Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Imzy wants to be a kinder, gentler version of Reddit

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126 pointsohjeez326 comments

I am staggered by the amount of people here who object to Imzy's "Be Nice"-policy on the basis that it limits free speech. To me that seems to be a rather flawed argumentation:

a) The First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees free speech, explicitly does so in a political context ("Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech"). Imzy is not the US Congress, they don't have jurisdiction over anything but their own little niche of the Internet (which absolutely nobody is forcing you to visit if you don't want to) - so why are you upset when they ask you, within the bounds of their community, to be nice?

b) Why does free speech mean that we get to insult and demean each other, even going so far as to sending death threats? I think the German constitution (the Grundgesetz) has a point when it says in Article 5, §2 that the right of free speech is limited, amongst others, by every person's right of dignity ("Recht der persönlichen Ehre" - a hard to translate concept).

c) On Reddit and like sites we see behaviour that we would never tolerate if we saw it in real life. Why do we not only tolerate it online, but suddenly elevate such antisocial behaviour of the extremest kind to a mystical status of "expression of free speech"? There is a reason we are taught "manners" as children: without a minimum of politeness, societies cannot function. Politeness and courtesy have to do with respecting another's person even if you don't share his (or her) opinions, with tolerating people who are different from you. And is that not the very epitome of freedom?

Free speech is perhaps the most fundamental right of any democracy that must be protected at all costs. It is vital for the continuation of a free nation. However, Imzy is not a nation. It is a little website on the Internet. And it doesn't ban dissenting opinion (the real reason why we need free speech) - it merely asks you to remain polite while stating your's. So what is your problem with it?

There is more to the idea of free speech than simply the first amendment. This essay explains it well: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/29/the-spirit-of-the-first...

The general gist is: imagine a world where women who advocate for suffrage and women's rights are ostracized from society, rejected from conferences and fired from their jobs. Those of us who favor a broader concept of free speech feel this is a bad state of affairs even if it isn't Congress doing it.

I would say that in a society like that, there is more amiss than simply a lack of free speech. After all, there are other human rights. However, I see what you mean, and not being a constitutional scholar I shall cede the point.

Nonetheless, you have only addressed one half of a point out of my original three. (You cannot compare a website like Imzy with society at large is what I was trying to drive at in point A.) What do you say to the other two?

> I would say that in a society like that, there is more amiss than simply a lack of free speech.

Every society (and community) has norms which are acceptable, and those which are not. If a person decides to not live according to those norms they're an outcast and will be dealt with as such. The society is like a living organism which will protect its norms in order to survive akin to an auto immune system. Because of these principles every society lives within its own bubble, too.

I suppose Von Trier's Dogville touches upon the subject, but there's countless examples available from Swartz to Snowden. If someone has another (or better, more accurate) example I'm interested hearing yours.

>imagine a world where women who advocate for suffrage and women's rights are [...], rejected from conferences

Your expanded idea of free speech is noble but it's not possible for society to provide.

Free speech allowed by the government is possible.

Free speech hosted and paid for by private commercial entities is impossible -- in any long-term sustaining way.

The "free speech on commercial entities" would require 2 extra draconian laws that citizens would never agree to:

1) a law to force private entities to pay for speech they disagree with on their private platforms and in their private conferences even if that opposing speech causes them to lose the funding that allows for them to pay for it in the first place.

2) a law to force web surfers' eyeballs[1] to view content they don't agree with, and force people to buy tickets to conferences with speakers they don't want to hear

Free speech with private commercial entities creates a contradiction of priorities. I've written about this impossibility before.[2]

To make it relate to HN readers, imagine after creating a Digital Ocean account and paying $9/month for VPS to host a blog about photography or enthusiast forum about cars, you must now pay for opinion pieces about Trump or Clinton (whichever you disagree with). The draconian law requires you pay for it because nobody's opinion is allowed to be marginalized. Also, the web users visiting that new site are required to show video proof (maybe via iPhone/Android camera) that they've read the marginalized opinions. (To satisfy the proverbial "if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" ... if no visitors go to the web page and read it, it's effectively not free speech.)

[1] Ludovico technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(film)#/med...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12158682

> 1) Private entities must pay for speech they disagree with on their private platforms and in their private conferences even if that opposing speech causes them to lose the funding that allows for them to pay for it in the first place.

Just thinking about your point (1), I'm not sure it is impossible, depending on the industry. Isn't it just the straightforward position for most companies that are considered common carriers - they can't discriminate?

>Isn't it just the straightforward position for most companies that are considered common carriers - they can't discriminate?

(For more about that won't work, see my previous comment I linked in the footnote.)

It wouldn't make any sense for the government to forcefully reclassify a company like Facebook as a "common carrier"[1] like a telecommunications provider because FB is sponsored by advertisers. The ISPs (with subscribers) can be common carriers but not websites (with ad sponsors).

A "common carrier" designation from the government doesn't come with a $20 billion payment to Facebook from the government (taxpayers) to make up for loss of advertisers pulling their ad dollars on platform that allows speech they don't like.

Likewise, since "common carrier" doesn't mean users are forced keep their Facebook accounts and forced to read newsfeeds of opinions they disagree with, it doesn't solve the problem.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier#Telecommunicati...

Not everything has to be a law. For example, one could imagine a world where the social norm was that services embodied some more generalized idea of free speech, and people are reluctant to use services that don't do this because one day it's likely to be used against them. Instead, the press are pushing the opposite social norm, that sites are somehow morally obligated to restrict speech: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/social-media-companies-are-...

>For example, one could imagine a world where the social norm was that services embodied some more generalized idea of free speech, and people are reluctant to use services that don't do this because one day it's likely to be used against them.

Ok, I'm having trouble parsing what you wrote. I also looked at your link to see how it relates.

Tell me if I interpreted your hypothetical scenario correctly:

Suppose we have website called OrganicMothers.com that focuses on things like mothers breastfeeding their infants, growing veggies in the back yard and using a blender to pulverize it into homemade baby food. That website has heavy censoring against posts about artificial foods, or alternative viewpoints about synthetic breast milk, or messages with a disrespectful tone.

Another website is AnythingGoesMothering.com allows any writings including chemical additives and all profanity and insults are uncensored.

You're saying that a future societal norm could be where a mother who avoided AnythingGoesMothering.com because it had too many messages saying "any mother who doesn't feed her baby Monsanto's patented baby milk instead of breastmilk is a stupid c-nt!" ... will be denied a job and/or shunned from dinner parties?

Remember that "free speech" includes everything from the cess pool. Basically all text is allowed short of doxxing people's social security numbers.

I just don't see your hypothetical becoming the norm.

Honestly, I was more thinking about the layer of abstraction above individual communities like OrganicMothers.com and AnythingGoesMothering.com - the one made up of shared services like Reddit and Facebook that are used to establish communities, since they're harder to avoid. But even at that level, speech-restrictive websites can certainly be worrying. For example, anti-vaccination ideas are likely to be popular with your hypothetical organic mothering community, and obviously they are also likely to attract a lot of anger. So the community would certainly be a lot friendlier if they banned criticism of mothers' choices not to vaccinate their kids. Can you perhaps see how this might not be socially desirable?

>be a lot friendlier if they banned criticism of mothers' choices not to vaccinate their kids. Can you perhaps see how this might not be socially desirable?

Yes I do, but only because you cherry-picked an example that seems to be an obvious benefit.

I want to emphasize again that true free speech includes everything you don't like and all stupid opinions so you can't isolate good examples and ignore bad ones.

You cannot isolate good and bad examples of censorship that easily either, because it denies users information on what information they're being denied. This hypothetical site is hardly going to tell users that it's hiding the fact they're killing their babies from them; it's more likely to frame it as protecting them from industry propaganda, exactly as you argued they should be allowed to. It's only from the outside perspective that this is obviously terrible.

(This is, in my experience, a general principle of site-based censorship. For example, if I had a dollar for every regular of every feminist community who was sure the site moderators were protecting them from the oppressor, when actually they were protecting the site owners from criticism and dissent by women more oppressed than them who they were rather spectacularly failing to represent...)

>Suppose we have website called OrganicMothers.com that focuses on things like mothers breastfeeding their infants, growing veggies in the back yard and using a blender to pulverize it into homemade baby food. That website has heavy censoring against posts about artificial foods, or alternative viewpoints about synthetic breast milk, or messages with a disrespectful tone.

Indeed these sort of communities actually require "heavy censorship" to remain functional and on topic otherwise it enviably would be overrun with trolls or people "looking to debate." It actually cannot be prevented without moderation. Without moderation the internet is not functional for the majority of users.

Anyways, any form of moderation at all, even removing spam and off topic posts is "censorship." Commercial speech is also speech so removing spam is "restricting freedom of speech." (not that I think "freedom of speech" is applicable to private websites, because that's silly)

1) The fact that they're paying for speech they disagree with isn't necessarily bad for business. Whether it causes them to lose funding/revenue is a business problem that doesn't seem inherently unsolvable. Does reddit increase or shrink their ad revenue when they decide to drop a controversial subreddit? To take the example in your other post, there's probably a bunch of offensive groups on Facebook. Does P&G threaten to stop advertising on FB? What about non-ad-based revenue models?

2) Not sure why that follows at all.

>2) Not sure why that follows at all.

Because marginalized or fringe opinions already have freedom of speech at the level of ICANN DNS (get a domain name) and the ISP (pay for internet connection and virtual server to host webpages). E.g., if you really really really want to write a webpage about the benefits of child sex, you can get a domain called ChildSexIsGood.com. Host your controversial content (text not pics) there. You don't need Facebook to "approve" of your fringe content. There, you already have "freedom of speech" -- and you've had that autonomy for decades before Facebook/reddit came into existence. You still have that uncensored publishing power on DNS+ISP now.

But that's not good enough because marginalized voices also want an audience. Registering a new domain name doesn't mean you have web visitors. Without the audience, it's not "really free speech."

>What about non-ad-based revenue models?

Nobody has come up with a way for people to pay for websites with opinions they don't want to read.

Consider how hard it is for The New York Times and WSJ to entice people to pay for stories they do want to read.

1) But free speech doesn't entitle you to an audience? Not sure why you're making that leap. It's free speech regardless of the existence of an audience.

2) Sure. And people read the fraction of the NYT they do want to read. And they pay for the part they don't want to read too, because it is happily packaged with the rest. There could also be other business models that involve other third parties than advertisers. Who knows?

Edit: Engrish.

>Not sure why you're making that leap. It's free speech regardless of the existence of an audience.

To clarify, I'm arguing the way others argue so if doesn't seem logical to you, I totally agree!

When you tell people who are censored on places like Facebook to just go make their own website, they'll respond with the analogy: "freedom to shout opinions in my own living room where nobody else can hear it is NOT FREE SPEECH!"

Using that logic, that's why they insist putting the "public space" label on Facebook/reddit/twitter. It's not good enough that DNS+ISP is the "public space". Instead, it must be somebody else's website that already has an audience of millions.

I didn't advocate creating any laws. I was simply describing a concept that goes beyond congress.

However, lets roll with your thought experiment. Lets consider a variation of "equal rights" that applies to more than just the government - say it also applied to lending. It would require 2 extra draconian laws:

1) A law to force private entities to associate with people they dislike, even if that association causes to lose money.

2) A law to force some borrowers to pay higher interest rates to subsidize the defaults of others.

Actually these draconian laws exist and are not particularly controversial at all (though they certainly were in the past). I'm curious to know what you think about it.

Which laws are those?

