> The "free market" will always, always end up with large fish eating up the small fish

I still think this has much more to do with market interventions enabling 'artificially' large economies of scale. Infrastructure, police, subsidies/grants, IP protections--all played and continue to play a massive role in shaping markets today.

There are spaces on the internet where people are nice to each other, it's just they're usually heavily moderated or invite-only where there's a consequence to being an asshole. People don't act nice on the public internet because there's nothing disincentivizing being mean.

I feel the opposite actually. I’m super hungry for information provided in good faith, but there’s an overwhelming amount of copypaste crowding it all out.

Exactly. I'm hungry for information and much of what I find is non information poorly researched and placed in SEO friendly listicles posing as information.

The challenge is sorting through that to find real information.

Sometimes I secretly wish the entire internet would burn to the ground and we'd get to start over clean. (Of course then I'd be out a job so I don't really wish that, but the thought has crossed my mind).

The "broken" thing is (and always has been) the existence of low cost, low barrier-to-entry competitors to monopoly power.

Yes. Makes me wonder who is putting money into the pockets of the legislators, because they have everything to gain by building deeper moats.

I think absentee ownership and zoning laws have a fundamental impact on the availability of housing. It seems outside of governmental concern because their impact is already so normal. It’s normal for rich people to own/rent land they don’t occupy or use in perpetuity. It’s normal to see almost everything zoned for car dependent, single-family housing.

Landlordship is older than high rent

Trust is the biggest thing missing from most forms of advertisement. I know I will gladly check out a product that a YouTuber I enjoy recommends, but banner ads/prerolls/TV ads/etc feel like a scam reel.

This is huge. There's a YouTuber I've been following for a stupidly long time, and if he recommends something, or even is sponsored by someone, I'll check them out. Same thing with acoup.blog - if there's a book recommendation there, I'll check it out in a heartbeat. Why? Because they've spent a long time developing trust with their audience. The YouTuber has been absolutely brutal about products, and has been extremely open about how people have tried to influence him one way or another when he's doing reviews. The author of acoup.blog has similarly put a lot of work in establishing his bonafides, so when he says a work is good or important, I know what he means by that.

I trust YouTubers (or whatever celebrity) even less than banner ads.

I know a pharmacist on Instagram that quit being a pharmacist and started hawking health supplements in between semi useful posts, mixing bullshit with truth and trashing the credibility of their qualifications.

I'll trust a product that a youtuber I like organically recommends. But I'd still not trust anything they "recommend" in a sponsored ad slot.

The only way you can (legally) pay for the former as a business is indirectly, via investing money into making a decent product rather than advertising.

There's a fun model I built once upon the level of monetization versus trust building activities a given YouTuber/influencer should do maximize monetization over any given time period. You can model the decay in audience trust per monetization.

We basically need a curation protocol.

This is the field of library science

The state suggests that people cannot play nicely en masse without violent control, but doesn’t actually back this assertion up with anything. Maybe I’m a conspiratorial nutcase, but my relationship with the state consistently feels like interacting with the world’s biggest protection racket.

Some authors clearly analyzed/described many facets of this: Leopold Kohr (the breakdown of nations), Mancur Olson, James C. Scott (Zomia), Jacques Ellul...

This is exactly in line with my experience as well. There is also an idea that all skilled players are grinders, which in my experience is definitely not true; having more games played than a professional usually signals to me that they're addicted to the game but don't care much about actually improving.

> Of course, I don't expect AAAs to offer an experience like this, because human moderation doesn't scale cheaply to 10s of millions of players.. race to the bottom <3

I think it does scale, but it requires users being able to host their own servers for your game. It doesn't scale in a way that maximizes control for the IP holder, however.