Been reading nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a's article entitled ‘The Power of Nostr: Decentralised Social Media & More’
I have found this article fascinating and so on point, especially the nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m Dorsey quote on free speech and free will.
“This is going to sound a little bit crazy but I think the free speech debate is a complete distraction right now. I think the real debate should be about free will.
We feel it right now because we are being programmed. We are being programmed based on what we say we’re interested in, and we are told through these discovery mechanisms what is interesting. And as we engage and interact with this content, the algorithm continues to build more and more of this bias. But the algorithm, even if it’s open-source, is effectively a black box. You cannot predict 100% of the time how it’s going to work, what it’s going to show you, and it can be moved and changed at any time. And because people become so dependent upon it, it’s actually changing and impacting the free agency we have.
I think the only answer to this is not to work harder at open sourcing algorithms or making them more explainable about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, but to give people choice. Give people choice of what algorithm to use from a party that they trust, give people choice to build their own algorithm that can plug in on top of these networks, and see what they want, and they can shift them out as well. And give people choice to have, really a marketplace around an algorithm that you can choose, “I want to use this for these reasons, I don’t trust that party anymore so I’m not going to use this, or I’m not going to use anything at all: I want to be the discovery mechanism.”
And that’s really the biggest problem and why these corporations became so large and so valuable, is because they solved the discovery problem on the Internet.
We talk a lot about the public square, but the public square cannot be owned by one company. The public square, by default, is the Internet. But the problem with the public square is it’s very hard to discover and to be matched with the things that you’re truly interested in. And that’s where the value of a Google came in; it helps you discover. That’s where the value of a Facebook; it lets you discover your friends. The value of a Twitter; helps you discover news and interesting content of the day.
But if we can solve the discovery problem in an open-source way, in a free agency way, that you get to choose how you see the world and what algorithms you’re using and more or less how they’re working and that you can turn them off and see everything, that’s really powerful and that’s what we need.
And we just haven’t seen a lot of motion there. Twitter took the first step some time ago when we enabled you to turn off the algorithm and just see who you’re following. But the problem with that is that you miss tons and tons of content, because there’s just millions and billions of tweets going by, and you need some help. But to be able to trust the help I think you need to be able to choose it and have agency over that. Otherwise it really is attacking free will. It’s programming how we think. And we can resist it all we want, but it knows us better than we know us because we tell it our preferences implicitly and explicitly all the time. It just feels super dangerous to continue to rely on that without choice.”
-Jack Dorsey, June 2024
https://www.lynalden.com/the-power-of-nostr/
