8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service • Hacker News Board

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#971

Post by collyw » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 3:27 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #499

irrational wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Popper's tolerance criteria, by contrast, seems clearcut What is that criteria? Because I can easily see people disagreeing on what is and is not intolerant. Would you agree that saying that a baker in Colorado must make a cake for a gay wedding is intolerant of the baker's belief? Because I'm certain a sizeable proportion of the US population would agree that it is intolerant.

> I can easily see people disagreeing on what is and is not intolerant Not in the subject at hand. I think pretty much everyone reasonable agrees that "kill the {jews,muslims,hispanics}" (once more, folks, this was the THIRD ethnic massacre advertised on 8chan!) is intolerant, no? Can't we start there?

How about religious texts? Some of those have inspired a lot more killing than 8chan.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#972

Post by syrrim » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

throwawayjava wrote: post #865

odessacubbage wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'My opinion is that women's bodily autonomy is a fine ideal to strive for, but it relies on having a stable society with some minimum level of education (moral and philosophical too, not just the technical kind). It requires women who are able to fully parse the implications of what they are hearing to make sound and rational judgements on the rejection of a fetus or the embrace of it. It creates a moral duty for the…

Most pro-choice people do believe that education is important to women's (bodily) autonomy. And abortions are not "universally understood to be reprehensible". Only a minority of the country believes that abortion is universally reprehensible, and the rest draw various lines between "universally" and "never". The country is very divided on the morality of abortion. The country is not very divided on the morality of s…

>abortions are not "universally understood to be reprehensible".

Some abortions. Late term, say.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#973

Post by slothtrop » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #970

slothtrop wrote: post #969

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forums like 8chan and 4chan effectively incubate hate speech by providing a safe space The simplest view is that these safe spaces mostly exist because some larger platforms have been turned into safe spaces. However, even on larger platforms, these types form insular groups that are effectively walled gardens within a larger ecosystem (see T_D). The mode of operation appears to be to rally behind safe spaces, then…

Conservatives have few places to gather. T_D grew large because a displaced group of people finally had a commonly known enough place to gather. T_D was constantly brigaded by other subreddits. Yes T_D members may comment in other subs, but that's there right as users of the site. To my knowledge there was no coordination of all users to brigade. Liberals have nearly the entire internet as a safe-space. It's nice to…

> Yes T_D members may comment in other subs, but that's there right as users of the site.

That's not what a brigade is.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#974

Post by syrrim » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 3:49 PM UTC

moab wrote: post #393

DonHopkins wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lost good friends to 4chan/8chan. They were obsessed. At first it was cat pictures and memes, but it went way downhill from there. I've watched those sites cause the transition from normal, interesting, reasonable, open minded, intelligent, happy human beings, to horrible inexcusable pieces of shit who I never want to have anything to do with ever again. It's not just that they inspire a few shooters and mass mu…

I would not lump 4chan into this discussion. I'll concede that some boards on the site are more polemical than others and promote alt-right ideologies without a doubt, but there are many other interesting boards and people on 4chan that are not captured by the broad strokes you're outlining. I know people that browse /fit/, /lit/, /mu/ and /out/ just to name some boards that are perfectly reasonable individuals that…

There are good boards on 8ch too. Probably more, considering anyone can make a board.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#975

Post by hgoel » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 3:56 PM UTC

spookthesunset wrote: post #472

jolmg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really that well informed of 8chan, but bringing it down, while practical, doesn't seem like the ideal solution. Isn't it just like covering your eyes and pretending the problem isn't there? The problem doesn't sound like it's 8chan, but rather these people and their ideologies. If 8chan was brought down, they'll just find another hub to congregate, but now we don't know where to reach them to talk. I thought…

8chan never got brought down. They just got dumped by their ISP and CDN. They are free to start their own CDN and ISP to host their content. And if they cannot find a private business willing to peer with them, they are free to offer alternative access methods (dialup?). They can even go set up a booth downtown and hand out flyers with access numbers. No free speech rights were trampled on, and no censorship took pla…

That's clearly against the spirit of free speech. At that point, what's stopping the government from relying on corporations to perform censorship for them in exchange for say, tax benefits and just going off of this plausible deniability of "oh, but we the government didn't do it! Go blame that corporation!". I suspect if water and electricity services weren't public utilities, you'd argue that they too can take away service from whoever they want simply because of their unrelated views. I'm guessing you also think it's okay when banks and transaction processors can interfere in the unrelated business of their clients, relying on their large market share to coerce their clients into dumping certain users. There's absolutely nothing authoritarian about that! Seriously, this naive approach to things is going to ruin this country. The road to hell is truly paved by good intentions.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#976

Post by chroma » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #76

We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society. What 8chan is doing is exactly the same, minus the Islamist part, yet there's hypocrisy in how they're treated vs e.g. the social media wing of ISIS. These people are trying to kill as many of us as possible. In no way should society accept it. It's simple societal self-defense. Ro…

> We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society.

I completely disagree. I've read Dabiq[1] and similar publications because I want to know why people believe the things they believe. It is a good thing that such horrible ideas are available to the public, and for the same reason that it's good that flat earth sites are available to the public. JS Mill puts it best[2]:

> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.

> If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

It is for these same reasons that I also read /pol/ and /leftypol/ on 8chan.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabiq_(magazine)

2. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#977

Post by parliament32 » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

In comparison, NFS' policy on offensive content: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#TheLongGame

>Of course, the simplest reason is that it's not up to us to decide what the rest of the world should or shouldn't see. Bad news, it's not up to you either. Worse news, it's still true even when we agree. Which is probably most of the time.

>Finally, censorship is always bad, for a variety of well understood reasons that we don't need to repeat here. But in the case of some types of content, it has special dangers. When you censor a web site based on the extreme or dangerous views of its creator(s), you haven't stopped those people from thinking that way. You haven't made them go away. You certainly haven't stopped the people who hold those views from doing whatever else they do when they're not posting on the Internet. What you've actually done is given yourself a false sense of accomplishment by closing your eyes, clapping your hands over your ears, and yelling "Lalala! I can't hear you!" at the top of your voice. Pretending a problem doesn't exist is not only not a solution, it makes real solutions harder to reach.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#978

Post by falcrist » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

pickle-wizard wrote: post #305

hacknat wrote: post #251

What does free speech have to do with this? Cloudflare and other companies have 1st amendment rights as well. One of them is that they can serve customers as they like, as long as they are not violating the rights of a protected class. Political ideology or party affiliation is not a protected class, nor should it be. Twitter could ban every Republican on its platform tomorrow and it if the government tried to stop t…

I mentioned this above. The relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1357/

I've pointed this out many times, but Randal conflates freedom of speech with the first amendment of the US Constitution (and other similar protections against government interference) with freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech goes way beyond freedom from government censorship... And it isn't some mystical unlimited right that trumps all other rights.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#979

Post by smugllama » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 5:07 PM UTC

_khhm wrote: post #938

UPDATE - It's now back up on ZeroNet. Install & run https://zeronet.io/ and then go to http://127.0.0.1:43110/1DdPHedr5Tz55EtQWxqvsbEXPdc4uCVi9D Amusingly, it's now the #1 site on ZeroNet, with even more users than then ZeroNet homepage.

I have to say, this is very exciting technology. This makes an impossible to censor network. The only downside seems to be that it doesn't seem to have as good of privacy as traditional chans because this one is peer to peer.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#980

Post by ebspelman » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #688

ebspelman wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We now live in a society where it is acceptable for private companies to essentially completely ban individuals from exercising their free speech on the internet. This is phrased as something to be fearful of here, but I think I'm actually fine with this precedent. There's nothing to stop people with extreme right-wing ideologies from marshaling the resources required to stand up all the pieces of web infrastructur…

Are you going to be saying the same thing when Elisabeth Warren's or Bernie Sander's webites/ads/donations methods get taken off the internet because big corporations don't like that they want to raise taxes? The purpose of the canary in the coal mine is not to protect the canary. It is to protect the miner from the encroaching danger.

Hmm. I'd say the canary is in the Wal-Mart.