Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kanye West is buying Parler

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 939 posts

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#251

Post by mariusor »

colinmhayes wrote: post #186
mariusor wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think moderation should be about the words that are being said, not the ideas that are being discussed. A free speech platform should allow a wide range of topics, but it's not expected to stand for all manner of trolling and bad faith argumentation. I think that conflating the two is tripping a lot of people up in the debate about the topic.

In the end you end up with the same problem. All the "exterminate the jews" types go to the free speech platforms at which point everyone else leaves, even if the people with the ideas that aren't liked are using respectful language. It's not just the bad faith and trolling that make people want to leave the site, it's the base level ideas of the people who have been moderated off other platforms.

I think that a platform where people expect the ugly ideas to be debated (in good faith) will have the users that are willing to do that[1].

Not every platform needs to have _all_ the users. I know that it's a bit of an anathema on a discussion board built by venture capitalists to say that the goal of a social platform should not be to maximize the amount of users and engagement, but here we are. I think optimizing your service for "everyone" is a bad strategy in competing with existing social networks, especially coming from an "indie" background. Not that Parler is exactly indie.

[1] I'm saying this as someone that is working towards a discussion platform that targets smallish to medium communities formed around a common interest. In this world if moms wanting to share their latest knitting project are excluded from a service that targets free speech people, that's fine, there can be a knitting community out there also for them. Having these two communities intermingle by using something like ActivityPub is a way to keep "the network effect" but keep them separate enough.

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#252

Post by itake »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #213
tptacek wrote: post #117

This is really a story about a celebrity's mental illness and public breakdown. If you haven't been following the news, West has spent the week saying increasingly unhinged things, not just about politics but about Pete Davidson, his wife, and (if I'm remembering right) his kids and the fake actor children that have been installed in his former home to corrupt them. He was interviewed for a show on Fox and a big chun…

It's sad because to become successful Kanye had to ignore hundreds/thousands of important people telling him he wasnt good enough and he would never make it as a rapper. Then he became, arguably, the most popular rapper/hip hop artist of all time. Now image you've done what seems impossible despite countless people telling you it wont work out. You are in the top 1% of fame. Now someone tells you your other ideas are…

> the most popular rapper/hip hop artist of all time

Slim Shady stands up [0].

[0] - https://iamyourtargetdemographic.com/2011/08/30/kanye-west-v...

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#253

Post by coinbasetwwa »

mrtksn wrote: post #11

Musk and everyone else is right that we do need a platform with free speech. The only problem is that all those free speech advocates are actually NIMBY's when it comes to free speech. I have been following self proclaimed free speech absolutists(because I too, believe in free speech but don't believe it exists) and they are totally not the kind of people that say "I hate what you say but I will die defending your ri…

I’m pretty sure all you need is a free speech platform with a tiktok style algorithm that suppresses the grimiest of toxicity. Such a platform would blow every other one of the park and have a rush of content creators. I believe as those engagement algorithms become more accessible we’ll see a clear winner emerge.

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#254

Post by ch4s3 »

dementiapatent wrote: post #105
luckylion wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where on e.g. Twitter or Reddit would that be disallowed? Isn't r/antiwork/ hitting the front page regularly?

I would like to point out that employers are/were permitted to discriminate against these people under federal law: The Equal Rights Act of 1964: https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196... > As used in this subchapter, the phrase "unlawful employment practice" shall not be deemed to include any action or measure taken by an employer, labor organization, joint labor­ management committee, or emplo…

To be fair, when that was written being a member of the CPUSA meant there was a very good chance that someone was working with the KGB. There was a long history of people with college ties to communist groups going to work in sensitive industries and passing secrets to the KGB.

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#255

Post by kixiQu »

themitigating wrote: post #217
_chu1 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we just go back to not using one big central social communication platform and go back to the spirit of using separate independently owned forums, chatrooms and websites for our little niches and communities to prevent this issue.

How does this prevent the issue? You can say horrible things on smaller forums as well

People are not necessarily all on the same side of defining "the issue", FWIW.

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#256

Post by Joeri »

mrtksn wrote: post #11

Musk and everyone else is right that we do need a platform with free speech. The only problem is that all those free speech advocates are actually NIMBY's when it comes to free speech. I have been following self proclaimed free speech absolutists(because I too, believe in free speech but don't believe it exists) and they are totally not the kind of people that say "I hate what you say but I will die defending your ri…

I used to be free speech absolutist, but I am not any longer, especially when it comes to social media.

The argument in favor of absolute free speech for me was basically “let everyone hear everything and make up their own mind”. This presumes that people are swayed by the content of an argument. This is a false assumption, people are mostly swayed by the volume of the argument. This is well documented in psychological research. Now, if everyone had the same level of visibility for their personal speech this would just lead to an ersatz version of opinion democracy, where the most often held opinions would rise to the top, which wouldn’t be a bad thing.

