Protecting social media from the oligarchy

Bluesky is rolling today but is already running into some things. Subscribers complain of targeted harassment, pesky bots, and aggressive sealioning. Clay Shirky writes in the NYT that maintaining the site’s nascent culture--open, freer of misogyny and other harassment, fewer trolls, even “communal”—will be difficult in part because of reactionary attacks. Melissa Heikkila comments, in the MIT Technology Review, about fake Bluesky accounts, whereby scammers impersonate known figures (tech, journalism) in attempts to seduce the targets into opening crypto wallets.

Most dangerous to Bluesky will be what has killed a competitor––an oligarch will decide that an open social media platform is incompatible with his plan for the world and buy it. This appears to be occurring now with a part of The Guardian, as has happened with other social media sites.

How to protect social media from the oligarchy ?

Bluesky must be converted into a permanent trust: call it Azulejo. It would be run on some strict principles--collective governance, a financial model safe from the moods of rapacious oligarchs and their dullard heirs, a non-commercial operating model, and defense against the badgering of incels and other cultists.

What would the trust do ?

Azulejo would have a constitution, something like The Guardian trust created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of The Guardian free from commercial or political interference".

The trust document would declare as a governing principle--Respect of the current Bluesky ethic, codifying an open space for activism, generally scientific and broadly tolerant. The principle of respect would mandate free speech with responsibilities—no harassment, no bullying, no anti-science trash.

Azulejo would emphasize exchange of climate analysis and related activism; informed advocacy for universal health care; disaster reporting (e.g., the attempted coup in South Korea); and advocacy for taxing the wealthy.^[1]

Azulejo would be “broadly tolerant” yet, in the interest of self-preservation, would intolerant of toxic waste (climate denialism, anti-vaxxing, quack remedies), of pimping for crypto and online gambling, and of misogynist or anti-LGBTQ harassment. Repeated offenders get banned.

Azulejo would be strictly non-commercial and have a subscribers only model. It would never have ads. Subscriptions would never be payable in crypto. Donations would be accepted, though never in crypto. Subscriptions would never be sold at a discount with a no-ads variant.

Azulejo would support open-access journals, encourage scientists to publish in them and, one fine day, create a journal to compete with the greedy firms who now run scientific publishing.

To be sustainable, the trust agreement must say that Azulejo can never be sold. If it starts to run short of money, run a donation campaign or raise the subscription price.

Ownership and capitalization

The trust would own Azulejo with a significant minority to be held by the members^[2] after an initial transition period in which the current owners would cash out (and leave, never to be seen again)^[3] and in which a Founding Board (15 people, at least 9 F at all times^[4]) would launch the new platform.

Capital would be accumulated by one-time gifts from wealthy people^[5] (who would make their donations and leave) to invest in servers, engineers, and content moderators. A fundament of the first round is that the original donors would never have anything to do with running Azulejo; they could be paying subscribers at most but would never have voting rights.

An immediate second source of seed capital would be pre-payment of a $20 annual subscription for 2 years (i.e, $40 x the number of subscribers).

A third round of seed capital would be crowd-sourced donations from subscribers and the public in addition to the subscription fees. Target groups could be those who have canceled certain major publications and/or who have decided to stop wasting money on hopeless grifter blue candidates.

At the end of year 1, the Founding Board would organize an election for a new 3 year one-term Board in which any subscriber can run.

Posters and commenters would accumulate voting rights as functions of numbers of followers and of up/down votes on their posts (something like how Stack Overflow works). Rankings would NOT be algorithmic and there would be no ‘For you’ feeds.

Subscribers would accumulate voting shares at different rates.

• Subscribers who read only but do not post (replies do not accumulate votes) gets 1 vote.
• Subscribers who post, have some followers, and get some up votes have more voting rights, up to a limit, as determined by a published formula.

Governance

There would be collective governance, with subscribers voting to elect board members and to advise on management.

The Founding Board would choose a CEO, a CFO, a CTO (in charge of cyber-security) and Chief Moderators (who will oversee content moderation and decide on bans and suspensions in several languages). All would work full time and be paid something reasonable but not excessive.

Board members would be paid modest honorarium ($25 k/yr) and be expected to contribute 4 weeks per year.

Accounts (salaries, costs, electricity use, carbon footprint, health policy costs) would be published every week.

Consultants (e.g., specialized cyber-security people) would be named in the weekly published accounts with their job description, compensation, and days worked. All reports commissioned by the Board or management would be published.

Membership information can never be sold or given away even for supposed research purposes.

Subscribers need not list real names or public contacts (emails, for example) because of the risk of official and private harassment.

