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8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

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Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#511

Post by toast0 »

idlewords wrote: post #200
romaaeterna wrote: post #174

If we're going to have internet censorship, I don't want it to be a backroom thing. It needs to be transparent, auditable, appealable, with bright line rules and due process guarantees. It's unfortunate if we need to live with some level of censorship. But I don't accept it being carried out in back rooms by unaccountable companies operating hand-in-hand with illegal DDoS attacks. Put it out there in the open, and le…

Speaking as someone who runs a public site with the discretion to ban accounts, no thanks. Due process means people will game your policies. We've had arbitrary internet censorship by site operators since day 1 and it works pretty well.

I think people generally don't have a problem with forums where the moderator declares upfront that access is subject to the whims of the owner which can and will be capricious. Certainly, I see some threads now and again where people complain about such and suck, but locking the thread and telling people if they bring it up again they'll get banned is usually enough to get people back on topic. Sure, it's a brutal dictatorship, but whatever, everybody knew it was at the start. I'm certainly not on HN because of its dedication to free speech, it's in part because of the swift and effective moderation that eliminates most off-topic stuff.

The problem I have is if one of the services that says they'll provide services to everyone, especially those that say they support free speech, turn around and say we'll provide services to everyone, unless we agree that they're really reprehensible and our paying customers threaten to leave; in that case, we don't care so much about free speech or universal access.

Having a MFFAM policy[1] seems like a much more honest approach to being a free speech supporter. Of course, if you have a free tier, it's hard to take the free you're getting from the customer whose views you don't like and send it off to an organization that opposes those views.

[1] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#BecauseFuckNazisT...

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#512

Post by sagichmal »

DuskStar wrote: post #332
sagichmal wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sadly, but hopefully! Free speech absolutism is a maladaptive local optima. Free speech isn’t an end in itself, it’s a means, a tool, that every society must use to create just and ethical outcomes.

And the reason we had free speech absolutism was that no one should be able to dictate what the proper "just and ethical outcomes" should be. Is today's morality the end of all things? By locking down speech, what developments will we prevent?

> No one should be able to dictate what the proper "just and ethical outcomes" should be

Not only is every human _able_ to dictate what "just and ethical outcomes" are, we're _obliged_ to, if we intend to form civil society.

> Is today's morality the end of all things?

No, of course not. Everyone is obliged to continuously engage in the conversation, to push the course of all society away from suffering and toward justice.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#513

Post by madeofpalk »

prawnsalad wrote: post #365
DrDimension wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A private company must act as public infrastructure once it becomes a de facto monopoly.

Your argument aside, Cloudflare is definitely not a monopoly. There are many, possibly hundreds, of different CDNs that run at scale.

What is Cloudflare's share anyway? Akamai would be #1, right?

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#514

Post by comex »

danharaj wrote: post #15

"I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the deaths of others your right to say it." How many free speech absolutists have "skin in the game", or whatever? Every alternative to censorship suggested always puts the burden on the victimized. Like, "if you debate it in public you will defeat these bad ideas". Few who are free speech absolutists roll up their sleeves and volunteer to take the action they presc…

Well, mass shootings tend to be indiscriminate once they get started.

Those motivated by animus towards a minority group do generally target areas frequented by members of that group, like in the Texas shooting where the gunman targeted a Walmart in a largely Hispanic community. As a non-Hispanic white person (who lives in the US), that does put me at less risk of being a victim of that type of shooting. Also, to the extent that terrorism’s impact is emotional rather than purely rational, I’m less impacted simply because I don’t feel targeted in the same way.

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t say the risk is zero; it’s not impossible that I could be in a place like that when the next shooting happens. So I have at least a bit of skin in the game.

Edit: Also, while perhaps not 8chan specifically, Internet forums have been implicated in shootings that weren’t targeting ethnic groups and thus would put me at more risk. An example would be Elliot Rodger’s shooting, which was driven by a hatred of women, but ended up killing an equal number of men and women (not too surprising, since people don’t self-segregate by gender to the same extent they do by race and religion).

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#516

Post by laughinghan »

rnernento wrote: post #337
tepidandroid wrote: post #139

My opinion is that freedom of speech is a fine ideal to strive for, but it relies on having a stable society with some minimum level of education (moral and philosophical too, not just the technical kind). It requires people who are able to fully parse the implications of what they are hearing to make sound and rational judgements on the rejection of an idea or the embrace of it. It creates a moral duty for the peopl…

What makes you say it's unchecked though? These are anonymous imageboards where ANYONE can say ANYTHING, there isn't anything stopping you from challenging them? Part of me wonders if we should be taking better advantage of this opportunity to reach out the people posting. Mental illness is clearly in play, but can't we as a society do better? We should be reaching out to these people and at least trying to wrestle t…

> We should be reaching out to these people and at least trying to wrestle them back to sanity.

If you believe that's what we should be doing, why aren't you doing that? There are people right here in this thread you could be reaching out to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20617883

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#517

Post by AimForTheBushes »

LargeWu wrote: post #120

Can any free speech absolutists explain to me the legitimate public interest that is served by allowing terrorist breeding grounds like 8chan to continue to operate?

"Give an inch give a mile"

It's the ability to chip away at free speech. First 8chan, then something else that's bad, then something slightly intolerant, then what? Is it really worth censoring when something else will pop up to take it's place? Monitor and move on.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#518

Post by khawkins »

LargeWu wrote: post #425
lone_haxx0r wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moral principles don't need to be justified by the "legitimate public interest" (in the short run), otherwise we would kill all babies that we predict will become criminals, even thought they've done nothing wrong yet. I think laws should be fair and consistent. Censorship is inconsistent with freedom and justice. Additionally, the interpretation of messages is subjective. If laws are inconsistent and arbitrary (and…

"individual is the base of all laws" Yes. The Individual. Well, what about the rights of the 29 individuals that were randomly murdered, plus the scores of others wounded this past weekend? What about their justice? I'm sure it's fun for you to treat all of this as some sort of abstract thought experiment, but the reality is that people are dying senselessly and violently for no reason other than we as a society won'…

Your definition of "justice" is warped beyond recognition. Justice doesn't mean bad things don't happen, it means people who wrong others pay for their actions.

Thousands of people every year are randomly murdered for no good reason. Many actually never get closed, meaning no one actually goes to jail or gets punished for their murder. These people actually don't receive justice, but obviously we can't live in a perfect society.

You're oversimplifying a complex issue to accuse others of being heartless. It's the lazy moralizing of tyranny.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#520

Post by anigbrowl »

jolmg wrote: post #175
nilkn wrote: post #4

I've generally been on the free speech side of this debate, as some of my previous comments on HN will show. With 8chan, I legitimately don't know what my opinion is. I've read it before, and I spent a few hours reading it this weekend, and it's beyond clear to me that it absolutely had the potential to radicalize shooters and terrorists. I'm not referring to the simple use of racial or ethnic slurs -- of course this…

I'm not really that well informed of 8chan, but bringing it down, while practical, doesn't seem like the ideal solution. Isn't it just like covering your eyes and pretending the problem isn't there? The problem doesn't sound like it's 8chan, but rather these people and their ideologies. If 8chan was brought down, they'll just find another hub to congregate, but now we don't know where to reach them to talk. I thought…

they'll just find another hub to congregate, but now we don't know where to reach them to talk

You don't.

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