I think that people have an (almost) unalienable power, very strong, and pretty underused.
It's the power of walking away.
If you find an environment toxic, leave it, and ask your friends to leave it, too. Yes, you have to research alternatives first, and make compromises, at least temporarily.
Lately this somehow worked for Facebook. I bet they are going to see that on their bottom line.
So, if you dislike the outrage machine, leave it. Consciously ignore it. Do not retweet, do not link to tweets (instead, quote worthy tweets, they are short).
If enough people did that, and migrated elsewhere, that would be noted. Speak to companies in the language they understand, that is, the language of money. Their money comes from your attention spent on their property. Vote with your dollar — the dollar not spent by online advertisers for your eyeballs that are not there.
This is the part that I don't understand. Facebook, in the grand scheme of things, is still an incredibly new development for people. Most users (at least those who abide by the age limit) have spent most of their lives not being on Facebook. What grand utility does Facebook provide that makes it so difficult to stop using it? I cancelled my Facebook account a few years ago and the only time I ever even thought about it was when I'd try to sign in to services (like Spotify) that were linked to my account at one time and it got reactivated through that. I'd have to login and cancel the account again.
What is it about Facebook that has suddenly and inexplicably turned it into a necessity for people when they lived for so long without it? It's not like a cell phone or other technology that has massive utility. Most people don't even communicate via Facebook (from what I hear). They just post divisive nonsense.
Facebook (along with Google, Amazon, EBay, AirBnB, Stripe, etc.) get their strength from the long tail. I had deleted it off my phone and logged out on desktop, but then I heard (via email from my sister, who heard it on Facebook) that my aunt was in a coma and my cousin was posting updates on Facebook. That was enough to bring me back. And my cousin posts updates on FB because it's by far the easiest way to distribute news to everyone who cares without worrying if you're forgetting someone.
I'd assume a lot of casual FB usage is similar. There's 90% outrage posts, political stuff, memes, ads, chain letters, people sharing glamor shots of their vacations - and 10% pics of the grandkids, reconnecting with long-lost friends, networking into chance opportunities, and birth/wedding/death announcements that you wouldn't otherwise see. Missing out on the good 10% is a sufficiently large incentive that people put up with the bad 90%.
I'd argue that communication via email can work just as well as FB. It's a little harder to "opt in" to updates, but with spam filters and other email features, it seems like it can be a lot less noise to have to filter through. But this is coming from someone who doesn't use FB.
It works on a small scale with a group of people who regularly communicate with each other. That's how I organize most of my social events - e-mail a bunch of friends and say "Hey, wanna get together on Saturday?"
It fails when groups are larger or more loosely attached. In my cousin's case - my dad was one of 10 brothers and sisters (many with their own spouses), I have 16 cousins on that side (again with spouses), 3 half-cousins, 10 cousins-once-removed, 1 cousin-twice-removed, and there's a tendency for at least one person to feel offended if they don't get the news when everybody else gets the news. It's somewhat understandable that my cousin would want a broadcast medium rather than trying to remember all that.
Or as another example - a friend of mine died recently, and I found out through FB. I hadn't been in touch with her for several years, since before she got married, I'd never met her husband, and he certainly didn't have my e-mail. Still, I appreciated knowing, and passed on that info to other mutual friends, who also appreciated knowing. That's the long-tail; in my parents' generation, they might've found out at some reunion 30 years in the future, long after the funeral has passed and people are done sharing memories & photos.
The problem that Facebook solves is finding a way to contact someone when all you know is their name. If you don't have a phone number, address, or email but you know First and Last (or even First - if you have related friends), then Facebook still works to get in touch. Whereas phone books for personal numbers aren't really a thing. Facebook is that phone book.
One thing that I have been discovering recently: Discussion groups. Back in the day it was Usenet, of course, and there are still websites that host niche forums. But it seems I am now running into weird new interests where the major discussion is happening on a facebook group. I go months without logging into facebook, but this seems to be what's drawing me back in.
