171–180 of 606 posts
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The Boston Common is such a platform.
Hasn't Speaker's Corner[0] been DDOS'd IRL by radicals? [0]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner )
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Substack is trying to generate returns for venture capitalists. That they agree with one piece of your politics at this particular moment in their company's growth and at this particular point in the evolution of your political beliefs is a massive red herring. Let me repeat. Substack is trying to generate returns for venture capitalists.
Just because their interests are opposed to mine doesn't mean I can't trust them. Teacher's unions can use their poor performance as a justification for increasing their own pay which comes straight out of my pocket and yet I'm able to trust them. I'm evaluating their deeds, not their motivations. Calling something a non-profit doesn't magically make it pure. The Red Cross and Goodwill have plenty of problems, as do…
That said, your point is well-taken. I think one of my other comments already captures my thoughts on the point your making; let's move there to discuss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30093683
No doubt, these censors and would-be censors have the best of intentions. But you've really got your head up your own ass if you convince yourself that you are protecting people by deciding the information that is appropriate for them to be exposed to. I just don't understand the shortsightedness, the naivete, or the willingness to discard the principle of free speech.
The argument I sometimes see is that censorship is justified to prevent indirect harm of misinformation. If you want to be unvaccinated, that is your choice, but posting anti-vax content may have externalities , such as convincing other ppl to not be vaxed.
Oh erudite student of history, what then will stop the toxic vaccines and unethical medical studies from being halted then?
Such as:
The Cutter Incident [1] , The SV40 Contamination [2] , The Swine Flu Vaccine Debacle [3], The Vaccine Contamination disaster [4] , The Tuskegee Syphilis Study [5] , just to name a few.
We should be skeptical about the pros and cons of medical interventions, and also, non-interventions too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC452549/
[3] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200918-the-fiasco-of-th...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/us/politics/johnson-covid...
We don’t have a trust problem. We have a lack of trustworthy people in positions of power problem. I see how one can be easily confused. But we (the People) don’t trust politicians or business leaders because they have show repeatedly they’re not worthy of trust.
We never trusted politicians. We never trusted corporate executives. We never trusted lawyers. We used to trust that the large news organisations were somewhat self-correcting and accountable. The New York Times, Washington post, Wall st Journal, CNN, NBC, CBS, NPR, etc. After the total lack of accountability for Iraq and WMD, for 2 decades of Afghanistan, The Russiagate debacle and you can add a hundred things you'v…
And we should keep it that way! These individuals objectives are not aligned with those of Joe & Jill Everyman.
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The Boston Common is such a platform.
Hasn't Speaker's Corner[0] been DDOS'd IRL by radicals? [0]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner )
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The crux is disallowing or otherwise destroying the profit motive for platform creation, as much as or more than creating a functional alternative.
Pretty much none of the Fediverse is for-profit. People have tried, before. Nobody uses the for-profit Fedi services, because they're just bad. (There are for-profit hosting providers like Masto.host, but I don't think they count.)
The problem is the government and traditional media have been caught lying again and again. Once that trust is broken I don't know how you rebuild it. Hell people I commonly talk to still believe a police officer was beaten to death on 1/6 and that people, other then the women shot for trying to enter the chambers, died directly due to the riot. All because of that what the news reported and quietly fixed days later…
They may have some details wrong, but do you think their overall impression of the event is wildly inaccurate? There was significant violence perpetrated during that event, even if it didn't result in death. Police officers were beaten. When these mistaken people are corrected and told no one died at the hands of rioters, but 150 police officers sustained injuries some so bad they were still out of work six months la…
Jan 6th, BLM protests, and the pandemic are all Rorschach tests.
Unlike 9/11, the 1992 LA riots, and the Spanish Flu, the more recent events occupy a mushy middle ground of severity - a lot of people can go either way when deciding if they're the worst thing ever or just nuisances.
The ambiguity is causing people who feel strongly - in either direction - to lose their minds when they encounter dissenting or even just lackadaisically held positions on these events.
I say Bah to the entire censorship debate! My critique of Substack is that our lesson from the last ten years is simple: speech should happen primarily on platforms that are prohibited from profit-seeking and run in the public interest. Censorship on these platforms should be prohibited, of course, but so should any form of profit seeking. Our problem isn't censorship. Our problem is that our political/economic/relig…
The Facebook/Twitter backlash is pretty far along and some people have migrated to Gab, Parler, Truth, etc. They are low SNR for me, so I don’t care to join them, as much of the US hasn’t either.
This country was founded 2000 years before the modern internet and discourse was fine back then. People can invite others to their houses. There is still a town square concept, although it is increasingly private property (because governments are outsourcing lots of their functions). There is almost no barrier to entry to create a news/media company from scratch.
But even then people were ostracized from communities/families and people were kicked out of bars/homes or arrested or sued for their words — I get the feeling that those who advocate for maximum freedom don’t have a good understanding of history of the USA.
Yes, large corps can affect discourse, but it is because humans are averse to using the scarce attention / memory they have. We don’t like the cognitive load of changing social media platforms every 2 weeks.
Moderation should be fully reviewable. I made a site to do this for reddit [1]. As of this hour, user pages [2] work best because the archive service is down. Subreddit history pages [3], which show where the community and mods have disagreed the most, also still work. [1] https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq [2] https://www.reveddit.com/y/rhaksw [3] https://www.reveddit.com/v/worldnews/history
Although I acknowledge that moderation is absolutely required to keep online communities on track, I also believe that moderation should be fully reviewable.
The best approach I've come up with is that moderation results in a label (such as "spam", "hate speech", "incivility", "misinformation", etc...) being applied to a user's problematic post. New users to an online community would have a standard set of filters applied to their account to achieve the default "moderated view", but would have full control to manage their filters and see (or not see) whatever content they want.
It's absolutely terrifying how welcoming people are to let large central actors dictate what they are allowed to see and hear. As an example, during the whole GME situation last year, the WallStreetBets discord server was taken down for "hate speech", conveniently at the same time that community was causing millions of dollars of losses for certain corporations. If you normalize the unquestionable removal of content, it will be used to suppress content that is contrary to the interests of powerful central actors.
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This largely has to do with the social media ecosystem in which these traditional companies find themselves, where social media is the primary vector for information access for the majority now (HN is an extreme outlier where people may actually read things beyond their "news" feed). "quietly fixed" in that sense means "NYT reports one thing and it goes viral, corrects/updates/adds context later post-virality and, be…
Are we blaming traditional media companies for the content overload shitshow we now find ourselves living in? If NYT could provide a remedy, what would that remedy even look like? Wikileaks' ascendancy was on the narrative that traditional media is broken and untrustworthy. At the time I brought into that and the premise that they were disrupting this traditional industry and remaking it better. Now I realise like al…
I don't know if we can even consider the NYT a reliable source. After all, it was the NYT's fabulist Walter Duranty that covered for Stalin's forced starvation of 7 to 13 million people in former Soviet countries [1], and actively wrote for the benefit of communism, rather than the truth [2]. And, for his deception, received a Pulitzer Prize [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...
[2] https://codoh.com/library/document/stalins-apologist-walter-...