[hooande]

I thought that regulation was based on the idea that it's difficult to start new, competing social networks. But the market seems to be taking care of that. Why regulate twitter if any miscellanous billionaire can start a competitive service?

Regulation means that companies have to follow arbitrary rules, including rules that you may not like. Wait until every social site is legally required to ban you if you violate a given rule.

The social networking space seems to be working itself out It's just a slow process.

[ghusto]

> I thought that regulation was based on the idea that it's difficult to start new, competing social networks.

Tried it? Difficult is an understatement. As you point out though, "miscellaneous billionaire(s)" can try. That's hardly the same thing as the first days when Twitter started.

> Regulation means that companies have to follow arbitrary rules, including rules that you may not like.

I'm going to presume your use of the word arbitrary there is a result of a lack of faith in government. As little faith as _I_ have in government though, I wouldn't call regulations arbitrary. Anyway ...

> Wait until every social site is legally required to ban you if you violate a given rule.

Fine with me. There are plenty of laws I don't agree with, but follow because the rule of law is more important than getting laws right (aligned to my opinion). This is not least because we can do something about those laws we disagree with in a civil way.

I'm fairly certain I'd get punished on these sites if the current social justice trends became law. That works well, because then we'd be able to go through an established public process to change them — rather than a private company deciding their own laws, with no recourse.

[_Algernon_]

Regulation as a utility could focus on data ex-changeability. Ie. the "utility" is a certain standard all social media need to support which allows users to interact with people on other platforms, and move their data and identity between them. This would reduce network effects by a lot, thereby increasing competition.

[doublespanner]

It seems like the group of people who can start a competitive service is small enough, and homogeneous enough, that we risk a case where we can choose between the site where you can use the word "cis" and the site where you can use the word "retard", but can not find a platform where tracking the political activity of billionaires is OK.

[tenpies]

> if any miscellanous billionaire can start a competitive service?

Can they really?

At least on Zuckerberg's side Threads' competitiveness would have been impossible without piggy backing on the back of Instagram. He was willing to possibly cannibalise an existing product in the Meta portfolio, to hopefully take away share from a competitor's product. I'm not sure how well that strategy works, and there will surely be organic growth, but will be talking about Threads in 2 years or will it be a Google Circles?

I'm also sure they factored this in at Meta. Perhaps they determined that one Threads user will be more valuable than one IG user, so even if it were a 1:1 cannibalisation, it would be worth it. I'm really curious what the Threads roadmap looks like, because if they are truly going after Twitter, Musk has been fairly clear that Twitter is to be an everything app, a la WeChat.