
We Need a PBS for Social Media - tshannon
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/opinion/public-broadcasting-facebook.html
======
oliwarner
We don't need another service provider. We need a protocol, a specification
for completely decentralised, carry-with-us social networks.

A way that my device can securely communicate with my friends devices and say
"Sup?". A way that we can share messages, photos, calendars, contacts, etc
without some behemoth (or state) sticking its nose in the middle.

I've had this conversation here before and somebody mentions RSS but it's not
enough on its own. It's certainly a basis for content exchange but nowhere
near enough for the authentication, and authoring side of things.

~~~
jasode
_> We need a protocol, a specification for completely decentralised, carry-
with-us social networks._

I know it seems logical that a "social network protocol" is the answer to
replace Facebook but after studying the mechanics of social networks, I've
concluded that focusing on technical protocols is incorrect.

My suggestion to programmers seriously thinking of new solutions in the social
networking space: don't get sidetracked into thinking about the _protocol_
because if you do, your new social network will end up in the graveyard of
previous failed projects like Diaspora. Instead, think about the _database of
real names_.

My previous comment on why _protocols_ like ActivityPub & Mastodon are not the
answer for a general purpose social network adopted by the masses:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18727230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18727230)

Also, another previous comment on how focusing on _protocols_ is
(inadvertently) analyzing the wrong drivers for success:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960)

And another previous comment about how an open and free-to-use _protocol_ like
Signal does not mean Moxie Marlinspike is willing to federate with others'
servers:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499)

(If you _still_ believe that designing a new protocol is the correct answer
after reading my 3 previous comments, please explain your thinking. I'm open
to changing my mind on this.)

~~~
beatgammit
The problem here is that you're looking at it from an entrepreneur
perspective, while the people building it are looking at it from a privacy
perspective.

I don't use Facebook _because_ of the reasons it's popular. I don't want my
information easily accessible online, and I do want as much control as
possible over who sees my information. I believe it should be easy to give and
revoke access to my information and content. The European solution here is to
legislate our way to that end goal, whereas the "market" way is to make
something that's appealing that gets you most of what you liked about the
centralized service, but with more control over your data.

And that's why I'm so interested in projects like ActivityPub and Matrix: it's
not because I think they'll become popular, but because of what will happen
_if_ they become popular. If I was to invest money, I'd go with Facebook's
business model every time, but if I'm going to evangelise something, it'll be
something like Mastodon or Riot.im.

------
thosakwe
It's been a while since I've found myself disagreeing with something so
strongly.

I think that the absolute last thing we need is government-funded social
media. If YouTube "spreads propaganda," what do you expect from a platform
that a massive government has its hands directly on? I don't understand. It's
as dystopian-sounding as any idea I have ever heard.

> In other words, it should be built to prioritize sharing things you love
> over getting attention by simply being loud online.

This is an over-trivialization of Twitter. At risk of sounding snarky: if you
think Twitter is all about getting attention, you're using the app wrong, and
maybe you only follow celebrities.

Also, I think the question "Will people use it, and how many?" is the wrong
question ask. _Why_ will people use it? Can I get news updates? Can I find
funny/entertaining content? Can I reasonably expect organic engagement, and
potential virality? Can I get private life updates from my friends, without
the government's eyes peering in? People don't typically go to PBS for most of
these things (news is one thing they do), so I can't imagine how a "PBS" for
social media would be very different.

Yet another question: "Why would I be on a social media app with my parents?"

I can understand the reasoning behind this, but I don't see it realistically
gaining any traction or significant usage, ever.

All this being said, Mr. Mark Coatney is a former director of Tumblr, so
obviously there's a big gulf in social media experience between us, and I
could be egregiously wrong on some of what I have said above. Who knows?

~~~
qtplatypus
I actually think that the worry about government censorship isn't as strong as
you think. The US government unlike a private corporation can't legally engage
in viewpoint based censorship.

