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> The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to se

> The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish. You can be as independent as you want if you don't care about getting paid. If you want to run a small web site with handwritten HTML hosted on a server in your house that gets a few hundred visitors a month, you can still do that. (I'd be willing to bet it's easier now than it was in the 90s!) If you want to have ten million customers and a staff of full-time employees, then you'll be integrating with the rest of society whether you like it or not. I'm not sure that's unreasonable in and of itself, although I do agree that the way we treat porn (and sex in general) in the US is pretty bizarre.

jlawson 4y ago
It's fine to have to 'integrate with society'. The problem is that you have to 'integrate with this very short list of megacorps, and if they don't like you you are not allowed to operate'. At any substantial scale at all, these are true: - If Cloudflare doesn't like you, you can't have a website. - If Google doesn't like you, you can't get discovered. - If Visa and Mastercard don't like you, you can't get paid. We never elected these corporations; they power they wield is illegitimate.
- admax88qqq 4y ago
  > We never elected these corporations; Sure we did. We voted with our wallets. I'm not sure why you believe it would be any different if we _had_ elected these companies with votes. In the current policital landscape in much of the western hemisphere has lots of people arguing for restrictive policies around speech or access to healthcare. At least with the megacorps there is the potential to build a competitor. If they were heavily regulated good luck getting your account reactivated when the government sanctioned monopoly decides it doesn't like you.
  - nostromo 4y ago
    Some types of regulation increase competition - for example, antitrust law.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > Sure we did. We voted with our wallets. Give an equal alternative to Google or cloudflare? If I can't get a comparable product from someone else whose views align more with my own, than I can't exactly "vote" with my wallet can I? They are essentially "running" unopposed. It's also very convenient that the voting system is "whoever can spend the most money wins" when we're dealing with corporations who have more money than entire nations. We need something a lot better than "deposit cash to cast vote" when it comes to choosing who controls what we're allowed to see and hear.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Trump was kicked off of Twitter and Facebook. Does he have any trouble getting his message out? No one stops people from going to Trump rallies. There are plenty of ways to get your message out if people want to hear it. It’s work. But it can be done.
      - jlawson 4y ago
        Yes, he has trouble getting his message out. Obviously - that was the whole point. Rallies? Trump had like a hundred million Twitter followers. The total number of people who even can go to a rally is like 30,000 at extreme scale. Even if he had a massive rally daily (impossible) with no repeat visitors (absurd) in a year he still wouldn't get to 1/10 of the people he could reach via Twitter. And he'd be able to reach them each once. Plus he'd never get any casuals or outsiders like me - people who go to rallies are already committed. Rallies are not a substitute for the entire edifice of modern social media. A hundred million twitter followers isn't worthless or meaningless. If someone you liked was ever silenced like that, you'd be up in arms and rightly so.
        scarface74 4y ago
- majormajor 4y ago
  Unless you have enough money to build your own CDN infrastructure instead of using cloudfare and do your own advertising. Sure, that's $$$$$, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea that operating "at substantial scale" is any sort of entitlement. Or that "investing to build the systems and services that tens of millions of people have chosen to use" is "illegitimate." You think "legitimate", political-backed power is would be better? Of the "Shut the internet down when people are protesting something the government does?" variety? There's negative vs positive spin you could put on this, you know. Things like Twitter let people be heard to a much larger extent than they would've been in the past. Good or bad, it definitely has consequences, and one of them is that some powerful people listen to people who would normally be outside their circle. Getting paid is more interesting, this is probably easier than it was in the past - there were always pretty limited options, but crypto is a new interesting one.
  - banannaise 4y ago
    > You think "legitimate", political-backed power is would be better? No, but that's not an argument against the thing you're arguing against. It's a false dichotomy. "Three or four unelected rich white dudes should not have this power" does not mean three or four elected rich white dudes should either.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > If Cloudflare doesn't like you, you can't have a website. There are a number of other CDN vendors. Akamai, AWS, GCP, Azure come to mind. Besides, Cloudflare doesn't have any problem with porn anyway, the only thing they do not want is CSAM or explicitly illegal stuff such as material violating copyright or unauthorized releases ("revenge porn").
IntFee588 4y ago
Perhaps this is true, but this is all the more reason why giving social media sites the right to police free speech/expression is too much. Public discourse today happens online. The "uhhhh, this is a private venue, they don't owe you a soapbox" rhetoric rings increasingly hollow when we just went through a multiyear period when society collectively forced millions of people to work or go to school over the internet, often through big tech platforms. Telling people who don't like the current state of the mainstream web to find their own platform is like telling people who are unhappy with food prices to simply farm their own crops; it's not technically impossible, but there's more likely to be civil unrest before people start sowing seeds. It is also very telling that when independent discussion platforms do start to reach critical mass (4chan, voat, wherever else) there is often collusion or pressure to take down their hosting or stop payment processors from working with them.
- MartinCron 4y ago
  The "uhhhh, this is a private venue, they don't owe you a soapbox" rhetoric rings increasingly hollow when we just went through a multiyear period when society collectively forced millions of people to work or go to school over the internet, often through big tech platforms. That feels like a non-sequitur. People can both use mainstream platforms for work/school and create/find their own platforms for other parts of their life.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  The issue I think is the sheer scale of the "soapbox" and level of access to it, which is unprecedented. It used to be that fringe opinions were expressed on street corners on literal soapboxes and never got much further unless they had a certain level of credence. Now with the likes of Twitter and Facebook, these individuals have a global stage to broadcast to where they'll find a massive audience regardless of how bizzare and unfounded they may be, thanks to the legitimizing effect of the "communities" around these ideas. In the hands of someone charismatic this can be dangerously destablizing to society, because it's the perfect recipe for cultivating a following that believes almost anything imaginable, including ideas which directly conflict with demonstrable reality. I don't agree with some of the things the internet has collectively decided to clamp down on but I do think it makes sense to not give just anybody the grand stage and spotlight.
lmm 4y ago
> You can be as independent as you want if you don't care about getting paid. If you want to run a small web site with handwritten HTML hosted on a server in your house that gets a few hundred visitors a month, you can still do that. I used to agree with you, but watching Kiwi Farms get cut off from the internet has been pretty sobering.
- armchairhacker 4y ago
  It's not big news anymore but Kiwi Farms is back online > On September 6, 2022, The Daily Dot confirmed that VanwaTech was providing content delivery network services to the site, hence bringing it back online.[60][61] Other websites running on VanwaTech infrastructure experienced availability problems as a result, including The Daily Stormer and 8chan.[62] Also keep in mind that Kiwi Farms was only blocked because of the massive backlash Cloudflare received. If your site only gets a few hundred visitors a month, you're not going to get this backlash. (Not to mention, porn is considered much more acceptable than doxxing and targeted threats, relatively speaking)
  - lmm 4y ago
    They got taken down again a few days after that, although they've occasionally been back up since. I don't think of them as a big site, although I could be wrong.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    The owner had their domain name, CDN/ddos protection, post box, personal phone number, legal aid, and likely other services canceled. All within a week. They now are struggling against a constant stream of DDoS and targeted hacks due to a lack of protection previously provided by CloudFlare.
- AdamH12113 4y ago
  A site for organizing harassment campaigns to drive innocent people to suicide is an obvious exception, no? If you go around making trouble, you shouldn’t be surprised when trouble finds you.
grishka 4y ago
You can sell whatever the heck you want for cash IRL regardless of how legal it is. But you have to interact with the banking system somehow regardless of whichever payment option you choose for your website. And that system wants to police what you sell. That's the problem.

