751–760 of 789 posts
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> in the Venn diagram The one you just made up from whole cloth? > Honestly though, I have another theory. Do you have an actual position, too?
This breaks the site guidelines and is unacceptable. If you can't post thoughtfully and respectfully, regardless of how wrong someone else may be, please don't post here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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> One can argue when these terms were initially coined. But we do have hard data on when they became prevalent in the public mind. Look at the Google trends for "deplatforming"[1], "no platforming"[2] and "alt right"[3]. "No platforming" had some blips starting in the late 2000s, but begins rising significantly in 2015, "deplatforming" in January of 2016, and "alt right" in august of 2016. There is evidence to the cl…
Sure, it reduced toxic content "elsewhere" but that "elsewhere" is limited to the same space that is administered by the same authority. Banning /r/coontown may have made posters in /r/politics less toxic, likely because they witnessed the shift in moderation policies. Also because racist users likely stopped using the service for posting racist content. But you're acting as though this means this content wasn't post…
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So, without knowing anything about the actual details, you have no doubt in your mind. And the livelihood of others is just to roll over, because you can't be bothered to actually look into it, before weighing in either way. So, what do you think you are practicing, here? If one were to look into history, with what would they find parallels, you think?
What part of "time and time again I find" was so unclear you had to bring out the "without knowing anything"s and the "can't be bothered"s.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18750037
Would you call that person an "agitator, racist and asshole"?
This person isn't on the receiving end of it, but not happy about the arbitraryness of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv7hvZee-PQ
Does that make them an "agitator, racist and asshole", too?
How is such a broad claim not also kinda agitation, especially if it's on the backdrop of people already knocking people off platforms in an organized fashion -- with no word about what is to become of them, simply because some people are considered undesirables, or "assholes"?
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That is not the same thing. The white supremacists are thrown off Patreon because of what they do not because of who they are . Their ideas aren't being suppressed.
The white supremacists are thrown off Patreon because of what they do not because of who they are. The problem is this: The power you talk of is arbitrary. People like Sargon of Akkad, who are not white supremacists, are being thrown off Patreon, while the media are giving them cover by spinning a narrative. This is the classic pattern of oppression. You vilify people with a label, which becomes meaningless as the la…
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Yes, and this was problem exists to this day in prevailing cable and newspapers. During the time they were prevalent, unpopular events and speech were not spoken on the biggest networks (still not spoken about) and significant silenced perspectives had to make do with smaller platforms, poorer cable times, smaller venues, and self-publishing newspapers assuming they could fund a printing press. There was not a push t…
It's not new , but I do believe back in the day there was such a thing as public-access television, and anyone could in fact start their own newspaper without being somehow banned from taking cash payments.
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> Privately-owned services should be free to censor. Yes, but they should also be free not to, so we really just need some companies with guts to make a payment processor that to the law, nothing more, and related platforms that do the same thing. > there's not much anyone can do in the current framework of things other than encourage decentralization But that is ultimately at odds with "hardened policies that aren't…
You're making a real big assumption that anyone wants to build this service, and anyone wants to support it. The evidence says, they do not - hate groups fail at these gives all the time because ultimately they also don't get along with anyone else. I'd view that as the marketplace of ideas working correctly.
And of course, people who just nilly-willy declare other people unpersons with a broad brush, those aren't hate groups, either, they couln't possibly be projecting.
You might be declaring millions and billions of people as "nobody", and a few ten thousand witch hunters and those who egg them on or belittle them as "everybody". The next few years will show.
> I'd view that as the marketplace of ideas working correctly.
By people being attacked and smeared? That's not what marketplace of ideas means.
So in your mind, would the "marketplace of ideas" be working even better if instead if just kicking people from Patreon, they'd also have their water and electricity turned off? If not, why not? Don't say "it's an utility", this is in the context of your claim nobody could possibly want such an utility. If that were true, it would be like regression to some very medieval understanding of society, if even that.
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Of course they do; do you have a more specific point or argument?
More specific than pointing out the contradiction of letting corporations do whatever they want while expecting them to behave a certain way?
I think ultimately I'm against censoring out 'alt-right' ideas and the like because we've already taken a pro-business approach to freedom like some of the commenters are suggesting (a more allowable use of the right to refuse service to anyone). This resulted in segregation by race and by gender, leading to unfair discrimination which ultimately resulted in a constitutional amendment disallowing it.
