Heavily editorialized headline here. Just as accurate: "Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to insufficient moderation"
Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act
61–70 of 318 posts
Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that is not how it works. Large companies can afford compliance costs. Smaller ones can't.
What are the compliance costs for this law that would apply to a small independent forum?
Have you run a forum, in, say, the last decade? The amount of spam bots constantly posting links to everything from scams to pints to guns is immense - and no, captchas don’t solve it.
Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that is not how it works. Large companies can afford compliance costs. Smaller ones can't.
What are the compliance costs for this law that would apply to a small independent forum?
You can just read any of the writing by the people operating these fora that are closing.
Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure why you're comparing total posts to monthly new posts. The tragedy here is that 2.6 million posts, potentially full of great content, is being deleted. > The forum is so inactive that they’re deleting posts faster than creating them. They've been in read-only mode, more or less, for awhile. Primarily, again, due to the (at the time proposed, now passed) law. Not to mention, this comment is missing the fo…
The forum has had less than 100k posts in the last 10 years. Forums and small websites have been killed off by changing consumer behaviour, the shift to big social media platforms. Using big numbers to suggest that the UK Online Safety Act is responsible for killing off these smaller independent websites is disingenuous. If you do the same exercise for the other forums, you’ll find they’re all long dead too.
I posted another example in this thread of someone running forums with 275k monthly active users that also decided to shut down. That does not qualify as "long dead".
That's just one other example. I can assure you that it is not just long-dead forums deciding to shut down, despite your preconceived notion.
Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act
#65It's awkward. It's clear this law affects terribly bona fide grassroots online communities. I hope HN doesn't start geoblocking the UK away! But then online hate and radicalization really is a thing. What do you do about it? Facebook seems overflowing with it, and their moderators can't keep up with the flow, nor can their mental health keep up. So it's real and it's going to surface somewhere. At some level, I think…
Hate and radicalization are products of existential purposelessness. You can’t make them go away by preventing existentially purposeless people from talking to each other.
Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the compliance costs for this law that would apply to a small independent forum?
You can just read any of the writing by the people operating these fora that are closing.
I have read every post, every article, every piece of guidance. I’m asking for specifics, not hand waving. What are the actual compliance costs?
Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act
#67It's awkward. It's clear this law affects terribly bona fide grassroots online communities. I hope HN doesn't start geoblocking the UK away! But then online hate and radicalization really is a thing. What do you do about it? Facebook seems overflowing with it, and their moderators can't keep up with the flow, nor can their mental health keep up. So it's real and it's going to surface somewhere. At some level, I think…
Online hate is skyrocketing in large part because billionaires and authoritarian regimes are pumping in millions of dollars to uplift it. Let’s address this issue at its source.
Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act
#68The State of Utopia has published this report on the source of funding of Ofcom, the U.K. statutory regulator responsible for enforcing the Online Safety Act:
https://medium.com/@rviragh/ofcom-and-the-online-safety-act-...
(In short it is funded by the regulated tech companies, which must pay fees to it.)
Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act
#69It's awkward. It's clear this law affects terribly bona fide grassroots online communities. I hope HN doesn't start geoblocking the UK away! But then online hate and radicalization really is a thing. What do you do about it? Facebook seems overflowing with it, and their moderators can't keep up with the flow, nor can their mental health keep up. So it's real and it's going to surface somewhere. At some level, I think…
Is it a thing?
I mean we had the holocaust, Rwandan genocide and the transatlantic slave trade without the internet.
The discovery, by the governing classes, that people are often less-than-moral is just as absurd as it sounds. More malign and insidious is that these governors think it is their job to manage and reform the people -- that people, oppressed in their thinking and association enough -- will be easy to govern.
A riot, from time to time -- a mob -- a bully -- are far less dangerous than a government which thinks it can perfect its people and eliminate these.
It is hard to say that this has ever ended well. It is certainly a very stupid thing in a democracy, when all the people you're censoring will unite, vote you out, and take revenge.
Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
The forum has had less than 100k posts in the last 10 years. Forums and small websites have been killed off by changing consumer behaviour, the shift to big social media platforms. Using big numbers to suggest that the UK Online Safety Act is responsible for killing off these smaller independent websites is disingenuous. If you do the same exercise for the other forums, you’ll find they’re all long dead too.
I posted another example in this thread of someone running forums with 275k monthly active users that also decided to shut down. That does not qualify as "long dead". That's just one other example. I can assure you that it is not just long-dead forums deciding to shut down, despite your preconceived notion.
You’re falling for the big numbers that do not stand up to scrutiny. There’s no such forum shutting down. Are you referring to lfgss? First, it’s not shutting down, second, the user numbers are completely wrong. As is the claim that the platform supports over 300 forums. You’re an order of magnitude off. Go and visit it and look at the activity, it’s clinging to life. 275k active users? Pure fiction.