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Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Facebook and Twitter

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Re: Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Facebook and Twitter

#771

Post by chillacy »

joezydeco wrote: post #502
hntossaccount12 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect we will continue to see services that unbundle social media's hottest topics. Social media may have created an outrage economy -- a subset of the attention economy. But like ebay, craigslist, etc, the social media platforms' broad focus means their product can't specialize when strong trends emerge. The outrage will be unbundled by niche companies. I actually think this is a good thing. Seeing conspiracy th…

I suspect we will continue to see services that unbundle social media's hottest topics. I've seen this before with Usenet groups that got too bogged down with infighting and trolls, so splinter groups formed off on handmade vBulletin/phpbb sites or wherever. They always imploded shortly afterward. A safe space eventually falls to the same splintering, just in more fractal detail. Some of them survive the implosion an…

That was an awesome article, I really wish I read it sooner. So many of today’s problems are predicted within. My favorite parts:

1. Designing Social software is as different from UX design as UX is from bare functionality.

2. Tech groups are not immune from using “vilification of external enemies” to increase group cohesion, where enemies included Microsoft in the 90s, it’s probably surveillance capitalism today.

3. Unrestrained social software can lead to constitutional crisis: the tension between individuals and group, the rights and responsibilities of each, what’s the social contract for an online community? That’s more political science than computer science.

Re: Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Facebook and Twitter

#772

Post by swyx »

dustinmoris wrote: post #118

In mid October I deleted almost all my tweets and likes (but Twitter being so shit they are still showing my likes except it’s not liked anymore lol) and have not been tweeting anything anymore. I found Twitter too toxic, it made me angry with people for no reason, so I deleted all my tweets and the app. No more notifications, no more “just checking Twitter quickly”. I now go to Twitter like once a day just to have a…

great job pivoting to posting negative stuff on Hacker news then

Re: Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Facebook and Twitter

#773

Post by joshuamorton »

rayiner wrote: post #462
joshuamorton wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you claiming that Clinton's suggestion that we wait until absentee ballots are included before letting someone claim victory is "disputing ... democracy", or are you trying to change the subject to something else?

Oh c’mon. “Don’t concede under any circumstances” is a lot stronger of a statement than “wait for absentee ballots to be counted.” She was reinforcing accusations that she and folks like Jerry Nadler made that Trump would try to “rig” the election.

In context it really isn't. I think it was misguided, but her entire concern was that trump would attempt to mess with absentee ballots and get the race called before they were counted. By any account, he's done both. He hasn't really succeeded, in the "popular" sphere (although he's still delaying the Biden transition from starting, which is bad for the entire country), but if the race had been a bit closer his claims of "well overturn the results on a recount" might ring truer, especially if news organizations weren't able to call the races.

Also worth mentioning that, while I can't find the full clip of the quote anywhere, some of the reporting on it seems to imply that the question she was responding to was if Biden should concede on election night, and the answer was under no circumstances. That really strains the whole "disputing democracy" thing.

Re: Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Facebook and Twitter

#774

Post by UncleMeat »

simmons wrote: post #593
Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame, but it really does feel like "free speech" has become a near dog-whistle. Almost any time I hear of a service billing itself with free speech as a primary selling point, a quick visit is more than enough to turn me off of ever returning. Besides this, there's a clear feedback loop that happens regardless of the intent of the service's creators. The people most likely to get kicked off of social media pl…

I'm about as close to a free-speech absolutist as there is, and it's very frustrating that the market for these platforms seems to be settling into ruts where we have to choose between the hyper-conformity of highly managed platforms and the dumpster fires of the unmanaged platforms. I think the feedback loop you describe is a big part of it. I also wonder if we're experiencing a decline in education and critical thi…

> Can't there be some way to build a platform that encourages intelligent, reasonable, polite debate?

Yes. They are called journals and academic conferences.

Most people aren't interested in these things and if you build forums for everybody, it definitely will not turn into scholarly debate.

Re: Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Facebook and Twitter

#775

Post by jrnichols »

entropea wrote: post #309
hntossaccount12 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect we will continue to see services that unbundle social media's hottest topics. Social media may have created an outrage economy -- a subset of the attention economy. But like ebay, craigslist, etc, the social media platforms' broad focus means their product can't specialize when strong trends emerge. The outrage will be unbundled by niche companies. I actually think this is a good thing. Seeing conspiracy th…

>I suspect we will continue to see services that unbundle social media's hottest topics. I'd love to see people go back to early 2000's PHPBB-similar specific topic/hobby/interest forums with tens to hundreds, maybe a couple thousand members. The good days.

I wouldn't even mind seeing more actual usenet groups again. but then the same problems will creep up again.

and spam. relentless spam. in my view, spam and spammers are the worst thing that happened to forums. a constant arms race against spammers and then script kiddie types trying to break into forums, often so they could spam even more ads.

but I like the sentiment. there are still plenty of phpBB type forums out there, and I like them. It's much better than having everything hidden away behind the barbed wire wall of Facebook Groups.

Re: Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Facebook and Twitter

#776

Post by joshuamorton »

Veen wrote: post #209
joshuamorton wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was discussing the exact same set of views as the parent: those espoused on "Parler, TheDonald, etc" (and also subtly objecting to the parent's proposed timeline. The_donald started self-radicalizing long before it was quarantined. In fact, it was the radicalization that took place in the Donald that led to its subsequent quarantine and removal). I certainly do take issue with extreme views on the other side, but t…

I imagine this view will not be looked on with approval, but the ethos espoused by the BLM cadre is explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-police. To many who are right of center, that looks like an extreme left-wing view that is not only tolerated by tech and social media companies, but actively promoted. It’s not all crystals and homeopathy.

