News and especially political news is one of main things that make social media so miserable, so if anything platforms would have preferred to have less of it.
You almost had a monopoly on advertising within the geographic area that you served. If a company wanted to reach people in Wilmington, Delaware their best bet by far was to buy ads in (I just looked it up) "The News Journal".
You could afford to hire a lot of reporters.
Online advertising - first Craigslist, which chomped up the classifieds section, and then Google and Facebook, which provided access to your audience with better metrics and lower rates - means that business model doesn't really work any more.
Newspapers still haven't found a model that comes anywhere close to replacing that.
It’s really classifieds that killed it. Maybe not in terms of absolute dollar values, but they are were way up there in ROI per unit effort. Those going away really took away a lot of runway.
Clear Channel could not exist without this Act - that should be enough on its own to condemn it.
The media is trash today because of this law. But the media is owned by those who benefited from it, so you'll never hear about this.
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Fortune Magazine: Fortune Magazine's New Owner Is Member Of Thailand's Richest Family
https://www.forbes.com/sites/linhnguyen/2018/11/09/fortune-m...
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Rolling Stone: Owned by Penske Media Corporation, owner of Variety, Deadline Hollywood, Billboard, Boy Genius Report, Robb Report, Artforum, ARTNews, and others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penske_Media_Corporation
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USA Today: Gannett. Owns the Ventura County Star, The Times Herald, The Arizona Republic, Detroit Free Press, El Paso Times, The Journal Sentinel, The Indianapolis Star, Bergen County Record, The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Columbus Dispatch, The Louisville Courier-Journal, The Des Moines Register, The Florida Times-Union, The Nashville Tennessean, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, The Memphis Commercial Appeal, Asbury Park Press, The Wilmington News Journal, Knoxville News-Sentinel, The White Plains Journal News, Reno Gazette-Journal, Providence Journal, The Ridgecrest Daily Independent, Utica Observer Dispatch, The Gadsden Times, Naples Daily News, and others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Gannet...
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SF Chronicle: Owned by Hearst Communications, who also owns The Danbury News-Times, Greenwich Time, The Stamford Advocate, Connecticut Post, The Middletown Press, New Haven Register, The Norwalk Hour, The Register Citizen, The Alton Telegraph, Edwardsville Intelligencer, Jacksonville Journal-Courier, Huron Daily Tribune, Midland Daily News, Albany Times Union, Beaumont Enterprise, Houston Chronicle, Laredo Morning Times, Midland Reporter-Telegram, Plainview Daily Herald, San Antonio Express-News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, half of A+E Networks, 20% of ESPN, Inc., and Hearst Television, owner of 35 television stations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearst_Communications
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearst_Television#Television_s...
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Reuters: Thomson Reuters. I don't know how to start figuring out all that they own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_Reuters
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LA Times: Owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong, who also owns The San Diego Union-Tribune and a 24% share in the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, The Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel, South Florida's Sun-Sentinel, The Virginian-Pilot, and the Hartford Courant, among many others.
https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/la-times-owner-patrick-soon-sh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribune_Publishing
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Yahoo!: Owned by Apollo Global Management. Again, who knows? It's enormous, and from a skim of the Wikipedia article, they even own a local grocery store chain with a location a few blocks from me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Global_Management
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ProPublica: Independent, but in a particular way that is very common among a certain type of nonprofit.
> While the Sandler Foundation provided ProPublica with significant financial support, it also has received funding from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Atlantic Philanthropies. ProPublica and the Knight Foundation have various connections. For example, Paul Steiger, executive chairman of ProPublica, is a trustee of the Knight Foundation. In like manner, Alberto Ibarguen, the president and CEO of the Knight Foundation is on the board of ProPublica.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica#Funding
Also: "ProPublica, along with other major news outlets, received grant funding from Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who was subsequently arrested for fraud."
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Semafor: I have no idea who owns it.
Media startup Semafor says it will buy out Sam Bankman-Fried’s $10M stake
https://nypost.com/2023/01/18/semafor-plans-to-buy-out-sam-b...
> Semafor is a news website founded in 2022 by Ben Smith (the former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News and media columnist at The New York Times) and Justin B. Smith, the former CEO of Bloomberg Media Group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semafor_(website)
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The Conversation US: Nonprofit, independent. But very connected.
> The website was launched in Australia in March 2011. The network has since expanded globally with a variety of local editions originating from around the world. In September 2019, The Conversation reported a monthly online audience of 10.7 million users, and a combined reach of 40 million people when including republication. The site employed over 150 full-time staff as of 2020.
> Each regional or national edition of The Conversation is an independent not-for-profit or charity funded by various sources such as partnered universities and university systems, governments and other grant awarding bodies, corporate partners, and reader donations.
