> Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising.

The problem is, running broadcast networks is insanely expensive. You need either a lot of antennas (or other distribution points such as coax and fiber) around the country, or you need insanely large and power-hungry antennas (i.e. AM radio), or you need powerful data centers and legal teams.

Someone has to pay the bill, and so it's either some sort of encrypted pay-tv which most people don't want to pay (see: the widespread piracy), or it's advertising, or (like with social media) venture capital being set alight.

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majormajor 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Social media doesn't have to be that expensive to run. Countless forums out there for decades.

But especially if you allow audio/video then your moderation costs can get very high if you're aiming for more "broadcast" and less "community."

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mschuster91 16 hours ago | parent [-]

> Social media doesn't have to be that expensive to run. Countless forums out there for decades.

Said forums existed because of volunteers paying in the form of time. Moderation is expensive, so are legal liabilities and associated cost that have only increased over the last decades - DMCA, anti-CSAM legislation, anti-terrorism legislation come to my mind primarily - and especially, there is a huge workload to deal with abusive behavior from unrelated third parties: skiddies, ddos extorters, dedicated hackers hired by "competition", spammers, you get the idea. Someone always pays the bill.

There is a reason so many forums and mailing lists collapsed once Reddit took off. It just isn't worth it any more.

	▲	PaulHoule 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It helps a lot for a community to have a specific focus. For instance if it is photography technique or sports talk or Arduino programming almost all problematic content is "off-topic" and easy to delete without splitting hairs or offending libertarian sentiments. Similarly "no explicit images" is an easy line to defend, but anything past that like "no CSAM" is excruciatingly difficult. For a general purpose platform where people can post what they want, particularly if there is a libertarian ethos where people cry about "censorship", moderation is a bitch. My personal pet peeve is that on any platform that has DMs I get a lot of messages, particularly when starting a new account, for things that are transparently scams and if I was starting one today my feeling of responsibility leads me to the conclusion that I would not support DMs.