> What grand utility does Facebook provide that makes it so difficult to stop using it?
For example, all your friends might be on it, and organise events via it. Then, if you don't use FB, you don't find out about events you might have wanted to go to.
This is the power of network effects, whiuch causes monopolies. The monopolies would be broken up if social networks had to use open protocols to allow interoperability.
> Can you imagine using WhatsApp to chat to your friends on Reddit or share photos from Flickr to Facebook and still see likes and comments? That’s the power of open protocols.
It could, but if you rely on being sent a calendar invite you'll miss the event, because people aren't sending calendar invites, because everyone is on Facebook, because people aren't sending calendar invites, because everyone is on Facebook. This is the network effect, as the parent post was saying.
To most of my family in the Philippines, from children to elders, they only started using the internet heavily when Facebook was available (cell phones and decent data coverage were big enablers of that though).
Facebook provides clear utility to a society that has had no decent online method of replicating their group/communal way of sharing experiences before. Do they _need_ to share their experiences or communicate through Facebook? No, but it’s an obvious extension of what they’ve already been doing.
FWIW the issues I see with Facebook here in the west—fake news and divisive nonsense specifically—are exacerbated there, so definitely a double-edged sword.
It's not so much utility as it is addiction. A lot of the popular platforms are implemented to take advantage random reinforcement / variable reward schedules, social approval, ego validation, etc.
Walking away sounds easy on paper, like for gaming addicts. The articles about Facebook from the past come to mind where management was fully aware of the addiction factor, and in fact did everything to encourage people to stay on Facebook longer, including showing them "relevant" content and encouraging likes.
Maybe restrictions, similar to gambling could be put into effect? For instance, clearly stating the business intent of the site, requiring ID, limiting to certain hours,.. its sounds weird but it reflects how underregulated the internet is compared to other areas.
If such addiction is something that can be diagnosed via a reasonably rigorous procedure, then yes, we'll probably have to do something similar to other addictive things: age limits, clear warnings, maybe even independent ongoing testing of the effects. Compare to selling alcohol.
Is the potential risk of addiction related to why alcohol sale is regulated? Most rationales I've seen for preventing sale to minors relate to health effects and immediate intoxication effects (car crashes etc.) instead.
Don't get me wrong, I'd be thrilled if addictive potential was considered primary among reasons to consider regulating something. I'm just not sure it is.
And whom do you suppose would be writing those regulations? Of course the answer to this question is the very same reason that the tech giants will not be split up. We have a mountain of rules and regulations and anti-competitive behavior, price fixing, and all other sorts of stuff. And then we have Time Warner/Comcast openly agreeing to not compete, charging arbitrarily high prices, and the FTC apparently deciding there's no such thing as a merger that might lead to reduced competition. Then you have the head of Comcast golfing, partying, and most importantly fundraising like a fiend for the former president.
One of our two political parties is campaigning on a platform to reign in this type of campaign finance influence:
"Democrats would use their first month in the House majority to advance sweeping changes to future campaign and ethics laws, requiring the disclosure of shadowy political donors, outlawing the gerrymandering of congressional districts and restoring key enforcement provisions to the Voting Rights Act, top Democratic leaders said on Tuesday."
Everybody says this before elections. Trump was going to 'drain the swamp' and Obama was going to take down k-street influence. Then they get into office, tip their hat, and turn their back until the next election when suddenly they're incredible again, or at least they promise they will be. Obama ended up creating a special executive chair to let a Monsanto VP take control of the FDA, tried to jam the corporate written TPP through in the most undemocratic and secretive way possible, chose not to even try to hold the banks accountable for collapsing the economy, and so much more. Trump's apparently decided his go-to man on foreign policy and national security is none other than John 'Yellowcake' Bolton.
That old joke really is true. How do you know when a politician is lying? Their lips are moving.
