Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder

#111

Post by nickthemagicman » Sun, Oct 04, 2020, 12:30 PM UTC

cies wrote: post #83

valvar wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the utterly ridiculous "paradox of tolerance" is just a bad cope for people who truly do not believe in free speech. "Free speech" which only applies to your predefined set of approved speech is not free speech, but a monstrous parody of it. The purpose of free speech is to enable dissent, not to affirm the status quo.

Nonsense. Do you think movies of child abuse are "free speech", or recruitment/instruction videos tot terrorist organizations, or inciting violence and hate? What about Assange, he published some stuff, could that be free speech? Or violations of copyright? To me free speech is like free markets. The word does not adequately cover the implementation as boundaries do apply. There are little to non truly free markets (…

I would argue that your argument is nice in theory, nonsense in practicality.

Who decides what speech is hateful or violent and should be limited? You, me, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un ?

How easy is it to label something as hateful and ban it? Very easy.

That's the flaw in your argument, the human element.

The revolution to create America had violent and hateful speech towards the British crown.

Private companies can do what they want, but in public sphere the parent poster was right free speech exists to enable dissent, not support the status quo.

Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder

#112

Post by Avamander » Sun, Oct 04, 2020, 12:30 PM UTC

voldacar wrote: post #58

xevrem wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

honestly, i would say the banning of thedonald is clearly a response to The Paradox of Tolerance rather than not supporting free-speech. you cannot be tolerant of the intolerant if you want free speech to survive.

Thedonald existed on reddit for quite some time and during that period, free speech survived relatively intact. Since the banning of thedonald along with hundreds of other subs, free speech has suffered, not improved, inconsistent with your hypothesis. Also, "the paradox of tolerance" can be trotted out to justify just about any banning or censoring of someone you don't like

There was no free speech with r/thedonald, they banned anyone that didn't agree with them. Blatantly.

Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder

#113

Post by neilv » Sun, Oct 04, 2020, 12:31 PM UTC

losvedir wrote: post #6

I thought it really was founded by those two, and written in Lisp at that. Then YC hooked them up with Swartz and his big thing was rewriting in python. (And maybe there was some contention about this? I forget, but I seem to recall some drama at the time about his contributions.) It was a long time ago, though, so I might be misremembering. In any case, I'm fairly certain Swartz did join after the fact, but I'm not…

Yeah, I think it's accurate to say "Reddit was founded in 2005 by two college friends."

But some acknowledgement of the other early people, including Aaron Swartz (who I believe was nominally considered a co-founder), might've been appropriate.

What was the context of the graphic to which some people are objecting?

In that context, is the most important story what two people did alone initially (or with the help of YC and others)? Or the eventual cofounders of record? Or everyone who was influential/formative/contributor to a given milestone of Reddit? I don't know.

Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder

#114

Post by watwut » Sun, Oct 04, 2020, 12:31 PM UTC

drno123 wrote: post #29

As a non-American, I lost track of this case - was there an investigation into prosecutors who went after Aaron? Are these people still prosecuting other people?

Yes why not. And I am not sure why you think they broke rules or for something that would be seen as job losing offense by law community. Even defense lawyers claimed this is how things are done.

Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder

#115

Post by Avamander » Sun, Oct 04, 2020, 12:32 PM UTC

valvar wrote: post #60

xevrem wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

honestly, i would say the banning of thedonald is clearly a response to The Paradox of Tolerance rather than not supporting free-speech. you cannot be tolerant of the intolerant if you want free speech to survive.

No, the utterly ridiculous "paradox of tolerance" is just a bad cope for people who truly do not believe in free speech. "Free speech" which only applies to your predefined set of approved speech is not free speech, but a monstrous parody of it. The purpose of free speech is to enable dissent, not to affirm the status quo.

Yeah, but r/thedonald did not provide free speech to the other side. Don't try to tell me it was some bastion of free speech that could be brought up as an example of such.

Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder

#116

Post by cies » Sun, Oct 04, 2020, 12:32 PM UTC

bfieidhbrjr wrote: post #102

cies wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Do you think movies of child abuse are "free speech", or recruitment/instruction videos tot terrorist organizations, or inciting violence and hate? What about Assange, he published some stuff, could that be free speech? Or violations of copyright? To me free speech is like free markets. The word does not adequately cover the implementation as boundaries do apply. There are little to non truly free markets (…

You're mixing up a lot of things. Child abuse is a physical act and isn't speech. Recruitment and instructional videos are speech. Assange is speech, but, he wasn't a journalist with protections for handling secret information. Copyright used to have a limited term before it dropped in to the public domain where it would become speech. These are all different things with their own problems.

