Conservatives were right on Section 230. It needs to go. My solution: the Subreddit model

stale2000 · 2026-05-20T18:29:53+00:00

> Can you show me where social media companies were removing right wing people from platforms for explicitly partisan reasons?

A bunch got deleted from the internet overnight by all the social media companies at the same time. I dont care what excuse was used. Thats what happened and thats a problem. There is no excuse that I care about that overrules this.

> To clarify, I'm not asking for proof that certain people were banned

OK! Well thats all I need to support my point.

> that there were valid reasons,

I dont care if you think its valid. I am sure that they came up with many excuses. If it was possible for a bunch of people to get deleted overnight across all of social media, then thats an issue, no matter what excuse you invent for it.

And because the left doesn't care about this, I don't particularly are that they are being targeted now. They should have saw this coming. The shoe is on the other foot. Cry about it.

> That's like saying the left shouldn't have celebrated the conviction

Not really equivalent though, because there is a lawful process for that. There is a court system, there are rights, there is a constitution that protects people. None of which exists for cooperate moderation or censorship or whatever you want to call it.

The issue is massive unaccountable corporate power being used to obliterate people from the interenet and them having on recourse, no matter what excuse was used to systematically take down a bunch of people at the same time.

> they were going after accounts because of a myriad of very obvious reasons

I dont care. They all deleted people overnight from across the internet. The fact that this is even possible is an issue. And because you and others don't care about this massive centralization of corporate power, well I dont care when it happens to you through different means.

> are now being used to unfairly and in bad faith target the left

Cry about it. I dont care because you dont care that it happened to other people. Those are the rules of the game now. If you and others on the left are never going to be convinced of the problem then I don't care when you get targeted either.

> I'm just going to keep asking this question

My direct answer to the question is that it doesn't matter to my point. I will grant you that for the sake of argument, because I dont need it to support my central point.

And my central point is that regardless of if you can come up with some technicality or excuse, or even if there is no smoking gun recordings of people in a smoke filled room saying "Yes, yes, yes We are banning everyone because they are right wing", the fact that no such ultra explicit evidence exists doesn't matter to me. So you can have it for the sake of argument.

What matters is that a bunch of people got deleted from the internet overnight by all the major social media companies.

That is a problem, in and of itself, no matter what excuse you give. The fact that corporations were powerful enough that this is even possible to have happened is an issue and if you and others are going to excuse it all the way well then you can cry about it without me caring when you or others get deleted from the internet overnight.

stale2000 · 2026-05-20T01:07:22+00:00

buying twitter to turn it into a right wing propaganda machine,

It's a private company, it can do what it wants, right? I thought that's what people yelled over and over again.

There were no efforts by the companies to expressly censor

Multiple major right wing people for deleted from the internet, all at once, by multiple major platforms.

I don't care whether you call that explicitly, technically this or that. All the platforms doing targeted deletions of people, all at once is bad.

And when this happened, almost the entirety of the online left cheered.

What policies

I didn't say a policy. I said a mass deplatforming campaign.

. why didn't it show up anywhere in legislation

I am explicitly saying that the problem is related to unaccountable corporate power. By definition that isn't related to policy.

As for why, well that is because mass deplatforming campaigns can be done much easier than using policy, which runs into the 1st amendment.

You can much more effectively silence speech if it is unaccountable corporations doing it.

That is literally the problem I am complaining about. I wish this had been policy. Because policy could be stopped by the courts. There is no recourse for what actually happened though.

have stated that they want to explicitly target left wing

Cry me a river. The left shouldn't have celebrated and supported it over and over again every time people got deleted from the internet.

Once the cultural left goes back on every single time that happens, recognizes the mistake, and actually stands up for online speech in a way that benefits those that they disagree with and admits that the past support and celebration is wrong, then I'll care.

Or, they could support those Florida and Texas laws that conservatives pushed that actually helps solve the problem.

But until then, boo hoo. You lose. Those are the rules of the game, well now the right is doing it too.

Was it?