jlawson 4y ago

It's fine to have to 'integrate with society'. The problem is that you have to 'integrate with this very short list of megacorps, and if they don't like you you are not allowed to operate'. At any substantial scale at all, these are true: - If Cloudflare doesn't like you, you can't have a website. - If Google doesn't like you, you can't get discovered. - If Visa and Mastercard don't like you, you can't get paid. We never elected these corporations; they power they wield is illegitimate.

admax88qqq 4y ago
> We never elected these corporations; Sure we did. We voted with our wallets. I'm not sure why you believe it would be any different if we _had_ elected these companies with votes. In the current policital landscape in much of the western hemisphere has lots of people arguing for restrictive policies around speech or access to healthcare. At least with the megacorps there is the potential to build a competitor. If they were heavily regulated good luck getting your account reactivated when the government sanctioned monopoly decides it doesn't like you.
- nostromo 4y ago
  Some types of regulation increase competition - for example, antitrust law.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > Sure we did. We voted with our wallets. Give an equal alternative to Google or cloudflare? If I can't get a comparable product from someone else whose views align more with my own, than I can't exactly "vote" with my wallet can I? They are essentially "running" unopposed. It's also very convenient that the voting system is "whoever can spend the most money wins" when we're dealing with corporations who have more money than entire nations. We need something a lot better than "deposit cash to cast vote" when it comes to choosing who controls what we're allowed to see and hear.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Trump was kicked off of Twitter and Facebook. Does he have any trouble getting his message out? No one stops people from going to Trump rallies. There are plenty of ways to get your message out if people want to hear it. It’s work. But it can be done.
    - jlawson 4y ago
      Yes, he has trouble getting his message out. Obviously - that was the whole point. Rallies? Trump had like a hundred million Twitter followers. The total number of people who even can go to a rally is like 30,000 at extreme scale. Even if he had a massive rally daily (impossible) with no repeat visitors (absurd) in a year he still wouldn't get to 1/10 of the people he could reach via Twitter. And he'd be able to reach them each once. Plus he'd never get any casuals or outsiders like me - people who go to rallies are already committed. Rallies are not a substitute for the entire edifice of modern social media. A hundred million twitter followers isn't worthless or meaningless. If someone you liked was ever silenced like that, you'd be up in arms and rightly so.
      - scarface74 4y ago
majormajor 4y ago
Unless you have enough money to build your own CDN infrastructure instead of using cloudfare and do your own advertising. Sure, that's $$$$$, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea that operating "at substantial scale" is any sort of entitlement. Or that "investing to build the systems and services that tens of millions of people have chosen to use" is "illegitimate." You think "legitimate", political-backed power is would be better? Of the "Shut the internet down when people are protesting something the government does?" variety? There's negative vs positive spin you could put on this, you know. Things like Twitter let people be heard to a much larger extent than they would've been in the past. Good or bad, it definitely has consequences, and one of them is that some powerful people listen to people who would normally be outside their circle. Getting paid is more interesting, this is probably easier than it was in the past - there were always pretty limited options, but crypto is a new interesting one.
- banannaise 4y ago
  > You think "legitimate", political-backed power is would be better? No, but that's not an argument against the thing you're arguing against. It's a false dichotomy. "Three or four unelected rich white dudes should not have this power" does not mean three or four elected rich white dudes should either.
mschuster91 4y ago
> If Cloudflare doesn't like you, you can't have a website. There are a number of other CDN vendors. Akamai, AWS, GCP, Azure come to mind. Besides, Cloudflare doesn't have any problem with porn anyway, the only thing they do not want is CSAM or explicitly illegal stuff such as material violating copyright or unauthorized releases ("revenge porn").

