All Things Alt-Tech

We take a look at yet another couple of alternative social networks, discuss some sounder approaches to privacy and running social networks, and the creation of a potential social standard.

Mewe.com functions very well, but it is largely a Facebook clone with more sound approach to privacy. But if they were really serious and obsessive about privacy, why not make the platform open source? And how do they make money?

Meanwhile, most people have already invested a lot of time and effort in Facebook. That’s not an excuse not to leave Facebook, but in reality, it’s one reason why the big players remain so well entrenched in the market. People have come to accept that it’s a panopticon — we obviously shouldn’t, but that’s where we are.

Privacy is great, but from the perspective of creating a vibrant social platform with lots of discourse and action, you can argue that you can have too much of it. If you have zero skin in the game, that is if you have complete anonymity, the platform risks turning into Gab.com or Twitter. The problem with brand new social networks or platforms promising privacy or free speech, is that it’s going to initially attract people who are there to precisely to spew out vitriol — it’s not going to attract people who are just there to carry on a conversation without any restraints or snooping.

When it comes to true privacy, decentralized is the way to go — another competing centralized service, and a pinky promise not to touch your data, doesn’t cut it. With a sufficiently decentralized solution, any government demands become almost moot and void, because such services are ungovernable, and legislation is just a formal recommendation without any teeth.

Mastodon is a free and open-source self-hosted social networking service. It allows anyone to host their own server node in the network, so its various user bases are spread across many different servers.  Mastodon is a part of the wider network of social networks, meaning its users to also interact with users on different open platforms that support the same protocol.

Meanwhile, in a rather timely development, Jack Dorsey from Twitter has come out stating he wants to create a social media standard, in other words, develop something of a protocol for social data. This would make social media networks operate more like email, so that users could join different networks but still communicate with each other no matter which one they’re using.

Let’s not forget, that Twitter shut down many of the healthy and useful applications that were already building using Twitter’s API, because twitter tightened the reins of their data to make room for more internal products. One such discontinued app was Storify, its purpose was to allow users to create stories by importing content from various forms of media into a timeline. Another one was Favstar, a third party app that showed how people’s Tweets were getting liked and retweeted by others on the network. In other words, Twitter doesn't have exactly have a good track record of supporting a free and open transfer of information online and should not be leading the charge in developing any standards.

Dorsey says that "Existing social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than conversation which informs and promotes health". True or not, it’s not up to any social network (or social network stand

COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) Is a federal law that seeks to regulate how websites and online assets could gather information from children, and it is enforced by the FTC. The goal of COPPA is to prevent the deceptive targeting of children with campaigns to extract personal information -- but is that what it will really accomplish?

COPPA regulates websites that obtain personal information from U.S. children under the age of 13. YouTube have been charged with illegally collected personal information from children without their parents’ consent. They are going to have to pay a record $170 million to settle allegations by the FTC. Under this settlement, YouTube will have to implement a series of changes for how kids’ content is treated on the platform. 

First, they have to stop collecting data and serving targeted ads against these videos, regardless of the age of the actual viewer. This is a big deal — it means ads served against kids content will basically be served blindly, i.e. the targeting against these videos is not personalized. This means poor performance for advertisers, and as this content becomes less lucrative, advertisers might outright avoid ever serving against kids content altogether. This also means this content becomes less lucrative for creators. In plain revenue terms, turning off personalized ads in your channel is, if not decimate your revenue, it’s going to at least cut it in half. That’s not all, if you mark a video as being for children, it’ll cut the notifications and commenting features, and it will not be recommended. 

Under COPPA, a court can fine operators who violate the rules up to $42,530 per violation. As a content creator, that’s a big chunk of your revenue. 

Under the settlement, YouTube also has to develop and maintain a system that lets channel owners identify “child-directed content” so that YouTube can ensure it complies with COPPA. Here's have a better idea — stop siphoning off data from users altogether. How about that — there, fixed your problem.

Starting this month, YouTube is requiring all creators, regardless of location and whether or not you actually produce kids’ content, to designate whether your videos are made for kids. So, YouTube is putting the onus on creators to comply with COPPA. According to YouTube’s help-center document on the topic, “If you fail to set your audience accurately, you may face compliance issues with the FTC or other authorities, and we may take action on your YouTube account”.

As a content creator, what can you do?

Here's how to verify a YouTube Channel with Brave Payments

Here's the Request for Public Comment on the FTC's Implementation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule

Here's the Petition to SAVE Family-Friendly Content on YouTube

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In this episode, we talk about YouTube's new policy regarding termination of accounts and how the platform is quickly losing its original appeal. We also touch on Facebook's Atlantic Council partnership, Facebook throttling mentions of Minds.com and the de-platforming of Daniel McAdams.

