Comment by thomasmeeks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomasmeeks | Hacker News Reader

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I find myself in a very nuanced place with these sorts of discussions. I don't know what the right answer is.

I _don't_ think the right answer is anything goes (even if you attempt to let the community police that with voting). I've seen many small forums self-destruct due to the dedicated action of a few committed individuals to ruining it -- either explicitly (due to a grudge) or implicitly (a commitment to getting their way at any cost). Misinformation is terribly difficult to combat, and can lead to real harm to real people.

I _don't_ think the right answer is heavy moderation. I even feel like hacker news goes overboard sometimes (though I do enjoy the irony of comments here railing against calls for moderation on FB). A ministry of truth is never a good idea because it creates a clear path to corrupting the truth by controlling an entity.

I do think it is reasonable, however, to consider certain things to be settled facts. Humans breathe air, the earth is round, the holocaust happened, slavery is bad, racism is bad. Of course I have no answer about where the line is drawn between what I just said and a ministry of truth.

In my experience, the most successful communities are intelligently moderated, however, including IRC. Though the moderation was more about banning people and keeping channels on-topic than suppressing certain ideas.

The best answer I have so far is social consequence -- disagree vocally & publicly, block early, block often. Of course there are a whole slew of downsides here too, but I haven't seen anything better.

> I've seen many small forums self-destruct

Too bad, so sad. The health and growth of your channel is not the network's problem, unless downtime and latency are your issues. If you can't solve the squabbles in your #furry/lgbt/conservative/socialist sub community, you can't expect me to come and declare you "the winner of the internet fight" and banish the losers. Do that yourself, if you're the chanop. If you aren't, start another channel.

> Misinformation is terribly difficult to combat.

Still not the network's problem. Last I checked, my role was providing a service, not arbitrating truth.

> and can lead to real harm to real people.

Mmn, aaand still not the network's problem. (If said harm even exists. Most times, it's just "emotional distress", or some indirect butterfly effect we want to blame for things like Trump, instead of looking at the direct causes.) If there is harm, it's the local, state, and federal government's problem. Not the service administrators.

> A ministry of truth is never a good idea

But it's what you're calling for. You try to make it seem virtuous by limiting the scope to certain "undeniable facts" like racism, slavery, the holocaust. Or worse, I've seen people trying to push it off to some Mechanical Turk, like Machine Learning. The computer will tell us if it's racist! It will soon grow to include vaccines, global warming, and a litany of other "social ills to be fixed" that just need to be accepted as truth.

Agreed. And how do you define racism? Sure, it's discrimination based on race. What if I oppose affirmative action? Then I'm called a racist!

> If there is harm, it's the local, state, and federal government's problem

When people living in the jurisdiction who elected that government will have enough, the government will shut down, block, or heavily regulate these networks. The internet is global, they can’t prosecute users.

When that will happen, it will become the network's problem.

Even if the networks themselves don’t feel any moral responsibility for that real harm, it’s in their best interest to do something.

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