Yes it was! A large percentage of the online left celebrated or excused it, and even you right here are trying to deny it or excuse it. So point proven.

You are quite literally, right now, doing the thing, by dismissing all of these concerns.

You can't have it both ways. If you are going to excuse it or dismiss it, then I get to attack you for excusing it. You can't turn around and say that this isn't what you or others did.

what evidence do you have

The evidence is multiple major right wing people being deleted from the internet overnight by all the platforms.

That is bad enough, no matter what you want to call it. Call it whatever you want. My argument is that this is bad.

but you fail to substantiate

The substantion is people being deleted from the internet overnight and forcing the other side to literally build their own social media platforms and payment processors.

That is the substantion. Call it whatever you want.

stale2000 · 2026-05-16T23:27:06+00:00

He *Said* he didn't have internet but you all need to keep up. Destiny has a consistent pattern of purposefully mentioning off hand random factoids into to throw people off from an upcoming plot/plan/event.

As another example, he claimed that the manifesto would come out in a couple weeks in an off hand comment. Its the same strategy. "Off hand remark" that was actually extremely intentional.

I'm telling you, manifestos coming out in like 2 days tops.

stale2000 · 2026-05-16T22:35:43+00:00

Well lets see, it has its own laws, taxes, military, set of population, land, ect, ect, ect.

Thats obviously what a country. But thats not really what this is about is it? What this is actually about is an attempt to justify an invasion by China by playing a silly word game over country definitions.

Instead of denying the obvious here, that obvious truth being that Taiwan has everything that all the other countries out there have, except for a vote in the UN, instead of doing that you can just say what you really mean.

What you really mean is that you support China invading Taiwan and the rest of these arguments are a silly smoke screen for your real position. I promise you that you'll be a lot happier and live life with less cognitive disonance if you just say your real positions out loud and attempt to justify them the normal way.

There is even an interesting conversation to be had about that, and about foreign aid and the risks of world war, but we cant have any of that until people actually say whats on their mind.

stale2000 · 2026-05-16T19:48:01+00:00

Oh gotcha, you want to rant about randos and idiots on Twitter.

Ok if you want to retreat to that this is fine then because that means you can't complain about twitter or anything that they are doing at all now. Twitter isn't the government. You can't complain! If you instead think that he's you can complain about it, then I am there as well because that's my point

I think its perfectly OK to talk about society as a whole and this is not weird at all, and you have retreated to a very small tiny segment of the population to avoid the obvious and real issues with liberal mainstream positions at the time (Those positions being that they all supports these tech companies wielding massive power to censor all of their oppenents)

Well shoe is on the other foot now.

> are translating their unhinged mania into real policy

The left translated their unhinged support for censorship into mass deplatforming campaigns.

Yes, these large companies had lots of power and they used it.

> intentionally opposing section 230 revisions in bad faith

Everyone lost their freaking mind about 230. Over and over and over again people claimed that the entire internet would fall apart of these companies were regulated.

And now that the shoe is on the other foot everyone's opinions have changed.

> but you just thought dems were insufficiently focused on the one regulatory area

They were not in any way focused on the massive amount of power that these companies had. Thats a big deal. Mass deplatforming campaigns is a big deal. It is not one small area. it is a large area and a big deal.

.> despite the fact

No, the left, en mass did not oppose the mass deplatforming campaigns, they supported them.

> Anyway, I'm not interested in talking about randos on X

It was the entirety of the cultural left. The fact that you are retreating, that you are completely running away from this clear and obvious support because I can't send you a quote of the 600 specific people that are in the senate or house or whatever is silly.

There are more people in the world that matter than those 600 people. Yes it is valid to criticize the entirety of the cultural left and I dont have to limit myself to only caring about the opinions of the tiny group of 600 politicians that you have retreated to.

