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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

Did you read the article? It's not about competing social networks, it's about regulators.

> Pressure is mounting, at home and abroad, from legislators, regulators and activists, all looking for various ways to nudge and, in some cases, shove Facebook to acknowledge and act on its responsibility as the most powerful distributor of news and information on Earth.

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Right. I guess I should be more explicit in my prediction that the market will move faster than the governments will.

I know that people here don't like Gab, but looking at it rationally they look like the most likely challenger in that the leadership understands the coming tech stack that will route around whatever governments and private consortiums come up with, and they have the cash on hand and ideological commitment to do it.

Dear lord, they have an image problem... I quickly checked the site and all of the content they show on the front page (is this like an automated sampling of recent posts?) is atrociously sexist and frankly really low bar content intelligence-wise. (I guess you can find equally dumb stuff throughout the twitterverse, but I can't believe they're using it to market on their homepage) I'm surprised, I thought early adopters would be more thoughtful silicon valley types. Can't see anyone I know switching to it any time soon.

Yeah, I agree. They need to have an ideological filter for the popular page or, better, do something like an ideological page-rank algorithm so it can be personalized. Right now it is pretty shocking content, a result of Gab's commitment to free speech and the purging of the (alt) right on other social media platforms.

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