Spotify deletes 70 Joe Rogan episodes

Yes, I agree with almost everything you said. However, the issue is that platforms are consolidated. Depending on your chosen format of content, there are only 2-3 viable platforms to reach people - and for some types of content, only one.

And if those very small number of platforms decide to, or are pressured to, delist content or a content creator, this is bad. Okay, you don't want to call it 'censorship', so lets invent a new term - 'kindacensorship'. Kindacensorship is identical to censorship. It has all the properties of censorship and all the negative effects of censorship.

If we had our present day internet infrastructure in the 1950s, there would have been moral outrage at, for example, gay content. And youtube and twitch and reddit would be kindacensoring all gay creators, and all who say that maybe homosexuality isn't so bad, and everything culturally adjacent to these topics. Because the majority demands it. And the majority would have demanded it, because that was the culture of the 1950s.

Then, all those gay creators would have been forced off all platforms, all internet infrastructure, and from all types of mainstream media - tv, radio, etc. Yes, they could have still written their thoughts, but it is an absolute guarantee that they'd languish in obscurity, reaching only each other, but not the masses.

(If we had our present day internet infrastructure in the 1900s, there would have been moral outrage at people talking about desegragation. Or wanting to abolish the monarchy. Or communism.)

Is it not obvious that this would have been bad? Kindacensorship would have stopped dissenters, would have halted the social evolution. And this is exactly what is happening now. The only reason silencing gay people sounds bad, and silencing Joe Rogan sounds good, is because the one message is culturally acceptable, and the other has not yet passed to the Overton window of acceptability. And if we allow kindacensorhip to grow, we will culturally stagnate. All dissenters will be silenced.

Kindacensorship is identical to censorship in form, and in function. Who cares that it's not the government banning books, and it's a (very) small cabal of technological companies deciding what can and cannot be said? Is this somehow better? I genuinely don't think it is.

And I don't know what I'm proposing, exactly. Not sure I know how I'd renegotiate the social contract. I just know that I'm seeing kindacensorship everywhere and it. is. bad.

Ironically, I see this on HN, too. Not always, but frequently enough.

What I'm talking about is comment sections (often about economics, climate change, etc.) with commenters who post with iron-clad confidence, only to be contradicted by other commenters who take the opposite position with the same confidence.

I read these dueling comments and think, "Everyone seems so sure of themselves. But I have no clue as to who is correct here."

I find this jarring because: a) somebody has to be wrong in these wars of dueling facts and b) I'm surprised because I feel that HN is enriched with reasonably bright people who I'd expect would be more circumspect with their comments.

I'm not surprised about the abject confusion that the general public has when discussing similar topics, especially since I am often confused reading HN comments. I know that's arrogant of me, but there's truth in there, too.

tldr: If I can't get a handle on dueling "facts" when reading HN, how the hell can I expect Joe Rogan or his listeners to do the same?

Is Joe Rogan really the problem? If you don't like it, don't listen to it. I don't.

Someone else framed this in terms of centralized vs decentralized distribution, which brings up a lot of important considerations — if Neil Young or Joni Mitchell would just distribute their songs themselves, they wouldn't have to issue an ultimatum. Likewise, if Rogan did so he wouldn't be the target of censorship.

But why isn't Young making that his hill? He doesn't care about freedom of speech, he just wants his ascendant. And Spotify could do what used to seem to me to be common sense, support its artists and drop those calling for restrictions on other artists' works.

This is a bad cultural route we're headed down. It doesn't go anywhere well. "Cancel culture" became a sort of buzzy topic of conversation, but it's a real problem and goes deeper than the referent of that catchphrase.