These platforms are becoming the de facto public square, and there is not necessarily room for a bunch of competing platforms to function collectively as a publ

These platforms are becoming the de facto public square, and there is not necessarily room for a bunch of competing platforms to function collectively as a public square; one will tend to dominate for each form of content, it appears. These platforms are supposed to do two things: - blog/media hosting, both storage and web distribution - Handling regulatory and coding requirements for accepting payments, via a trustworthy single payee... so that subscribers aren't having to provide credit card numbers to every random content creator out there These platforms are violating expectations by going beyond solving those problems and trying to be a nanny. We don't need nannies on the internet. They aren't even doing a good job of being a neutral nanny. On patreon, there is a ton of objectionable content depending on your point of view and morality. (On youtube, there is a ton of garbage content, though not much adult/erotic material because it's mostly banned.) If either platform cared about the perception of their platforms being a place for content appropriate for a formal dinner party, they wouldn't operate as they do now. In the case of Patreon, if someone doesn't like a patreon creator's content, they don't have to subscribe to it. Patreon content is discoverable, but it's not self-promoted by Patreon, so people aren't generally going to see much that they find objectionable. For platforms like youtube, which use subscriptions/histories to recommend other videos unsolicited, there needs to be a better tagging system so visitors can blacklist tags that will trigger them. Other than that, these platforms are not, and should not pretend to be, in the nanny business. And everyone needs to have a thick enough skin that they can encounter a summary, title, or first few seconds of a video they find offensive and simply laugh it off as internet idiots being idiots, and navigate elsewhere rather than pretending they have moral justification to complain to platforms about content that is neither violence-promoting nor defamatory.