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Comment by iasay | Hacker News Reader

Worth pointing out that more life exists outside the corporate run stages. Part of their trick is to make you think that the only way of life is via their platforms.

I’m not and never have been a Twitter or or TikTok or Facebook member.

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I also avoid those platforms but that also means self-exclusion from entire communities. I've seen large groups (DnD groups, gaming/sports clubs, obscure tech forums etc) being swallowed wholesale by Facebook, then Reddit and now Discord. That may not matter for a random game group but unfortunately Twitter is where most of the worlds journalists post and network.

Where I live now, most sports and hobby clubs coordinate solely via Facebook.

If you don't have a FB account (like myself, currently), you are shit out of luck when it comes to finding out what's going on where/when.

Meetup.com is still working out well for me. Also everyone knows everyone so you end up with a vast contacts network after a bit.

I don’t think it’s a trick at all, it’s actually much worse than being kicked out of a public square. Making YouTube videos or Tweets or Facebook posts can be your job and facilitate your entire form of income. You spend 10 years cultivating a following and if you say or do the wrong thing, you don’t just lose the public square, you basically get fired. Yea you can try to diversify but the average person doesn’t do this, they build something somewhere specific. These platforms are tremendously important, both for speech and for peoples livelihoods. Banning people and the appeals should be much more of a delicate process than currently. Right now these moderators are akin to police departments with no court system. One day we will enact laws that force companies of certain sizes to have an appeal process, or in some way dedicate resources to accurate appeals, or maybe just force companies to keep records of the ban and give users the right to sue for mistakes, similar to workers have for with employers. We almost need an entirely new public court system to manage that process so the burden isn’t on companies or users. I don’t have the answers but at some point consumer rights will be needed to stop abuse or lethargy in moderation of important decisions.

Sure, but getting hundreds or thousands of people to join your Mastodon instance or whatever is a huge barrier when Twitter works fine /most/ of the time.

Or, you know, in real life. Which was more my point. I've done more networking face to face over the last couple of years than I ever got done using the Internet.

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