Building social platform for everyone - a free speech utopia brainstorm

by Dmitry Kirsanov 15. May 2019 01:08

We have seen it often, with almost every known social network and platform built to express yourself - at some point it gets to a milestone which changes the platform to the opposite of its original vision.

"Don't be evil" becomes THE evil, the outlaw becomes the law enforcer, independent form alliances and neutral become ferocious fighters against neutrality. There are still islands of free speech, where borders are wide enough to call it unbiased, but they are doing it with serious personal risk and at significant expenses.

In this essay I'll try to analyse the history, trends and risks of self-expression platforms, and provide some food for thought for those who will attempt to build the next platform.

The most important aspect of this work is technology, second is sociology and third - economy. We'll scrape the law a bit, but the main premise will be that whatever you are doing is illegal somewhere, and if not - then content certainly will be. And so we'll use technology to obey the law when possible, and protect from it when it's not.

But first - let's look at existing platforms and their pitfalls. This will help us to list the known problems and caveats, and see how titans fell and why.  More...

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Analytics | Other | Social