Remove Section 230 protections for profit driven social networks, carve out exemptions for public goods and other sites operated without a profit intent (Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Hacker News, etc) and the problem solves itself (the cost to police/moderate the platform rises above a point where the revenue returned is no longer sufficient to make the endeavor worthwhile). Social media is toxic due to the social fabric impact being externalized and socialized while the profits are privatized.

I could get behind some more restrictions on websites of a certain size, but putting any burden on brand-new web site owners beyond urgently dealing with problematic content is too much of a burden. It just acts as a moat for powerful incumbents, and they have far too deep moats as it is.

That would just destroy all user generated content on the internet....

It would destroy user generated content below the value of moderation cost on certain platforms.

You can't know the quality of content before it is submitted. It would effectively turn the internet into TV. Did you forget web hosting is also protected by section 230? Web hosting as we know it would go away. Every site update would need to be pre-approved by the web hosting company.

Sadly, the solution so described amounts to nationalizing free speech (between the removal of protections and the "blessing" of some few channels).

Wouldn't fly in the US, so it's a non-starters since those companies are based in the US.

Except in reality it's the opposite.

Free Speech is SO IMPORTANT that it can't be fettered by private companies for private gain like Facebook.

No disagreement that free speech is important, but the solution proposed up-thread wouldn't safeguard it. In practice, it would instead limit controversial content to only a small set of sites while everything else (for fear of lawsuits currently headed off by S230 protections) would either close shop or become more moderated than it already is.

... This is in addition to the legal / philosophical criticism that the government repealing S230 protection for all but a few websites would be equivalent to the government providing libel-lawsuit protection to only a few state-sanctioned media outlets. Wholly incompatible with the first amendment.

It really doesn't matter the system - people are already upset that people they don't like are doing things like selling NFTs (please don't buy NFTs, they're cringe)

OK, Facebook is now a non profit which only income comes from selling ad space to "Definitely Not Facebook Inc" at such a price which avoids racking up profits. (Like ad house of old.)

Non profit can't have shareholders, and there are regulations around how non profits operate financially.

Define social media? Does discord count? Does mastadon count? Do forums count? Does hacker news count? Stack overflow? Github?

All of those do count, but many people have a narrower definition because of how the term "social media" is often shorthand for Twitter, FB, IG, and similar when used in the traditional media.

My point is that if you want to ban something then you need a specific dividing line other than "like Twitter." Otherwise either everything is banned or nothing is banned since everyone just uses loopholes. And if everything is banned you better be sure you actually want everything banned.

What makes you think HN is exempt from that?

If you feel it needs fixing by killing it then why are you participating in it, and by extension validating it rather than arguing for that fix?

I could survive without HN. The internet existed before it. We had things like webrings and mailing lists that were highly personal forms of communication & aggregation.

You could even find content that you wanted online before Google made search pay-to-play.

Killing social media and requiring services (like email, etc) not be an ad-supported free model (where the product is the user) would completely transform the internet (and its balance of power) as we know it and for the better.

SomethingAwful charging $10 for an account was always/accidentally the right idea.

This, 100%. I only come to the Orange Website to see what bad ideas are currently popular in the industry, and it never fails to provide.

My consistent answer to the "if companies weren't allowed to spy on you and do other horrible shit, and if ad dollars dried up, all these sites would go away!" argument is that all those sites have value approaching zero anyway. So they go away. Oh well.

The Web loses 1% of its decent content, while the remaining 99% gets higher visibility, more funding, more interest/attention (which can improve quality, as in, say, collaborative communities like Wikipedia, or open source). The rest of the cost is the loss of a bunch of shit content that most people could/would replace with time-wasters like sudoku or Tetris or entertainment magazines, and carry on with life. Seems like a bargain to me.

You also couldn't have megalithic companies like Google that bait you into their ecosystem with "free shit" like Gmail and search completely bankrolled out of their other primary enterprise.

