> Yeah, but Kickstarter always marketed itself as being synonymous with crowdfunding.
I think this is really the crux of the issue: That there are these quasi-monopolies for certain online services.
What's possible in crowd funding comes down to what Kickstarter does. Expected behavior of a search engine is what Google does. The standards of an online dictionary look like what Wikipedia does. And what microblogging looks like is now determined by Elon.
If in each area there was a small ecosystem of, say, three to five different players, they could each find their niche, competing on something like leniency towards such projects like Unstable Diffusion, or on how to interpret free speech etc and the users could choose the service that suits their own standards.
But since for many popular online services there is effectively a single go-to site, this one site gets to set the rules that everyone has to play by.
So how do we get more variety? I don't know. It seems to be inherent in how this market of online services works that there's always one who ends up with 99% market share.
I think this is really the crux of the issue: That there are these quasi-monopolies for certain online services.
What's possible in crowd funding comes down to what Kickstarter does. Expected behavior of a search engine is what Google does. The standards of an online dictionary look like what Wikipedia does. And what microblogging looks like is now determined by Elon.
If in each area there was a small ecosystem of, say, three to five different players, they could each find their niche, competing on something like leniency towards such projects like Unstable Diffusion, or on how to interpret free speech etc and the users could choose the service that suits their own standards.
But since for many popular online services there is effectively a single go-to site, this one site gets to set the rules that everyone has to play by.
So how do we get more variety? I don't know. It seems to be inherent in how this market of online services works that there's always one who ends up with 99% market share.