Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

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I think for a while BitChute [1] was like what you describe. There are probably other platforms created in response to censorship and I suspect they stay mostly uncensored until they get popular and/or try to monetize videos. Eventually they get enough pressure from their local governments, investors, financial institutions and will take the same path as YT or get taken down. To add to your thought experiment, maybe the platform would remain less censored for some time if it were started by an incredibly wealthy philanthropist and had no desire to make money from it. The ties to financial institutions make it hard to be a neutral platform as they will have their own policies for what content investors and advertisers find acceptable. The financial institutions are heavily inter-connected internationally. So maybe the answer is to keep the monetized content on YT and just accept that their content is heavily regulated. Then create a similar platform that is not tied to any financial institutions at all. Incorporate the company and put their headquarters and servers in a country that has minimal content regulations. The remaining challenges will be finding CDN's, DNS providers and ISP's that can also remain neutral.

[1] - https://www.bitchute.com/

So how do you architect a system that doesn't have a single point of failure on all axis, storage/delivery/financial?

It's funny how the early web thinking encompassed nuclear war but not the presence of authoritarian government in the East and a zealotic secular religion in the West.

That is a great question and I think some site creators have shared your thoughts on this. I don't believe there is a single simple answer. The internet is not as distributed as some think it is. IP allocation is still controlled by a small number of governments ARIN, APNIC, RIPE NCC, AFRINIC. ISP's, DNS providers, CDN's are subject to their governments regulations and political influence. Every proposed solution I have seen ends up down some rabbit holes and obscure technologies that are generally too hard for the masses to adopt.

> Every proposed solution I have seen ends up down some rabbit holes and obscure technologies that are generally too hard for the masses to adopt.

There's an implicit circle in this logic. Manually crafting IP packets is unwieldy to the masses, too, but some kind souls came along and made web browsers to make the crafting of IP packets for the purpose of browsing the web easy.

The only thing stopping us from doing the same for better "obscure technologies" is willpower.

Who says we have to listen to ARIN, APNIC, and the others?

You don't, but you need to set up parallel infrastructure then that routes things in a different way.

PeerTube is pretty close to that, given its interoperability between instances. But you could easily argue it's not free (as in beer) to run a server.

It's a very good point.

I believe the network effects are stronger than the free speech incentive for most people, after all, that is what current leading platforms bet on when deciding about censorship.

This can be in theory only resolved by the state. Advertisers will adjust, marketing is the most adjustable business there is.

It's a big point of dispute if a state should be able to censor someone, of course, but IMO state should not allow censorship within a global privately owned platform.

The state is one piece of the puzzle for sure. I have a theory that if a very wealthy philanthropist not entrepreneur were to create a new platform, we may find that it remains far less censored even if/when it gets popular. Money talks too much sometimes and if the only regulations on a platform were state/federal laws then I suspect there would be far less censorship. This may be especially true if run in a country that tries to remain politically neutral. There would still be pressure to remove content that embarrasses politicians. Short of content that explicitly breaks laws, there would be no financial incentive to remove content. Oppressive countries would still block the site, but people are adaptive and will find a way to get the news out to the world.

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