Google uses Ads to unevenly compete with every other software company on the planet. Google can buy your company and outpay you for engineers with what is essentially their financial fingernail clippings. The thing that's gained in this scenario is all of the talent that could be going to other things besides optimizing ads.

They use those advantages to compete with other companies and with volunteer efforts. That's another reason I'm not too worried about doom-and-gloom predictions of what would happen if we killed the ads (and spying-fed ML) golden goose: we do not know how much better protocols, free (open source) products, non-profit services (as in Wikipedia), and paid software/services would be without ad-fed giants sucking all the air out of the room at best, and deliberately using their advantages to kill things (competitors, protocols, et c.) at worst. I suspect all of those would be a whole lot better, absent the money-firehoses dependent on bad & dangerous behavior.

Excellent point, it is easy to forget the minor miracle of FOSS. Plus, without the ad revenues there would be no mega-corps vacuuming up all the new grads, so I would anticipate a significantly greater rate of innovation and FOSS contribution broadly.

There's even an interest or social-reward factor to participating in these kinds of things. Working on an open-protocol messaging client for free is a lot less rewarding when the userbase of the entire protocol is 1% or less of all online messaging, because most of that market's captured by closed platforms that forbid and/or discourage other clients, than when it works with 20+% of clients and even your non-geek friends are using the protocol, if not your particular client.

I truly think we couldn't launch something like the email protocol these days and have it gain traction, and I don't mean because of its flaws. I judge that a pretty crappy state of affairs, and I think the #1 cause is that it's so lucrative to keep your users in a position where you can track & spy on them very well, while avoiding leaking anything they're doing so that competitors can see it—IOW incentives are set up to greatly reward successful closed platforms while discouraging interoperability, so we get even more of that than we otherwise might.

> I truly think we couldn't launch something like the email protocol these days and have it gain traction...

Sadly it's worse than you expect here. Enter ElasticSearch. The company behind the innovation you propose will piggy-back on open source projects (Lucene), add a novelty to it (clustering) and choose a permissive open-source license to encourage contributions. Once hitting a significant market penetration threshold, the project then will move to a mixed-source, enterprise license model with intentionally-crippled community versions (think Neo4j, JFrog, etc).

ElasticSearch isn't even alone here, it's just the most obvious example. I've actually been insisting for a long time that we need an Apache-licensed standard solution for clustering generic applications...something useful enough that anyone can connect part A & part B to get "clustered Lucene" instead of "ElasticSearch". Something reasonably deployable (read: is monitorable, has RBAC) without massive licensing costs (read: Neo4j). Not an easy problem, for sure.

I was around at the time, and webrings were useless from the start. Mailing lists, usenet and IRC were fine but they were just as viciously combative and abusive as any social media we have now. You're looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses.

You might also be forgetting that Google first became big because they created a search engine that actually worked. Getting Altavista or Lycos to find what you were looking for was a real skill.

Webrings definitely were not useless from the start, but they were useless after a couple of months. For a very short while though, they were great, and there are even some efforts to revive the concept today.

That Google also isn't the same Google that's pay-to-play.

Care to explain why your hackernews profile says "Censors have never been on the right side of history" ?

That's not censorship.

I'm not out celebrating when a country like Turkey or something blocks Twitter.

No, I'm advocating the Amish approach. It's perfectly reasonable and noble for a society to get together and decide "we're not going to use X". There's nothing censorial about that. It's the same kind of logic people use to advocate against things like ICEs and eating meat. Are vegans trying to "censor" your meat-eating? No. It's the same kind of reasoning behind us having _any_ laws to begin with.

And I'm not even talking about blocking Twitter. I'm saying that legislatively we should make sure that no company with a product like it can do business in our country(-ies). The same way that we have laws in place that prevent companies from business practices like "dumping toxic waste next to your housing development" under threat of force (like we will fine you to hell and back and then throw you in prison). Is that censorship too?

Come back with a more thoroughly-reasoned argument, please.

I need a thoroughly reasoned argument? You are comparing twitter to physical toxic waste.