A basis of sustainable governance must be—no hiring for Board or for staff of superannuated politicians or their minions, most of whom would inevitably push for monetization. No one who has ever had a confirmation hearing in the US, no Nick Clegg or Campbell Brown, no Nicolle Wallace or Ken Mehlman, no George Stephanopolous or any of the Never Trumpers, no Tony West or Neera Tanden, no Gordon Brown or anyone named Larry, no Starmer or Macron refugees when their ships sink, no Chelsea Clinton or Steve Schmidt, no Ron Klain, no Rachel Kyte or Charlie Sykes, no Jeff Zients, no climate denialists, no anti-vaxxers, no one with a history of being overpaid at an NGO, no one from the Gates, Bezos, Clinton, Blair or Three Cairns foundations, no lobbyists or anyone from Brookings or Heritage, no one from the BBC or NPR, no one doing the thumb-sucking “just asking questions” act, and especially no one who has ever written fairy tales about Antifa torching tractors in Nebraska. No one who ever had a leading position in Gross Tech, no one who from the VCs or PE or the hedge funds, no one from the Hill or from the White House or from the “intelligence community”. No billionaires. No one who was ever promoted crypto or online gambling.

Operations

There would be no ads or sales effort, no research, no air travel, WFH as much as possible, no lobbyists though expert subscribers (e.g., climate scientists) should speak in public, and testify before legislatures, etc.

AI-generated posts and comments are forbidden; if a subscriber gets caught they are suspended for the first offense and banned for the second.

Training of AI on any form of post or comments is forbidden.

The site would offer simple data archiving and account deletion procedures.

The current translation function would have to be re-thought.

Location

Ultimately the location of this new business would be somewhere with cheap renewable electricity and less risk of lawfare. It will be inevitable to move from Seattle (an expensive housing market), to a cheaper housing market because Azulejo will never be really competitive with Gross Tech salaries.

It would be eventually be necessary to control power supply to Azulejo, by signing long-term contracts for renewable energy or by building a solar farm, because of the risks of attacks from reactionary media.

Objections

Why not sell ads to keep Azulejo going ? Never. Selling ads is the first step to a hostile buyout, as we are seeing in another social media site, or to the degradation of quality, as we see with search engines.

Isn't the focus on climate, universal health care, and inequality elitist? No. Who suffers the most from global heating (in the US alone, hotter working conditions, tornadoes, floods, and fires, higher insurance rates), from lack of health care, and from inequality ? The preterite. Defending their interests is the opposite of elitist. If readers want something else (stock tips; bondage hook-ups; the best pizza in Phoenix; used junk; etc, etc, etc) then the commercial social media sites have it.

Isn't a subscription model elitist ? No. I propose an annual subscription fee of $20. Readers for whom that is too expensive may use the read-only format. Anyone who is reading Azulejo on a mobile device can find some way to save $20.

The current owners will never walk away. Maybe they won’t. Yet, some people will occasionally do the right thing on their own. Perhaps some dramatic public event will move the current owners. Maybe they will sell at a profit; there is plenty of cash around to buy out the current shareholders and give them a nice return. Some members of the PE oligarchy are reportedly paying hundreds of millions for small pieces of NFL teams in which they will have no management role, getting, as one such noble is reported to have said, a couple of parking passes for US$200 million.

What if Board members want to monetize one day ? Then they must resign. There will be many available Board candidates who believe in something other than flogging overpriced junk on the internet.

Will this new site become a target ? Yes. Social media sites are always targets and the attacks will only get sharper unless the sites surrender to the puppet trolls and their masters. Nothing will end the attacks but a strong defense—owenership, governance, operating rules—can block them.

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[1]. I am NOT saying there should be no jokes or pictures of cyclists or recipes or videos of weeping Yankee fans or kids’ drawings. All that is part of the fun, but the main part.

[2]. An otherwise dear friend has suggested that the state of California could own Azulejo. This would not work because state ownership would be corrupted—think of the awful people that Gavin might name to the Board.

[3]. AFAICT, whatever stakes belong to the current owners could be bought out by a single donor; one example would be that generous person who has reportedly given away US$19 billion since 2019.

[4]. Why more F > M ? Females are less likely to bully and harass, and are more likely to be harassed, making it probable that will be more active in suppressing male bullying and harassment on Azulejo.

[5]. Not being tax exempt should be an option because Azulejo will be a target and does not want to waste its strength fighting politicized tax enforcement in certain countries. Possible donors: the Dems who have gotten fat on insider trading; hopeless candidates like Steyer, Phillips, and Bloomberg; there must be a few tech people who want to do something other than for money; the vanity foundations doing little but hiring their relatives or wasting their endowments on ineffective grants. Kamala Harris raised US$1 billion in a short period; not all of that money was printed in the Valley.