581–590 of 996 posts
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I wonder when someone is going to figure out that obscenity laws violate separation of church and state and are thus unconstitutional.
Never, because morality is not the same as religion. Morality is well established as a basis for law.
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When your content is too cancerous for Reddit ...maybe the issue isn't Reddit.
Well, I can tell you what's bugging me personally about this. There's a growing divide in our society between the "equal opportunity" and "equal outcome" camps. And while the "equal opportunity" people mostly have the "just let me grill" attitude, "equal outcomers" are pushing increasingly harder, while doing their best to silence any opposing voices. It's now getting to a point where raising one's kids to be proud o…
The rationale they gave is that hate speech appears on these apps, because some of the microblogging sites that can be accessed via Fediverse have this kind of content. Based on this rationale, I look forward to Google Play removing Chrome, Firefox, and all other web browsers from the store as well.
When can I expect gmail to be removed too?
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A home is not a platform at all, let alone a public one open to everyone, anonymously and without needing an invitation. It's a personal and intimate place.
Most service platforms are not public, either, requiring, at minimum, a way to identify the content creator, even if only to the admins. While consuming the content may be anonymous, production is not. The platform itself is only acting as a publisher. In this specific instance, Google is n the wrong. 4chan, being the obvious exception, since content can be created anonymously.
The rationale they gave is that hate speech appears on these apps, because some of the microblogging sites that can be accessed via Fediverse have this kind of content. Based on this rationale, I look forward to Google Play removing Chrome, Firefox, and all other web browsers from the store as well.
Do the apps connect by default to a server that allows hate speech? If that's the case, is this an instance of bad defaults? Maybe the apps could work around this by just connecting to a server that's moderated to be acceptable to Google, but leave it configurable.
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I agree, I've been thinking along these lines for a while too; thank you for phrasing it so clearly. My current thinking led me to conclude that we don't have sufficiently good tools[0] for modelling O(n) problems with n > 2. Particularly when (what your simplification doesn't capture) there are feedback loops involved. Take this O(2) problem: x causes more y, y causes more z, z causes less y but much more x. Or in a…
Great point. Those problems are really hard to reason about, partly because without specific knowledge of the coefficients, all you can expect a well-reasoned person to conclude is that "it can go either way". And even knowing the data, most practical problems in this category would take either computer modeling or simplifying assumptions to really draw conclusions about. Worse, someone motivated to shape the story o…
Taking the carbon exports example I pasted, the model presented structurally tells you that carbon footprint is going to grow with exports. We can haggle about "how much", but - under this model - not about "whether". You can tweak the parameters to mitigate impact, you can extend the model with extra components and tweak those to cancel out the impact (and that automatically generates you reasonable solution candidates!). Or, you can flat out say that the model doesn't simplify the reality correctly, and propose an alternative one, and we can then discuss the new model.
The good thing is, at every point in the above considerations you're dealing with models and reality and somewhat strict reasoning, instead of endlessly bickering about whether A causes B or the other way around, or whether arguing A causes B is a slippery slope, or whatnot.
I strongly agree with teaching examples, both real (serious) ones and toy ones, to teach this kind of thinking.
Jevons paradox is indeed great to dig into and I suppose offer some sort of counterexample to what I'm talking about. The nature of the phenomenon is in a feedback loop, and whether it'll go good or bad depends on the parameters (the increased use can reduce the value of the intervention, cancel it out, or even make it worse than doing nothing). But from what I hear, people sometimes pick one of the possible outcomes and use it as thought stopper (e.g. "we shouldn't do X because obviously Jevons paradox will make things worse!").
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If they didn't intend it, they were being incredibly naive. If your defining characteristic is that you don't censor things that are banned on Reddit, then your site is only attractive to people who want to do things banned on Reddit.
It wasn't just Reddit they were fleeing. I think it was Twitter too...
So again... Reddit and Twitter are already a cesspool of hate. If you are bad enough to be banned there...
For anyone else concerned with the recent Big Tech censorship, people are actively building alternative social medial platforms and they are taking off. The RedditAlternatives subreddit [0] provides a fairly good overview of them. Some are rather extreme, others are more reasonable, but there are alternatives, and it's up to us, the reasonable people, to choose where we want to spend our time and money. [0] https://w…
When your content is too cancerous for Reddit ...maybe the issue isn't Reddit.
Lots of legal gray area ones that revolve around data hoarding / archiving are constantly threatened and sometimes taken down for piracy. The subreddits try to police the most blatant piracy but due to the nature of why people archive/hoard data it can be difficult.
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And for good reason. It doesn't make sense to mandate equal time for mainstream and fringe positions, rational proposals and ones riddled with contradictions. Either some government censor is responsible for deciding which positions are "serious" enough to warrant equal time or the media eventually gets overwhelmed with nonsense and conspiracy theories. If you want to see where the "fairness doctrine" leads, just hav…
Evidence suggests that the fairness doctrine worked really well until we ended it. Until it’s elimination mass media news in the US was pretty middle of the road.
Its not like we have a MONOPOLY problem in tech!
The markets will just sort it out.