~~~
thosakwe
It's not about censorship, so much about it just being that there's nothing
appealing about a government social media site. At all. The majority of
conversations that happen on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat would
just not happen.

~~~
qtplatypus
Why wouldn't it happen? In democratic countries like the US, UK and Australia
there have been a long tradition of independence from the state broadcasters;
often hosting forums where guests antithetical to the views of the reining
government have taken place.

Can you explain what types of conversations that you think would not happen
and why being government run would result in this.

------
snickerbockers
>Trolls and abusive behaviors thrive on for-profit social platforms in part
because at some level the platforms don’t mind this.

They'd thrive even more on a government-funded platform which is legally
obligated not to censor their speech.

~~~
martey
The author isn't suggesting that their proposed social network be run by the
government, and there is no legal obligation for private non-profits who
accept government funding to refrain from censorship.

Later in the article, the author explicitly suggests that accounts be
connected to real world identities in order to prevent fake accounts and
discourage trolls.

~~~
icelancer
>> Later in the article, the author explicitly suggests that accounts be
connected to real world identities in order to prevent fake accounts and
discourage trolls.

This solves one problem and introduces about ten other massive issues with
underrepresented populations, protected classes, and stalking.

This is not a new idea. It's been tried many times before and shot down
regularly for very obvious reasons.

~~~
martey
> _This solves one problem and introduces about ten other massive issues with
> underrepresented populations, protected classes, and stalking._

I think the author already considered this. From the article:

 _" An account on a public media platform would be tied to a real-world, local
identity, like a driver’s license or library card. Anonymity online has real
benefits, and a user name doesn’t have to be your real name. The public social
media network could keep this information hashed, unscrambled only when action
against a user is required, which would make it easier to crack down on fake
and troll accounts."_

~~~
lonelappde
> hashed, unscrambled

Anyone who says this has no technical credibility.

------
sp332
This seems pretty doable from a tech standpoint. Is funding really the only
reason it's not being done? I think a much thornier question is the moderation
policies. With broadcasting, not everyone can get air time and so there's an
expectation of curation built-in. But once everyone can technically join in
the conversation, keeping certain people or topics out can be a very heated
conversation.

~~~
qball
>This seems pretty doable from a tech standpoint. Is funding really the only
reason it's not being done?

It's not being done because this already exists. It's called 4chan (though
8chan is a better fit; I don't recall if source code for it was ever made
available).

Of course, 4chan depended on a single individual's pocketbook and liberal
moderation policies, which has let it down in the past; having such a service
be government-funded and shardable so that if one mod goes bad you still have
a place to go would help.

But at its core, you'd still have 4/8chan, because that's what "public access"
(and "free speech") means. And while it is very valuable, a lot of people just
can't properly digest it.

~~~
doomrobo
The theoretical site described in the article requires that every account be
tied to a real person (e.g. by driver's license or library card). I think
having something like this would produce a climate very different from those
on the *chans

~~~
parliament32
"Real identities" don't work for open discourse. See: Facebook.

------
BitwiseFool
I'm getting really burned out by the wanton use of the term 'Propaganda'.

"YouTube spreads propaganda and is toxic to children. Twitter spreads
propaganda and is toxic to racial relations. Facebook spreads propaganda and
is toxic to democracy itself."

What does the author actually mean by this? Messages posted and shared by
government entities? Or, people sharing inflammatory opinions?

~~~
grimjack00
By 'propaganda', I'm guessing the author means "things I don't agree with".

~~~
magashna
Author is spreading anti-skub propaganda.

