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Comment by Yhippa | Hacker News Reader

I have a vision for what could end up happening. We will see a bifurcation of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit into a conservative and liberal version. There appear to be many (apparently unsuccessful) attempts right now to do exactly that. The recent swath of bans could change that however.

It's not too dissimilar to message board culture from the aughts. You essentially had federated versions of Reddit. It looks like we're destined for that again because people can't stop peeing in the grownups pool.

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Twitter, YouTube, Facebook serve a global audience - but the “conservative”/“liberal” dichotomy you describe is unique to the USA.

If social media companies will be bifurcated as you say, it’ll be a tiny fraction of their American audiences - leaving the rest of the world sticking with the mainstream. Those smaller Ameri-centric sites will fail to reach critical-mass needed to sustain themselves in the long-term and hopefully those movements will fade into the background.

Your comparisons to the *chan imageboard splintering is apt, but look at how the more extreme chan sites have been having in finding a web-host (with enough capacity) to host them.

The bans will expand to the rest of the world soon enough. There is no way to satisfy this beast and no border that will contain it.

After Biden wins, I'd guess we'll have a couple years of laxer enforcement and that will doom the alternatives.

> Twitter, YouTube, Facebook serve a global audience - but the “conservative”/“liberal” dichotomy you describe is unique to the USA.

Not really. Many other countries also have a left-wing/right wing split in their politics. There is a lot of sharing of thought and cross-influence between right-wing politics and left-wing politics in different countries. Figures on the British right like Lord Monckton [1] or Nigel Farage [2] find many admirers in American and Australian conservatism. Conservative American journalists write puff pieces extolling the virtues of Marion Maréchal [3].

And I think you will similarly find a lot of exchange of ideas and thinkers on the political left between different countries too.

[1] https://www.heartland.org/about-us/who-we-are/lord-christoph...

[2] https://ukipwsx.org/nigel-farages-speech-at-us-heritage-foun...

[3] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/marion-marech...

those day weren't all that bad. The nazi wannabe's had their own place, and almost everyone believed in Godwin's rule.

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