Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#161

Post by ddingus » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 10:28 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #91

ddingus wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love you mom, but those people are fucking clowns. How can I help? (Have had this exact exchange. Took a while, but did resolve. Human problems take human work.)

Lane Davis's dad tried that approach, arguing to his son that he (the son) had fallen down a neo-nazi rabbit hole. Davis denounced his dad as a 'leftist pedophile' and stabbed him to death. I could supply a laundry list of examples, but the basic point I'd like to communicate is that once someone signs up to an eliminationist philosophy we have (to misquote Churchill) established what they are, and the only question…

Let's just say I am not getting upvotes on this. :D

Rather than actually have a real discussion, people prefer to "solve the problem."

It won't go well.

I will bow out of this discussion for now. There are places where a real conversation can be had, and this isn't one of them.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#162

Post by cptskippy » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 10:28 PM UTC

tinalumfoil wrote: post #126

braythwayt wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument works well in relatively small social groups where people generally can be relied upon to act in good faith, and where there are social disincentives to clinging to bad ideas after they have been refuted. When you have a small group with social bonds, you don't have to worry about a bad actor constantly repeating their already-refuted arguments to people who haven't heard the refutation. But when you ha…

People are better off hearing a bad idea and hearing it refuted then never hearing a bad idea. You could say, "well then detractors of the idea will have to keep refuting it" and you'd be right. That's how public forums work, and I hope you don't take everything your parent's believed for granted just because their detractors have already been "refuted".

I think the problem is that small groups no longer exist. The internet is a vast and deep public space just line our planet. You could never hope to explore every part of the internet just as you'd never expect to explore every inch of our planet. So just as it's possible for there to be vast parts of our earth that millions of people will see except for you, it's also possible for there to be vast public forums on the internet that rational thought won't ever reach.

* Typo

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#163

Post by lainga » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 10:30 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #150

minimaxir wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been screenshotting the front page for months Out of curiosity, why?

I honestly don't know why. Something just made me think I was going to want data about it someday.

Is this something you do manually...?

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#164

Post by SlowRobotAhead » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 10:31 PM UTC

yifanl wrote: post #57

lylecubed wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who decides what is and isn't a silly idea? For 40 years, Americans were told by the government to believe that low fat high carb diets were the key to a healthy life. Not only is that not true, but it's never been true. There was never any evidence to support that stance. And yet, that was the official government policy and subsequently the commonly held belief for 40 years. "It ain’t what you don’t know that ge…

If the problem is "what determines truth", then there isn't an organization out there that could resolve the issue (barring something like the Chinese government, I suppose)

Did you just organically come up with the Ministry Of Truth?

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#165

Post by fareesh » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 10:31 PM UTC

The content here is quite disgusting, and I certainly do not defend it, but I really take issue with what is happening here in principle.

Overall this is similar to a runaway effect that negligence of the environment can have. At a certain point it will be too late to solve the problem i.e. control emissions or oppose this kind of authoritarianism under different circumstances. The very means to do so will either be impotent or impossible.

By then you are reliant on some new magical invention to resolve the problem, or a large death toll in the millions, which changes the entire landscape.

Corporations certainly have the right to do this, but they are only choosing to do so because there are strong winds blowing in this direction. It's important that they are opposed, before this paves the way for big mistakes to be made.

It's important that these kinds of ideas see sunlight. Ideas that promote tolerance, peace and common sense will win in the end, provided we keep talking. If talking comes to an end, we know what comes next. These ideas will only find more room to grow, and see greater validation when they are opposed in this kind of authoritarian manner.

Rather than advocating a strategy where we are relying on governments and corporations to solve these problems, we should be the ones fixing our societies and arguing against disgusting ideas such as this, with well reasoned arguments, or even humor, both of which have historically been great at winning ideological battles.

I am sure this crowd knows their Aaron Satie.

"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#166

Post by DanAndersen » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 10:32 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #127

DanAndersen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone with a server can host content in a technical sense, but can it ever scale without playing ideologically with the big players? One tactic for deplatforming undesirable sites is a DDoS -- if you put your home server online, what options do you have for DDoS mitigation if the big players in that space decide they're on the political side of those doing the DDoS?

