> You can't compare 2000s social media to what it's become today. It's orders of magnitude larger today both in terms of volume of data and cultural impact.
Why? The available computing power and bandwidth are orders of magnitude more plentiful / cheaper than in the 2000s, too. I can't think of any technical reason why we couldn't have social in today's world media without advertising money.
The main non-technical reason why you can't run Facebook on the cheap is that it's expensive to respond to regulatory and PR pressures they're under. You need an army of lawyers, lobbyists, and compliance people in almost every country on the planet.
But that's in some respects a product of consolidation that we never really needed in the first place: we don't need every human on the planet on the same social network. Social circles are small and the only reason to have everyone under the same roof is if you want to be the gatekeeper for the world's ad targeting data.
The scrutiny is also a product of amount of money involved. No one is exerting as much pressure on Signal, Mastodon, etc, precisely because they're not trillion-dollar companies.
I agree completely. We would benefit a lot from people dispersing into multiple competing social media solutions, but the current state of things is that if I don't join Instagram it's likely I won't have many of my contacts available.
So while infrastructure is also much cheaper than it was 10 maybe 20 years ago, and you could in theory spin up an Instagram competitor in the cheap, people use what they use, and the money printing machine needs to print money. So we need an alternative to ads, which could be just people choosing to joint a paid social network, or another business model, but to just write off ads as something you could regulate into oblivion without consequences is just naive.
I've actually wrote before in my blog against a form of political realism, and this in a sense falls into it, but we gotta be pragmatic eventually, and take into account the dynamics that feed the powers that be.
Why? The available computing power and bandwidth are orders of magnitude more plentiful / cheaper than in the 2000s, too. I can't think of any technical reason why we couldn't have social in today's world media without advertising money.
The main non-technical reason why you can't run Facebook on the cheap is that it's expensive to respond to regulatory and PR pressures they're under. You need an army of lawyers, lobbyists, and compliance people in almost every country on the planet.
But that's in some respects a product of consolidation that we never really needed in the first place: we don't need every human on the planet on the same social network. Social circles are small and the only reason to have everyone under the same roof is if you want to be the gatekeeper for the world's ad targeting data.
The scrutiny is also a product of amount of money involved. No one is exerting as much pressure on Signal, Mastodon, etc, precisely because they're not trillion-dollar companies.