Untitled topic

You can very realistically "self host" up to a certain scale. Larger scale you can still do it realistically, but you can't just do it overnight. It takes a while to get all the pieces in place to handle that scale.

Really, there was a time when every company that had a website would spin up their own hardware and software...

Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook ban people all the time for calls to violence. Reddit made the national news last year because moderators of r/The_Donald failed to police the numerous posts of users who plotted to murder the governor of Michigan.

Parler, by contrast, did not moderate calls to violence. It quickly became a safe space for neo-fascists to plan, coordinate, and execute plots against the US government.

Parler was playing a completely different game to Twitter, Reddit, and FB. Parler was deservedly ejected from the stadium.

I voted yes.

Let's say that I want to start my own cloud hosting company. Say I'm Armenian and I don't want to host anything by the Turkish government. Shouldn't that be my right?

Say I have a Jewish employee who I don't want to offend, so I don't host holocaust denial websites. Shouldn't that be my right?

Let's say that I sign up Nike and they only agree to do it if I won't host Reebok. Shouldn't that be my right?

I don't see what's different here.

Amazon is far from a monopoly for web hosting. If you don't like their terms go elsewhere. If you are a cesspool like Parler, shame on you for not seeing the risk that AWS would drop you at some point.

There's all sorts of racist garbage on the internet and plenty of people with low standards or love of money who will host them. Go to one of them.

Is this kind of submission really a good idea?

I have real concern that polling like this only succeeds at falsely distorting and amplifying the small[0] differences between people within a community. It draws battle lines and suggests that people ought to take a position now and sort themselves into buckets. It does not ask us to think beyond a straight line from yes to no, black or white, right or wrong. It does not encourage us to remember our innumerable other shared interests and values.

An observer glancing at any of the submissions about Parler’s fate in the last week will clearly see that opinion is divided. Quantifying that division, as this poll does, might satisfy some curiosity for hard numbers, but what is the cost to our sense of belonging to a community to do so? What is the cost to our ability to put our differences aside in pursuit of larger goals?

The question of what to do about the influence of social media and conglomeration of power among big tech companies is clearly a defining one for our age, but I don’t know how we’re going to get closer to a thoughtful answer with polls like these which—intentionally or not—seem to me almost purpose-built to drive ideological wedges between people and nudge them toward taking hard-line positions. In a time where the lack of nuance itself is driving so many negative outcomes, this feels dangerous.

[0] I don’t mean that this is somehow a minor or unimportant issue, but rather that people on HN are more similar, even in disagreement, than two random people on the street.

This is the same Amazon AWS that has our CIA as one of its biggest customers?