------
anderber
I feel like Mastodon has the right idea. Decentralized, open-source and easy
to setup.

~~~
riffic
Media organizations (I'm looking directly at you nytimes.com) should be
standing up their own Mastodon instances for the benefit of their writers and
staff.

ditto for anyone else in the public sphere currently publishing status updates
via walled garden platforms (elected officials, agencies, educational
institutions, et cetera)

edit: or, more generically, any implementation of ActivityPub will do. or
write your own!

[https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-
activitypub](https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub)

~~~
privong
> ditto for anyone else in the public sphere currently publishing status
> updates via walled garden platforms (elected officials, agencies,
> educational institutions, et cetera)

I like this idea. But I think it's unlikely to happen. Universities often
don't even run their own email anymore (at least for students; faculty often
have a local Exchange setup for them). I would have thought that Universities
would want to run their own services for file synchronization and sharing
(i.e., internal Dropbox), audio/video conferencing (i.e., internal but
interoperable Zoom/Skype, perhaps set up with SIP), etc. This would enable
them to better manage IP and sensitive student information (SSN's, etc.), but
they don't seem to have enough foresight to offer those kinds of services
until the faculty are already using a freemium service. Then, _if_ they roll
out something, the University version is clumsy and error-ridden.

Additionally, the network effects of other social networks likely means it
would be a tall order to convince the sufficiently senior administrator that
they should dump twitter and go to their own Mastodon instance.

20 years ago this might've been a possibility. That was back when individual
departments ran their own email/web/whatever servers. So individual
departments within universities that had more agility and flexibility might've
tried something like that. But now most universities seem to be clawing that
functionality and freedom away from departments and putting it into a
centralized IT department. So email stays because it's already embedded in the
culture, but it makes it hard to add something new like a federated social
network (or even video conferencing, it seems).

~~~
riffic
Single example counterpoint: MIT runs a mastodon instance:

[https://mastodon.mit.edu/about](https://mastodon.mit.edu/about)

~~~
privong
Pleasantly surprising to see. In all the universities I've experienced
recently, the trend is strongly in the opposite direction. One of the admins'
bio on the MIT instance states that they're at math and comp sci major at MIT,
so I wonder how "official" it is? If I'm interpreting the MIT IT page
correctly[0], *.mit.edu hostnames can possibly be registered by students? In
which case it's not clear if it's run by MIT or by some students who happened
to request that particular hostname.

[0]
[http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=15...](http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=152584629)

------
lone_haxx0r
So, the solution to big corporations employing asshole tactics to lure you
into selling your attention is big government using your tax money to make a
heavily censored, totalitarian version of Facebook? Ok.

The whole article is futile attempt to try to embellish that concept.

------
peterwwillis
If you took a combination of Facebook, Nextdoor, and PBS, removed all
commercial interests, made it publicly owned, and made its mission the
betterment of the public good, yes, that would actually be amazing. (As a
portal for government information and services)

I would start with just a very stripped-down platform, and then allow
integrations, such that every government entity could use the platform to
publish information and communicate. Citizens could also communicate among
themselves, either in "neighborhood groups", or privately. But personal
profiles should be private by default, and require strong authentication
guarantees for others to view. Everyone could still comment on public content
as they do today, but personal data would remain private.

As government entities integrate into the platform, they could begin
publishing data that citizens could subscribe to. Community classes at the
local library, parks department announcing a call for volunteers, DMV office
closings, IRS filing deadlines, local civic board meeting notes, and of
course, PBS content. It could be one source to consume all of the potential
open data available to citizens. It could also be a portal to _find_ the right
government services, as well as pass information to it: report a crime,
pothole, zoning violation, etc much like '311 apps' do today (Philadelphia
311:
[https://www.phila.gov/311/form/Pages/default.aspx](https://www.phila.gov/311/form/Pages/default.aspx)
Open Maps Philly: [https://openmaps.phila.gov/](https://openmaps.phila.gov/)
Open Data Philly:
[https://www.opendataphilly.org/](https://www.opendataphilly.org/) Philly
Property History: [https://li.phila.gov/](https://li.phila.gov/) Philly Atlas:
[https://atlas.phila.gov/](https://atlas.phila.gov/))

Right now Facebook and custom regional solutions serves much of this need, but
it's also filled with a huge amount of crap that we shouldn't have to deal
with just to find this information. And of course, privacy can come first on
such a platform, rather than last.

> Let’s build one.

