We have William Gibson novels nearly coming to life a few decades later. Celebrity and influencer obsession and the itch and the need for that dopamine hit to go viral. It's a disease.

Otherwise on topic, I see and feel the chilling effects on speech from those big platforms being discussed across America as well. I do not see any of it coming from the US government, though. I see it all coming from citizens wishing to control others' speech all around them, else they will whip out a phone and think they're some sort of vigilante over others' speech or wrongthink. This is tiresome and old already but I'm not comparing this to government level, authoritarian free speech removal. Still, it's having a mass effect on societal attitude, conversation, politeness, and all else, as far as I can tell.

I see a lot of clearly incorrect information being displayed here about l2 such as Lightning Network, and at odds with reality. I'm not addressing the posts but it seems lately HN comments have nearly become a pile-on of misinformation bike-shedding about Bitcoin and in the face of reality, these folks want to spread outright lies and falsities. You may not own Bitcoin and you may not like it, but it's going far when hundreds of comments are so boldly misleading. For folks who are into science and technology, and some who are hackers, the ethos doesn't check out spreading misinformation about energy usage, centralization, and fairness of the system. When I was growing up, hacking was all about freedom to explore, libertarian bent, and/or anarchy.

The cypherpunk movement from which Bitcoin sprang was very libertarian or even one could say classical liberal. This article attempts numerous times to, for some reason, compare libertarianism to communism which is quite absurd. Libertarianism is for as little system of government as necessary, for staunch individual liberty and property rights, and hands-off free market economies. Clearly, communism is for state controlled property and no individual rights, one-world state, and no individual rights at all. Communism seeks to replace free-market economies with everyone equal and no individual rights. It's absurd on it's face to even compare libertarianism to communism when they're at opposite poles. At any rate, I would hope people don't take all these fear-mongering anti-crypto articles just at face value and do some research into what crap they're reading.