[HN Gopher] Interview with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber
___________________________________________________________________
Interview with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber
Author : rntn
Score : 72 points
Date : 2024-03-25 18:07 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I still think we haven't seen the "what's next" in social. I
| think all these completing protocols are barking up the right
| tree but they seem to be a bridge to the next thing, not the next
| thing in and of itself.
| thisislife2 wrote:
| Federation is the future because politics demands it. As more and
| more social media platform turn into an intelligence gathering
| and an information warfare tool, countries around the world will
| make stricter laws to restrict the current American and Chinese
| owned BigTech moats of social media platform. We are already
| seeing this with new data privacy laws or stringent restriction
| or even outright banning of the platform (as China has done).
| This is a huge headache for American and Chinese government
| because such restrictions impairs their current online
| intelligence programs. The obvious solution is to partly
| sacrifice the profits of the BigTech to keep the data flowing.
| We'll soon find inter-operability being _forced_ on platforms
| (like iMessage or WhatsApp). More "open" protocols will be
| pushed and standardised slowly to make it difficult to impose
| political restrictions and weaken privacy laws (because the
| message will be that BigTech are no longer in control, but "the
| people" and _every_ government wants to spy on its citizens).
| Just look at email to realise how these things eventually end up
| - how many of you run your own email servers, and successfully
| ensure that your mails aren 't bocked by "spam" services?
| Federation is good and necessary. But we are now decades past
| from the idea of "controlling our data".
| ein0p wrote:
| "Turn into"? They were explicitly invented for surveillance and
| personal data mining. That's their entire raison d'etre.
| freedomben wrote:
| I actually think it's exactly politics that will make
| federation impossible, with the exception of a few big players
| who have the deep pockets to fund major moderation. For those
| people (big tech), you're right interop will be mandatory.
|
| There's no way government are going to give up the control they
| have with big tech and companies that can be regulated and
| served warrants and stuff. The last thing they want is for
| individual decentralized citizens to be able to stand up their
| own systems and discuss dangerous ideas[1] without oversight.
|
| On top of that, big tech will be eager to push things like Web
| Environment Integrity[2] and Private Access Tokens[3] that can
| ensure that unapproved (or semi or fully anonymous) actors with
| dangerous operating systems like linux aren't allowed to
| participate, at least on a first-class level. It will be
| packaged as "anti-spam" or "a better user experience for our
| users" but the fact that it massively empowers the tech
| companies and enables them to further entrench you into their
| walled gardens will absolutely not be an opportunity they want
| to miss.
|
| [1]: The definition of dangerous ideas will depend on who and
| which party is in power. Unless the corporate overlords end up
| in control, in which case it will be what their managers
| consider dangerous.
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
|
| [3]: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=huqjyh7k
| tootie wrote:
| Federation solves nothing. The problem with the current
| generation of social media is quite simply the profit motive.
| Elon Musk tried to make a big deal out of being a free speech
| absolutist, but his company is run for profit and any time free
| speech butts up against profit, profit wins. Federation's only
| advantage is that the profiteers haven't invaded that space
| yet, but Bluesky is loudly telegraphing that it will no longer
| be a safe space and they intend to start monetizing it.
|
| If you want to a shining example of effective content
| moderation, public utility and centralization, then just look
| at Wikipedia. What's different about them? Non-profit.
| mrweiner wrote:
| $technology is the future of $industry, says CEO implementing
| $technology in $industry.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an article
| or post to complain about in the thread. Find something
| interesting to respond to instead._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| r14c wrote:
| I honestly hope so. Having organizations like Meta or Twitter et
| al control massive sections of the social media landscape is not
| healthy. Any organization, group, or individual that wants to
| have an online presence should be able to spin up their own
| service and publish to any constellation of servers that want to
| hear what they have to say. I hope the EU efforts to push common
| standards are also applied to US companies in US markets to make
| all of the coms services federate like we were promised over a
| decade ago.
| luqtas wrote:
| isn't better to have legal regulations on big servers? as i can
| see some abuse from hosts (that entered early it the game) &
| now hold multi-thousand users instance...
