Twitter makes it super easy to do mass warrantless surveillance, because Twitter gathers millions of people together in the same searchable public space. It's a honeypot.
What's dangerous about the "public square" concept is that Musk doesn't just want a public square — one public space among many, one among equals — he wants the public square, a monopoly on online conversation. "I think I see a path to Twitter exceeding a billion monthly users in 12 to 18 months" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596751751532937217
We shouldn't have all of our conversations, political or otherwise, in one place. That's a giant mistake. We need decentralization for our own safety and freedom.
Yes, for example Facebook and TikTok.
> HN is no different in that respect.
Well, Twitter has over 200 million users. I believe that HN is much much smaller. HN also tends to be more anonymous.
I like to think that dang's days consist of monocle and tophat shopping, sabotaging the metric system, and propping up the global media conspiracy.
However, I suspect the root cause is more mundane: Some small percentage of users treat "flag article" like the downvote button.
Does that help?
That's the relevant number. So Twitter is about 1000x larger than HN.
From a surveillance standpoint, we're really only talking about commenters, on both sites.
How so? How many HN comments have "gone viral"? How many news stories are about a HN comment? How many politicians and journalists and pro athletes and Hollywood celebrities are commenting on HN?
Any given HN comment can receive only a theoretical maximum of 250K upvotes, if (improbably) every registered user upvoted it, and those upvotes would be superfluous anyway, because they would only bring the comment to the top of a single HN submission.
You don't have the expectation of privacy in public in the sense that someone can see what you're doing. But there's also the expectation that a democratic (small d) government isn't watching your every move in public, because that's a sign of totalitarianism.
No matter where or what site you use.
Look up Talkwalker, Hootsuite, Nexalogy, etc. Governments and other institutions use these tools.
Spreading the conversation elsewhere doesn't change the ability of these analytics platforms to cover them, although it does introduce more noise into the signal; the smaller the forum, the less an impact it has in the analytics rankings. If you slice up the pie into a ton of tiny chunks, the data received becomes less useful.
That said, some of the uses of these platforms are completely reasonable and very pro-social. We kinda want law enforcement to know if Jimmy Bullets just posted that he's gonna shoot up grade 4 English tomorrow.
Someone with 1mil+ followers is a whole other story. They have enough people watching their every move to cause problems if they are dealt with directly, so they need more attention for implicit handling over time, psychological and financial handling, etc. People with an audience can cause a lot of social, political, and ultimately financial damage to many entities just by some words. And in a world run by marketers, salespeople, lawyers, bankers, and politicians — this is the scariest threat imaginable.
Tech people can do a lot of technical damage but it is mostly just a thorn in the side of the machine. Even if they built something disruptive, an audience is needed for it to go anywhere, and most avenues for scaling anything disruptive are already tightly controlled / monitored by big tech.
I say this as what I believe the controlling authorities perspective is on the matter.
I suspect that these tools are all looking at the world's largest social networks with 9-10 figure user bases. The same argument applies to them: they're too big. None of them should exist. Once you break it down to thousands or millions of different platforms, each with much smaller user bases, it becomes prohibitively expensive to surveil them all.
> We kinda want law enforcement to know if Jimmy Bullets just posted that he's gonna shoot up grade 4 English tomorrow.
Has this ever prevented a shooting? They always find these posts after the fact.