8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service • Hacker News Board

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#911

Post by wozniacki » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 8:22 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #539

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…

My main issue with discussions on topics like this is a sort of fundamentalism. It's very easy to take a particular right (e.g., speech, property) and defend it absolutely. But rights are inherently social, and must be balanced against other people's rights. For example, I don't think my freedom of speech should trump Cloudflare's or Voxility's right to freedom of association. They should generally be able to decide…

   It's very easy to take a particular right (e.g., speech,
   property) and defend it absolutely. But rights are 
   inherently social, and must be balanced against other 
   people's rights.

Would you find it acceptable if we societally agreed to do away with the privacy that surrounds the dispensation of healthcare - all the costly protocols (like Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and others), the costly mandated use of privacy compliant software, the costly mandated use of approved healthcare vendors and sub-vendors, the costly management, storing and archival of your records - all of that - say in the name of cheaper, higher quality and more widely accessible healthcare with more rich array of options offered to the citizenry as a whole - the likes of which that are unimaginable in our bloated, archaic and fault-prone system?

Doesn't that sound like a good societal trade off? Your paramount right to privacy can't be defended absolutely at the cost of people's basic access to quality healthcare.

Now can it?

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#912

Post by nimbius » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 8:23 AM UTC

all philosophy aside, these decisions were not made based on a moral conscience of any sort. Just because corporations are in some sense treated like people in the United States doesnt mean they act in any way like them. Epik and Cloudflare are donning the cloak of moral turpitude to protect their shareholders.

Cloudflare and Epik are keenly aware that if they do not take some tangible action immediately, they expose the company to enormous risk. They understand that Americans will not be able to get satisfaction from their government or law enforcement. People will file lawsuits that will be well funded, and increasingly difficult to defend.

Even if there is no lawsuit, there could still be a mass exodus from these providers. GoDaddy enjoyed the same such exodus after years of bad PR and Cloudflare is no different. Host the site that planned a mass shooting, and companies will flee from your service to protect their brand.

This is really no different than Subway dropping Jared, or Disney dropping PewDiePie.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#913

Post by rswail » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 8:30 AM UTC

chessturk wrote: post #790

devmunchies wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some minimum level of education What a bunch of horse crap. Being told what to think, what to buy, who to vote for, how to feel. If you claim to believe in a liberal democracy but want "education" or limited-speech then you don't have must faith in the system. Democracy has been broken since the rise of technology and mass media. If you control the narrative, you control the people, and the power. The outrage over…

> Democracy has been broken since the rise of technology and mass media. I'm sorry, when was everyone equally franchised? Between Jim Crow, Women's Sufferage, and Civil Rights you've got what? The mid 60s to mid 80s as the heyday of American Democracy? Having Nixon smack in the middle of that doesn't really help the arguement. If we define democracy as universal suffrage and equal vote weight, democracy has been more…

If deomcracy been broken since the rise of technology and mass media, then I assume we're talking about Hearst and his stoking of propaganda during the Spanish-US war of 1898?

Or perhaps you're referring to British propaganda during the Boer War?

Thinking that the advent of Facebook has radically changed the use of media for propaganda purposes is misguided. It may allow for more direct propaganda and greater ability to select and target a particular audience, but it is no different to the psyops and propaganda techniques that have been prevalent during the entire 20th century.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#914

Post by 2_listerine_pls » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 8:30 AM UTC

thrwayxyz wrote: post #815

s9w wrote: post #335

So the campaigns against free speech show results. The wheels are in motion, the dominoes are falling. Funny how here on HN the use of the term "free speech absolutists"/"free speech absolutism" has absolutely skyrocketed for example. So are these the last days of the internet? 4chan is still there, voat too (although barely) - but I don't know how much longer. 100% legal sites are taken offline for absolutely no rea…

The www is fucked. Move to tor. The only place where you can have an interesting conversation is one where the conversation can't be monetized.

any suggestions?

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#915

Post by JulianMorrison » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 8:31 AM UTC

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of scum and villainy. The internet has to grow up and conclusively eject these kinds of people - don't tolerate them, don't tolerate their providers.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#916

Post by sytelus » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 8:32 AM UTC

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 visited 8chan/pol for the first time before it went down. I think reading content there should absolutely make anyone think hard about reasonable constraints on free speech. For example, I saw someone started a thread about population in Nigeria rising. Several anonymous commenters piled on, virtually everyone referring to Africans as “subhumans”. One commenter proposed that western countries should issue tags to hunt Africans in same way as animals and utilize their skills to survive as hunting challenge. Other commenter thanked Trump for shutting down Ebola research and hoped it will soon spread again. It was very clear no one had any rational debate. No one cared to fact check or cross-question anything. You can literally through whatever number and cite whatever source you want and everyone merely would go with it as long as it supports racial superiority. Everyone was busy one upping another in how grotesque and extreme they possibly could be. It is at this point I realized that hate is an addiction. I am certain it gives large dopamine hits for these people to consume all these material. It is probably highlight of their day to justify themselves as savior of humanity, being superior and created favorably by god than others. They probably hang out in here very large portions of their free time not for learning something but for pure entertainment derived dopamine hits. They are neither looking for nor want rational debates or reasoning from the other side. I can see how someone vulnerable will get in to these forums and become terminal addict. These forums should not be considered any less dangerous than drug dealers who handout cocain to young kids.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#917