ECOA and FHA act, among others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Credit_Opportunity_Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Housing_Act

Surrounding these laws is a bunch of regulation and agency interpretation - i.e. if an agency doesn't like your lending/free association choices they'll hit you with lawsuits/regulatory actions that are themselves very punishing.

As a concrete example, see Figure 7 of this paper. This figure shows that lenders could avoid a lot of defaults if they did per-race isotonic regression on FICO scores. In non-technical terms, this means a black person with a FICO score of 600 is more likely to default than an Asian person with the same score, and this information is easy to use. However, lenders are legally forbidden from using this information; as a result, lenders must associate with people (potential defaulters) that they don't want to and Asian people must pay higher interest rates because of this.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-wQVEjH9yuhanpyQjUwQS1JOTQ...

> citizens would never agree to

From the perspective of your elected officials, apathy is agreement.

> I am staggered by the amount of people here who object to Imzy's "Be Nice"-policy on the basis that it limits free speech.

It's especially curious, because HN does try to have a free speech uber alles approach. If limiting speech is good for HN, why isn't it good for Imzy?

It's also important to remember that reddit is very pro-free speech, but bans some protected speech, namely, doxxing. Redditors started to dox people who ran some of the more ahem controversial subreddits. And then reddit banned doxxing.

No right is limitless. I don't know about other countries but in elementary school where I am we're taught a person's freedom is limited by the freedoms of others, and freedom of speech is certainly limited by other people's human rights, including the right to human dignity. AFAIK the declaration of human rights include that right. There is no freedom without responsibility, and that's why people who aren't or can't be responsible are often excluded from the community temporarily or permanently.

Elementary school is not the place to learn about the subtleties of human cultural conflict.

A good starting point though.

I must have been doing something wrong then... Elementary school was exactly where the subtleties of human conflict first appeared to me. IMO, it's as good of a place as any to have some of your first (and due to that, perhaps the most important) encounters with what it means to exist within a society.

Reminds me of the book. "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten".

Early education is generally where people get most of their socialization and first learn about conflict resolution.

This was downvoted for some reason I couldn't see so I upvoted it.

Well, thanks, but some downvotes were quite foreseeable as there are those who believe every right is limitless and that a functional society on that base is possible. I suggest those to go up to someone on the street and try using their right to free speech to the extent they believe it's okay, and see if that person gives them a punch or calls for help.

I'll let you on on a secret that you aren't thought in elementary school. Real human rights are intrinsic and inalienable. Things like the right for your pursuit of happiness and freedom of thought and speech. All supposed rights that require other people's labor or permission (health, education, shelter) are bogus, they are just organizations moving goalposts. Real rights are not bestowed.

Bogus rights are to not be offended, not be attacked, be given dignity and respect. Real rights are to defend yourself, stand your ground and use your body how you want. You just want a few more social norms in some spheres of interaction than some of your neighbors that's all.

Well I hope then that you end up in a society like what you describe, where there are no bogus rights. All the best.

I know I won't, it is too far away I would probably not be alive even it came to pass.

My point was that at least some people recognize that these rights are made up and want to be in a place where they may be offended, they may be riled up, and laugh, and be insulted, and be seriously challenged in their beliefs. We are the smartest known species in the world and yet most of us make such a darn effort not to upset our childhood-imprinted beliefs.

My point was that at least some people recognize that these rights are made up

All rights are "made up". Rights can only exist in a system that recognises them, definitionally.

And just how are you going to pursue happiness or use your freedom of speech if you do not have the ability to defend yourself? A healthy body to stand your ground with? An education that enables you to express what you want to say?

You are not advocating human rights, you are advocating social Darwinism in its worst form.

I am not advocating. It's just what we have. Decreeing we have the right to health doesn't make diseases disappear.

I am advocating not calling this a discussion about human rights but about human wants.

There's no such things as "real rights." Rights are granted to people by the entities willing to defend those people in the exercise of those rights. There's no "real" right to a pursuit of happiness, there's no "real" right to freedom of thought, and there's no "real" right to freedom of speech.

> Real rights are to defend yourself, stand your ground and use your body how you want.

A right that you grant to yourself is called an "ability."

That is false, or maybe just semantics. Imagine an enslaved man. I believe he has the right to attempt to free himself from slavery. By your definition he doesn't because those around him haven't granted him that right. In my definition he may or may not have the ability to actually free himself or attempt to.

Did slaves in the 17th century have the right to free themselves from slavery? No. That right was limited by law. They had the ability to do so, in some cases, but certainly not the right (as is legally recognized).

"No right is limitless" I agree. But some want no limits on speech, they want to be able to say any homophobic thing they want, on any forum. And when/if that is banned/removed they complain about free speech.

HN does try to have a free speech uber alles approach

Could you explain what you mean by this? I take uber alles to mean "above all", which would imply that HN aspires to have no moderation. But this clearly isn't the case, as your next sentence says. Did you maybe mean to write "HN does not try"?

> Could you explain what you mean by this?

The HN FAQ[1] has the rules/guidelines. e.g.: " Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.". It says guidelines, but you will be banned if you keep breaking those things.

I think this rule for HN is a great idea BTW.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Right, exactly. If you own a bar and some person is picking fights all the time or generally acting like an asshole in your bar.. Then you tell them to change their behavior or throw them out of the bar. Or allow it and become "that kind of bar" over time.

Press coverage of Imzy has been rather clickbait-y. It's a good angle to get attention I guess. How the actual site and community will feel and plays out in practice will actually feel rather normal. Its not super revolutionary.. Internet forum moderates discussion and participation for better resulting community.

>Then you tell them to change their behavior or throw them out of the bar. Or allow it and become "that kind of bar" over time.

this is exactly why it isn't censorship. no one has a right to be an asshole on the internet, if you insist, don't be shocked when you get shown the door.

no one is obligated to deal with pricks.

calling it censorship or pretending to be persecuted for political opinions is disingenuous at best.

The reason people raise issues of free speech is that Reddit-style sites act more like a public utility and less like a single community. Reddit is a community of communities. The argument is that Reddit itself shouldn't limit speech, but that the individual communities within it can decide for themselves how to regulate discussion.

This is the same tired justification of injustice that "states rights" advocates trot out.

I don't think that really compares.

and reddit really is just one aggregator among many others, we can play this Matryoshka thing all day.

There's a huge problem with calling sites like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and the rest utilities is that it implies there's no other means to communicate effectively on the web. The reality is that we have RSS, Atom, blogs, Bittorrent, and many other easy to use technologies for which anyone can share their content. It's not like these are hidden behind console commands on Linux as these are readily available for use via for-pay (and some free) providers. So, your argument doesn't hold in terms of the practical aspects of a utility who has a legal and material monopoly (the web cannot exclude other technologies and their adoptions like say the power grid can).

>On Reddit and like sites we see behaviour that we would never tolerate if we saw it in real life. Why do we not only tolerate it online [...]

That's because the behavior you are seeing online is actually not at all like the behaviors "in real life" that you are comparing them to. In person, you get a lot more information and in a vastly more narrow context, and it's much easier to interpret people under those conditions.

For one thing, if you show strong opinions online, people tend to think you're a pig-headed fool, but if you do it in person, they're more liable to think you're just blowing off steam or impassioned. Which is to say, we also tolerate things in person that we do not tolerate online very well.

Funny that you're getting downvoted for a nuanced polite response to why online behavior necessarily differs from in person behavior. Apparently being nice doesn't apply to arrows.

I'm generally nicer online than I am in person; online you can be misinterpreted, and as a cipher behind a username, your entire identity becomes what you just said. In real life, you can be a lot harsher and more blunt, because you don't have to bundle an implicit friendliness into every statement that you make:) In the proximal world, you start building up civility credit with the first handshake and smile.

Well, lets say you know someone who is a legit flat earther. You're not going to change their mind, because such a belief is unreasonable, but if you attempt to reason with them you elevate their social status and accidentally lend credence to them. This is the Fox News "fair and balanced" model -- if you give equal time to both viewpoints, even if one viewpoint is nuts, people will assume that there's a rational debate being had.

HN, for all its good parts, tends to be humorless. I would argue that humor can work as an immune system to bad ideas. When someone says something really stupid, often the best response really is mockery. You wont convince the person you're making fun of, but it can settle a debate pretty fast. Humor doesn't have to be mean to be funny, but sometimes it is. "Be Nice" policies tends to lead to communities that lack this useful sociological immune system, and it can drive out the smart people, to the point where you have a lot of "nice" people arguing some very dumb points.

> When someone says something really stupid, often the best response really is mockery.

That's not working for climate change, brexit, the Us election, etc etc etc.

Maybe it's time to accept that mockery is a sub-optimal tactic that makes you feel good but is counter-productive.

It might have played slight part. But those have multiple dimensions to them.

The worst thing that ever happened to fixing the pollution was calling it climate change. Making wildly inaccurate hyperbolic documentaries and politicizing it to such a degree that it became a defining aspect of our species. Where everyone needed to have an opinion on it, no different than their favorite brand of cereal.

When greedy selfish people make doomsday prophecies which happens to make them more money, the people get skeptical. We've been exposed to millions of such prophecies in the past, the average person will just say "Oh? Another one..."

Regarding Brexit/US election, I think Obama interfering with peoples choices by telling them what they should pick hindered one side in both events. Brexit and Trump happened because Obama was condescending. Both would have been different results if he had done nothing at all.

Regarding Brexit/US election, I think Obama interfering with peoples choices by telling them what they should pick hindered one side in both events

No. I guarantee that Obama's opinion on Brexit was given little attention in the UK, and his intervention had no effect on the outcome. I am utterly baffled that anyone could possibly think that the result would have been different had he not communicated his opinion.

How did Obama's endorsement of Clinton interfere with people's choices? There's nothing that says you have to listen to him. And how could he not endorse his own party's candidate? And since Clinton served in his administration, anybody who had a negative opinion of Obama wouldn't have voted for her anyway.

What would you do in real-life? Would you make a mockery of them? Or would you simply ignore them?

I find a lot of people (on both sides) will do things online behind the shield of anonymity they wouldn't otherwise in real life.

I find this behaviour cowardly.

Would you confront these people in real life, and mock them to their faces? I suspect a lot of people who do it online wouldn't in real life (if for no other reason than they'd get punched in the face).

I'm not saying we can't argue with people, or be direct - however, there are lines you don't cross (and I feel Reddit often crosses those lines). You can be upfront, and honest about your beliefs without being a jerk.

> What would you do in real-life? Would you make a mockery of them? Or would you simply ignore them?

I guess it depends on the context right? I remember in college there used to be these religious fanatics that would loudly berate strangers in the plaza; whenever someone would walk up and try to "debate" them, it would just make things worse, but sometimes someone would just say something really funny and the mood of the whole crowd would change and the extremely aggressive obnoxious fanatic would end up packing it in early or going for a new tactic. (Maybe not immediately, but it did seem to have an impact overall)

My point isn't like, go pick on people, that would suck, I'm just saying that humor is a really useful tool sometimes. Self-serious "be nice" policies can remove those tools and give some unreasonable people a nice cloud of cover to haunt places.

Maybe a different metaphor is better. A good community is like a garden. Nobody likes pesticide, but sometimes if you have a pest problem... It's all a judgement call right. "Be nice" policies only work if you can assume the other people you're interacting with are reasonable, and that's not really always true.

It all makes sense, however i don't like metaphors that compare people with opinions to pests (insects don't have opinions afaik), a metaphor like this is dehumanizing your opponents - it is a very bad metaphor.

To be honest, yeah, in a lot of social environments that I've been in, if someone were to make a show of some really bizarre beliefs, they would be openly mocked.

