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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  1177 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Section 230 discussion

If 230 had a head and I had a revolver, I would empty six shots and reload.

I wouldn't stop there. I'd annihilate the Telecom Act of 1996, repeal the DMCA and bring back the Fairness Doctrine.

Conservatives stood all this shit up because they knew it would enable monopoly control of media, which has always favored conservatives. Now that they've been reminded that progress, by definition, belongs to the liberals they want to corner-case this one tiny segment of it.

The lives of everyone on here would be better without Facebook, Amazon, Google, Youtube, Twitter, Netflix or Microsoft. I would glory in a future where every tech fuck out there had to sing for his supper like a Soviet nuclear physicist.

Fight me.





goobster  ·  1176 days ago  ·  link  ·  

In the 20-year view, putting a bullet in these policies and regulations would be an enormously good thing for humanity... but the infant resists being weaned off the teat because they don't know about flatiron steaks with crushed peppercorn aioli...

Can you imagine the mental breakdowns that would happen if social media suddenly went away? The sheer numbers of people who wouldn't be able to function, even in a basic way? It's frightening to contemplate.

kleinbl00  ·  1176 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Assumes facts not in evidence.

"But what if I don't get to know what that girl I vaguely knew in English class 30 years ago had for breakfast?" listen to yourself. Social media is a badly gamified, thin gruel substitute for actual conversation and everyone knows it. Besides which you're assuming that a top-down infrastructure is the only way this works - when fuckin' blogchains did a better job anyway. 'member back when you didn't need to know who someone voted for to be friends with them, you just needed to share an interest in z-gauge Marklin trains? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Study after study after study after study after study supports the fundamental truth that social media makes people less happy, not more. If I could change my enameling and watchmaking groups for alt.rec.watchmaking.humor or whatever I'd do it in an instant. The fact that the killer productivity app is basically IRC for $40/seat says some shit, namely that the minute we traded Mosaic for Netscape we were fucked.

goobster  ·  1176 days ago  ·  link  ·  

... man... I miss rec.moto and rec.pyro... those were great groups...

And one of my favorite rec.moto sub-groups is actually on FB... it's funny... same content 30 years later, just now with higher rez images.

And I miss the time when everyone had a web site and had to publish their links list... rat-holing through pages and pages of links was a fun way to discover sites before Yahoo came along...

kleinbl00  ·  1176 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The promise of Diaspora was that your "facebook" was a server that you controlled which allowed you to link up with everyone else.

Google is dumb. Google is dumbly dumb. Their move wasn't Google Plus, their move was to sell rack space and Diaspora instances that you subscribe to through your Gmail which you configure and you keep running and you manage and you link up. Make them a dollar a month. Fuck advertising. Allow people to expand or shrink CPU usage for things like protein folding or aircraft search or decrypting the Voynich Manuscript or WTFever. The fact that a company that buys servers like they're cord wood decided that the way to beat Facebook at their own game was to suck at it says everything you need to know about why fucking Section 230 needs to die. If people roll their own iron they're immune forever and if someone is running their "business" in a way that crosses the feds, the lines are a lot more easily crossed.

goobster  ·  1176 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Diaspora is going to be that "first idea" that never was successful (except Diaspora is a derivative of an older idea; basically a SaaS BBS), and someone later on is going to come and do the exact same thing and be hailed and great innovators and thinkers... and we old farts are going to go, "yeah, but Betamax had better image quality..." and people will continue to not care.

It's turtles all the way down, isn't it?

am_Unition  ·  1177 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Wouldn't repealing 230 give big tech an advantage by potentially crushing small tech businesses in legal fees? Only established companies might be able to combat lawsuits, but I dunno, lol Twitter's potential liability for Trump alone is interesting to consider.

kleinbl00  ·  1177 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Small tech businesses don't attract class action sharks.

"Show me where the mean Zuckerberg touched you" goes out to every person who has held a Facebook account from 2007-2021. They're given a checklist of all the privacy violations Zuck has committed and are allowed to select the ones that "materially impacted" them. Big dumb firms gear up for combat and it's a war of attrition that ends up with Zuck paying every person who has ever had a Facebook account like eight bucks, say. That's a 22 billion dollar settlement, which the sharks get 20 percent for administering. Facebook can afford it but most firms prefer avoiding nine figures worth of peril as a matter of principle.

First rule of litigation is "don't be the deep pockets." When I was in biomedical engineering we worked with firms that "laundered" 3m polyurethane because it was good stuff that 3m wouldn't sell to biomedical device manufacturers. Why not? Because an atrial defibrillator uses a nickel's worth of polyurethane and comes with an inevitable bazillion dollar lawsuit where the plaintiff attaches every contractor, supplier, subcontractor and vendor involved and of those involved, 3M is the one with the pockets.