Not only does facebook have a tremendous size, amount of dysfunction, number of users, and pile of money, they have no responsibility to their users. There is no user representation at any $techco. The future of everything is being architected by closed door committee, free from competing ideas.
For FB, like for other “free” platforms, the end users are not paying customers and are more of a necessary evil. Such a platform only needs to keep the majority of eyeballs by the number.
— It doesn’t really matter if those eyeballs are satisfied or not. There is no transaction taking place.
— Most eyeballs can’t really leave, since service is free and all their friends are here.
— There’s nowhere to leave to anyway, as new companies can’t compete with “free” (unless they are extraordinarily well-funded. As in, by a nation-state).
— If eyeballs complain and make $platform be regulated by the government (forcing some sort of user representation, oversight of habit-forming tech use, etc.), all the better—targeted regulation would lend it the status of a public good, implying approval, solidifying its already almost-monopoly. Meanwhile, business model will find its way as user representatives and lawmakers are lobbied, regulations can’t keep up with the tech, and politics proliferate.
The root problem is that users are tricked into thinking they are customers of a service for which they are not paying. This is at odds with the way the market is supposed to work.
If we take away this trick—the core idea where a platform survives off advertiser money—we might just be able to finally let the market do its job, move towards heterogenous social tech landscape and vote with our wallets rather than being exploited.
This is something I have been thinking about. I don’t like regulation, but imagine a small, surgically focused requirement that says, for example, “you are obligated to provide an API covering the entirety of your platform’s GUI features if you serve more than N users”.
As a consequence:
1) fully-featured third-party cross-platform client software allows users to transition across platforms more easily,
2) platforms start bleeding users,
3) platforms start charging for service,
4) platforms become pipes.
There are implications, though:
1) big tech might find ways to pretend to be smaller entities;
2) this does not guarantee that user data privacy is respected, but ideally this creates a scenario in which the user is free to choose a more ethical provider;
3) client app security & ethics will become paramount, client apps will become valuable targets;
4) downgrade to pipes will end of the age of cool Web 2.0 platforms and grand social startups. Unfortunately, I don’t see any other way—this business model is user- (society-?) hostile yet addictive, and there seems no other way around it apart from WeChat-like nationalization which is objectionable for a whole other chunk of reasons.
A pipe is like a mobile provider: it provides an infrastructure for data to flow, but not necessarily the terminals. Here too, if platforms open up full APIs they’d be liable to become more like pipes for social data to flow through, to be displayed by third-party client of user’s choice. They can still offer a GUI and develop new features, it just has to be covered by an API. It’s an interesting thought experiment.
It sounds nice in theory, but in practice I suspect such a regulation would at best accomplish nothing and at worst would be a disaster. How do you even define a "social network?" The regulation would either be too broad and wind up covering the comments section of HN, or too narrow and easy to evade. In all likelihood the outcome would be similar to GDPR -- the big companies that inspire it would have little difficulty with compliance while startups would find it that much harder to compete.
> The regulation would either be too broad and wind up covering the comments section of HN
HN is clearly a social network. What I envisage is a regulation that applies to social networking and user-generated content sites with greater than a certain number of users, e.g. 1 million.
Obviously there shouldn't be onerous regulation on small sites.
Ben Thompson @ Stratechery does the most in depth analyses of regulating companies like FB, which I think reach similar conclusions for different reasons, such as it's actually in the users' best interest in some ways.
> There is no user representation at any $techco. The future of everything is being architected by closed door committee, free from competing ideas.
"User representation" sounds nice, but I wonder how that would work in practice. After all, there is "citizen representation" in modern democratic governments but most decisions are being architected by closed door committees free from competing ideas as well.
One of the examples that comes to mind is the battle of activists with ICE. ICE is a government agency, so activists, being citizens, at least in theory have a say in how it is run. Instead, one of their main tactics is shaming private companies for cooperating with ICE, which is kind of backwards if you take the idea of "citizen representation" at face value.
I've started to experiment with looking at these large social media/communication orgs less as companies and more as countries/nation-states, and when I do, the metaphor illuminates a lot for me. E.g., FB gives its citizens free services as long as it can watch (almost) everything people do and put up advertisements (almost) everywhere. And if someone breaks the laws, the Supreme Court, appointed by the President, interprets those laws. If citizens don't like the laws, they can move to another country. And lastly, if citizens don't like the President, well, there's not much they can do, besides again, maybe move to another country.
> Should some kind of democratic process apply to such organisations?
I've wondered what would be some effective ways to add more user voice in the ownership and governance process of these platforms. Do you have any ideas?
It's a dictatorship, but nonetheless, FB is not an actual country so the "move to another country" part isn't that hard to do. It becomes a problem when you don't agree with something of the country but everyone else does, so choosing to leave does alienate you from those who stayed. Basically, FB's killer product is the other users, not the actual features of FB (although they're necessary for the collective to not leave en-mass).
> Basically, FB's killer product is the other users not the actual features of FB (although they're necessary for the collective to not leave en-mass)
I agree. I think one of the hardest things for most people when moving from one actual country to another is leaving behind the people and has been the hardest thing for me when I've decided to delete FB or stop visiting certain internet communities.
While there are many definitions of a state, I just learned that Max Weber defines it as "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory" [0]. This makes me think more about what a state would look like if it were a human community organized around a digital territory and what that means for the future (and present).
>I've wondered what would be some effective ways to add more user voice in the ownership and governance process of these platforms. Do you have any ideas?
The obvious answer would seem to be structure them as cooperatives.
Allow service users to purchase shares at a nominal value, and restrict voting rights to one member one vote - that is, shareholder votes are not weighted based on how many shares one has, owning more shares would only enable one to earn more interest on the shares' capital.