> Child abuse is a physical act and isn't speech.

I say movies of such acts. That's not the act itself. See Japan where comics that show sexual abuse of "young looking individuals" are freely distributed.

> These are all different things with their own problems.

> You're mixing up a lot of things.

No, they are all current limitations to free speech encoded in law. I mean to say (please re-read my comment) that "true free speech" already does not exist (just like "truly free markets" dont).

> Recruitment and instructional videos are speech.

Try massively sharing those to the wider public: I'm curious how long you stay free or your endeavors remain uninterrupted. Lol.

Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder

#117

Post by Avamander » Sun, Oct 04, 2020, 12:32 PM UTC

sebmellen wrote: post #15

agumonkey wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sub being shut has nothing to do with restricting free speech, isn't it ?

Shutting down platforms for discussion is quite literally restricting free speech. If you want to argue Reddit has a right to do that, sure. But that's not the argument.

There was no discussion in r/thedonald, it was a echo chamber that actively banned dissent.

Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder

#118

Post by watwut » Sun, Oct 04, 2020, 12:34 PM UTC

akarma wrote: post #89

cryptica wrote: post #9

Most of the elites are weak, cowardly and selfish hypocrites. There is no way they'll be able to stop the upcoming revolution. They'll fall like dominoes the minute the tension starts to rise... If you're an elite and you have any strength at all, you'd better start throwing your buddies under the bus soon. It's going to be you or them. They're so weak and so selfish, you don't have much time left before they start t…

> There is no way they'll be able to stop the upcoming revolution. As someone who grew up poor in America, these talks about “revolution” have always perplexed me. We have one of the highest median incomes in the world, and we live in a country that pushes much of the world forward in terms of technological progress. People have always flocked to America for opportunity, and if we cut welfare so we can expand immigra…

For a country with abundance and happiness, there is large incarceration rates, inequality, protests, some escalating to riots, politically motivated murders of protesters and recently attempts to devalue voting process.

I am not saying who is right or that America is not superpower anymore. But the way it was getting dysfunctional is worrying.

Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder

#119

Post by natch » Sun, Oct 04, 2020, 12:34 PM UTC

secondcoming wrote: post #49

dogma1138 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH the platform itself doesn’t lend particularly well to free speech by penalizing unpopular opinions through karma. Ironically I think HN is worse in this regard by greying out posts once they get to -1, I often find out that sorting by controversial on many topics gives you the most interesting read on reddit. I would actually love if both HN and Reddit allowed you to see a Karma graph for each post.

Any upvote/downvote concept on online content is flawed because it does not show the historical score of a post over time. Even here on HN I can post something during GMT business hours that gets scored based on the views of HN's readership at that time, but when the US wakes up the score can change dramatically. Essentially, the US west coast can have the 'final say' because of its timezone and probably larger user…

Yes it’s interesting but it’s also more complicated than that.

I tend to start at the top and up/downvote some of what I encounter. By the time I get lower on the page, I have several reasons to care less about each comment:

1) fatigue

2) an expectation that these lower ranked comments may be less worthwhile to read

3) the fact that any reply I make to a lower ranked comment is unlikely to have any impact or even be read at all (so why bother).

Even voting for low ranked comments has little payoff, because the ranking setup virtually guarantees that they are only being read by a couple people.

You can verify this fact by posting a quality comment right as the west coast is waking up on a story that has already been up for say 8 hours, where comments in the story have already garnered a lot of votes. Your good / interesting comment will likely sit at 1 point forever.

This seems to be a blind spot in the design of most comment vote ranking systems. Including HN.

So in case it wasn’t clear, although I agree it’s interesting, the part I disagree with is that the west coast has the last word. Technically they are the last, but for some stories that have already been voted on by other time zones, the ranking is already cemented.

Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder

#120

Post by DavidVoid » Sun, Oct 04, 2020, 12:34 PM UTC

sebmellen wrote: post #69

valvar wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the utterly ridiculous "paradox of tolerance" is just a bad cope for people who truly do not believe in free speech. "Free speech" which only applies to your predefined set of approved speech is not free speech, but a monstrous parody of it. The purpose of free speech is to enable dissent, not to affirm the status quo.

To piggyback on this, here is a quote from Karl Popper (the "discoverer" of the Paradox of Tolerance): > I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise.

With t_D it was clearly not possible to counter them with rational arguments, because all users who went against their moderators' views were immediately banned from the sub.