471–480 of 1001 posts
Anyway, when it comes to online communities, almost no one does it right, and so not only is the consensus wrong, but so are all known examples.
When I was younger I thought I was a few speech absolutist. Then I went to where was free speech was absolute and saw what was discussed. Now I favor moderation.
> Then I went to where was free speech was absolute and saw what was discussed. That suffers from a selection effect. Since not many sites prioritize free speech and only allow things within some narrower region of the overton window to be discussed it follows that the more extreme positions get pushed to sites that allow more. If, hypothetically, every site were tolerant then you wouldn't have that association. Also…
In the long-term, without moderation and community standards, the bad drives out the good. If you work in a place with an absolute asshole, and nothing is being done to deal with this person, you're more likely to quietly leave for greener pastures. Meanwhile other assholes might find a kindred spirit, and join up. Repeat these interactions for a while, and you're left with a community of assholes and a toxic culture.
Tor's onion service will always there to provide hosting to the less popular ideas. The censorship-resistant network is there. Make sure to give it some love. Last time I checked, people were discussing how to murder, exchanging nazi manifestos and conspiracy theories. I was looking for anarchist discussions but I actually ended up having these on reddit. Don't get fooled by the current positioning of IT firms, it on…
The issue isn't whether or not it's possible for two nutjobs to converse in some way, obviously they can. It's whether or not there is a group of nutjobs all feeding on each others' nutjobbery to the point where someone gets radicalized into dangerous behavior.
On the one hand, I like the idea of a free, open, and distributed internet, where no one company or government has the power to control what is distributed or discussed. As the great John Gilmore said, more aspirationally than accurately even then: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." On the other hand, we don't live in that world, and I don't know how well it would work in practice if we d…
So you're willing to give unchecked control of online discourse to a private corporation?
A government funded Reddit?
Which government would fund it? How would it be run?
Free speech is a cultural value. It sometimes manifests itself in the form of codified laws like the first amendment to the US Constitution. However, free speech is not limited to the USA. The idea behind free speech is that people are allowed to put forward new ideas ( especially ideas about how to organize society, what is good and moral etc ) so that people can consider and accept or reject them. The idea is that…
The often left unsaid basis of free speech is that each member of the audience is capable of rationality evaluating the argument, willing to invest in fact checking and is educated on background material. When these conditions are not satisfied, there will be members of audience who will make suboptimal choices based on misinformation with some probability. When scale of audience becomes large, even small probability can uproot sane society.
All these are very interesting questions and honestly I don't think anyone has answers.
Seems to me like a lot of the arguments against why this shouldn't happen or isn't effective basically amount to some sort of whatabouttery. Well done Cloudflare, I hope their next host takes the same attitude or can be induced to.
Don't be fooled. It's not a virtuous move. It's a business decision. If they wanted to be virtuous, they'd start working with groups to solve the problem--counteracting radicalization.
Easier said than done
This is the same argument cake shops make against taking order from gay people. I do believe that so-called manifesto is mind-numbingly dumb, fact-free and it is dangerous in the sense it will inspire more violence against innocent people. But that precisely what makes it a good test case for asking some fundamental questions. Can commercial businesses with deep reach, pricing power and critical function deny service…
Refusing service to people based on their ideology or sexuality is vastly different to refusing service to people who threaten harm to others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Matthew Prince could have just said "per our terms of service we don't provide services for websites that violate US law and 8chan allows posts that in our opinion incite imminent lawless action, therefore we're terminating their account". Instead he posted this confused essay that clearly shows he understands neither 8chan nor the relevant law, instead making up weird terms and making it entirely vague what their po…
OK, so 8chan ( edit: sorry, should have written "Cloudflare" ) could have handled this better according to your personal sense of justice or aesthetics or whatever. And... 20 people are dead in El Paso. It's like we're not even talking about the same thing here. I just don't get your thought process, sorry. You agree that this incitement and radicalization shouldn't have had a forum, I think. You just... would rather…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This post repeatedly refers to 8chan as "lawless" and "unmoderated" but it is neither. I'd encourage anyone who thinks it's plausible that /pol/ is "moderated" and "lawful" to go read that board for a few minutes. Perhaps then they can comment here on whether there's a problem with the moderation, or the policing, of the board.
Have you read the comment fully? 8chan is not just /pol/, it's an amalgation of hundreds of boards with different content and moderation rules.
What response are you expecting here?
As a subset of 8chan, if /pol/ isn't properly moderated or policed, 8chan isn't properly moderated or policed.
If a subset of a thing does not have a particular quality that must be universal for it to be true for that thing, then that thing does not have that quality.
I'm very happy to help you out with this or any other first year undergraduate philosophical logic problems you may be having.