I gave advice, advice rarely follows what you've experienced or people wouldn't feel the need to give it.

It could. Imagine 80% autonomous vehicle traffic, 30% of that is multipassenger capable taxi service. Autonomous vehicle lanes moving reliably at 75mph. With this amount of taxi service the advantages of personal vehicle ownership falls and the wait time for an available pickup diminishes rapidly. China has many areas with pretty good public transportation. In the US, tech advances and legislation changes to enable the above model is better suited to the existing infrastructure.

Because artists are still there.

I think you're missing some key points. Any file hosting service, no matter what, will have to deal with CSAM as long as people are able to upload to it. No matter what. This is an inescapable fact of hosting and the internet in general. Because CSAM is so ubiquitous and constant, one can only do so much to moderate any services, whether they're a large corporation are someone with a server in their closet. All of the larger platforms like 'meta', google, etc., mostly outsource that moderation to workers in developing countries so they don't have to also provide mental health counselling, but that's another story. The reason they own their own hardware is because the hosting services can and will disable your account and take down your servers if there's even a whiff of CSAM. Since it's a constant threat, it's better to own your own hardware and host everything from your closet so you don't have to eat the downtime and wait for some poor bastard in Nigeria to look through your logs and reinstate your account (not sure how that works exactly though).

The main difference being the consequences that might result from the surveillance.

Interesting post! While I see the appeal of these platforms, I still find tools like chatgpt português much more useful for creative and intelligent conversations. Just my take!