Strong disagree here. Network effects are king here, and social media is a natural mono/oligopoly. Overcoming this requires the construction of a superior and more addictive product, and the incentives just aren't there for such platforms.
The smart move is to hit them with the hammer of regulation here. They can either be the small exclusive club with tight control over their members and their behavior, or the mass market app with minimal control over their userbase.
The alternative is to have the full cyberpunk future, where "I like <wrongthink>" means being cut off from everything. Banks, search, email. We're already seeing the slope, and it's pretty damn slippery.
> Overcoming this requires the construction of a superior and more addictive product, and the incentives just aren't there for such platforms.
Nope. You can have a smaller, simpler substitute if you have comparative advantage in some other niche.
DuckDuckGo is making a decent showing against Google, despite arriving on the scene almost 2 decades later. A handful of righty / unPC social media properties (Gab, Parler, whatever Lindell’s app is called this week, etc) are slowly eating into Facebook/Twitter market share because they promise less moderation.
Didn't said righty social media properties literally have to face existential threats like getting multiple hosting providers drop them?
Moreover, this is only something that's fine if you accept ceding control of the vast majority of communication to private control. I. E, we now get cyberpunk thoughtcrime dystopia.
> if you accept ceding control of the vast majority of communication to private control
When our lifetimes has it not always been this case? Newspapers, television, internet have always been this way (owned by an organization and provided with contractual limitations). Talking face to face in your own home is the only unabridged communication method, even in the USA. I have always found this issue strange that people demand that App Stores, cloud platforms, web hosting, etc must allow any content despite the companies’ freedom of association (and disassociation). We aren’t talking about companies which are covered by Common Carrier laws.
And “existential” doesn’t mean what you think it means. They are rebuilding on different platforms and other substitutes are coming online.
The smart move is to hit them with the hammer of regulation here. They can either be the small exclusive club with tight control over their members and their behavior, or the mass market app with minimal control over their userbase.
The alternative is to have the full cyberpunk future, where "I like <wrongthink>" means being cut off from everything. Banks, search, email. We're already seeing the slope, and it's pretty damn slippery.