[phmqk76]

Here’s an unpopular opinion among the typical Hacker News crowd: Section 230 (inadvertently?) artificially created a market wherein a platform provider has the exclusive right to earn revenue on the content you post, and yet has zero culpability over that content. This allowed companies like Facebook to pop up and literally print billions and billions of dollars, scaling exponentially, with nearly zero overhead, wreaking havoc on society. Legal culpability for what you host is a very potent way of preventing enormous scale, as content moderation is costly to scale, and provided direct incentive to maintain clean platforms. Section 230 created a system in which Facebook et al. get all the upside, including the privilege of building a platform without having to charge their users, with zero downside.

Maybe this isn’t the internet we deserve?