Comment by willstrafach
8 years ago
I can understand that an app may be more convenient to use, but needing to use the website instead of an app seems pretty different than having no place at all to post the messsages that most users do not want on Twitter.
That's a fair point -- and it's great the web exists. Super-awesome, open platform. We're really lucky to have it, and here in the US, in a raw, uncensored form. Frickin' awesome.
But from a tech/convenience perspective, the web is pretty...janky. Native apps are where it's at. And those have centralized gatekeepers with absolutely no freedom of expression.
It's not just conservative-ish stuff like Gab that gets hit. Another example is Apple refusing to accept an app that sent notifications when the US assassinated people via drone strikes. I think this does real damage to the polity; this is an important political message that cannot be delivered by the most salient medium because of corporate censorship.
And in the artistic or gaming realm, there's all sorts of "adult themed" stuff that'll get you rejected from the store. It's like a return to the 50s before the various Ferlinghetti obscenity trials.
Do you think the app-equivalent of Lolita or Howl or the Tropic of Cancer of even American Psycho would ever make it onto the app store today? Highly unlikely.
(Maybe you don't think apps are as important as books, but I think they will be.)
(And again, more generally, the interesting thing is we seem to have rapidly culturally shifted, where many people value the desire to be protected from disruptive speech more than the freedom to speak without disruption.)
the web is pretty...janky. Native apps are where it's at. And those have centralized gatekeepers with absolutely no freedom of expression
Sure, the web is pretty janky now, but it's the future (if we have one for apps). Native apps are doomed. Progressive web apps are catching up fast, and the good ones are already providing a more seamless experience, particularly on mobile, than native apps can. Ask yourself, how many users now, on average, install new apps on their device from an app store?
And your example of Apple, while true, only puts a fine point on this. What developer wants to write 3 different apps instead of just one that works across all platforms? And Steve Jobs knew this and pushed devs to build iPhone apps using standard web technologies.
I think this is still very much an open question. My gut says native will matter more and more as time goes on, but we'll see...
Sounds more like an antitrust issue than a censorship issue to me. My local grocery store doesn't carry Daily Stormer magazine, but I doubt that'd be cast as "corporate censorship" by anyone.
Yeah, I agree. Without the monopoly, the censorship isn't hugely important (except maybe important to you as a site user, or as an interesting cultural trend).
I do think app platforms are natural monopolies, so I wonder if the best thing to do is regulate them somehow to ensure openness. E.g., require any app to be installable that does not actually do illegal things.
It's seems kind of heavy-handed, but the current situation of Apple heavily restricting the kinds of apps we can have seems very non-ideal to me, too...
(The web is a great escape hatch for all of this, as pointed out by some other commentators, but I think native is where the action is, and it'd be nice to have web-levels of freedom there, too.)