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The Crime of Curiosity

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Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#91

Post by Asooka »

djoldman wrote: post #75

You don't have a right to service from a private company. Why are people so surprised and or angered by this? The law is clear: you can be denied service as long as the reason you are being denied is not your sex, religion, etc. [Protected classes]. If you go to a restaurant and they don't like you they can throw you out, and so can a hardware store, and a movie theater, etc. (Exempting the protected reasons). Find a…

Those rules were written when you could find another service. Nowadays communication platforms are too centralised to be allowed to remove content at will.

The other issue here is the person was banned for life from using YouTube, which is a far cry beyond having some of his content removed for not fitting the platform.

With great power comes great responsibility. The banhammer is being wielded too sloppily and that is hurting people in real ways, because parts of the web are now of central importance to daily life. Private companies in other sectors that can similarly impact people's lives are regulated in what they can do to their customers.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#92

Post by thomasahle »

djoldman wrote: post #75

You don't have a right to service from a private company. Why are people so surprised and or angered by this? The law is clear: you can be denied service as long as the reason you are being denied is not your sex, religion, etc. [Protected classes]. If you go to a restaurant and they don't like you they can throw you out, and so can a hardware store, and a movie theater, etc. (Exempting the protected reasons). Find a…

Whenever people make "the new decentralized YouTube" or whatever, everyone cuts them down and say "nobody wants that, they just want an easy centralized service with everything". At some point we have to accept that's what we've gotten in nearly every field: 2-3 monolite providers that control the market.

If people want that, then fine, but they can't then be regulated as if we had a vibrant decentralized market. We need democratic control and certain guarantees rights.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#93

Post by thatcat »

frazbin wrote: post #26
ftrobro wrote: post #13

"Democratizing genetic engineering won’t suddenly unleash bioterrorism upon the world." How sure is he of that, and why? As a comparison, nuclear power has been of great utility for many countries, but I sure would not want to see it "democratized".

Yeah I was with him up to that point. "None of the kits we sell contain anything dangerous, nor is the average person experimenting with biology inherently dangerous. If you are trying to engineer something hazardous — like say a bat virus — you might have a problem, but the genome search space is large enough that accidentally creating a harmful organism is astronomically improbable. Access to most dangerous materia…

Democratization of chem isn't responsible for the dispersal, the lack of regulation and proper labeling is. This occurs at the manufacture level not the level of research chemists.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#94

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

hncensors wrote: post #74
liamwire wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this is a dishonest take. I’ve seen the moderators leave up some pretty egregious violations of the site rules because it fostered good discussion, which seems to be at the heart of HN. However, good discussion ultimately requires respect for one another, and it seems maybe that thinking is not bilateral in your case. I’d encourage you to introspect on why you may be finding resistance wherever you look.

So you're saying that you support censorship if it fits with what the mods claim is "good discussion"? Do you also think YouTube should have pulled down the author's video? What are the acceptable reasons to enact censorship in your mind?

What was said: "I've seen mods allowing blatant rule violations because of good discussion"

What was read: "I've seen mods censoring stuff because of good discussion".

Sometimes you just want to give up.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#95

Post by notriddle »

reginold wrote: post #65
Barrin92 wrote: post #62

The author conflates two things. The right to biohack at home and Youtube's alleged obligation to let him broadcast his material. The first one is okay, as long as we're not talking about experiments that may be dangerous to the public. (which he seems to categorically reject for some reason, while home made bioterrorism is a real threat), the second one just doesn't follow at all. Youtube has no realistic way to tel…

Agreed - the lesson here is platforms like YouTube have a lot more control than most assume. An easy to use, censorship resistant, video host seems needed.

> An easy to use, censorship resistant, video host seems needed.

Are you sure? It sounds nice, but I think in practice it would be overrun with quacks selling herbal remedies that claim to make your boobs bigger, just like email. So instead of censorship being built-in, you get censorship tacked on after-the-fact. In the world of search engines, bad content drives out good.

Alternatively, you have a dumb pipe that takes care of hosting video without trying to host things like comments or recommendations, so even if you upload spam nobody actually sees it unless they find it elsewhere. But that’s not a solution to spam. It’s just making it somebody else’s problem.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#96

Post by hncircus »

Sebb767 wrote: post #88
hnisfullofshit wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HackerNews is notorious for censoring anything that falls outside its groupthink or threatens a portfolio company. It's actually one of the more aggressive censors on the internet. Case in point from this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28558254 There is no free speech here.

HN is not overly censoring, but it [0] is very disapproving of overly divisive and flaming content. Also, HN is not one person. And the comment you linked is not even negative at the moment. [0] In this case, both community and moderators.

HN leaves up all kinds of divisive content, as long as it's in their financial interest or aligned with the ideologies of the site owners and moderators.

"Very disapproving", you mean they censor. They censor content they don't approve of. It's wild that so many people will defend that position here.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#97

Post by kbenson »

sneak wrote: post #86
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have precisely as much control as anyone familiar with US law and business practice should expect: total control. As for censorship, I'm sorry but I don't consider what even a corporation whose operation is on the scale of YT or FB does to be censorship.

It's still censorship even if it's not the government. User A posts content. User B subscribes. Entity C decides that B is not allowed to read what A has to say. C is a censor.

There's the definition of censorship, and then there's people's perception of censorship as something the government does. Beyond that, it's not just that many people can't distinguish the two, but that they've merged aspects of each into the same thing in their head.

Censorship is natural and expected in many, many contexts. Any time a parent punishes their child for saying something they feel is unacceptable, that's censorship. It's just censorship in the hope of teaching their children how to be responsible members of society.

The difference between censorship at the individual or group level and at the government level is that with individuals or groups it's possible to find to other people or groups (or create your own) where that speech is not censored. At the government level, where they can control all aspects of expression, that might not be possible, which is why it's more of a problem and why it's set as a fundamental right in some countries.

YouTube does not control all expression through video. There are both other video streaming platforms, and peer delivery networks that can have platform front ends, and social media networks (which YouTube might classify to some degree as also) that allow video dissemination but are operated differently and have different restrictions.

YouTube is censoring people, just like it has always done since day one, and in new and evolving ways as their policies change. That's expected, and legal, and the same thing every other commercial platform does, and if people have a problem with a specific type of censorship YouTube performs, they should give their attention to a platform that doesn't, but not just because there's censorship at all, because of course there is.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#98

Post by hncircus »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #84
hnisfullofshit wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was flagged by a mod.

and no longer is.

Because the bare-face hypocrisy of censoring a comment like that on a thread about commenting pulled back a bit too much of the curtain. They'll be back to silently killing accounts and comments in no time.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#99

Post by kbenson »

analognoise wrote: post #89
sneak wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still censorship even if it's not the government. User A posts content. User B subscribes. Entity C decides that B is not allowed to read what A has to say. C is a censor.

Are you a censor if you own the platform? You can't come into my print shop and print Nazi literature. Could you print it yourself? Sure. So I'm not preventing you from printing it - I'm preventing you from printing it on my equipment. I.E - No, that's not censorship.

It is censorship, it's just that not all censorship is bad, and people should care more about the details than that the definition fits for a word they have knee-jerk reactions to.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#100

Post by drumhead »

Youtube are a private company and as such can publish or not who or whatever they want. They arent obligated to publish anything. There are video platforms that however will, so he can use those instead. But I think the complaint in not rooted in Youtubes behaviour as much as it may be in the authors desire to be seen by as many people as possible. The ability to seek attention is much diminished on other platforms.
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