People hear the term Big Tech and don’t realize that it really means monopoly tech. There are few options for social media and each one has its niche. Additionally, if you intend to interact with friends or family, you generally are limited to the social media that they are on.
Creating a new social media to compete with Google/YouTube, Nextdoor, Facebook/Instagram requires billions of dollars. This is a huge barrier to entry and leads to monopolistic behavior. Scaling to the level where you can handle traffic and monitor posts for illegal activity requires billions of dollars. In addition to the cost of entering the market, there are existing audiences on the established sites, which is yet another competitive advantage. People are much more likely to join a site that already has many of the people that they already know.
These monopolies are a huge problem because rather than acting as an impartial utility, these companies police what can be said on their platform. The mega corporations are using their monopoly status to attempt to push their morality standards on the community. Facebook has censored Hernando Sportsman’s Club several times for advertising their gun and knife shows. Nextdoor says that saying “Blue Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter” can violate their community standards. Previously, they had banned these phrases.
These giant trillion/billion dollar companies constantly get users to provide value for them for free. Google asks you to review businesses and tells you how popular your photos are on their site and asks you to do more for them. This is a megacompany asking regular people to do things for free for them. They know nothing about our community and most likely could care less about the success of our community. It is insane that trillion-dollar companies asking local people to do things for free has become normalized.
These Big Tech companies create walled gardens for the user-provided content. It is difficult to take the content you have created to a new platform. The companies decide which content is shown and the reach of that content. After a little while, it is difficult to find content, so history is lost as well.
We need more options that represent large portions of the population. Not having their views shared leads to people feeling marginalized. There needs to be small and medium tech.
Local and regional news sites can help fill this void. They also provide high-quality original reporting and pay people to gather information. On large social media sites, there is little in-depth information because information providers are not paid. The producers of content often do little to no research before posting.
These small tech sites pay reporters to create high-quality articles. This enables journalists to provide comprehensive coverage as they are earning money for the story and can spend time researching the information they are reporting on. This verified information serves as a basis for reasonable discussion of issues since everyone has a similar understanding of the basic issues.
The small local tech companies, like independent family-owned newspapers, spend money in the community by hiring local writers and sponsoring events. The money you send to big tech leaves the community. This is why you shop local and why you should advertise locally.
If you love your community, you need to help your small and medium tech companies, not the trillion-dollar big tech companies requesting that you do more for them for free. These big tech companies have been built on the backs of millions of people who have not been compensated. Small tech can bring communities together by highlighting wonderful people, places, and events happening locally.
Rocco Maglio is the co-publisher of The Hernando Sun. He is also a software engineer and cybersecurity specialist.
