111–120 of 151 posts
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this one has nothing to do with free speech though. they want to know who's providing the megaphone. they requested for a named employee to be responsible for what the business chooses to do in their country.
That’s the strategy Brazil used to stop free speech. They then arrest whoever the representative is when they don’t comply with government censorship.
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> The local Costco is "at such a scale in the modern day" that it, too, is essentially a public square. But it's not at such a scale though. It does not have one location with billions of members.
Okay, McDonalds then. "Billions served" What gives you the right to leverage their private property as your soapbox? Because people on the sidewalk won't listen, and that hurts your feelings? They have a business, if you are using your speech in any way to obstruct the conduct of their thoroughfare then they can have you ejected. The cops will not listen to your tirade against multinational burger tyrants, they'll dr…
With your linking of that xkcd, it's clear you're misunderstanding my point about legal vs natural rights, as I stated initially.
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Yes, and it's shocking to see people cheer it on. An oft-heard refrain is about the legal right of the first amendment of the US constitution preventing the government from blocking speech, but that is based on the natural right of freedom of speech, as Hobbes and Locke would differentiate. Social media platforms are at such a scale in the modern day that they are essentially the public square, so the government bloc…
I don’t really think of social media companies as being the public square. They are more like private clubs, just with really low standards for membership. IMO the bigger problem is the total lack of a public square these days. The internet is more pseudonymous than we’re used to dealing with, compared to the in-person public square. People behave in ways that would normally cause their acquiescences to use their fre…
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"Hunger in Abysland" // "Ah, right, I just started a diet" // "Immediately I thought it funny to remember that once we also had little to eat" Appropriateness.
Right. Well, I think they were being perfectly appropriate and that your comparison is asinine: starvation is about as indisputably bad as one can think of, whereas missing out on social media really isn't. Almost as if highlighting that was my damn point, which they then found appreciable, and you clearly didn't. Coincidentally related is why I withdrew myself from most online community spaces. Pretty much the only…
"Hunger" (etc.) was used to try and frame the lack of appropriateness - in the logic, not comparing earthquakes and floods; not perfect, not meant to be perfect. "Missing out on social media" is not representative of the facts: a coercion over a population, not excluding the possibility of attempted population control, not excluding the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war, and a coercion that tries to stop the access to a formerly unbelievable wealth of information (YouTube is in there).
So, yes, I call it serious. And when the above is matched by a jump like "oh I am also doing without" - that is inappropriate.
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If it is clear to you that it is simplistic, why do you publish it anyway?
I only mentioned that I know it's simplistic so that the pedants would not attack my character for being so naive. But, I guess it takes more than that to keep the pedants from finding fault.
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"Hunger in Abysland" // "Ah, right, I just started a diet" // "Immediately I thought it funny to remember that once we also had little to eat" Appropriateness.
My comment was not about suffering, war, starvation, or anything of the like. You've clearly added your own context and then judged me for it. Great job.
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you don’t really need a lot of collusion. Control of the media and communication channels is a natural impulse of authoritarian goverments.
> Control of the media and communication channels is a natural impulse of authoritarian goverments. and of surveillance capitalism. Funny how they collude with one another.
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Right. Well, I think they were being perfectly appropriate and that your comparison is asinine: starvation is about as indisputably bad as one can think of, whereas missing out on social media really isn't. Almost as if highlighting that was my damn point, which they then found appreciable, and you clearly didn't. Coincidentally related is why I withdrew myself from most online community spaces. Pretty much the only…
> starvation is about as indisputably bad as one can think of, whereas missing out on social media really isn't "Hunger" (etc.) was used to try and frame the lack of appropriateness - in the logic, not comparing earthquakes and floods; not perfect, not meant to be perfect. "Missing out on social media" is not representative of the facts: a coercion over a population, not excluding the possibility of attempted populat…
Nor was what we were going for, yet your scrutiny didn't escape us.
> "Missing out on social media" is not representative of the facts
It is quite literally the bare fact itself as per the title and the article's contents.
> a coercion over a population
This is a characterization. I could remark that it was in defense of a population, and it would hold the same weight: it's worthless.
> the possibility of attempted population control
Just like the previous, this too is a matter of characterization. I can choose to look through an uncountable number of philosophical lenses, and what I'll see will conform to each. If I look at it through a lens of ethnic tension somehow, I'll see ethnic tension or a lack of it. If I look at it through a lens of globalism vs protectionism, I'll see either one of that. If I look at it through... you get the idea.
The cherry on top to this is the phrasing "the possibility of". Lots of things are possible indeed, kind of at any point in time.
> the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war
Last time I checked, social media were tools of mass telecommunication. I think it's fairly agreeable that if one cuts themselves off of such platforms, then the cheap and highly scalable tools of modern informational warfare will become ineffective, and the old ones will need a return. Did you entertain gauging the possibility of that? Why not?
> a coercion that tries to stop the access to a formerly unbelievable wealth of information (YouTube is in there). So, yes, I call it serious.
Was I trying to argue there's no merit to these platforms or something? Did I ever question its seriousness?
You seemingly rattled off on the idea - which was complete headcanon on your side - that my "goal" is to make light of this, to downplay its seriousness, or to deny the merits of these platforms' existence. But that was in fact not the goal - it was the predictable side effect, because turns out, there's lots of downsides to these platforms, which I felt was rarely ever brought up in threads like this. The goal then was to remedy this strange miss. To finally break the unending cycle of blackboard-scratching tier perpetual unproductive whinging about """free speech""" and censorship that a HN thread about an issue like this would normally receive. And to that end, I was successful. There's still a lot of that, with the usual end results, but for once that's not all the thread is about.
> And when the above is matched by a jump like "oh I am also doing without" - that is inappropriate.
Wake-up calls are rarely gentle. Perhaps it's not my behavior that's odd, but instead your frame of mind on this is. I cannot tell you.
Other than the obvious discussions around free speech(very valid points), do we have any real studies on the actual effects of social media? What if social media platforms didn't exist. Would the world have been a better place? I don't know the answer, but atleast from my observations it feels as if almost every country in the world has moved to the right but by bit. We have moved away from globalization and are into…
Social media platforms are no more closed circles. They are platforms for advertisers and "click fishers". And people engage with content which revolt them. As a consequence social platforms, and low quality newspapers, have converged to show the bad news from all over the world. There is no shortage of them. This affects people's morale, confidence. Have you noticed how people you talk to can be very concerned about…
Social networks are waste of time and source of anger combined with cheap dopamin. Lovely. It is what is really good for your health /s
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I only mentioned that I know it's simplistic so that the pedants would not attack my character for being so naive. But, I guess it takes more than that to keep the pedants from finding fault.
I did not point to naïvete. I asked why, if you see the thing has gravity, you would be treating it as just a "oh well no great loss".
For example, yes, the given family friend dying is very heartbreaking, but we might discuss it separately that he was basically a living corpse for the past several years already as-is, and so their family is probably at least going to be able to move on now, even if they don't feel that way themselves at the moment for understandable reasons. We might also be very wrong about that, and this may well be very rude to say out loud, and then incredibly embarrassing if found false later. Such is life.
There's no such distinction here however, because it's the internet, it's a public forum, so everyone sees everything. The best next option then is to communicate the distinction and trust that people understand the intent. We both did in our own ways. You did not care either time, and/or was not willing/able to treat it as intended. That's the risk we took. A lot more people did than did not reassuringly though - maybe that should tell you something about this.