Comment by Stranger43
1 year ago
But those are platforms, for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds rather then people sharing spaces on a single platform.
There was always an underground of filth(even in the pre-internet days) but unless you sought it out you werent actually exposed to it back in the pre-platform days.
It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).
>for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds
Eh this kind of discounts how the entire world has changed between now and then.
At one point online was something disconnected from who you were as in IRL identity. Really very few people posted back then (think tens of millions verses billions across the world). When you hung your modem up, that the online world and the real world were disconnected.
That seperated world no longer exists for any number of reasons caused by any number of actors. The real world affects the internet and the internet affects the real world, these are no longer separate entities, but things that are intertwined by billions of connected devices and sensors almost everywhere.
Quite often in the past middle sized sites got blasted by DOS attacks, and if your own small forum got a DOS/DDOS you could suffer some problems. Now, you don't even need an attacker to DOS most small sites, it's pretty damned easy to get search engines trying to index your site to take it off line, or for just random bots to be 99% of your traffic. People moved to big sites to avoid having to be said system administrators from all the crap that moved into the net.
>It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).
This is so true; on every internet forum or community, there are different moderators, rules and values for the community and on the Facebook for example there is only Facebook and its TOS. You are in the mercy of the Facebook when it comes to the content moderation and setting rules and values for the community.
Facebook has user-run groups, so there are at least 3 levels of moderation/rules there:
But the legislative power, to to speak, at the group level is quite weak. They can further restrict according to some values, which is fine as it is. Freedom of association. They can't control the UI.
It's simply that platforms are more convenient. Most bloggers never got a comment that wasn't spam, but platforms make it easier to find an audience. Platforms (if they're big enough) make it easier to find content relevant to your interests than webrings or link aggregators ever did. Most people don't want to learn how to hand-code HTML and run a server just to express themselves or communicate on the web. Curation is also a plus, but framing that as "wanting censorship" is disingenuous. What people want is stability and predictability.
It also doesn't really lead to a blandification of content. The quality of content on the web now is higher than its ever been. The value gained by being able to publish nearly effortlessly to the web without being a tech nerd is outweighed by the value lost in not being able to put a skull playing a trumpet in a site header.
There were plenty of ways to have a website without writing any HTML and without running your own server even 20 years ago.