Alternatively, all shares (or maybe just 50%+1) could be held in trust for the benefit of the users. Trustees would then have responsibility of taking users' needs in to account.
I like both of these suggestions! While I've read a bit about cooperatives and digital ones, I haven't heard too much about the trustee idea. Do you have links to either where I could learn more about how they might work in with digital platforms?
I think the best example (although it's not a digital platform, and the ownership is for the benefit of employees rather than customers) I know of would be the John Lewis Partnership in the UK.
It's incorporated as a public limited company, but all of its shares are owned in trust.
They're also working on creating a New World Order™ so you can't easily move to another country, which, by the way, is a terribly underestimated and underused ability at the moment.
As the EU, a supranational government, strengthened in Europe, it actually made it easier to move to another country. Perhaps if the EU became more and more controlling of its member nations, then it wouldn't feel as if one were moving from another country, because each place would be quite similar in law, I don't agree that supranational governance would necessarily make it more difficult to move to another country.
Also, I think it might be underused right now because it's probably really hard for most people around the world to move to another country for various reasons: financial, social, linguistic, legal, etc.
I agree that moving countries can help people, I think it is currently a huge task for most and ironically, believe that better relationships between countries and an overarching form of governance may make it easier to do.
Ostensibly we can vote to make them behave however we want domestically, as long as our government isn't captured. But even ignoring regulatory capture, multinationals are hard to hold to account by any single government. I've seen people saying that where we went wrong was letting any economic entity get bigger than the [democratic] government regulating it. However, that admission (true or not) doesn't present us with any obvious solution.
Yeah, I often see this as a challenge that most governments are based on physical space, and don't seem to know how to regulate digital space. For example, typing on this thread, I could be interacting with all people from the US like me, or people from maybe 20 different countries, all with different geographical law. Yet, we're all in this same digital space at the same time.
I'm curious how governance (not just government, but even governance of orgs and other platforms) adapts to a world that more and more abstracts away physical space.
Exactly, it's often the "either you like our platform or you leave" attitude, which, as the platform covers more and more of one's life, and gains larger network effects, becomes pretty hard. The switching costs can be huge and so people often stay with very little say over how the platform is governed.
I am forced to pay the government money every time I earn income, buy anything, wish to start a business, hire someone, or just exist as annually I have to file a tax return. Failure to do any of these things results in violence - the seizure of my property and / or my freedom forcibly taken away and my body put in prison.
Facebook may have business relationships with other private entities I use, and as a side effect receive some of my information, but Facebook is nothing like the government.
I'm not saying they are equal in power over one's life. I do believe that most governments have more influence over one's life, whether national, regional, local, or other levels.
I also think most governments haven't regulated online interaction very much, for better or worse. Which means most online interaction is moderated/regulated/controlled by the platforms that host them. Yes, Facebook won't throw me in physical jail, however they could suspend or even ban my account. If I don't use it, not such a big deal. If it's the only way I communicate with 90% of the friends in my life and I run my business on there, it could be a huge detriment. They could even just tweak the algorithm of posting, without me knowing, and all of a sudden, my friends and family aren't receiving the messages I'm sending, without me knowing. Not just Facebook, but Amazon, Google, Visa, Stripe, Paypal, and many other platforms have huge power over our digital lives.
Is getting banned from Twitter the same as getting thrown in physical jail? Personally, in most cases, I don't think so. However, I still think these platforms can have a lot of power over one's life.
You're the customer. If you don't like the service they provide, you can choose to spend your money/attention elsewhere. There's no more powerful representation than that
There's much more powerful representation than that. Actually having representation in the decision making process. The most powerful, I'd argue, is being able to make the decisions of the platform.
Leaving seems like almost zero representation to me. Now, it doesn't mean zero freedom, yes, people have freedom to leave. I just don't see that as representation.
I love this question and admittedly, it took my breath away, almost speechless that I could be a part of FB, instead of being given whatever management wants to give me.
Honestly, I'm not sure how it would look. I imagine it might feel different. I imagine I might feel a little more hopeful, instead of so helpless. A little more calm, less filled with dread. I imagine I might feel a little more relaxed, believing I have some say in a safety valve to keep the platform going, in case some leader takes it in a direction that most of us don't want.
I don't know if I'd even want direct democracy, where we users vote on feature prioritization and other nitty-gritty details, I may like some type of representative democracy.
I don't know. It may not look different but maybe it would feel different. Does that make any sense?
I'm pretty sure Stockholm Syndrome is when one falls in love with their hostage taker, which sounds pretty different than me feeling distance or animosity towards Facebook. Fair point in that it may not be so healthy for me to stay, although leaving also has its strong downsides, which may contribute to this feeling of helplessness, and yet I'm almost certain it's not Stockholm syndrome.
Yeah, that's the same as how if I don't like the country I was born in, I can make a raft and take off into the ocean to be a citizen of nothing. It might seem like a hyperbolic analogy, but it's a matter of degrees. Network effects are powerful.
Sometimes I wonder if anyone studied to which extent modern business practices resemble communist practices. Both have multi year plans, closed door high level commities deciding things, sometimes Byzantine politics... The main difference is, it seems, modern business doesn't completely ignore customers. And we now have the tools to make those large, multi year plans work.
- Both of which I discovered via "The People’s Republic of Walmart" by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
A quote from Simon:
"The economies of modern industrialized society can more appropriately be labeled organizational economies than market economies. Thus, even market-driven capitalist economies need a theory of organizations as much as they need a theory of markets. The attempts of the new institutional economics to explain organizational behavior solely in terms of agency, asymmetric information, transaction costs, opportunism, and other concepts drawn from neo-classical economics ignore key organizational mechanisms like authority, identification, and coordination, and hence are seriously incomplete."