It’s much more fashionable and edgy to point at any failure and then judge their entire administration on solely that point. Don’t forget to dramatically overestimate the presidents ability to effect change in the government as a whole, and instead hold them accountable for congressional obstruction.
Indeed it does! We live in a democracy and we have the ability to elect literally nearly anybody we'd like for any office. And fewer Americans than ever strongly identify as either republican or democrat. Yet, somehow, republicans and democrats make up nearly 100% of all office holders at all levels of American government. Isn't this interesting?
The reason is tribalism, and more specifically politicians becoming extremely adept at driving and exploiting tribalism. Many of the issues held as cornerstones by both parties are ones that are relatively unimportant. The reason they are held as cornerstones is because they do an extremely good job of dividing people. The reason for the desire to divide is because it helps both establishment parties to maintain a grip on power.
How? In the most recent presidential election what percent of people do you think voted for Hillary thinking 'Yes, this person truly represents what I value most and will make a great president.' By contrast what percent voted for her because the alternative was simply unacceptable? And similarly for those that voted for Trump. By focusing all of their energy on dividing people it makes people ignore the failings of their preferred side and instead focus on the awfulness of their less preferred side. This, in turn, does a fantastic job of getting people to vote against their own interest. And, in turn, this also encourages both sides of the political spectrum to play up to their own villainy (from the other side's perspective).
By continuing to vote for the 'least awful' choice instead of the choice people actually want, this system will be perpetuated indefinitely.
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Interestingly enough, I think the efforts made towards sharply dividing people started to happen around the early 90s. And something happened then that was probably not just a coincidence. Ross Perot, at one point, looked set to win the US presidential election. He was polling ahead of both Bush and Clinton. He ultimately ended up taking 18% of the vote and, at the minimum, working as a spoiler. Ross Perot was a complete outsider. And he got those tens of millions of votes running a straight forward platform that he advertised on public broadcasting and infomercials. All these fancy political campaigns, teams, and political strategery was was nearly upstaged by this [1] guy with some printed out graphs and plain speaking.
And so it looks like works on min-maxing elections went into overdrive since then. It just turns out that getting people ragingly mad at each other over inane issues turns out to be one of the best ways to keep getting elected. And so yes, I do think pointing out how both parties in the US are complete trash does help solve the problem. What we need is people to stop being so scared and tribal. Instead vote for whoever you think will do the best job, instead of trying to decide who's "electable" and will do the least awful job. Trump, if nothing else, should show that the notion of "electability" is a complete lie and tool to maintain power. Anybody is "electable", anybody is "presidential". Vote for who you want instead of kicking in that cognitive dissonance, pretending the future won't be exactly like the past, and voting for the exact same idiots over and over.
Very true. But it would be easier to walk away if there were an alternative to walk to. Such as alexandercrohde's proposed site which is essentially a reality/emotion filtered twitter/facebook stream.
The alternative is the real world, where you look into the eyes of the faces around you and put your energy into those relationships more than others. (Not being flippant. I was on FB 9 years, but realizing that I was prioritizing the far over the near was what got me to say goodbye).
I think the comment you're replying to is trying to strengthen that ability. Now you don't have to convince some critical mass of your friends to switch over; you just switch over to the new platform, which everyone is connected to via some open source API/protocol, or the company running the data service is not running a front end to present the data. You continue to get the data from your friends and family while using a front end that you feel safer in.
It would require regulating the companies who hold personal data and divorcing them from the entities that tailor feeds and provide a user experience for the data. I don't think it's that ridiculous of an idea, really.
When AT&T was a monopoly and you had to rent your phone from them at an outrageous price, you could also walk away. But having to either walk/drive around or send slow mail to communicate was not very efficient. Perfectly doable, mind you, but very inconvenient. Sometimes the cost of walking away is just too steep, so abusing a dominant position becomes very easy and tempting.
