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Then someone posts that the real issue is the lack of robust anti-trust legislation leading to the absence of a free market for online media platforms; in a tru
by MontyCarloHall 6y ago
Then someone posts that the real issue is the lack of robust anti-trust legislation leading to the absence of a free market for online media platforms; in a truly free market someone should be able to start their own competing platform whose defining characteristic is absolute free speech (or not), and people can choose to join it (or not) depending on their personal preference.
Then someone else responds that network effects in social media make a truly free market impossible even with strong anti-trust legislation, and we’re back to square one.
- ghayes 6y agoDoesn’t this exist with Parler, Voat and maybe Mastodon? With Voat, at least, the lack of moderation caused the site to become a cesspool and quickly abandoned. I would argue the network effect is only one reason that unmoderated social networks have not reached mainstream.
- MontyCarloHall 6y agoI think network effects are much less pronounced with microblog platforms like Twitter, Parler, and Mastodon — most people sign up for these platforms to follow a few big accounts with orders of magnitude more followers than the average account. There’s no detriment to flipping between a Twitter and Mastondon/Parler account depending on which big accounts you want to read. Contrariwise, people sign up for Facebook to socialize with their friend group as a whole. An alternative platform with only a handful of your friends would be pretty useless. Worse, having your friend group split between platforms would completely prevent being able to socialize as a group, defeating the whole point of the platform.