211–220 of 335 posts
Most HN posts: HN users hate internet controlled and censored by governments or corporations This post: HN users hate it when things they don't like manage to get around corporate and government censorship
lol and another big story is talking about china attacking activists and everyones freaking out. people who want to censor are the worst.
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A fair request. I did sign up some months ago to see for myself, but you can get a good idea perusing the references on their wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)
as an aside i always find it amusing that agitating for removing freedom from people based on religion, ethnicity or sex is somehow considered an enshrined freedom
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I see two propositions 1. Trump supporters are fascist. 2. Fascists should be sabotaged at every turn. If we link this up with the fact that the majority of white Americans are Trump supporters, it's hard to escape the conclusion that people are basically calling for persecution of white people.
> If we link this up with the fact that the majority of white Americans are Trump supporters, it's hard to escape the conclusion that people are basically calling for persecution of white people. 1. X is bad and deserves punishment. 2. The majority of Y are X. 1 & 2 together do not imply: Y are bad and should be punished.
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So what does it say that unmoderated platforms always seem to become sinkholes of bigotry? Or are you saying that, like the Pilgrims, they will eventually transmute themselves into something less unpleasant if left alone? That's stretching the metaphor a bit far, I think.
> So what does it say that unmoderated platforms always seem to become sinkholes of bigotry? They don't become that. Or rather this is orthogonal to moderation.
The way it seems to work is that unmoderated forums attract the toxic bigots that aren't allowed to speak their minds elsewhere, and they attack anyone who disagrees with them until most of those people get tired of it and go elsewhere, leaving the forum to the jerks. (Or else the owners have second thoughts and start moderating.)
It happens to any unmoderated forum that gets large and popular enough.
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All that does is create a filter bubbles. On subreddits like the_donald, cringeanarchy and others that slowly turned into hate-filled cesspools, there have been users who had a bout of self-realization and left the sub. Over time, there's a larger exodus of regular people, leaving only the crazies talking to each other.
> Over time, there's a larger exodus of regular people, leaving only the crazies talking to each other. That's how it's supposed to work. At the end of the day, there's a nonzero amount of people who believe this nonsense, and reaching them is a different set of problems (Education? Therapy?) but getting the vast majority to abandon it is sufficient.
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¯\_(ツ)_/¯ They are racists, it is all fake, and even if if it weren't all fake, I wouldn't shed a tear if they came for the racists.
so people who care about free speech are racists? or do you just throw that word around? and theyre going to come for you too and youll be shedding a lot of tears then when its too late. its how it goes.
Aw. No, racists are racists. Nice try, though.
Keep it up and someday you'll grow up to be a real troll.
>and theyre going to come for you too and youll be shedding a lot of tears then when its too late. its how it goes
Why would people opposed to racists come for me? I'm not a racist.
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Not sure exactly what you mean by this
They censor speech in order to conform to US law, which means they don't support free speech. They cannot as a platform both support free speech and practice censorship.
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Mastodon is like email. How do email users feel about other people sending nazi stuff via email?
Depends on where we are in the historical timeline. I remember abandoning Hotmail in 2004 because of just how much spam got through. Gmail's spam filter was leagues ahead, but I think these days they're all pretty good. These things take time to change. There will be an adjustment period during which Gab's hate content will spill over into other Mastodon environments. Like a spam senders list, Mastodon environments w…
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Incorrect. > Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient".[2][3][4] Censorship can be conducted by a government[5], private institutions, and corporations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
I am not required to host your speech on my platform. The only free speech protection that is guaranteed in the United States is from the government stifling a citizen's speech and even that is fairly limited with free speech overridden by safety and security concerns on a fairly regular basis. That a particular platform doesn't want your speech is their right under their ability to speak. You cannot be forced to adv…
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I tried Diaspora a while ago, and found the lack of "the center" very unappealing in discussions, and see some of the same today on Mastodon: People who end up on these alternate networks tend to be people who were either banned from mainstream or bullied off of them, so they tend to be the very far ends of the political spectrum on both sides. I remember when Wil Wheaton tried to join Mastodon, and some transgressio…
Not quite. He shared some blocklists that had a disproportionate amount of trans women during Gamergate. The grudge remained, his Mastodon account received a lot of reports, and the admin of the instance he chose decided that he doesn't want to deal with that drama. Wil fully acknowledged that, and decided to stop using social media altogether. Also, there's no such thing as "not liberal enough". People on the far le…
The second instance was a non-US-based instance that looked like mastodon.social but was not (IIRC, the instance was Japanese run and moderated?), and the instance moderators had moderation trouble exacerbated by English not being their first language and moderation not being their full time jobs.
I feel like Wil could have been successful on Mastodon had he found (or founded) an instance better aligned with his interests and moderation needs in mind (maybe even mastodon.social). Part of the problem of the whole debacle was that learning that any way but the hard way was likely next to impossible for someone like Wil, because Federation is complicated and hard enough to explain to technical people, much less someone with so many complicated moderation/community needs by nature of being a "celebrity" to begin with.
(I still sometimes hope that someone like Wil would make the right technical connections to learn everything they need to know in order to thrive in the Fediverse and have joked that I would be happy to be such a guide if I were asked.)