I don't think Twitter or Facebook are anywhere close to that threshold. Maybe that's just because I barely use them. But I'm sure some people were also not using phone in the seventies, so I won't conclude based on my individual case.
Walking away from AT&T was hard because of the expense of building a phone transmission network, and (I suppose) because of some patents they held.
Walking away from Twitter is much easier, because multiple global instant or near-instant messaging systems exist, including completely open and user-controlled systems, and even building a new such system is reasonably easy for a group of competent people.
That's looking at it from a purely technical perspective. A 20% better Twitter or Facebook (from a technical perspective) is certainly comparatively easy to do, but would still have an approximate value of nil. The value of Twitter or Facebook is not technical (though running services at this scale is technically very challenging): it comes from the people using it. Building another Facebook, even with marginal improvements, is never going to be enough to make enough people switch.
So is the case for AT&T: even if you could build a network competing with the AT&T one it would still have been a largely useless endeavor, unless you could also force AT&T to be interoperable with your network.
Thanks for posting this. It's all too often people (like in this article) want to lean on bureaucracy and legislation to fix their problems as opposed to actually doing something about it. Not using Twitter and Facebook has a positive step for my sanity, much like not watching 24 hour cable news was another positive step. I don't need the government to break up CNN or News Corp to solve that problem.
The problem is far broader than that. Other people are still watching cable news or read Facebook 24/7, and what they take away from it guides their actions. When those actions start affecting you, it kinda becomes your problem as well.
No. That's just more software engineer hand waving to avoid taking responsibility for the way their products have changed the emotional landscape for real people in the last couple of decades.
It's like saying the CIA wasn't trying to destroy communities when they were handing out crack, because "moral people wouldn't have taken it". Every single person building these platforms knew how addictive they were. It was the entire reason these companies were valued from the start. It was the end goal.
Yeah, a junkie can decide not to go find another needle. But if that is your response to the drug epidemic, you then have marginalized people who you've decreed "not worth saving". And I don't like what that has looked like over the last 60 years.
This is correct: if you see that you're taking part in building something you know (or suspect) is a bad thing, you are responsible if you continue to work on that.
This only reinforces my point: if you think it's a wrong thing, walk away from it. Leave that job at Facebook data science division; there's a number of other well-paid data science jobs.
But I'm not trying to talk about what "they" have done wrong, and could have done differently in the past, or what regulators should be doing. I'm talking about something you and me can do right now, and what is completely within our own power to do.
It flies in the face of so much opposition from reality – much of it credible – like how the hell do you make money when you eschew walled gardens, engagement boosters, and adtech friendly practices? Do people even want to make the tradeoffs they'd have to? Is regulation too heavyhanded?
Will it be that for as long as these systems can be turned into money machines, old money will use them to print new money? Perhaps.
But the mentality of "open at all costs, profits be damned" feels like one we in the tech industry have gradually let slip from our ethos, and it's so core to the old web. I miss it.
I can't help but feel that the Internet is hamstrung by overreliance on advertising as a revenue model ...
All of the opposing forces you describe simply evaporate if you charge a fee for access to the API.
Something small and unobtrusive but which would at twitter scale add up to an awful lot of moolah.
Because you're not trying to monetise your users beyond that it doesn't really matter if loads of people stop using because the network effect isn't important.
But at the end of the day it's all about monitoring the activities of mass populations as much as it is about direct advertising revenue, and that's too priceless for the big corps to let go of.
These remarks don't really address the points I was making.
Firstly, if people want to use it, and pay for it, even small charges at mass scale pay off. Something like twitter doesn't cost a lot to run in particular at unit cost.
If they don't, GOTO 10: "the Internet is hamstrung by overreliance on advertising as a revenue model"
That would be just as important for a subscription based service. If your friends use the service, you're much more likely to continue using it and keep paying the monthly fee.
> Something small and unobtrusive but which would at twitter scale add up to an awful lot of moolah.
