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Comment by SulfurHexaFluri | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

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