Spinning up another HN or Twitter is hard because the web is a lot more centralised these days. Back in the old days you could spin up an alternate IRC channel or web forum and have a decent chance of succeeding, I saw it happen and even did it myself once or twice.
> It is like creating a new whatsapp group or a new instagram profile nowadays, which also has higher chances of succeeding, inside the walled garden of someone else.
The point is it's now quite easy to get banned from the whole platform. Whereas in the old days it was pretty hard to get banned from a whole IRC network (it would happen if you were DDoSing the network or insulting an ircop directly, but never just because you said the wrong thing in your own channels, and worst case even the IRC networks were less centralised than today's social networks) and virtually impossible to get banned from the whole web to the point that you couldn't make a new web forum.
> Back in the old days you could spin up an alternate IRC channel or web forum and have a decent chance of succeeding
Yes I agree. It is like creating a new whatsapp group or a new instagram profile nowadays, which also has higher chances of succeeding, inside the walled garden of someone else.