Fuck it, yeah, let's. Where do I sign up?

~~~
sp332
I've only heard nasty things about Nextdoor - probably because it's more
sensational. What do you like about it?

~~~
peterwwillis
Granted, Nextdoor is a source of a lot of drama. The features I like are the
ability to connect with a specific neighborhood, receive local notifications,
and coordinate with neighbors. I think if there were very specific groups for
very specific purposes in an area, or only govt employees could start new
posts, it could be useful, such as _" the parks department is having a clean-
up day this weekend near you, post here to coordinate rides to the park"_, _"
there is an amber alert in your neighborhood"_, _" police are asking if you
have any tips about a break-in that happened on your block"_, _" school
closures tomorrow"_, _" local elections tomorrow at the following locations"_.

------
itomato
We have better than 'PBS for Social Media'.

We (still) have IRC.

~~~
dangus
You have to be in a thick bubble separated from all the teens in the universe
to think that IRC can do even 10% of what Instagram/Snapchat/TikTok/Facebook
are capable of doing.

Facebook in particular is nearly an operating system.

~~~
noobermin
The replacement for IRC these days is discord. It's not like we can't do IRC
again, it just isn't as visible for people who's only experience with
installing a program is through an app store.

------
dehrmann
I don't disagree, but more people watch Fox News than PBS, so I'm not sure how
much it would help.

------
Deimorz
_(Disclaimer: self-promotion)_

This article echoes a lot of the reasons I'm working on Tildes
([https://tildes.net](https://tildes.net)) and specifically founded it as a
non-profit. My announcement post from last year discusses how the current
approach to community-based sites -- specifically the dependence on venture
capital and advertising -- makes companies chase goals that are harmful for
the users themselves: [https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-
tildes](https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes) (HN discussion at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093))

I believe that a non-profit model is the only way to break out of the current
cycle of sites starting out as "too good to be true" (as they burn through
their VC), and inevitably devolving into privacy-invading, advertising-heavy
sites dominated by lowest-common-denominator content when they need to keep
forcing growth and monetize their users.

Tildes has been publicly visible for a while now, but still requires an invite
to register an account. If you're interested in registering and participating
just send me an email, the address is in the announcement post linked above.
It's not intended to be difficult to get invites, I mostly just want to keep
the growth rate under control while more features and the early site culture
continue building up.

~~~
bscphil
Quick thought: this looks like a clone of Reddit, or maybe more loosely HN,
Lobsters, or Metafilter. I think the most important aspect of social media to
most people is that it allows for people who are friends "in real life" to
share text / media with a circle of friends in a semi-private forum.

This is why such an apparently unlikely candidate as Discord has become the
medium of choice for a lot of young people. It's basically group chat with a
few extra features like history search, different "channels", and easy media
sharing. It's also why I think a lot of the current open source attempts are
likely doomed to failure for _this_ purpose - they're basically decentralized
Twitter.

Do you have plans for Tildes to fill this kind of role? Admittedly, I didn't
look all that closely at it, and so what you're getting from me is my surface
impression.

~~~
thosakwe
> I think the most important aspect of social media to most people is that it
> allows for people who are friends "in real life" to share text / media with
> a circle of friends in a semi-private forum.

I agree with this. In all of the decentralized social media iterations I've
seen, the main two things I've always missed were the "personal aspect," and
appealing visual design.

It's worth asking, though, how possible it is to achieve that in a truly
decentralized fashion, while still providing a good user experience. From a
user's perspective, it doesn't make much sense to have separate sites with
limited interoperability when you can simply just one (centralized) site. I
guess that for the Fediverse to truly take off, there really needs to be a
concept that simply _cannot_ be implemented without de-centralization. Until
then, it'll be an uphill battle.

~~~
bscphil
I agree that that's a problem. If Discord is "good enough" for social media,
then Matrix is trying to be an open source, decentralized Discord. It's also
(in my personal experience) _unbelievably_ crappy, even if you stick to 1-1
conversations on the "default" matrix.org instance that Riot.im uses.

Some security experts have indicated that it's not up to par with Signal for
those who need the strongest confidentiality guarantees. (I wouldn't fully
trust Signal either if my adversary was the NSA, but there might also be no
better alternative you could get people to use.)

So it's really telling to me that years of work on decentralized "personal"
social media hasn't come up with anything that's fully functional, let alone a
replacement to existing social media sites.

