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Comment by foolfoolz | Hacker News Reader

This doesnt make sense to me. Core internet community experiences to me have always been about smaller sites, message boards, mailing lists, chatrooms, voice chat groups, etc.

Seeing large corporation websites like tumblr, reddit, facebook crack down on content doesn't stop any of that. it just means you need to get out of your internet bubble.

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The problem is that platforms and web hosting services are engaging in censorship too.

The article gives Cloudflare as example. Hosting porn content, even if it is art, can get very expensive because most services have an explicit no porn policy.

Also without Google Search and without presence on a big social network, you’re essentially invisible.

The situation for mobile apps is even worse, as Apple doesn’t allow porn content in its App Store and Google started banning such content as well.

Also the article mentions the by-law censorship of articles in which sex workers are interviewed due to FOSTA-SESTA.

So the smaller websites you’re talking about are being pushed off the web ;-)

I think you bring up some very good points and frankly, it's quite depressing. A decade or two from now the internet will be exactly like cable TV.

It's always like that. TV and radio were quirky in the early days too, but as soon as you go mass market it changes. It's not the medium, it's the people on it. Time to keep moving and get away from the mainstream.

Is it really "people on it", or is it just the ad-based business model? Sure, mass market means lowest common denominator, but people generally don't mind weirdness as long as it doesn't force itself on them. I feel most cases of censorship or self-censorship of weirdness on the media has always something to do with some advertiser not wanting their ads associated with weirdness.

TV was heavily regulated. So it is not just market, but also politics and governing.

problem always is that moving away from the mainstream is non trivial and only for people with oodles of money. for eg if i want to use ipfs i should have 1.a computer capable of handling these connections 2.an internet connection capable of handling the connections with no caps forcing me offline

we need solutions that allow any weirdo to easily get online and say what they want to say

One would say HN is pretty mainstream nowadays. Any suggestions for alternative communities? I feel like there is an extreme lack of what HN used to be. How do I get away from the people on it?

jwz predicted it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y&t=53m36s

Cloudflare is by far not the best example I think. They proxy thepiratebay.org after all.

There are some portals listed on this similar recent hn thread, in which I added to a similar comment, ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19040384 ) - basically that for many people the internet is google, and for many, especially in other countries from what I have read, 'the internet' is facebook.

It appears many people do not know how to use urls or ask people about other portals.

If facebook censors it, they may never know it every existed on the internet. For others if Google doesn't show it on the first page of results - it does not exist.

I should of seen this coming years ago I noticed when I would tell people to go to whatever-site-url.com - they would open a browser and put that into the search box.

Heck people put google.com into the box and search for it rather then enter a url and hit ctrl-enter.

Now many phones and tablets are also defaulting search boxes, browsers, and voice searches to be using these censoring services - not showing ways to escape these bubbles, solidifying the walls of the garden.

> Heck people put google.com into the box and search for it rather then enter a url and hit ctrl-enter.

Not even that. They google directly from the address bar. Once you could google without going to google.com, anecdotally I started to notice most people would google everything, including URLs they obviously knew

remembering urls is not a trivial task. it's the reason why we have bookmarks and history functions in browsers. a good search engine like google abstracts that away. i couldn't remember the name stack overflow for quite some time(i always associated stack with hay in my mind)

just typing in "hay code questions" would get me to stackoverflow in google. not so in bing/yahoo search(at the time)

Indeed there are likely many good reasons for making the url bar become a search bar under certain circumstances (I would bet the money google pays mozilla for these kinds defaults was actually touted as 'make things better for the users' )

and it certainly can make things better in some ways, and likely for a majority of people.

I for one however was appalled the first time I found not typing my url properly sent that data to google to find a suitable alternative.

(also disturbed when I see cell phone carrier give me a "you may be looking this-and-that list of links when a 404 or similar is detected - helpful maybe, doing it for the monetization? probably. Stealing privacy at the same time? Maybe.

Providing a curated version of available resources? Yes. That is often censoring more and more these days. Google does not provide the internet options to end users that it did 7 years ago.

I have seen people go to the url bar type "google" and hit enter - which on many browsers default searches google for google.

Whatever the reasoning for these issues, the result seems to be that most people think they need to use google to get to parts of the internet and don't know any other way.

Once jerks started domain name spamming this became recommended behavior unless I’m 100% certain of my url.

Yeah but many of the small communities get smaller and smaller until they die away.

For example in the pre-Facebook time there used to be a great amount of online chats to get to know people or just for chit-chatting. Then Facebook came, of course everybody was excited and many of the small websites closed down. Those that are left are usually packed with weirdos and fakes, it's a real pity. Although it was all pseudonymous I think back in the days there were less fakes than on Facebook. Not to talk about IRC or Newsgroups, which have become more niche then ever.

Well or HN... There used to be high quality content elsewhere, for instance Dr Dobbs was really nice. Now all that stuff is extremely centralized.

I don't really see this trend reversing at the moment. Despite people talking about decentralization since 3 years or so.

Probably it's Google's fault ;)

I was about to write an whole comment about how Violet Blue's perspective wasn't matched with reality. But you hit the main point dead on.

I feel that her perspective is not very sympathetic to the average couple nor is it relatable with the average corporation. It hasn't been in the past and it isn't now. The closest that she can get to what she's asking for is Fetlife.

there is no such thing as the "average couple" when it comes to bedroom stuff. not even in the US.

of course the new direction is worrying, but in the end porn always wins, it has won in the past after all. james joyce, larry flint, this list goes on...

Porn does not reflect the actual behaviors of people. Porn is bascially the candy of sex. Taboo-ness, and fantasy is a big part of what that caters.

When I say average I mean the biggest general cluster of sexual behavior.

One bubble you will find very hard to get out of is the search bubble, defined by the big 2-3 search engines, predominantly Google. And that bubble pretty much defines the Internet itself for most people.

I partly agree, but another half of it is people with interesting stuff yet very poor technical skills.

Some people just like to create stuff all day and have a ton to show, but only ever learned enough computer skills to do their hobby and go to forums.

For these kind of people, creating a new place in one click is a boon, and getting moderation and management tools out of box is also an incentive to keep it going.

Sure these people can start learning how to build places and use hosting services, but that’s a non teivial barrier to entry, and we must be losing so much in the deal.

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