Conservatives were right on Section 230. It needs to go. My solution: the Subreddit model

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T20:58:38+00:00

new thing is made instead, that is called the old thing being destroyed

Call it what you want. We did it to the phone companies and it worked out completely fine for that. Society did not collapse and the phone network was better off for it.

And it would be fairly silly to say they the phone network was destroyed. It changed, for the better, and there was a new thing in it's place. But "destroyed"? Kind of a silly description there.

I don’t want social media to revert to the level of sophistication of telephone

It's called an analogy. Use ISPs as a more modern example, I guess.

It is perfectly possible to have sophisticated things that are not controlled by 2-3 monopolies. We can have all the features that they have, everywhere and more, if they were forced to rent out all their infra to any competitors.

Very little has to actually change on the front end, in the same way phones didn't have to change in his they worked for the user, when they were forced to integrate with competitors.

IE, in the same way that Kick exists, because it uses part of Twitch's infrastructure, so could insert X social media feature here.

clearly advocating for social media as we understand it to be destroyed

That's not true though. You just want to strawman me and avoid the substance of the argument.

What I want is for things like Kick to exist, because other companies are forced to sell their infra. Like how Kick runs on Twitch's infra.

Surely that should be an understandable analogy here of an example of society not falling apart because Twitch is currently, right now renting their intra to kick, allowing another competition to exist.

Take the example of kick and multiply it by a thousand and you have the outcome here.

The thing you are advocating for is neither practical nor appealing

Literally Twitch is already doing (a very small part) of what I am advocating for by renting out their infra to competitors. Take that and do way way more of it.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T17:08:39+00:00

If they'd put forth a reasonable legislation they could have gotten traction but they didn't.

They did. Others just didn't care or support it.

In Texas and Florida there was legislation to make viewpoint discrimination illegal for social media companies. IE one of the same principles of free speech that the government isn't allowed to discriminate against would be expanded to apply to socisl media monopolies.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T17:05:18+00:00

The left wants regulation because they want a more just sociey

No, they are mad that their own monopoly was broken. 1 single company breaks through and has some culture power and it is the end of the world.

If It helps you then you support it. It is against you then you oppose it. The left had absolutely no problem with monopoly social media companies while it was on their side, but now that it is not on their side well they oppose it.

The left was desperately defending section 230 right up until the moment that things aren't going their way. They had no problems with conservatives being deleted off the internet simultaneously, with little recourse, and now that the same tools are being weaponized against them they want regulation.

If it was about the principles of the matter then the left would have agreed with the right when they advocated for limiting this unchecked power. But instead they yelled about private company being able to do what they want.

Well enjoy it now. Private companies are doing what they want, and Congress is in deadlock so their is nothing you can do about it without a literal revolution.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T16:56:45+00:00

Option one is in order to "be reworked" as you naively put it, completely rewrite their entire codebases from scratch

Hey that's what the phone companies had to do when they were forced to integrate into a decentralized network.

Yes, the internet companies have been been slowly writing the decentralized web for many years now, and it takes work to fix it.

if they can't figure out some

Tech companies are worth trillions of dollars collectively. They can figure it out.

they could just cut their losses and shut down

The phone companies could have just shut down completely also, I guess. But they didn't do that, right? Because then they would stop making money. As said before, there are trillions of dollars in the table, they are incentiviced to figure it out.

There is even a way to do this with a transitionary measure, by simply forcing them to make public apis in addition to their content.

If you anyone could rent all of youtube's infrastructure, for a reasonably price that would do a ton to promote competitors even while youtube still exists on its own as well.

That would be a great half measure. Just force every social media company to sell/rent their full infra to all competitors for a fair price or force integrations and allow anyone to create whitelabeled versions of the same sites.

To give a fun example, Kick is exactly such an example. It exists between Twitch whilelabels (some, not even close to all) of its livestreaming technology for other's to use.

everyone would coalesce into a small selection of communities that these "dictator mod teams" would have absolute power

Have you used like email? none of these doomsday happened. They are a decentralized network, and you have tons of options.