~~~
Arathorn
suprising and depressing that riot feels _unbelievably_ crappy; lots of people
seem to be able to use it ok. would be helpful to know what bits sucked most
if you can face it.

~~~
bscphil
Okay, so maybe "unbelievable crappy" was a bit of an exaggeration. After all,
I _do_ use it. But I'll try to explain. It starts with the fact that so many
of the features still aren't up to par with what e.g. Discord provides. It
_feels_ like a knock-off.

The biggest problem I've faced is dealing with the encryption. Every new
device in a conversation has to be verified with every other, which means you
need n(n-1)/2 pairings for a room with n devices. That's right, if you're
trying to set up a chat with 10 people who have an average of three devices,
you're going to need to do 435 pairings. The pairings themselves are a huge
pain: there are different pairing "methods" to use, and different clients will
make guesses about the method the other client supports, and the whole thing
falls apart if it guesses wrong (there's no negotiation, as far as I can tell)
or if the person with the device doesn't immediately respond. There's no
notion of a web of trust or trusting a person instead of a specific device.
Even if everything goes right (it usually doesn't) it's going to take about 30
seconds per person to do each pairing, which means your group chat with just
10 people is going to take over 7 hours to set up. You could just ignore the
verification stuff, but presumably the reason you wanted to use Matrix
(instead of a centralized service) in the first place was because you thought
it was more secure / private.

Someone adds a new device, or logs out of a device, or there's some glitch
(it's happened to me)? Everyone in the room gets to do another pairing. With
every one of their devices.

Another issue has been the unreliability of the service itself. Sometimes it
breaks, logging you out. (Hope everyone backed up their keys!) Or they get
hacked and the server goes down for days:
[https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-
remediati...](https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediations-
for-apr-11-security-incident)

And then there's just the random client bugs. I _literally_ just opened the
tab for Riot to remind myself of other issues and was greeted with this:
[https://i.imgur.com/8Rgebfr.png](https://i.imgur.com/8Rgebfr.png) They don't
seem to be keeping up with them, either. Riot Web alone has almost 4000 open
issues: [https://github.com/vector-im/riot-
web/issues](https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues)

Having a searchable history is supposed to be one of the major advantages of a
Discord-like interface, but I just did a search for a word _that I 'm looking
at in the chat_ and got no results.

So basically, it's a mess right now. I'm using it with one person because
they're the only person who wants a Discord-like chat with me and are willing
to put up with the amount of nonsense needed to use an alternative that
doesn't siphon off your data to a private company.

~~~
Arathorn
So, firstly - huge thanks for taking the time to list the problems :) I'm the
project lead for Matrix & Riot hence my interest.

Totally agreed that the lack of cross-signing for key verification is our
single biggest problem. It turns out that this is not an easy problem to
solve, but after a few rethinks we finally have a design
([https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-
doc/pull/1756](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1756)) and an
implementation
([https://scitech.video/videos/watch/d1ef04a8-397a-4570-a9a9-c...](https://scitech.video/videos/watch/d1ef04a8-397a-4570-a9a9-cef143ea637c))
which works. The only bit that remains is wiring it into the Riot's UI itself,
which we started a few weeks ago and is looking promising. The TL;DR is that
it optimises the number of verifications to the absolute bare minimum. You
verify your new device once when you log into it (a bit like WhatsApp), and
then everyone else will transitively trust the new device.

In terms of the unreliability of the matrix.org server: we added encrypted key
backup about a year ago to solve the whole "if you get logged out you lose
your keys" problem, but agreed it used to be a massive problem. And yes, the
matrix.org security breach was a nightmare - apologies.