I've worked on construction crews were people will rib each other over almost anything. If you start spouting off about the earth being flat, you're for damn sure going to catch some flak and everyone is going to have a good laugh at your expense.

Is that really a good thing though? I mean it's not the polite thing at least and I don't care to be around impolite people.

> I would argue that humor can work as an immune system to bad ideas.

Okay, but malice and schadenfreude are not requirements for humor. Obnoxious memes and troll baiting are not some kind of Shakespearean fools. They are the lowest form of humor that incubate far more bad ideas than they're worth.

> "Be Nice" policies tends to lead to communities that lack this useful sociological immune system, and it can drive out the smart people, to the point where you have a lot of "nice" people arguing some very dumb points.

I think you've touched on a very important point. There is a huge difference between enforcing "niceness" and civility. The latter allows for the organic and authentic discussion of ideas, while the former doesn't.

> This is the Fox News "fair and balanced" model -- if you give equal time to both viewpoints, even if one viewpoint is nuts, people will assume that there's a rational debate being had.

I don't think this a good citation for the point you're trying to make. The problem is the concept of "both viewpoints" rather than many viewpoints, and that they get extremely irrational people to debate against slightly irrational people, and the viewers think that's the entire range of discourse and they have to choose somewhere within that continuum to fall themselves. (Usually right smack in the middle based on the average person's trust in the "law of averages.")

The problem with Fox is a narrowing of opinions to a range acceptable by management, not any diversity of ideas.

Think of Reddit as a quarantine or a honeypot. The people who don't value decency have to go somewhere.

I thought that was 4chan?

I can't upvote you enough. I've always likened Internet forums to having guests in my home. If I, as a forum owner, invite you into my home, you are expected to abide by the house rules. If my house rules allow you to destroy the furniture, insult my other guests, and generally raise hell, I won't yell at you for it. But if my rules forbid such activity, I'm well within my rights to kick your ass out. Free speech has nothing to do with it; you chose to enter my realm, and in my realm I am the king.

The only way freedom of speech enters into it, is if it's a government run forum. Last I checked, Reddit, Voat, Imzy, and others are not government sites, and there is no free speech violation if the forum owners decide to bounce a misbehaving person.

That's correct as far as the law is concerned. However, when you have a very large social network like Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, things get more complicated. A forum's owner has some say but a lot of the conflicts are at the boundaries between forums, or involve the common rules that everyone should follow. It's not a government but at this scale, the moderation starts to look more like privately run governance, something imposed from above onto a community rather part of the community itself.

True that. Public utilities (traditionally pretty much anything with a network effect) require regulation; the government must get involved, and then governmental ethics ought to apply.

There exists doctrine in constitutional law where its guarantees are deemed to apply even when the actor infringing the right is a private party. This can occur in cases where a private party is deemed to be a "state actor". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_actor

I would suggest that even large social media organizations are not "state actors", so federal constitutional protections don't apply. Of course, states are free to enact laws on their own to guarantee free speech in social media, if they want. It's just not protected by U.S. Constitution, not a constitutional right. [As an editorial aside, I'm dismayed at the general low level of understanding of constitutional rights in the U.S., even among "well-educated" people.]

I think this is a bit to one side of the question. Where government is doing the regulating, then surely the government itself is a state actor and must not infringe constitutional rights or be a party to same. You can argue it doesn't have any business calling anything a public utility, but that would be a different argument.

Your argument is flawed. Your primary intention is to invite total strangers into your house. You then cannot force your rules on them, because they can naturally demand things.

Edit: Besides, nobody opens up their houses for strangers. So it is a flawed comparison as well. You need to be honest with the premise. You are talking about an online community which is built for a purpose. Your purpose is two-fold. You want to be a nice contributor towards some ideal (nothing wrong with that). Your second purpose is to be self-sustaining (so you can continue your goals). Again, nothing wrong with that either. But none of this has anything to do with open and inviting house, or even strangers. But look at what your purpose does: it necessarily invites strangers. You then have consequence.

You also know in your heart of heart, that if you do not invite strangers (let's also remember that we're talking about the online world), you will never be able to achieve your ideals. Because no matter how big your social circle may be, you cannot achieve your ideals through just the people you know.

The invitation isn't to come in and do whatever you please. The invitation contains conditions. In the case of Imzy, one of them is to be nice. And the invitation doesn't necessarily mean you can stay as long as you want flouting the house rules. And the house rules can change if the owner decides the current ones need to change.

You are missing the point. Your secondary intention has no relevance because your primary intention is to "invite the strangers". When you invite strangers, you should expect anything.

Expecting anything doesn't mean putting up with everything.

Again, you're looking at secondary matters. Look at the consequences which results due to the primary intention.

Besides, nobody opens up their houses for strangers. So it is a flawed comparison as well. You need to be honest with the premise. You are talking about an online community which is built for a purpose. Your purpose is two-fold. You want to be a nice contributor towards some ideal (nothing wrong with that). Your second purpose is to be self-sustaining (so you can continue your goals). Again, nothing wrong with that either. But none of this has anything to do with open and inviting house, or even strangers. But look at what your purpose does: it necessarily invites strangers. You then have consequence.

What are you saying? This doesn't really make much sense. Are you arguing that inviting someone into your house, a stranger or not, means that they can demand whatever they want and you have no right to kick them out? Sorry if I'm not following but the idea of primary and secondary intention doesn't really make sense to me.

This argument is not about creating a "perfect social circle" with only specific people who have the same view points as you, it's that you can have someone who believes wildly different things than you but they are expected to be nice and treat the invitation into a community with respect, e.g. be nice, rather than do whatever they want. And if they disrespect the invitation, they have consequences.

> ...means that they can demand whatever

What I am simply saying is that setting such an expectation (via rules and enforcement) is unnatural for humans.

People are not going to "demand whatever" because they are not nice. You should expect them to demand whatever, even if they are nice.

What I am really trying to say is further explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13148978

But just because they can demand whatever does not mean you have to fulfill their request.

But now that's a different point altogether, isn't it? We were not talking about whether one should fulfill the demands or not. This also does not imply that the implicit rules can be automatically enforced.

If you agree that the rule-setting is unnatural under such context (i.e, the context of an online community, dealing with humans and human nature), then you would agree that you should first fix your own expectations.

If you read my comment about the Scott Peck's framework, then you can see that at the first stage, humans are generally nice to each other in any group setting. This is a modern condition: the consequences of civilized societies. But humans also tend to reach the second stage, where they are totally not nice to each other. If you read him directly, you'll get the better idea.

This argument of freedom of speech, or lack there of, is misguided and misplaced in my opinion. It tends to come up at every opportunity (every normalized social network now initially had this argument when they started in the beginning - and we're still having this misplaced argument.

I'll be honest. I don't know what your point is right now (which I admit you stated explicitly above: "You are missing the point"), other than to disagree. I've read and re-read your comments in this thread, and this one in particular in an effort to figure out where you're coming from.

I see no reason why the consequence of allowing people to join and contribute to an online community where they might do things I'm not happy with (I think that's what you're getting at when you say "consequence")—which I understand will happen—also doesn't mean I can't have expectations of their behavior and choose to, say, kick them off if they don't meet those expectations. I haven't expressed this explicitly, but I don't think it's much of a reach from what I've posted upthread.

At best we're talking past each other, but I'm going to take my answer off the air.

Let me ask you this: If you want to kick "people" off, because they're not playing nicely (according to you, or normal perceptions) then why in the first place you want to invite them? Note my emphasis on people which includes you as well.

If I invite some friends over for drinks and one one them takes a shit on the carpet in my living room I will kick them out. Shitting on the carpet is not playing nicely, according to me and "normal perceptions", whatever that is supposed to mean. I invited them over because I wanted some friends over for drinks, but there are a few things that I will not tolerate in my home. How can you possibly not understand this?

I think you're missing the point - inviting strangers does not mean the absence of rules of conduct.

Any public space is open to strangers, but you can't go around murdering people.

Public space? How are these social media platforms, run by corporations, a public space? What is your definition of a public space?

I was never arguing against the rules, and following the rules.

I've invited people who are strangers to me into my home many times. Friends invite friends so strangers show up at my house and I welcome them. Everyone was polite because social norms dictate politeness when you are a guest. If they weren't then you bet I'd tell them to GTFO. I don't have to "expect anything" because it's my home, I make the rules.

>The First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees free speech, explicitly does so in a political context ("Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech"). Imzy is not the US Congress, they don't have jurisdiction over anything but their own little niche of the Internet (which absolutely nobody is forcing you to visit if you don't want to) - so why are you upset when they ask you, within the bounds of their community, to be nice?

Yes, insofar as the law protects free speech, it does so only against the government.

We as individual Americans, should, however, be wary of using privately-owned spaces as public spheres unless they provide broadly similar guarantees that different points of view can be expressed. This is becoming more important as the traditional public sphere is increasingly giving way to privately-run ones (e.g. Facebook and Reddit).

>Why does free speech mean that we get to insult and demean each other, even going so far as to sending death threats? I think the German constitution (the Grundgesetz) has a point when it says in Article 5, §2 that the right of free speech is limited, amongst others, by every person's right of dignity ("Recht der persönlichen Ehre" - a hard to translate concept).

No one is arguing for allowing death threats. This is a classic straw man used in just about every major online debate ever.

The German constitution is flawed here. When German police can arrest people for having the wrong opinion, something is badly wrong.

>On Reddit and like sites we see behaviour that we would never tolerate if we saw it in real life. Why do we not only tolerate it online, but suddenly elevate such antisocial behaviour of the extremest kind to a mystical status of "expression of free speech"? There is a reason we are taught "manners" as children: without a minimum of politeness, societies cannot function. Politeness and courtesy have to do with respecting another's person even if you don't share his (or her) opinions, with tolerating people who are different from you. And is that not the very epitome of freedom?

The problem is the definition of politeness. The cultural powers have dictated that calling people racist and sexist for disagreeing with you is "polite", while fighting back against that madness is ghastly.

> unless they provide broadly similar guarantees that different points of view can be expressed.

Note, once again, that Imzy does allow this. They just ask you to remain polite while you do so. (Which appears to me to be a reasonable request.)

> No one is arguing for allowing death threats.

I didn't say anybody was. I am saying that they are being made anyway, and that that is one of the things we need to stop if we want a culture conducive to a civilized online discourse.

> When German police can arrest people for having the wrong opinion, something is badly wrong.

I agree, but you misunderstand the difference between free speech and free thought. German police cannot arrest you for holding the wrong opinion, they can arrest you for voicing that opinion in a way that wrongfully infringes on the honour and dignity of another person. (This is the basis for libel and slander laws.)

> Note, once again, that Imzy does allow this. They just ask you to remain polite while you do so. (Which appears to me to be a reasonable request.)

It's an extremely reasonable request, but its enforcement is unlikely to be even-handed. In general people are very likely to allow their personal biases to influence the application of the politeness rule.

It's fairly easy to think of examples where "different points of view" may be perceived as personal attacks. Eg. I've seen a few commenters here suggesting that reddit is a terrible place inhabited by terrible people. I don't think it should be forbidden for people to express that opinion, even though it's not really possible to do so without risking offence.

> Why does free speech mean that we get to insult and demean each other

This doesn't pertain to Imzy as all, but asking this question seriously is a very strong indicator that you're completely missing the point of absolute legal free speech protection.

"Oh, you're saying bad things about the current government? That's pretty insulting and demeaning towards all these nice politicians and government employees! To the jail with you!"

Does it really seem reasonable to you that that saying something "insulting" should be met with force at the hands of the government? That's as anti-liberal as any Sharia law-based Islamic nation that kills people for blashpheming Mohammad.

