Yeah, basically no successful American social media company advertises itself as being American. And its users do not think of it as "an American company," they just think of it as its own thing.
That might be true for social media, but there are 100s of American brands that make a large point of being thought of as an "American company" or "American made" goods.
I think that's when selling inside America but I don't remember seeing any american company proudly advertising its product as "American". I'd wager that today they want to hide that fact.
Does the average non-HN type in Europe hold comparable pan-European or even plain National Pride? I think here of the German national relationship with their own flag and feel skeptical of a comparison here.
From my observation both studying and working abroad in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Finland and Latvia, people almost always tend to cluster along ethnic or linguistic lines in another European country. This stays invariant even if the command of English is perfect. Pan-European national identity is very much non-existent, ethno-lingustic patriotism very much is alive.
The problem is impressumspflicht, you have to add your full contact address plus name to a website you host, inviting all sorts of trolls on the internet to ruin your life. No thanks.
You can be suite in some European countries if you have a web page without an impressum and latest your domain registration will have your credit card to track you. Obviously, not all cases can be traced back.
Totally valid point - but there are a lot of other strategic consideration.
Especially with 'Social' there are network externalizations like 'critical mass' - that actually compounds across a lot of things.
No European country given size and language is going to be able to create something that resonates as well as the American variation beyond the critical mass needed, at least naturally.
If 'French Facebook' started at one of the 'Grande Ecoles' it would have grown much more slowly, and maybe never moved out of being French centric and therefore not gone beyond borders.
Without the 'momentum' that doesn't attract investors, doesn't make employees want to work 'late nights for the big IPO payoff' etc..
And there are so many other related conventions, such as capitol markets, public markets, so many issues.
So - in order to overcome those limitations there may have to be a lot of strategic thinking and manoeuvring.
Given that Europe took 4 years to adjust to a nation literally invading it ... well ... I wouldn't hold my breath.
There are some winning opportunities: government procurement is powerful but Euros are afraid to negotiate hard with MS Goog etc..
There's a lot of money involved, forcing issues on privacy is entirely possible.
Same for local content, some degree of decentralization.
Requiring government actors to use 'Euro Mastadon' or whatever - it means school, students, parents come abard and then you have 'critical mass'.
Requiring 'open doc format' means you can break the MS Office monopoly.
Requiring 'Linux First' on every IT procurement decision - or even 'Open Soruce First' so local city council must give an excuse for why they are not using 'Approved Euro-Linux Variations' etc..
That's definitely the main issue. We will end up with a really neat technical stack, a few products built on it for their 100 users each, and it will be forgotten in a few years...
Is there room for European companies to be the “Hermes of the Internet?” The American web is ad-optimized slop for the masses. Can the europeans provide higher quality experiences for more discerning buyers?
I’m thinking about Tik Tok. When it was Chinese, my feed was stuff I actually wanted to watch. A lot of it was Chinese propaganda, but it was stuff that was pleasant, like people cooking in Chinese villages. Now it’s just rage bait and engagement farming.
Depending on how hardcore enforcement of the upcoming Cybersecurity Resilience Act is, that might(?) push EU products very slightly towards this luxury pricing power on the margin.
But on the whole I think you're dreaming, Ray. I can't imagine a single case of a successful luxury software product. (Apple is premium mediocre at best, doesn't count.)
You’re probably right i’m just thinking out loud. It is interesting that software has resisted quality-based segmentation, something that exists in almost every other type of product.
very interesting thought experiment here. I wonder how much it would take in a monthly subscription to offset the money they make in ads? picturing an Instagram without drivel and the crap and the manipulative behavior, that I would pay for simply to escape for 15 minutes. Curate the good content, heck create AI content I don't care I'm there to just mentally check out for a bit. Time lock it based on my prefs so that it respects me as a human being, doesn't try to feed off of me as a data source and I'll pay for that. I agree with you why is no one doing this? I can hear an argument about economies of scale, that it's just not worth the hassle, big guys too entrenched, but isn't that what we're all here to do... create new ways to disrupt?!?
