It's a matter of resources, not corporate status per se. For better or for worse, the current status quo largely democratizes content promotion. You and I can post these two comments here and put our ideas and names in front of a bunch of strangers for $0.

In a world where the risk-adjusted cost of allowing third-party comments on your platform shoots up, someone has to pay that cost. A personal blog hosted on your server might struggle to find any significant reach without a real advertising budget, because distributing speech/content that promotes your platform would no longer be ~free.

I don't necessarily believe that the major social media platforms would fully evaporate, but I'd expect some or all of these changes across the ecosystem:

* Massively scaled up LLM-based moderation/censorship.

* Replacement of direct user content posting with an LLM-based interface (to chat with an LLM about what you want it to write on your behalf).

* Payment-gated public posting, e.g. monthly or per-post fees to cover liability/insurance and/or LLM inference costs. Possibly higher fees for direct authorship vs LLM pair posting.

* Massive rise in adoption of decentralized architectures, either via current mainstream platforms if legally tolerated or via anonymous dark web platforms otherwise. Maybe Tor becomes as normalized as VPNs, or maybe the Western legal environment shifts hard against general-purpose computing.

I understand where this sentiment is coming from, but I think it's taking a lot of the current status quo for granted. What you guys are proposing isn't necessarily a targeted change that would simply make bad guys stop doing bad things. It's more likely a massive structural change that would dramatically alter the social and economic fabric of the internet as we know it, and not in a way that most of us would like.