I agree that it is within any website's authority to determine precisely what its users are allowed to say. I just disagree with your weakening of the concept of free speech. Germany does not have a tradition of free speech in any meaningful sense, so their law is not a great example.

If reddit bans everyone on the site, reddit would be a nice place, definitely no trolling anymore.

>c) On Reddit and like sites we see behaviour that we would never tolerate if we saw it in real life. Why do we not only tolerate it online, but suddenly elevate such antisocial behaviour of the extremest kind to a mystical status of "expression of free speech"? There is a reason we are taught "manners" as children: without a minimum of politeness, societies cannot function. Politeness and courtesy have to do with respecting another's person even if you don't share his (or her) opinions, with tolerating people who are different from you. And is that not the very epitome of freedom?

Because internet communities regularly raid each-other. Someone who's a dick to you on reddit may just be a troll from 4chan with a new-made alt-account. Community and politeness require a relatively fixed set of identities with which to interact.

Lot's "but this isn't free speech" in here, but that's exactly the point, free speech has been tried and it leads to shit holes like reddit and voat. Places you might visit, but wouldn't recommend or even admit to using in a mixed group.

People talk about free speech like it's some goal, but in reality all people seem to do with it is make fun of fat people and post stolen naked pictures of celebrities.

When confronted with the fact that this isn't acceptable behavior, even if you specifically don't ban them, they will threaten you with death and ddos your site.

"Voat has been under constant DDoS [distributed denial of service] attacks almost since Day One. At one point, our servers were shut down by our ISP without notice. We even received death threats."

Instead of lowering the bar and getting surprised when people fling shit, Imzy is trying the opposite.

Will it work, no idea, but free speech as much talk as it gets doesn't work out as well as some people like to pretend it does.

Free speech is designed to protect potitically important edge cases not optimized for your entertainment or consumption. Thats not to say it cant be, this site for example seems to work out pretty well due to the carefully designed comment economy and fair moderation system.

reddit is not one place. Each subreddit has its own moderation policy. Stolen naked pictures and overt abuse are one thing, but it is common in other subreddits (e.g. /r/europe) for posts or comments to be blocked just because they are critical of immigration. The mods might deny that, but it happens, because there are lots of mods, and people who donate a large amount of their free time to moderating a web forum are often not that bright or tolerant.

> People talk about free speech like it's some goal, but in reality all people seem to do with it is make fun of fat people and post stolen naked pictures of celebrities.

All people do in reality ... if for some reason you choose to disregard the huge number of fairly autonomous communities on Reddit?

If I used that ultra-broad brush for HN, I'd say that all commenters here seem to do is post links to xkcd 927 and the wiki page for ad-hom.

The problem with Reddit (the company) is that it chooses to represent its service as a single community, and thus allows all of its communities to be tarred by the same brush.

If Reddit was more like, say, StackExchange, or Wordpress.com, or Discourse—a hosting site for "communities" which happened to use the "Reddit engine"—then it wouldn't have nearly the PR problem it has now. Nobody blames Wordpress.com for the content of somebody's blog hosted there.

I think reddit accurately represents the fact that both factors are present, lots of specific communities and also a larger reddit-wide community. At least I was never confused about that.

Right, it's clear enough "from the inside" as an experienced user. But from the outside, people (e.g. journalists) just talk about "Reddit" as one place. Reddit Corp issues administrative policies for the site as if in complete ignorance of this public perception.

There is a reason WordPress has the .com/.org split, and it's not just that large customers demand to self-host. That could have resulted in something more like GitHub Enterprise, but instead you see a well-supported FOSS offering. Why? Because this split allows WordPress.com to maintain a very strict TOS that disallows many types of content, while still allowing other people who don't want to adhere to those policies to "run on WordPress" easily by using the WordPress.org software either directly or through third-party hosts.

If Reddit was smart, the "Reddit engine" would be a well-supported, easy to install FOSS offering like WordPress.org, and there would be a healthy ecosystem of third-party hosts running that software. Voat would just be "Yet Another Reddit-as-Service Provider", instead of a competitor and political statement.

As it is, the Reddit engine is an effectively-unsupported blob of code that needs tons of other heavy dependencies to get it running. The only site I know running a copy of the Reddit engine is LessWrong—and they've heavily forked it for their own purposes.

Autonomous public communities on Reddit do not exist because adequate protections against the male white supremacist hive mind do not exist.

It would be interesting to study at what user size trolling and offending interactions take root. My take is there is a moderator/user ratio which at some point slants in favor of trolls. Once the slide toward disrespect and instigation begins it's very hard to correct.

Reddit's version of "free speech" works fine for me. I almost never see the kind of hateful speech it's allegedly full of, and if I do it's voted down to -20 or something. It seems to me to be preferable to, say, the Guardian comments section which is full of people being rude to each other but heavily moderated for forbidden facts or ideas.

I have to agree with you here. I don't bother reading any political or news subs (except /r/uk) because I can pretty much guarantee the comments will not be adding anything to the discussion.

For me, Reddit works pretty well and it's very easy to avoid the worst bits.. and to be honest, like you, I find a lot of the comment sections on mainstream news sites and places like Youtube are much, much worse.

How often do you read discussion of politically or culturally sensitive issues in defaults?

Not very.

> When confronted with the fact that this isn't acceptable behavior

Who defines what "acceptable" behavior is though? If so many people "wouldn't recommend or even admit using in a mixed group", then why is Reddit the 8th highest traffic website in the US?

It's become the seedy underbelly of the net. If Freud were still en vogue, they could rename it redd-id.com

Am I the only one who finds lots and lots of good stuff on forums etc?

My wife is annoyed because I spend time here but just because of the time I spend not because of anything that shows up on my screen; most of the bad stuff people write about just doesn't seem to cross my path.

:-/

I don't see the really insalubrious stuff on reddit unless it's via people being outraged by it. I fairly often see people being unnecessarily rude, eg. professionals on r/filmmakers are often scathing towards amateurs, particularly if they mention working for free or low wages.

I signed up on their website, went through the onboarding flow and joined a couple of communities. Without them knowing anything about my political leanings they suggested a bunch of anti-Trump communities. I guess they're not trying to solve the "filter bubble" issue, but rather becoming the Reddit for liberals? I mean it's their business for them to run as they like, but I hope somebody can take us past the Breitbart vs Huffington Post dichotomy.

Honestly, the best solution right now is probably just to find good subreddits. Or whatever blogs/forums there are out there for your interests. And although I can't really say I give a damn about tech/coding/etc. until I have to use it; I have yet to find more enlightening, balanced discussions of politicized issues than what is on HN.

It sounds like a fair amount of statements directly made by Trump on the campaign trail (mocking a disabled person, telling people to check out the "sex tape" of a former Miss universe he didn't like, many other statements) would themselves not be allowed on this site, so it's not surprising it would be naturally anti-Trump. I highly doubt it would have any such attitudes towards people like Jeb Bush or Rand Paul who are decidedly not liberal.

Perhaps luck of the draw? I just signed up and saw two anti-Trump communities. The rest were just random groups.

The suggestions are random based on interests you've chosen, and based on how the volunteer community leaders (mods) have tagged their communities. So if you picked "politics" as an interest during onboarding, it will suggest popular communities that have been tagged as such.

If there were popular republican communities on the site, our system would recommend those to you.

We're a new site, and our userbase so far is pretty liberal leaning.

In 2008 and 2012 respectively, neither the McCain nor Romney campaigns were associated with rampant fraud, demagoguery, and indecency. I didn't vote for either of them, but I didn't believe that they were terrible.

The Trump campaign earned a certain image not because it was the Republican ticket but because of its unique properties. There's a price to be paid for that, period. Such as, a lot of communities won't want to have anything to do with it.

But he's still the republican candidate (who will also unfortunately be the republican president of these united states). The issue here is taking all of the moderate republicans and putting them in a situation where they only feel welcomed by the extreme variant, and limiting their ability to see coherent counter arguments to what the extreme variant says.

If we set up this dichotomy we will create many problems for ourselves down the line.

> rampant fraud

To be clear, you are accusing the Republican campaign of this?

I signed up and they suggested I join the Fempire community.

I have to say I had high hopes for Imzy, but my experience was less than positive. I found it really quite slow and heavy (hopefully this has improved). I also found that the signal to noise ratio was really poor when I was a member, and a lot of the content was deeply polarising. That's not to say that one particular set of views are good or bad, but that it tended to reinforce the same views and ideas, creating a bit of an echo chamber filled with noise. (FWIW I've seen this to a lesser extent with Voat too, but that's an entirely different kind of animal).

I think the left/right dichotomy is going to exist for a while, especially in anywhere that supports political or politicised discussion. HN did it's best with a no politics week, hopefully that will take some of the heat out of what's a very emotionally charged time for many.

I don't understand how commenters generalize about Reddit: the is no Reddit, only subreddits - each of which is moderated in a different way. I moderate /r/Africa we deal with speech mercilessly. /r/askScience or /r/askHistorians have even stricter policies. On the other hand, there are subreddits which are most definitely hateful... But I never go there. In the middle, I'm still subscribed to /r/Europe which is a battleground... I won't give it up and I do not see how any amount of moderation could make it better: politics are all about conflicting ideas !

> the is no Reddit, only subreddits - each of which is moderated in a different way

I was banned for 2 days on the whole platform for following a link to Voat, another link back to Reddit and downvoting a guy who was copy/pasting the same comment all over the thread. (Reddit is surprisingly link-sharing adverse for a site based on link sharing)

Reddit exists through the abuses and policies of its administrators. It's not a generic forum platform and I don't think it ever was.

Voat is where the groups who were kicked off of reddit (pizzagate, jailbait, c--ntown and the rest of the "chimpire", fph) go to organize brigades off-site. It doesn't surprise me in the least that reddit bans people participating in off-site brigading activity, especially from Voat.

If you want to do any non-specific(ie. I like mechanical keyboards so I'll search for a subreddit on it) then you are stuck with the frontpage and all. That is the reddit people are talking about when they generalize because it is the default experience.

I've been using imzy since very early on, and I have to say, I really like the idea of it. The basic premise is basically: "do whatever but play nice". And if you don't play nice you get modded and eventually kicked out.

I can get behind that TBH.

Also, to be sure, they do have some growing pains to go through. There are too many empty communities at this point (they should've started with fewer high-traffic ones). And the website perf isn't as fast as Reddit or HN. But I'm sure that will get worked out over time...

The concept is nice but I have a real issue with this part:

Why do they need pixel tags for tracking, and why don't they support DNT? No 'new' website should put up with this. I'll cut some slack to the 2010 and before era sites, since they've got a lot of legacy to work with.

Pixel Tags. In addition, we use "Pixel Tags" (also referred to as clear Gifs, Web beacons, or Web bugs). Pixel Tags are tiny graphic images with a unique identifier, similar in function to Cookies, that are used to track online movements of Web users. In contrast to Cookies, which are stored on a user’s computer hard drive, Pixel Tags are embedded invisibly in Web pages. Pixel Tags also allow us to send e-mail messages in a format users can read, and they tell us whether e-mails have been opened to ensure that we are sending only messages that are of interest to our users. We may use this information to reduce or eliminate messages sent to a user. We do not tie the information gathered by Pixel Tags to our users’ Personal Data. How We Respond to Do Not Track Signals. We do not currently respond to "do not track" signals or other mechanisms that might enable Users to opt out of tracking on our site.

Our emails use Pixel Tags, both our sendgrid emails and our intercom ones. That part of our Privacy Policy is boilerplate from the lawyers, I included that section because of the emails. Sorry if the phrasing is sorta awkward.

