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Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

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Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#191

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

unishark wrote: post #187
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those protests mostly fizzled out with a week or two of the election results (even before all state results were certified). "Disrupted confirmation hearings" seems fairly different to me from "smashed windows and doors to gain entrance to the US Capitol while hundreds of people chanted "Hang Mike Pence!".

Different in some ways, of course, same in others. Ultimately I'm just seeing the same news with one side one-upping the other. They weren't even the first armed group to try and defy the government in the last year, though perhaps the most ambitious.

In what ways are these the same?

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#192

Post by gweinberg »

jasode wrote: post #3

>a workable plan that enables more free speech, [...] That approach: build protocols, not platforms. To be clear, this is an approach that would bring us back to the way the internet used to be. The early internet involved many different protocols—instructions and standards that anyone could then use to build a compatible interface. As I've commented before[1][2], discussing protocols and advocating for them is a pop…

I can tell you why I stopped using USENET: because so few other people were using it it was no longer worthwhile. I would go back to it if enough other people did. I use Reddit now, and Reddit is just an inferior USENET.

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#193

Post by CharlesW »

dang wrote: post #167
CharlesW wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That your (thoughtful, IMO) response is being downvoted into oblivion by the same people who purport to want "free speech" is sort of perfect.

Please follow the site guidelines, which ask you not to post like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html The GP comment is no longer in a downvoted state, let alone "oblivion". Meanwhile comments like yours linger on as uncollected garbage even after they have been falsified. The thing to do instead is to give a corrective upvote and move on. Most often, fair-minded readers do enough of that to restor…

I appreciate the feedback, dang. Please feel welcome to replace it with "[removed]" (I'm not able to.)

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#194

Post by majormajor »

coldtea wrote: post #163
majormajor wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the point isn't to have no moderation, it's for the power of "moderation" not to be vested in a small number of oligarchs pressured by angry mobs spurred on by media companies with bad incentives to want to damage their political opponents and market competitors. This is not a statement many people who have been angry recently would agree with. Trump would've gotten himself banned from any of the forums I h…

> This is not a statement many people who have been angry recently would agree with. Well, what "angry people would agree with" is a pretty strange basis for an argument, anyway... > Trump would've gotten himself banned from any of the forums I hung out in from 2000 to now. Not for being conservative, for being an asshole. And that would be neither here nor there, cause your forums are not so massive as to shape publ…

> It's actually analogous to election influencing - same as if 9 out of 10 channels in TV only carried the views from one party and not the other(s).

Thanks to the Reagan administration, that's fine, yes? It would violate Twitter's free speech rights to force them to do otherwise?

This is an ancient argument and Twitter neither "banned a whole side of the political spectrum" (the asshole Trumpian wing is hardly all of conservatism) nor did anything new to US history.

The reason Trump is pushing for the "public square" aspect is because in a decentralized world, his crowd would still be pushed to the fringes because it's expressing fringe (but loud) views. 90 out of 100 forums would have issues with him. So instead, he wants to have access on his terms.

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#195

Post by coldtea »

majormajor wrote: post #194
coldtea wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not a statement many people who have been angry recently would agree with. Well, what "angry people would agree with" is a pretty strange basis for an argument, anyway... > Trump would've gotten himself banned from any of the forums I hung out in from 2000 to now. Not for being conservative, for being an asshole. And that would be neither here nor there, cause your forums are not so massive as to shape publ…

> It's actually analogous to election influencing - same as if 9 out of 10 channels in TV only carried the views from one party and not the other(s). Thanks to the Reagan administration, that's fine, yes? It would violate Twitter's free speech rights to force them to do otherwise? This is an ancient argument and Twitter neither "banned a whole side of the political spectrum" (the asshole Trumpian wing is hardly all o…

>Thanks to the Reagan administration, that's fine, yes? It would violate Twitter's free speech rights to force them to do otherwise?

Well, I don't particularly care for a corporation's free speech rights. I think it's better for citizens to have free speech rights, not corporations. Besides, I don't think Twitter's free speech rights are in danger or would be in danger if they were forced not to censor people. They could still print whatever message of their own (Twitter's) they want, exercizing their free speech. They just wouldn't be able to exercize censorship.

Same way I want net neutrality from ISPs, I want it from social media.

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#196

Post by majormajor »

WClayFerguson wrote: post #168
majormajor wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our founding fathers knew power corrupts, but today's 20-somethings seem quite unaware. The government has to be able to actively respond to the problems of the moment, and those problems will constantly change. A handcuffed government only benefits the already-powerful. The dirty secrets of the "but the founding fathers!" argument are that (a) they knew they weren't creating a perfect set of rules in the Constitut…

Our founding fathers and subsequent forefathers fought wars to protect our freedoms, and sadly the current generation don't value or even want to preserve that freedom. Good times create weak men, and weak men will happily surrender to Tyranny.

Some of that "subsequent" group actually even fought a war to prevent some of our freedoms!

There's no weakness in challenging the storybook fable-ized versions of history.

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#197

Post by [deleted] »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #191
unishark wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different in some ways, of course, same in others. Ultimately I'm just seeing the same news with one side one-upping the other. They weren't even the first armed group to try and defy the government in the last year, though perhaps the most ambitious.

In what ways are these the same?

[deleted]

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#198

Post by kibwen »

konjin wrote: post #177
lallysingh wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The defenses were so poor it was a coin flip whether it would succeed.

What would success have looked like? Stealing the original copy of the constitution and using whiteout to change the bits they didn't like?

Success for them would have looked like apprehending the legislature and coercing them into throwing out the votes of states that didn't go to Trump. And this is charitably assuming that their chants of "hang Mike Pence", along with the gallows they erected out front, might have only been for show.

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#199

Post by konjin »

kibwen wrote: post #198
konjin wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would success have looked like? Stealing the original copy of the constitution and using whiteout to change the bits they didn't like?

Success for them would have looked like apprehending the legislature and coercing them into throwing out the votes of states that didn't go to Trump. And this is charitably assuming that their chants of "hang Mike Pence", along with the gallows they erected out front, might have only been for show.

My version of editing the constitution is vastly more likely to happen than whatever fever dream this is.

Re: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

#200

Post by dang »

julianmarq wrote: post #188

It's interesting, the usual go-to argument of the censorship apologists is to claim that they're not actually advocating for censorship because the hopeless gigantic corporations they so nobly defend are private actors and thus have the right to ban whatever they want. Then this article (posted long before recent events made the discussion a hot topic) presents how we need a serious alternative to these giant platfor…

> the censorship apologists in HN's usual go-to argument

Please don't make spurious generalizations like this one, which is obviously false. Instead, please familiarize yourself (I don't mean you personally, but all of us) with the cognitive biases that lead to these false feelings of generality [1]. Yes, a lot of people make the argument you're mentioning—and a lot of people also make the opposite argument. I don't know if it's evenly split (no one knows that), but it's close enough not to matter.

It's important that this community get educated about this so we don't tear ourselves apart—which is what the fantasy of being an embattled minority, surrounded by enemies and demons [2, 3], will lead to. In reality, there's a range of views here, more or less homomorphic to the range in society at large. That's what any sufficiently large population sample converges to.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

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