A Glimmer of Hope for a Decentralized Internet

If you don’t own your online services, you’re at the mercy of whoever does. This rule has always been true, but hasn’t been obvious until recently. Service providers have become increasingly tyrannical and arbitrary with the exercise of their control. More and more people are finding themselves banned from services like Facebook and YouTube. Compounding the issue is that the reasons given for the bans are often absurd and that’s assuming any any reasons is given at all.

This type of abusive relationship isn’t good for anybody, but is especially dangerous to individuals with money on the table. Imagine investing years of your life in building up a profitable business on a service like YouTube only to have Google take it away without providing so much as a reason. Some content creators on YouTube are beginning to acknowledge that risk and are taking actions to gain control over their fate:

Whether he’s showing off astronomically expensive computer gaming hardware or dumpster-diving for the cheapest PC builds possible, Linus Sebastian’s videos always strike a chord, and have made him one of the most popular tech personalities on YouTube.

But Google-owned YouTube gets most episodes of Linus Tech Tips a week late.

Now, they debut on his own site called Floatplane, which attracts a much smaller crowd.

A handful of content creators are mentioned in the article. Most of them are too nice or perhaps timid to state the real reasons they’re seeking alternatives to YouTube: YouTube has become a liability. Google; like Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and other large online service providers; has been hard at work destroying all of the goodwill it built up over its lifetime. There’s no way to know whether a video you upload to YouTube today will be available tomorrow. There isn’t even a guarantee that your account will be around tomorrow. If you post something that irritates the wrong person, or more accurately the wrong machine learning algorithm, it will be removed and your account may be suspended for a few days if you’re lucky or deleted altogether if you’re unlucky. And when your content and account are removed, you have little recourse. There’s nobody you can call. The most you can do is send an e-mail and hope that either a person or machine learning algorithm sees it and have a bit of pity on you.

I’m ecstatic that this recent uptick in censorship is happening. In my opinion centralization of the Internet is dangerous. Large service providers like Google are proving my point. They are also forcing people to decentralize, which advances my goals. So less anybody think I’m ungrateful I want to close this post by giving a sincere thank you to companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon for being such complete bastards. Their actions are doing wonders for my cause of decentralizing the Internet.