Certainly one can imagine that. But do you really think, upon more than a cursory examination, that you'll see Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg actively arguing for an end to capitalism as we know it?

I mean they're anti-union.

I'm also not clear about the equivocation you're making. Being anti-capitalist or "anti-American-police", even if we take those at face value, while certainly extreme in the modern American political sphere, aren't on a global scale, nor is it advocating for political violence (which we've seen not only advocation for, by both the Trump and his supporters), but actual real-world attempts at smaller-scale violent coups[0].

This runs into the philosophical questions of what "extremism" is, and whether or not it's socially constructed, and I think an important takeaway is that there are tons of reasonable, "objective" measures, by which abstract anti-capitalist sentiment is fine, and calls for defunding the police are fine, while false claims of election fraud are not. A platform choosing an independent, objective measure by which to judge extremism and then having one group go off the deep end doesn't make the platform biased against that group, it makes that group more extreme by the objective measures.

Even if a person doesn't understand Critical Race Theory, or is afraid of the "socialism" boogeyman or whatever, people advocating for socialism, modern anarchism, or critical approaches in politics[1] aren't usually doing so violently, and those that do are usually deplatformed as well.

Like in your followup to another user you get into the weeds on CRT, and your conclusion was "You make it about race rather than accountability and the problem will not be fixed." Which okay, that's a fair view. Ultimately I disagree. I think a rising tide lifts all boats, and among white-middle class people police apologia is so strong that you're never going to get popular support. So gathering support among minorities is the best you can do (and I'll add, reasonable levels of support amongst Republicans and white people as well, Black Lives Matter is, if I'm reading the polling correctly, more popular than Joe Biden). But even ignoring all of that, so what? Does that mean that a site should remove that content? Does it at all compare to right wing content that is removed?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...

[1]: which are really just a lighter version of the modern anarchism take and, I should add, should be super popular on HN because they resemble libertarianism a surprising amount

Re: Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Facebook and Twitter

#777

Post by entropea »

refurb wrote: post #430
entropea wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iraq war criticism would've been labeled as conspiracy and had warnings below tweets and Youtube videos, despite us now knowing there were no WMD's.

Not sure why you're down voted. It's a good example. The whole "Saddam was buying yellowcake" was completely false, yet the only evidence was a gov't statement saying it was true. If someone said "that's a lie", it would likely have been viewed as disinformation, but it would have been the truth.

Not sure why you're being downvoted either. This scenario is completely true and it absolutely would've been marked as disinformation by Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. It's being marked as disinformation now by Hacker News members without any actual discussion as to why. It's a very valid scenario and a great topic of discussion.

Re: Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Facebook and Twitter

#778

Post by holler »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #743
holler wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss those days too! I used to spend a lot of time in #efnet and #dalnet, speaking to strangers about things like #skateboarding and other random topics. It was kind of cool because back then most people didn't know what irc was, nor did they have the prowess to download, install, and configure a client. Mirc was the jam. I'm working on a new open chat site, https://sqwok.im , and hoping to recapture some of that e…

Checked it out. I like the simplicity of the design. The font/size is a little odd for my eyes but I can get used to it.(maybe because I am seeing it on my phone) I am unsure tho how to navigate to get to the chat rooms. ETA: ahhh! I got it! Will there be some form of indexing? Eta2: can I describe it this way: the author of a topic of discussion is the moderator of the topic?

Thanks for checking it out!

So the key thing is on Sqwok each post has a built-in chat room instead of comments, meaning that creating your own chat and sharing it with anyone else is as easy as sharing the url for your post. It currently works on mobile and desktop web.

> can I describe it this way: the author of a topic of discussion is the moderator of the topic?

yes this is accurate! I'm still actively building out some key features including ability to do some basic moderation, but that's the plan!

Re: Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Facebook and Twitter

#779

Post by holler »

dvtrn wrote: post #755
holler wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss those days too! I used to spend a lot of time in #efnet and #dalnet, speaking to strangers about things like #skateboarding and other random topics. It was kind of cool because back then most people didn't know what irc was, nor did they have the prowess to download, install, and configure a client. Mirc was the jam. I'm working on a new open chat site, https://sqwok.im , and hoping to recapture some of that e…

I like that there are no "engagement" or "proofing" indicators like likes and hearts, or other mechanisms signaling approval and consent-of-the-crowd(like votes/points/karma). Do you intend to keep it this way? (Please say yes)

Yes! I wanted to build a place that's mission focused on conversation, and tries to mimic the real world as much as possible. There are no plans to add likes, voting, or public "karma", and I'm split on whether or not to show follower count. In real life people "vote" by either walking away from a conversation, or chiming in with an alternate viewpoint. The relevance algorithm is based on conversation metrics such as activity and publish date, and I'd like to explore further ideas around that.

Re: Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Facebook and Twitter

#780

Post by zarkov99 »

clairity wrote: post #726
zarkov99 wrote: post #718

Now we just need a conservatie NPR alternative. Could this article be written in a more biased way?

npr has never been unbiased, but it's fallen heavily into partisanship in recent years. that's problematic even for folks who agree on a lot of their positions, as unsavory methods overwhelm credibility. we don't need a conservative npr (there are alternatives for that), we need an independent and diverse npr, which is something we're truly lacking in the media landscape.

It just strikes me as odd that NPR should have positions at all, other than "our mission is to inform the public to the best of our limited ability".
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