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Comment by npsimons | Hacker News Reader

As to the "no comments section" policies, I'm gonna be honest: I don't blame them one bit. No one owes anyone a platform, and considering how easy and cheap it is to host your own content, why should anyone be forced to broadcast someone else's opinion?

The truth of the matter is there are more trolls these days - see especially "The Card Says Moops" (https://youtu.be/xMabpBvtXr4) as to one reason why. If you say "get your own website and post there" it raises the bar just enough that trolls won't do it. I think this is a good thing.

Note that I am firmly in favor of Net Neutrality and carriers (eg ISPs, registrars, etc) banned from having tiers or otherwise hampering access. What I oppose is people crying censorship when big name sites kick out the despicables. As I pointed out above, anyone can get a website and domain name.

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> As I pointed out above, anyone can get a website and domain name.

I wish this were true, but I don't think it is anymore.

If you post or host anything remotely controversial, expect to have your site DoS'd off the internet. How can that be avoided? Well, mostly through the help of one of the big boys (Cloudflare, Google Project Shield, etc). What happens if they decide you're a despicable, e.g. Stormfront? You're pretty much SOL.

Sure, there are plenty of other mitigation services, but they generally get pricey - not only pricey, but asymmetrically pricey. When your detractors know that they can burn through your war chest by expending a fraction of what you lose, that's clearly an unsustainable position.

The same is true for DNS. When every registrar can be pressured into denying you service, you don't have a lot of recourse.

That's not to mention the well-worn argument that, in a hypothetical era where the vast majority of traffic is via one of the big name sites, going off on your own is basically analogous to having your soapbox relocated from Hyde Park to the industrial wastelands. Are you still technically able to speak publicly? Sure, but the original intent of protections on speech is nowhere to be found.

I don't have an answer to the subsequent question of what to do about it, beyond supporting decentralized technologies. That's a tough one. What I do know is that the idea that anyone is able to provide their own platform if deemed undesirable may be comforting, but doesn't really hold up.

With the way corporate control of the internet is further consolidated every single day, I fully expect (and hope for) a parallel mesh internet to be established, completely open source based, no corporate or business interests involved.

As the DRM and content filtering noose tightens, it becomes more and more annoying to be a freely moving and freely acting person online. Encrypted channels on the current internet are only a stopgap measure, far too many people have their traffic sniffed by proxy servers and the like, if not outright spyware on their devices or in their routers.

I envision a global mesh network, built on open standards, fully encrypted, resilient against DDOSing and similar attacks, with no central control, no central points of failure, an uninhibited flow of information, for the people, by the people. Warts and all.

The thread wasn't banned off of reddit though, just his site and subreddit. So no such issues here.

Otherwise I agree with worrying about the big platforms, though for I dont think stormfront would be the case to be upset about. We need net neutrality, then user controlled social media based on open source and probably federated. At that point users can decide what to let onto their feed.

Scott isn't blaming them for shutting down comments either, in fact Scott is also shutting down comments. Scott is blaming them for not being truthful about the reason they shut down comments.

>> anyone can get a website and domain name.

Except they can't. The outrage brigades come after the registrars and the hosting services and the payment processors and anyone else they can coerce into compliance. A few platforms have survived this process (...so far...) and are thriving, but joe schmoe will get disappeared in no time at all.

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