That only works if there is something else preventing competitors from monetizing end-user attention instead. That's possible, but (I don't think) probable.
Well, you could charge for it. But of course you wouldn't be able to compete with free - you'd have to have competitors who needed to charge too.
They do exist but are pretty niche. The WELL comes to mind. www.well.com
If it's any help I applaud every newspaper that puts up a paywall, and more are doing it. It only came about when the industry was (is) about to be completely wiped out and there weren't really alternatives though. But if you're not paying your journalists, someone else is paying them to tell you what to think.
I miss the old internet too :-( . It had so much promise.
I just had this same conversation with a colleague. The old internet was really the civilized wild west. All the idealogical virtue of sharing and learning was plentiful and you had to have some basic technical skill to contribute or be involved enough to learn how to do it. Now, any curmudgeon can post whatever brain farts pop out with a frequency that only rivals that of their actual mouths.
Maybe the nice thing about the old internet was that it felt distinct from the rest of life, instead of an integral part of it - or, frighteningly, much of the foundation. Bad things happened on the internet (or AOL, Prodigy, etc.) in 1994 but then I just signed off and went about my day. Also, it felt like something most people hadn't quite figured out yet and, well, of course it was going to attract eccentrics of all stripes - including some less savoury ones.
I loved the internet, and Prodigy, when I was a kid in the 90's and 12 year old me would be shocked to hear that sometimes I dream of going to a cabin with just a landline, radio, and desk for writing letters for a month.
Wow, you exactly nailed how it felt back then.
You mentally switched modes “ok, now I’m online”, and it felt distinctly from “real life”, mostly because accessing it was hard (compared to the present).
I think the problem with current internet is that life outside is mostly the same as in 20-30 years ago, and we have artificially overvalued internet presence (youtubers, influencers, online tracking, data leaks, etc)
>Well, you could charge for it. But of course you wouldn't be able to compete with free - you'd have to have competitors who needed to charge too.
Are you sure about that? Twitter's annual revenue is 2.4 billion dollars, and they have 300 million users. $0.55/month per user is all it would take to match their current revenue.
Sure, when a service is getting up off the ground, you can't beat free, but for one that's established, like Facebook or Twitter, the subscription fees can be made miniscule.
As long as the advertising model is used, a set of perverse incentives exist that encourage social platforms to treat advertisers as more important than users, to inflate their user numbers, to lie about views, to tolerate fake accounts and harassment, and to close their APIs.
A $1 premium ad-free option with 50% adoption would increase twitter's revenue and remove the perverse incentives.
And as soon as they do that somebody else will start a free clone to siphon off their users, and people will abandon Twitter. Getting people from $0-$1 is a lot harder than $1-$5. Humans aren't very rational.
For that matter, note that mobile game companies found out it was harder to get all your users to pay $5 for a game than to get 1% of your users to pay hundreds.
This assumes that all Twitter users are actual people and that one person doesn't have multiple accounts all over the place. I would imagine that, although still not a major issue, the cost would be a bit higher for users and that's only factoring in users that find enough utility in Twitter to think that it's worth paying for.
This feels like a uniquely engineering perspective. My parents won't filter twitter, they also won't go searching for some complicated front end.
In my opinion, the problem of hate spreading is not a technical one, but a social one. These platforms are just better exposing it, but if they didn't exist, or were somehow filtered or modified, then the people would just go elsewhere.
You already see this with reddit, where they cracked down on a lot of the hate based subs. The result is that new sites popped up to cater to the hate, message boards, news sites, and others. Plus, these hate groups operate locally too. In Canada there have been many cases where they setup outreach groups in person in neighbourhoods trying to recruit.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but the core issue is that at this point in time, hate sells. Maybe people have lived in such a good time that they forgot what wars were like. Maybe inequity is at such a high that those not in the top 10% are just filled with bitterness and rage wondering why this sort of divide should exist.