Doesn't work. As soon as something great appears, US VCs immediately buy it and move it to the bay area. A fair few of the products you think are US grown probably aren't. If not, a competitor appears that is less constrained by regulations and can move faster, taking over most of the market instead.
Having spent years working for a VC and having raised rounds from VC's in Europe multiple times over the last 26 years, that it doesn't exist is news to me.
America can make those those just as well as the Europeans, that much is true. But world-class implies renowned and nobody outside of America wants those American products. Hell, Americans who care about quality in those categories will favor the European option (whether it's based on merits or not isn't relevant, it's just how it is, it just shows that world-class means nothing).
Engagement metrics fed into recommendations algorithms are the paperclip maximizers that feed humanity's collective poison.
Europe should do the one thing it knows how to do: regulate. For once, it is the answer. Do it only there. The rest of the dominos will fall.
Making a european branded humanity poisoner is not the answer.
Specifically, regulating against silent signals like watch time and comment count. Upvotes/likes can serve a purpose and would not cause the situation we're in now.
Yes, but us universities aren’t financially accessible to most people and access depends more on connections and families than merit.
But your link also is only relevant to the university system.
It doesn’t change the fact that the non university part of education is severely financially crippled in major areas of the country in order to hinder black people from getting proper education.
Combined with a burnout introducing system of standardized tests the us educational system is truly world leading. At demonstrating how NOT to do education.
And yet my American ex-GF that went to one of these top universities with very good grades when she came to Barcelona to do a masters (in a lowly Spanish university) she was so far behind in knowledge compared to her peers she had to do a lot of work just to catch up.
I'm pretty sure most of these are just politics being played.
Do you mean regulating "watch time and comment count" at the presentation (to the client) or the server (business/analytics) level? If the later, how would you even enforce that?
Like all good regulation, it would only kick in after a company has a large reach. So as to not snuff out startups and cause regulatory capture problems that are already so common.
Telling big companies to be transparent about their suggestion algorithms would not be hard. I think governments already do this? wasn't that a tiktok thing in the US? Anyway, it's well within government's reach.
Telling companies to only use signals that people consciously give seems like a no-brainer.
Well, I mean, if you believe that a goal of civilization is to respect the free will of individuals up until the point that that free will becomes a problem for other people.
The alternative is something less than respectful of human dignity.
I'm only partially convinced. I just can't see how you could really know if a company is using a hidden metric (or some sort of proxy for that metric so that they are not technically in violation) for figuring out what to promote. Short of having constants audits, how would you ever really know?
But my skepticism may be unfounded. Do you have examples of companies that are currently working with regulators to allow full auditing of their content promotion policies? Are they actually auditing these partnerships or are they simply accepting promises from the companies?
I'm all in favour of the EU finally emancipating itself from American tech companies, but trying to recreate Social Media, just in a European way, is the worst possible way to go.
We need less Social Media, not an inferior clone of TikTok or Instagram. Gaia-X would have been a nifty project, if it weren't a committee designing a framework for designing committee design frameworks by committee. We seem to make this mistake way too often. Don't plan to build Neuschwanstein—start to build a humble wooden cabin, and expand from there.
Making people less addicted to social media, or creating other versions of social media that are less harmful, might be the "harm reduction" discussion/tradeoff of our modern times, but they're very different goals and ambitions. Sure, I agree, people shouldn't spend hours mindlessly scrolling through TikTok/Instagram/Whatever, but most likely they will, regardless of what we do. So, why not come up with some alternative that kind of gives them that experience, but not as addicting and with maybe more user choice, like Bluesky letting people chose their own recommendation algos they like?
I think there's space for less crappy social media.
The early days of Facebook, where I actually saw friends and family posting their thoughts, that was great! It wasn't dominated by people resharing political screeds or random videos from groups I've never even heard of.
