I was born in 1974. Netscape's browser (what became Mozilla) was released my junior year of college. It was a cute alternative to gopher and ftp. Then, newspap

I was born in 1974. Netscape's browser (what became Mozilla) was released my junior year of college. It was a cute alternative to gopher and ftp. Then, newspapers were published once or twice a day. Magazines weekly or monthly. Publishers worked as editors, fact-checkers, and curators (with their various agendas, of course). The original miracle of internet free speech was the promise that anyone could become a publisher - no more gate keeping by major media companies - no more financial barrier to entry to buy presses, paper, delivery trucks. Then various platforms emerged to centralize online publishing -- Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LiveJournal, Yelp, ... and thousands more. They took the profit model of traditional publishers (paid advertising), exploited the structural advantages of digital publishing, and gave up the overhead and responsibility of curating and creating content. Now we are trying to figure out how to manage real time publishing platforms that can't (or won't?) validate identity, won't take responsibility for fact-checking, are open to targeted manipulation by adversaries, and are capable of distributing damaging lies and propaganda with little oversight or financial consequences. Speech is still "freer" now than when I was a teenager. The reach of an individual voice is massive in today's world compared to the 1980's. When I was young, my community was the people who lived within biking distance. Now it includes all of reddit, twitch, hackernews... Can we sustain these advances while managing the mob-mentality inherent in human nature? Can we protect our forums from adversarial misuse? Are open platforms that shrug off responsibility for content while collecting advertising profits compatible with democracy? Looks like we'll find out in the next few years.