Since then, the right of a company to deny services to someone hasn't been exercised as much.
What happens if we begin to censor content on online platforms more readily, or in a more general sense censor ("curate") more readily? As happened in the 1950s, people will be unfairly excluded. Will we have to add another entry to the whitelist (another constitutional amendment) for this category of people then blindly continue in support of censorship? Will we be happy to create segregated circles where a group with superior technology clearly profits? In this case, I'm pretty obviously in support of allowing controversial content because freedom of expression is, in our culture, rightly (imo) regarded as important, discrimination has yielded poor outcomes in the past, and it is arrogant to think that we have figured out exactly what is acceptable to censor and to start actively censoring on that basis.
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I was under the impression that the main thing preventing "another company/service should be able to fill the void." - is the rules and hoops / unchecked power of the visa/mc/amex etc. I have seen rumors about us gov and other govs pressuring cc authorities to do things in certain ways as well, however my senator says there is no proof rumored pressure changed anything in one case that I write about. there is demand…
> I have seen rumors about us gov and other govs pressuring cc authorities to do things in certain ways as well, however my senator says there is no proof rumored pressure changed anything in one case that I write about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point Operation Choke Point was a 2013 initiative of the United States Department of Justice,[1] which would investigate banks in the United States and t…
However I am sure that banks were indeed discriminating based upon it, in some cases refuses accounts, in other cases charging higher fees. Taking advantage of marginalized access to banking based upon 'possible scrutiny as laid out by the choke point initiative'
There may not be any evidence in that they can refuse service or raise rates and blame this or whatever that, however lets be real. The govs telling private money handlers if they touch money that was part of these things we don't like, err, have a higher chance of fraud, then we will send fed investigators to investigate you - well...
here is a list from the linked wiki mentioned in parent comment, partial / edited,
Ammunition Sales
Cable Box De-scramblers
Coin Dealers
Dating Services
Drug Paraphernalia
Escort Services
Firearms Sales
Fireworks Sales
Government Grants
Life-Time Memberships
Mailing Lists/Personal Info
Money Transfer Networks
On-line Gambling
Pharmaceutical Sales
Pornography[5]
Racist Materials
Surveillance Equipment
Telemarketing
Tobacco Sales
Travel Clubs
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I argue that by your own ideal state of decentralization, the current system should be working perfectly fine for you regardless of private companies censoring X, Y, and Z. The "fully decentralized" internet can (does?) already currently exist today alongside our usual youtube/facebook/cloudflare/etc centralized internet. The state of centralization is entirely by user choice, not by force. Literally the only necessa…
Thanks, that's a great deconstruction of my argument. It seems one of the problems I have is cultural (censorship being increasingly thought of as acceptable) and the other a proposed solution to the problem as it exists solely on the internet. And you're right, the internet is already decentralized...it's just the things built on top of it that are mostly centralized. I guess my viewpoint is that decentralized servi…
I agree, it's an unfortunate consequence of monetary incentive.
There's tons of FOSS self-hosted alternatives for any typical centralized service, all of which could be bundled and idiotproofed and sold to average people. But no one is out there innovating and marketing it and pushing it to the mainstream (if the demand is even there - not likely)
Theres a few attempts, like https://nextcloud.com/devices/ , but I would have never heard of them if I didn't have a specific interest in finding open source alternatives to cloud services.
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What part of "time and time again I find" was so unclear you had to bring out the "without knowing anything"s and the "can't be bothered"s.
I find it very clear, it's simply just a bald assertion, and "asshole" makes it meaningless, since that's entirely subjective and not falsifiable at all. And time and time again doesn't tell us how many times we're talking about, and what you "finding" that means, what kind of examination precedes it, if any. At the most basic level, a phrase like "I find Jazz great" doesn't express the result of a thorough investiga…
Every individual that is harmed by an agitator is exactly as deserving of protection as every individual that is harmed by deplatforming. Guess which group is more numerous?
There may be some undeserved damage among people labeled as "assholes", but there is A LOT of undeserved damage among the innocent victims of hate speech. It seems that you consider the former group more deserving of protection (due to number, value, or something else?) than the later. Be my guest, but I do not.