The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

> Just as radio stations, newspapers, and television networks were the communications gatekeepers of earlier generations, we now have Internet gatekeepers keeping us in line, on line--preventing our voices from being heard by too widely

I am about the same age as the author of this piece. I think they are making a fundamental error with his comparison.

"Back in the day", radio stations, newspapers and television networks were the only actual public media (we could include zines perhaps, but they rarely had the printing capacity to reach a large audience). Their status was conferred by their capital requirements, legal status and in some cases, physical properties.

Today's internet gatekeepers only have the role they do because of network effects, and because people implicitly grant them that role. None of them have licenses from any government to do what they do (business license, sure; not a license to serve specific kinds of content the way that TV stations do).

The only thing preventing my voice from being heard more widely is that most people are watching/listening/reading in places I don't have the desire or capacity to conquer. But there are no hypothetical barriers to me becoming a wildly adored prophet, I just have to do the work.

I think it is both dangerous and misleading to make this comparison, but more significantly, it is also misdirecting. It leads us away from what we would need to do if we actually want to build alternatives, and instead draws comparison with utterly different media and legal frameworks.

> The only thing preventing my voice from being heard more widely is that most people are watching/listening/reading in places I don't have the desire or capacity to conquer. But there are no hypothetical barriers to me becoming a wildly adored prophet, I just have to do the work.

I agree with this comment so much. I have zero desire to participate in most social media and I think it's giving them too much power to suggest they are limiting your speech, etc. The media has done a truly horrendous job by using tweets and social media as news. As if 100 people chiming in with an opinion on something has much relevance in a world of billions.

I prefer my own space online and don't need it to scale, or be seen by thousands, or even be liked. Hell, I don't even run analytics on my site so I might be the sole visitor and I'm fine with that.

I think it is a fair comparison they just did not state it fairly well.

Back in the day you could create your own radio station too or make your own TV content and do it relatively affordably. But reaching a massive audience was multiple times more difficult and required help of one of the gatekeepers.

With the internet you can be heard more widely and cheaper yet (comparatively) but again if you want to really reliably reach a giant audience you again need the permission of the gatekeepers.

If modern politics have proven anything it is that you are not gonna become a wildly adored prophet without using a lot of different mega huge social media platforms no matter how hard you try.

> again if you want to really reliably reach a giant audience you again need the permission of the gatekeepers.

This is not true.

I suspect it is far more so than you're giving credit.

An entity which raises the ire of Facebook, Google (Web search, YouTube, and/or the Android marketplace), Apple (iOS marketplace), Amazon (AWS, publishing, retail), Cloudflare, other major hosting and service providers, etc., will have a hard time or high costs reaching an extensive audience.

Gatekeeping isn't specific to a single role or function, it's a property which emerges through cost structures, network effects, access to capital or talent, regulatory and political sway or vulnerability, and numerous other factors.

In an age of print, presses, paper, and distribution were limiting factors. Where these were controlled, fixed costs of production (writers, illustrators, editors) were amortised over the large number of copies which could be produced of a single issue or publication, and advertising attracted on that basis. Today, technical expertise in building infrastructure and support systems similarly is difficult to attain, but amortises technical staff and paid content (if any) across not and audience of merely thousands or millions, but of billions in the case of Google and Facebook.

It's possible for the equivalent of a zine to be produced and served to a much smaller audience (though one which would have made publishers of the 1860s, or 1960s, salivate), and at comparatively high per-member cost, though the absolute costs could still be low in most cases.

(Static sites and intelligent caching strategies can still make very-large-scale services on a shoestring budget viable.)

Discovery, promotion, engagement, and visitor insights / metrics are other areas in which today's media monopolies also acquire gatekeeper status.