*Are* these sites popular as functions of individual choices? It’s been pretty well established that governments and regulators in the U.S. overlooked the actions of or actively supported these companies from the start.
It is extremely hard to have a 2nd youtube, reddit or facebook... because of the network effects
This is a subjective distinction, but setting aside subjectivity for the sake of argument, it's a user-driven video sharing website, it's pretty similar to YouTube in many ways, but the fact that it is not synonymous is exactly my point - TikTok created something that differentiated itself from YouTube and so people flocked to it, and the fact that YouTube was already popular didn't diminish TikTok's accessibility nor did TikTok's explosion in popularity come at the cost of YouTube's popularity. TikTok created something attractive and people made individual choices to use it.
a better comparison is the conservative leaning 'rumble' - without google's massive support, it stands no chance of winning against youtube.
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parler was the alternative to twitter and fb, and see how it was cut down for no real reason, though at the time, the entire media made it seem as if it was the most logical thing to do.
later one finds that there is more extremist stuff in fb and twitter..
also, it was interesting how all the biggies - Amazon, Google, Apple, Visa all joined hands to squelch Parler an opponent of their enemy (for ad dollars) Twitter...
speaking loosely, this is quite an example of a cartel.
tiktok and youtube have essentially the same core functionality: sharing user generated video content. YouTube even has a "Shorts" section that is entirely composed of tiktok style videos wherein most of the videos are actually ripped from tiktok.
> parler was the alternative to twitter and fb, and see how it was cut down for no real reason
Parler is an alternative to twitter and fb, it exists today, it was not "cut down" https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parler/id1402727988.
The furor over Parler was manufactured outrage, Parler was suspended from the app stores because they didn't do what the app stores asked, a very common occurrence, we could all be so lucky as to have that much publicity surrounding the suspension of our apps from the notoriously capricious app stores.
> also, it was interesting how all the biggies - Amazon, Google, Apple, Visa all joined hands to squelch Parler an opponent of their enemy (for ad dollars) Twitter...
It's not that interesting, it was an obvious reaction to Parler openly courting extremism after there had just been an attack on the U.S. capitol. Parler made themselves toxic and nobody wanted to do business with them because they were extremely unpopular. Anyway, I suspect we probably won't agree on the details of Parler, but there's no disputing that Parler's temporary shutdown was under extremely unusual circumstances.