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Maybe this is a pretty good test of the free-market to self-regulate. Most people wouldn't shed a tear for one hate site going down. But if someone else takes t
by Pigo 9y ago
Maybe this is a pretty good test of the free-market to self-regulate. Most people wouldn't shed a tear for one hate site going down. But if someone else takes the reigns of this company and starts following Twitter or YouTube's example, what would stop another competitor from filling that void and taking the money from jilted sites? As long as it's possible for new services to compete...
- problems 9y agoThis has sort of happened in some spaces - in certain right-wing communities Twitter has been largely replaced by Gab, Patreon by the aptly named Hatreon, etc. The issue becomes more severe when it runs up against services that are hard or expensive to start or which rely on other uncooperative services - look at what's happened with Daily Stormer and Bulletproof.ai for example - Bulletproof wants to provide them service, but they're unable to find a TLD thus far which will allow their domain to stay online.
- Pigo 9y agoThis is what I was wondering. If it's impossible to be a Cloudflare alternative because they rely on something like ISP's rely on public utilities, it feels like these barriers to entry really hurt the consumer.
- danso 9y agoThat already happened with Daily Stormer: https://www.propublica.org/article/spurned-by-major-companies-the-daily-stormer-returns-to-the-web https://www.propublica.org/article/spurned-by-major-companie... I imagine it might be easier to make some niche profit in Cloudflare's business. Not so sure with Twitter, partly because Twitter itself isn't profitable, but also because the main feature of social media services is their ubiquity and userbase. Even if Voat were decidedly a better site than Reddit, it just wasn't that interesting to revisit a sparsely populated discussion site. Especially one weighted toward folks who wanted to discuss the things that Reddit wanted to ban.