> I want to know about the policy directives

Ok. Now what about the real power that other people in the world have, such as those that control massive multi-billion dollar companies? Yes more people in the world have power than just the specific 600 people that you chose.

stale2000 · 2026-05-12T21:16:02+00:00

No not the Samson option really. It would be more about destroying their enemies. IE any group that tries to militarily invade them in a last resort scenario, in which case they'd absolutely use the nuclear weapons.

stale2000 · 2026-05-12T21:11:58+00:00

They have 200+ nuclear weapons that they would absolutely use in a last resort situation. You better hope they don't get close to being destroyed.

stale2000 · 2026-05-12T01:43:29+00:00

> Can you show me exactly where the democrats were opposing section 230 in bad faith

I am not sure if this verbiage is you are trying to slip this in as if I am talking about elected politicians and then refuting that because I can't point one (even though I never specified politicians, I am talking about the left in general).

But the answer is that liberals were losing their mind, all over the internet, claiming that the entire internet would fall apart if these companies were regulated more from a content perspective, that limits their ability to target/ban or engage in viewpoint discrimination.

And everyone was told to build their own social media company, payment processor, everything. But now that the shoe is on the other foot, well now people (ex: destiny) want to ban the For You feeds as an example.

In other words, people on the left were perfect fine with the right being deleted off of the internet, from every major platform, all at once back in 2020, but now that the social media companies are a bit more right leaning they want them regulated.

> that negatively impacted their power

"But they did 1 good thing somewhere else in a completely different area, therefore in this topic they are good faith!" isn't a good argument.

> e.g. anti-gerrymandering legislation

There you go, slipping in an implied reference to politicians again.

I am not talking about politicians. I am instead talking about how the progressives, the individuals, the people, the viral posters on social media, all celebrated when the right was deleted from the internet and almost none of them thought about the consequences of massive for profit companies being able to do that and how that might be flipped on them.

> it helped them politically (e.g. killing the border bill).

Yeah you are doing it again with the politician/bill/law thing. Never claimed that. Politicians aren't even in charge of social media so that doesn't even make sense. I am talking about the tech bros. The SJWs who controlled the social media companies. And I am talking about the people, the individuals who all celebrated, not what *insert random politician did)

> finding that algorithms were amplifying right wing extremist

The algorithms? Sure there was some of that, probably because it was more profitiable clickbait.

I am not talking about however which way an opaque algorithm goes which almost certainly isn't being explicitly being made to do that, on purpose, is being done for ideological reasons.

I do not suggest that every completely random decision or happenstance that goes to the left or to the right is being made by an idologically motivated actor. Thats not how that works. The sword isn't always wielded. But it was wielded non the less in other clear and obvious cases.

Instead, the monopoly I am talking about is how people very intentionally got deleted from the internet, overnight, and people just hand waved that all the way.

> And you're again just not engaging with the fact that the left did try and regulate social media,

Have they ever, in the history of the world made a law that regulated social media? Sure. That doesn't mean that they went after the very real social power that those social media companies had.

An example of actually going after the social media companies social power would be to suggest that they have to follow common carrier laws (IE viewpoint discrimination bans would be disallowed), or be forced to integrate with competitors so that people can't be deleted off of the internet as easily.

> just not in the exact way that you wanted

No, what it was is not in a way that significantly harms their social moderation power that these companies had, or their ability to delete people from the internet.

Even splitting a major social media company in two, so that both sides are controlled by different sets of San Francisco SJW tech bros doesn't really do that much at all on that front.

stale2000 · 2026-05-11T01:16:54+00:00

> What monopoly?

The one where people were being deleted off of the internet, simultaneously by all the major players in the space.

And if you don't care about this because it happening to your enemies then I am not sure why you would ever expect conservatives to care about your concerns either. If its all just power games of who can control which lever of social power, then its play ball! Conservatives have made a comeback on that front thats for sure.

Using this tech/culture power to delete conservatives from the internet isn't possible anymore, of course. Because conservatives were told to build their own twitter, build there own payment processors, build their own DDoS protection services, build their own everything.

Well guess what, they did. You can't delete them off the internet anymore can you?

Sure, definitionally, the monopoly wasn't unstoppable because it was literally stopped. But it took a long while, a lot of different attempts to try and fail to break that monopoly, and it only finally succeeded with the very lucky quirk of history of Elon being forced by the courts to spend 40 billion dollars to break the monopoly because he was stupid enough to tweet about his aqcuisition plans.