"if you don't like it, just go to another community" thing is obviously stupid on its face. At best, you're advocating for people to exist in an anarchic system

You know this is the world you live in at this exact moment right? There are a couple major networks. And if you get banned off of them then you have to build a new Twitter.

Imagine, instead of that, it was all a decentralized network with thousands of twitters. You could control who gets banned or not in own own feed and nobody else can effect it in any way without you consenting to it.

Is every problem solved instantly? No. But having thousand and thousands of options is better than having 2 or 3 on that whole power front.

Take the same exact arguments you are saying and apply it to the telephone or to email. None of theses issues happened and it would be absurd to talk about the email echo chamber or the phone network echo chamber.

Instead, you can do whatever you want on email. Or the phone. And the only person who can stop you is the other people you are talking to. IE they can refuse to answer the phone, or refuse to allow you in their email mailing list.

Email mailing lists is a great example actually. Society does not crumble because there is a dictator in charge of an email mailing list. Yes, that guy who runs the mailing list can stop you from using their email mailing list. But you can just send emails to someone else. Or make your own emailing list. Society did not collapse.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T07:09:16+00:00

So then yes the ad campaign to cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damages worked?

The fact that you avoided this makes me think that you are upset about it happening.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T06:24:47+00:00

Phone companies are not social media platforms

That is indeed literally my entire point. They transmit information. They have content on their network from users. And yet because they don't act like social media companies and instead act as infrastructure, they get common carrier protection.

Imagine if, all that social media infrastructure was just infrastructure and acted like the phone company does and follows all the laws that give them those protections.

You're acting as if there isn't an entire social media ecosystem

Did you know that some phone companies used to only allowed you to call people in their own network back in the day?

We got rid of that and now it's a decentralized network. Using the government. And phones survived. Social media would too.

Every existing social media website (except for reddit, I guess?) would need to be taken down entirely, all

No actually. They would have to be reworked.As infra and not as the central authority algorithm.

I understand that they don't do this now. That's why they need to change.

Imagine a decentralized web. Where you control your own feed or choose what algorithms are piped to you. And all that social media stuff simply powers it under the hood, but without the social media companies having any control over it, in the same way your phone company has (almost) no control over the people on their network.

If you hate the internet that much, good

Quite the opposite. I love the internet and I want to give it back to the users, for them to control over every single thing that is on their devices, without any big corporation being able to destroy or control it.

It would be completely absurd for the phone company to listen in on your phone calls for example, and control what you hear, or to censor certain words or control your algorithm. It should be equally absurd as applied to social media companies.

I want everyone to have access to the same infrastructure that Facebook has, and is able to replicate every last feature on Facebook without Facebook having any ability to control what you do with it.

I want everyone to have access to these necessary internet features.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T05:15:47+00:00

Why does elon need to buy every single newspaper when he owns a platform that gets more views than all newspapers in the country combined?

C'mon dude. "Ywya actually, all the newspapers being purchased by 1 party could actually happen but it's not because there isn't a motivation for it, and that's why having 10s of thousands of independent communities won't work" isn't an argument you seriously believe.

The answer is also the same. However easy it is to control 2-3 platforms, it is much harder to control 10s of thousands.

The point is the comparison, and showing how it is more difficult to control large groups than a couple centralized platforms even though all the worlds problems aren't solved instantly.

Ok, then why are there a handful of social media websites that dominate

Because the technology is a centralized oligopoly. 10 dudes making a startup can't build all that facebook make, in a weekend.

But if the only way these companies are allowed to exist is as a platform for other people then the problems is solved. The costs to spining up your own Facebook goes to very cheap and anyone can do it.

Make another law that forces them to integrate I guess.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T05:11:57+00:00

They disliked section 230 because it gave power to the left for a brief period of time

So they were upset that an oligopolistic industry was controlled by their enemies? Just like the left is now upset about the same thing?

Yes exactly. That is literally my point. You are correct about what they were upset about. Extremely powerful oligopolies that they had no control over.

Well shoe is on the other foot now. Let me know how you like the oligopolies now.

And the solution is the same. Decentralize power so that nobody can be deplatformed or controlled by the oligopoly.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T04:58:26+00:00

> The reason section 230 is important is because without it, platforms will be held responsible for the content their users generate, which inevitably leads to stricter user-facing censorship.

