631–640 of 701 posts
Emperor G built a beautiful walled city, inviting everyone in, encouraging them to paint their houses whatever color they like. A year later, Big G banned blue houses. If you didn't like the rules, you were more than welcome to build your house outside the city and paint it whatever color you like. Only most people don't leave - blue is just one color and they weren't very interested in it anyway. Besides, the city i…
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For a number of years now you have to give a phone number to make an account. Doesn't need to be a one-to-one mapping, but it still connects the accounts. It can be evaded by using multiple phone numbers, but if you're working that hard to not be violated by Google then chances are you aren't using Google in the first place.
> For a number of years now you have to give a phone number to make an account. Doesn't need to be a one-to-one mapping, but it still connects the accounts. Even if the number is required (a sibling comment challenges that), it only connects your accounts if you only have one phone number, or all the phone numbers you have and use for Google accounts are publicly (or privately but through Google) tied to your identit…
Emperor G built a beautiful walled city, inviting everyone in, encouraging them to paint their houses whatever color they like. A year later, Big G banned blue houses. If you didn't like the rules, you were more than welcome to build your house outside the city and paint it whatever color you like. Only most people don't leave - blue is just one color and they weren't very interested in it anyway. Besides, the city i…
Human race has a lot of intellectual growing up to do. This is, in effect, the same Modus Operandi that resulted in the Opium Wars - addict a populace to "free" some thing and bankrupt them intellectually.
There's a lot of bad content on the Internet, and a lot of people wanted to ban it. And the free speech absolutists said, that's a slippery slope. Once you start restricting speech beyond whatever is illegal, there will be no end to the demands to ban certain content. And a lot of us said, slippery slopes are silly arguments. All we're asking is to ban overt racism and calls to violence. We can evaluate these things…
I’m in that boat. I thought the slippery slope argument was just fear mongering. How embarrassing. Last I heard anti GMO content is to be banned. Bizarre. At this point I don’t know why “slippery slope” is called a logical fallacy when so much experience has proved otherwise.
He’s just wrong
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According to your analogy, YouTube is no different from a news paper. All they do is collect content and publish it. The content can be user generated, it can written by people who don’t work for the news paper, it can be written by journalists from other papers. All they’re doing is decided what is and is not published, right? When I read it for free on their website, there is also no transaction taking place. So if…
> According to your analogy, YouTube is no different from a news paper. All they do is collect content and publish it. The alternative is that all websites do, in fact, become exactly like newspapers. Every bit of content would have to be submitted behind the scenes to editors who, in turn, would decide exactly what to publish, ensure nothing is libelous or copyrighted elsewhere, and edit the content appropriately. O…
This whole argument seems to run up against some of the values that HN would appear to hold most dearly.
HN discussions around net neutrality would suggest that this community thinks it’s one of the most important tools for protecting a free internet. However this argument is arbitrarily applied only to specific companies. I could go and create my own website, with my own ad network, and have my own YouTube. I could also go and create my own ISP that discriminates against content in a way that satisfies me. This argument is somehow absurd when it comes to packets, but completely rock solid when it comes to the content they transmit?
This community also derides walled gardens when it comes to publishing software, but walled gardens are somehow perfectly acceptable when it comes to speech?
It seems indisputable to me that section 203 grants common carrier protections to organisations that are not common carriers. The outcome is that freedom of expression is restricted. This should be seen as a problem, regardless of whether you personally agree with how those restrictions are applied.
https://sites.google.com/site/bughunteruniversity/improve/ho...
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What you say is true, but the better solution is for huge corporations not to have a monopoly/oligopoly on channels for public discourse.
That's an extremely difficult problem given the speed at which social media changes and the slowness of legal changes. Look at the explosion of Discord. Also, social media isn't a commodity service. What happens if YouTube is broken up? Facebook? Instagram? Twitter? It seems safer to also require that any platform that offers free, open access to social media style content not show any bias towards that content unles…
If you're going to break them up, you don't do it along those lines. You don't need to have six separate Facebook clones so that five of them can fail or flail around until they get bought back up by the others. Look at what happened with the AT&T breakup.
