Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

Putting aside concerns about overreach government powers, would ending social media as we know it really be a bad thing?

How? Forbid all of it? Forbid what, exactly - any app that allows communication between more than 1 person?

Even if Twitter were to go bankrupt tomorrow, something else would come to replace it.

If Trump actually closed it (not going to happen), then something may come along to replace Twitter, but it certainly wouldn't act like Twitter.

That would be a USA Great Firewall. It would require some re-branding to get the US population to accept it

Trump would have no intention of ending social media. He just wants to end social media that doesn't do what he wants.

And yes, that would be an overwhelmingly bad thing.

Social media can only survive because of safe harbor provisions. If sites become responsible for the content they host, social media as we know would instantly die out.

I think it would be great and I pretty much long for it. It's so obvious that even if it may be an overreach, there is such malpractice going on from all major social media players.

Youtube: Censors youtubers, documented in so many cases. It also gives "authoritarian news" a heavier weight in the algorithm. Removes comments with "communist bandits" in Chinese.

Twitter: Seriously bans people if they say the wrong pronoun

Reddit: A few people controls the majority of big subreddits, bans people with conservative views outright. Bans people that upvote stuff that they don't like. The have removed, banned hundreds of subreddits and users in the last few months. While they have chinese owners.

Facebook: Surprisingly the best of the bunch when it comes to serving every viewpoint imo. But they have had huge privacy implications just so many times.

But even so, I am very torn on the subject. The best thing would probably to force these companies not to censor/ban/remove people based on opinions. But the best thing for the world would most likely for these social media sites to not exist in the first place.

Personally I think social media sucks but I think most people are not ready to live without it either.

Why wouldn't it? Proven good formula and a hole in the market. A dozen clones would spring up immediately.

Get rid of section 230

You are not forced to follow or interact poeple you disagree with.

So would a vast number of things. github, blogs, cloud, public web hosting of almost any kind.

Although it's impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, social media has had a net negative effect on a LOT of people. There's people that have had a big positive effect to. So, it's not obvious where it ends up on net if that even matters.

But, yeah. There's a lot of people that would be better off not on social media. But it's so addictive that they can't help themselves.

I, for one, have stopped using social media (unless you consider HN social). And I've had a lot less friends because of it. But it's been a huge improvement in my mood and outlook on life.

I could do without Facebook and Twitter, but what counts as social media? Does Stack Exchange count? Hacker News? Email?

Just so we're clear: Hacker News is social media.

Funny you say, but on social platforms we know you are kind of forced, through suggestions and ads.

Newspapers "force" you to read articles by their writers and ads as well... This has nothing to do with social media.

Making public comments anywhere online impossible? I don't think that's helpful.

But you can - just don't use it.

>(unless you consider HN social)

Yes, yes it is. What else would it be? What's the difference between sites like HN and reddit, and facebook?

> unless you consider HN social

Why wouldn't we? Pseudonyms? Reddit is considered social, I think, and that tends to be even more difficult to map to IRL identity.

Edit: just barely not inb4!

Are message boards / BBS / forums?

Yes, so that's why I somewhat included it. But, it's definitely on the lighter side of social I think.

On HN, it's a lot tougher to follow specific people, though it's cool to see posts and then follow up with what they've recently posted or commented.

Yeah, that's why I only somewhat included it. It's tougher to follow specific people. But it is possible if you keep a list yourself of interesting accounts and check in later on what they've posted.

But the dynamic is definitely different and seems a lot more anonymous unless you are a really high profile account like antirez, patio11, drewdevault, or a CEO of some well known company or startup.

We probably need a more detailed vocabulary for describing various types of social media. In my opinion, the most insidious forms of social media share three attributes:

* Broad reach - they are accessible to and used by a population broadly for public communication rather than a specific subset of the population or private communication.

* Optimized for engagement - Content is personalized and optimized for individual engagement. Compare this to a stream of content organized by time (email inbox) or basically time with minimal voting/decaying (HN)

* Feedback is quantifiable and visible - Likes, retweets, upvotes (ie, engagement metrics) are countable and displayed to users. I think this gets at something deep in the human psyche and encourages users to chase those metrics.

It turns out that in systems with all three (FB, Twitter), you create enormous echo chambers that only occasionally flare up into outrage when they inevitably leak to a broader audience. This is great for engagement but pretty self evidently bad for society.

Lots of sites fit somewhere on this spectrum (including HN and Stack Exchange) but have basic safeguards to prevent the worst types of behavior. But this is usually because they aren't profit motivated to slide all the way to one side on the three factors above.

Yes.

I don't want to be dismissive, if you have some kind of distinction you're trying to get at, I'm open to hearing it. But I personally don't see a big conceptual difference between Reddit and a forum, other than that one of them happened to get bigger. And I'm pretty skeptical of using size as a criteria here, because it would force us to say that Google+ and MySpace stopped being social media at some point when they dipped in popularity.

We're gonna build a wall, and make Cyberspace pay for it.

Perhaps it would be easier to enumerate the things that aren't social networks. Does the postal system constitute a social network, at least in the literal sense of those words? Maybe! It's a network that facilitates social interactions after all.

Because the government closed something that acted exactly like it before?

Aka chilling effect.

Sure. I'm not saying that I think it would be good, just that it's possible.

Newspapers are curated and responsible for what they publish.

I think one place HN falls short of what I think of as social media is that there's no following of individual accounts, that creation of networks and personalized feeds feels like part of the core of what separates social media from simpler forums. Reddit was closer to just forums as well but subreddits allowed you to more directly curate and associate between groups, now every user basically has their own little subreddit they can post on and people can follow and join.

The distinction I was going for was things that predate the classification terminology. I guess there's no particular reason not to apply such classification retroactively, but it feels a bit weird considering that in the heyday of these technologies, few if any people referred to them as social media. Seems a bit like saying "let's stream some music" as you're loading up a CD player. Technically yes there is a stream of bits but it just seems silly to speak in such terms.