> On HN you also can't really say many things cause it is moderated, I've experienced it many times that people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything.
That is the community doing that, not the owners of HN, so I don't understand why you'd have a problem with it. You are free to post what you want here, and other users are free to up/down vote you, or reply to you, as they see fit. That is the very freedom you're crying for here, right?
I get it though: You want a fully unmoderated soap box to say whatever you want and don't want anyone to censor or moderate you. You're never going to get that using someone else's forum, so the solution is simple: Build your own! Buy a domain, learn to code or use a premade platform, launch a VPS or CoLo box, and post to your heart's content. If you are able to build an audience and get people to listen to you, great. If you choose not to censor or moderate your users, great. But I think your eyes will then be opened to exactly how difficult it is to maintain an Internet forum without some sort of rules and moderation.
But if we remove the notion of "it's only the Internet" from the equation the same behavior comes under harassment and anti-stalking laws in the US. So, how it is any different if you stalked a person online from that doing it in person? How it is less of a threat because the Internet makes it easier to do? The possession of a firearm makes murder easier to do but it doesn't make murder less of a crime either. I just think some people are looking for an excuse to break the core values of civil society for the sake of some sadistic pleasure of harming another human being.
/rant
No, it's the First Amendment which means that the government may not arrest your for what you say or censor your speech. 'Freedom of speech' means exactly what it says on the tin: that you may speak freely. In the United States, the government must respect your freedom of speech, and private entities have no such restriction.
> If someone invites you into their home and you start calling their family names and pissing all over the carpet, the homeowner is well within her rights to throw you out and shut the door on you.
Note that this is the same argument used by a monarch to justify restrictions on speech: it's his home, and you're welcome to leave.
I think that it's fine and proper that private entities are free to regulate speech on their properties, but I also think that it's often inadvisable and unfortunate that they do so.
To say "I suppressed their speech but it wasn't unconstitutional" is a very poor defense - that what you did can't be punished by the supreme court. I'm supposed to respect you for that? Its not just inadvisable and unfortunate; its wrong. At least here in America.
In such a case, would it not be your employer's right to terminate your employment? I'll give a hamfisted example:
Let's say I work for "E Corp". I also have very strong opinions on interracial marriage. In my opinion, people of different ethnic backgrounds shouldn't mix because it pollutes the gene pool of "superior" races.
Now let's say I start a blog where I regularly post essays and editorials which describe my opinions and I critique various media and public figures based on their adherence to my worldview.
One day, after a particularly impassioned post, my blog is noticed by a columnist at the New York Times who writes an opinion piece on modern day race relations. The public debate quickly spreads and soon my blog and opinions are being condemned by millions (and praised by several as well).
Now, E Corp knows I'm one of their employees and despite what you may have heard, the executive board is actually a pretty level-headed bunch. They typically seek to maximize profits but draw the line when it comes to things that make the company look bad or could hurt their public image. In fact, the CEO is currently the spokesman for a well-known minority rights group.
Now, while the state cannot force me to take down my blog, no matter how unpopular the opinions posted there may be, they also cannot force E Corp to keep me (a non-contracted employee) on the payroll. In fact, many public figures have stated their opinion that in keeping me on staff, they're essentially saying that they're OK with my opinions.
Can the state compel E Corp to keep me as an employee since I make my blog posts outside of work? Would that not be compelling E Corp to make the statement that my publicly broadcast opinions are OK? They may not be illegal but I'd wager that just as The Man can't shut down my blog for being unpopular or "offensive" to many, they also can't force my employer to make a statement by standing with me.
And I never said it did. I was refuting the illogical leap from "First Amendment" to "I can say or do whatever I want and not suffer any consequences, period".
Everyone is indeed born with the right of free speech, and I will staunchly defend that right. However, that doesn't mean I or anyone else can walk into someone else's demesnes and start verbally abusing them without at least being told to leave, which is their right. Or if they like the abuse, they equally have the right to let me stay and continue abusing them.