Regarding DNT- I should mention that we don't actually have advertising on the site. I feel like this might be a bit of flamebait on my part, but I think a lot of the time, DNT is just privacy theatre. Some sites (like Medium) have done a great job with DNT implementation, but I think the initiative has largely not worked out nearly as well as people would like.

(My opinions about DNT are my own, I'm not really speaking on behalf of Imzy regarding that.)

> if you don't play nice you get modded

did you mean muted or does modded not mean "promoted to moderator" on izmy?

I didn't see this as their basic premise. Their basic premise seems to hinge on the idea of "tipping people's niceness". If I am nice and helpful, then I should expect to earn a penny. And I should do the same to others.

That's actually very similar to the plot of Black Mirror's Nosedive episode.

I tried to hang on there but I didn't find much motivation to "earn anything". I am not even sure why I should reward anyone there.

>Their basic premise seems to hinge on the idea of "tipping people's niceness".

This isn't actually true. Some news article decided that was our basic premise because it made a good clickbait headline. Our tipping system is the beginning of a larger business model that we hope to implement in the future.

https://medium.com/imzyhq/why-imzy-doesnt-have-ads-and-what-...

We don't want to have advertisements on the site, and the tipping system is part of our strategy to avoid that.

Isn't the business model the real premise? Without which, you won't be able to self-sustain, which then renders any other supposed premise, useless.

I think for more community-run sites, the business model is not the real premise.

No one would say that the real premise of Wikipedia is collecting donations.

But Wikipedia proves that the real premise is not sustainable if they don't collect donations.

So whether one defines the hierarchy of premises or not, the fact of the matter is that the intention matters. The intention of Imzy seems to be that they want to stand against Reddit, and their stand out qualification is for people to be nice via reward-system. Now here I am not going to go into the argument of whether reward systems should be used for adults...but it is one of their premise for sure.

I'm saying that literally no where do we say that people should "tip each other for being nice", nor do we have some sort of reward system based on that. That is entirely a thing invented by clickbait headlines.

From the medium article I linked:

>Most of you know you can tip posts, comments, and communities on Imzy. It was important to us that we include our payments platform in some way from day one, and this was the simplest way to do it. You can give any community, post, or comment a reward for great content that you really appreciate. But that is just the tiniest little seed of what’s to come.

That is what got misconstrued into "tipping people for being nice."

To use something you might be familiar with, reddit has reddit gold. It gives some minor perks, and you can gift it to other people. Reddit calls this "gilding". People gild some pretty ridiculous and even awful content all the time. The idea that we would institute a tipping system (which in some ways could be seen as analogous to gilding, except with real money) and just magically everyone would use it for "being nice" simply doesn't make sense, and would have been a pretty odd idea on our part.

A lot of times folks want to tip content creators and others. We wanted to give them a way to do this. We have a bunch of other stuff planned for the payment system in the future, as outlined in that Medium piece.

Hopefully this clarifies some.

So I am not really a regular Reddit user, nor do I even participate there (I subscribe my selected content there via RSS).

When I joined Imzy, the very first thing I was told, was to use this reward system. But you are saying that it is just a tinniest part of the whole. To me, it seems contradictory because otherwise a tinniest part wouldn't stand out up front.

I am not necessarily against this system (tiny or otherwise), but Imzy clearly seems to have an issue establishing its narrative properly. I recently read or heard somewhere, that it is psychologically proven, that if you tell someone what to do, they won't like it (or they'd do the opposite). You give people unconditional choice, and they won't go home regretting, even if they'd do what you want them to do anyway.

>I recently read or heard somewhere, that it is psychologically proven, that if you tell someone what to do, they won't like it (or they'd do the opposite).

Have you found stop signs working that way? There was a crash at a stop sign near my house tonight. Perhaps the people were just psychologically driven to ignore the stop sign because of science.

I don't really understand what you're talking about with "unconditional choice." Yes, you have a choice to run a stop sign. That choice has the consequence of potentially killing you or other people. Yes, you will get your drivers license taken away if you are constantly driving around yelling "screw the man!" and running every stopsign you see because of some strange notion of "unconditional choice" to run stopsigns.

No you can't start a racist hate mob on our platform. That should go without saying, but for some reason that is considered "novel" to some folks on the internet.

Regarding the tipping system, we're not forcing anyone to use it. Only a small amount of our users use it, and that is totally fine.

The vast majority of communities are user-created, so it's kind of expected that there would be a long tail of community size, especially since there aren't any "default" communities like on Reddit. I think the most popular communities are still fairly active. I'm confident that there'll be more activity now that more people are joining.

As a long time Imzy user, do you know of a way to hide the images so that we're left with text more similarly Reddit or HN?

I registered, because I needed to before being able to browse stories and found that it isn't anything like Reddit UX-wise not even considering the niceness element.

The only internet community that I've ever seen achieve a set of rules that are followed by the community has been somethingawful.com. And while there's lots of criticism you can lay on them, they've maintained a culture and community for nearly two decades.

They did this by making accounts to comment cost money, a one-time $10 fee. If you troll, you get banned and you need to pay $10 again to get your account back. It's a simple and brilliant solution- those who are good members of the community pay the least and those who make the community worse pay the most.

Most of the early Somethingawful community is long gone, broken into splinter sites that look more like SA did in its early days. It's now populated with people who are ok with the heavy handed mods enforcing their views through bans. It's also a mostly irrelevant site now, when compared to how fundamental it was to early internet culture.

Metafilter has a similar model, and the community there is fairly orderly and respectful. I have however detected a reduction in ideological diversity over time.

The Internet has such an enormous potential in terms of fostering cross-boundary communication, the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, and all the rest of it. It makes me sad to see once again that the greatest thing preventing it from really fulfilling that potential is that we can't stop adults from behaving like kindergarteners. Why is it so difficult to get people to abide by the basic rules of human decency and civility?

not everyone is making a good faith effort email has spam ebay has fraud forums have forum spies and bad actors see the snowden docs they talk about denying, degrading, disrupting, and destroying

And yet, whether you realize it or not, you learned things from people that are "behaving like kindergartners". It might even be as basic as seeing examples of how not to behave.

Censorship is not the answer.

I learnt how not to behave because my parents taught me that everybody deserves at least a minimum of respect. How is it censorship to ask people to behave themselves?

Think about what gives you control of the situation. Is it easier for other people to change or is it easier for you to change? It's always easier for you to change because you are in control of yourself. In this particular example it's easier for you to build a natural filter for behavior you dislike than it is to get people to not behave like you dislike.

Just because most people are decent doesn't mean most comments are going to be. A decent person might right out a thoughtful post at one site with the same frequency that it takes a misanthrope to write 100 comments across multiple sites. And once something starts to become a shouting match, you'll get a certain number of people who go along with things even if they wouldn't act that way normally (since they think that's what most people are doing, even if it's just what a loud minority is doing).

But with good moderation you can have good conversations. For instance, I've found subreddits like /r/AskHistorians to be pretty good (for the most part).

Because people aren't so much inherently good as inherently think themselves to be good. And disassociation - the state of mind when people are alone with their computer - does the rest.

From what I see in the subs I'm subscribed to, the vast majority of people are perfectly personable on Reddit, most of the time. No less so than real-life people anyway. I suppose that the issue is that it doesn't take many truly awful people to make some people feel negatively towards the site as a whole.

Edit: If I went to a bar and somebody stabbed me I would probably be wary of going there again, even if the stabber was only one person out of a clientele of thousands.

> Why is it so difficult to get people to abide by the basic rules of human decency and civility?

Because nobody is running these social media platforms with proper framework towards the goal of achieving such ideals.

What you are describing is a second-stage natural conditions of humans. What it needs is a push toward the third-stage. I recommend reading late Scott Peck's The Different Drum to understand this missing psychological framework.

Humans are naturally conditioned to be stuck in this second stage where nobody is nice. At first, this is better than being in the first stage, where everyone is nice. The problem however is, that the second stage needs a push towards the third stage (which is where the sanity prevails and people understand each other better).

The social media platforms are geared towards financial motives. If they were to gear towards human motives, they will implement some kind of framework (what Scott Peck did in his days).

I know some subreddits have "be kind and respectful" built into their rules, but this is often gamed by some redditors who will make carefully worded passive aggressive statements at ideological opponents and then quickly call for banning them when they react. There are also moderation issues with volunteer moderators sometimes using different standards of "kind and gentle" based on whether they agreed with the views of given posters. It seems hard to maintain standards like "kind and gentle" in any objective manner.

I think you've hit on the core issue here. Whilst I abhor some of the hatred and viciousness posted online, and think it's absurd to try to turn it into a free speech issue, I can understand the benefit of no censorship: drawing the line, consistently, is very, very difficult - maybe impossible. But even reddit draws a line (US law?), so there's no getting away from it.

Does anyone here advocate 'free speech' so strongly that they wouldn't mind someone posting their personal details or naked photos online? I'm sure some people are so thick-skinned that they could handle that, but I certainly couldn't.

Non-consensual sexualization (like upskirts, revenge porn, kiddie porn) gets rationalized as free speech by assholes for whom it is personally self-serving to do so.

Free speech is about being able to have and communicate about ideas that may be against the status quo. It's not about harming people. It's a clear boundary that has been held up both judicially and culturally time and time again.

Am I limiting free speech if I kick out some racist, hate spewing bully from my house because I don't want to listen to their nonsense? No. It is just common sense and how the 'real' world works. Why should the online world be any different? If there are a few destructive people affecting the experience of the majority lets just kick them out and not deal with them anymore. Problem solved. They don't have the right to ruin the experience of the majority in the name of free speech.

Free speech just for white men isn't free speech at all. When you don't kick out the racist bully, they turn your space into one that is exclusionary toward minorities. Do you shut up some idiots who have nothing but purely harmful things to say, or all people of color?

> Free speech just for white men isn't free speech at all.

What you're describing here doesn't exist on any mainstream websites. On the other hand, there are plenty of women-only or PoC-only subreddits, for example. So while what you're saying is true, I'm not really sure why it's relevant.

> exclusionary

You're creating a false equivalence between two different concepts of "exclusion"; one is actual enforced exclusion (like banning people whose opinions you don't like) and the other is when someone gets their feelings hurt because they don't like what's being said on a website.

> Do you shut up some idiots who have nothing but purely harmful things to say, or all people of color?

You're doing it again. "Shut up" means, in one case, banning people, and in the other case, when they (hypothetically) choose to leave of their own accord because they don't like the community.

There are a number of subreddits for women or people of color that have been very articulate about precisely this problem. They are assaulted on an ongoing basis in a way that most communities full of white men never have to worry about. That is an affront to free speech.

It's not about feelings. People don't tend to swim upstream when searching for community. Why should they? If a platform demonstrates over and over that it lacks both the will and means to protect marginalized communities from personal and private abuse, then its demographics will remain significantly white and male, and they will set the tone for what is normal and permissible rather than the people who are at risk.

Choosing to favor no one is not a choice that's available to us, because it's effectively choosing the most exclusionary voice.

TwoXChromosomes deals with this a lot.

I take it you agree with kicking out the minority on websites that prefer racist, hate spewing bullies then? I take it you wouldn't suggest they be forcefully closed down or anything? As long as the majority is happy, you wouldn't oppose a state to kick out their minorities right? Consensus rule is the right way to go right?

All of these questions are meant in a sarcastic tone.

Quite a false equivalence you built up there friendo. :)

Where is the false equivalence? You talk about common sense and majority knows best. What am I missing, are there some specific things upon which the majority cannot decide upon?

Hate speech, bullying, none of that shit needs to be protected speech. It's not as delicate or complicated as people who generally aren't on the receiving end of it try to make it out to be.