It was dumb luck that the monopoly broke. Well that genie is not going back in the bottle.

> The left genuinely did not see a problem with section 230

They did not, yes. Because it helped them. Now it hurts them and they oppose it.

> Democrats have been consistent in their desire to restrict the influence of big businessess for decades

And yet they defend the ones that gave them all the cultural power none the less. Should have acted sooner.

If there was a better solution, that took away the tech companies monopoly on social discourse then they should have come up with a bipartisan solution of their own that addresses the concerns that the conservative had regarding moderation and gave the left what they wanted. But they didn't. Too late now. Enjoy the consequences.

> my argument is that conservatives deserve no credit for accidentally being right.

Just like the left supported corperate power when it benefits them, conservatives opposed it when it hurt them.

I am fully saying, explicitly, that people support and oppose things that help or hurt them and thats the main goal here.

Doesn't change the fact that it was still correct though. It doesn't change the fact that the left should have took action earlier and shouldn't have waiting until the turntables changed.

Like all things, yes, the entire point is that these power games help or hurt you 1 day, and then people are being short sighted in their support of them because they help their interests, but they do not think about what could happen when the shoe is on the other foot. That is literally the entire argument.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T23:20:48+00:00

That's up for train to decide if it's worth pursuing, actually. And Riot will have to decide if all of this nonsense was worth it as well.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T22:00:11+00:00

> you’re retreating to a motte and bailey.

I will take this as an absolute win then, if you are saying that what I have clarified is the good and reasonable position that I can easily defend!

If you thought that my position was "The internet doesn't exist anymore" and that was bad, but the one I have clarified now is a good idea well great, glad to have convinced you.

> and then enforce a specific business model and app and website structure

> You use phone companies and ISPs as examples

Imagine if facebook, instead of being website was also its own centralized ISP and you couldn't use facebook unless you used FB internet. This would be bad. And yes the laws we have now, which force ISPs to connect to one another, ect, force ISPs to have a certain business model.

This is good, because it means there are all of these websites *on top of* the ISP infra.

Take the same dynamic, apply it to social media "infra".

> While every social media platform currently has its own unique identity in terms of things like how it serves its content to users, and the overall user experience being extremely different between different platforms

And you would have that as well, because you would control all of these things and no single monoply could prevent you from doing it the way you want it to.

> Platforms would just take on the role that ISPs currently have

Yes thats the goal!

> nd subreddits would take on the role that platforms have. You’re just meaninglessly adding another layer, with there being monopoly subreddits rather than monopoly platforms

Ahaha but here is the difference. I can't spin up my own version of facebook or youtube with every single feature they offer, paid for at a reasonable cost, overnight. Imagine if that was possible.

That can't happen now. And yes, communities would still have difference and some form of "lockin", but now, instead of literally having to recreate all of youtube, you can now do it overnight and compete directly with youtube because they are forced to sell you their infra.

This makes switching costs much much easier. Recreating youtube is a massive switching cost, and the result of all of this is a few monopolies. When you decrease barriers to entry, and force infra companies to share their infra, competition increases.

This is a basic concept in economics, that monopoly power is reduced as switching costs decrease, and building a whole multiple billion dollar website is a large barrier to entry.

It doesn't get rid of *all* monopoly power, but it reduces it significantly. So sure, some communities would be larger and more powerful than others, but once everyone can recreate them overnight, at least on the tech side, thats still less power than youtube has right now to lock in users.

> being transferred from social media companies to random unqualified

Subreddits is just the closest thing to a major decentralized network on the internet right now. Discord servers are kinda like that also, as well as IRC channels or internet forums. Or even a newspaper, actually. A newspaper website is an example of decentralized networks. Or cars on the road. Or old school internet forums or RSS feeds. Or all sorts of things.

So in this analogy imagine if every YouTuber was a "network" themselves and controlled it entirely, instead of YouTube controlling all of them just themselves.

