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Comment by jimmySixDOF | Hacker News Reader

You can try Pocket Casts [1] who are my favorite and only

Of course that's assuming that they don't get the same play store treatment from GOOG

It's a little too ironic that Goggle, who has countless times made the argument that they aren't responsible/liable for what their users do on a service ("honestly senator its just a platform we provide"), and then here they are the ones calling for some downstream accountability. Not that I agree at all with the logic- you may as well say that a bank is responsible(liable) for the use of any money they lend out ;} -- but its the hypocrisy that stinks to high heaven here!

[1] https://www.pocketcasts.com/

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That's not a solution. Instead, we should switch to alternative stores like F-Droid:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/

F-Droid only lists FOSS software, but Google sorely needs competition. Unfortunately, any alternative store is unlikely to succeed since the users only have incentive to use it when Google misbehaves, so all Google has to do is misbehave rarely enough to kill the alternatives off.

F-Droid is great, it has been years since I've had to use the app store.

Don't worry, Pocket Casts is a much bigger developer. They can generate the necessary online outrage to get relisted. It's the small guys that get shafted.

And this is how we end up with monopolies. "Well intentioned" policies designed for giant companies only.

Or you can just not drop an app that just became the victim of corporate censorship.

Why is this topic not coming up more often? There is heavy censorship in play here at the same levels as China and Russia.

Because many times the conversation frustratingly becomes a turtles all the way down slugfest between the loud “it’s their platform and they can do what they want” crowd vs. the equally loud “free speech is an absolute” officiated by the “censorship only matters if the government does it” crowd.

Call this an oversimplification of a nuanced issue if you want. Because it is. I’m not shying from it. Just doesn’t seem all that much different from the amount of nuance that goes into and subsequently comes out of the kinds of flame wars commonly immolating this topic anyway.

This is just opinion though, I wouldn’t encourage anyone try to unearth anything objective out of it beyond what pleasantry is warranted for such idle (and wholly inane) thought.

Maybe this is the effect of continuously putting liability on them? You should account the timeline into your thinking, it's not happening at the same time.

it's the effect of trying to avoid regulation by self-regulating. after trump got elected, one of the big media narratives was that it happened because of misinformation ("fake news"); the response has been censorship by platform owners to avoid the charge in the future and any potential federal action

Why do you think so? How do you know it's not the response to multiple attempts to put liability for content on platform owners like Google and Facebook? How do you know they did not respond strongly because most governments have declared state of crisis, which means more severe punishment, and punishment of things that would be OK otherwise (and of course nobody knows what that actually means, let alone all around the world)?

there can be more than one reason, but the censorship began in earnest after trump's election and before covid.[1] this isn't even a controversial position and i'm nowhere near the only person to have remarked upon it.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/636030043/youtube-apple-and-f...

It didn't start after Trump's election. It started with the "cancel culture" thing a couple of years before that and pressure on companies to participate in the war on crimethink.

I tend to think that it contributed to Trump's election, because it has the effect of creating massive polarization.

You can't segregate sites by viewpoint and thought filter everything in favor of one side or the other and expect it not to devolve into extremist conflict.

But the people doing this didn't want to admit that they caused the problem to begin with, so instead they double down.

The modern polarization of the media began in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich...with help from his patron Rupert Murdoch, an ultra-conservative Australian who owned television stations, tabloids, and newspapers in the US, Australia, and the UK.

Before them, politics was still very cutthroat but not polarized along party lines.

True - but something happened in the 2010's when Big Tech started taking sides in a way it hadn't before. I cannot picture Google doing this when it was still Google.

> The modern polarization of the media began in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich...with help from his patron Rupert Murdoch, an ultra-conservative Australian who owned television stations, tabloids, and newspapers in the US, Australia, and the UK.

That was certainly a thing that happened, but as far as I know Rupert Murdoch never got Gore Vidal blacklisted by book publishers or whatever.

It's one thing to say your piece, something else to stop the other guy saying theirs.

This- among side the cable news cycle effect were the genesis of today’s virus.

Have to say — Murdoch has been remarkably influential as a massive negative impact on humanity

I could say the same about disney, their ownership of certain networks and their ability to influence politica to single handledly redefine trademark laws on behalf of the US government

Talk about impact.

Truth is in the eye of the beholder

It seems very similar to McCarthyism and the anti-communist messages from the late '40s and early '50s like the "loyalty review boards", just with wider media available in the modern world. McCarthyism also adopted similar conspiracy theories concerning vaccinations, mental health care, and fluoridation.

There were sweeping purges on Twitter after the elections. The official story was that these were 'bots' or 'trolls', but lots of good accounts got permanently deleted. It happened two or three times as I recall. You'd wake up and see that your follower count had mysteriously plunged overnight indicating another crop of bannings.

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