I knew I recognized that username from somewhere. It is indeed neither delicate nor complicated so long as you define hate speech and bullying by whether one particular clique supports it or is against it, since by definition they're always going to have a firm indisputable conclusion on it and anyone who disagrees is the enemy. You don't even have to worry about that clique doxing, harassing or lying about others since they're obviously in the right by doing so. The hard part - and the part you failed at on Reddit - is actually stopping bullying, rather than crowning a gang of official bullies that you like and calling it a day.

White hood wearing motherfuckers chomping at the bit to call black people "chimps" is not merely some alternative "clique", as you disingenuously suggest. The problem with tolerance of the intolerant is that you end up with an authoritarian monoculture where speech is much less free than it could have been.

You think that the only reason someone would disagree with you is because they're a literal KKK supporter, but this is somehow fighting against an authoritarian monoculture? Right. Had nothing to do with said clique's awful treatment of LGBT people, dubiously moral tactics, tendency to see anyone who disagrees as literal neo-Nazis, and utter refusal to brook any kind of internal dissent over anything at all, of course. All those times they went after gay and trans men for daring to claim to be oppressed were sure a-OK with me. The fact they could only claim to meet their own basic moral standards by banning anyone who held them to the same standard as the rest of Reddit over anything, as a matter of policy, has zero to do with my assertion that it's not that simple or easy.

(Hell, the ex-Reddit CEO's since confirmed they had a history of IRL harassment campaigns against the families of Reddit admins who didn't go along with them.)

You're right, in many cases, hate speech and bullying are obvious and can be easily spotted. But there are always grey areas and disagreements where eradicating hate speech and bullying can also end up getting rid of speech with valid political dimensions.

One sort of obvious case where important speech was classified as harmful is facebook's recent spat with the prime minister of Norwary over them censoring the famous photo of "Napalm girl," a young, naked Vietnamese girl running naked in the streets from a Napalm attack.

The presence of grey areas does not invalidate the entire concept of "fuck off, nazis."

That was a historical photograph, not "hate speech or bullying". Also, how can you say "eradicating hate speech and bullying can also end up getting rid of speech with valid political dimensions" with a straight face?

>Zork created an Imzy community about debunking falsehoods, mostly political ones. It’s got 3,000 members and no trolls.

This just seems like a way of saying "people who agree agree with me." In any controversial topic determing who is a troll at the margins of discussion is very difficult.

Yeah, its impossible.

Say I post "black people are subhuman." I could be trolling (intentionally provoking emotional responses for the lulz) or that could be my actual honest to goodness opinion. You just don't know. There's also no polite way to express that opinion and that's the same for many, many opinions.

Somehow I think an open community can't be nice if it's anonymous. Not that all communities have to be anonymous (far from that), but if you want self-restraint then you need to revoke anonymity. I don't see how else that would work. At least a semi-anonymous system. For example one where a seed pool of people are chosen to be a part of the community and have them invite and be responsible for a certain number of child/invites. If one of the invites and their invites screws up, whole branch suffers or something.

> Somehow I think an open community can't be nice if it's anonymous

Facebook comments have demonstrated that having your real name attached to your internet comments does exactly nothing to stop people from saying awful things. It's a moderate deterrent at best.

It's interesting what a difference there is in people's perspectives. To me, Reddit seems excruciatingly polite and well-mannered, often to the point of dishonesty. This is probably because I've been to 4chan and similar places.

As a frequent channer I find Reddit a hugbox of insulating opinions and gaming the karma system (To the point where commentary can be as trite as shitty dad-tier jokes). The benefit of 4chan and company is that once the identity is stripped away (and a filter for callous remarks created) a user is actually free to speak their mind.

Sometimes this develops into meaningful posts, othertimes it ends up as a mess of shitposting. But the freedom is there and it is wonderful.

Just one question: If a muslim says gay people should not be allowed to be married or a teacher or whatever, is this allowed?

What does being Muslim have to do with it? People of any religion are free to express their opinion on gay marriage. Now if they said all gay people should be stoned, that would be another thing.

> You are still welcome to express your opinions, even if they are offensive to some users. We want honest and open discussion to happen on Imzy from all sides. However, these opinions cross the line into malicious speech when they specifically incite violence or hatred, or make people fear you will act against them in a violent manner. We reserve the right to remove anything overtly malicious.

That said, each community has its own moderation policy on top of it. So people expressing an opinion the community leaders deem unacceptable may be banned from the specific community.

> It's like Reddit, without the trolls

That's HN.

HN is known for its cynicism

Being cynical isn't the same as trolling though.

I see both cynicism and optimism here in different parts.

Reddit definitely does not have the tech focus hn does. Maybe it did in the long past, but not anymore. Definitely not a substitute for Reddit content without the trolls.

It makes no sense to talk about Reddit and HN as if they had the same scope. It would be more appropriate to compare HN to a particular subreddit.

There was a time when Reddit did not have subreddits (or even the ability to comment). During this time, Reddit's community was very much like HN is currently. It was mostly techy people who found Digg was getting a little too "low brow". It may not have been explicitly tech focused, but it may as well have been.

HN was delibrately set up to be "what reddit was at the start"

To me HN is more like 1999-2004 era slashdot. Certainly not like reddit.

/r/programming is quite excellent much of the time. Reddit generally doesn't have a technical slant, but there are many great subs which do.

Oh, but it does. You won't find it on popular general subs like /r/technology, but there are really dedicated subs for everything, if not more, that you would want to find.

Some subreddits are very technical, and also some content from Reddit ends up here.

With the right subscriptions Reddit is quite more technical while HN is still more entrepreneurish.

There are some great startup/business/legal/finance subs, too.

Yes the moderation team here does an excellent job balancing both sides of the challenge vs. offend dichotomy.

It's a neat site. First thing I noticed when I made an account was that they already have a place to setup a Payment method. Is it just me or is that a bit strange?

One of the features of Imzy is that you can "tip" other users. If someone creates something that you like, posts a good link, or makes a great comment, you can tip them.

You can read more about that here: https://medium.com/imzyhq/why-imzy-doesnt-have-ads-and-what-...

Imzy sounds interesting. The questions is how well the rules are written and enforced. If the rules are just "be nice," then the community may be pleasant, but it will be rife for censorship of any sort of dispute, establishment of "safe spaces," etc.

I've been through reddit, usenet, and the chans, and I'm part of the programming culture (one perhaps more acidic than most), so I do detest censorship. (ie, you can't say that sort of thing/express that sort of opinion here). But that doesn't seem to be where Imzy is coming from. The use of a chan/usenet style most recent system as opposed to reddit-style voting also shows that Imzy seems to have a good understanding of how corrosive "internet points" can be.

Community moderation can be a good thing. HN and 4chan are living proof. And if your criticism is "but my freedom of speech," xkcd.com/1357/ gives the explanation for why that's wrong.

Basically, I think that if Imzy is well-run, it could be a very good site (just like the good parts of reddit). However, if it's poorly run, it will end up as an endless cycle of agreement, with any dissent leading to an immidiate ban. Time will tell.

There are plenty of sites out there for those who wish to express themselves freely. Well-moderated sites are considerably rarer, and we could use another one.

But hey, maybe I'm crazy.

Well here are the rules: https://www.imzy.com/community-policy

I think those are fairly clear. Granted there are always going to be grey areas. I agree that effective moderation is hard. I'm sure the site admins are cognizant of that.

Hmm, perhaps the intent is noble (or not, depending on your perspective), but historically products like this have failed in the past (and I am not trying to be needlessly critical, but just provide some feedback and perhaps a warning). "I want to make product X, but with different ethical standards" is not enough of a selling point for most people. It is hard enough to entice people away from a popular platform even when you are adding new, desired features. Happy to be proven wrong here.

As I have said many times before, I have found EVERY form of feedback to be valuable, even the most seemingly poisonous feedback. A simple 3 line response to any of your harshest critics will often turn them in to fans, or at least neutral, if you approach them with humility and respect (i.e. admit that their criticism has some degree of truth, and try to explain to them how you are attempting to work around the problem).

The internet is not a good place to be emotionally fragile, especially when you are willingly putting yourself out there. I am not expecting human behavior to change any time soon so I'd rather help people understand that they are talking to real people on the internet, instead of just filtering them out. Of course, that is strictly a personal preference, I would not blame others for thinking differently. :)

As for all the trolls and nasty internet content, I have no problem with it to be honest. It will exist somewhere if not on Reddit, and I never encounter it on Reddit anyhow (within my subreddits at least). Moderators tend to do a pretty good job of keeping their respective communities clean. On the rare occasion where I do encounter it somewhere, I just ignore it. Why waste my mental energy?

37signals did research on this. For a respectful community, start with a difficult-to-attain, invite-only profile where a person has to show a real, verified profile pic and post their also verified name. More like ASW. Anonymous positing is useful for exposing misdeeds of power or be more honest than one would otherwise self-censor; anonymity is no panacea either.

"Safe-space" utopias never scale: there will be SJW bickering and whining and/or extreme self-censorship which will lead to an extremely boring (and irrelevant) platform. Plus, online platforms never have to guarantee free speech... they're businesses and organizations which can choose to do just about whatever they like within various, regional legal limits.

I don't think this would be a really successful model.

For one, once this scales, it's either gonna cost a ton to moderate unless you have it do people voluntarily, in which case you'll get moderators that don't care or alternatively you won't scale.

On second, I'm having serious doubts if such a community could grow a honest and public forum wherein opinions and statements are calmly discussed and properly evaluated.

Especially the second one is a huge problem, it makes any discussion platform essentially worthless, no matter how hard you try to be nice.

Which of the following are considered "free speech"? The term means different things to different people.

Some examples: (The first 3 are material-based, the last 3 seem are person-based (is there a better word for that?))

* State an opposing/unpopular view

* Refute a forum posting with facts

* Refute a posting with lies (a recent hot topic)

* Insult a specific person, libel, defame their reputation

* Death threats against "enemies", inciting a mob against a person/business/group

* DOXing your enemies or opposing moderators, hacking their accounts, destroying data.

But that's the part of Redditch that makes it awesome... It's unfiltered.

So what they really mean is "Reddit without anyone who will disagree with your sophomoric views on politics" it seems. It's people's choice if they want to dig into a non-threatening bubble, but it's fairly sad. You don't grow by surrounding yourself with people just like you.

I've used reddit for around 10 years now and the past 3 or so it has become a seriously hate filled place full of awful people. It makes me a worse person when I interact regularly there these days so I rarely do.

If people on the other side of the political spectrum to me can't express their views without being rude or mean than honestly I don't care about their opinions. Is that living in a bubble? No it is choosing not to interact with people that I consider to be jerks. It's only living in a bubble if you let some social network define your life.

What I find sad is how upset people are getting here at the idea that not everyone wants to deal with them. It's like there is a surprise that there has been a backlash against jerks and all the jerks are sitting around complaining about no one wanting to be friends with them anymore and how the other people are jerks for that.

A lot of people on the internet have constructed identities and ideologies around temperaments and modes of interactions. Maliciousness and meanness and tolerance for it is virtuous to many 4chan types because it demonstrates strength and resilience, traits they value highly. I heard an interview with a /r/The_Donald moderator who said that the specific idea that words matter less than actions was a key attraction of Trump's message and an unifying idea for his movement. The moderator also said there was no need to or value in attempting to unify the country after the election and that it didn't matter.

The site attracted Lena "kill all white men" Dunham. Ooohkay...

Random question, what does it take to get an advertisement in a major paper? I suppose as long as you are part of the "in" crowd, any site/app/service you build will garner a free article for publicity?

