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Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

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Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#341

Post by nommm-nommm »

vectorpush wrote: post #340
nommm-nommm wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If someone takes a knee during the national anthem conservatives will say that person should be fired and naturally liberals defend that as free speech. If someone addresses a transgender woman as "he" liberals will say that person should be fired and naturally conservatives defend that as free speech. Isn't it possible to defend it as free speech AND say that person should be fired? Something like "its their right…

Threatening someone's livelihood based on their speech is about as antithetical to the idea of free speech as you can get (short of suggesting they should be arrested or killed for it). It might be different in a situation where the speech reveals a critical incompetency for an important job (like a judge who suggests certain races deserve harsher punishments or an MD that suggests homeopathy is a viable alternative…

Oh give me a break. It's free speech to be rude to other people. Being rude to customers and coworkers will get you fired. Censorship! Being in the news for being a huge dick outside of work, like the ESPN reporter was (she was caught on camera berating a clerk) will get you fired. You cannot have some sort of meaningful distinction. You MUST own up and take responsibility for your actions. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from responsibility and accountability. It doesn't mean freedom from any and all consequences.

This entitlement BS really annoys me.

Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#342

Post by vectorpush »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #341
vectorpush wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threatening someone's livelihood based on their speech is about as antithetical to the idea of free speech as you can get (short of suggesting they should be arrested or killed for it). It might be different in a situation where the speech reveals a critical incompetency for an important job (like a judge who suggests certain races deserve harsher punishments or an MD that suggests homeopathy is a viable alternative…

Oh give me a break. It's free speech to be rude to other people. Being rude to customers and coworkers will get you fired. Censorship! Being in the news for being a huge dick outside of work, like the ESPN reporter was (she was caught on camera berating a clerk) will get you fired. You cannot have some sort of meaningful distinction. You MUST own up and take responsibility for your actions. Freedom of speech doesn't…

> Being rude to customers and coworkers will get you fired.

Being fired because you're rude to customers or coworkers is obviously not a free-speech issue, that is a "disruption to the work environment" issue.

> Being in the news for being a huge dick outside of work, like the ESPN reporter was (she was caught on camera berating a clerk) will get you fired.

Once again, not a free-speech issue. If your job is to represent an organization as a professional public figure and you tarnish your public image by acting like a dick in public, that is clearly a situation where you cannot do your job effectively and so it makes sense that you might be fired.

> You MUST own up and take responsibility for your actions. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from responsibility and accountability.

That's an oft repeated platitude that doesn't really add much to the discussion because just about everyone agrees with that statement. If one's actions are causing a disruption at work or bad publicity for one's employer, it's natural that those actions might jeopardize one's job. What I'm talking about is calling for someone to be fired after they say things you disagree with as punishment for saying those things; the distinction between that and the former is that the employer's actions can be justified without taking into account whether or not the employer agrees with the employees speech, at the end of the day if you're bad for business the employer is not obligated to endure the burden of your choices, however, when individuals seek to get others fired because they dislike their speech or ideas, that is antithetical to the notion of free speech.

Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#343

Post by yummyfajitas »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #328
yummyfajitas wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't advocate creating any laws. I was simply describing a concept that goes beyond congress. However, lets roll with your thought experiment. Lets consider a variation of "equal rights" that applies to more than just the government - say it also applied to lending. It would require 2 extra draconian laws: 1) A law to force private entities to associate with people they dislike, even if that association causes to…

Which laws are those?

ECOA and FHA act, among others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Credit_Opportunity_Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Housing_Act

Surrounding these laws is a bunch of regulation and agency interpretation - i.e. if an agency doesn't like your lending/free association choices they'll hit you with lawsuits/regulatory actions that are themselves very punishing.

As a concrete example, see Figure 7 of this paper. This figure shows that lenders could avoid a lot of defaults if they did per-race isotonic regression on FICO scores. In non-technical terms, this means a black person with a FICO score of 600 is more likely to default than an Asian person with the same score, and this information is easy to use. However, lenders are legally forbidden from using this information; as a result, lenders must associate with people (potential defaulters) that they don't want to and Asian people must pay higher interest rates because of this.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-wQVEjH9yuhanpyQjUwQS1JOTQ...

Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#344

Post by Barrin92 »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #124
veddox wrote: post #74

I am staggered by the amount of people here who object to Imzy's "Be Nice"-policy on the basis that it limits free speech. To me that seems to be a rather flawed argumentation: a) The First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees free speech, explicitly does so in a political context ("Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech"). Imzy is not the US Congress, they don't have jurisdict…

The reason people raise issues of free speech is that Reddit-style sites act more like a public utility and less like a single community. Reddit is a community of communities. The argument is that Reddit itself shouldn't limit speech, but that the individual communities within it can decide for themselves how to regulate discussion.

and reddit really is just one aggregator among many others, we can play this Matryoshka thing all day.

Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#345

Post by zzzeek »

glenra wrote: post #336
zzzeek wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched the video and it is still completely obvious he was mocking that person's disability. perhaps you've never been mocked before but exaggeration is part of it.

You may have seen video of Trump , but you haven't seen video of the reporter in question. Here's some video of the reporter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baUuXQ443fA And here's Trump doing a similar impression of Ted Cruz (who is not disabled): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4604reEqk0 You can find more relevant videos (including one where Trump does a similar waving-hands-around thing in reference to an army g…

> Trump appears to be an equal-opportunity mocker; his mocking mannerisms do not discriminate between targets on the basis of physical ability. :-)

even if that were true, it doesn't matter. If you had a fun joke you like to make imitating blowing your head off with a gun, and then one day you did it in front of some people and all the sudden someone breaks down...that person's spouse killed themselves in reality in just that way. What would a decent do? They'd say, "I'm so sorry!". That's all! they'd apologize. Even though they had no idea their "joke" was actually going to hurt someone. So even if Trump's lie that he didn't know this reporter were true, if he were decent (which he is absolutely not), he'd apologize (for real. Like, you just spilled your drink on someone at a party by accident apologize).

The "jokes" we make are not always the same depending on context. Trump knew very well (despite lying that he didnt know this reporter personally) that the reporter in question was disabled. Even if his routine was 100% the same (which it wasn't), he still reveals himself to be a vile human being to launch into that impression knowing its resemblance to this person's actual physical disability.

But IMO that's all moot because he knew damn well he was specifically imitating the guy's disability. After all, that is Trump's entire appeal. He doesn't care about so-called "PC". That's the basis by which his voters like him, why can't they just own that? Just own it. These trollish denials like the youtube video are fooling nobody except his own supporters who might have some inner doubt that what he's doing is really acceptable (which it of course is not). He mocked a disabled person, and you think he has every right to do so, which in fact, he does! mock away. Mocking is not illegal. But neither is overwhelming disapproval of someone's behavior by others. Trump supporters need to get over it.

Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#346

Post by _b8r0 »

jdavis703 wrote: post #26

I signed up on their website, went through the onboarding flow and joined a couple of communities. Without them knowing anything about my political leanings they suggested a bunch of anti-Trump communities. I guess they're not trying to solve the "filter bubble" issue, but rather becoming the Reddit for liberals? I mean it's their business for them to run as they like, but I hope somebody can take us past the Breitba…

I signed up and they suggested I join the Fempire community.

I have to say I had high hopes for Imzy, but my experience was less than positive. I found it really quite slow and heavy (hopefully this has improved). I also found that the signal to noise ratio was really poor when I was a member, and a lot of the content was deeply polarising. That's not to say that one particular set of views are good or bad, but that it tended to reinforce the same views and ideas, creating a bit of an echo chamber filled with noise. (FWIW I've seen this to a lesser extent with Voat too, but that's an entirely different kind of animal).

I think the left/right dichotomy is going to exist for a while, especially in anywhere that supports political or politicised discussion. HN did it's best with a no politics week, hopefully that will take some of the heat out of what's a very emotionally charged time for many.

Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#347

Post by Nomentatus »

hsitz wrote: post #252
Nomentatus wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True that. Public utilities (traditionally pretty much anything with a network effect) require regulation; the government must get involved, and then governmental ethics ought to apply.

There exists doctrine in constitutional law where its guarantees are deemed to apply even when the actor infringing the right is a private party. This can occur in cases where a private party is deemed to be a "state actor". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_actor I would suggest that even large social media organizations are not "state actors", so federal constitutional protections don't apply. Of course, stat…

I think this is a bit to one side of the question. Where government is doing the regulating, then surely the government itself is a state actor and must not infringe constitutional rights or be a party to same. You can argue it doesn't have any business calling anything a public utility, but that would be a different argument.

Re: Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

#348

Post by norea-armozel »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #124
veddox wrote: post #74

I am staggered by the amount of people here who object to Imzy's "Be Nice"-policy on the basis that it limits free speech. To me that seems to be a rather flawed argumentation: a) The First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees free speech, explicitly does so in a political context ("Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech"). Imzy is not the US Congress, they don't have jurisdict…

The reason people raise issues of free speech is that Reddit-style sites act more like a public utility and less like a single community. Reddit is a community of communities. The argument is that Reddit itself shouldn't limit speech, but that the individual communities within it can decide for themselves how to regulate discussion.

There's a huge problem with calling sites like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and the rest utilities is that it implies there's no other means to communicate effectively on the web. The reality is that we have RSS, Atom, blogs, Bittorrent, and many other easy to use technologies for which anyone can share their content. It's not like these are hidden behind console commands on Linux as these are readily available for use via for-pay (and some free) providers. So, your argument doesn't hold in terms of the practical aspects of a utility who has a legal and material monopoly (the web cannot exclude other technologies and their adoptions like say the power grid can).
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