Freedom of reach IS freedom of speech

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/

by leephillips • 4 years ago

20 34 4 years ago

pluralistic.net

aredox2• 4 years ago

This whole argument is moot because it doesn't acknowledge the very obvious elephant in the room: the spam problem.

leephillips4• 4 years ago

The article mentions the spam problem repeatedly. It’s one of the main threads.

space_fountain5• 4 years ago

Does it? It mentions advertising a bit, and I think I could get to what the authors take would be, but it didn’t mention spam as far as I can tell

bitwize2• 4 years ago

The elephant in the room is the fascist problem.

Before Musk, one of the metrics by which Twitter would evaluate whether to ban someone was: how many trans people will die if we allow this person to keep tweeting? (A competing metric was, regrettably, how big a PR black eye will the far right give us if we ban them, which led to people being banned more slowly than maybe they should have.)

It's a social benefit to muzzle fascists. Fascist ideology plays to our deepest, most visceral hatreds and fears, which means it spreads like wildfire. "A lie can run halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes" and all that. And when considering whether American standards of "free speech" are universally applicable, do bear in mind that the USA is a shithole banana republic with a far worse fascist problem than most of the rest of the OECD.

lilboiluvr694• 4 years ago

If everyday citizens cannot be trusted to tell truth from fiction, or to choose democracy over fascism, how can they be trusted to elect their rulers? Why believe in democracy at all?

And while I believe wealth disparity, healthcare, and fascism are all real, sadly neglected problems in the United States, I would strongly caution you against hyperbolic criticisms. You should reflect on what you think of when you think 'banana republic', and in what ways day to day life for the average citizen of the United States are comparable to say, the average citizen of Zambia.

Georgelemental5• 4 years ago

It's true. Hateful ideologies make people see everyone who disagrees with them as threats to social order; make people equate expressing an opinion with physical violence. It's concerning that these authoritarian ideologies, in which the enlightened few want to limit the rights of the dumb, uneducated, deplorable many "for their own good," have spread so far and wide, causing so much real-world harm. We need to combat these mind viruses if we want to preserve democracy and civil rights.

theCrowing• 4 years ago

everyone is so entitled nowadays.

warning26• 4 years ago

My favorite one is "YouTube is censoring me because they demonetized my video!"

Okay, person, so now it's censorship if YouTube broadcasts and hosts your content for free, but fails to give you money for the privilege of doing so?

jhbadger• 4 years ago

You make it sound as if YouTube is hosting videos out of their good will. They are doing to make money for themselves, which they do, whether or not (for often very arbitrary reasons) decide to demonetize a video and stop the creators from getting any of it.

tobbob• 4 years ago

I've never heard anyone say that.

afinlayson• 4 years ago

Great so now I have to follow all 200M people on Twitter? That’s going to be pretty noisy.

barbariangrunge2• 4 years ago

That’s not really what the article is about

space_fountain5• 4 years ago

Why does this article fail to praise the platforms that do provide non algorithmic feeds (YouTube and Twitter). If the point is more platforms should provide that experience isn’t that contradicted by the YouTube experience where the subscriptions are rarely used.

I think the most interesting point is that maybe if similar investments had gone into tools to curate your own feed it would be of similar quality, but it’s hard to compete with quality and interest signals like people who watch the stuff I watched like this, and as soon as you add that signs you’ve at best built a standard evil recommendation engine with extra levers for the user to control and we all know customization is a great way to ballon the maintenance cost of a feature

leephillips4• 4 years ago

His comments about Twitter suggest that he’s not too familiar with how to use it. It’s a simple matter to get the non-manipulated list of tweets, to get exactly what you ask for, which he claims is not on offer:

https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/

hairofadog2• 4 years ago

Isn’t YouTube notorious for having one of the most insidious algorithmic feeds, both in terms of driving people to extremist content and serving disturbing content to kids?

space_fountain5• 4 years ago

YouTube has two feeds. A subscriptions feed which a pure chronological feed of people you follow and an algorithmic feed (home). The fact that people don’t use the subscriptions feed very much (and didn’t even when it was the default) is telling

zug_zug• 4 years ago

This is so rambly that I can scarcely parse it. The title is also linkbait.

The end though has some good questions so maybe a better way to approach this is to say what asks we'd like from a platform.

Here's the contract I would like to see with platforms:

- Ability to whitelist/follow people so that we get their legal messages, even if provably factually incorrect, (optionally with a caveat attached by the platform if it's say a known falsely labeled video that's a deliberate misinformation attempt)

- Ability to blacklist any person or ad

- All ads are marked as ads

- Ability to blacklist subject matters from feeds, and ads

- No entitlement of anybody to be put it any feed for non-subscribers

- Ability to create ones own feed, to which others can subscribe

leephillips4• 4 years ago

Twitter works exactly this way today, if you use lists and ignore your timeline. See my other comments for instructions.

barbariangrunge2• 4 years ago

The article is not exactly about what some commenters think it is. These quotes summarize the thesis a little bit:

This is called the End-to-End (E2E) principle: a network is E2E if it lets anyone receive any message from anyone else, without a third party intervening. It's a straightforward idea, though the spam wars brought in an important modification: the message should be consensual (DoS attacks, spam, etc don't count).
The degradation of the internet into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four" (h/t Tom Eastman) meant the end of end-to-end. If you're a Youtuber, Tiktoker, tweeter, or Facebooker, the fact that someone explicitly subscribed to your feed does not mean that they will, in fact, see your feed.

Freedom of reach IS freedom of speech

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