Send a press release with a compelling story. Make it something they can use more or less verbatim. Phone to check they got it, try to find out who to talk to about it. Ideally know an insider who can help you. Repeat for other major papers.

It probably doesn't hurt if your story is that a major competitor to the mainstream news orgs is run for the benefit of misogynists and paedophiles.

'Imzy', the name is a bit hard to pronounce.

That's what you get when you name with this criteria:

the name means nothing; it was an available URL without copyright issues

That said, it sounds very appropriate a name for an IM service, and if people were asked to guess without knowing about the site, that would probably be their first guess.

I think I'd guess it's a mixture of "image" + "etsy", or maybe a pinterest clone (image-zy).

To me an issue with the name is it has no obvious non-awkward member name: Redditor sounds good; Voater quite reasonable; but is it Imzer? Imzier? Imzy-er? none of which trip off the tongue.

Could be like SA where it isn't made of up the name of the site.

Why? It rhymes with whimsy.

Why can't a forum cater to everybody? E.g., you could hide troll comments using a filter.

Why should a forum cater to everybody? That's what the Internet is there for.

Thats almost dangerous actually. The internet makes it easier than never before to isolate yourself with same-minded people.

Once you do that, you're in a positive feedback loop to reinforce your beliefs and behaviours, no matter how wrong they may be.

I don't think forums should cater to every subject, but they should be accessible to anyone interested.

Why should it be accessible specifically to the demographic known as "trolls"? Trolls push other demographics out, so they make their own spaces (imzy) and are then criticized for not allowing trolls?

The problem with that is, "troll" basically just means "internet asshole", and everybody on the internet is an asshole according to somebody.

Of course there's some blurry line past which behaviour can't be allowed, but "get rid of the trolls" is an extremely unspecific manifesto.

I'm wary of any type of moderation. I don't know how it can be done, but it's very apparent that reddit has lots of moderation (within subs) and it seems to heavily promote echo chambers.

I fear we won't make any major advancements until AI can accurately measure our intent, snark, etc. Because we need to not be echo chambers, imo. Unpopular opinions are amazing and needed. But the assholes, for any cause, only serve to detract from the discussion.

I really dislike echo chambers.. and it's all i see these days.

It varies by subreddit. Some are low to no touch, others are tightly moderated.

>I'm wary of any type of moderation.

Even moderation that only removes spam? How about off topic posts?

Please suggest how I can hide (say) homophobia.

The original has a hell of a linkbait title (at least when it comes to audiences with ardor for internet fora) so we changed it in accordance with the HN guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Curious why this was flagged.

As am I.

I'm going to go with the 'too political' theory, given the experiment that's currently underway. It might be worth bringing this up in discussion when the experiment concludes.

That experiment has ended already.

Interesting... Maybe this a lingering effect of encouraging a politics-free environment.

Same here, particularly considering it's just a Bloomberg news article about a website. How are flagged stories reviewed?

Users flagged it. They don't tell us why, so we don't know why. It may have been the title, so we changed it to the subtitle.

It may have been the title, so we changed it to the subtitle.

Switching titles based on flags doesn't sound like a very efficient approach. Maybe you could add a text box or a pulldown for a private comment to the moderators when flagging? Requesting a reason for a flag doesn't seem like too much of a burden, and seems like it would make you much more productive when reviewing. And as a user, it would be nice to have a way to clearly flag "dupes", "broken links", "typo in title", etc. without worrying about being misinterpreted. Would also be nice to be able to suggest alternative titles or URL's in some easy "out of band" manner rather than in a comment or email.

We bat that idea around from time to time and may try it. If we do, though, it will be a way that preserves the option of rolling it back if it doesn't pay for its supper. I fear increasing complexity.

This story got flagged off the front page of HN. Strange?

HN is doing some "no politics week" to "cleanse themselves".

"No politics week" is over (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251)

I guess this is because it provoked a bunch of political comments, which we are having a break from at HN. It's unfortunate, we should just flag those comments not the whole story.

I'd say censorship is a bigger issue than trolls. Creating safe spaces to protect you from other views isn't going to make them go away.

I am not a user of Imzy, so I don't know how they choose to censor, but I don't see how censorship necessarily means living in a bubble.

Take a look at Reddit, where the /r/The_Donald, is just spam, shitposting and fake rumors, nothing to learn. On the other hand, there are subs like /r/AskThe_Donald/ which are very interesting.

IMHO banning communities like /r/The_Donald while encouraging the ones similar like /r/AskThe_Donald, would create a much better place, where you don't live in a bubble, without having to deal with people that just want to spam, shitpost and "trigger".

On the other hand if the troll problem is bad enough it's going to stop non-trolls from commenting. So you either censor the content that doesn't add to the discussion or you lose the discussion as people self-censor/decide it's not worth it posting.

Well, it's a good thing that Imzy is not that. Have a look at their community policy.

https://www.imzy.com/community-policy

Most of those things are also ostensibly prohibited on Reddit. It's just that Reddit's admins don't care to enforce those rules until there's significant controversy.

I guess most of the world could live in safe spaces like this?

But for the creators and doers it's horrific.

We move forward by being challenged. That includes everything.

(until AI has the ability to filter out things that challenge but don't move us forward)

If by safe spaces you mean places where people of colour aren't subjected to racism, gay people aren't subjected to homophobia and women aren't subjected to misogyny, then I fail to see how any of these types of attack would help anyone "move forward", even "creators".

A safe space was originally a place where you could have a discussion about anything. A transgender individual could sit down with say an evangelical pastor and have an honest discussion about issues they disagree on without ad hominem attacks, fear of saying the wrong thing, etc. Somehow Safe Spaces came to be regarded as a place safe from anything remotely controversial, which hinders having conversation with people on the other side of the divide.

The problem here is that we don't have a fixed definition of this relatively new concept. Your description here of safe spaces as places devoid of controversy does not match up with my experience of encountering the concept in the world and online. As I said, for me it means a place where prejudices are not expressed in (in your words) ad hominem attacks, not a place where complex, innovative thinking is forbidden. I'm not saying my experience of the concept is right and yours is wrong, but the fact is this discussion is bound to end in mutual confusion from the get-go given our differing understandings of 'safe space'.

That's what safe spaces are defined as in the dictionary, but it's not what they are in practise though. In practise it's often a system of oppressing dissenting opinions and voluntary segregation.

I can only say that when you say "in practise" you sound dogmatic, defensive and vague. I am going on the assumption that you have not (as I have not) performed any kind of scientific / sociological investigation into this and that in fact when you say "in practise" you mean "in the limited set of encounters with safe spaces that I have experienced". I admit you say "often", thereby admitting the possibility that sometimes a safe space could accord with its dictionary definition. But your comment is mostly just the impotent expression of hearsay. At the very least an example ought to be given. Without that bare minimum I really can't understand why your comment exists.

I don't really understand the point of your comment either, you didn't give any examples or give any indications that you have performed any scientific/sociological investigation into safe spaces either. My phrasing of the comment wasn't the best, I admit that, but you made an unsubstantiated claim to what safe spaces are in the comment I replied to, just as unsubstantiated as my claims.

I was actually deliberately vague in the comment. Unfortunately it's usually not a good idea to post examples in forum discussions like this, since it quickly turns into a pointless competition where the part who wastes the least time googling for examples/counter-examples/criticizing the examples the other gave are considered the loser. If I had had posted examples you would probably have clicked them, looked for flaws, wasted time criticising them and googled for examples to make your own point. Then I would have had to do the same with your examples. And so on, until one of us grew tired of it, none the wiser.

I could have posted a lot of links about safe spaces, but in practise I would just do the googling for you. NYT wrote this week about how Trump supporters feel like they need their own safe spaces on college campuses, which is a sad testament to the division and increasing political segregation in America, no matters if its trolling or genuinely felt.

My point was precisely that neither of us has done this kind of investigation (in a clause you clearly didn't parse, I actually said that I hadn't either), and that in the absence of such large-scale evidence remarks as vague as yours only have even the minimum of meaning with at least some experiential data. You also contradict yourself: here you say that I was making an unsubstantiated claim, whereas earlier you said I was paraphrasing the dictionary definition. The first is indefensible in arguments like this; the second seems like a reasonable approach.

I agree about googling.

Censorship tends to have more implications than that

We move forward by being challenged. We do not move forward by being insulted, slurred or trolled. Mutual respect is the necessary foundation for any constructive interaction.

Are you implying that "safe spaces" promote constructive interaction and mutual respect?

Being gay, a safe space is the only place I've ever gone and been called a homophobe and then kicked out. They don't promote constructive interaction and mutual respect. They promote further exclusion: a place where minorities with minority opinions are kicked out.

Imzy is not, nor attempting to be, a safe space by that definition. From the article: "You can get your feelings hurt. You can't get death threats." So far, most of the people that have received bans were like the people who ran the safe space you were kicked out of.

Do you then consider hacker news a "safe space?" Many of the things they don't allow aren't allowed here.

Yes people should be challenged. They should be challenged by being told we expect them to act like adults. They should be challenged by being told it is unacceptable to threaten people with rape and murder.

Why is it a safe space? Trolling is completely different than challenging ideas. A lot of reddit is a complete waste of time. People want to be "clever" and have a yuck. There's a lot of noise.

Have you actually /been/ to reddit in the last year? The idea that anything of value is created by this raging mob of hateful teenagers with too much free time is laughable.

FFS, they've just spent a month riling each other up about a Clinton/Podesta pedophile ring operating out of an italian restaurant. That may be "challenging" for some of them (because letters etc.), but it's not the stuff the next breakthrough in physics will be based on.

Can you further define "they"? Reddit has hundreds of thousands of communities in it. It seems like you are generalizing the actions of a tiny subset to the whole user base.

I was speaking about the part of the community that would be affected by "censorship", as should be obvious from context, i. e. the post I was replying to. Nobody is talking about /r/askahistorian

No, that wasn't at all obvious. If what you're saying is that the bad parts of reddit are bad then I agree with you.

I don't know anything about this Italian restaurant thing, probably because I spend time on Reddit and not wherever you learned about it.

This is the opposite of why people are leaving reddit. Neat idea, but misguided.

It's the opposite of why some people are leaving Reddit.

But judging by the number of people who have come to the site from Reddit, it's clear that it is the reason a lot of people are leaving Reddit.

Boy, just what I wanted, another hugbox where I can feel good about my views without someone challenging them. Sign me up! /s

Places like this tend to show the hypocrisy of the average leftist when it comes to free speech, though. When free speech benefits them by weakening social norms (especially religious ones), they champion it, but the moment free speech starts to subvert the new liberal norms they put in to replace it, suddenly we get arguments about how free speech is a limited concept and pleas to rediscover civility and tolerance.

So much of discourse honestly is bullshit, and no, this place isn't immune either. Replace "free speech" with "disruption" to get this place's hypocrisy too. Oh, let's trumpet the sharing economy, whose purpose is to disrupt and ignore law in order to give urban programmers benefit, but when some employer decides to disrupt employment law by discriminating against older techies or native born ones, and the same thing happens.

It's all about self-interest in the end. I'd rather a reddit style community that tolerates all self-interest than one that claims to be encouraging civility when it's really something else.

To a large part the difference is what comedians call "punching up" vs. "punching down" – Making fun of born-again christians is a bit more legitimate because they're 40% of the (US) population and have an insane amount of power compared to the hardcore atheists insulting them. It's quite different from being a muslim in a predominantly christian country being subjected to abuse by the majority.

It's also a bit more legitimate because those radical atheists usually come from within the society they're criticizing. Not always in the sense of having been devoted christians themselves, but just being white and born in the US means you're more of the "in-group" of a white christian than others.

