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Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ? Why do the users agree to the limits imposed by them and let the platform d

Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ? Why do the users agree to the limits imposed by them and let the platform decide who gets to see the content they posted ? Because they're offering the infrastructure. The tech for such a network is now within reach of many, but these apps are heavily dominated by network effects and that makes it impossible for competing apps to take hold. This is negative for society. Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists. People who don't have an account are not getting vital information because the company decided to restrict access to the entire network. This needs to be regulated somehow. At least for public services and major news outlets - as a tax for the network effect these apps benefit from.

arrowsmith 22d ago
Whatever happened to "Twitter can do what it wants, it's a private platform"?
- johnnyanmac 22d ago
  I believe that sentiment started to die out around the time people realized a Nazi gained control over the world's centralized communication hub. Whether that says more about the communication, the nazi, or the people is a question for the ages.
  - arrowsmith 21d ago
    So it was never about principles, it was only about who was in charge. Colour me shocked.
- hamdingers 22d ago
  Have you heard of the Goomba fallacy?
  - arrowsmith 21d ago
    I hadn't, but don't pretend there's not huge overlap between the people who were saying that then and the people who are saying this now.
    - joquarky 21d ago
      Perhaps you should read it again.
hsuduebc2 22d ago
I do not use this garbage product made only to make your day miserable because it's ragebaiting algorithm. It's not essentiall by any means, it's only designed so you feel that way.
- brynnbee 22d ago
  Mine rarely shows rage bait and when it does I just block everyone involved or add words to mute list. I think people who see this a lot are in fact baited and it creates a cycle. Which isn't to say it's a good system, more that it's easily avoided
  - hsuduebc2 21d ago
    I understand it's me but I always pause when I see some ridiculous russian propaganda or idiotic politic commentaries. Weird thing is, that I always everytime click on I'm not interested but it rarely works. Instead of stopping showing me any propaganda or politics at all it usually just switches to the opposite pole of same theme. I would gladly be using it if it be basically be hn with pictures.
  - D-Machine 21d ago
    Most complaints about Twitter look quite lazy once you understand you choose your followers, can block accounts, and mute words. It's not like these are hidden features that are hard to use even.
    - hsuduebc2 21d ago
      Except for the fact that this doesn't work. This platform always trying to nudge you to engage in any way possible. These "not hidden features" are not working properly, it always spawn back after some time. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34162706/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34162706/
      - D-Machine 21d ago
        Never had any significant issues with these features, I tend to suspect a skill issue when people say things like this. Muting is the most effective option, but it does require you use it with some careful thought.
vaylian 22d ago
> are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists. The fediverse is a viable alternative. But most non-tech people don't know about it.
- carlos22 22d ago
  And it has much less users, I would say its max 1-5% of X users.
  - vaylian 22d ago
    That doesn't mean that it's not viable for posting public announcements
  - ben_w 22d ago
    In the context of: Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists. It simply does not matter how big Bluesky is relative to X. You put messages somewhere and tell your population about this, that's that. For comparison, I have NINA installed on my phone, a German government app for exactly this category: https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Warn-App-NINA/warn-app-nina_node.html https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Warn-App-NINA/wa... Number of users? Google play story says "10M+", same as the Bluesky app. 90% of an app like this (broadcast, one-way, no comments, no need for moderation system because only governments get to push content) was already for the most part a piece of piss to write before LLMs came along. The 10% part that's hard is going to be backup infrastructure that X also won't help much with, because the first two items in the list of hazards icons is "Attack on IT systems" then "Attack with nuclear weapons". (4 is "IT system outage", 6 is "Telephone line outage").
- threetonesun 22d ago
  Did websites and RSS stop working and I missed it? With more people doing AI searches a website is even more viable now, it's better for AI scraping than x.com.
xnorswap 22d ago
Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation. Even FINGER had .plan files, where you could get status updates from people. But how are you going to query whose plans you want to read, and who is going to moderate without centralisation? It's the moderation in particular that dooms most federalised efforts. The web itself is only really moderated through the relative lack of discoverability, with Google and hosting providers having become a form of gatekeeper to remove the very worst of the web. Twitter in the early days took off because it did solve a technological problem of the time. You only had your SMS enabled phone, no WAP or smartphone, and wanted to provide updates. They gave you a number you could text, which would post updates. Hence the character limit ( less than the SMS limit, to leave space for your credentials ). Plenty of alternatives exist for getting information out, people just don't know where to look for it. That technical problem disappeared, but it had by then grown to provide a service to rapidly get updates from people, one that had a sense of authority and the moderating effect and discoverability of centralisation is impossible to ignore.
- bigfishrunning 22d ago
  The requirement for strong moderation only exists *because* of centralization. If I'm looking at a linear feed of content, it has to be curated by someone. In the old days, content on the internet was mostly links between webpages -- the "web" if you will. If i like the content on a page, it'll link to other pages i may like, and I'm free to follow those links at will, and no third party moderation is required. Contrast with modern social media, where everything is condensed into a single list of algorithmically curated content, and we've implicitly eroded a lot of freedom (and handed control to Big Tech) All this to say: bring back webrings.
  - akoboldfrying 22d ago
    Well, replies to a post also require moderation. In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation. (Plenty of people don't want that, or would at least prefer interacting only with their explicitly chosen friends if they were forced to choose between that and unmoderated public access. For them, group chats on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram suffice.)
