Consolidation of capital into monopolies is a tale as old as the exchange of goods and services for currency.we just lived through a brief period where the Internet didn't follow those rules so rigidly. Those days are done.

Perhaps it's also time for a new generation of antitrust protections with our newer, expanded understanding about how companies undermine competition: oligpolies that are technically not monopolies, price collusion (rather than explicit price fixing), undercutting to extreme levels to put others out of business, SLAPP lawsuits, etc. If we're going insist on a "free market", then a highly competitive market is in our best interest.

I've been very critical of the Biden reelection campaign, but the thing that has put me at ease is the FTC going full tilt after very obviously anti-competitive behavior.

Is it full-tilt or is it just enough of measures to get through election season and then it's business as usual?

I don't see any FAANGs being broken up by antitrust, even though that point has been well overdue for nearly a decade. It honestly should have been done ever since those CEO emails about poaching talent came out.

Meanwhile they're grifting on collecting information from the entire population of North America, amassing untold wealth and influence.

Perhaps it's time to just admit that monopolies are the inevitable end result of capitalism, its natural state - and all attempts at anti-trust are basically treating the symptoms rather than the disease.

That's just about as totally wrong as one can be.

There were thousands of independent bookstores, record stores, hardware stores, you name it.

The oligopolies are criminals, period. Th eUS population is so distracted with the computer in their hand, and regulators so allured to the prospect of the revolving door, that there has been no adequate response...

Capitalism is generally good at the startup scale, to figure out who has the best ideas. Once we have collectively decided (or was forced into) a single or a few implementations, good job, you won! Now you are non-profit / state-owned company / worker coop.

You can extend the blame to anything. Look at reddit or hn. They not only took over all these old tech forums and sites, but their very existence means users who would have been on those would be forums aren’t even available. Maybe even worse is how news orgs like nyt or cnn or fox news have stolen their customer base from local news orgs. Chances are if you don’t live in dc or ny your local news org is a shell of its former self and probably mostly republishes ap wire news, and local issues aren’t well understood by most anyone.

And then there’s Discord, which also takes over from existing forums, but which has the additional distinction of being a complete pain to search.

As well as being a pain to search, it's complete black hole for information.

The trend of more and more projects and companies using Discord as their primary forum for support, docs, and discussion boards is probably not one that will be looked back on as having been a good idea.

I worry that there's so much valuable information stored in prior chats that will simply disappear if Discord ever goes away.

In addition to this, this valuable information is not accessible/searchable via the web without a Discord account. Plus there's the 100 server limit for free accounts, which can become a problem depending on how many projects/communities one is involved with.

That being said, Discord is convenient and cheaper to license/host communities than Slack, which I think is part of the allure.

> Maybe even worse is how news orgs like nyt or cnn or fox news have stolen their customer base from local news orgs.

These news orgs didn't kill the locals, or even "steal" their customer base. It was the death of classified ads and other ad revenue. Google and Facebook stole their customers, not the NYT.

If people were reading the paper the ads would still have a lot of value

That's not true and is part of the problem. Paper ads only have "brand value". Advertising on Google/Facebook allows you to target your ads at males, 35-44 who have expressed interest in cars and are registered republicans.

Something Awful is still alive and well.

I feel like HN is just the right size. Reddit is a whole another ball game.

I feel like it was Reddit who more successfully cannibalized forums.

And Discord.

It is not the same experience, but Discord servers often act as community hubs in the same way private forums did before. I seems to be eating Facebook too.

You're right about Amazon (and would have been onto something about Google or even Apple), but I think you overstate FB.

They're in a quiet, desperate search for a new line of business to justify a trillion dollar valuation as ad tech revenue gets chipped away at by privacy regulation and eyeballs drawn to other networks. They even rebranded their whole identity around a moonshot idea for one.

Poaching little startups is something you might be able to see here and there but isn't something they can or do distract themselves with overall; not nearly to the degree or scale that Amazon does.

For Amazon, it's a top line business stragy. For Facebook, it's something a manager here or there might drive for a little attention.

> Forums used to exist... now it's FB.

Forums are alive and well. When I look at the forums I was active in pre-FB, about half are still up and active.

Come on a dystopian duopoly with corporate wars on the backdrop of draughts and starvation is exactly the future everybody pictures themselves and their kids in. Or as the kids say these days: but for a brief moment in time we created a lot of shareholder value.

/S

> I don't know if it's that kind of world I want to live in.

I do.

The "do" refers to "know" or "want" ?

The knowing. I definitely don't want to live there. I have successfully unsubscribed my household from the Prime subscription. I haven't ordered anything from them in many years. And never will again if I can help it.

Indeed. Seeing the downvotes, it seems many people misunderstood your comment.