> It's not that hard.

For one person maybe, but try getting all of society to do the same.

Edit: You do realise we are both using a "digital forum run by a private entity" right now?

Yes, and if it turned out that hacker news was doing anything unscrupulous I would have no problem dropping it. I don't care what the rest of society does, start with you and yourself.

If you want to make a public statement or have an open discussion, you need to be where the public is.

How often do you actually need to do that?

Ask the BLM movement. Why did they feel the need to block traffic? Couldn't they have just posted on facebook?

Besides, frequency of something isn't a good measure of its importance. "How often do you feel the need to vote?" is also the wrong question to ask.

Consider that the majority of the internet still does not use adblock software. Disable your adblock and go browse for a while. And then imagine that the vast majority of people still browse this way -- 70% according to the first result I found.

While I think people are genuinely quite smart on average, I also think most are not particularly well informed. Adblocking is something that directly and immediately provides a vastly better experience. But the majority of people still do not use them and are, for the most part, likely more or less ignorant of their existence or their effect. Now somehow getting people to engage in behavior for an abstract high level change that would, in the short run, result in some negative consequences for themselves (for instance Google search is certainly still the best search engine by shrinking but still wide margin) -- that's something that is going to be very challenging to make happen.

[1] - http://www.businessinsider.com/pagefair-2017-ad-blocking-rep...

DuckDuckGo, Protonmail and ...too many to list. I use Google very rarely, and mostly if I am looking how things appear the the rest of the world. DuckDuckGo is a drop in replacement for search

But they all may nudge search results in this direction or that. Google is injecting partisanship in search, like newspapers always have been-- NYT vs WSJ, people just expect different content. Factionalizing search inherently means there cannot be a single dominant player. Google is stronger as a business when people perceive it as nonpartisan like the phone book.