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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, just look at how well this worked out with Gab.

Gab is such a great example of this. You have a new player in social media (yet we apparently need to break up the big tech companies because you can't enter the market anymore).

It operates in a successful niche. And it also is home to many far-right actors who hate Jews and minorities. Yet the claim is that breaking up the tech companies would help stop hate.

Tim Berners Lee has no salient point here whatsoever, and I don't think anyone would care about what he's saying if he wasn't who he is.

Not to mention he's calling for government regulation of tech companies at least partially to cut down on hateful speech (which is very much against the right to free speech).

>Not to mention he's calling for government regulation of tech companies at least partially to cut down on hateful speech...

This is the most troubling aspect of his call. "There's too much hate speech, so let's take action against platforms until it goes away."

I'm tired of all the terrorist attacks too, but to my mind, you handle that by having your counter-terror people do what they do. It's not like the terrorists would go away if you break up Twitter.

Gab (and Voat, and, er, Hatreon) were open attempts to create far-right versions of existing websites. I don't think they're good examples of the inevitability of hatred.

I'd hazard a guess that many more people are angry about hate speech on Reddit than about hate speech over email. The difference is that one is a company and the other is a federated standard. If I've understood Tim Berners-Lee correctly, he wants to replace Twitter with a million Mastodon instances rather than a hundred different versions of "Twitter, but for the far-right/far-left/radical-centrists".

They were not created as such (well, maybe with the exception of hatreon). They were created to be similar platforms, competitors or clones, with a promise of better management/operation/features. See also: Vidme.

When you compete with a monolith, your early adopters will be the people thrown off the bigger ship, and most of those people were thrown off for a reason.

Very few alt-repreneurs seem to understand this

Gab was very much created with that kind of content in mind. Its creator was specifically concerned with "left-leaning Big Social media monopoly", after Facebook and Twitter started censoring alt-right accounts. Which is not surprising, given his past history:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/12/pro-trump-ceo-gets-booted-...

They were created to be uncensored versions of existing websites. (I don't think there're any examples of Gab limiting left views.)

It happened that the existing websites were censoring far-right viewpoints.

So...by default the predominant users were far right.

> You have a new player in social media (yet we apparently need to break up the big tech companies because you can't enter the market anymore).

The existence of competition doesn't mean they're within the spirit of anti-trust regulations. Twitter using their network to eclipse other markets would be the concern.

Exactly. The existence of ubiquitous dial-up does not mean that Comcast doesn't have a monopoly on Internet connections in my area. As long as Comcast is offering 100Mbps and dial-up is 56k, the choice is obvious. As long as Twitter has 336,000,000 users and Gab has 400,000, Twitter is going to win.

Can you imagine Twitter's hosting provider taking them offline because they have objectionable content? Can you imagine their registrar revoking their domain name? It would be unheard of. It would be a catastrophe. They're too big to fail in the way Gab failed.

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