For the i18n bug: if the request to load the i18n file for your language fails
for whatever reason, you get that ugly error - it's similar to getting an ugly
page if the CSS didn't load. We can make the i18n req retry, though - i just
filed [https://github.com/vector-im/riot-
web/issues/10965](https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10965) for
this.

In terms of the number of bugs - yes, we have 3775 open, and 5871 closed. This
is because we deliberately try to track each and every possible suggestion &
feature request & bug of every severity in the issue tacker; trying to use it
as the main knowledge store for the project. I wouldn't judge the quality of a
project by the number of bugs - it's like judging the quality of a book by the
number of pages. It doesn't tell you much beyond how big a book it is.

Search should work, but delegates straight through to postgres's FTS engine.
We need to tune it better, for sure.

> So basically, it's a mess right now

Hopefully key verification will fix the biggest issue here. Thanks for
persevering with it in the interim.

~~~
bscphil
Hey, I didn't know you were the project lead. Thanks for taking the time to
reply! By the way, when I said

> If Discord is "good enough" for social media, then Matrix is trying to be an
> open source, decentralized Discord. It's also (in my personal experience)
> unbelievably crappy

it was sort of a loving complaint. I brought up Matrix in the first place
because to me it _is_ one of the few attempts to solve the personal social
media problem with decentralized open source software. So I really want to see
it succeed, and my quick rant about how the state of it now was in that light.
Kind of like complaining about your favorite sports team. You forget sometimes
what a range of people are on HN, and so I hope you / others who work on
Matrix aren't too disheartened by complaints.

I've been following the cross-signing bug for a while now. I had hoped to see
it implemented earlier, but it's good that it's being worked on. I wonder if
an encrypted copy of the keys could be stored in the browser's local storage,
so that logging out doesn't reset the client. It would also be great to have
all my devices store encrypted backups of each other's keys, so that unless
all my devices get signed out everything just works without requiring a backup
or re-verifying devices. I _think_ Signal works like that, and I thought
Matrix was supposed to do this partially, but it didn't work last time I was
signed out. From the user's point of view, you want one identity / set of keys
/ backup for all your devices, even if that's not what's happening at a lower
level.

> the i18n bug

Since you already have the pre-translation English text, wouldn't it make
sense to fall back to showing that instead of "translation failed" on every
line of text? Plus, my locale is en_US so especially in my case failing to
fetch the i18n files shouldn't result in such an ugly bug.

> Search should work, but delegates straight through to postgres's FTS engine.

If I'm understanding you, this means the search is always done server-side.
Doesn't this mean that search will never work on encrypted chats, since the
Matrix server doesn't have the text of my chats to search? If that's expected,
some user-facing way of making this obvious would help.

Thanks again for the detailed reply.

------
golemotron
I can't wait for the incessant fund-raisers on sign-on ala wikipedia and
terrestrial PBS. It's easy to think this is the best model but that is the
price.

------
badrequest
This technology is clearly harmful to those who participate in it. Why anybody
would think the solution is to get the government involved in the farce is
beyond me.

~~~
dadarepublic
I think you've misperceived PBS and what this effort would be. The funding
would be _ _public_ _ - as in crowdsourced. If the effort were non-profit like
PBS it would be eligible for grants and funding from government(s) but it
would not act as a government agency.

I think a good question to ask would be to ask how we insure that governmental
intelligence agencies do not have their hooks in the effort.

~~~
weberc2
Genuine question: can the government legally sponsor a social media network if
that network censors legal but abhorrent speech (e.g., anti-black or anti-
white hate speech)? Seems like it would either be a cesspool or it would get
struck down in the courts.

~~~
conception
The government has censored public speech in various forms of media since
forever, whether funded or not. It wouldn't be an issue.

~~~
weberc2
I would be surprised if the courts would uphold an equivalence between
broadcast television and a social network. I would expect them to interpret
speech on a public social network like speech in a town square.

------
dreamcompiler
We need a PBS for search engines too. A public, government-funded spider that
indexes everything on the web that wants to be indexed. And a public API so
that anybody can build a search engine on top of it.

------
youdontknowtho
I would say it needs to be more like BBC with a funding stream that isn't
dependent on Government approval.

------
root_axis
Social media is a blight on human discourse. We need _less_ of it, not more.

------
zacharytelschow
No, we don't.

