>> We are going to have the government deal with shitty Mods?

Breitbart.

>> Back when I was a kid, if the Mods sucked, you'd stop going to that website.

If websites existed when you were a kid, you are not the target market for this tool.

>>Serious question, why do unhappy customers keep buying what bad companies sell?

That's how addiction works.

>>I stopped using Facebook and many subreddits. I have this self control.

Then they have won. Every time a reasonable person disconnects, the ratio of unreasonable people on a platform increases. Unreasonableness, extremism, creates greater engagement, generating more add revenue.

>> Is there anyone here that cannot stop visiting bad websites?

We are all here aren't we?

The platform shouldn't exist as a monopoly for discussion in the first place. If all people, when facing a website that sucked, just stopped using the damn website like GP and me, the platform wouldn't have this much power.

Seriously, what's so hard with not using social media? Aren't there plenty of offline stuff to do and people to talk to in meatspace? Is its prevalence a uniquely American thing?

Are you kidding? Social media companies literally have people on their payroll whose entire job is to increase engagement. They turn the sites into addictive Skinner boxes because the are incentivised to do so.

Of course it's hard to quit. It's designed to be hard to quit.

I would hardly classify Hacker News as a bad website. My inflammatory comments are routinely downvoted as they should be. My good posts tend to be well received. This is quite frankly one of the least terrible places on the internet for discussion with a relatively wide viewpoint for the internet. We've got libertarians, liberals, conservatives and even a few greens and generally we agree to keep it mostly civil because that's why we're all here. There's no crappy memes, no quizzes. We're explicitly here for the comments.

>>Serious question, why do unhappy customers keep buying what bad companies sell?

Many good convos have happened on this -- Facebook is de facto required for participating in some levels of society. I've heard of people being required to use Facebook to get information as vital as announcements about school for their kids. For those of us with poorly understood chronic illnesses, Facebook is the only place we can find people who share our condition and can trade information with. Many community events are only announced through Facebook events. Essentially, it's infiltrated so many aspects of life that it's become very difficult for many people to fully walk away from.

If Facebook disappeared overnight, my life and that of most of my social circle wouldn't change that much. I think the issue of Facebook penetrating everyone's aspects of life is perhaps unique to your side of the Atlantic. They only have the power people chose to give them. You could opt out any time you like, it's maybe not convenient but it's liberating. See Stallman on freedom etc.

I think part of the problem is that they have the power that OTHER people choose to give them. If my entire social circle uses Facebook then I don't have much of a choice.

Yes, many people, even (!) in Hacker News.

It's sometimes not about self-restraint, and that's an ongoing discussion here: What do you do when everybody else are on these services?

Where do I go for a Twitter sized audience if they ban me from their platform? The only real competitor is gab and there's barely anyone using it. The problem right now is these platforms are basically monopolies and are aggressively censoring people on the right side of politics

Isn't it a bit conceited to think you'll have access to that audience? I don't believe my twitter account is reaching that many people. If the message is strong enough and will get to that many people somehow, might as well start a blog.

> I don't believe my twitter account is reaching that many people.

That's up to your message though. If people share your tweet, it might. If you're banned from the platform, that's not an option, no matter how many people find your opinion valuable, they'll never see it.

The amount of people who see even the most popular tweets is a small subsection of Twitter. If you're banned from the platform, sucks to be you. You shouldn't have violated their TOS. If you didn't understand the TOS then you shouldn't have joined. Pewdiepie is one of the biggest people on Youtube, how many people have heard of him? Outside of that slice of society not many. How many people could tell you off the top of their head who Marshall Mathers is? Noam Chomsky? Outside of tech how many people know who Linus is? The point is there are very, very few people who have their voices heard. Even famous people aren't guaranteed to have their tweets read. If you want a platform where people will listen you have to control your own platform, like Oprah or the pope. You have to have as many people following you as Oprah to have a guaranteed voice.

> You shouldn't have violated their TOS.

Since their TOS are vague, and they enforce it very discriminatory, deplatforming is obviously not about "violating TOS".

> The point is there are very, very few people who have their voices heard.

I agree wholeheartedly. My point isn't that everybody on Twitter automatically reaches everybody else on Twitter. It's that he has the chance. If you tweet something that everybody loves, you can go viral. If you're banned, you can't.

Everybody can run for office, but not everybody can win. If you block people from running in the first place, you better have some damn good reasons, and they better not be "I don't like their political opinions".

Why do you need a Twitter sized audience?

People were able to organize and communicate effectively on the web before Twitter, Facebook, etc. Not being on one of the big social media silos isn't de facto censorship, it's just slightly less convenient than being on them.

But it's still entirely possible to build an audience elsewhere.

Isn't the fact that gab is dominated by fascists and racists evidence that Twitter isn't banning people just for being conservative?

Nobody is entitled to a Twitter-sized audience. I agree monopolies are bad but the fact that right-wing tolerant platforms are shitshows and niche compared to more mainstream ones is perhaps not the fault of the left. Maybe, just maybe, there aren't that many people holding (and willing to listen to) the kind of opinions commonly posted on gab et al.

Arguing for deplatforming while using a throwaway account to not get deplatformed on your main is somewhat ironic. ;)

Not sure that athrowaway was arguing for deplatforming, though...

I understood that "right-wing tolerant platforms" are different from platforms as deplatforming anything right-wing, as in "not tolerating" it, and that this would be all good, but I might have misunderstood.