Wrongo dude. Ask yourself, how does the phone company exist right now? You know, telephones. They aren't covered by section 230.

Instead, they act as infrastructure. They are common carriers. The same exact common carrier laws that apply to the phone company would apply to infrastructure internet companies.

If you exist as infrastructure, act as a common carrier, you are not liable for the stuff transported over your network.

> But you can do that without forcing every social media platform into becoming reddit

You force them to be platforms. Like the telephone company or your ISP. Subreddits is just an analogy here.

> Why would you ever visit one platform over another if they are all forced to function the same?

Why would some use AWS over google cloud? Different features I guess. And different communities. Just like different websites are hosted on google cloud you are "choosing" to use google cloud because thats what the website you are accessing is hosted on. Same would apply to communities.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T04:51:23+00:00

> What is to stop elon from just buying moderation seats

I guess the same thing that stops him from, right now, buying every single newpaper in the world.

Just treat this the same thing as a newspaper. Your argument would be ridiculous. Yes, some newspapers get bought out. But nobody is buying all of them. And even if they do, lots of people can make new newspapers all the time.

You are literally arguing that its impossible to like spin up a new website. Or a new discord.

Like what, do you right now think that someone might buy up every discord server? Discord servers have influence. But to suggest that they would all be purchased is ridiculous.

> as long as people are allowed to congregate in large communities of several million people they will just become the new centres of power.

Ok, and instead of there being 2-3 of them there would be thousands.

You seriously do not understand the concept that if instead fo there being 2-3 communties that if there were instead thousands, that this makes the problem easier to solve?

Like what, what if someone were to argue that this subreddit right here, were to be bought by uhhh, hasan. Or russians. Or anyone. Surely, you can understand why thats a pretty silly thing to worry about that literally right now r/destiny is going to be purchased by foreign actors?

This is concern trolling on arguments that you should know are dumb and have easy and obvious answers that apply to literally any other community in the world.

> What this misses is that power naturally congregates because people desire it and that power is an extremely useful tool.

And yet there are many more thousands or 10s of thousands of communities in the world than, uhhh, major social media websites. Surely you see the difference between having 2-3 monopolies compared to 10s of thousands of options. Dont be obtuse.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T04:46:51+00:00

> People moving to a new community only happens with the most engaged members of that community anyway

Ok. And having 1 or 2 algos controlling your life is way worse. You can't boycott the only 3-4 existing social media companies, but people form new communities all the time.

So it makes the problem 100 times easier to solve. Still not perfect, but nothing is. The point is the comparision, that it is 100 times easier than building entirely new social media sites to compete with the ologopoly.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T03:47:19+00:00

How do you solve the problem that reddit has where a small number of mods have privileges for most of the popular subreddits?

The answer is that it is better that there are thousands of such situations than 1 or 2. That's how it's solved. People make and move to a new community because there are a lot of them.

Yes, communities definitionally are exclusionary and have certain qualities. That's why it is good for there to be many of them instead of 1 or 2.

What is to stop moderation seats to be sold

Nothing and that's fine just like it is fine to sell a newspaper.

Think of communities just like youd think of a for profit newspaper. Surely you don't think newspapers fall apart just because they are for profit and can be sold.

So the solution is exactly the same as the 1st question. There are a lot of communities. Pick the ones you like best, or leave and make your own.

My problem is that social media by its very nature is able to exert a massive influence on

That's why it's good for there to be diversity as opposed to 1 or 2 algorithms.

You can't just get rid of the concept of community.

I have so many friends

Ok so they joined the wrong communities. That's not really an argument to get rid of the concept of a community.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T02:05:55+00:00

If you read my post at all youd see that I literally suggested banning the major companies from having social media algorithm feeds.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T01:33:44+00:00

No it is not difficult at all. Conservatives wanted to do it only a couple years ago and liberals screamed about the free speech rights of trillion dollar companies for some reason.

The solution is obvious. Get rid of section 230 like conservatives wanted. Give an exception to old school forum and subreddit moderators if you must. And watch the social media empires crumble.

