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Comment by jurassic | Hacker News Reader

To me, this just shows why it's important to build communication channels that you own (e.g. podcast, mailing list, etc) if you want to have unimpeded access to your audience. Today it's a censorship thing, tomorrow it'll be somebody deciding to erect a toll booth between you and your followers. Social platforms should just be the cherry on top of your foundational communications strategy.

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Totally. The issue is that my customers use Facebook and Instagram to share their portfolios. While my business isn't built on Facebook, my customers use it, and when they can't, it comes back on me even if it isn't my fault.

I guess you could say I could police my content better, but with the moving target about what's not allowed, that's an expensive proposition.

How can you own any online communication channel? Your domain registrar could decide your domain is abusive and terminate it. Your hosting platform could decide it doesn’t like the politics of your site / business / whatever and refuse to host it. Your advertising provider could decide it doesn’t like your ad content and refuse to serve it. Your billboard vendor could decide to cave to local government if there are complaints about your billboard. The local police could push you out of a public space where you try to hand out flyers. Your landlord could not allow you to renew your lease because they privately don’t like your politics and just invent any outwardly permissible fake reason for it.

We live in a world where you’re not allowed to exist unless you (publicly profess to) believe what one of two prevailing political parties dictates is allowable, yet at the same time we pretend like you do have free speech but just have to live with social consequences of it.

An unfortunate consequence of the private-only internet. If you want to send out newsletters about how right-handed people are scum and the cause of all earth's problems the postal service isn't allowed to stop you. If you want to have conference calls about how much you and your friends hate right-handed people the phone company has to let you. It's part of the social and legal contract that neutral carriers are not responsible for user-generated content. The internet doesn't have that. Because YouTube has the legal ability to censor your "Righties are Wrongies" videos the public demands that they do so, and as non-neutral private companies they will do whatever makes them the most profit.

You don't need full vertical integration of the communication channel. You just need enough diversification between the domain registrars, hosting platforms, ad providers etc. so that you are not at the mercy of a single entity to reach your audience. It's always been a terrible idea to rely on a single company for all your needs.

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