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Comment by minimuffins | Hacker News Reader

> It doesn’t make me feel any specific way.

I think it should!

It's disconcerting to see the expansion of platform censorship even if the censored party is aware of it, "doesn't care," and was in on the deal. That "it's just business" doesn't make it a neutral development. Spotify gets to decide what ideologies are acceptable for Spotify listeners. This is just one point on the graph. The overall picture is more and more of this stuff, with little or no resistance.

You like that? You feel nothing either way? There is a moral and political valence to this stuff.

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I think a lot of folks, myself included, see what you are pointing at and think, "That's not novel. That's the way media works, and has worked, for generations."

What makes Spotify different from, for example, radio stations deciding which music I should listen to in the 50s? Or TV stations deciding which shows I should see in the 80s?

Media companies have always cared and deliberately curated the ideologies they present -- whether that's a political ideology or a marketing one. (I know that a whole lot of the TV shows of my childhood were aimed at selling me toys, for instance.)

I think the division line is you see this as ideological, but to the rest of us it's all just business. Publishers will always be free to choose what they place on offer. On my bookshelf I have a copy of the old Linux Device Drivers book from O'Reilly. The book is no longer being published by them. Could it use an update? Yes, severely, the 3rd edition is over a decade old. Why hasn't it gotten one, is it censorship? No, they don't see a return on investment in it.

Spotify only cares about the episodes because of concern about injuring their brand via giving offense, which is as close to an ideology as any large corporation gets, to the point where folks (such as you, in this case) get offended by their clumsy attempts to avoid offense.

Rogan doesn't care because it's always been about money. He doubtless took a haircut on his audience by moving to Spotify, all in order to get money up front for less effort on his part.

I don’t use Spotify and frankly >= 80% of the content on Spotify is for morons. In any case I do respect your commitment to freedom of speech and liberalism.

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