[SilverRed]

>And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own.

And no one will read it unless you can post links on facebook, twitter and reddit. In the end, almost all communication online runs through a limited set of american megacorps who all act in the same ways, have the same rules and align to the same culture.

It's no surprise China and Russia ban American sites because those sites control the debate and culture of the places that use them.

[munk-a]

I do think there is a problem with how tightly some big corporations have locked down social media - but the 1st amendment (and equivalent laws elsewhere) don't cover the requirement that anyone actually listen to your speech.

I think if we see social media as being a necessary modern medium for speech then we're going to need to get a government sponsored something in the mix - whether that is a common required protocol for messaging or a full blown nationalized social network is an open debate we can have. The main issue is that as long as we're blindly trusting the market to fix itself - it has decided the fix is that monopolies are great when nobody is breaking up big tech companies.

[tshaddox]

> And no one will read it unless you can post links on facebook, twitter and reddit.

I suppose the question is how long that list of websites really is, and how long it needs to be before people stop calling all those websites "monopolies." Obviously it would be fairly absurd to say "no one will read your website unless you can post links on site 1, site 2, site 3, ... site 3,109,550, and therefore those 3.1 million websites are monopolies."

[lmm]

Long enough that they don't co-ordinate, essentially, which would show in how they acted. When facebook, twitter and reddit all announce the same kind of moderation changes within a few months of each other, you can tell that they're a de-facto cartel, and the specifics of how that happens (such as whether they directly communicated with each other) are kind of irrelevant.

[stevenicr]

I believe there are a LOT of people in the world that would think if your site does not come up in gooogle than it doesn't exist.

I remember reading that there are huge populations in which 'the internet' is facebook - so if fbk censors you - you do not exist.

[pessimizer]

Also, your site will not come up in google.

Google is just another social network that people are gaming (with the lazy consent of the people who run it.) Even if you make it, you can be wiped off google as easily as off twitter, no matter what your traffic.