The big challenge for publishers right now is censorship. Platform censorship happens in many ways:
- Visibility hidden because an algorithm in a non-chronological news feed thinks your content won't get enough engagement
- Visibility hidden because you aren't buying advertising
- Account banning or throttling because of grey area content (everything from nipples to politics)
- "De-monetization" (Youtube specific)
Most people using the internet are now aware of these problems. It used to be a fringe issue that like people doing SEO and spammers thought about.
Will it be easy for a platform to convince content publishers to return after it has chased them off the platform?
Facebook's usage exploded just as Myspace's was struggling to keep their servers up and was users were being hammered by very invasive ads. Once those users started logging on to Facebook instead, they never looked back. May be it was inevitable, but there was a very clear value proposition to users and it benefited Facebook immensely. The users were literally chased off of Myspace, by Myspace, and went to Facebook.
My hope is that we will get open protocol adaptation instead of startups building another walled garden to replace Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Youtube. Open protocols are better for everyone, including startups.
(and few things scare me more than a startup that is going to "fix email" by creating a new walled platform.)
Censorship is not the root problem. The root problem is spam. For example, the main reason that we all choose one of the giant tech corps to host our email is because of spam. Spam defenses are why it's so difficult to run your own mail server these days. Thus spam causes email provider centralization even though though there is no network effect lock in. Then with centralization you get the secondary problems such as censorship.
- Visibility hidden because an algorithm in a non-chronological news feed thinks your content won't get enough engagement
- Visibility hidden because you aren't buying advertising
- Account banning or throttling because of grey area content (everything from nipples to politics)
- "De-monetization" (Youtube specific)
Most people using the internet are now aware of these problems. It used to be a fringe issue that like people doing SEO and spammers thought about.
Will it be easy for a platform to convince content publishers to return after it has chased them off the platform?
Facebook's usage exploded just as Myspace's was struggling to keep their servers up and was users were being hammered by very invasive ads. Once those users started logging on to Facebook instead, they never looked back. May be it was inevitable, but there was a very clear value proposition to users and it benefited Facebook immensely. The users were literally chased off of Myspace, by Myspace, and went to Facebook.
My hope is that we will get open protocol adaptation instead of startups building another walled garden to replace Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Youtube. Open protocols are better for everyone, including startups.
(and few things scare me more than a startup that is going to "fix email" by creating a new walled platform.)