Post by Doxin » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 8:37 AM UTC

saintPirelli wrote: post #910

wpietri wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main issue with discussions on topics like this is a sort of fundamentalism. It's very easy to take a particular right (e.g., speech, property) and defend it absolutely. But rights are inherently social, and must be balanced against other people's rights. For example, I don't think my freedom of speech should trump Cloudflare's or Voxility's right to freedom of association. They should generally be able to decide…

> For example, I don't think my freedom of speech should trump Cloudflare's or Voxility's right to freedom of association. Right, but those only produce a conflict in a very specific case and your right to free speech should be defended by your government/peers regardless of where you do the caching for your blog (or whatever). I have a huge issue with this modern relativist approach, because it leads to the situatio…

> I think the boldest example of why this is bad is the right to live. In my view, this is an absolute right. "But what if it's a mass murderer?" - "But what if they are terminally ill and are suffering?" - "But what if they are so heavily handicapped that... ?" Adding _ifs_ and _buts_ to a right that should be absolute leads down a very dark path, because _the line_ will be a constant subject of discussion.

Could you clarify what exactly you're arguing here? This part is not entirely clear to me.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#918

Post by hrktb » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 8:49 AM UTC

adnzzzzZ wrote: post #492

hrktb wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inciting violence is not legal though. It’s reasonable to cut support to players that relentlessly fail to comply with the rules. The platforms are not turning against them, they are constantly abusing the ToS of these platforms . Now some people disagree with the ToS in the first place, but it’s another discussion to be done at another plane. There has always been a filtering of what goes to a super wide audience, m…

8chan took the shooter's manifesto down way faster than it took Facebook to take down the Christchurch shooter's streams. You're mistaken if you think that 8chan "relentlessly fails to comply with the rules", anyone paying attention knows that they're very responsive. This is nothing more than a witchhunt because people want the site to go away.

I get your point, but I think responsiveness is just an aspect of the issue. For 8chan and for any other platform.

For instance if you were harrassed on twitter, twitter being blazingly fast at taking down tweets you report wouldn’t help you much, you’d still have to report every single tweet of users harrassing you.

Even if 8chan takes down every violence threat, if it still propagated enough to be worth it for the poster, 8chan’s modus operandi has very little impact on the situation.

I am not saying it’s easy, just that they clearly haven’t found a good solution.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#919

Post by onetimemanytime » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 9:08 AM UTC

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…

>>Unchecked extremism compounded by more unchecked extremism inevitably leads to scenarios like the ones we’re witnessing more and more often.

IMO providers like cell phone, internet and all should be forced not to cut off service based on speech. Thanks to the same Amendment they have the right to choose who they associate with, and 8Chan has the right to broadcast abhorrent (but legal, at least in USA) views. If we allow them to ban 8chan next they'll move to ban even less controversial views as time goes by.

A middle ground would be to kinda force them not to ban sites based on content that is legal but controversial. If internet providers ban you for your views, do you exist? Internet providers are as essential as electricity these days. Can PSEG cut power to KKK's headquarters? I doubt it and no one would say that PSEG agrees with their views because they provide electricity to them in exchange for money. Freedom from slaves and women voting was controversial at one point...

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#920

Post by solohan » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 9:14 AM UTC

saintPirelli wrote: post #910

wpietri wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main issue with discussions on topics like this is a sort of fundamentalism. It's very easy to take a particular right (e.g., speech, property) and defend it absolutely. But rights are inherently social, and must be balanced against other people's rights. For example, I don't think my freedom of speech should trump Cloudflare's or Voxility's right to freedom of association. They should generally be able to decide…

> For example, I don't think my freedom of speech should trump Cloudflare's or Voxility's right to freedom of association. Right, but those only produce a conflict in a very specific case and your right to free speech should be defended by your government/peers regardless of where you do the caching for your blog (or whatever). I have a huge issue with this modern relativist approach, because it leads to the situatio…

I sympathize with this argument, but it has several problems: Rights and wrongs are inherently social constructs. The is no (currently) discovered moral potential in the laws of the universe, nor is there a well defined, clearly bounded, definition of life.

I would argue that relativism is in fact the fundamental construct, and that societies only arise in the unstable balances between extremes.

That's not to say that fundamental rights cannot be instrumental in strengthening society, but since they arise from within society, they will need to be updated as society inevitably changes in time.