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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that the first step is to stop letting the tech corps control your world. If the range of opinion on popular platforms is too restricted, make a deliberate effort to step back from popular platforms onto group chats and random blogs and web forums, the same way we used to a decade ago.

Most people who do this, in my experience, realize that it's actually pretty easy to see and talk about what you want these days. Youtube's content policies are still a problem, but they're the same kind of problem as CBS's content policies, not an existential threat to free speech.

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These tech companies make it harder and harder to avoid their lock in platforms. They crush and buy all the competitors and end up with userbases so big that if you do not participate you will be missing out.

I never wish to sign up for facebook but they have crippled the alternative buy and sell sites, obsoleted most forums and are now invading the VR space with their spyware.

At some point we need to stop blaming the user and look at what we can do to curb the size and power of these companies.

You'll only be missing out in the same sense that you're missing out if you don't go to church on Sundays or don't watch NCIS on Tuesdays. There may be commercial advantages to having accounts for your business, but there's absolutely no reason you need to personally participate in the discourse or know about the most viral tweets.

I think we've gotta step back and recognize how strange this would sound just a couple decades ago. If you talked to someone in the 70s, they'd tell you that of course mainstream media platforms are sanitized for public sensibilities; that's just what it means to be a mainstream media platform. If you want to show things that might shock and offend people, you have every right to do so, but you've gotta do it in a smaller forum. My argument is that they were right, and the past decade of nation-scale but unsanitized platforms has been an inherently unstable aberration.

This is a very sensible comment, but I think the fear some have is that these companies will eventually be the sole arbiters of what is and is not acceptable to talk about because they will control all means of communication and information dissemination.

I'd like to say face to face communication is outside of their control, but when I think about how many devices in my house have microphones and cameras in them I begin to question even that assumption.

I bring up private communication because Norway recently passed hate speech laws that threaten prison time for private remarks they deem "hate speech".

> It seems to me that the first step is to stop letting the tech corps control your world.

This sounds like the "Read the Manual" style of programming UX, vaguely applied to the entire U.S. population.

I offer the "F" from "RTFM" as evidence that this technique doesn't scale well.

> CBS's content policies

Inside Edition cannot construct a personalized chain of increasingly engaging and outrageous conspiratorial content, on the fly, that exploits Inside Edition's data about my blind spots in order to maximally capture my attention. Personalized rabbit-holes are a problem on Youtube, however. That, the size and scope of data collected, the scope of potential content (and lack of moderation of said content), and the speed with which the blackbox algorithm can prime users are all problems which don't (currently) exist with Inside Edition. So the comparison you make isn't apt.

Edit: clarification

I don't think it needs to scale well. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the idea that you should be able to easily find arbitrary content on mainstream platforms is very new; as recently as a decade or two ago, it was well-understood that if you're interested in niche ideas you've gotta seek out niche platforms that support them. We just have to resurrect that consensus.

Personalized rabbit holes are certainly a big problem, but establishing radically permissive Youtube moderation won't really do anything to fight them. It doesn't seem like a related issue.

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