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Comment by LoveLeadAcid | Hacker News Reader

Just do what smart people have been doing for years - stop using big tech. Stop using Google, Facebook, Apple, IBM, Microsoft. Buy a used computer and install a Free OS and just check out of the entire big tech ecosystem.

Otherwise you get what you deserve. And let’s all disabuse ourselves of the incorrect notion that it’s big tech alone which is ordering censorship. It’s our own governments, who use the many secret laws and intelligence agency relationships (all of big tech is basically In-Q-Tel) to get what they want.

Make it difficult for them. Don’t play nice. Dissent. Stop using PRISM platforms.

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I use Linux, discuss political ideas on private, members-only forums, and share memes over Signal. This is an excellent setup... if you want to have conversations with your fellow computer janitors.

This is no way to connect to other people. And these people might also have interesting ideas, ideas I might want to hear before some bot at Facebooks deems them against "community standards" or whatever they call their censorship that is totally not censorship.

> This is no way to connect to other people. And these people might also have interesting ideas, ideas I might want to hear before some bot at Facebooks deems them against "community standards" or whatever they call their censorship that is totally not censorship.

Well, people connected with each other before 2007, so presumably you could be exposed to different, interesting ideas by joining local clubs, churches, or other community gatherings where you have interactions with non "computer janitors"

It's an honorable call but most people can't follow it -- like my dad. They're too entrenched.

It's not reasonable, in a connected world-system like today's, to put all the burden on individual people to instantly switch away from bad providers, no matter the level of entrenchment.

Isn't one important role of government to protect constituents from corporate encroachment? Have we given up on electing governments that work for us?

This right here is it, for the most part. I see a lot of people who lament how terrible the takeover of "big tech" is, but they still use Facebook on a regular basis and don't go out of their way to seek alternatives. It's like complaining that Kraft has taken over your local supermarket aisle while you're buying 10 boxes of name-brand mac and cheese.

Not really. There's a gradient of entrenchment. Your example doesn't work at all if we're talking about deeply-entrenched/natural-monopoly products like electricity or internet access instead of a trivially-switchable product like a brand of mac & cheese or ranch dressing.

The question is where does Facebook fall on that gradient? It's certainly not on the "product on the supermarket shelf" end. It's closer to the middle somewhere.

I gave up Facebook in 2013 and more or less lost any semblance of an ongoing connection to a dozen childhood friends from my home country. Many people aren't willing to give up that type of thing. This isn't whatsoever like swappable supermarket products.

Well, that Mac & Cheese is free cuz you're giving them your phone number so they can call you and sell you a gym membership.

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