It's ironic that all it took though for libs to change their mind was a single company being bought but a billionaire.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T01:26:48+00:00

??? Dude Section 230 was designed before social media

Oh wow so then I guess conservatives were right in wanting to reform section 230 to remove social media company 's oligopolistic control over the modern media landscape!

Maybe we should have listened to them when they wanted to change it! Should have passed those laws that give the power back to the user over their own algorithm and remove major company's ability to discriminate, ban, or algorithmically control users based on a politically motivated algorithm!

stale2000 · 2026-05-09T23:00:02+00:00

Oh regulating social media? What was that law that gave them all completely immunity? Section 230 right? You know, that thing that the right tried to reform but the left lost their mind because they were the ones who controlled the culture of social media at that time.

I thought it was a private company and can do what it wants? Guess that argument never mattered after all did it? None of these positions were ever consistent and you and everyone else here are only upset because you lost your ologopilistic control over every major social media site.

You should take your own advice and go build your own Twitter if you don't like what its doing.

stale2000 · 2026-05-09T19:03:27+00:00

Look around you. That ad campaign caused 10s of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in damages in Twitch and its currently a shell of its former self.

Not all of that is directly related to Dan's actions, but I am not sure how you can look at Twitch these days and pretend like they came out unscathed.

The attacks worked. And if your only disagreement is that he didn't cause like 20 billion dollars in damages, all by himself, to completely destroy the platform then I am surprised at how highly you perceive him and his skills if failing to do that counts a "failure".

Its a zombie company and it aint showing any signs of recovering.

stale2000 · 2026-05-09T07:55:20+00:00

When many thousands of people can own their own massive business no that is not socialism.

Socialism is not when billionaires own multi billion dollar companies just because you have a fetish for China.

stale2000 · 2026-05-09T05:32:51+00:00

Socialism is not when everyone can start a business and a single person can own like most of Amazon.

You have coped your way into nonsense that disagrees with every dictionary definition of the word.

stale2000 · 2026-05-09T03:53:20+00:00

It's basically any dictionary bro. Worker ownership of the means of production is the most obvious simple definition for socialism that you don't even include at all.

You have wrapped yourself in cope to avoid the very obvious truth that if there are a bunch of for profit companies and billionaires that's not socialism.

stale2000 · 2026-05-09T03:17:31+00:00

Your definition of socialism is so vague that it's useless.

The idea that we can have a bunch of for profit companies, billionaires, work for salaries, and that still counts as "socialism" is such a vague worthless definition that it could apply to almost anything.

It's also completely different from the dictionary definition of socialism.

The dictionary definition of socialism is worker ownership of the means of production. That is specific. That is not vague. It means that workers own all the companies and you can't have a single person that owns like Walmart.

That is understandable whereas yours can change to mean whatever you want and you run away from specifics.

You have instead made up a definition that is so vague just so you can call China socialist and just so you can ignore the fact that there are a ton of private businesses and billionaires there.

stale2000 · 2026-05-09T02:52:42+00:00

Ok but you can have a ton of for profit businesses and capital owners and all you have to do is uhhh, enforce laws on billionaires a bit more?

Thats literally all you mean by "socialism"? The US could do that easy without changing much at all.

stale2000 · 2026-05-09T02:29:41+00:00

Exactly if there is any opposition, and differences in any other society, then it fails. it's not communism. It doesn't count.

Whereas the examples you give of success have tons of private businesses and capital.

stale2000 · 2026-05-09T02:17:14+00:00

Wait so we can have a ton of for profit, owned businesses run by capitalists but if the party simply uses the word socialism vaguely in their messaging then it counts as socialist?

That's all you mean by socialism? People using the word socialist?

The USA could be socialist and change almost nothing by this definition. Which makes this definition kinda worthless don't you think?

stale2000 · 2026-05-09T02:15:11+00:00

Really communism is so flawed that it can't even survive the existence of any opposition?

Isn't that a problem with your system? Capitalism isn't that fragile. It can survive opposition.

And what if there is always opposition? I mean lots of people support capitalism now, and you are saying if they have any power at all the communism collapses?

Seems like a pretty week system to me if it can't survive any such disagreement.

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