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Ask HN: Is de-platforming reversible?
4 points by skynet-9000 on Jan 12, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments
When I first started building things on the web in the 90's, people weren't de-platformed just for their speech or beliefs (no matter how bad it was), as long as it was legal.

Now I have to think through every little project and decide if it's going to fall on the bad side of some person at some vendor, or if even one of my users will say or do something that will do this. (Not to mention that the number of vendors that I need for any little project has exploded!) I have to wonder if my search results will be censored for me, as if I am somehow not an adult.

I can't help but feel like something very significant has been lost. It feels a lot more serious to the future of the net and to democracy than even losing a historical artifact like Geocities or Altavista.

This new way just doesn't feel sustainable. The sea change in the desirability of de-platforming, as if de-platforming your enemies is actually a good thing, just feels irreconcilable with the open ideals that the web was founded on.

Can we ever go back to how it was, and even if that were possible, would it even be desirable?




First of all, you are painting a false dichotomy. Plenty of people were "de-platformed" in the 90's. AOL, Geocities, MySpace, etc. banned or removed people all the time for perfectly legal actions. [Random Geocities example https://www.cnet.com/news/geocities-takes-down-site-rating-s... ]

Second, if you are building your business based on relying on a certain vendor then you should re-build your business.

Third, if your business cannot survive on any platform then you may want to re-think your business, but if you still truly love that business then go build it on the decentralized web and put in the hard work to make it work.


Contrasting Geocities or MySpace of decades past with coordinated bans from Facebook and Twitter in 2021 (not to mention AWS and Stripe) is knowingly disingenuous and not argued in good faith. Neither were communication monopolies.


Nor were they destroying livelihoods and entire businesses across a broad swath of supposedly competing companies.

The actions of today seem to have more in common with the union-busting blacklists across large companies of previous centuries. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklist_(employment)#United_...)


The OP very specifically stated that this didn't happen in the 90s. Facebook and Twitter didn't exist in the 90s, Geocities and MySpace did. Thus why the examples are from that era.


I don't think it's reversible. I think we are where we are, for better or for worse. The web will never be the same, and the world is worse for it.




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