[munk-a]

If the oversight you provide as part of your service is unreasonably expensive then you probably shouldn't be in business - if you can't sanely moderate your platform then you also shouldn't be in business. I can rationally accept that argument as quite logical but I can also accept the fact that news papers ran classified ads for years and years without assisting terrorists by giving them a platform to coordinate attacks in plain text on - facebook comes along and suddenly the bar for obfuscated text is "r u rdy 4 the b0mb?"

Companies that are providing such an amazingly affordable service because they're just skipping out on doing moderation don't get to use "Well, doing it the right way would be too expensive" as a defense - that's how you end up with Uber. Uber broke laws, Uber shouldn't exist at this point, something like Uber should exist, but Travis Kalanick should have been fined into near non-existence and not currently be sitting happy on 2.8 billion. We, as a society, need to have standards.

[gruez]

>If the oversight you provide as part of your service is unreasonably expensive then you probably shouldn't be in business - if you can't sanely moderate your platform then you also shouldn't be in business.

So you'd rather have the status quo of a few decades ago (ie. large media organizations acting as gatekeepers), rather than the democratized ecosystem we have now?

[munk-a]

I mean, both have their glaring issues... but I think our modern system is worse. Independent news outlets didn't get a large readership but they did exist and people did express non-mainstream views in them - and while the main companies were definitely status quo aligned they attracted (and focused on attracting) actual journalists that occasionally broke stories that gave the editors headaches. In the absence of them being required to be the source of news (and due to competition from blogs running on a completely non-existent budget) they've focused more and more on advertiser revenue acquisition which really just only cares about the number of clicks you're getting.

I'd prefer neither system, and I don't think it's a binary choice - but if forced to choose between the two I'd probably go with the monolithic status-quo machine (even though I'm extremely progressive and they hated us).