<story><title>Google disabled my husband&apos;s account</title><url>https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315749803041619981</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jbay808</author><text>I definitely think that what you&amp;#x27;re saying is true, and is part of the explanation. But another part is that the Wild West internet also had its own major issues -- roving bandits, to carry the analogy -- and these big companies did solve real problems that were only growing with time.&lt;p&gt;Gmail&amp;#x27;s spam filtering. Recaptcha&amp;#x27;s bot rejection. Facebook&amp;#x27;s identity verification. Paypal&amp;#x27;s secure credit card processing. Google de-ranking link farms. Youtube&amp;#x27;s hosting costs. All of these very effectively solved real problems with the old web, and those problems were growing as bad actors became more sophisticated.&lt;p&gt;I like the old web too, but I do appreciate that an attempt to return to it would still require very effective tools to solve at least some of these problems, and they&amp;#x27;d require constant improvement to keep the roving bandits at bay.</text></item><item><author>kodah</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think the internet was ever going to become regulated. What did occur post-2007 was that what made the internet work as a disparate ecosystem of loosely connected destinations (news groups, message boards, blogs, misc websites) that all played their own very important role, controlled and owned by their own communities became one platform under Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc... and was controlled and owned by people who had no identity-based connection to the people using those platforms.&lt;p&gt;This is largely based on my own observations and could be wrong, but it&amp;#x27;s my theory. Tech companies robbed an internet culture they didn&amp;#x27;t even realize or appreciate existed, and then shoved a bunch of people who had never used the internet before on it and convinced them that Facebook was the internet. Or rather, that the standards, norms, and culture on Facebook was somehow reflective of everything outside of Facebook. Just replace Facebook with the growing list of companies who engage in &amp;quot;platforms&amp;quot; in varying degrees.&lt;p&gt;tldr: this obsession with centralization made no sense to the way we do things as a human species, any of our values, any of our culture, and we let it happen anyway. The chickens have come home to roost.</text></item><item><author>breakingcups</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you&amp;#x27;re supposed to appeal, but you don&amp;#x27;t know what you&amp;#x27;re being accused of doing.&lt;p&gt;This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it&amp;#x27;s an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible.&lt;p&gt;The remaining 1 time it&amp;#x27;s because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose.&lt;p&gt;The only reason these tech companies managed to get so big is because they&amp;#x27;ll cheat at anything that requires human scale. Support, moderation, taking responsibility for the content they host. They somehow managed to skirt on that just as the web was transitioning from a wild west to a somewhat ingrained, regulated place and the world is worse off for it.&lt;p&gt;Because they skirted on all this, they are now somehow the world&amp;#x27;s gatekeepers on modern communications. If you don&amp;#x27;t play ball with them, you&amp;#x27;re cut off from almost everyone. Their recklessness and callousness ironically put them in the position to rule over the rest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jjav</author><text>I believe this is an overly rosy-glasses view of the current heavily centralized internet.&lt;p&gt;Gmail spam filtering? Isn&amp;#x27;t particularly good. I run my own email infrastructure and I get way less spam through it than on my gmail address. And I don&amp;#x27;t do anything particularly special other than configure postfix correctly.&lt;p&gt;Recaptcha? Was there ever a more hated piece of user abusive technology? Plenty of rage against it here in many discussions. I won&amp;#x27;t do business anymore with any site that won&amp;#x27;t let me buy without identifying 27 traffic lights in slow motion (looking at you adorama). We&amp;#x27;re all better off if this dies.&lt;p&gt;Facebook verification? Don&amp;#x27;t know what value this brings to anyone other than FB.&lt;p&gt;Youtube? Granted.. Hopefully with bandwidth costs reducing over time, decentralization becomes more viable.&lt;p&gt;Paypal? Always pay with credit card directly. The regulatory consumer protection for that was well in place before internet commerce even took off.&lt;p&gt;The original potential of the internet was in its fully decentralized functionality. Usenet being a great example (owned by nobody, hosted peer to peer) which should be studied a bit more now that we have generations of developers coming up never having known it. Of course, it was (mostly) overrun by spam. But unlike email where spam is pretty much defeated, there was never a meaningful effort in addressing spam on Usenet (forums and mailing lists took over instead). Applying the same techniques to NNTP could well be equally successful.