“Two out of three ain’t bad” is the title of a Meat Loaf song but is also the idea behind triangles: situations in which you can achieve only two of three objectives. The classic example is the idea that in manufacturing you can have any two, but not all three from fast, cheap, good. (*)
Much of the current debate about social media and how to regulate it is people shouting loudly past each other because they are pursuing different objectives in what I believe is a social media triangle:
Freedom: there isn’t a central authority that can exert power over individual expression or appropriate rents generated by contributors to the system.
Openness: anyone can join a globally connected network and express themselves without being trolled or harassed.
Criticism: there is a mechanism by which people get exposed to opposing viewpoints and relevant facts and by which information cascades (especially spread of misinformation) are curtailed.
All the existing big systems such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube fail on the first objective, as they are controlled by for-profit corporations, which are further subject to regulation and intervention by governments.
This of course has many people, myself included, arguing for decentralized alternatives. I think we have to be clear though that this will make accomplishing objective #2 harder (although to date the bar set here by the centralized players is extremely low). More importantly though accomplishing #3 will not be possible in a decentralized system.
At the current trajectory though there is a good chance that we will wind up with the worst of all outcomes, at least for a while: a regulatory environment in which massive players are perversely protected from new entrants but simultaneously hidebound because their conduct is subject to behavioral rules (which require consulting an army of lawyers for every product change). That is what stagnation looks like and we know it all too well from many other industries as well as some prior moments in information technology. In tech those moments were kept thankfully short by massive platform shifts (e.g., mainframe to PC) but there isn’t an obvious one of those on the horizon (except for blockchain but more on that in a moment).
There is a clear alternative to this which helps us accomplish objectives 1 and 2, while at the same time incentivizing competition. Give a Section 230 like protection to companies in return for providing a complete set of enduser APIs. In other words, require Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. to be fully programmable in order to have their liability limited.
How does this accomplish objective 1? By reducing the network effect lock in of the incumbents. In a fully programmable world new interfaces can be created that let me interact with multiple systems transparently, so I don’t need to keep track for example of which social network my friends are on. Some of these alternatives may be new centralized systems but others may be decentralized ones.
What about objective 2? In a fully programmable world, users can control what they see and what they don’t. So while that will not prevent trolls from getting on a system it allows endusers and coalitions of endusers to filter what they see.
Of course this immediately shows that objective #3 will be challenging. Again centralized players have done a horrendously bad job at this to date, largely because they are optimizing for total attention gathered. To get a glimpse of how hard that will be one need to look no further than information cascades on WhatsApp.
Why do I still think this is better? Because the misinformation problem is much larger than any one social media system and reaches all the way back to such fundamentals as how people learn and what value systems they internalize. In other words, it has been and will continue to be one of the central problems of human progress. For more thoughts on that I have an entire book which you can find at World After Capital.
(*) It turns out that you can achieve all three if you start with quality but only if you build a culture of quality. Similarly here I believe you can eventually accomplish all three if you build a culture of criticism.
