Occasionally over the years I've propounded on a concept which I call "hub value".
It's the reason why a state like Kansas can lower corporate taxes to the floor (I remember there was a governor named Sam Brownback who tried this) but not be able to entice businesses to migrate there from California: all your business partners are already in California. All the talent has already migrated to California since that's where the jobs are. If they all simultaneously migrated then the cost would be mitigated but the first to move will suffer a loss. And so, nobody moves. The passive influence that comes from already being big is what I call hub value.
Hub value isn't all-powerful. Texas is gradually gaining on San Francisco or Los Angeles even in the tech sector. For example, laxer zoning laws make it easier to build AI data centers in the state than in California. But basically no matter what California does it'll continue to be a big player for years, and probably decades, thanks to its massive pool of hub value.
This applies to the internet too. "Alt-tech" competitors to, say, YouTube or Wikipedia (e.g. Odysee and Conservapedia) will always struggle to take off because YouTube and Wikipedia are where things are already at. Granted, the cost is less than the California-Kansas example because you can visit multiple sites, but when what you find is a ghost town will minimal content then you'll be tempted to spend more time where a lot of content already exists and less time where that's not the case. The people uploading content to competitors sites, in turn, will be discouraged by this fact and upload to YouTube or Wikipedia instead.
But we may be entering an age where internet hub value is breaking down, and the first experiment is Grokipedia.
Grokipedia, an AI-generated alternative to Wikipedia, launched on October 27. At the time of writing (three days in) it has 885,279 articles available; in comparison, English-language Wikipedia has 7,082,943 articles after 24 years.
To put it another way, if Grokipedia can sustain its current rate of growth then it will have as many articles as Wikipedia in under a month.
Browsing Grokipedia it seems to work. I've put in such random search results like:
-Sword Art Online
-A Confederacy of Dunces
-Beverly Cleary
-Ampersand
-List of Presidents of Namibia (this one only gave me President of Namibia, which included a list of officeholders lower down in the article)
-Beer Pong
-Trapdoor Spider
-Romulus Augustulus
This is absolutely unprecedented by the way. Something like Conservapedia, which specializes in covering political topics and little else, could never dream of having such a massive scope of content. It even seems to hold up well compared to Wikipedia itself, its article on RFK Jr. including biographical details missing from the latter (e.g. a successful 1997 lawsuit against a polluting company called Consolidated Edison).
For 20 years Wikipedia has stood as the online gatekeeper of "facts". An either glowing or excoriating article about a political candidate can decide (and probably has decided some) elections. And of course, the nature of said articles invariably depend on the political lean of said candidates. But now a more politically neutral alternative might pop up out of nowhere thanks to the AI revolution. And if Grokipedia itself proves dissatisfactory to some then who's to say Grokipedia won't prove but the first in a long line of overnight Wikipedia copycats?
Anyway, you can check out Grokipedia for yourself here:
https://grokipedia.com/