
The Socialist Republic of Twitter - dbuthay
http://diegobasch.com/the-socialist-republic-of-twitter
======
lukifer
It is an often-missed subtlety of capitalism that a free market must include
the existence of privately controlled economies that act in socialist ways.
(Apple exerts tyrannical control over its app economy; Netflix's light users
subsidize its heavy users; etc.)

Generally, even the most staunch libertarians are okay with such things
because the payments and relationships are voluntary, issues like monopoly and
free will notwithstanding.

But Twitter, FaceBook and even Google demand a form of somewhat involuntarily
payment: time and attention. For some people, mainly the lucrative few who
subsidize everyone else, time is much more scarce than money. These virtual
"time-pennies" are sliced away in such negligible chunks that lead us to think
we're not getting ripped off, but it's siphoning away an economic scarcity
nonetheless, and everyone who participates in social media or any ad-supported
services (which is asymptotically approaching everyone) pays the tax.

That's what Twitter's new rules really come down to: they couldn't give two
figs about ensuring a consistent experience. It's an unsubtle smokescreen for
"don't you dare interfere with our ads; that's our bread and butter you're
f&*king with." It wouldn't surprise me if after locking down the client apps,
they begin an aggressive cat-and-mouse game with ad-block plugins.

Is there anything wrong with any of this? Not inherently. But I'd much rather
pay into a semi-socialist freemium service than one where my precious
attention is sold to the highest bidder. (Dear App.net: go free-for-most with
a paid tier, and you just might take over the world.)

~~~
magicarp
> "Dear App.net: go free-for-most with a paid tier, and you just might take
> over the world."

I don't think App.net offering a paid tier would protect them from making the
same mistakes as Twitter, Facebook, and Google down the road. If they grow to
the size of any of those companies, they'd be susceptible to the same forces
and temptations that are driving Twitter down its current path.

~~~
lukifer
Yes, that is absolutely true, especially if/when it accepted investment
capital or changed hands. But just because it can succumb to those temptations
doesn't mean it will, and if it does, someone will start The Next Open Social
Service/Protocol, and progress marches on.

------
smacktoward
Socialism isn't what you appear to think it is.

A privately owned company that provides services subsidized by one group of
customers to others for free isn't "socialist" in any meaningful sense. It's
still privately owned, it's still driven by profit, there's still money
changing hands. It's funded by capitalists who put money in with the hope of
seeing a return on their investment. Etc.

It's not impossible to imagine a "socialist Twitter," but that would involve
something like it being operated as a venture owned cooperatively by the
people who work there (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative>), or
as a wholly or partly nationalized enterprise, kind of like how the old Bell
System worked from the 1930s until the 1980s.

~~~
diego
It's not meant to be taken literally. I'm using a figure of speech called
hyperbole to drive a point.

~~~
smacktoward
But it actually undermines your point. You're arguing that Twitter as it
exists today is somehow inherently "democratic" and run in the public interest
because some users subsidize others. And that's just incorrect; those users
subsidize the others because _it is in their financial interest to do so._
They want their ads to show where the eyeballs are, that's all. If the
economics changed and it suddenly became more attractive for the paying users
(the advertisers) for Twitter to be an exclusive gated community, that's what
Twitter would become. It is responsive to market forces, so in that sense it's
a very capitalist institution.

Which is not a bad thing! I'm not saying that Twitter employees should run up
the red flag and seize control of the means of production. I'm just saying
that Twitter is a business, which is to say that it's an enterprise designed
to enrich those who set it up. The fact that currently the easiest way to make
that happen is to let some people use it free is tangential to that.

~~~
diego
You didn't understand my point. The advertisers are _not_ the ones who
subsidize users. Users who click on ads subsidize users who don't.

You are also repeating the last part of my post!

~~~
anigbrowl
Not unless they are clicking on the ads to ensure that Twitter can make money.
More likely, they're clicking because they wish the purchase the good or
service the advertiser is offering. Consumption is not subsidy. You might as
well argue that the chattering masses are subsidizing a viral marketing
platform for the consumer goods sector.

------
polemic
While one western user might be produce more income than a single user in a
developing country, that isn't really relevant as long as twitter can provide
massive scale at almost no cost. Wealthier users might subsidize ongoing
growth and development, but not the operation of the service. This isn't
socialism, just economics at work :/

------
Tycho
If a wealthy corporation were to buy or even just 'sponsor' twitter, it would
probably be worth subsidising just for the good-will effect on their
reputation. Especially if they did so as it was being forced into charging.

~~~
smacktoward
Google actually did something exactly like this early in their corporate
existence, when they bought DejaNews in 2001 (see
[http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2001/02/google-acquires-
usen...](http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2001/02/google-acquires-usenet-
discussion.html)).

DejaNews was a company that held the most comprehensive archive of discussions
on Usenet (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet>) in the world at that time.
Usenet was where public discussions happened online before Web forums, so that
database represented an important chunk of early Internet history.

Deja had hoped to turn that database into a monetizable resource, but the
bursting of the dot-com bubble ended that dream, and people started worrying
that when Deja folded its Usenet archive might be lost forever. So Google
stepped in and bought Deja to ensure that its archives would be held by
someone who hadn't been crushed by the market collapse. Deja's archives
eventually formed the basis of the product that became Google Groups.

There wasn't a lot of business logic to the acquisition; Usenet had been in
decline for years by the time Deja sank, so if Google was only interested in a
discussion product the Usenet archive wasn't a must-have. Buying Deja was more
about saving a key piece of Net history (and putting it under the Google logo)
than it was about financial prudence.

Of course, all this was in 2001, before Google went public. Private companies
can make charitable gestures like this much more easily than public ones can.