I'd also like to mention that you're operating from a stereotype of "average leftists" that I feel is overly broad. What you see on tumblr (or what you see when someone shares a screenshot that looks like tumblr) is far away from the average. Regarding uber, check this 500-comment threat to see that there are many people on HN critical of their business practices, especially in regards of drivers' rights and wellbeing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9731963

> It's quite different from being a muslim in a predominantly christian country being subjected to abuse by the majority.

Hm, interesting that you choose the example going that way. Not to deny that Muslims face discrimination in the West, but have you had a look at what life is like for Christians in Muslim countries?

Hell-- even some types of Muslims in places where the other type of Muslim dominates.

I'd never deny the problems christians face in many countries. The Egyptian's use of the "pig flu" a few years ago as a cheap cover for slaughtering the christian minorities' pigs still makes me angry/sad.

But I'd warn against using such (and greater) injustice as an excuse. The idiots responsible for them are not the muslims who live in western countries, and any sort of collective guilt is morally indefensible (especially considering many muslims are in the west precisely because they wanted to get away).

It's also subject to what my father used to say when I tried to excuse a bad grade as "still pretty good considering how the rest did": "When did we start comparing us to others?"

Also, using the example going that way is exactly what I meant with "it's more legitimate (effective...) to criticize your own group".

All you're pointing out here is that Muslims are capable of punching down when they're in power too. This is (a) not particularly insightful, and (b) irrelevant to his US-based examples of punching up vs punching down.

There is just about nobody anywhere on the political spectrum that believes in absolute free speech, people simply support speech that falls within their ideological boundaries. The criteria for obscenity on the left is sexism and bigotry, the criteria for obscenity on the right is blasphemy and criticism of traditions. If someone takes a knee during the national anthem conservatives will say that person should be fired and naturally liberals defend that as free speech. If someone addresses a transgender woman as "he" liberals will say that person should be fired and naturally conservatives defend that as free speech.

When it comes to the selective protection of free speech, accusing any particular side of hypocrisy only reveals the bias of your particular political perspective.

>If someone takes a knee during the national anthem conservatives will say that person should be fired and naturally liberals defend that as free speech. If someone addresses a transgender woman as "he" liberals will say that person should be fired and naturally conservatives defend that as free speech.

Isn't it possible to defend it as free speech AND say that person should be fired? Something like "its their right to say it/do it but it shows their "true character."? You can both support free speech and also want a person to accept the consequences of what they do or say.

I mean, I wouldn't personally fire anyone for those social transgressions but I can see how if I had certain world views I would see each person as less trustworthy or less desirable as an employee or coworker.

Threatening someone's livelihood based on their speech is about as antithetical to the idea of free speech as you can get (short of suggesting they should be arrested or killed for it).

It might be different in a situation where the speech reveals a critical incompetency for an important job (like a judge who suggests certain races deserve harsher punishments or an MD that suggests homeopathy is a viable alternative to chemotherapy etc), but in the general case, if we accept loss of livelihood as a consequence for uncomfortable speech it is a tacit endorsement of censorship.

Oh give me a break. It's free speech to be rude to other people. Being rude to customers and coworkers will get you fired. Censorship! Being in the news for being a huge dick outside of work, like the ESPN reporter was (she was caught on camera berating a clerk) will get you fired. You cannot have some sort of meaningful distinction. You MUST own up and take responsibility for your actions. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from responsibility and accountability. It doesn't mean freedom from any and all consequences.

This entitlement BS really annoys me.

> Being rude to customers and coworkers will get you fired.

Being fired because you're rude to customers or coworkers is obviously not a free-speech issue, that is a "disruption to the work environment" issue.

> Being in the news for being a huge dick outside of work, like the ESPN reporter was (she was caught on camera berating a clerk) will get you fired.

Once again, not a free-speech issue. If your job is to represent an organization as a professional public figure and you tarnish your public image by acting like a dick in public, that is clearly a situation where you cannot do your job effectively and so it makes sense that you might be fired.

> You MUST own up and take responsibility for your actions. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from responsibility and accountability.

That's an oft repeated platitude that doesn't really add much to the discussion because just about everyone agrees with that statement. If one's actions are causing a disruption at work or bad publicity for one's employer, it's natural that those actions might jeopardize one's job. What I'm talking about is calling for someone to be fired after they say things you disagree with as punishment for saying those things; the distinction between that and the former is that the employer's actions can be justified without taking into account whether or not the employer agrees with the employees speech, at the end of the day if you're bad for business the employer is not obligated to endure the burden of your choices, however, when individuals seek to get others fired because they dislike their speech or ideas, that is antithetical to the notion of free speech.

I will probably try this, out since Reddit seems unwilling to address corruption in its management.

Wondering how free speech issues will play out here.

Look at the pic of the founders hugging plush toys, I'm sure you can imagine it.

Did you even read the article? They are explicitly saying that they will (and do) ban bullying and hateful communities. They are not free speech absolutists.

I probably didn't express my view well here. I did read the article & understand they aren't free speech absolutists.

Still wondering how free speech will play out here, because I wonder if they will stick to eliminating trolls or if their moderation will be subjective and "politicized".

There's no free speech if you want to ban "hate speech" or "trolling".

This more or less means removing all challenging opinions and basically focus on being an echo chamber even more so than reddit. Basically thought-crime policing

I think it can be easy to differentiate name calling and trolling from actual discourse. I say this, based on past participation in a local political forum that did allow a wide variety of viewpoints... including viewpoints that were banned on the forum that spawned us.

It seems to me that many sites who have censored particular viewpoints point to hate speech and trolling inappropriately. It also seems like people here do not have high expectations for Imzy, in this way.

I have more or less given up on online political forums, and these issues seem to come up less for hobby/tech topics.

How is preventing racism and slurs a thought crime policing? You're free to think all the dehumanizations of all the demographics you like. Many sites are available for you to even express them. You just are not allowed to do it at imzy. No different than say, not shouting slurs at black people in a cafe. That's not a thought crime issue, that's a "stop pushing out demographics out" issue.

While I understand it is tricky to properly moderate a forum without stifling dissenting opinions, it isn't impossible. You can censor clear, vulgar, abuse while not censoring challenging opinions.

Trolling, name calling, and abuse are NOT "challenging opinions", and removing them does not stifle discourse. There is no opinion that can't be expressed in a way that doesn't resort to abuse.

> This more or less means removing all challenging opinions and basically focus on being an echo chamber even more so than reddit. Basically thought-crime policing

If you think left groups never disagree with each other, you're sadly misinformed. Left wing groups are famous for splitting over disagreements. Don't you remember the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea?

Probably depends on how you define politicized. Take the example of /r/fatpeoplehate... some people think banning it was simply eliminating trolls and abuse, while some people think it was SJW left-wing censorship.

free speech is moving to voat and gab this site is not advertising itself as a free speech zone more like a polite speech zone

I heard about Voat recently when expressing unhappiness with Reddit. Will probably be checking it out, also... I am not that interested in the political discussion though, and on a first look it wasn't clear if Voat had much going on with techie/hobby type things.

To me I think free speech is important as a political right, but these are private sites, and it's not clear to me 100% free speech is useful. I am more interested in good, ethical management. If people are going to be banned for being jerks, especially across communities, it's not necessarily a deal breaker for me. When it amounts to filtering out particular viewpoints, I'd leave.

Voat seems to be geared toward the stuff that got banned or reddit. Gab.ai is people who got banned on twitter. I don't see any reason to look for tech stuff there.

Voat does not really support free speech, as per their user agreement:

    You may not use Voat to break the law, violate an individual's privacy, 
    or infringe any person or entity’s intellectual property or any other 
    proprietary rights.

(...)

    You agree to not post anyone's sensitive personal information that relates to 
    that person's real world or online identity. Do Not Incite Harm: You agree 
    not to encourage harm against people. Protect Kids: You agree not to post 
    any child pornography or sexually suggestive content involving minors.

No site which recognizes the authority of laws prohibiting content or expression of any kind truly supports free speech. When most people say free speech it seems what they really mean is a degree of censorship that doesn't interfere with them personally.

Free speech doesn't mean "anything goes even if illegal"

To me, it does. Free speech is an upper bound on human expression - anything less than absolute is something less than "free."

I'm not advocating for this - sites should police certain illegal and immoral activities. Doing so is clearly in the benefit of society and the quality of any online community. But accepting this is subjugating free speech for the sake of cultural norms and legal necessity.

That is an extremely loose definition of freedom. Ever heard the dictum "One man's freedom ends where another's begins"? Or, as somebody once put it: "My freedom to swing my fist ends where your face begins."

Liberty for all is only attainable when all restrict their individual liberty to accommodate others. If that isn't the foundation of your society, "homo homini lupus" is what you get.

> "My freedom to swing my fist ends where your face begins."

Ever heard it? How could we ever escape it? I've been reading this smug, patronizing sentence on the Internet for 20 years. I've come to believe that this formulation is so important to the people who say it, because they know they're exceptionally punchable.

Hm, you have honestly intrigued me. How is that a "smug, patronizing sentence"? Could you imagine any society worth living in that is not based on this rule?

To me, respecting another person's freedom is the only way to ever get anywhere close to a society that offers "liberty and justice for all". Can you offer an alternative approach?

I don't disagree. But it suggests an extremely low opinion of the intelligence of the audience to point it out. There's no need to point out to a civilized adult, especially professional, educated adults prevalent on a site like this, that freedom doesn't include violating others. And it's a strawman, because nobody is ever arguing that freedom includes violating others. What's usually being argued is whether a specific action should be considered a violation of others' rights, as opposed to those others being e.g. oversensitive, controlling, or intolerant.

I was not addressing the audience in general, but the user whose comment I was referring too, specifically this statement:

> anything less than absolute is something less than "free."

Now maybe I misunderstood the poster, but that does sound pretty much like what I was talking about... If you felt patronized, my apologies, but my remark was not aimed at you.

I prefer to see it as an idealistic definition, albeit one that most people wouldn't tolerate in practice. But as a philosophical point of reference, I think it's useful because it's absolute - other definitions of of free speech depend on a particular framework of law or cultural referents that not everyone agrees on.

It sort of does by definition, but nobody implements it that way.

Voat has rules against brigading other sites, which is not illegal.

Kudos for Imzy but unfortunately (imo) these kind of initiatives are accompanied by attacks to websites that don't further restrict their users speech in a manner that is more savory for the media or politicians in question.

These discussions about free speech always remind me of an event of the movie Amistad, which I will surmise very briefly:

A number of people are sold into slavery, and in attempting to free themselves they kill their captors, being imprisoned and put to trial shortly after.

The movie raises some very interesting questions (and the story it is based on many more I bet), but what I find relevant here is that one person may say that homicide is the ultimate crime, and the next that freedom is, instead. One may argue that since the law of the land allowed for slavery, supported by the majority of the population, it then supplanted their right for freedom.

I think the moral of the event was that the slaves rights were inalienable. They were not to be given or taken away. Freedom of speech can also not be legislated upon, you can ban people but they will just move on to exercise it some other place or way. And freedom to insult or berate or "troll" is still speech, it conveys meaning, it cannot be stopped from human spirit no matter how much the majority deem it bad taste.

You can down vote now.

> Freedom of speech can also not be legislated upon, you can ban people but they will just move on to exercise it some other place or way. And freedom to insult or berate or "troll" is still speech, it conveys meaning, it cannot be stopped from human spirit no matter how much the majority deem it bad taste.

Sure, and Imzy believes that you may exercise that right on some other site and not theirs.

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