I'm pretty sure Pandora's box has already been opened. The youth spending hours on TikTok every day is not going to go back to early days of Facebook on their own.
Any software engineering done in germany is so bureaucratic. You cannot start small, you have to create the EierlegendeWollmilchSau that handles all edge cases, all security constraints and privacy concerns, use the latest architecture buzzwords and needs to be meticulously documented... Most projects turn into Stuttgart 21 within a year
This thesis is undermined by the reality of operational an implementation concerns.
A 'wish list' is not hugely important to the operational capability of 'doing the thing'.
It's definitely a 'nice to have' and a 'starting point' from a certain angle, but it's a nominal thing really.
Thinking about critical masses, requiring established social networks to have open APIs and local content etc., definitely some regulations around local hosting and even use aka 'gov entities must use European based entities' for certain things, which helps build critical mass.
Etc.
Also - as someone commented 'doing the things' is often 75% of the reality of this, strategic considerations make up the smaller part even if they are critical.
Europe is adopting open source and open protocols, not to promote individual sovereignty, but explicitly to protect European sovereignty from foreign influence. This is not what these technologies were built for; "promoting democracy" does not protect the rights of individuals.
The technology listed is mostly federated, not radically open (like, for example, nostr). In particular, ATProto has provided the EU with the perfect opportunity to signal openness while simultaneously standing up a new walled garden in which dystopian "moderation policies" will be the norm.
>not to promote individual sovereignty, but explicitly to protect European sovereignty from foreign influence
good, what's wrong with that? Europe isn't a continent for Ayn Rand reading crypto bros obsessed with their individual sovereignty, collective responsibility has always been the basis of our social contract.
We're not a continent for internet libertarians, if that's what you're going for you might want move to some Peter Thiel VC funded micro-nation somewhere, we don't want nostr or 'radically open' we want social technologies that facilitate democracy, human dignity and being able to defend ourselves from nations that don't care about any of it. In the German constitution we have a concept for this Wehrhafte Demokratie, 'militant democracy', building democratic tools that are able of defeating its enemies, not individual escapism.
As long as E2E encryption is not guaranteed and we rely on id verification, the only thing this can do is to limit the 3rd parties that can easily access your data.
Everything else is in the air
Why do you think a government should compete on a market segment? I find it slightly irritating.
Let me get a cup of the good EU coffee! I like the "privacy" blend the most!
Now let me turn on my EU computer and log-in with my EU id
Check my messages on EU social media and then I have to leave for work
Oh that's a cute girl that messaged me on EU dating
I hope she also likes privacy and democracy
Now into my EU car, let me quickly stop at my EU charging station
Power is cheap, no middleman, all EU for our democracy
And then I'm on my way to my EU employer!
Meh. Best thing for dating apps is probably for them to cease to exist. Humanity managed dating fine before these things were created, even managed it in cities where we live in isolating apartments and only know our neighbours by the music leaking through the walls.
Pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share, these all do fine. Even lonely hearts columns in newspapers probably still work, as physical newspapers still get sold here in Europe.
>Humanity managed dating fine before these things were created
Except back then we had stuff like religion, church, village, common communities etc to bind people.
>even managed it in cities where we live in isolating apartments and only know our neighbours by the music leaking through the walls.
Statistics show urbanites to be lonelier than ever, so that take disagrees with you.
>Pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share, these all do fine.
Massively depends on what the social life is like in the city you live in and what age you age. Some cities are better than others and the older you get the worse it is. While dating apps are more of a sure thing because most people are there to date. Meanwhile you can waste time and money in pubs and clubs for years and never meet a partner.
It's similar to job searching, if you're unemployed and need a job, you go straight to linkedin and apply, you don't go to clubs and pubs hoping you meet a founder who has a job for you. The latter might work every now and then if you're sociable and lucky and live in the right place, but it's not a sure thing for everyone all the time. That's why dating apps will never go away just like linkedin will never go away.