~~~
workethics
Alright then

------
riffic
The "Public Alternative" hinted in this paywalled article can be built on the
w3c recommended standard, ActivityPub. Organizations should be adopting this
and running implementations under their own organizational control.

------
vernie
Posting op-eds should be against the rules.

------
cestith
I find it disingenuous to say we need a public, free, and open place to
exchange ideas in an article behind a company's paywall.

~~~
lazugod
Disingenuous in what way? Do you think the editorial author doesn’t actually
desire a public space?

~~~
cestith
If the desire is so strong to make discourse open and unencumbered by
individual corporate walls, then this one article could have been placed up
outside the paywall. To say, "I think we need an open public forum" on a
medium as open and public as the WWW and then to restrict it behind az paywall
kind of misses the point of the article itself. It is within a walled garden
arguing for an alternative to walled gardens when the party publishing it is
the one controlling the walls in this case.

------
not_a_cop75
PBS also spreads propaganda. Look at Sesame Street as of recent and basically,
they label Trump a shithead. I mean anyone can disagree with the guy and
basically does. I'm sad to think that shows like this are basically telling
our kids what to think, rather than encouraging independent thought.

~~~
bdamm
Reference? Sesame Street is mostly apolitical, unless you consider encouraging
tolerance to be political. My experience with PBS is that there's plenty of
encouragement of independent thought. Yes, there's maybe too much armchair
science and handwaving, but that's a wider cultural issue that every media
outlet is participating in.

~~~
not_a_cop75
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_r6iojNnYg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_r6iojNnYg)

It's been early on and recent as far as I know - if you watch the whole clip
you'll see that, though they only show a second or two of the new clips. I
would never teach kids to make fun of others. It's simply bad form.

~~~
msbarnett
Is your complaint here that the writers of these segments didn’t use a time
machine in order to determine that the regularly lampooned pop culture
celebrity they were parodying would become president several decades later? Or
that they _did_ use a time machine and that this particular parody was
politically motivated, unlike all their other celebrity parodies?

Because they parody a lot of celebrities and always have.

~~~
not_a_cop75
Do they negative parody others? Are any of the other parodies related to
trash? Serious question.

~~~
msbarnett
They have an a long-running Oscar the Grouch CNN parody,
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E893MS_HZlk](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E893MS_HZlk)

~~~
not_a_cop75
As much as I dislike CNN, that's not exactly tasteful either.

------
busterarm
NYT journalists still wouldn't be responsible enough to not say something
racist.

~~~
lukifer
1\. Are you referring to something specific that I'm not aware of?

2\. Is this really the primary concern, in the grand scheme of things? In a
utilitarian sense, a problematic or offensive choice of words is peanuts
compared to (for instance) failing to sufficiently question the WMD narrative
in the run-up to the Iraq War.

~~~
busterarm
It's been in the news for the last month. Admittedly I'm being a bit snarky
here, but the NYT is firing a shot saying we need a platform that's
administered responsibly (which we do) when they've proved they can't even use
the ones we have responsibly.

Between the linked stories and the whole Sarah Jeong thing, the NYT doesn't
have the gravitas to come out and ask for this right now. The Gray Lady is
failing its mission (for more reasons than just this).

[https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-york-times-tightens-up-
on-...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-york-times-tightens-up-on-social-
media-after-scandals-people-are-locking-down-their-accounts)

[https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/339852/tweets...](https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/339852/tweets-
come-back-to-haunt-new-york-times-cnn-jo.html)

[https://nypost.com/2019/08/22/new-york-times-political-
edito...](https://nypost.com/2019/08/22/new-york-times-political-editor-in-
hot-water-over-insensitive-tweets/)