YouTube has a new policy regarding termination of accounts. The key point is that “YouTube may terminate your access if they believe, in their sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable”. In other words, if YouTube thinks your budding new channel doesn’t have legs, they can cut you off entirely. If they apply the policy, or when they do, this policy is going to make YouTube a lot of enemies.

The inspiration for YouTube first came from Janet Jackson 2004 Super Bowl incident, when her breast popped out during her performance. The founder noticed that you could not easily find video clips of this online, which led to the idea of a video sharing site. It was in large part, as a way to find obscure and edgy content online — to circumvent the existing media machinery. 

Since then, YouTube has lost a lot of that original essence, the original essence being giving everyone their own voice and content being freely available in a simple free speech manner. It used to be YouTube, not CNN-tube, not MSNBC-tube, Youtube. Today, it’s becoming more like regular, legacy, old school TV online. It’s curated, airbrushed and streamlined content that’s safe and palatable for the generic masses. I’ve mentioned this before, but the whole corporate TV-online direction shows such a lack of vision on the part of YouTube.

Meanwhile, Facebook have not been as keen on the outright de-platforming as of late, but they are certainly on the censorship bandwagon. Facebook announced last year it was working closely with the neoconservative think tank, The Atlantic Council (which is largely funded by Saudi Arabia, Israel and various weapons manufacturers) to fight foreign “fake news”. Good luck with that!  What could go wrong when these people get to influence what 2 billion people see in their news feed? When an organization like the Atlantic Council is controlling the information flow on the largest social media platform in the world, that is authoritarian censorship on a global level.

Finally, and most recently, Twitter just banned Daniel McAdams, Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute, supposedly for calling Sean Hannity a retard. Not a nice thing to say, but let’s be honest, that word is used all the time by others, but somehow that alone was enough to get McAdams kicked off. It’s obvious that the rules are applied arbitrarily, when it’s convenient for the wokesters over at Twitter. 

We can see where this is going. If you are on the 'wrong' side of any issue, you could raise the ire of the wokester police and you could be in danger of being deplatformed. So far, this is only affecting persons and pages with larger followings, but this could change. What we are seeing play out in the tech space is about control, controlling whatever narrative that the corporate executives happen to agree with. So, think long and hard about which platforms you want to make use of, and which ones you are dependent on. As a business, diversify, and as a consumer vote with your feet — or rather your thumbs.

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Time to talk about anticompetitive behavior in big tech. There’s actually been some hard evidence surface over the past few days, and it’s pretty damning for Facebook. We take a look at their history of anticompetitive stunts over the past decade: their acquisition of Instagram, their attempted takeover of Snapchat, the WhatsApp deal and more.

For instance, Facebook gave Amazon special access to user data because it was spending money on Facebook advertising. In another case, it shut down access to a new messaging app because it had become too popular and could end up competing with Facebook. This wasn’t just a couple of instances though; Facebook cut off access to thousands of developers. Also, court documents suggest that Facebook did this deliberately to protect their position in the market, while they were publicly saying that it was to 'promote privacy'.

There have of course been a number of similar cases in the past — even just pertaining to Facebook alone. They acquired Instagram in 2012. Granted, IG only had 50 m users back then, but it was displaying a tremendous growth rate, and it could have become a competitor to Facebook. Instead, Facebook bought it and married it up with Instagram, dominating the social space even further.

in 2013, Facebook tried to pull the same trick again with Snapchat (and yet again, without any challenge by the FTC). Rather, it was Snapchat’s founder who simply didn’t want to sell it, even for $3 billion. What did Facebook do in response? They copied the core features from Snapchat, basically stealing the Stories feature, launching it both on FB and IG, and also adding filters and stickers for good measure.

Then, in 2014, Facebook decided to buy WhatsApp for $19 billion. Another purchase that should not have been allowed to go through. And because WhatsApp has access to your contacts and phone numbers, this is a treasure trove for Facebook, in that it now knows even more about who you know — even if they are not on Facebook.

And what’s next — Facebook trying to launch a cryptocurrency. Of course, not before they made sure to ban ads for other cryptocurrencies on Facebook. If that is not an egregious display of anticompetitive behavior, what is?

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The online ecosystem is concentrated on a number of fronts: search, social, video, news, browsers, etc. Why is this? In this episode, we take a look at why seemingly all aspects of the online world are dominated by just a select few players.

One study that Google ran internally was to see how users ranked various search engines if you basically removed the branding. It turns out, users can’t distinguish between the quality of the results. We think Google is the best, therefore it is the best to you. It’s a valuable brand just as much as a superior technology.

In fact, the very underlying search algorithm itself contributes to an oligopolistic market constellation with regards to websites as a whole. It’s a popularity contest; it’s about being big, loud, famous — this will help you maintain your position.This makes it difficult for new entrants or some dissident views to spread. It doesn’t matter if you have higher quality content, more accurate information, more painstakingly reached conclusions, that doesn’t count. Instead, having other sites linking to your content is key.