Social media and dating apps together have created this isolation. People can demand a completely comfortable illusion of life and enforce this sterility.
> Except back then we had stuff like religion, church, village, common communities etc to bind people.
And in cities, more pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share.
Most of us didn't go from Renaissance village churches to dating apps in one lifetime, let alone one day.
> Statistics show urbanites to be lonelier than ever, so that take disagrees with you.
Most surveys only started about 10 years ago, i.e. after social media and dating apps were already around, and the few longer surveys disagree with each other, but even they only go back to the 80s AFAICT; we've been living in big dense isolating cities for a lot longer than that.
> Massively depends on what the social life is like in the city you live in and what age you age.
So the focus should be on that, then. As in, not a dating app.
> While dating apps are more of a sure thing because most people are there to date.
Everyone I've heard talking about dating apps since Match Group cornered the market, says the only "sure thing" about them is how mediocre they are, at least for straight couples. Women get all the low-effort displays, men get no responses and spiral into low-effort displays.
I mean, for a while, I thought something like Substack (and not Fediverse) could disturb things a little, but I suppose it and many others have already been killed by slop. So, if you do verified identity management, which is good for certain purposes but perhaps not for others, I suppose you should also do decentralized trust management, and with an ability to delete nodes from a personal but federated trust chain. (And feel free to adopt the idea also for science; it would be very much needed.)
Perhaps relevant context: The EU commission just ignored the "Tech Sovereignty Package" it launched ~3 weeks ago, and explicitly referred open-source as a core element of their strategy, and endorsed W, another ATproto-based social that recently a) closed their code and b) ...had its CEO attend Davos. Make of that what you will.
I think they focus mainly on the fact that these are federated and mature solutions. I don't know anything about Matrix but as far as XMPP/Jabber and "push notifications" go, you don't need to reveal the message, nor the sender, in the alert. Right, it's not perfect, but in my book that goes a long way for privacy.
Attention trap platform feel nothing like social to be frank. Now that we have LLMs to prove that it doesn't take any human direct involvement to generate epic useless conversations, that should make it all the more obvious.
> Europe is in a hybrid conflict on two fronts; our elections and political life are under direct attack from foreign agents who use social media to manipulate public opinion and centre the political agenda to undermine us. We are deploying systems that have editorial pluralism and FIMI monitoring built in to shield our polity from influence and make our democracy resilient under attack.
I just wish there'd be more of a acknowledgement about the very real democratic deficit in the EU, where multiple elections are overloaded and affect different widely disparate affairs, leading to much of the EU largely able to operate completely without fear of repercussions from its citizenship. Strengthening democracy must start at an institutional level.
As of right now, there is just no real way for a European citizen to hold anyone accountable for something like Chat Control. Parliament, where you get a say, is mostly already opposed to it. The council and comission are de facto untouchable.
Your ethics can still be great, but don't make me feel like your product won't be. If you have to market "Europe" or privacy it probably won't be.
You’re generalizing, DACH != the entire EU.
Especially with 'Social' there are network externalizations like 'critical mass' - that actually compounds across a lot of things.
No European country given size and language is going to be able to create something that resonates as well as the American variation beyond the critical mass needed, at least naturally.
If 'French Facebook' started at one of the 'Grande Ecoles' it would have grown much more slowly, and maybe never moved out of being French centric and therefore not gone beyond borders.
Without the 'momentum' that doesn't attract investors, doesn't make employees want to work 'late nights for the big IPO payoff' etc..
And there are so many other related conventions, such as capitol markets, public markets, so many issues.
So - in order to overcome those limitations there may have to be a lot of strategic thinking and manoeuvring.
Given that Europe took 4 years to adjust to a nation literally invading it ... well ... I wouldn't hold my breath.
