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

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#921

Post by Daido_M » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 9:23 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…

...so why is the right to live an absolute right? What does it mean for a right to be absolute? (e.g. if someone kills other people to save himself, was he entitled to do so on the basis of his right to live?) Who gets to decide what rights are absolute and what rights aren't? Whose responsibility is it to enforce these absolute rights (and thereby to impose corresponding obligations on other people)?

The logic of "absolute" rights requires an over-simplification that doesn't reflect how rights work in practice.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#922

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 9:27 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…

Disagree. "Absolutely positively absolute rights" are taking decent heuristics and turning them into thought-terminating clichés.

Let's go with the "right to live". Consider questions such as:

- Who has that right? You, or your body? If you don't want to live, should you be forced to? What if you're suffering so badly it's debilitating, and this state won't improve until you eventually die? Is living in a state of endless torture better than not living?

- How do you trade lives for lives? Imagine you have a crazy shooter killing people left and right. There's no fast way to get to them except a drone strike, and each minute you hesitate, they kill another person. Do you pull the trigger and save innocent victims, or do you wait for the armoured police to arrive and safely incapacitate the shooter, honoring their right to live at the expense of many other people? What if it's you facing the shooter alone, and they intend to kill you? Will you shoot first, or give your life for their right to live?

- What if probabilities get involved? The shooter is cornered, and a police sniper has his head in their sights. You can either take the shooter down now, or have a team of officers incapacitate them. The latter has a X% of chance ending in a police officer dying. At X=100%, you're trading life for life. At what X do you decide to have the sniper take the shot? What if there's a risk of more than one police deaths involved? At what threshold in the probability density function is it worth to take that risk?

- What if money gets involved? The most complicated variant, an extension of trading lives with probabilities. You have me sitting in front of a button, pressing which will immediately wreck the economy of a small country. You can't get to me, but see my head through the scope of your sniper rifle. I'm about to press that button. Will you pull the trigger? And before you say, "obviously no!", keep in mind that wrecking the economy of a country is bound to result in many, many deaths.

"Absolute rights" are good as heuristics. But like all heuristics, they hit corner cases. These corner cases need to be thought about explicitly.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#923

Post by znpy » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 9:29 AM UTC

laughinghan wrote: post #803

znpy wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a fallacy in your thinking imo. Sites like 8chan are not entirely devoted to radicalisation, just like a mosque is not devoted to radicalisation. Yet sometimes in a mosque some evil islamic imam or something preaches radicalisation. Yet we tolerate and welcome mosques. Then why shouldn’t we tolerate and welcome sites like 8chan? Also please keep in mind that now that 8chan has been basically shut down, we ha…

What are you talking about? We can and do arrest, charge, and convict "evil islamic imams" that "preach radicalization", and don't let them operate mosques. We tolerate and welcome mosques because they ban radicals and report them to the FBI: "Monteilh eventually so unnerved Orange County's Muslim community that that they got a restraining order against him. [T]hey also reported Monteilh to the FBI" https://www.thegu…

> What are you talking about? We can and do arrest, charge, and convict "evil islamic imams" that "preach radicalization", and don't let them operate mosques.

Indeed, you arrest the single imam, you don't shut down the whole mosque. That's the point.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#924

Post by saintPirelli » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 9:30 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #922

saintPirelli wrote: post #910

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Disagree. "Absolutely positively absolute rights" are taking decent heuristics and turning them into thought-terminating clichés. Let's go with the "right to live". Consider questions such as: - Who has that right? You, or your body? If you don't want to live, should you be forced to? What if you're suffering so badly it's debilitating, and this state won't improve until you eventually die? Is living in a state of en…

We can talk about edge cases when we agree on the base principles. A principle isn't automatically invalid because it has hard-to-answer edge cases. This is faulty logic.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#925

Post by saintPirelli » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 9:33 AM UTC

Daido_M wrote: post #921

saintPirelli wrote: post #910

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

...so why is the right to live an absolute right? What does it mean for a right to be absolute? (e.g. if someone kills other people to save himself, was he entitled to do so on the basis of his right to live?) Who gets to decide what rights are absolute and what rights aren't? Whose responsibility is it to enforce these absolute rights (and thereby to impose corresponding obligations on other people)? The logic of "a…

