‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It (Published 2017)

Today it feels like we’re living through another important cultural shift—the decline of Twitter—and a new generation of networks is experimenting with new structures to try and capitalize on it. If we want to understand what’s next, it helps to ask: what caused the culture shift? What new structures would be better? And what will it feel like to u... See more

The major issue, we think, is that business models based on engagement have created a class of wildly successful media products that distort online discourse. It is increasingly difficult to participate in reasonable discussions on these platforms.

Opportunistic bad actors — anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers,conspiracy theorists, misogynists, racists, xenophobes, trolls, partisan extremists, scammers, and pedophiles — have taken advantage. Facebook and YouTube continually tweak their algorithms, use machine learning to detect spam and abuse, and spend billions of dollars hiring tens of thousands of... See more

The social platforms of web 2.0 are broken. On the path to mass scale and attention-based monetization, they compromised much of their usefulness to users. I think back to the early days of the social web and how much interesting stuff I would find each day and how connected it made me feel. Today fake accounts and fake posts d

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