There are some winning opportunities: government procurement is powerful but Euros are afraid to negotiate hard with MS Goog etc..
There's a lot of money involved, forcing issues on privacy is entirely possible.
Same for local content, some degree of decentralization.
Requiring government actors to use 'Euro Mastadon' or whatever - it means school, students, parents come abard and then you have 'critical mass'.
Requiring 'open doc format' means you can break the MS Office monopoly.
Requiring 'Linux First' on every IT procurement decision - or even 'Open Soruce First' so local city council must give an excuse for why they are not using 'Approved Euro-Linux Variations' etc..
Lots of things.
I’m thinking about Tik Tok. When it was Chinese, my feed was stuff I actually wanted to watch. A lot of it was Chinese propaganda, but it was stuff that was pleasant, like people cooking in Chinese villages. Now it’s just rage bait and engagement farming.
But on the whole I think you're dreaming, Ray. I can't imagine a single case of a successful luxury software product. (Apple is premium mediocre at best, doesn't count.)
Europe should do the one thing it knows how to do: regulate. For once, it is the answer. Do it only there. The rest of the dominos will fall.
Making a european branded humanity poisoner is not the answer.
Specifically, regulating against silent signals like watch time and comment count. Upvotes/likes can serve a purpose and would not cause the situation we're in now.
We need to get specific about the real issue.
You would now that if you ever went to a proper school. Those unfortunately are not widely available on your side of the pond.
But your link also is only relevant to the university system.
It doesn’t change the fact that the non university part of education is severely financially crippled in major areas of the country in order to hinder black people from getting proper education.
Combined with a burnout introducing system of standardized tests the us educational system is truly world leading. At demonstrating how NOT to do education.
I'm pretty sure most of these are just politics being played.
Telling big companies to be transparent about their suggestion algorithms would not be hard. I think governments already do this? wasn't that a tiktok thing in the US? Anyway, it's well within government's reach.
Telling companies to only use signals that people consciously give seems like a no-brainer.
Well, I mean, if you believe that a goal of civilization is to respect the free will of individuals up until the point that that free will becomes a problem for other people.
The alternative is something less than respectful of human dignity.
But my skepticism may be unfounded. Do you have examples of companies that are currently working with regulators to allow full auditing of their content promotion policies? Are they actually auditing these partnerships or are they simply accepting promises from the companies?
Penalizing the successful is also inherently rewarding the unsuccessful. You can’t do one without the other.
We need less Social Media, not an inferior clone of TikTok or Instagram. Gaia-X would have been a nifty project, if it weren't a committee designing a framework for designing committee design frameworks by committee. We seem to make this mistake way too often. Don't plan to build Neuschwanstein—start to build a humble wooden cabin, and expand from there.
The early days of Facebook, where I actually saw friends and family posting their thoughts, that was great! It wasn't dominated by people resharing political screeds or random videos from groups I've never even heard of.
A 'wish list' is not hugely important to the operational capability of 'doing the thing'.
It's definitely a 'nice to have' and a 'starting point' from a certain angle, but it's a nominal thing really.
Thinking about critical masses, requiring established social networks to have open APIs and local content etc., definitely some regulations around local hosting and even use aka 'gov entities must use European based entities' for certain things, which helps build critical mass.
Etc.
Also - as someone commented 'doing the things' is often 75% of the reality of this, strategic considerations make up the smaller part even if they are critical.
When you start writing something, pick something more believable. It just invalidates anything you write thereafter.
Europe is adopting open source and open protocols, not to promote individual sovereignty, but explicitly to protect European sovereignty from foreign influence. This is not what these technologies were built for; "promoting democracy" does not protect the rights of individuals.
The technology listed is mostly federated, not radically open (like, for example, nostr). In particular, ATProto has provided the EU with the perfect opportunity to signal openness while simultaneously standing up a new walled garden in which dystopian "moderation policies" will be the norm.
good, what's wrong with that? Europe isn't a continent for Ayn Rand reading crypto bros obsessed with their individual sovereignty, collective responsibility has always been the basis of our social contract.