thinkingtoilet 22d ago
>Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ? Because it is a private enterprise that you signed up for. You don't have a right to Twitter. You don't have a right to Facebook. If you don't like it, leave. The entitlement is massive here. These sites are poison in so many ways. Stop feeding the beast.
- johnnyanmac 22d ago
  >You don't have a right to Twitter. Regulation over communication channels is not only common through the ages, but expected and needed. There may not be literal landlines to worry about in the modern age, but the general idea of communication being an important medium that shouldn't be squandered by competition remains. I prefer everyone to simply leave Twitter and to let it crash and burn, but I see the arguments to have stronger regulations on channels central enough for governmental entities to be using it as a communication hub.
  - Supermancho 22d ago
    This pattern is exceedingly common: Multiple government agencies have a gap in capability. Larger government body chooses to leverage a popular (private) company Z solution over trying to develop an internal system. This is often because it's already been done in smaller jurisdictions. Z becomes head of agency/regulatory capture cartel. Z abuses the position to curtail the government actions/enable further corruption/abuse.
- delegate 22d ago
  Of course I don't have a right to Twitter. But I do have the right to the public information posted by people who intend it to be public information. They're not posting 'on X', they're posting to the public and the only reason they do it on X is because there are no alternatives due to the network effect intrinsic for such services. The 'network effect' part needs to be defined and taken into account by regulators and then regulate the companies such that they make the information available to the public if the poster intends so.
digikar99 22d ago
I found this post from Nostr. I find it a saner alternative to fediverse, particularly because the identity is just a server-free public-private key pair But I don't know when if ever we will have a significant mass there. Hacker News 100 on Nostr: https://njump.to/nprofile1qqsfexztjz4sq05j972pv5h3s9w0gaqvay7z2lfdz5nxlmk3v4fwx6qpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43z7kajcch https://njump.to/nprofile1qqsfexztjz4sq05j972pv5h3s9w0gaqvay...
parineum 22d ago
> Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ? Because that's not what happened. Why have users given control over their content to X?
ghastmaster 22d ago
>Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists. RSS. Website. Both have been around for a long time. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.
- throw0101d 22d ago
  > RSS. Website. Both have been around for a long time. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. A "foo-announce@" or "foo-alerts@" mailing list.
  - rjzzleep 22d ago
    Acquire and extinguish with google mailing lists and RSS
- alightsoul 22d ago
  No one spends their time on websites.
  - scientifik 22d ago
    And yet here we are
    - Crosseye_Jack 22d ago
      There are people still using IRC, but the popularity of Discord can't be denied.
    - swexbe 22d ago
      I'm using an app
    - alightsoul 21d ago
      We are outcasts
BobAliceInATree 22d ago
> Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists. Government agencies have communicated to their citizens long before twitter has existed. There's a myriad of ways they can use today: websites (with or without RSS), email newsletters, text updates, other social networks (bluesky, threads, etc). Choosing to give critical updates only on Twitter is definitely a choice and they are deliberately ignoring a very large segment of their population that doesn't have a twitter account.
carlosjobim 22d ago
The competing app is e-mail. You can subscribe to important information by e-mail and send out important information to mailing lists. > This needs to be regulated somehow. Of course, this is HN so regulation is always the solution to all problems. Instead of making the people who are responsible for doing stuff and are getting paid for it get off their asses. They can easily post updates on government alert websites, on e-mail lists, and on social media and everywhere else to get the attention of the public.
gloosx 22d ago
I don't believe updates on X is an exclusive channel for vital alerts in Spain. This just doesn't make any sense, maybe what they are posting on X is just some typical SMM slop. To send nation-wide or localised alerts for forest fires, floods or natural disasters, Spain seems to be using an entirely different system called ES-Alert via cellular broadcast technology which makes a lot of sense.
alightsoul 22d ago
It's time to repost content on bluesky
sajithdilshan 22d ago
Because it’s either this or tax payers money and corruption. Maintaining infrastructure and human labour is not free.
21asdffdsa12 22d ago
Finally some variety by those who want to take over via social control-cults. It used to be all about protecting the children.
electriclove 22d ago
I agree with you. I hope you've had similar outrage for Facebook over the last 20 years.
- strenholme 22d ago
  The Facebook of 20 years ago is very different from the Facebook of today. 20 years ago, one’s Facebook timeline was filled with whatever your friends were posting. These days—and I think this started about a year ago when AI made it really easy for “influencers” to post AI Slop—one’s Facebook feed is filled by random AI Slop accounts posting nonsense like, as just one of many examples, 80% of the women sleeping with 20% of the men. [1] I am now using a project called Facebook Clean My Feeds [2] which cleans out all of this AI Slop, so that my timeline is like the timeline I had, say, five years ago, with only posts from friends, accounts I follow, and ads. The only problem I see with this plugin is that it is a Greasemonkey script, so I have to trust it to not do anything nefarious. [1] This isn’t actually true, as I detail at https://samboy.github.io/blog/80-20-myth.html https://samboy.github.io/blog/80-20-myth.html [2] https://github.com/Artificial-Sweetener/facebook-clean-my-feeds/ https://github.com/Artificial-Sweetener/facebook-clean-my-fe...
kova12 22d ago
I recently came to conclusion that x is deliberately used for psyops. After I made a couple of posts questioning the benefits of data centers on X, account was suspended for "inauthentic behaviors", restored, then suspended again, restored, and now X won't let me access it until I install an app on my phone and jump through hoops. In other words, doxx myself, it will not work with app on throwaway phone. X is clearly not a beacon of free speech it pretends to be
janaagaard 21d ago
> Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists. This what a healthy society shouldn’t be accepting. But we both need to create laws about this and build the alternative.