Users are waking up to the fact that Google, YouTube, Facebook (et. al.) don’t represent all-encompassing, solutions that offer universal stream of information, but rather, these companies curate their results and outright hide others. People were very quick to abandon Altavista, Yahoo when there was another site with better, richer results. Long term, users, conservative or liberal, are unlikely to want to choose to have their reality curated for them by a company. Meanwhile, new alternative entrants are popping up in every vertical (Bitchute.com for Video, Minds.com for Social, Duckduckgo.com for Search, etc).

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This is a quick episode on how the news landscape is shifting and how it's now nearly unrecognizable to what it was only a decade ago. Legacy news networks have figured out that investigative journalism is costly and requires lots of legwork, while independent YouTubers are now commanding immense audiences. What's next?

As the traditional news networks are struggling to monetize their content and maintain their business, they clamor harder and harder for their core following (left or right), whilst also trying to provide a sense of excitement. Everything is breaking news. There’s a need to sensationalize every event, however trivial, and they are constantly suggesting that a major dramatic turn is just around the corner (see impeachment, proof of a Russia-trump collusion, etc.)

If you want to make it as an individual; as an investigative journalist in the digital age, you have to provide value — not just talk — and the legacy networks are now finding themselves competing against exactly such individuals.

Meanwhile, platforms such as YouTube are definitely siding with the losing team. We know through official statements as well as through Project Veritas etc. that YouTube views the legacy networks as ‘authoritative channels’, and therefore these are getting surfaced and recommended far more often. This is, in part, because of the more advertiser friendly nature of buttoned-up old school news channels, but it’s also because of the narrative and political affiliation associated with the legacy broadcast media. 

More and more people are waking up to the tiring nature of today’s corporate news media. Impeachment is supposedly just around the corner, election interference is just about to be declared a fact, Trump’s tax records are nearly about to be released, etc. It’s not news; it’s rumor milling, gossip, hearsay, it’s endless regurgitation of recent events, and it’s historical revisionism in realtime.

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In this episode, we look at the upcoming antitrust case against Google and anticompetitive behavior in the tech space. What has Google done to be called a monopoly and should governments be intervening in the market?

Google dominate mobile advertising, display advertising, small business analytics, email, file storage as well — it’s no secret that they are very anticompetitive. An obvious example is how Google behaved with their shopping listings: up until a few years ago, Google indexed their results fairly, and included them in the organic search results. Shoppers easily found the best deals, and competitive merchants enjoyed great visibility. Not so great for other shopping comparison engines, who struggled to maintain their traffic, and some of them, naturally, died. Suddenly, Google pulled the rug underneath everyone and rendering shopping results now paid only. Suddenly, users didn’t necessarily get the best deals at all — and businesses who couldn’t afford to pay (or wouldn’t pay), lost their visibility. In essence, they launched a free service to starve out competing shopping engines, and once complete, they made their service paid only: a fine example of predatory marketing.

The Google antitrust case is part of a larger, or at least, just as large of a problem, and that is Google’s way of generating content and servicing users. Google, the search engine, doesn’t have proprietary content. They trawl the Internet for content, index it, and serve it to users who come to Google and search for information. That’s not a problem on its own, at least not if done the way say the way a phone book sources information and displays it. 

In the past, Google used to optimize their search performance to how little time is spent on their site — the faster someone leaves, the faster they found what they were looking for. Over the past few years, Google have started displaying more and more content on their own property. For instance, search for weather, song lyrics, news content, you name it — the content is now going to be displayed on the search result page. This is at the expense of the content creators — they get no visitors, ad revenue, even credit. Google takes all.

We take a look at the legislation that exists in the US, the Sherman Antitrust Act; passed in 1890. It is meant to give the government the power to break up companies, and it deals specifically with violation of antitrust as it pertains to monopolization. It has been criticized by libertarians, perhaps more by anarcho-capitalists, as anti-capitalist, but in fact, it’s the opposite. Monopolies prevent true capitalism, they stifle innovation, distort prices and keep prices above market-rate and they hinder competition.

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In this episode, we look at the document dump provided to Project Veritas. The documents contain references to partisanship, psychological research, fake news, politics, machine learning 'fairness' and more. For some reason (although not surprisingly), these have not been thoroughly disseminated anyone in the media -- so, let's delve in.

What is 'twiddling'? Re-ranking of results from a single corpus (i.e. an existing search). In the doc, there are references to the ease with which twiddlers can be created, and that an example function is to ’strongly demote results’. In other words, Google clearly manually intervenes in its search results. (On December 11, 2018, Sundar Pichai appeared in front of Congress, under oath, stating that Google doesn't intervene in its search results).