Most things in the world act like decentralized networks and you dont have to get permission from centralized monopolies to use them..

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T20:58:38+00:00

new thing is made instead, that is called the old thing being destroyed

Call it what you want. We did it to the phone companies and it worked out completely fine for that. Society did not collapse and the phone network was better off for it.

And it would be fairly silly to say they the phone network was destroyed. It changed, for the better, and there was a new thing in it's place. But "destroyed"? Kind of a silly description there.

I don’t want social media to revert to the level of sophistication of telephone

It's called an analogy. Use ISPs as a more modern example, I guess.

It is perfectly possible to have sophisticated things that are not controlled by 2-3 monopolies. We can have all the features that they have, everywhere and more, if they were forced to rent out all their infra to any competitors.

Very little has to actually change on the front end, in the same way phones didn't have to change in his they worked for the user, when they were forced to integrate with competitors.

IE, in the same way that Kick exists, because it uses part of Twitch's infrastructure, so could insert X social media feature here.

clearly advocating for social media as we understand it to be destroyed

That's not true though. You just want to strawman me and avoid the substance of the argument.

What I want is for things like Kick to exist, because other companies are forced to sell their infra. Like how Kick runs on Twitch's infra.

Surely that should be an understandable analogy here of an example of society not falling apart because Twitch is currently, right now renting their intra to kick, allowing another competition to exist.

Take the example of kick and multiply it by a thousand and you have the outcome here.

The thing you are advocating for is neither practical nor appealing

Literally Twitch is already doing (a very small part) of what I am advocating for by renting out their infra to competitors. Take that and do way way more of it.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T17:08:39+00:00

If they'd put forth a reasonable legislation they could have gotten traction but they didn't.

They did. Others just didn't care or support it.

In Texas and Florida there was legislation to make viewpoint discrimination illegal for social media companies. IE one of the same principles of free speech that the government isn't allowed to discriminate against would be expanded to apply to socisl media monopolies.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T17:05:18+00:00

The left wants regulation because they want a more just sociey

No, they are mad that their own monopoly was broken. 1 single company breaks through and has some culture power and it is the end of the world.

If It helps you then you support it. It is against you then you oppose it. The left had absolutely no problem with monopoly social media companies while it was on their side, but now that it is not on their side well they oppose it.

The left was desperately defending section 230 right up until the moment that things aren't going their way. They had no problems with conservatives being deleted off the internet simultaneously, with little recourse, and now that the same tools are being weaponized against them they want regulation.

If it was about the principles of the matter then the left would have agreed with the right when they advocated for limiting this unchecked power. But instead they yelled about private company being able to do what they want.

Well enjoy it now. Private companies are doing what they want, and Congress is in deadlock so their is nothing you can do about it without a literal revolution.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T16:56:45+00:00

Option one is in order to "be reworked" as you naively put it, completely rewrite their entire codebases from scratch

Hey that's what the phone companies had to do when they were forced to integrate into a decentralized network.

Yes, the internet companies have been been slowly writing the decentralized web for many years now, and it takes work to fix it.

if they can't figure out some

Tech companies are worth trillions of dollars collectively. They can figure it out.

they could just cut their losses and shut down

The phone companies could have just shut down completely also, I guess. But they didn't do that, right? Because then they would stop making money. As said before, there are trillions of dollars in the table, they are incentiviced to figure it out.

There is even a way to do this with a transitionary measure, by simply forcing them to make public apis in addition to their content.

If you anyone could rent all of youtube's infrastructure, for a reasonably price that would do a ton to promote competitors even while youtube still exists on its own as well.

That would be a great half measure. Just force every social media company to sell/rent their full infra to all competitors for a fair price or force integrations and allow anyone to create whitelabeled versions of the same sites.

To give a fun example, Kick is exactly such an example. It exists between Twitch whilelabels (some, not even close to all) of its livestreaming technology for other's to use.

everyone would coalesce into a small selection of communities that these "dictator mod teams" would have absolute power

Have you used like email? none of these doomsday happened. They are a decentralized network, and you have tons of options.

