Big Tech's active moderation promise is also a potential source of eternal commercial advantage over newcomers

[doctorow]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/26/gameable-systems.html

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[gracchus]

There are definitely two issues to be addressed here:

1. Monopoly power: the U.S. government has to recognise that a company can exploit consumers in a market it monopolises in ways other than price gouging. Big Tech’s lobbying will ensure this doesn’t happen.

2. Active moderation: social media companies have to invest in a truly effective system. Their greed, laziness and (in Twitter’s case) incompetence will ensure this doesn’t happen.

[NovaeDeArx]

I would also rush to point out that, now that FB’s stocks are in decline because they’ve hit market saturation, they’re quite likely to start looking at more and more abusive policies to be able to squeeze quarterly profits out of people.

And as that happens, they’ll push customers away, and that’ll accelerate the ol’ corporate death spiral.

The alternative is that they’re looking longer term, and will try to make themselves a platform that’s less toxic, more inviting, and that people won’t be fleeing from en masse.

Of course, it’s far too late for the latter; once people quit a platform they rarely come back, once they adopt an alternative (and in this day and age, they find alternatives very very quickly), and the real “social driver” users, the ones that help push or pull the huge crowds to or from platforms, have long, long ago migrated to other platforms themselves.

Old people and clueless people are FB’s current stock-in-trade, not young people, not “influencers”, and that’s really bad news for any major platform. Investors know this, and that’s why they’re so sensitive to FB not hitting (fairly conservative) growth targets - they know that growth is the only thing left, and now they’re all bailing out.

[Papasan]

#deletefacebook
#deletetwitter

[NovaeDeArx]

#HitLawyer
#GymUp