To put it another way, your right to swing your fist stops at my face.
You were the first person to mention the "First Amendment".
The amazing benefit of the internet was the solution to this. In network protocol that doesn't distinguish between different classes of network hosts, each network peer has the ability to publish on their own. Sure, there are technical details in figuring out how to run your own server. The cost of learning that or paying someone else to handle it is a normal cost of publication (which isn't particularly expensive). The point is that there is no authority standing in the way.
As you say, if someone doesn't like how they are moderated on someone else's forum, they have the same ability they had to run their own forum where they get to be the moderator. The catch is that Freedom of Speech doesn't guarantee an audience, so getting people to participate is a problem for the individual publishers to solve on their own.
Unfortunately, we have lost a lot of this freedom, and that loss is accelerating. NAT has created multiple classes of hosts, some of which cannot publish on their own. This created a culture of software where connections that should be peer-to-peer are brokered through a central authority.
We need to regain the true right to publish - where network peers are equal - before these rights are lost completely. The imprimatur[1] is almost finished and the discussion is focused on how people moderate (or don't moderate) various forums, when the focus should be on making sure the right run those forums still exists in the future.
Even on 4chan, amusingly, the best boards are the ones ruled most strictly.
If you want mindless brain candy, to giggle at absurdity, or revel in the filth that is humanity - then the larger boards on reddit, and /b/, and /r9k/ are the place to be, and in that context, are better.
If you want curated debate and discussion, then more moderated boards and places like hn are where to go, and would be called better in this case.
I would say that the discussion quality is better on more heavily moderated boards, but the exposure to varied topics is definitely stifled. The flip side of heavier moderation is that it is much easier for dissenting opinions to be stifled. And even if it's not intentional, or not even occurring, knowing that there is heavy moderation will always lead a very vocal minority of users to claim discrimination and censorship.
It's harder to avoid being just an echo chamber, too.
Where did jsf666 say their rights are being trampled, you've just invented that unless they've edited their post. This is like strawman the post. On topic it's hilarious that he/she's complaining about downvotes for airing opinions against the hivemind then gets downvoted for that opinion. Way to prove them wrong. (jsf666 comment is currently greyed out)
Not really.
> Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[1]
I agree with you 100%. After reading so much social media which is designed to increase one's professional reputation, ego and social status like facebook and HN (as well as main stream news about celebrities and politicians), it's grounding and humanizing to go to a place like /b/ where you can't maintain a reputation. You can actually be honest and get an honest human response.
This was one of moot's main reasons for keeping it going. I chat there with suicidal people, people afraid to go to doctors, people abused and neglected by their parents, people trying drugs, people seeking spirituality, homosexuals from small towns, all afraid to speak up in public, their doctors, their schools.
I hate the racism there. The sexism is not great. I especially the deplore the animal torture. But even real-life socializing isn't as intimate and bold as anonymous socializing. And what people need to remember is that a .gif of a scumbag who rigged a clothesline to drown a dog every time it moves is just a picture. The disgusting act has already been done. Moreover, these images are evidence that bad things happen and we can feel justified in doing something about them in real-life instead of only acting on fear.
I need to look past all of that crap in order to have actual human connections I can't get in real life or online. And so do the people on the other end of my connections. Because mainstream social life has failed us.
When I said you can't maintain a reputation on /b/, though, there are some workarounds: People create labels for their groups like gamergate and anonymous that leak out into the rest of the world. There are plenty of those people who obviously aren't satisfied to have intimate, anonymous conversation and have bigger axes to grind. They wreck the environment and as the saying goes, "This is why we can't have nice things." I could see all of that being too damn much of a toll to take on moot, and I don't require of him that he maintain any particular ideals. I also heard other things, but who knows.
