[skybrian]

The funny thing is that when it comes to governing online discussions, it seems like hardly anyone wants power? We would rather that someone else handle the tough calls about spam prevention, moderation, and abuse. This then gets handled partly automatically, but mostly outsourced to large teams of workers.

We are unlikely to see a large-scale movement towards self-reliance by users, or any government in the U.S. or Europe taking this on directly. Instead they will penalize companies until they do it.

So the companies that got big are ending up with the governance job because nobody else wants it. Mostly they started with semi-libertarian philosophies until they found that social media does not work that way and someone needs to handle the filth. And a lot of companies that started out with online forums (like newspapers) decided that it's not worth it and shut down their forums, so there are fewer players.

This makes it convenient for scapegoating. We can blame the big tech companies when they get it wrong, because we don't want to do the work ourselves.

[phoe-krk]

> it seems like hardly anyone wants power

It's a little bit more complex. Everyone wants the profit, no one wants the liability. Everyone wants data they can sell to advertisers, no one wants responsibility for handling it.

[genericone]

One could think of their predicament like middle management, the big companies had some skill at delivering content which is how they got so big. So society also promoted them into the job of moderating content, a job which they were unskilled at doing. Maybe this is a case of companies, like people, rising to the level of their incompetence and staying there because of lack of ability(the appropriate tech) or will(customer/employees revolting against a policy) to move upwards.

[identity-haver]

There's a lesson about political organizing in here, which is that whoever cares the most about controlling discussions is going to end up doing it, even if it costs them money. Whether it's being a government official or NGO executive who can pressure tech companies, going on a moderation career track inside a big tech company that might not be the most remunerative, or just starting your own online community, actually acquiring said power will beat appealing to principles every time.