Re:They're deleting my channel, but they don't know why? [vi...
by nemothekid on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @08:46PM
(#24574127)
>So when a competitor comes along, the natural way to differentiate is to say "we won't ban you unless you break the law".
We are "Social Media X but with no moderation" is a braindead business strategy. I'm failing to find a source, but moot (this founder of the anything goes social website), once said of all the 4chan clones, the ones that never lasted were the ones that were started by people who decided to make their own 4chan clone after being banned from the site. Naturally people discovered those clones were filled with insufferable asshats and died off.
Naturally when you look at these video sites, very few of them actually offer the number one thing I would expect from a YouTube clone - revenue sharing. So not only are they not competitive with YouTube, but for a large group of people kicked off of YouTube, they aren't even substitutes.
Of the people who get kicked off of those platforms, a significant number will be socially obnoxious. They of course have "freedom of speech but not freedom of reach", and our legal structure has decided that the big platforms get to enjoy being both a platform and a publisher, simultaneously.
So when a competitor comes along, the natural way to differentiate is to say "we won't ban you unless you break the law". So the socially obnoxious flood to the new plaform, and pretty quickly, you've got a core user base of people who like that, and a few people who are merely willing to tolerate it on principle.
I don't think this was originally strategic, more a matter of not wanting socially obnoxious voices on the platform, because advertisers don't care for that sort of thing. But it so obviously contributes to the continued dominance of the big platforms that there's no chance they haven't noticed.