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Comment by im3w1l | Hacker News Reader

Call me paranoid but it seems increasingly that Big Tech uses all their avenues to force conformity. The message is that if you don't do what we want, bad things start happening. It can happen anytime anywhere and you wont necessarily know why. It's about encouraging a helpless, submissive, fearful mentality.

Maybe they'll no longer show you as verified. Maybe your posts will be demoted a bit in the feed. Maybe you now longer show up when people search for you. Maybe your sub becomes quarantined for an obviously for an obviously false reason (facts don't matter). Maybe you see more captchas. Maybe pages start loading more slowly for you. Maybe for your subscribers. Maybe you wont be able to show ads. Maybe it's the comments that get revoked. Maybe your account gets frozen and all your funds stolen.

Most (all?) of those are actual things happening right now.

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> it seems increasingly that Big Tech uses all their avenues to force conformity.

because these big tech companies are all dependent on advertising revenue, and thus converge to advertiser friendly behaviour.

Nothing much to do with ads in this case. If Insta cost money to use, Insta would still not want people leaving for Snap.

Of course they wouldn't, but it's a question of who their customers are – hint: not their users (even the "verified" ones).

exactly. the ad-based model skews incentives.

"Call me paranoid but it seems increasingly that Big Tech uses all their avenues to force conformity. The message is that if you don't do what we want, bad things start happening. It can happen anytime anywhere and you wont necessarily know why. It's about encouraging a helpless, submissive, fearful mentality."

Just like is done here on HN through its rules and enforcement of such, with maybe the exception of not knowing why. It still encourages a submissive, fearful mentality. Well, not for me, because I really DGAF and will continue to speak as I see fit. I can't speak to the gonadal fortitude of the rest of HN commenters.

Just using private browsing and UBO makes you see more reCaptchas from google and sites using it

Or to paraphrase: Company getting vast majority of its money from advertising and tracking, actively hampers experience of people who block advertising and trackers.

It sucks for those 'influencers', but how are they surprised? Aren't they in on the marketing game? The chose this fake job themselves right? You don't see Conan O'Brien as a main act on 2 TV networks at the same time, because that is not how the advertisement game works.

Instead of investing time and effort in online identities, we should invest in our offline identities. Investing in your local community, friends, family, etc is a lot more secure than some online persona on a platform you have zero control over.

An alternative would be to invest time and effort in decentralised platforms like mastodon, but even there you'd be dependent on the whims of the masses and thus advertisers. And even then, what do you have at the end of the day? Some virtual kudos and likes from people you would avoid in real life? Money if you are lucky.

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