We're not a continent for internet libertarians, if that's what you're going for you might want move to some Peter Thiel VC funded micro-nation somewhere, we don't want nostr or 'radically open' we want social technologies that facilitate democracy, human dignity and being able to defend ourselves from nations that don't care about any of it. In the German constitution we have a concept for this Wehrhafte Demokratie, 'militant democracy', building democratic tools that are able of defeating its enemies, not individual escapism.
Having a competitor here to bumble or hinge that is free and doesn’t care about short term monetisation would be a good thing.
Pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share, these all do fine. Even lonely hearts columns in newspapers probably still work, as physical newspapers still get sold here in Europe.
Except back then we had stuff like religion, church, village, common communities etc to bind people.
>even managed it in cities where we live in isolating apartments and only know our neighbours by the music leaking through the walls.
Statistics show urbanites to be lonelier than ever, so that take disagrees with you.
>Pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share, these all do fine.
Massively depends on what the social life is like in the city you live in and what age you age. Some cities are better than others and the older you get the worse it is. While dating apps are more of a sure thing because most people are there to date. Meanwhile you can waste time and money in pubs and clubs for years and never meet a partner.
It's similar to job searching, if you're unemployed and need a job, you go straight to linkedin and apply, you don't go to clubs and pubs hoping you meet a founder who has a job for you. The latter might work every now and then if you're sociable and lucky and live in the right place, but it's not a sure thing for everyone all the time. That's why dating apps will never go away just like linkedin will never go away.
And in cities, more pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share.
Most of us didn't go from Renaissance village churches to dating apps in one lifetime, let alone one day.
> Statistics show urbanites to be lonelier than ever, so that take disagrees with you.
Most surveys only started about 10 years ago, i.e. after social media and dating apps were already around, and the few longer surveys disagree with each other, but even they only go back to the 80s AFAICT; we've been living in big dense isolating cities for a lot longer than that.
> Massively depends on what the social life is like in the city you live in and what age you age.
So the focus should be on that, then. As in, not a dating app.
> While dating apps are more of a sure thing because most people are there to date.
Everyone I've heard talking about dating apps since Match Group cornered the market, says the only "sure thing" about them is how mediocre they are, at least for straight couples. Women get all the low-effort displays, men get no responses and spiral into low-effort displays.
All these companies are just a new way of money laundering with a proud word sovereignty
I guess the Swiss, British, Norwegians, Albanians etc etc are not welcome to participate in this project.
EDIT: In any case this whole thing is stupid. Open source and privacy matters, not country of origin.
I mean, for a while, I thought something like Substack (and not Fediverse) could disturb things a little, but I suppose it and many others have already been killed by slop. So, if you do verified identity management, which is good for certain purposes but perhaps not for others, I suppose you should also do decentralized trust management, and with an ability to delete nodes from a personal but federated trust chain. (And feel free to adopt the idea also for science; it would be very much needed.)
> want to host infra outside the US
> write a blog post
Ah yes, there it is. We‘ve learned how to translate this in our heads.
> Europe is in a hybrid conflict on two fronts; our elections and political life are under direct attack from foreign agents who use social media to manipulate public opinion and centre the political agenda to undermine us. We are deploying systems that have editorial pluralism and FIMI monitoring built in to shield our polity from influence and make our democracy resilient under attack.
I just wish there'd be more of a acknowledgement about the very real democratic deficit in the EU, where multiple elections are overloaded and affect different widely disparate affairs, leading to much of the EU largely able to operate completely without fear of repercussions from its citizenship. Strengthening democracy must start at an institutional level.
As of right now, there is just no real way for a European citizen to hold anyone accountable for something like Chat Control. Parliament, where you get a say, is mostly already opposed to it. The council and comission are de facto untouchable.