Comment by zzzeek

You know, I think lots of us on HN, can at least be the people who can and should go to next levels of this discussion.

So yes - we should definitely agree that all new technology for publishing (publishing? COntent creation?) result in issues of free speech.

I will say that each of these, have had different issues, and that from Radio onwards, we are dealing with several issues (side effects ?) that become more intense with each new media developed.

I'll jump to the end, but Social media is definitely different from the printing press.

We certainly get new and improved benefits, such as the distribution of publishing power to individuals.

At the same time, we are getting issues with an abundance of content, that people need content to be eye catching, in order to gain an audience.

Theres also a tendency for networks to consolidate over time, so at the start of the radio era, or TV era, you have a bunch of cable networks, then over time they start collapsing into larger groups, which are better able to survive.

Fully admit that these are highly generalized, I am just thinking of what others can chime in with.

To be fair, scripture doesn't actively change to increase obsessive engagement at the expense of all else.

Not entirely inaccurate! Martin Luther's 95 Theses propagated from Germany to England in a matter of weeks, thanks to the printing press. I think society got better but it sure did change a lot.

the government of China is a hostile adversary and they dont just spread gobs of misinformation and pro-CCP propaganda on TikTok, they also heavily censor topics the CCP does not like. This is not about free expression so much as where the public square should take place. Having the US public square take place in a tightly controlled, deceptive environment controlled by our worst enemy presents an existential risk to the US.

think of the printing press as invented and controlled by your worst enemy and only printing what it deems to be acceptable.

It's not free expression when someone else chooses what everyone sees.

Threads is notorious for de-boosting posts with external links. This is a deliberate choice which filters facts and external references out of the conversation.

Or you can just delay the feed of posters you don't like. They arrive at every debate a day late, while your favourites go through immediately. And to more people.

And so on.

There's nothing free about any of this. It's covert behaviour and sentiment modification.

With a newspaper you get an editorial angle, so you can choose it if you want it.

Social media pretends to be a neutral conduit. But it's carefully curated and manipulated, and you don't know how or why.

What matters is not the diversity of the overall userbase but the diversity of what gets shown to you. From my (limited) experience TikTok is hyper-targeted and will narrow in on your interests/biases quickly and keep you in that bubble.

HN (and reddit) generally lacks this hyper-targeting. Obviously, just the act of going to HN is selecting for a certain cross-section of opinions, but once you're there what you see is determined by the community and not by your own personal preferences.

"Echo chamber" is a tautology by this point. What's bad about a narrower focus? It's good to cross pollinate on occasion but you're not going to ever get to deep discussions when you have the same arguments over and over with people who share little common ground. I don't come to HN to read what flat earthers think about that gorgeous photo of the Earth's curve taken by an astronaut, and I can have productive disagreements with other technologists.

Hell, I'd make that arbitrary amount 300.

That's about the number of social connections the human brain is really meant to handle.

Its worse for the US Govt in that they cannot secretly ask them to control what gets seen