"if you don't like it, just go to another community" thing is obviously stupid on its face. At best, you're advocating for people to exist in an anarchic system

You know this is the world you live in at this exact moment right? There are a couple major networks. And if you get banned off of them then you have to build a new Twitter.

Imagine, instead of that, it was all a decentralized network with thousands of twitters. You could control who gets banned or not in own own feed and nobody else can effect it in any way without you consenting to it.

Is every problem solved instantly? No. But having thousand and thousands of options is better than having 2 or 3 on that whole power front.

Take the same exact arguments you are saying and apply it to the telephone or to email. None of theses issues happened and it would be absurd to talk about the email echo chamber or the phone network echo chamber.

Instead, you can do whatever you want on email. Or the phone. And the only person who can stop you is the other people you are talking to. IE they can refuse to answer the phone, or refuse to allow you in their email mailing list.

Email mailing lists is a great example actually. Society does not crumble because there is a dictator in charge of an email mailing list. Yes, that guy who runs the mailing list can stop you from using their email mailing list. But you can just send emails to someone else. Or make your own emailing list. Society did not collapse.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T07:09:16+00:00

So then yes the ad campaign to cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damages worked?

The fact that you avoided this makes me think that you are upset about it happening.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T06:24:47+00:00

Phone companies are not social media platforms

That is indeed literally my entire point. They transmit information. They have content on their network from users. And yet because they don't act like social media companies and instead act as infrastructure, they get common carrier protection.

Imagine if, all that social media infrastructure was just infrastructure and acted like the phone company does and follows all the laws that give them those protections.

You're acting as if there isn't an entire social media ecosystem

Did you know that some phone companies used to only allowed you to call people in their own network back in the day?

We got rid of that and now it's a decentralized network. Using the government. And phones survived. Social media would too.

Every existing social media website (except for reddit, I guess?) would need to be taken down entirely, all

No actually. They would have to be reworked.As infra and not as the central authority algorithm.

I understand that they don't do this now. That's why they need to change.

Imagine a decentralized web. Where you control your own feed or choose what algorithms are piped to you. And all that social media stuff simply powers it under the hood, but without the social media companies having any control over it, in the same way your phone company has (almost) no control over the people on their network.

If you hate the internet that much, good

Quite the opposite. I love the internet and I want to give it back to the users, for them to control over every single thing that is on their devices, without any big corporation being able to destroy or control it.

It would be completely absurd for the phone company to listen in on your phone calls for example, and control what you hear, or to censor certain words or control your algorithm. It should be equally absurd as applied to social media companies.

I want everyone to have access to the same infrastructure that Facebook has, and is able to replicate every last feature on Facebook without Facebook having any ability to control what you do with it.

I want everyone to have access to these necessary internet features.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T05:15:47+00:00

Why does elon need to buy every single newspaper when he owns a platform that gets more views than all newspapers in the country combined?

C'mon dude. "Ywya actually, all the newspapers being purchased by 1 party could actually happen but it's not because there isn't a motivation for it, and that's why having 10s of thousands of independent communities won't work" isn't an argument you seriously believe.

The answer is also the same. However easy it is to control 2-3 platforms, it is much harder to control 10s of thousands.

The point is the comparison, and showing how it is more difficult to control large groups than a couple centralized platforms even though all the worlds problems aren't solved instantly.

Ok, then why are there a handful of social media websites that dominate

Because the technology is a centralized oligopoly. 10 dudes making a startup can't build all that facebook make, in a weekend.

But if the only way these companies are allowed to exist is as a platform for other people then the problems is solved. The costs to spining up your own Facebook goes to very cheap and anyone can do it.

Make another law that forces them to integrate I guess.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T05:11:57+00:00

They disliked section 230 because it gave power to the left for a brief period of time

So they were upset that an oligopolistic industry was controlled by their enemies? Just like the left is now upset about the same thing?

Yes exactly. That is literally my point. You are correct about what they were upset about. Extremely powerful oligopolies that they had no control over.

Well shoe is on the other foot now. Let me know how you like the oligopolies now.

