> If Facebook starts censoring posts or private person-to-person DMs with your URL in it
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/7/20903613/apple-hiding-tai...
Apple made it so you can't even type a Taiwanese flag emoji if you are using an iPhone in the PRC.
And what about when HN disappears the post talking about how Amazon disappeared the book you wrote? This thread is no longer accessible from the first (or second, or third, or...) page.
On this one I actually have put my money where my mouth is: I built an open-source tracker webapp specifically to note and display when HN does that.
This is entirely false. The books can still be put up as an .epub at a URL on any of thousands of servers that can be accessed by the entirety of the internet-connected Earth. Such hosting service can be obtained in 5 minutes for a pittance, and will easily serve tens of millions. For slightly less than a pittance you can serve the file to billions.
If Facebook starts censoring posts or private person-to-person DMs with your URL in it, we have another discussion to have, but until that time this is just the normal freedom-of-association choices associated with being unpopular. Amazon sucks for doing this, to be sure, but the TFA is committing a worse offense: claiming inaccurately to have been banned.
There has never been a time where it has been easier or cheaper to publish to literally billions-with-a-b.