arrowsmith 22d ago

Whatever happened to "Twitter can do what it wants, it's a private platform"?

johnnyanmac 22d ago
I believe that sentiment started to die out around the time people realized a Nazi gained control over the world's centralized communication hub. Whether that says more about the communication, the nazi, or the people is a question for the ages.
- arrowsmith 21d ago
  So it was never about principles, it was only about who was in charge. Colour me shocked.
hamdingers 22d ago
Have you heard of the Goomba fallacy?
- arrowsmith 21d ago
  I hadn't, but don't pretend there's not huge overlap between the people who were saying that then and the people who are saying this now.
  - joquarky 21d ago
    Perhaps you should read it again.

hsuduebc2 22d ago

I do not use this garbage product made only to make your day miserable because it's ragebaiting algorithm. It's not essentiall by any means, it's only designed so you feel that way.

brynnbee 22d ago
Mine rarely shows rage bait and when it does I just block everyone involved or add words to mute list. I think people who see this a lot are in fact baited and it creates a cycle. Which isn't to say it's a good system, more that it's easily avoided
- hsuduebc2 21d ago
  I understand it's me but I always pause when I see some ridiculous russian propaganda or idiotic politic commentaries. Weird thing is, that I always everytime click on I'm not interested but it rarely works. Instead of stopping showing me any propaganda or politics at all it usually just switches to the opposite pole of same theme. I would gladly be using it if it be basically be hn with pictures.
- D-Machine 21d ago
  Most complaints about Twitter look quite lazy once you understand you choose your followers, can block accounts, and mute words. It's not like these are hidden features that are hard to use even.
  - hsuduebc2 21d ago
    Except for the fact that this doesn't work. This platform always trying to nudge you to engage in any way possible. These "not hidden features" are not working properly, it always spawn back after some time. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34162706/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34162706/
    - D-Machine 21d ago
      Never had any significant issues with these features, I tend to suspect a skill issue when people say things like this. Muting is the most effective option, but it does require you use it with some careful thought.

