This week: Reddit bans Cigar, beer and Alchohol trading subreddits, toy bb gun sales, and gun related coupon clippers
Youtube (and facebook?) banned Channels featuring guns they deem inappropriate. Including videos regarding proper safety and maintenance.
It has become clear to be that the internet is naturally monopolistic in a way physical institutions are not. One simply cannot move their gun channel, or the cigar trading forum to other sites and have a decent chance of maintaining even 10% of their customers. What happens if google also decides that they don't want these things to show up in search results. We need regulation to ensure that these platforms remain open for all types of users, not regulation that forces more content off these platforms.
I was reading earlier today people are uploading their gun vids to PornHub.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/youtube-b...
Funny thing is, my coworker and I were talking about this earlier today... we ended up agreeing that it wouldn't be surprising at all if PornHub ends up creating an SFW site under a different name (VidHub?) for things like this.
Frankly, it's a privilege to able to rely on public and paid services to protect you and your property. Not everyone gets the same service levels and not everyone can afford to pay to fix the problem.
So yeah, I would imagine they probably do watch some videos on their profession on there, like I watch videos about game design and programming on there sometimes.
But, yes, there are a few extra steps to unclog a bathtub with a plunger. YouTube videos are pretty handy there.
That's funny - I thought that exactly the opposite was true.
The Internet (not particular sites, not AOL or "the facebook", but The Internet) is naturally un-monopolistic because you can, in fact, just move your video channel to your own website and do whatever you'd like there.
In fact, it's trivially easy to do so - you can probably accomplish the entire task using only your telephone.
If you feel that this is not the case I think you've made yourself fragile to services and processes that have nothing to do with The Internet.
This legislation isn’t that but your examples are.
Reddit also banned subs that were used for sourcing marijuana, designer drugs, xanax.. direct deals onsite.
i'm not defending the drug war, but when you only include the subs you wrote the move looks really silly. if people were only doing giveaways and trading toy bb guns, those subs would still be open. the fact is reddit was being used by vendors for direct deals of illegal shit, and in order to put that to a stop reddit had to ban all sourcing.
Banning both subs definitely stops the illegal transactions at the (relatively minor) cost of not letting people trade bb-guns on their site.
Big ol' [citation needed]. This just moves it to r/beaniebabytrades, where you have to not explicitly say you're trading firearms. The only way this helps is by making those subreddits less discoverable, but anyone with an interest in guns will go to another subreddit, and get clued in by the members there.
So, reddit is moralizing, has a logically inconsistent position, and deserve to be called out for that.
I want a new internet in which content is NOT posted on platforms. I want to host my own videos and host my own pictures.
This is where we are going. I really hope that the greater public realizes little by little that the tradeoff of the ease of use of those platforms is that they lose all freedom of speech or control over their content.
Not acceptable.
This is infrastructure is poor in some places, some areas have failing infrastructure (such as flint MI)
These types of projects require an elected official to see beyond their term limits. Something few of them can do.
i.e. see beyond the need to focus on short-term sugar highs for voters, to get re-elected every 2/4/6 years.
Politicians think short-term for the same reason public CEOs so often do: near-term placating to retain their position.
I can relatively easily block Facebook if I want to, on every site I visit. Try figuring out a way to eliminate all of the NSA's data hoovering of you. Tell the TSA you're not giving them your device, etc.
The Cloud Act is government legislation, that was not initially promoted by private industry. Private industry gave in over time because the alternative the government would pursue instead is far scarier. It was a compromise to keep the politicians in DC from doing something even more draconian. I don't agree with that compromise, however, just try saying no to them (see the Yahoo fines).
The internet already functions well enough for purposes of decentralization. Sure, there are some clear improvements and some less clear trade-offs that could be made, but the brass tacks is that these are social issues, not technical ones. They have to be addressed at the social level.
There has been some shadowy coordinated push behind the scenes over the last week, corresponding with the CLOUD Act and other dubious events, as described above. I believe this is just the beginning of such coordinated pushes. There are powerful forces at work looking to assert their authority and control over the open diaspora of the internet.
Americans take free speech for granted, but they forget that open forums where anyone can make a strong argument that lives and dies on its own merit are extremely dicey for the status quo power structure.
My belief is that the 2016 election pushed some fence-sitters over into the belief that the internet as constituted is a threat to their power, and that they are working triple-time to fix the situation. Ultimately, I believe this will evolve into something like a government verification and ID check system before someone is allowed to publish, and a YouTube-like strike system that will take away those rights as people are "abusive" or otherwise express wrongthink.
The relatively-free internet of the 90s and 00s will be driven into the darkweb where anyone interested in accessing non-corporate-approved content can be trivially mischaracterized as "a Russian agent or sympathizer" (if not much, much worse). What just happened with the purge on reddit is part of that.
The internet has been re-AOLized over the last several years as massive tech companies have consolidated against the grassroots nature of the homegrown internet. The CFAA and the Copyright Act allow companies to sue the living crap out of anyone who tries to free user data, and Google et al now have the resources to enforce this thoroughly.
The long and short of it is that a new network or protocol may offer some nice features, but it's not going to solve the key problem that ensures maintaining a free marketplace for ideas will always be hard: the rich and powerful don't like things that may threaten said richness and power. The internet is arguably the most powerful such tool invented since the printing press.
As another commenter expressed above, the real question is why this has taken them so long.
Less charitable: they already made their money and are fine with pulling up the ladder.