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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

In the coming years, we may see the rise of separate economies based on political divide. I think this is where we are heading, and this will counterpart the world splitting the internet into nationally divided fragments.

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Will they be significant economies though? Gab and Epik are mostly about culture wars and conspiracy theories. How many people are actively involved in those?

The history of explosive growth in tech platforms should make us very cautious about assuming small economies will stay small. It's been barely a decade since Facebook and Twitter were small platforms that didn't matter.

A decade ago Facebook and Twitter were small in a nascent industry.

A decade ago Facebook had 500 million users. Not sure that's actually that small. It took them 2 years to double, and 5 years to double again (in 2017 they hit 2 billion).

That's how we see it in retrospect, but at the time it wasn't obvious that the industry was nascent. Many people saw them as strong competitors to Myspace and Friendster rather than anything fundamentally new; even once they got clearly past Myspace, it was quite common to hear people saying that the global demand for social media is probably saturated as they continued to grow.

(And of course, it wasn't obvious that Myspace was a nascent industry either when they launched in 2003!)

Facebook and Twitter don't require buying into any particular politics to join.

But as things are going you need to have a very limited ideologically worldview to not get expelled. And I am not taking about silly things like _Hitler was nice_. Do you want recent examples?

If you mention the following (you dont even have to support it or believe it) and many people complain there is a big chance you will be banned because of hate-speech:

1. There may be genetic differences in cognitive abilities between the sexes

2. Intelligence is highly dependent on genetics which may be expressed differently depending on the population clusters. i.e. East Asian people vs Sub-Saharan groups.

3. The killed of unarmed, black males by the police is statistically insignificant in the US and it is dwarfed by other more important issues.

4. What China is doing with the Uighurs and what France is planning to do with their Muslim population is something very similar in spirit and can show the inability to host a significant muslim minority in your country without being exposed to separatism movements based on religion.

5. It is ok to say "only women" menstruate

And on and on and on. The list is growing every day.

It's true, the list is growing every day. I remember not long ago how the term "sexual preference" became considered offensive overnight, purely for political reasons. It was interesting to see even the dictionary immediately change their definition in response to some twitter drama. Despite the fact that the offense is completely baseless, since people cannot freely change their preferences.

Something happened in the last 5 years or so. I am an old school leftist, by no means a Stalinist or so, but very much in favor of the former colonies rights, against imperialism, unilateral use of force, excessive power of multinationals, militarism, that sort of stuff. Let's say I am a crazy commie in the mold of Chomsky or Howard Zinn. Well, in the last 5 years, that left "poooft", evaporated, disappeared totally and now the only "opposition"to the usual suspects is a motley group formed by ex-tumblerinas, social media companies C-executives and their employees, mainstream democrats and celebrities,twitter comedians, and the problems are not more: "Why Grenada was invaded", "What is the future of Gaza" or even "Why are unions disappearing in America?", not more "Iran-Contra" or "Somalia intevention" Now the problems are "Is JK Rowling a TERF" "Should Colin Kapernick(sp) have an extra year of contract" "Is AOC college degree more prestigious than Trump's" When the top-20 Fortune companies are on your side I think it is time to reassess your priorities as a leftist movement, but no, that is not happening.

In 2010, Facebook was worth north of $10B. What is your definition of small platform?

Without Visa, Mastercard or Paypal on the other side how can it survive? Cryptocurrencies as the current niche are hanging on, I suspect for as long as VMP permit them (ie buying bitcoin with a credit card). Everyone else, even Apple, go through them.

> Without Visa, Mastercard or Paypal on the other side how can it survive?

Bank transfer?

Separate economies don't necessarily have to be equal in capability. One may be the dominant while the other operates closer to being a black market, while not necessarily being an actual black market.

Maybe it would be based on cryptocurrency, or a more traditional form of currency that is centralized but isn't USD, for instance. Or someone with a lot of money decides that having dominance over a new economy takes the opportunity and forms their own "competitor" to Visa, but it operates within the economy that Visa decides it doesn't want to be a part of. Then again, maybe Visa one day leaks enough customers that it decides it's not worth being as moralistic.

It's really more of a bootstrapping issue than anything. You need to accept credit cards because that's what your customers expect to pay using.

If your customers start to expect to pay using some cryptocurrency, what do you need credit cards for?

First you have to reach a critical mass for the alternative payment system, but the more legitimate businesses that PayPal boots to the other side of the wall, the more mass there is on the other side of the wall.

Genuinely curious: if it’s a growth thing, how did PayPal get where they are today? I know eBay was involved, but not much more than that.

First to market advantage, more or less.

Also, it's even not so much PayPal as Visa and MasterCard, and how they got the way they are involves both politics and backroom dealings.

It happens a lot today. Advertising targets lifestyle cohorts, and political orientation is part of that. if you polled Uber and Lyft users you'd find that they have very different views of the world. Same with McDonalds and Chick-Fil-A. Last year, I was on an American Airlines flight and it was notable that they played up patriotism in a way that Delta doesn't.

I haven't flown on American in ages. How do they play up patriotism? Like, if a soldier boards they announce it kind of stuff? Because I've seen that on Delta too.

>and this will counterpart the world splitting the internet into nationally divided fragments.

Perhaps, but how is this related to this story? Both epik and paypal are located in the US. If anything this points towards the internet being divided across partisan lines.

"political divide" from the first sentence.

I think he is just comparing it to another way in which the internet is balkanizing.

This, but also in that I think internet balkanization, if it takes off, will only make it easier to further balkanize it into "micronations" for different ideologies, or corporate brands.

This kind of situation used to exist in the Netherlands prior to World War II: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation

I always found it crazy that my grandparents would tell me how there would be a socialist bakery and then a protestant bakery.

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