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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

> limit the extent to which it's a cyberwarfare or propaganda battlefield.

This was already done years ago by concentrating "the internet" and limiting it to a few companies with ban-hammers ready.

What once used to be many many different personal webpages, blogs, forums, chat sites (and protocols), is now basically limited to facebook (facebook, whatsapp, instagram), twitter and google (plus some outliers, such as telegram). Even with the mainstream news services, a huge percentage of people read that (MSM) news on sites like facebook and twitter (or atleast get linked from there).

Other countries have their own bundles of services (wechat in china, yandex+vk in russia, etc.)

So basically from a million different sources, pages, social groups, we've gone down to single digits per language group... and all of them can be monitored and censored by a few individuals with few agendas.

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This feels more like a thing that "just happened" rather than something that was intentionally done.

Blogs and such are still there, they just take an much work as they always have. And the centralized sites don't require nearly as much intentionality.

> rather than something that was intentionally done

Normal users cannot even put a link into an instagram post (pointing to whatever external site).... it seems pretty intentional to me (to keep you on their platform)

Intentionally done .. as an anti-spam measure. It's also there to limit the extent to which Instagram is part of OnlyFans customer acquisition.

As someone who lived through it, I don't think decentrafans really appreciate that we had decentralised services and spam turned them into unusable wastelands.

AI makes this worse, not better: the chance that a random site which looks like an interesting personal blog or small forum is a disguised sales op increases.

> Intentionally done .. as an anti-spam measure

Instagram is one of those sites, where all the content you see is either content from people you actually follow (so, friends & family, and not actual spammers), or is actual spam from instagram itself (instagram ads), where links (to advertised products) are of course allowed.

So yeah... only people who'd get the onlyfans links (or whatever other non-instagram-ad spam) would be the people actually following the onlyfans "creator" (or whatever other spammer), and those probably already know the onlyfans link too.

There's been a push since 1997 at least to have gatekeepers added to the Internet.

All kinds of politicians, international and national, including Hillary Clinton (senator and Secretary of State, 3rd or 4th in line to the Presidency) have been saying for 20 years they want gatekeepers.

There were laws passed that specifically enabled consolidation and centralization.

You figure that congress and the senate "just happened" to pass those laws?

Personal webpages and blogs still very much exist, though. I started one recently and I'm positive it gets more traffic than it would if I started it 20 years ago. I don't think censorship is the issue so much as the fact that many more people hopped on the internet and are more interested in social media than small blogs, even though they coexist.

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