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.