But I'm willing to bet strongly that this is people problem, not a tech problem.
The only difference is scale. You had to be a prolific gossiper to spread a message to several dozen people before. Now, it's one click button away for most of us.
This looks a bit optimistic or underestimating real life tradeoffs.
There can be an API, yes. But if you want to filter by positivity, you have to expect the company to actually implement that in the API. Otherwise, do you expect to get all billions of tweets over an API and then add positivity on top?
You can't have sustainability, performance and "open for everything" on one single API, there are tradeoffs and constraints involved. Even GraphQL needs certain fields to be filterable even before the API call returns, otherwise one can't just loop over all commits in GitHub universe without exhausting both consumer and provider systems!
Atleast that's what I think. Would be happy to be proven wrong.
I think these are good questions. But I also think there are good answers.
One solution is for my client to sentiment-analyze as a filter after the api-call and downrank that way (much like reddit/HN downrank controversials).
Maybe a more generic solution is to allow parties to "tag" twitter accounts. Clients could then make intelligent deductions based on tags (e.g. "political," "controversial," "satirical," "pg13").
I'm sure many other people have many other smart ideas.
I wonder if this is one of those few genuine uses for a blockchain based system. Comments (tweets) would be posted on a very thin layer of technology, which would only support say:
- comment id
- comment text
- datetime of comment
- commenting user id
- list of [upvoting/downvoting] user id
- list of reply comment ids
As you say, third parties could then come along and build whatever front-end they see fit. Don't want to show or allow clients to downvote? Go for it! Only aggregate upvotes from user ids over a certain age? Be my guest! The underlying information would never change.
Operating costs would be funded by transaction fees, whatever that specific blockchain model may be.
Because the underlying message service wouldn't be controlled by any single entity. This would mean that once the code was out there, you could be confident that no-one would change the service when there was a change of CEO or new censorship laws brought in or something like that; we'd have a neutral piece of underlying infrastructure that anyone could use to build a robust discussion platform on top of.
I know, right? The only time I encounter Twitter is when others link me to it. I’m okay with that and sometimes I share forward, but I’m not fed a daily stream of tweets. I left google services a few months ago. It was a long weekend of work, but I’m happier than I was before with otherwise no noticeable impact (except the emails that write themselves for you in gmail). I exported all my data from Facebook around the same time but I’m still mulling over how to resolve deleting 10 years of my digital life against my core principle that things I’ve said and done should not be allowed to disappear even if my 30 years future self would look back in disgust.
A lot of people don't really have this option since their audience is on twitter. Many artists would lose basically their entire livelihood if they just stopped using twitter and stopped being able to communicate about their work. You may have this option but it's not true for everybody.
My daughter is in a youth choir, whose director insists on communicating with parents via their Facebook page, which is of course not publicly viewable. I have told her that I will not join Facebook solely to be able to read communications from her. I offered her my phone number and email address, and so now for important things she will send an email as well. But she was absolutely incredulous that someone was not on Facebook in this day and age, and was not interested in joining.
GP: I’m convinced this is how people with poor email management skills feel. It’s how I felt until I stepped up my filter, unsubscribe, and delete game and really developed a strategy for managing my inbox. It’s not heavyweight but the goal is to reduce your inbox to a task/todo list of sorts—only the things you need to worry about. Might be a direct inquiry or a notification about an upcoming sale, etc. Eventually you get to a point where you realize that _everything_ uses email. The internet _is_ email. It’s just really easy to end up being bombarded by so much of it that it feels useless.
Many people don't use facebook. I thinks WhatsApp is a better example, it's even more ubiquitous, though I'm sure there are still people who don't use it. Heck, I'm personally thinking of stopping, it's just that everyone is there. Two of my recent orders were negotiated by WhatsApp. It's used almost universally.
I think that depends on what country you're in. The only people I know who are on whatsapp are immigrants who use it to talk to family in the old country.