vaylian 22d ago

> are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists. The fediverse is a viable alternative. But most non-tech people don't know about it.

carlos22 22d ago
And it has much less users, I would say its max 1-5% of X users.
- vaylian 22d ago
  That doesn't mean that it's not viable for posting public announcements
- ben_w 22d ago
  In the context of: Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists. It simply does not matter how big Bluesky is relative to X. You put messages somewhere and tell your population about this, that's that. For comparison, I have NINA installed on my phone, a German government app for exactly this category: https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Warn-App-NINA/warn-app-nina_node.html https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Warn-App-NINA/wa... Number of users? Google play story says "10M+", same as the Bluesky app. 90% of an app like this (broadcast, one-way, no comments, no need for moderation system because only governments get to push content) was already for the most part a piece of piss to write before LLMs came along. The 10% part that's hard is going to be backup infrastructure that X also won't help much with, because the first two items in the list of hazards icons is "Attack on IT systems" then "Attack with nuclear weapons". (4 is "IT system outage", 6 is "Telephone line outage").
threetonesun 22d ago
Did websites and RSS stop working and I missed it? With more people doing AI searches a website is even more viable now, it's better for AI scraping than x.com.

xnorswap 22d ago

Because open protocols were abandoned, because they generally lacked security, discoverability, and perhaps most significantly of all, moderation. Even FINGER had .plan files, where you could get status updates from people. But how are you going to query whose plans you want to read, and who is going to moderate without centralisation? It's the moderation in particular that dooms most federalised efforts. The web itself is only really moderated through the relative lack of discoverability, with Google and hosting providers having become a form of gatekeeper to remove the very worst of the web. Twitter in the early days took off because it did solve a technological problem of the time. You only had your SMS enabled phone, no WAP or smartphone, and wanted to provide updates. They gave you a number you could text, which would post updates. Hence the character limit ( less than the SMS limit, to leave space for your credentials ). Plenty of alternatives exist for getting information out, people just don't know where to look for it. That technical problem disappeared, but it had by then grown to provide a service to rapidly get updates from people, one that had a sense of authority and the moderating effect and discoverability of centralisation is impossible to ignore.

bigfishrunning 22d ago
The requirement for strong moderation only exists *because* of centralization. If I'm looking at a linear feed of content, it has to be curated by someone. In the old days, content on the internet was mostly links between webpages -- the "web" if you will. If i like the content on a page, it'll link to other pages i may like, and I'm free to follow those links at will, and no third party moderation is required. Contrast with modern social media, where everything is condensed into a single list of algorithmically curated content, and we've implicitly eroded a lot of freedom (and handed control to Big Tech) All this to say: bring back webrings.
- akoboldfrying 22d ago
  Well, replies to a post also require moderation. In general, if you want people to ever see something created by people outside of their explicitly chosen friends: moderation. (Plenty of people don't want that, or would at least prefer interacting only with their explicitly chosen friends if they were forced to choose between that and unmoderated public access. For them, group chats on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram suffice.)

thinkingtoilet 22d ago

>Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ? Because it is a private enterprise that you signed up for. You don't have a right to Twitter. You don't have a right to Facebook. If you don't like it, leave. The entitlement is massive here. These sites are poison in so many ways. Stop feeding the beast.

johnnyanmac 22d ago
>You don't have a right to Twitter. Regulation over communication channels is not only common through the ages, but expected and needed. There may not be literal landlines to worry about in the modern age, but the general idea of communication being an important medium that shouldn't be squandered by competition remains. I prefer everyone to simply leave Twitter and to let it crash and burn, but I see the arguments to have stronger regulations on channels central enough for governmental entities to be using it as a communication hub.
- Supermancho 22d ago
  This pattern is exceedingly common: Multiple government agencies have a gap in capability. Larger government body chooses to leverage a popular (private) company Z solution over trying to develop an internal system. This is often because it's already been done in smaller jurisdictions. Z becomes head of agency/regulatory capture cartel. Z abuses the position to curtail the government actions/enable further corruption/abuse.
delegate 22d ago
Of course I don't have a right to Twitter. But I do have the right to the public information posted by people who intend it to be public information. They're not posting 'on X', they're posting to the public and the only reason they do it on X is because there are no alternatives due to the network effect intrinsic for such services. The 'network effect' part needs to be defined and taken into account by regulators and then regulate the companies such that they make the information available to the public if the poster intends so.

