Facebook/Google/etc displace previous iterations of the same services at a much larger scale. Their techno-optimist hope is that the scale can be managed by eve

Facebook/Google/etc displace previous iterations of the same services at a much larger scale. Their techno-optimist hope is that the scale can be managed by ever smarter algorithms. In practice, it turns out that in-person iterated human interactions have important moderation properties and can't be scaled out without losing something essential. The decentralization impulse is yet another misguided techno-optimist hope of returning to smaller communities and thus somehow restoring the moderation effects of such settings. Which won't work, as the world of organic communities tied by kin relations (aka 'village') is completely different than the world of ever diverging echo chambers the Internet produces. The Global Village is intrinsically dysfunctional. Facebook/Google cannot possibly perform healthy moderation at global scale, but fixing that can't be done short of banning the TCP/IP protocol.