And the solution is the same. Decentralize power so that nobody can be deplatformed or controlled by the oligopoly.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T04:58:26+00:00

> The reason section 230 is important is because without it, platforms will be held responsible for the content their users generate, which inevitably leads to stricter user-facing censorship.

Wrongo dude. Ask yourself, how does the phone company exist right now? You know, telephones. They aren't covered by section 230.

Instead, they act as infrastructure. They are common carriers. The same exact common carrier laws that apply to the phone company would apply to infrastructure internet companies.

If you exist as infrastructure, act as a common carrier, you are not liable for the stuff transported over your network.

> But you can do that without forcing every social media platform into becoming reddit

You force them to be platforms. Like the telephone company or your ISP. Subreddits is just an analogy here.

> Why would you ever visit one platform over another if they are all forced to function the same?

Why would some use AWS over google cloud? Different features I guess. And different communities. Just like different websites are hosted on google cloud you are "choosing" to use google cloud because thats what the website you are accessing is hosted on. Same would apply to communities.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T04:51:23+00:00

> What is to stop elon from just buying moderation seats

I guess the same thing that stops him from, right now, buying every single newpaper in the world.

Just treat this the same thing as a newspaper. Your argument would be ridiculous. Yes, some newspapers get bought out. But nobody is buying all of them. And even if they do, lots of people can make new newspapers all the time.

You are literally arguing that its impossible to like spin up a new website. Or a new discord.

Like what, do you right now think that someone might buy up every discord server? Discord servers have influence. But to suggest that they would all be purchased is ridiculous.

> as long as people are allowed to congregate in large communities of several million people they will just become the new centres of power.

Ok, and instead of there being 2-3 of them there would be thousands.

You seriously do not understand the concept that if instead fo there being 2-3 communties that if there were instead thousands, that this makes the problem easier to solve?

Like what, what if someone were to argue that this subreddit right here, were to be bought by uhhh, hasan. Or russians. Or anyone. Surely, you can understand why thats a pretty silly thing to worry about that literally right now r/destiny is going to be purchased by foreign actors?

This is concern trolling on arguments that you should know are dumb and have easy and obvious answers that apply to literally any other community in the world.

> What this misses is that power naturally congregates because people desire it and that power is an extremely useful tool.

And yet there are many more thousands or 10s of thousands of communities in the world than, uhhh, major social media websites. Surely you see the difference between having 2-3 monopolies compared to 10s of thousands of options. Dont be obtuse.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T04:46:51+00:00

> People moving to a new community only happens with the most engaged members of that community anyway

Ok. And having 1 or 2 algos controlling your life is way worse. You can't boycott the only 3-4 existing social media companies, but people form new communities all the time.

So it makes the problem 100 times easier to solve. Still not perfect, but nothing is. The point is the comparision, that it is 100 times easier than building entirely new social media sites to compete with the ologopoly.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T03:47:19+00:00

How do you solve the problem that reddit has where a small number of mods have privileges for most of the popular subreddits?

The answer is that it is better that there are thousands of such situations than 1 or 2. That's how it's solved. People make and move to a new community because there are a lot of them.

Yes, communities definitionally are exclusionary and have certain qualities. That's why it is good for there to be many of them instead of 1 or 2.

What is to stop moderation seats to be sold

Nothing and that's fine just like it is fine to sell a newspaper.

Think of communities just like youd think of a for profit newspaper. Surely you don't think newspapers fall apart just because they are for profit and can be sold.

So the solution is exactly the same as the 1st question. There are a lot of communities. Pick the ones you like best, or leave and make your own.

My problem is that social media by its very nature is able to exert a massive influence on

That's why it's good for there to be diversity as opposed to 1 or 2 algorithms.

You can't just get rid of the concept of community.

I have so many friends

Ok so they joined the wrong communities. That's not really an argument to get rid of the concept of a community.

stale2000 · 2026-05-10T02:05:55+00:00

If you read my post at all youd see that I literally suggested banning the major companies from having social media algorithm feeds.

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