![]() Nothing stops a private college from expelling any student who criticizes the administration, and nothing stops a private business from firing any employee who doesn’t support the boss’ preferred candidate. It’s a truism that the First Amendment only protects citizens from the government, not from other citizens. So instead of “let a thousand nations bloom”, it ended up more like “let five or six big nations bloom that we can never get rid of”. The only example I can think of where this ever worked was the Great Digg Exodus, where Digg screwed up their product so thoroughly that everyone simultaneously said this” and moved to Reddit. In order to compete with Facebook, you not only need a better product, you need a product that’s so much better that everybody decides to switch en masse at the same time. So not only do they have no competitors, but it’s really hard to imagine one ever arising. Amazon is the best because you can buy pretty much everything you want there Paypal is the best because most sites take PayPal. Facebook is the best because all of your friends are on it if I made a much better Facebook clone tomorrow no one would go unless everyone else was already there (Google found this out the hard way). Which suggests one reason why these sites are so dominant: their main selling point is their size. In that sense, there’s no real Facebook competitor except eg Orkut or Diaspora, which no one uses. milk: in theory you’ve always got the choice to drink either in place of the other in practice you usually know which one you need at any given time. But they’re not exactly competitors either – there are a lot of things Facebook is good for that Twitter fails completely, and vice versa. To some degree, if you’re unsatisfied with Facebook you can move to Twitter. These companies aren’t exactly monopolies. In practice, we tried this with the Internet for a couple of years, and then moved to the current system, where individual sites like blogs and little storefronts are in decline and conversation and commerce have moved to a couple of giant corporations: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Amazon, Paypal. In theory, this is supposed to lead to amazing communities as corporate states optimize themselves to get more customer-citizens and new polities arise to take advantage of deficiencies in the old. But it’s even more like a hypothetical corporate state CEO in a Patchwork or Archipelago – wield absolute power, tempered by the knowledge that your citizens can leave at any time – and if they don’t, skim a little off the top of their productive activity. The job of a community leader, be they a blogger or the CEO of Facebook, is a lot like the job of the Mayor of New York City: create a pleasant community where talented people will want to live and work, where wrongdoing is met with swift punishment, and where you can collect revenue without annoying your constitutents too much. They try to raise revenue, they establish a class system of Power Users and Premium Users, they deal with resentment from people who aren’t getting their way. ![]() They host cliques, power grabs, flame wars, even religious strife. They try to balance competing concerns like free expression and public decency. They work out rules for punishing defectors – your trolls, your harassers – and appoint a hierarchy of trusted individuals to carry out those rules. ![]() Internet communities – ranging from a personal blog like this one all the way up to Facebook and Reddit – share many features with real communities. A lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists envision a future of small corporate states competing for migrants and capital by trying to have the best policies.īut the Internet is about as close to that vision as we’re likely to find outside the pages of a political philosophy textbook.
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