Google is largely pay to play for search, content creators are having to leverage twitter, instagram, facebook and pinterest to try and deliver traffic so 90% of our business is derrived from creating value for thse social networks and search engines in hopes of return.
It really blows when the majority of your day isn't adding value to the web but trying to play in the perpetual game of fighting for morsels of traffic from the giants.
and as we've seen, those with money can manipulate...
I think the organizational model is relevant. Would we be having the discussions around the most popular social network selling our data and completely disrespecting user privacy if the most popular social network were a non-profit organization?
I have to think there is some middle ground between publicly traded megacorp and complete decentralization.
The middle ground is instead of a few major players in a given market, we have thousands of players in a market that people can move between easily. Kind of like mastodon, but every node is a different community with different interests. It would be like if we “upgraded” all of the existing forums on the internet today.
So instead of Facebook, we should have 10,000 smaller “social networks” all competing. This sounds like a much better outcome than never trying to compete with Facebook or twitter or google.
How can these large tech companies today serve the interest of every “user”? They can’t.
Decentralization is nice, but you don’t even need it to solve this problem.
There's technically nothing to prevent sending messages from facebook to twitter etc, those companies just didn't want it to happen so they didn't agree on a way to do it, that is a protocol.
Whether Facebook and Twitter end up supporting such a standard may well depend on how expansively the European Court of Justice interprets the right to Data Portability that is being introduced by the GDPR:
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/
Certainly when read in the light of existing competition law (not to mention the bad reputation Facebook in particular has right now, nor any cynical political protectionist goals that an EU court might have), it is possible that large near-monopolistic American social media companies may end up being forced to allow automated pushing of user's posts to friends on 3rd party competing websites.
But not every transaction is a valid vote.
Quite possibly. Non-profits still need to make money.
The question is what does a centrally controlled organization buy us? Why is that any kind of good compromise for users over a decentralized protocol?
NPR basically has a monopoly on public radio, and yet we don't constantly hear about all the evil stuff they're doing. Why? Because they're not being run as a loss leader to sell missiles and landmines or whatever.
Centralization isn't bad as long as the central organization exists to serve the relevant stakeholders in an equitable way.
NPR does not have a monopoly and it's answerable to the member stations so it's not a great example of centralization but I agree that centralization is not inherently bad.
If you think about that phrase for a second you'll realize how ridiculous it sounds.
There is nothing about NPR that discourages other public broadcasters.
(I'm not sure I'd call Google or FB a monopoly by that definition either, despite their market shares.
> and yet we don't constantly hear about all the evil stuff they're doing
We do, though, from conservatives.
Money is focus.
I strongly disagree. These giant monopolies on different corners of tech caused by centralization are the very reason we end up having to have these stupid discussions about how everything should work.
All of this crap tied up in walled gardens means we just have to cry on the outside with #DeleteFacebook hash tags and hope stuff changes.
You claim we need to change the business model. I claim the business model is irrelevant if we instead focus on open source and distributed platforms.