> Anyone with a server can host content in a technical sense, but can it ever scale without playing ideologically with the big players? For a wide reach via the press, you may need to either buy more (or higher capacity) presses or convince those who already have then of the value of devoting them to your ideas. That's inherent in freedom of the press and the marketplace of ideas. You aren't entitled to someone else'…

Perhaps I was unclear. When I said "scale," I meant it specifically in the context of being able to weather DDoS attacks.

By way of analogy, consider you are the owner of a small independent city paper -- the sort you see offered for free in boxes on streetcorners.

Now imagine a large corporate entity -- perhaps a competing paper or someone with a personal grudge or a political mission. Every day, they go to all the locations where the paper is offered, take every copy, and destroy them so that no one else can read them. You spend the money you have to put it on more streetcorners, but your rival has deeper pockets than you and can hire people to go to all the new locations and take and destroy those papers too.

Has there or has there not been any violation of your rights?

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#167

Post by tptacek » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 10:32 PM UTC

lainga wrote: post #163

tptacek wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't know why. Something just made me think I was going to want data about it someday.

Is this something you do manually...?

Yes.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#168

Post by nishantvyas » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 10:37 PM UTC

Nadya wrote: post #31

A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. When they are cast to the shadows they can grow, under everyone's noses, in private where only there are they allowed to exist. In private, these bad ideas cannot be challenged by others and people will be convinced to believe in them, with nobody challenging the idea as a genuinely terrible idea. It gives b…

I guess that's not the problem here.

Problem is combining ignorance with confirmation bias and then multipling it by distribution engines like FB, Youtube, Podcast etc....

unfortunately information is NOT absolute. it's asymmetrical and heavily influenced by our limited world view, ignorance and confirmation biases.... allowing bad agents to take advantage of this fact and then allowing them to use the massive distribution channels like FB etc. is recipe for unrest.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#169

Post by skybrian » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 10:37 PM UTC

Nadya wrote: post #31

A common argument in philosophy is that bad ideas should occur in the open - where everyone may ridicule them. When they are cast to the shadows they can grow, under everyone's noses, in private where only there are they allowed to exist. In private, these bad ideas cannot be challenged by others and people will be convinced to believe in them, with nobody challenging the idea as a genuinely terrible idea. It gives b…

Is this an argument in favor of the Streisand effect? After all, most of us wouldn't have known about these posts if Microsoft hadn't asked them to deleted.

Or is it an argument that there is not enough social shaming on the Internet? Since that's what we're likely to get instead of reasoned debate.

Maybe the old arguments in favor of debating bad ideas need to rethought to account there are so many people posting them, and they don't necessarily deserve attention. It's not 1995 anymore; we know that attention is valuable, and it's important to have efficient defenses against denial-of-service attacks due to spam, trolling, viral post-sharing, and so on. Debating every post of the same old outrage isn't efficient.

For bad ideas that aren't new, something like Snopes makes a bit more sense. And I'll point to the Ask Historians subreddit for a good example of how to run a high-quality Internet forum.

Re: Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed

#170

Post by DanAndersen » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 10:37 PM UTC

CM30 wrote: post #131

394549 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution is to require all hosting and domain companies to act as utilities, and require neutrality in regards to any content that's legal. They're not private forums or homes, they're the internet equivalent to the electricity company or the water company. They're the internet equivalent to a phone service provider or ISP. Exactly this. When the First Amendment was authored, I don't think it was even conceivab…

When the First Amendment was authored, I suspect people thought public property was going to be where the largest audience was, with the town hall and park and square and what not being the main platform for discussion. Reaching the crowd meant going out with a handbell or standing on a box passing out pamphlets. Stopping the government from arresting someone advertising in the town square was more important than sto…

>The way society is going seems to be making the amendment less and less relevant as time goes on.

Exactly. As society moves more and more online, it moves more and more into a virtual territory that is owned at every level by corporate entities who grant no rights to their users. If we're not careful, we could end up with a strange cyber-feudal arrangement.

The "it's their platform" argument seems strange to me when you start getting into the question of corporations beyond a certain size or monopoly. In the 1700s I'm sure there was a lot of arguing that certain kinds of protest were groundless because this is "the King's land." It took a re-examination of what the boundaries should be before that changed.