Google Drive bans distribution of “misleading content”

Early on Fauci was telling everyone how useless masks were [1].

I have a couple people in my social circle that were banned from fb for saying he was wrong early on about masks being ineffective. And several others were banned later for pointing out fauci's earlier stance and calling it all propaganda. You are not allowed to think for yourself. Pick up that can.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE-XVfZCX-o

"All these services are easy to replace" - I would like to agree, but I think that statement trivializes the endeavor a bit too much.

For Docs for example: Sure, from a technical standpoint, creating a webapp that lets you modify a document, syncs over new changes on a regular basis, and lets multiple users collaborate on the same doc and the same time is certainly harder than making a hello world calculator, but it's definitely not that hard. Most of us could figure out how to do it, especially since it's 2021 and our hardware is up to the task.

However, what is stupidly non-easy, is getting billions of people to use your solution, and for it to become the "standard" in society, for powerusers and non-powerusers alike, and for it not to have hiccups when a billion people use it. Oh, also, you need to somehow pay for the physical infrastructure that supports it, and the human beings that maintain it (hardware + software).

The situation would be even more complicated for YouTube because of the nature of the content, i.e. a single video on YouTube might be viewed by billions of people, while even the most popular docs are viewed by thousands at most, and even then making a copy of a text document to then distribute off-platform is pretty trivial.

And yes, we can spit out terms like blockchain w/ proof of stake, IPFS, etc. - but the tech isn't even the hard part, it's everything else that's hard (adoption, consensus, complexity for non-powerusers, funding, etc.)

It's an interesting form of curation, as if something has been censored, now that's something I'm interested in knowing about. Dangerous means powerful, and powerful is valuable. Most of everything is crap, but what's not crap is stuff that genuinely puts dominant narratives at risk.

I can't remember the name of it, but there is a feature of change in systems that has to do with complexity, where the change happens rapidly as the result of explosive exponential growth, and not relatively linear increments (period doubling?). In that view, something being censored is a good leading indicator that it's a candidate for sudden growth.

I recently started working on a program that distributes my own relational data in my web browser (IndexedDB) between my devices using WebRTC so that I can build applications on top of it. It seems like it will be needed more and more over time.

I agree it's among the possibilities, but one should be honest about their likelihood. Right now the consensus is that natural occurrence is the most likely explanation, but there is not solid evidence to discard a lab leak.

They don't have solid evidence to disprove a lab leak. Disproving is a lot harder that proving.

I must concede that your statement wasn't blatantly false, but it uses weasel language to appear more truthful than it is.