digikar99 22d ago

I found this post from Nostr. I find it a saner alternative to fediverse, particularly because the identity is just a server-free public-private key pair But I don't know when if ever we will have a significant mass there. Hacker News 100 on Nostr: https://njump.to/nprofile1qqsfexztjz4sq05j972pv5h3s9w0gaqvay7z2lfdz5nxlmk3v4fwx6qpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43z7kajcch https://njump.to/nprofile1qqsfexztjz4sq05j972pv5h3s9w0gaqvay...

parineum 22d ago

> Why have we let X (et al) have total control over the content posted by the users ? Because that's not what happened. Why have users given control over their content to X?

ghastmaster 22d ago

throw0101d 22d ago
> RSS. Website. Both have been around for a long time. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. A "foo-announce@" or "foo-alerts@" mailing list.
- rjzzleep 22d ago
  Acquire and extinguish with google mailing lists and RSS
alightsoul 22d ago
No one spends their time on websites.
- scientifik 22d ago
  And yet here we are
  - Crosseye_Jack 22d ago
    There are people still using IRC, but the popularity of Discord can't be denied.
  - swexbe 22d ago
    I'm using an app
  - alightsoul 21d ago
    We are outcasts

BobAliceInATree 22d ago

> Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists. Government agencies have communicated to their citizens long before twitter has existed. There's a myriad of ways they can use today: websites (with or without RSS), email newsletters, text updates, other social networks (bluesky, threads, etc). Choosing to give critical updates only on Twitter is definitely a choice and they are deliberately ignoring a very large segment of their population that doesn't have a twitter account.

carlosjobim 22d ago

The competing app is e-mail. You can subscribe to important information by e-mail and send out important information to mailing lists. > This needs to be regulated somehow. Of course, this is HN so regulation is always the solution to all problems. Instead of making the people who are responsible for doing stuff and are getting paid for it get off their asses. They can easily post updates on government alert websites, on e-mail lists, and on social media and everywhere else to get the attention of the public.

gloosx 22d ago

I don't believe updates on X is an exclusive channel for vital alerts in Spain. This just doesn't make any sense, maybe what they are posting on X is just some typical SMM slop. To send nation-wide or localised alerts for forest fires, floods or natural disasters, Spain seems to be using an entirely different system called ES-Alert via cellular broadcast technology which makes a lot of sense.

alightsoul 22d ago

It's time to repost content on bluesky

sajithdilshan 22d ago

Because it’s either this or tax payers money and corruption. Maintaining infrastructure and human labour is not free.

21asdffdsa12 22d ago

Finally some variety by those who want to take over via social control-cults. It used to be all about protecting the children.

electriclove 22d ago

I agree with you. I hope you've had similar outrage for Facebook over the last 20 years.

strenholme 22d ago
The Facebook of 20 years ago is very different from the Facebook of today. 20 years ago, one’s Facebook timeline was filled with whatever your friends were posting. These days—and I think this started about a year ago when AI made it really easy for “influencers” to post AI Slop—one’s Facebook feed is filled by random AI Slop accounts posting nonsense like, as just one of many examples, 80% of the women sleeping with 20% of the men. [1] I am now using a project called Facebook Clean My Feeds [2] which cleans out all of this AI Slop, so that my timeline is like the timeline I had, say, five years ago, with only posts from friends, accounts I follow, and ads. The only problem I see with this plugin is that it is a Greasemonkey script, so I have to trust it to not do anything nefarious. [1] This isn’t actually true, as I detail at https://samboy.github.io/blog/80-20-myth.html https://samboy.github.io/blog/80-20-myth.html [2] https://github.com/Artificial-Sweetener/facebook-clean-my-feeds/ https://github.com/Artificial-Sweetener/facebook-clean-my-fe...

kova12 22d ago

I recently came to conclusion that x is deliberately used for psyops. After I made a couple of posts questioning the benefits of data centers on X, account was suspended for "inauthentic behaviors", restored, then suspended again, restored, and now X won't let me access it until I install an app on my phone and jump through hoops. In other words, doxx myself, it will not work with app on throwaway phone. X is clearly not a beacon of free speech it pretends to be

janaagaard 21d ago

> Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists. This what a healthy society shouldn’t be accepting. But we both need to create laws about this and build the alternative.