Not using twitter/facebook/google/etc doesn't exempt you from experiencing the negative effect they have on the internet and the world around you, though.
I have been suggesting something slightly along these lines.
I think that the monopoly companies provide the platform with the large network. This platform is desirable. The monopoly control over it is not.
We can replace the monopoly platforms with decentralized peer based platforms running on technologies like Swarm Framework, IPFS, WebRTC, cryptocurrency, etc. Diverse companies can build varied opportunities that leverage the common platform and large network.
Its a challenging goal and most distributed technologies haven't been proven at Twitter scale. However I believe it is attainable and should be attempted.
Will you pay to access that front-end? I'm not a fan of closed systems but I notice that folks want access to other people's system and data without paying for it.
One thing that could help is more client-side tools to enable this. It's remarkable what you can get away with individually that would be blocked en masse.
Social fixer, for FB years ago, made the feed much better and was purely client side. Personally, I got sick of the real estate websites where I live and just made my own frontend for them, crawling with Scrapy. I haven't gotten a 403 yet.
Not sure how to make money off of it, though - short of selling people software in exchange for money.
I'd be curious to see what effect this has on business models.
A lot of useful features are free because they can make money on the backend or through paid promotions (search, email). Take away that ability and a lot of the services people enjoy will be forced to be paid or have annoying amounts of advertising.
I agree there is serious concern and we need to have discussions. I would consider breaking up companies a last resort though.
This assumes that someone creates a free and easy to use front end that has these filters. I can believe that.
This also assumes that a large fraction of Twitter users would use such filters. What makes you think they will?
The reason I have doubts is that people who tend to be influenced by evil Twitter posts are not the type of people who are amazingly self aware and look for ways to reduce that influence.
How would providing open access to their public data disallow them from using the network effect to their advantage? I'm not really following.
I get how it would enable alternative front-ends, but just looking at other platforms, these clients don't get used nearly as often as the official clients, so their existence wouldn't have much of an effect on the overall system. Look at Discord, Telegram, etc.; only a tiny percentage uses anything but the default client.
Plus, you can already filter messages like that, but in a much simpler manner: just follow people that feed into the "outrage-attention machine." If you get upset when you read a certain person's tweets, just unfollow them, and only try to follow people that you either personally know or really respect.
One of the things that I've realized is that I become more unhappy when constantly buffetted with bad news that I can't change. Things like country- or international-level news, international forums that feed off of negativity, etc; they all feed off of a number of views, or upvotes, or replies, or whatever, so they constantly have negative news. And because I can do nothing personally about the vast majority of these news stories, they simply make me frustrated or unhappy for no reason.
TL;DR following less people (or not having an account at all) fixes Twitter, not access to a public API.
How about a limit on how long you have exclusive rights on a house you built, and did not sell? Okay, how about the exclusive rights on your blog that attracted a million subscribers? Should a government agency regulate what you post there?
I'm afraid this is a slippery slope leading to things far more dangerous than we have now.
I agree it could be a slippery slope but we are nowhere near it today. A published work copyright expires 70 years after the author dies, or something similar. That would probably apply to a blog post. 70 years post death is pretty reasonable. Not sure what a reasonable number for a network would be, but I think "forever" is excessive in the other direction.
Come on. Facebook and twitter APIs are so restricted you can't even build a usable alternative client (look at all twitter clients that we had a few years ago, they are all gone now).
Facebook won't even let you read public events through their API anymore, public events created by businesses that want the public to attend, that are visible to anyone even if they're not logged in, that are easily searchable through Google.
But that's probably because the same day they removed that events API, they launched the Facebook Local app that shows all the events around you. Can't have anyone competing with your app.
Then this would enable alternative front-ends on twitter.
This would then enable me to filter messages by positivity, or whichever criteria I choose (e.g. non-Russian-bots, non-shills).
This is turn would then change the whole ecosystem. It would remove the perverse incentives of outrage-attention machine.