But people don’t have equal visibility. The reach of a wealthy or famous person is so much greater that in the political arena basically only the speech of the wealthy and famous ends up having enough volume to convince people, even if it starts out wildly unpopular and even if it is objectively false. Social media are especially sensitive to this thanks to the ability to buy access to views without the viewers even realizing, to micro-target audiences, and to have zero independent vetting of what is said. This then perverts absolute free speech into a weapon used by the powerful to deceive and subvert democracies.

That’s why I think that to protect democracies we must have some limits on the ability to get speech amplification through (social) media, but I don’t have a hard and fast rule for what that should look like. It is far easier to say “let everything pass” but that is the easy way out and ultimately bad.

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#257

Post by hfourm »

coinbasetwwa wrote: post #241
tptacek wrote: post #117

This is really a story about a celebrity's mental illness and public breakdown. If you haven't been following the news, West has spent the week saying increasingly unhinged things, not just about politics but about Pete Davidson, his wife, and (if I'm remembering right) his kids and the fake actor children that have been installed in his former home to corrupt them. He was interviewed for a show on Fox and a big chun…

Quoted post unavailable.

I think if you follow along with Kanye, it is obvious it is beyond normal celebrity "insanity". I feel bad for him because I really grew up listening to his music and still have a soft spot in my heart for him, but he has some incredible delusions it would seem in the last 5-10 years.

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#258

Post by RajT88 »

pjc50 wrote: post #228
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is really a story about a celebrity's mental illness and public breakdown. Devil's advocate: there's no way this isn't the case for Kanye, right? Why is this mental illness sparking up later in his life? Why was he able to achieve everything he's achieved 1996 -> 2012 (Roc-A-Fella -> The College Dropout -> My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy era) without these "mental illness" bouts?

https://www.thecut.com/2022/02/kanye-west-bipolar-disorder.h... : "He has famously referred to bipolar disorder as his “superpower,”" This is key to understanding bipolar: it has an "upswing" phase in which someone has more energy and less inhibition. Increased self-belief as well. It can, if you're lucky, be just the right thing to catapult someone into incredible creative works. The risk is that risk-taking may not…

I used to know a lady with Bipolar. She thought the highs were totally worth it, and she was self-aware enough when she was swinging into a low period, and she'd just isolate herself until she came out of it. She didn't like her medication because it dulled the highs.

After a few major life disasters (including getting married, and then having it annulled), she eventually figured out that the highs were fun but dangerous. I haven't talked to her in years, but she was reliably taking her meds to keep her even keel.

My friend was pretty self-aware though. Someone less so may not be able to see that their illness is the true cause of their life disasters.

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#259

Post by houstonn »

tptacek wrote: post #117

This is really a story about a celebrity's mental illness and public breakdown. If you haven't been following the news, West has spent the week saying increasingly unhinged things, not just about politics but about Pete Davidson, his wife, and (if I'm remembering right) his kids and the fake actor children that have been installed in his former home to corrupt them. He was interviewed for a show on Fox and a big chun…

It's more of a story of a famous artist who thinks for himself and has been marginalized for years as a result.

Every time he says something that deviates from the accepted narrative, he is attacked and dismissed as "crazy", "insane", "sick". Many non-normative geniuses throughout history have been treated in this manner.

Before anyone strawmans this, he does occasionally say things that should be condemned, particularly over the past week. Understandably people are focused on those remarks, but two things can be true at the same time.

1. He has been systematically marginalized and labeled as "crazy" every time he presents an alternative viewpoint. This has been going on for years.

2. He overcorrects when placed in a box. The more people try to control him, the more he tries to break out of that box by being purposefully provocative.

Re: Kanye West is buying Parler

#260

Post by UncleMeat »

mrtksn wrote: post #59
madeofpalk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, deleting a tweet is hardly being 'physically restrained' > Than it's up to the community to decide how t interact with those people. Twitter is a private company, and it chooses to run it's service how it wants. The government avoids actually physically restraining racist bigots, and lets the community decide how to deal and interact with those people. Some may chose to harbor them (Parlor, 4chan, etc), and o…

I don't accept that content deletion is a way to go. When an offensive content is deleted we lose the ability to jude it for urselves. The content must remain but be strictly attached to a persona so the persona can be "judged" rightfully. In real life, when we deal with these people we want to know what they did. It gives fidelity, unlike "the person said something that violates rule 4 section 3". We should stop pre…

I don’t see any value in spending my time judging content saying that trans people are degenerates or that black people are an inferior race. I’ve already judged those ideas in my life and don’t need to see them anymore.
Post reply on HN