If I declare a right an "absolute" right I do not aim to answer any of the questions you posed, those are all good questions that need to be carefully considered, but none of them render the "over-simplified" right to live any less morally justified or desirable.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#926

Post by Daido_M » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 9:35 AM UTC

AgentME wrote: post #836

username3 wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8chan incubated hate speech because no one challenged hate speech on 8chan. 8chan welcomed everyone, but everyone ignored 8chan. >The concept of freedom of speech falls apart if universally reprehensible speech is allowed to be publicaly espoused without being firmly challenged. Forums like 8chan and 4chan effectively incubate hate speech by providing a safe space for anonymized, like-minded individuals to congregate…

I've called out hate speech on 4chan and 8chan many times before. I've gotten called an "SJW cuck" a lot, and others doubled-down in posting shit gleefully when they saw their shit "triggered the libs". That was the fun part to them. To someone like me who isn't there just to challenge people, it's exasperating. I gave up and they didn't. I think certain site structures encourage different kinds of discussion. Imagin…

Regarding the "bumping" mechanism and its effect on "normies": isn't almost every forum like this? I can't think of a forum that doesn't shift threads with recent posts to the top. This isn't limited to 4chan or 8chan, so I think it's unfair to single them out as encouraging extreme views.

Regarding anonymity: perhaps anonymity has the opposite effect, allowing people to be more willing to have thoughtful discussions and change their minds, instead of having to stick to their guns for fear of losing face. Perhaps the freedom of anonymity allowed people to say what they always wanted to say but couldn't because they feared for their reputation.

All of which is not to say that 4chan and 8chan don't contain hate speech and other forms of expression deemed unacceptable in broader society. But perhaps the reason people say such things and talk in those ways isn't because of the forum itself, but because of the state that political discourse has devolved to these days. 4chan and 8chan are nothing more than fora at the end of the day; and if they're blocked, people will simply move to continue the conversation (just like they moved from 4chan to 8chan in the first place).

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#927

Post by Natanael_L » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 9:36 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…

Declaring them absolute also don't solve these problems, because sometimes you can end up with conflicts between absolute rights, where you are not able to protect both rights at once.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#928

Post by saintPirelli » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 9:46 AM UTC

Doxin wrote: post #917

saintPirelli wrote: post #910

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 yo…

I'm basically saying that the answer to the question of "Is murder wrong" should be a boolean value, not a float. Once it's a float, you open the door to all kinds of nasty thoughts arguing about where to draw the line.

Are handicapped people worthy of killing? What about long-term unemployed? What about the opressors - like rich people? Homosexuals? There have literally been people arguing and executing all of these appalling thoughts in the last century and I would argue beneath it all lies a deadly relativism that says "Of course there is a universal right to live, well, unless you are a ... of course."

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#929

Post by FooHentai » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 10:33 AM UTC

watwut wrote: post #881

username3 wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8chan incubated hate speech because no one challenged hate speech on 8chan. 8chan welcomed everyone, but everyone ignored 8chan. >The concept of freedom of speech falls apart if universally reprehensible speech is allowed to be publicaly espoused without being firmly challenged. Forums like 8chan and 4chan effectively incubate hate speech by providing a safe space for anonymized, like-minded individuals to congregate…

People did challenged hate speech on 8chan. What happened is that those who challenged hate speech on 8chan lost in following fights. One factor is that chan structure favors bad-faith actors and arguments, favoring inflammatory emotional ones. But the other fact is that bad-faith actors and arguments of the other side lost too.

It's unfortunate that IDs were not applied across the chans, as they went a long way to solving this issue (a single poster was tagged with a consistent identifier) without compromising the main point of anonymous imageboards (no persistent author identity was attached to messages, post contents stood on their own merits only).

Still possible to subvert, but harder to do so, and it made client-side blocking of particular ids fairly simple.

Tripcodes fail in this regard, as they are elective.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#930

Post by latexr » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 10:47 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'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.

You can support free speech and still condemn 8chan, by considering Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance[1]. If a person or group enacts violence on another person or group because of their ideas, the elements of the latter will curb their speech out of fear.

Violent groups use “free speech” as an excuse because it works. They’re only interested in free speech for themselves, not others. In fact, they’re so incapable of tolerating the free speech of others that they resort to killing them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance