Roissy has been deplatformed

Or so I hear, and Google doesn’t bring it up either, not even the shut down version.

I worry about deplatforming much less than many of you do.  I remember the “good old days,” when even an anodyne blog such as Marginal Revolution, had it existed, had no platform whatsoever.  All of a sudden millions of new niches were available, and many of us moved into those spaces.

In recent times, a number of the major tech companies have dumped some contributors, due to a mix of customer and employee protest.  So we have gained say 99 instead of say 100, and of course I am personally happy to see many of the deplatformed sites go, or move to other carriers.  Most of the deplatformed sites, of course, I am not familiar with at all, but that is endogenous.  I would say don’t overreact to the endowment effect of having, for a while, felt one had literally everything.  You never did.  You still have way, way more than you did in the recent past.

You might be worried that, because of deplatforming, the remaining sites and writers and YouTube posters have to “walk the line” more than ideally would be the case.  That to me is a genuine concern, but still let’s be comparative.  Did you ever try to crack the New York publishing scene in the 1990s, or submit an Op-Ed to the New York Times before the internet was “a thing”?  Now that was deplatforming, and most of it was due to the size of the slush pile rather than to evil intentions, though undoubtedly there was bias in both settings.

Another “deplatforming” came with the shift to mobile, which vastly favored some websites (e.g., Facebook) over many of the more idiosyncratic competitors, including many blogs (MR has done just fine, I should add).

Developments such as VR, AR, 5G — or whatever — will reshuffle the deck further yet.  There will be big winners, many of which are not yet on the scene, and some considerable carnage on the downside.  Maybe you won’t be forced off, but many of you will find it worthwhile to quit rather than adapt.

There still has never, ever been a better time to be a writer.  What bugs people about deplatforming is the explicitness and potential unfairness of the decision.  It’s like prom selection time, where there is no escaping the fact that the observed choices, at least once they get past the algorithms and are reviewed by the companies, reflect very conscious decisions to bestow and to take away.  We have painful intuitions about such rank orderings…still, we are better served by the objective facts about today’s diversity and opportunity compared to that of the past.

I thank a loyal MR reader for the initial pointer.