The lines you break them up on are the preexisting ones. Facebook can't continue to own Instagram and in general major social media companies can't buy competitors. Split YouTube off from Google so that YouTube competitors have equal access to Google's ad network and Google searches don't have any reason to suspiciously favor YouTube videos. That sort of thing.
> It seems safer to also require that any platform that offers free, open access to social media style content not show any bias towards that content unless it is otherwise illegal.
That is hopeless. To give an obvious example, a lot of spam isn't strictly illegal. You do want platforms to filter out content that all of their users want filtered out.
The problem is when they filter out content that some of their users actually want to see, merely because some other users don't want anybody to see it. But there is no principled test for that because the spammers and trolls will insist that they want to see spam and trolling while the censors insist that anything they don't like is spam and trolling that nobody wants to see.
It's inherently subjective. On top of that, you have the "anything not prohibited is now mandatory" problem where you have something which is questionably legal and if you allow it and then a court says it's illegal you're screwed but if you remove it and then a court says it's legal you're also screwed.
The only real solution is to fracture the power to banish into a million separate pieces so that everybody has a little but nobody has too much.
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> According to your analogy, YouTube is no different from a news paper. All they do is collect content and publish it. The alternative is that all websites do, in fact, become exactly like newspapers. Every bit of content would have to be submitted behind the scenes to editors who, in turn, would decide exactly what to publish, ensure nothing is libelous or copyrighted elsewhere, and edit the content appropriately. O…
You’re still just describing the status quo, without acknowledging any of the issues I’ve articulated. This whole argument seems to run up against some of the values that HN would appear to hold most dearly. HN discussions around net neutrality would suggest that this community thinks it’s one of the most important tools for protecting a free internet. However this argument is arbitrarily applied only to specific com…
Take your example: the community derides walled gardens. I personally dislike walled gardens and I move away from iPhones mainly because of that. There are plenty of ways that I feel that they're bad. But at the very same time, I believe that Apple is entirely within their rights to have a walled garden. The freedom to create software you want to create should be held dear by anyone on HN. Why should that be different for Apple.
I support the right of free expression; that government cannot restrict free expression and you can't be imprisoned or harassed for your speech. But at the same time I support freedom from speech as well. Just because you have freedom of speech does mean that I'm required to hear it. My freedom of expression also means I don't have support your expression. That's my right.
I also support net neutrality and common carrier requirements for phone companies and monopoly shipping companies, etc. But I also acknowledge that there is difference between being a communications carrier and a publisher. In fact, to be a publisher you need to have a carrier so they're already not the same thing.
Requiring publishers to maintain the speech of others without restriction is an impossibility. Is YouTube really going to be required to host every piece of video published to it forever? Is Hacker News? How would any of this work. They are fundamentally different and what you are proposing just doesn't work. But even more so, if I'm the owner of the website you'd be restricting my right to free expression with this scheme. I think that is equally as important.
Is there really a problem here? Maybe. Is forcing everyone to host everything the solution? God no. As long as we are free to choose what services we can connect to then we have the freedom to choose something other than buying an iPhone, going on Facebook, using YouTube, turning on Fox News, or reading the New York Times. We don't have to host our content, for free, on YouTube so they can monetize it. Having our freedom and eating our free cake too isn't going to work.
One effective way to protest this would be to report videos by high-profile companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google itself. Take a few minutes to look for a video about Azure or AWS or GCP, or a video of a presentation at a conference around such things, and report it as Inappropriate content citing the relevant terms of service. Be very careful only to report content that conforms to the above description —…
That's probably a great way to get your own Google account banned, and there is no way in hell I'm risking that.
I dont give a fuck about my google account anymore.