Did the early internet activists blow it?

*Godwin

> But the reality is that no matter how much money and manpower (plus less-than-perfect “artificial intelligence”) Facebook throws at curating hateful or illegal content on its services, and no matter how well-meaning Facebook’s intentions are, a user base edging toward 3 billion people is always going to generate hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of false positives every year.

In re: FB, there was an FB engineer saying the other day that it was impractical to have humans review every post.

I almost responded (but refrained out of a sense of not being snarky) that the word "impractical" here actually means "uneconomical".

No one's forcing Facebook to be what they are.

> no matter how well-meaning Facebook’s intentions are

They want money at the end of the day.

I know I'm beating a dead horse here, y'all know this already, but the service is free to entice the "users" who are then sold to the ad/marketing folks, the REAL users of FB.

It's possible to set up a non-exploitative social network (and indeed, many people are doing just that) but FB/Twitter/etc. have sucked the air out of the room and normal people do not care that they are digital cattle. They just don't, not in any effective operational way.

If somehow FB shut down tomorrow everything their servers do could be done by other servers (the data would be a problem, archive it, yeah, but then who gets to access what? That's just more data though, eh?) FB doesn't fundamentally add anything to the underlying capabilities of the Internet, eh? There are no "magic angel babies" working there.

I think if you somehow went back in time to, say, the 1950's and tried to tell people about FB they just wouldn't believe it. They wouldn't believe that so many hundreds of millions of people would voluntarily give a private company every detail of their private lives (more than the Stasi worked hard to collect) for no more than the Internet dressed up in a crappy UI.

But people do crazy things as long as everyone else is doing it too and there we are.

I don't really have anything constructive to say. Sorry.

The submitted title was "Goodwin: Did the early internet activists blow it?", but we've switched to the article's own title, as the HN guidelines request.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I agree with most of the article, but the author faltered in the area I predicted he would before I began to read. He expresses fear that without some restraint that sites might become "like 8chan". To which I have to ask, why is that a problem? Because its a hotbed for hate speech? What is hate speech? I'm sure I dont need to elaborate further on what I see wrong with that. What people seem to forget/ignore is that hate speech and other forms of taboo content a) existed before 8chan, 4chan, and other sites with similar cultures, b) would continue to exist even if these sites were removed, and c) currently exists on every other digital platform where people may create communicative content. Taboo content will always exist. You may not like it. I may not like it. But even if it was made illegal to say anything stronger than "I do not accept .", people would still go on the same way as before, albeit likely with more subtlety.

With that in mind, I'd also argue that there should be spaces for "anything goes" content. If people are going to do it anyway, why not give them their own space? Let it be an outlet for those who choose to partake in such content. If we arent willing to accept certain kinds of content everywhere, lets at least allow it somewhere. It will still exist regardless of what we do, but at least if it has its own space we can separate oursepves if we so desire.

Lastly, to make sites like 8chan out to have no value other than content some might find deplorable is, frankly, as close minded as those who the author apparently fears. If you hadn't geussed already I use 4chan regularlly and its brought much more positive value to my life than negative. The technology board is what got me into programming in the first place. Its through them that I learned about Linux, the benifits of FOSS, the history of computing, and skills that have lead me to be succesful in my life. They are even the ones who lead me to hacker news. Maybe the messages they gave me were worded in a way that some deem undesirable. But when looking at the message itself and not the envelope its wrapped in there is value to be found in these spaces. If the culture is not for you, thats fine! I understand. But please, don't see that as a reason to condemn those of us who do use these sites. We have a right to exist too.