2022-03-04 #media/Talks
talk from Ethan Zuckerman https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=175fe463-5b23-42c2-a759-ae1d012a1a74&utm_source=pocket_mylist
Good Web
- web 1 which was “good” and “nice”
- people did weird and fun things
until 2016 when narrative grew more popular that web had gotten bad or worse via social media
how do we get back to the ”good web”
- social media is not going away
1) Corporate Web
traditional web 2.0 where main corporations own the main platforms.
2) Deplatformed Web
the “weird” one. people who for one reason or another cannot thrive on existing social media so they built their own (mostly using Mastodon)
- Real communities are easier to govern. centralized moderation is the wrong way to solve ”community.” You need people with vested interest who are members in the community to dictate it
- all these niche social networks have very specific spaces and norms
3) web3
- very stigmatized and contested term, but very broadly tokenized, decentralized communities
- D.tube which is decentralized youtube where videos are backed by tokens
- steemit: basically prediction market betting
- fell apart because a crypto whale took over the site
- planetary: decentralized social network without blockchain, individual ledgers
- Project Liberty (https://www.projectliberty.io/). Open protocol around social graph
- a lot of money going into this not necessarily used by people
Advantages
- “decentralized”
- participant governance
- self-funded
- it’s cool (energy is good)
Disadvantages
- Tokenized democracy is not good. One share = 1 vote becomes plurocratic. In the end, they care about wallets and tokens not people
- efficient market theory doesn’t really work for these things
- it is centralized
4) cooperative web
web largely built by people who believe in open source and volunteerism.
lot of small pieces loosely joined
Mastodon rolling your own
- federated relationships: intentional choice to “interop” with other communities
- rolling your own is hard
Very small, simple social networks
- AmherstTalks
- but problem is that you don’t go to it because aggregators are convenient
- Gobo: aggregator of social networks
- Situated Software and personal software for social media
social media should be small, self-governed, and not sell my data
- everyone thinks they’re building the good web
- learn from everyone to synthesize what we want social networks to be like