IntFee588 4y ago

Perhaps this is true, but this is all the more reason why giving social media sites the right to police free speech/expression is too much. Public discourse today happens online. The "uhhhh, this is a private venue, they don't owe you a soapbox" rhetoric rings increasingly hollow when we just went through a multiyear period when society collectively forced millions of people to work or go to school over the internet, often through big tech platforms. Telling people who don't like the current state of the mainstream web to find their own platform is like telling people who are unhappy with food prices to simply farm their own crops; it's not technically impossible, but there's more likely to be civil unrest before people start sowing seeds. It is also very telling that when independent discussion platforms do start to reach critical mass (4chan, voat, wherever else) there is often collusion or pressure to take down their hosting or stop payment processors from working with them.

MartinCron 4y ago
The "uhhhh, this is a private venue, they don't owe you a soapbox" rhetoric rings increasingly hollow when we just went through a multiyear period when society collectively forced millions of people to work or go to school over the internet, often through big tech platforms. That feels like a non-sequitur. People can both use mainstream platforms for work/school and create/find their own platforms for other parts of their life.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
The issue I think is the sheer scale of the "soapbox" and level of access to it, which is unprecedented. It used to be that fringe opinions were expressed on street corners on literal soapboxes and never got much further unless they had a certain level of credence. Now with the likes of Twitter and Facebook, these individuals have a global stage to broadcast to where they'll find a massive audience regardless of how bizzare and unfounded they may be, thanks to the legitimizing effect of the "communities" around these ideas. In the hands of someone charismatic this can be dangerously destablizing to society, because it's the perfect recipe for cultivating a following that believes almost anything imaginable, including ideas which directly conflict with demonstrable reality. I don't agree with some of the things the internet has collectively decided to clamp down on but I do think it makes sense to not give just anybody the grand stage and spotlight.

lmm 4y ago

> You can be as independent as you want if you don't care about getting paid. If you want to run a small web site with handwritten HTML hosted on a server in your house that gets a few hundred visitors a month, you can still do that. I used to agree with you, but watching Kiwi Farms get cut off from the internet has been pretty sobering.

armchairhacker 4y ago
It's not big news anymore but Kiwi Farms is back online > On September 6, 2022, The Daily Dot confirmed that VanwaTech was providing content delivery network services to the site, hence bringing it back online.[60][61] Other websites running on VanwaTech infrastructure experienced availability problems as a result, including The Daily Stormer and 8chan.[62] Also keep in mind that Kiwi Farms was only blocked because of the massive backlash Cloudflare received. If your site only gets a few hundred visitors a month, you're not going to get this backlash. (Not to mention, porn is considered much more acceptable than doxxing and targeted threats, relatively speaking)
- lmm 4y ago
  They got taken down again a few days after that, although they've occasionally been back up since. I don't think of them as a big site, although I could be wrong.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  The owner had their domain name, CDN/ddos protection, post box, personal phone number, legal aid, and likely other services canceled. All within a week. They now are struggling against a constant stream of DDoS and targeted hacks due to a lack of protection previously provided by CloudFlare.
AdamH12113 4y ago
A site for organizing harassment campaigns to drive innocent people to suicide is an obvious exception, no? If you go around making trouble, you shouldn’t be surprised when trouble finds you.

grishka 4y ago

You can sell whatever the heck you want for cash IRL regardless of how legal it is. But you have to interact with the banking system somehow regardless of whichever payment option you choose for your website. And that system wants to police what you sell. That's the problem.