> people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything
Yes, especially on HN and reddit, voting is not used to eliminate spam and off-topic, but to indicate consensus values and idols. So even if you're right, if you don't validate the hivemind, you get downvoted. You could tell the world the Earth is round during the dark ages and get downvoted. If you're a recognizable name on HN, you instantly get upvoted. It's the same chickenshit conformity that creates the capitalistic hierarchy in mainstream social life.
Language is powerful. It is so powerful that almost every significant human achievement has been driven by it. It is so general that there are no actions that cannot be mediated through speech. By saying the right words in the right order at the right place to the right people, you can cause anything that is possible to happen.
There are people who will not exercise judgment with this power, and they will employ it to harm others. And considering that the main justification for supporting free speech is that it enable good decision-making, it should be revoked when bad decisions are clearly being made in its name.
You have a right to communicate your ideas, share your intent, express yourself, inform others of your experiences, and participate in your society. That is our freedom of speech. It is not a right to perform arbitrary actions through the use of language. It is also not a right to be heard.
> '"True freedom of speech" is an awful thing.'
That is, a good use of freedom of speech is to "speak truth to power". Yes, it's awful when freedom of speech is used to kick someone when they're down, but we need to preserve that freedom so that we can kick someone when they're (wrongly) up.
Freedom of speech must have limits. Those limits protect the vulnerable.
And empowerment > infantilization
Absolute freedom of speech is tyrannical. It gives the privileged enormous power to do harm.
Freedom of speech must be limited so it is a power against the powerful, not the powerless.
Protecting people from hate speech and incited violence is not "infantilisation". It's basic human rights.
Are you not familiar with the Intolerance Paradox?
It's a common tactic to root out and silence opposing view points used in dictatorships and non-free nations. As long as someone isn't making death threats or something similar, speech should be free.
But I think people like you need to have their livelihood and speech taken away for good for something they said on the Internet to fully understand why speech needs to be free and protected for all, not just the chosen few.
If I donated some money to a pro-gay marriage proposal, I shouldn't get fired from my job (or bullied online)..so why did the ex-mozilla CEO get bullied and then fired for donating to what he believed in? Because it's against the narrative? This isn't how freedom is supposed to work...
How about gangsta rap groups of the late 80s? Local law-enforcement and many other people used the exact same words that you use today: The freedom of speech has limits. Should they have been prevented from going on stage?
How about occupy Wall street? Why should specific types of speech be allowed in the name of freedom and others deemed conflicting with 'human rights'????
I suspect you and many other people posting here will attempt to come up with reasons why the examples I listed should be accepted but other forms of free speech (which happen to be against your personal views) are wrong and need to be silenced.
This bullshit only creates a divide between us and if our society weren't so lazy, it would lead to another war.
Acting like people cannot control themselves or react reasonably to unsavory opinion is infantilization. The incitement argument doesn't apply to free speech because it isn't just speech. It's speech plus action & it's the action that hurts. The only human rights that exist are the ones you give yourself.
Attempting to restrict speech is not the answer, has never been an acceptable answer, and will never be an acceptable answer.
It's rather difficult to come back to life after you've been murdered.
The old saying "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" is a lie. Words can severely hurt people, and even if they don't break their bones directly, they probably will incite people to actually break their bones.
In the case of suicide, the "victim" would have had any number of chances to disconnect from the source of the speech that was hurting them.
> they probably will incite people to actually break their bones In the case of murder/assault, well, last time I checked that's already a punishable crime.
Your argument does not further a case for the repression of free speech.
Sure, there are type of speech that I find very damaging to society, but they still have to have the right to speak their mind, or we open a Pandora's Box of troubles when we try to decide which types of speech are "bad".
This really is the real test of any society that describes itself as "free". Do they allow their enemies and troublemakers their equal right to speak? Or is Freedom Of Speech de facto only enjoyed by the classes that already have the power to speak, while others are prevented form having a voice? In the later case, "freedom" little more than marketing.
Also, remember that allowing someone the freedom to speak does not require us to give them a stage or an audience.