| ein0p wrote:
| Who do you think writes the regulations in the US? The
| lobbyists. They are written mostly with the intent of
| creating regulatory capture and making life difficult for
| smaller players.
| r14c wrote:
| why not both? i recognize that large decentralized networks
| create some challenges, but imo that's still preferable to
| giving a small number of large (even heavily regulated)
| operators total control over the network.
| threeseed wrote:
| Meta enabled ActivityPub based fediverse support this week for
| US Threads users.
|
| So today you can spin up your own Mastodon server and have
| anyone follow you from Threads and vice versa.
| zizee wrote:
| Will they extend this to Instagram? Until then (and even
| after) I'd be suspicious of their intentions. Embrace,
| Extend, Extinguish.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu.
| ..
| threeseed wrote:
| Instagram is moving towards being a TikTok competitor so it
| doesn't make much sense.
|
| Either way their intentions are pretty easy to understand.
|
| ActivityPub integration keeps regulators off their back and
| allows external content to appear on Threads which they can
| then monetise alongside ads.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| I'd like to see them actually make it so the common person can
| understand federation and see it as a plus rather than a
| confusing onboarding roadblock.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| They won't, because federation doesn't actually solve any of
| the problems the average social media user has, while
| introducing its own, (sometimes very hard/impossible) problems.
|
| The main driver behind current social media's shittiness is the
| user-hostile business model that means the incentives of the
| user and the platform are opposed.
|
| Federation doesn't actually address any of this, and currently
| the federated social media world "runs" on effectively charity.
| "Runs" in quotes because we've already seen instance shutdowns
| which caused a fair bit of trouble. It only currently "runs"
| because the scale is small enough that it can indeed be
| sustained by charitable efforts, and hasn't devolved into a
| unusable spam-fest because it's too small to actually be worth
| spamming.
|
| If your "solution" to social media shittiness is effectively
| turn it into something ran by charities, that's fine but you
| can achieve this much easier (and more efficiently) by just
| having one charity run one centralized service with an open API
| (since the business incentives around lock-in are no longer
| applicable).
| tiptup300 wrote:
| Back in jr high school we had halo modding forums that were
| hosted on free hosts until we had someone with money to pay
| for a server, until that ran out and we moved again.
|
| Some of those communities might go on and last a while and
| accumulate knowledge.
|
| Ah maybe not, sounds like a path the gamergate stuff. But the
| concept certainly feels nostalgic.
|
| And besides now I have a job and a small amount of extra cash
| to pay for a small community website.
|
| Would be nice to have federated reddits instead of reddit.
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| What? What does Gamergate have to do with any of that?
| That's absolutely deranged and obsessed.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The reason forums lost out to Reddit and centralized social
| media is because the latter is more convenient. Turns out
| having to register an account on every single forum and
| have to prove your worth every time is less convenient that
| having a single account and a proof of trustworthiness (as
| in if you haven't spammed/misbehaved elsewhere, chances are
| you won't misbehave here either) following you around.
| threeseed wrote:
| Meta actually tackled this pretty well:
|
| https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/21/networking-traffic/thr...
| s4mw1se wrote:
| Maybe working in secuirty has screwed my vision because this
| stuff bounces around in my head all day.
|
| I think social media as we know it today is already at the end of
| the road. Our data has been obtained to make generative AI
| products and now we are entering a new phase of the internet. The
| social media we have has already been poisoned by assholes trying
| to make everyone addicted for money, or victims of non-kinetic
| warfare.
|
| There is going to be way to many self-managing sock puppets all
| with an agenda. Automated psyops agents left to their devices,
| all talking to each other and you.
|
| That's not to say there won't be sociable media, it's just that
| regardless of how federated anything is we are all still going to
| constantly be in contact with AI.
|
| the next big social media platform will be the one that can
| guarantee the most authentic human connections.
|
| Until we get to that point, we will have what we have not and
| watch it get worse as smaller federated instances pop up that
| become selective or invite only.
|
| Not much different then private hidden services
| em-bee wrote:
| isn't it possible to avoid all the problems by simply using
| these tools in a certain way?
|
| i am on whatsapp, wechat, telegram, matrix, signal, sms, irc,
| email, even discord...
|
| on each of these services i am mostly in contact with real
| humans that i met in person.
|
| i am in a few groups mostly made out of these same people, but
| also some groups where i never met anyone. i am not on
| facebook, mastodon or ex-twitter or any service that tries to
| feed me with stuff instead of just giving me a timeline of all
| messages shared. even on youtube i follow the channels of my
| choice and mostly ignore recommendations except to discover
| other interesting channels.
|
| i don't see any of that going away. therefore i don't see
| anything changing for me
| zizee wrote:
| It would be useful to categorise "social media" into "publish
| to strangers" vs "interact with individuals in private".
| Apparently these are both social media, but they are very
| different use-cases.
|
| Most of the apps you mentioned are focussed on that second
| category, whereas (I believe) the GP was talking about the
| first category.
| em-bee wrote:
| well, at least whatsapp, wechat, youtube and even telegram
| are trying to get into the first category. i ignore the
| respective features. in my case i eventually realized that
| i would waste to much time if i would try to follow all the
| posts pushed there, and it would also take to much effort
| to curate that content, so i decided to completely ignore
| it instead. but i am old, and my life experience helps me
| to stick to this. for young people this must be harder.
|
| i agree that this distinction is important, but i am afraid
| it is a lost battle, and as we criticize the negative
| effects of the first category of social media we need to
| also point out how social media can be useful when it is in
| the second category.
| autonomousErwin wrote:
| I actually think this could be an incorrect assumption we're
| making that humans want authentic human connections on social
| media. Most humans on social media are not their authentic
| selves and want to project an image of who they think people
| want to engage with.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > the next big social media platform will be the one that can
| guarantee the most authentic human connections.
|
| Which is a thing that I don't think is feasible. I could be
| wrong, of course. But I do agree that authenticity is going to
| be the issue that social platforms will live or die on.
|
| I think the next evolution of "social media" is more likely to
| be a return to the old-fashioned notion of interacting with
| people in person.
| layer8 wrote:
| Social media was always just a fraction of the population.
| Most non-tech people I know in real life don't significantly
| engage with it.
| mminer237 wrote:
| The only way it's feasible is really requiring an ID or
| credit card to sign up. Technically, it's pretty doable, but
| I doubt the users would be willing to go that far for
| authenticity.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| One method to "guarantee" authenticity is to charge for
| usage. It could even be a low cost, like $1/month or
| $10/year. That'd be enough to deter the absolute worst kind
| of people.
| em-bee wrote:
| how about only following people that you met in person? i
| mean it doesn't even make sense to me to follow someone i
| don't know unless they actually produce interesting content.
| such as say viheart or nileblue or even mr beast if you must.
| is it possible that any of these could decide to sell out and
| start producing content using AI? sure. but will they be able
| to fool everyone?
|
| the problem is a lack of ability to recognize worthwhile
| content, a lack of critical consumption. there is also be a
| problem to find good content among the mass of junk. but
| that's already a problem now. i have mostly given up. i find
| new content mostly through HN.
|
| the problem will be that a lot of good content will remain
| undiscovered.
|
| so let me make this claim in response: the next big social
| media platform will be the one that will make it easy to
| discover actually good content as opposed to popular content.
| avrionov wrote:
| The current generation of generative AI models is quire far
| from perfect. They'll need more and more data. For bigger
| models, for models which are targeting specific areas, etc.
|
| But is possible that social media as source is already poisoned
| by Gen AI postings.
| sandspar wrote:
| I was wondering recently how much time I've spent arguing with
| bots online. Hours, surely. Dozens of hours? And it seems like
| it's going to get worse. The Reddit front page seems largely bot-
| run now. It's only a matter of time until it spreads.
| autonomousErwin wrote:
| If you could collate all these arguments and actually help you
| get _better_ at debating then this could be turned into a
| positive where you shouldn 't care about the person (AI or
| human) behind the argument but the argument itself.
| pests wrote:
| > I was wondering recently how much time I've spent arguing
| [...] online.
|
| Probably all of it?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-26 23:01 UTC)