The web was never a commons. It all rests on accessing content hosted by privately owned platforms. The commons is SMTP, SNTP, and IRC. Digital natives don't care about these because they aren't shiny and expect that the free stuff they've been given all their life is an inalienable right.

Apple has intentionally killed chat apps other than email and centralized stuff by not allowing self hosted push servers.

Don’t blame this on young people, IRC was becoming popular again right around when the iPhone started to become necessary for everything.

Whats App works on Apple, Signal, Telegram. How has Apple “killed” chat apps? That makes no sense.

> chat apps other than email and centralized stuff

Emphasis added for clarification.

Rights don't involve being given "free stuff", they exist to prevents it from being taken away. Which is a super popular misconception (or at least misuse) all on its own.

Positive vs negative rights [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights

If you read that Wikipedia you linked it supports my position more than negates it. Positive rights are rarely if ever imposed on individuals or organizations of a country and almost always involve some sort of significantly limited contract which outlines the government's responsibility to fulfill them.

For example, there's a massive difference between saying "everyone has a right to healthcare" in a country than saying "the provincial governments of Canada has to provide a public health insurance option to tax paying citizens and temporary visitors".

When I walk into a doctors office as a Canadian citizen or enter the ER I'm still at the whims of the system. All that I know is that the financial costs of the what care I can find will be covered, care which is provided by a limited set of doctors, care the doctors decide to provide me often based on their perceptions of need and a broad definition of 'cosmetic'. If the doctors office is busy and all the ERs are full, or they don't believe what I say or that my symptoms don't require care, there's no one I can go to about my "right to healthcare" or right to spend the health insurance.

Proposing these limited arrangements as if they are positive rights does more harm than good. Once you add enough modifiers to make it accurate, you might as well not say it at all.

I know this matters little during political campaigns and all promises are non-binding so they might as well lie through their teeth as much as possible, up to the point people call bullshit. But it still significantly influences how we debate and discuss important topics, and it's a type of thinking which filters down into a lot of things which have little to do with political campaigns.

Politically, I don't disagree.

I do find this nomenclature helpful when trying to convince people.

Nobody has a right to someone else's property.

What kind of night clubs do you go to where there's a high bar of entry — but everybody is still allowed in anyway?

It's more like a strip club, where the beautiful people are unpaid strippers who don't even know that they are strippers. And even that's a poor metaphor.

Oh, no, plenty of people who are confident that they're beautiful are getting paid these days. Plenty of them stripping for it.

Spend just a little time on Twitter/Instagram/Tiktok or click on any given Patreon link and you're likely to come across new age digital strippers. If anybody is unpaid and making popular content these days, they're very unaware.

The way I read the OP's analogy is just as the Night Club places restrictions on who can enter, TikTok is also placing restrictions on who can post content.

And why I think the analogy does have some merit, is because the metric used to decide on who gets restricted is the very similar in both of these cases.

They don’t limit who can post content but rather whose content reaches the suggestions, regardless of a post’s popularity.

Also, again, the people turned away from the night club door still can’t go in. Took Too users who don’t post can still view content.

All of that may well be true.

However, if this article is correct, they also seem to favour good looking TikTok users, which is not unlike Night Clubs who also like to favour good looking patrons.

If the posted content is never shown to anyone then this is the same as not allowing the post.

TikTok is like Twitter in that you can follow people.

Something not trending on Twitter isn't the same as not existing or not showing to one's followers. Likewise, something not becoming a suggested TikTok isn't the same as not allowing the post wholesale.

if you can convince your peers to surf your profile, your content is still accessible I suppose

The web is still there, you can still dump some HTML in IIS on your crappy windows laptop from bestbuy and plug it into your router and have it show up on google (not that that’s a good idea.) Heck you can dump your html files on github pages with the same effect, you don’t even need to know git.

The web is still the web, most people still don’t bother using it.

Getting a domain on google is not as easy as it used to be. If your domain has few inbound links don’t expect to appear on google at all, no matter how unique your search keywords may be.

I run a extremely small website and I have never had an issue with being found on google. This is with questions to visitors as to how they found us, and google is a consistent answer. Do you also have anecdotal evidence supporting your claim that google does not host niche content?

Yeah my personal website is on google and I don’t put any effort into making it searchable.

If I actually had interesting things on there it would probably be on the front page for a few related keywords.