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Comment by mmazing | Hacker News Reader

Let the market sort them out then, right?

The market won't sort them out, but the courts will. Wait until they are deemed a publisher, and no longer exempt from liability[0] for all of the content that they publish. Unfortunately they hire a lot of lobbyists so it might be a long wait.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

Revoking 230 won't make the executives at YouTube go "gosh darn, guess we'll have to start taking a loss by employing hundreds of thousands of moderators to literally watch every video uploaded", they'll constrain and limit the platform in any way which still guarantees similar or greater ad revenue. That is, if there isn't any legal loophole like requiring creators sign legal paperwork which makes creators their own "publisher" or something along those lines.

They'll probably cull everything that doesn't earn them ad revenue, to minimize the fallout. The content will trend toward sanitized garbage and the viewers will start leaking to somewhere else.

This is all great news if you're building a new social project...

Or if you just want more diversity.

that's the problem... the same handful of companies have dominated the space for the past decade and mostly monopolized the attention. we need more competitors.

Any fun theories on how we ended up replicating the same issue of consolidated TV broadcasters and traditional media companies with internet media platforms and content outlets?

We’ve had such a long time between the passage of things like the Fairness Doctrine and now to turn the boat (not to mention countless critiques of the consolidation of local news and syndicated television networks for examples), maybe learn a few lessons along the way that I wonder if this isn’t an emergent outcome and is in reality an inherent one.

Is this an extreme terminus of network effects?

No, it's the environment that the media platforms exist in. It's our laws, our economic system, our way of governing, and who has power to influence those things: all fairly consistent due to inertia but not really fated to be what they are, IMO. People seem to think present reality was destined. I think there are other viable ways we could have developed that would look much different and have fewer, more, or just different problems than the ones we take for inevitable.

How are you going to best network effects and the race to the bottom?

It happened with news (the cable news cycle) and it’s happening with social media.

The bare, sad truth is that any private or public societal scale information sharing function eventually gets captured - driven to relentlessly pound away at subconscious fight or flight routines so that they keep their cut of the audience.

Eventually the need to keep the network alive (advertising) overcomes its ostensible mission of carrying valuable signal.

As long as the two are not divorced - the advantage will lie in exploiting the vulnerability of our neurological systems over investing in carrying more in depth, boring but accurate news articles.

At some level we must recognize that we need to get the best of a central source of truth while also ensuring that this source of truth is not captured by the governing bodies of a country.

If, as t -> infinity, the fate of a video hosting service is getting classified as a publisher, why would a competitor turn out any differently?

You're only a publisher if you moderate the content you allow.

maybe they wouldn't, but would you like to live in a world where a single company has a literal stranglehold on video (or search, or social network) until the end of time?

I'd rather have many companies competing with one another.

It's not because the rules would apply to you as well. You'd have to do the same thing.

YouTube will finally become “Tube”

If they close off both ends does it become “Bubble”?

Yep, kill any content an ML model has predicted of high risk or unprofitable. Classic example of a regulation second order effects resulting in the opposite outcome of what was intended.

It seems to be exactly what would be intended. To get people to move to better platforms or improve the current one.

And then they become a constrained platform worried more about litigation than enabling voices, and the disenfranchised move somewhere to hear the message. It’s already headed there.

Applying US law for the rest of the countries is another problem.

Thank you for the laugh.

You are quite welcome. :D

We can't wait for markets to sort themselves out while a few executives and their well connected friends control and decide the information we get to see and hear. The stakes are too high to wait for a market solution here.

Or a market solution will be decisive if it gets to that point.

The courts broke up Microsoft, and it's not like that hurt them at all.

Microsoft wasn’t broken up.

Ah, you're right. The break up never happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

Very hard for the market to sort out NSA-backed companies like Google, Facebook et al.

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