We also look at the 'Fringe ranking classifier', and the leaked documents discuss ideas on how to identify ‘fringe’ news’, and one idea is to directly grade channel quality. Also in the dump, we learn about machine learning fairness; Google's Orwellian attempt to defy reality by 'trying to show search results that do not reflect any bias or unfairness'.

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Looking for an alternative to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube? We take a look at some of the upcoming alternatives: Minds.com, Bitchute, Gab.com, and others. What does it take to successfully get a new network off the ground?

Why would anyone look for alternative social networks? Most of your friends are already on FB & IG. Social will always be a monopolistic market because of that very fact. The first reason to look elsewhere is because of how Facebook has failed at safeguarding their user’s data. Probably the biggest trigger here was the Cambridge Analytica event. People were (rightly) quite shocked at the Cambridge Analytica event, but really, the shock was mostly due to the fact that the event happened to favor a certain political faction they did not approve of.

Another reason to look for new networks is the political bias and censorship. Sending messages containing words such as ‘Bitcoin’ and FB immediately flagged your conversation as dangerous. This is as annoying as it is alarming — you don’t need a tech company to determine or dictate the contents of my messages. In fact, reading the newsfeed, you can tell that it’s curated with a certain skew. People are waking up to the fact that is it dangerous when corporations dictate the information flows.

An alternative to Facebook is Minds.com. Minds rewards you for your contributions; for what you post. You earn tokens, which you can then use to advertise your content across the social network. There’s also premium subscriptions that gives you access to exclusive content, the ability to become verified, etc. Minds should offer a more organic feed, and incentives more favorable for the user — but beyond this, what else?

For an Alternative to Twitter, there’s Gab.com. They outline themselves as the free speech platform. They have received flak for harboring a lot of fringe people, and, based on my own experiences, yes, you certainly stumble upon dodgy content a fair bit — let’s be honest. There’s bigoted, aggressive content there for sure. Eventually, you’ll get what you follow, so it could still prove to be a decent platform if you really care about absolute freedom of speech.

For an alternative to Youtube, there’s Bitchute. Bitchute uses peer-to-peer WebTorrent technology, so when you are watching videos, you are also helping to seed or share them with other users. It was founded as a way to avoid content rules that are enforced on platforms like YouTube. It’s been criticized for hosting ‘alt-righters’, and yes, there’s definitely ‘alt right’ material on there. While technically, it’s an impressive product, but it's difficult to see many incentives for the common user to participate there, apart from circumventing tyrannical policies (or getting your fix for non-PC content!). 

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The current online economy is a strange and perverted one, with content creators generally try to monetize their content using ads. In other words, right from the get-go, you present your users on your with with the paradoxical choice of viewing your content, or navigating away from your site, to the advertisers’ content. So what's the alternative?

Content creators generally try to monetize their content using ads. To generate good return on the ads, publishers need to show a good click-through on their ads. In other words, right from the get-go, you present your users on your with with the paradoxical choice of viewing your content, or navigating away from your site, to the advertisers’ content.

This is why ad placements on website have become more and more ludicrous on websites and in apps as well. Often, ads are positioned to lure you into believing that they are organic content. In apps, ads are often placed so that you accidentally click them — fat finger clicks. This is a problem both for advertisers (as the traffic is of very poor quality), and for users, as it’s very annoying experience. If you are running campaigns with, say Google’s ad network, a lot of traffic comes through from apps such as alarm clocks, music players, dating apps, etc — which are often designed so that the ads catch your finger in a key moment of navigation.

This is clearly a broken system, but it’s the one that we slid into by default in the mid-90’s. The prevailing way of monetizing content, was using advertisements. In the same way that TV content was free or cheap thanks to advertisements funding the production, we have the same ecosystem today. Content creators skew their content to shoehorn in advertisers of a certain type. Intermediaries are getting dodger and dodger in the practices for collecting data. Ad networks and social platforms dig deeper and deeper into the user data to extrapolate more characteristics of the users. It’s getting filthier, more intrusive, less secure, more layered, less cost effective.

What’s the alternative? For starters, a model where the user gets something, instead of just getting exploited. Perhaps also a form of advertising that does not involve completely brutalizing the user experience. Does it have to be advertising? No. More and more content creators are relying on tipping — in other words, visitors donating money to support their work.

Another, more all-encompassing, big picture attempt at shaking up the ecosystem is the Brave Browser, where they take the above ideas and implement them at the browser level. Brave strips away all intrusive 3rd party ads entirely. Because this happens in-browser, it doesn’t even download any advertising assets, so the experience is much faster. Also, users can choose to see ads, but they will be rewarded with cryptocurrency (BAT), if they do so. They get 70% of the ad revenue, in other words, 70% of what an advertiser pays, goes to the user. This is turning the ad ecosystem on its head. Moreover, users can choose to donate the currency to sites they frequently visit. It’s a holistic approach at recreating the online ecosystem in a more sound way.

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