Every company that sends me unsolicited emails is forced by law to have an unsubscribe button on those emails. I have a huge amount of control around filtering spam and blacklisting and whitelisting specific addresses.
There is no way for me to stop the US postal office from delivering me giant catalogues of advertisements multiple times a week. I regularly get mail addressed to "current resident." I ought to be able to go to the postal office and say, "If someone doesn't know my name, just don't deliver the letter." It's friendlier for the environment, it would make the experience of checking my mail more pleasant.
The reason I can't do that is because spam is a giant source of revenue for the US Postal service. Coincidentally, the US Postal service has a number of services specifically designed to make it easier for advertisers to get mail into my mailbox. There is, in my mind, no reason to believe that a nationally owned social media platform would have any different incentives than Facebook would.
Email, a federated service that doesn't really make the government any money, doesn't have those incentives. So open protocols that are unaffiliated with any single organization (government or company) work better in my experience, unless whatever service is created is isolated from making profits in traditional ways. There are some good examples of that, but I'm not completely sure the Post Office is one of them.
Completely different example. Those advertisers are a customer of the service just like you. In most social media, we're not paying to post, but advertisers are. The rules of the game might be stretched to allow benefit to advertisers, but it's not rigged like you seem to think.
There is no way for me to stop the US postal office from delivering me giant catalogues of advertisements multiple times a week. I regularly get mail addressed to "current resident." I ought to be able to go to the postal office and say, "If someone doesn't know my name, just don't deliver the letter." It's friendlier for the environment, it would make the experience of checking my mail more pleasant.
The reason I can't do that is because spam is a giant source of revenue for the US Postal service. Coincidentally, the US Postal service has a number of services specifically designed to make it easier for advertisers to get mail into my mailbox. There is, in my mind, no reason to believe that a nationally owned social media platform would have any different incentives than Facebook would.
Email, a federated service that doesn't really make the government any money, doesn't have those incentives. So open protocols that are unaffiliated with any single organization (government or company) work better in my experience, unless whatever service is created is isolated from making profits in traditional ways. There are some good examples of that, but I'm not completely sure the Post Office is one of them.