&lt;p&gt;If there is any desire to avoid the internet becoming fully a new cable-tv controlled by just a few major player we need to pursue research into decentralized services as a priority.&lt;p&gt;(If nothing else, consider at least running your own email infrastructure if you&amp;#x27;re technically capable. Keep the foot in the door so it doesn&amp;#x27;t close permanently.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Google disabled my husband&apos;s account</title><url>https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315749803041619981</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jbay808</author><text>I definitely think that what you&amp;#x27;re saying is true, and is part of the explanation. But another part is that the Wild West internet also had its own major issues -- roving bandits, to carry the analogy -- and these big companies did solve real problems that were only growing with time.&lt;p&gt;Gmail&amp;#x27;s spam filtering. Recaptcha&amp;#x27;s bot rejection. Facebook&amp;#x27;s identity verification. Paypal&amp;#x27;s secure credit card processing. Google de-ranking link farms. Youtube&amp;#x27;s hosting costs. All of these very effectively solved real problems with the old web, and those problems were growing as bad actors became more sophisticated.&lt;p&gt;I like the old web too, but I do appreciate that an attempt to return to it would still require very effective tools to solve at least some of these problems, and they&amp;#x27;d require constant improvement to keep the roving bandits at bay.</text></item><item><author>kodah</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think the internet was ever going to become regulated. What did occur post-2007 was that what made the internet work as a disparate ecosystem of loosely connected destinations (news groups, message boards, blogs, misc websites) that all played their own very important role, controlled and owned by their own communities became one platform under Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc... and was controlled and owned by people who had no identity-based connection to the people using those platforms.&lt;p&gt;This is largely based on my own observations and could be wrong, but it&amp;#x27;s my theory. Tech companies robbed an internet culture they didn&amp;#x27;t even realize or appreciate existed, and then shoved a bunch of people who had never used the internet before on it and convinced them that Facebook was the internet. Or rather, that the standards, norms, and culture on Facebook was somehow reflective of everything outside of Facebook. Just replace Facebook with the growing list of companies who engage in &amp;quot;platforms&amp;quot; in varying degrees.&lt;p&gt;tldr: this obsession with centralization made no sense to the way we do things as a human species, any of our values, any of our culture, and we let it happen anyway. The chickens have come home to roost.</text></item><item><author>breakingcups</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you&amp;#x27;re supposed to appeal, but you don&amp;#x27;t know what you&amp;#x27;re being accused of doing.&lt;p&gt;This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it&amp;#x27;s an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible.&lt;p&gt;The remaining 1 time it&amp;#x27;s because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose.&lt;p&gt;The only reason these tech companies managed to get so big is because they&amp;#x27;ll cheat at anything that requires human scale. Support, moderation, taking responsibility for the content they host. They somehow managed to skirt on that just as the web was transitioning from a wild west to a somewhat ingrained, regulated place and the world is worse off for it.&lt;p&gt;Because they skirted on all this, they are now somehow the world&amp;#x27;s gatekeepers on modern communications. If you don&amp;#x27;t play ball with them, you&amp;#x27;re cut off from almost everyone. Their recklessness and callousness ironically put them in the position to rule over the rest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skratlo</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think you&amp;#x27;re right.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Facebook&amp;#x27;s identity verification&lt;p&gt;in real life, do you need to know the real name of the cashier and see their contract so you can trust them with your payment? You don&amp;#x27;t, you use common sense.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Google de-ranking link farms&lt;p&gt;hey, haha, and what do we get instead? Monopoly on ad-driven search engine, great, I&amp;#x27;d rather have link farms since I can easily filter those out with little brain-power. I can&amp;#x27;t do that with paid-for-propaganda&lt;p&gt;Now imagine we&amp;#x27;d leave the way it was, people would learn how to deal with it, the same way you learned you can&amp;#x27;t leave unlocked  bicycle in a city. It&amp;#x27;s a price to pay for anonymity, and we should all have right to be anonymous on internet.</text></comment>