2y ago

Let the community work it out: A throwback to early internet days could fix social media’s crisis of legitimacy

www.niemanlab.org

[...]why should a few companies — or a few billionaire owners — have the power to decide everything about online spaces that billions of people use? This unaccountable model of governance has led stakeholders of all stripes to criticize platforms’ decisions as arbitrary, corrupt or irresponsible. In the early, pre-web days of the social internet, decisions about the spaces people gathered in online were often made by members of the community. Our examination of the early history of online governance suggests that social media platforms could return — at least in part — to models of community governance in order to address their crisis of legitimacy.

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We believe it is time to consider not just how online spaces can be governed efficiently and in service to corporate bottom lines, but how they can be governed fairly and legitimately. Giving communities more control over the spaces they participate in is a proven way to do just that.
Agreed.

Yeah the internet being effectively crowded into a dozen or so sites controlled fiercely by nasty data hoarding mega corps is definitely the problem. And it really does feel like it has come to a head in the last few years. I've been on the net since the 90s and the recent shift has been really jarring and sad to see.
I really intend to ratchet it back. I've taken all the social media apps off my phone and am looking to get back to stuff like forums more than social platforms and honestly just not sitting online so much in general. The time I'm spending online is not feeling like a clear cut net positive anymore.
- Agreed. I don't have 90s Internet memories like a lot of here, but I do have some early 2000a Internet memories, which I honestly think was better than the 90s Internet cause we'd worked out a lot of the kinks.
  Forums were a great place to chat with people about whatever and in 99% of cases, people were polite enough. People talked about this and that. I and others shared their discoveries in video games on sites like GameFAQs (rest in peace, I put up so many Mario Kart DD tips).
  People treated interactive sites like they were neighborhoods. Sure, a ton of drama would pop up, same as any neighborhood, and sometimes that drama made modernTwitter drama seem tame, but it stayed within the community the majority of the time and it either got resolved or ended up killing the site. Either way people got over it and moved on.
  Nowadays, just keeping up with memes and drama is a full time job. Just 5 years ago I could stay on top of things, now it feels like what's funny changes the second I see it, and I'm not even old (I was just on the Internet at way too young). Hell, rage comics and impact memes were a think for over a decade.
  Lemmy has so far felt like a nice middle ground between the old days of things lasting more than five minutes and people not just immediately being dicks (as long as you block everything LG and Hexbear) plus modern comforts in technology.
  
  Am concerned that you see hexbear this way. I recently joined there precisely for the community reasons we all value in this thread and which Hexbear claims are it's treason for existing.
  Can you please give me details? If not here then in private. I am considering migrating a Facebook activist group to Hexbear (thousand people).
  Edit: hang on, this is a HexBear post your commenting on. Am confused.
- Apart from my illness support group, I'm only on fediverse social media now, and only via web browser. It's a breath of fresh air.
  I'm realising there are subtle ways that enshittification constrains and shapes actual conversations between us.

The problem that I see is that power comes in great part from the responsibility to educate yourself. In a community, you don't have to know everything to contribute to its workings, but someone has, enough people do you escape the clutches of external players. Everything is quite individualist right now though. Things must just work without the help of anyone.
- In a community, you don’t have to know everything to contribute to its workings, but someone has, enough people do you escape the clutches of external players
  Any chance you can rephrase this? Trying to parse it several times and I can't figure out what you meant.
  
  I think that the other user is conveying something like this:
  "If you're in a community you don't need to know something, as long as someone else knows it. And if enough people know it, you escape being manipulated by external players."

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