> The U.S. pilot was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and four other foundations. Maria Balinska became editor in 2015, before moving to the US-UK Fulbright Commission. She was succeeded by Beth Daley, who became editor and general manager in 2019. The U.S. edition of The Conversation was originally based at Boston University, and that was its first partnered university. It later opened offices in Atlanta and New York. Other partnered institutions include Harvard University and MIT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation_(website)
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Democracy Docket: The Arabella Group and Priorities USA Action.
> Arabella Advisors is a Washington, D.C.-based for-profit consulting company that advises left-leaning donors and nonprofits about where to give money and serves as the hub of a politically liberal "dark money" network. It was founded by former Clinton administration appointee Eric Kessler. The Arabella network spent nearly $1.2 billion in 2020.
> Organizations incubated by and affiliated with Arabella Advisors include the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the New Venture Fund, the Hopewell Fund, and the Windward Fund. These groups have been active in various efforts to oppose the Trump administration and to organize opposition to numerous Republican politicians and policies.
> According to The Atlantic, Arabella Advisors has "undeniably benefited from the rush of panicked political giving on the left during the Trump years." In 2020, the Sixteen Thirty Fund donated $410 million toward defeating Trump and winning Democratic control of the U.S. Senate. Because of the way they are legally structured, Arabella Advisors and its affiliated groups are not required to disclose their donors, and they have not opted to do so. Billionaires George Soros and Pierre Omidyar have disclosed multi-million donations to the network. Politico has described the Sixteen Thirty Fund as a "left-leaning, secret-money group", writing that the group "illustrates the extent to which the left embraced the use of 'dark money' to fight for its causes in recent years. After decrying big-money Republican donors over the last decade, as well as the Supreme Court rulings that flooded politics with more cash, Democrats now benefit from hundreds of millions of dollars of undisclosed donations as well."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabella_Advisors
> Priorities USA Action is a progressive political action committee and is the largest Democratic Party super PAC. Founded in 2011, it supported Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign. It was the primary super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. It focused mainly on high-dollar donors. As of September 2016, it had amassed $132 million in support of Clinton. The top six donors to the super PAC have given $43.5 million, which is a third of the money collected by Priorities USA Action in the 2016 election cycle. The super PAC raised $21.7 million in August 2016, marking its largest monthly fundraising haul.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priorities_USA_Action
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MIT Technology Review: Owned by MIT.
> Before the 1998 re-launch, the editor stated that "nothing will be left of the old magazine except the name." It was therefore necessary to distinguish between the modern and the historical Technology Review. The historical magazine had been published by the MIT Alumni Association, was more closely aligned with the interests of MIT alumni, and had a more intellectual tone and much smaller public circulation. The magazine, billed from 1998 to 2005 as "MIT's Magazine of Innovation", and from 2005 onwards as simply "published by MIT", focused on new technology and how it is commercialized; was sold to the public and targeted at senior executives, researchers, financiers, and policymakers, as well as MIT alumni.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Technology_Review
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World Politics Review: As far as I can tell, owned by a guy named Hampton Stephens. Has a pleasant enough face.
> Remember when social media was fun, introduced you to big ideas and cool people, and actually made you smarter? Remember when it didn't waste your time and make you angry or sad? When you could disagree with someone without being threatened or insulted? We want to bring that back with Post.
I remember no such thing. The only difference between the old and the new internet is in the new internet, the platform company tries to decide what's allowed and unallowed discource, whereas in the past you could find all sorts of unorthodox and heretical discussions in lots of places! They still exist, but incredibly more difficult to find because they are drowned out by the mainstream which has gotten a lot bigger.
If you can't moderate against your policies at scale, you'll be no more successful. Even using 'clever' AI and algorhythms is useless vs a manageable community size and good moderators.
You can't be a social platform for all and have it both ways in opening free speech up on all topics but with easy moderation.
There's a very good reason most internet forums had/have specific rules against discussing politics and religion, and here we are trying to include them at scale. Ha. This is especially hard if you want it to be publicly open for all on all topics.
the riff-raff can be subject to moderation policies, but there's no need to hire moderators to watch over reuters or propublica.
This sounds like the same talking point that Rupert Murdock used to convince Australia to pass a law that basically forced Facebook and Google to give him some of their revenue.
https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/australia-pressured-goo...
But every time that Facebook and Google say “okay instead of us paying you, we just won’t put you on our site”, publishers start whining
Yes, it was before the journalists found Twitter.
Journalism is dead. There is only propaganda (2-3 kinds of propaganda). Or maybe it was always the case only that I never noticed that.
There are 8 billion people in this world, close to 200 countries. Every second, there are millions of different events happen everywhere. Someone is born, someone dies, someone is killed, someone is promoted, some building is built, some building is being demolished.
There is simply no way to describe all this in any newspaper. The more I live, the more I see that every paper, TV channel, blogger, carefully selects tiny percent of facts out of billions of facts that happen every day. Only those facts that push the agenda or fits existing view.
There's no independent news and can't be. I don't know even what happens in a district which is 5 km away from my house. Thinking that I'm perfectly aware of what happens in some country that is 1000, 2000, or 6000 km away from my home is insanity.
